3 Tips To Effective Online Marketing For Your Business

Whether you are just forming your ideas or expanding existing promotional efforts to include online channels, you’re about to navigate a journey that has the potential of taking your business to the next level.

Although the techniques and tools for today’s PR and marketing may seem daunting, don’t be intimidated.

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Begin with these 3 steps to ramp up your business marketing efforts:

1. Create a Road-map. Before you start any project, the preparation you do beforehand will be key to future business success. Imagine getting into your car for a road-trip without a GPS or map to guide you to your goal destination.

PR and marketing are the same. When putting together a plan, ask yourself these questions:

What are my objectives? Do I want more customers? Do I want to attract a different market than I currently have? Am I looking to create a stronger local presence?
Defining what you want to achieve is critical in keeping your plan focused and being able to measure success over time.
What is my budget?
It’s important to establish what you are willing to spend prior to creating a plan. While many PR and marketing tools are not as expensive as you think, the costs still need to be accounted for in such a way that it’s not a strain to you or the business.
In creating your budget, look for places where you might be able to save. Decide in advance how you want to divide your Rands. Perhaps you should consider a mix of advertising (the message you pay for and place with specific outlets, such as free listing sites) and PR efforts (those which help you get the word out in multiple ways, such as news releases, special events, and community tie-ins).
How much time am I willing to commit to marketing?
PR and marketing efforts can be as big or small as you decide. However,on Google where “content is king” – you likely need to carve out time to create content, and connections online.

2. Go forth, measure and refine. Now that you have a plan, it’s time to take action.

One of the more important elements of any plan is ensuring to coordinate efforts so that you stay on message and can get more stars for your buck.
In addition, it is marketing and PR best practices to test a tactic at least 3 to 4 times before determining its effectiveness. Imagine if TV networks only ran one ad for a new sitcom premiering. The likelihood that the audience saw and remembered the concept, premier day/time and what they liked about it is minuscule.
Make sure your brand is visible in as many places as your target audience is looking including:
Search Engines (Google)
Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
Signage outside your building and or vehicleBefore, during and after you launch your marketing plan, measurement is key. In order to define success, you will need to know where you started – i.e. your benchmarks.
As marketing plan components deploy, watch for spikes in traffic on the site from referring sources such as search engines, press release distribution services, ads and so on.

After a frequency is established, you can compare tactics and messages to see which is working the best and which need to be refined or removed from the plan.

3. Don’t forget about local. Whether your location is critical to your business or not, making connections locally is still an important part in growing your business.

For example, when you become familiar with the news sources in your area, you can create relationships that make you the go-to-person for insight on your given area of expertise.

For a locally-driven business such as a restaurant, pet store etc., local is going to be a critical part of success as you need people within physical proximity to you to help the business grow.

However, companies that operate out of a city but serve national customers can also benefit from local connections. Don’t discount the affect you can have on referrals and even signing up local clients by attending networking events, sponsoring local charities, etc.

To let people nearby know you are there, try the following:

Submitting your business to Google Places
Use local listing services such as Gumtree and Hotfrog
Provide interesting tips, suggestions and secrets to local radio and news programs. For example, if you own a hardware store, offer “best bird feeding” practices highlighting products consumers can find in your store.
Create a blog specializing in activities and events surrounding your industry with a local flavor, i.e., if you sell surfboards, provide updated surf reports and new local competition information.

There is no limit to what you can accomplish with a well thought out and executed PR and marketing plan. Remember to be consistent in all your efforts. Maintain the same language, message and keywords in all tactics regardless of the channel. In no time you will be measuring noticeable returns on your small business marketing efforts.

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Google Adwords Explained

Important Points You Need To Know Before Rushing Into Online Advertising

Be very clear on your business sales objective and determine if your AdWords marketing is as relevant and specific as possible to the objective
Quantify the sales objective to be achieved over a specific time period
Set-up a score card to measure the results vs. objectives on a daily basis
Establish or re-establish a budget designed to meet the sale objective
Decide if you are branding your services or providing solutions to searchers
Do not ignore your Campaign, what you put in is what you get out
Enjoy the results of increased sales, and expand the Campaign utilizing our many tools and reports that are available to you to customize and optimize your business marketing strategies on a regular basis.

