1. Make how-to videos … don’t try to be funny

If you have to try to think of something funny, it just won’t work! The most valuable thing that many companies can offer consumers is their know-how. How-to videos are easy to make and have plenty of specialisation potential, while often still fitting with corporate aims and personality.

2. Follow formatting best practices
That is:

• Keep your video to 5 or 6 minutes
• Tag it with plenty of related keywords
• Structure your video with subsections to facilitate viewer learning
• Enable comments to generate discussion and get you some feedback

3. Call them to action

In a how-to video used for internet marketing, your call to action would probably be something like “If you would like to learn more about XYZ, here at XYZ Corp we’re always available to help. Call us on 123 XYZ”.

Put your Google Suggest suggestions in here!

1. Are all p …
   Seems that maths, biology, polar bears and pregnancy are some of the web’s top topics!
2. Why do I have …
   Sometimes, you might not want to know. Squeamish-ness warning on this one.
3. Can ju …
   After looking at these search results, I had to go to Wiki. I didn’t even know who the guy was!
4. Is there a he …
   Highly philosophical. I find it amazing that people actually expect Google to answer such questions.
5. Why do emo …
   Nothing about emotions, surprisingly! Seems that pop culture reigns over neuroscience … yet again …
6. Is it cool t …
   Check out the last result here (which is hopefully the same for you as it is for me!). You notice that many of the weirder results in Google Suggest are actually song lyrics
7. Will go …
   Another wonderfully poetic mix of the esoteric and the economical!

The case for outsourcing:

Sometimes outsourcing is the only acceptable option – you run a small partnership and just don’t have time for example. Here are some other advantages:

• It might be cheaper to pay someone else for it than spend your own time blogging
• It can create a more professional blog
• Pro bloggers are often more in tune with the net community

However, there are disadvantages …

The case for in-house blogging

• If you’re trying to build yourself up as an expert and have a relatively obscure industry, you’ll almost never get the quality posts from an outsourced writer that you could write
• In-house blogging creates a real face for your company … not an outsourced face
• You have access to inside information that you might not think to pass on
• You’ll have access to multimedia relevant to your company that freelance blog writers couldn’t get.

The solution?

As with many things – a mix of both strategies works best. Start with a 50/50 mix … and adjust as you go!

Does your web copy inspire trust?

Informational copy versus sales copy

The difference is not always apparent when you are the one behind the keyboard! As a general guide…

Informational copy

• Gives the reader information about a product or service, looking mainly at the features
• Usually doesn’t mention company names
• If a company is mentioned, there is no bias towards them in the copy. May mention several companies at once.

Sales copy

• Looks mainly at the benefits of taking out a product or service with a particular company
• Mentions only one company name
• Tells readers about how to take action towards purchasing a product or service

Benefits of informational copy

There is a heck of a lot of sales copy on the internet … and people really tend to distrust it. Anybody can write anything they like and publish it on the internet – there is little governance and few checks and balances in that regard. So sales copy is taken with an enormous grain of salt.

Having informational website copy makes your site seem much more trustworthy to visitors. You have no interest in giving bad information, because there is no direct financial gain to be had from doing so.

Additionally, people that aren’t ready to purchase will come to your site, building traffic and branding, purely for the information. However, when they’re ready to purchase (a week or year down the track), they’ll remember your site and trust it.

Benefits of sales copy
At some stage, if you’re selling something, you’ll have to tell your prospect about why they should buy from you rather than Joe Blow down the road. If you don’t let your customer know why your company is good, they might assume that it isn’t!

Several studies have shown that people have trouble finding products related to informational copy if there isn’t a direct ‘sell’ … and might then Google to find the very same product on the site they were already on … YOUR site! Thgis is one reason why some sales copy is essential.

There is a compromise between the two. For sales copy to be trusted and effective, it should have plenty of informational, factual backup – like user reviews, testimonials, technical data, etc.

Get the people that matter to yoour business through your doors!

1. Join your chamber of commerce

There is one in most cities and suburbs – chambers of commerce are a place for all the shop owners in the area to meet and talk, well, shop. They usually have websites, and if you’re lucky they’ll be affiliaited with the local council, which gives you a .gov link. Great value in general business as well a s link building.

2. Check in with your local business partners

Send out an email, or make a few phone calls, to your local suppliers, agents, and other business partners asking if they would like to exchange links with you. There is a real possibility this will drive both foot traffic through your door, and net traffic through your home page.

3. Launch an affiliate program

Start an affiliate program where people are rewarded for recommending new customers to you. In many cases, they will do this via the internet … talking to people they know on Twitter and Facebook and Myspace. These links may have no Google juice, but the exposure they create could certainly lead to ordinary links.

