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All articles by Robert Burko -
A recent iLogos Research study revealed 94% of Fortune 500
companies now hire employees online, a stark contrast from 1998,
when only 29% of them were doing the same. If you own or manage a
small business, that means the vast majority of your fiercest
competitors are now spending less time and less effort on
recruitment. And that leaves them with more time to, simply put,
get a leg up on you.
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So you want exposure on the Internet? Of course you do. You want
to drive people to your site, because that’s the only way your
online business can succeed. And the more eyes you can get to your
page, the better off you are. It’s common sense.
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Years ago many businesses might have claimed that sending out paper
flyers to their customers was a highly effective form of
advertising. Just about every consumer can recall seeing their
mailbox stuffed with flyers or having a flyer tacked onto their
windshield. Some people might have read these flyers while others
quickly cast them aside. But from the business' point of view,
enough people read (and often acted upon them) to make it an
effective platform for spreading their message. The traditional
paper flyer's time in the limelight as a viable and effective
marketing vehicle has, for all intensive purposes, come to an end.
Paper flyers have been replaced by a new, environmentally friendly
and far more effective platform.
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Over the past few years, research has continued to prove the
benefits of e-mail marketing for business: low costs, high
conversion rates and detailed tracking are all notable features.
But e-mail marketing is becoming much more than just a tool for
spammers and e-businesses. Consumers are becoming increasingly
savvy on the differences between spam and permission-based emails,
and more and more of them are accepting permission-based e-mail
marketing as a positive replacement for direct mail.
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The buzzword of the hour is ‘SEO’. It has transformed the
architecture of sites, brought about many new jobs, and is now
considered vitally important for those that want to take their
online operations to the next level. In its simplest form, search
engine optimization (or “SEO”) is about doing everything you can to
boost your natural ranking in the major search engines. The
algorithm that ranks your site (despite variations across engines)
is a compilation of many different variables. There is no one magic
secret or special key you can turn. The goal is really to check off
as many variables as possible from that algorithm. The kicker is
that, for the most part, we don’t actually know what is contained
in these algorithms that are so important to us. We can, however,
make educated guesses. And there are several aspects of SEO that
most, if not all, industry professionals agree on. One of those
factors is the importance of link-building.
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One of the most frequent questions my customers ask me is "What
should I do to make sure my email marketing campaign is a success?"
My answer is always different, depending on the client's industry,
campaign goal, and many other factors. But in today's e-marketing
landscape, there are a few pointers that stand true for any client,
a few things that can really make or break an email campaign.
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You just got your website online. Everything is setup and you're
ready to go. Excitement is high and the time has come to open your
virtual doors to the millions and millions of Internet users around
the globe. You put out the cyber welcome mat and declare your site
ready for action. But, instead of sitting and watching the users
trample over one another to get to your site, you see little to no
traffic.
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