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Google AdWords is the system that places your business’ advertising on the top or the side of the Google Search results page, usually with a cream or pink colored background. Google AdWords Express is a system that places a blue dot on a local map, and lists you with all the other AdWords Express business advertisers within a 50 kilometer radius of the searcher’s computer or mobile
device, on that same Search Results Google page.

What you pay for each AdWords Cost Per Click (CPC) is determined by you! How frequently your ad is served is determined by the maximum CPC and your ad’s daily budget. You can select to show your ads globally, nationally, regionally, or even in a targeted area determined by your address or by latitude and longitude.

Our Google AdWords Tips

We have also found that to just drop your “clicke” on the home page of your website is not effective in creating a good conversion rate and does not get your program a good quality score rating. We have learned to create a landing page for each ad group theme. We include sales content that is short and focused, with a keen call to action. We even include a small online contact form as well as phone numbers. All of these things help to increase your conversion rate – turning prospects into buyers!

The bottom line is if you are paying thousands of Rands for each newspaper ad relying on irrelevant leads, or simply doing no advertising at all, just hoping that a prospect will stumble across your website, you may want to consider advertising your products and services with Divine Formula Interactive Marketing Services and Google AdWords.

Divine Formula will research your competition, set up your account, craft your ad text, create your landing pages, monitor your account, and report to you about your campaign activity with our recommendations for action. We can put AdWords to work for you bringing you qualified prospects and sales – guaranteed!

If you would like to know where your AdWords ad will show in the Google content network if you select to show your ads there, view this list from Google of the display network and partner sites.

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3 Google Panda SEO Tips You Need To Know!

The Google Panda Update shocked the SEO world and changed a lot of approaches by webmasters forever. Panda’s main aim and focus is at eliminating or lowering low quality websites from the Google search results – namely spammers, and increasing the rankings of high quality websites. While it has done a relatively good job at removing a lot of these poor results, it has also inadvertently had a negative impact on the rankings of a lot of high quality websites too. It left many people wondering how to recover, or how to prevent any loss in rankings as even slipping three places could mean the difference of losing thousands of dollars or leads. If you have analytics tracking on your website you can pinpoint the exact time that your website either took a significant increase in rankings or drop; then look at the Panda release dates to see a correlation.

Many hit by Panda dropped fifty places overnight in the search results, or were completely removed altogether. If you want to try and recover a website, or avoid being subjected to the wrath of Panda, then you need to follow Google’s high quality guidelines exactly as they are stated. If you think you have been wrongly hit by Panda or any other Google update they do allow you to submit a request for review, however in the meantime it would be best to understand Panda and how to avoid being a victim as it will only continue evolving in the future to provide a better web experience for searchers.

By Bryan Conte (Co-Founder of Webdigia and is a professional copywriter).

Google Panda SEO Tips

#1 – No Thin Pages or Thin Websites

A common practice by spammers is to create hundreds of very thin low quality websites, which Panda has directly attacked. These websites may have very limited content or content on the homepage only. They may also contain a very small amount of indexed pages which is one signal that it may be a low quality website. To avoid or rectify these issues, make sure that your website is full of high quality pages and content that is geared towards providing value to the visitor. Aside from your standard pages (ie: contact or about page) every page on your website should have a minimum of 300-400 words on the page if possible. Remove low quality outdated pages or add content to them and make sure that you follow this guideline from here on out. It is proven that having poor or low quality pages on your website can affect the rankings and quality of your entire website and not just for that page. Keep adding high quality and valuable content to your website and you will strengthen your website as a whole.

#2 – NO Duplicate or Spun Content

In an effort to remove low quality websites, Panda has also taken aim at websites that have a lot of duplicate or copied content on their websites. Never post an article or other resource on your website that has been copied verbatim from another source on the web. I understand that sometimes it is necessary if it is a direct quote or a speech, however you can surround this content with unique content and as long as your website has significantly more unique content versus duplicate, you should be in the clear. This also goes for owning more than one website and providing the exact same content on it as the other which I talked about in a previous blog post called 10 onsite optimization tips, and watching out for how your website is setup and indexed as to not allow duplicate indexation. Another issue is actually using your own duplicate content on the same website too. If you have a disclaimer or section of text that is repeated on lots of your pages with very little other content on the page, this could be seen as low quality and affect your rankings.

