Pay per click advertising can drive more quality traffic to your site and get you instant results. Pay per click advertising targets specific people who are searching for the kinds of products and services which you are offering. This type of targeted traffic is the type of traffic you want to your website as they are more likely to buy or use your service.
Google’s pay per click system is called Adwords and is one of the more popular pay per click systems Adwords is Google’s biggest source of revenue, generating millions of dollars each year. Google ads appear in the top of the search engines or on the right hand side of the search in Google search engine results page. You only pay when these ads are clicked but if you target the incorrect keywords you will quickly use up your budget!
Selecting the correct keywords and creating an interesting, engaging ads, along with a landing page is very important. If done correctly campaigns can be instantly effective and you can see good returns. Consider running Adword campaigns along with other digital marketing campaigns and then even traditional marketing methods.
Having a strong online brand identity is imperative in today’s competitive online market and often first impressions count for a lot. You want to build a strong online reputation from the ground up and be remembered.
You still see businesses which don’t have their own email addresses and they are still using @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. This does not look very professional, especially if you are using it in marketing material and on business cards etc. All businesses should at least have their own email address their_name@company_name.com. Some people will even avoid doing business with these businesses!
As well as having your own email, think about your email signature. It’s important to have a well designed signature on your emails, having a smart, clear signature will be remembered by people and it also looks very professional.
Your online brand is very important as everything we do influences people’s perceptions. People see your brand on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, websites, email addresses etc. These all combine to build your online profile. So always be aware of the perception you are creating for your business!
Twitter first launched in 2006 and its popularity has grown year on year ever since. Twitter’s audience now is in excess of 140 million. It seems that people just love to tweet those 140 characters!
Twitter seems to be popular as it breaks down social barriers, messages and information can be communicated instantly. With politicians through to pop stars tweeting there latest information. Sometimes even news channels and journalists will get there breaking news from there! Companies will tweet new ideas and feedback from followers encouraging interaction. Twitter allows small business through to multinational organisations to build their brand, promote goods and services, generate leads, interact with current customers and even drive traffic to their sites.
You can even gain more followers by just following other people research has shown, so don’t just sit there waiting for people to follow you. Get following! Make your tweets interesting engage with customers and similar businesses.
A high percentage of twitters use their mobile and smart phones to view and post there tweets meaning they are always accessible. Is your business using twitter a marketing tool? If not think about that audience out there you could tap into and grow your business with Twitter marketing!
Nearly all small, medium and large businesses are using Facebook as a successful tool for advertising their brands and interacting with current and prospective customers. Once set up you can reach far more users than you have been previously.
A Facebook page is free to set up and can be prepared and uploaded in less than five minutes, it does not require any previous web development experience, although some of the advanced features are slightly harder.
Firstly you need to visit www.facebook.com/business/pages and click create a page button. You need to specify the category your page will fall under for example local business or place, company, organisation or institution, brand or product, as well as the name of the page.
If you do not have a Facebook account already you need to create one to establish the page, but if you have one already you can use this profile for the business page. The obvious advantage of using your personal profile is that you can tap into your friends list to encourage contacts to become fans of the page by liking it. You can also promote your page by using the import contacts button to send automated emails to people in your outlook and email contacts lists, and sharing it to the wall of your personal profile.
When you hit 25 fans on Facebook, you can create a customer URL for your Facebook page for example facebook.com/citibusiness making it a lot easier to post the page, link to your email signature, business cards, website and advertisements.
Finally you need to add some basic information about your business; you can link to your business website and fill in a basic about paragraph. Click the edit info link to add detailed information on your business. From the same window, you can also click on the manage permissions link to regulate who can see your page and whether users can add content to the page. Just like a personal Facebook page you can post status updates, photos, links, video to the wall, and you can add application from Facebook directory for things like custom HTML content, polls, contests and RSS feeds. That’s your Facebook page complete!
Don’t forget you need to start populating it with content and adding to it regularly to keep fans interested.
Do you realise that good quality links from other domains will get you more traffic to your website? Relevant links pointing at your site from well-established websites, will give your website more credibility and help towards optimising for the search engines.
You must try to establish links on valued sites, leave comments on sites and link them back to yours. You must build up an online presence and if you become recognised as an expert within your field this will build your online reputation.
You can actually buy links, but this is very risky as the search engines don’t like you buying links for gaining higher rankings. The links will be pointed at your site, the thing with doing this is the search engines can recognise these as the anchor text as it is often the same text. Also it’s very obvious if your site suddenly has hundreds of links overnight. Links need to be relevant and contextual.
The best links are the ones that you can build naturally. You should be aiming to get links to your site from similar sites to yours. When linking to your site don’t just stick to article sites, think about building relationships, guest posts and partners. Think about the anchor text and the articles and stay clear of cutting corners by buying vast amounts of unreliable links.