4. Submit your site to relevant government resources

Government departments often create resource lists of businesses that can help people in an area do something. Take the time to look through your local and state government websites, seeing if your site fits into any of the categories. Write asking for inclusion if it does.

1. Customer service tool

You won’t solve tricky customer service problems only using Twitter as a platform, but it is an easy and quick way for people to get in touch with you. You can both receive questions at a specific account, and constantly search Twitter for complaints relating to your products.

2. Market research

Twitter is all about offering your opinion. People loooovve to say what they think on the web. Some clever companies have connected this fact, with the realisation that they used to actually pay people for their opinions. It was once called market research, and Twitter is a more cost effective platform for it than any outsourced firm.

3. Word of mouth by incentive

The Roger Smith Hotel in New York offers a 10% discount to customers who make a booking after a Twitter referral. This Twitter internet marketing strategy depends on you being absolutely dedicated to customer service, though.

4. Finding, ahem, interested customers

If you use a Twitter platform to search for instances where your competitors’ names have been mentioned in a negative context, you could have a direct avenue to people who would be very interested in your service.

5. As a newsfeed

Many companies do this nowadays … while it is less innovative now, it is just as effective! Twitter helps gets the word out about your new articles and other related publishing. You can tweet blog posts, press releases, articles, interviews, etc as part of your SEO.

Twitter - Addictive

1. Coupon delivery

When it comes to coupons, people only want to know what they’re getting. They don’t need to be convinced of the worth of your product … they just want to know how cheap it is! Twitter’s 140 character limit is perfect for this sort of thing. Post a short description of your offer and a condensed link to your downloadable coupons. Don’t forget to tell people that you’ll be tweeting with discounts via your other web marketing methods.

2. Taking orders

While most Twitter marketing, and indeed most of social media marketing in general, is targeted at big firms, this is one that even the little guys can do. Tell your customers that they can now tweet their order direct to your store – it can be received on a mobile web device or a monitor can be set up near the checkout area. People don’t have to call to make a pickup or delivery request, then.

3. Contests

The best known example of this tactic is Moonfruit, a UK-based web design firm, that gave away Macbook Pros to people that tweeted with the hashtag  #moonfruit. They have done amazingly well out of the contest, though it did cost them the price of 11 Macbook Pros and 10 iPod Touches…

4. Replace email with Twitter

This takes your private work conversations into the public arena … and while many feel uncomfortable about this, it has been quite a sales driver for some companies. Appos shoes pioneered this concept, and it seems that people love the openness.

Video Article Marketing

Video is the new black on the web. Research indicates that people absorb a heap (yes, that’s a scientific statistic! ) more information from video than they do from either audio or simple text. Almost half of the searches performed on Google return videos within the first ten results. It costs more money to make than written content and takes more time … but unfortunately, that’s why people love it! Video won’t be moving off the top of the content heap in 2010.

Better URLs

What makes one URL better than another URL? Here are a few guidelines:

• Less is almost always better
• Words are better than numbers (Ie, your pages should be named www.ladeedah.com/blog/new-products-launched.html, rather than www.ladeedah.com/blog/1234567890.html )
• Try to avoid strings of auto-generated stuff in your URLs. Anything with an equals sign, ampersand or the characters ‘csid’ (Session ID) is on the ‘boo!’ list.

There are plenty of URL shortening services, but people don’t instinctively trust them (unless they are on Twitter). It is much better to use your own URL, for both SEO and branding purposes.

Speed

Google feels the need for speed … and indications are that if they haven’t already incorporated page load speed into their algorithm, it is on the cards soon.

Research shows that approximately 213 million searches are made on the most popular search engines every single day. This means that if your web page lands on the first page search engine results, your website will have more visitors. This cannot happen if the pages of your website are not properly optimized. No matter how brilliant your website is, the search spiders could still find it completely unnoticeable.

Specific problems call for specific solutions so if you are having problems with internet marketing, make sure that you consult with the right people.

Web marketing firms have employees who are knowledgeable enough to take care of your online marketing and advertising needs. Even if you hire an expert on this field, if this person does not understand how search engines work, you will never get your money’s worth. Doing SEO requires a full website analysis and only those who are knowledgeable enough can do the job. This is to make sure that every page of your website is indexed by all search engines.

There already are a lot of do-it-yourself articles for web marketing out there but you cannot learn all of these and do the job on your own when you have a business to run and employees to attend to. Web traffic, conversion rates, and business sales would only increase if hours of research and testing have already been spent.

Presently, there already are over 25 billion web pages all over the web and this number is practically increasing. Just imagine how your website can get lost amidst the sea of all the other sites just because you did not optimize it for search engines sooner.

If you wish to get the wheels of your web marketing endeavors going, never hesitate to consult with experts. It doesn’t hurt to seek professional help. Try searching the web. The results might just lead you to an online marketing firm that can provide you with excellent service at reasonable rates.