Since most spammers do not take the time to write their own content or provide quality content, using duplicate content to rank sites quickly was a common practice and is why it has come under fire. Spun content on the other hand is when duplicate content is either manually altered or through the use of a program so that it is changed just enough to pass as unique. If done manually it can provide high quality value as many news stories are manually spun by writers for example, however the problem with programs is that it often provides a poor quality article that is unreadable; as it is changed at the verb or word level versus the sentence level. The end result is something that will pass and is for search engines only and not the end user or reader; mostly abused and used by spammers.

#3 – Encourage Social Signals

Again, Panda is all about quality and value being provided to the visitors of a website. If you create content that is valuable it is likely to be shared. Place social network sharing buttons on your blog posts and other relevant pages as social signals can help improve your websites ranking and quality. Content that gets shared in Google’s eyes must be high quality, informative and full of value otherwise why would people share it? At the very minimum I suggest that you implement a Facebook Like button, Twitter tweet button, and a Google + button. Not only can social signals increase your backlinks and rankings, but it can also be another source of high quality traffic and brand awareness; and it’s free and easy to do.

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Why Is Internet Advertising So Efficient For Business?

The popularity of Internet advertising South Africa is growing every day. This growth is understandable and obvious because the advertising on the Internet itself, is still young, but it is gaining popularity and interest among businesses for which a point of honor is to be found online – to have a representation in the Internet – a web page and, of course, advertising.

Advertising Campaigns

It is needed to move forward and keep the pace with the new technology without wasting time on traditional advertising campaigns, because Internet advertising and services promotion become more mature, efficient, interacting with the customers and bringing in the end profits.

Nowadays, in crisis conditions, many companies began to use Internet advertising, because of its transparency, lower cost and undoubted effectiveness.

The ability to automate the process of an advertising campaign and receive invaluable information is the unique feature of the Internet advertising, which provides the advertiser full and constant feedback and gives him the possibility to respond swiftly on the advertising services market.

Advantages Of Internet Advertising VS Traditional Advertising

Internet Advertising Is Huge

With the growth of information on the internet has growth the amount of time people spend on it, which has in turn generated a new market for internet advertising. Some of the wealthiest companies in the world have made sure that they get a piece of the internet marketing success recipe, and for a great reason.

Internet Advertising Is Targeted

As a company looking for advertising opportunities to a specific market, internet advertising offers some targeting methods that insure that those who see your ads are the ones most likely to buy. Programs like Google’s AdWords Campaigns match up advertisers with content that their target market peruses regularly. Forget the costly “machine gun” strategy of newspaper advertisements, internet advertising is completely targeted.

Internet Advertising Has Greater Range

One more benefit is that, since the internet spans the globe, pockets of your target market scattered around the world can all be targeted at once, rather than trying to find different publications, radio stations and television stations that cater to a particular geographical area. On the whole, internet advertising can be a great way to get the word out there about your service or product in a cost-effective, efficient way.

Internet Advertising Enables Great Conversion Tracking

It’s impossible to get a good idea of how many people see advertising through traditional means. Tracking the reach of newspaper and television advertisements is difficult. However, internet advertising allows the advertiser to track the number of impressions an ad gets (how many people see it), and how many visits their business web site gets from particular ads, making it easy to see what kind of conversion rates internet advertisements are getting.

Internet Advertising Has Lower Entry Level Fees

If you have a limited budget, internet advertising can be much more in reach than traditional methods. A small yellow-page ad can cost several hundred dollars. However, you can bid for advertisements on Google and Overture on a performance basis. That means that you only get charged when visitors click on the advertisement, and bidding starts at a nickle or dime a pop.

Internet Advertising Can Be SO Much Cheaper

Because of the targeted nature of internet advertising and the ability to track the effectiveness of ads, conversion rates from internet advertising is typically much better than traditional mediums.

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Divine Formula Interactive Marketing Services Works With You

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The only thing that outshines our technology are the people who power it. Our account management team is composed of industry experts who work with you to achieve your campaign goals. Whether you prefer complete control, or a more hands off approach, our team will ensure that your goals are met. It’s just one of the reasons why 90% of businesses who try D.F, stick with D.F.

At D.F, we provide all the tools you need in order to run highly effective Re-targeting campaigns. That means that we not only provide the most robust Google Analytics in the industry, but we also provide the tools for you to act on those metrics. Edits and optimizations are at your fingertips in our incredibly easy to use interface. Or, if you’d rather let our experts do the heavy lifting, just log in to view our detailed reports.

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