4 Marketing Strategies That Still Work Online

Blogs

Blogs are an excellent way to market your company or product because:

• By adding relevant content regularly they keep your site “fresh” in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
• They serve as the perfect forum for you to demonstrate your  wide breadth of knowledge about the issues at hand.
• They provide a perfect medium for answering in depth all the questions your customers might want to ask about the product or service.
• They stimulate discussion among your site’s users which your client can respond to and so further demonstrate their authority.
• They make the site more interesting and of more relevance to a wider circle of users.
• They provide a means for interaction between you and your customers which, in the eyes of all the search engines including Google, adds to the value of the site and so goes to improve its ranking still further.

So, what sort of content makes your blog worth reading? Ideally it has to include:

• Interesting and relevant information that is of interest to your audience.
• Useful tips that will enhance the use or scope of the product or service.
• Answer questions that site users might have about the services or products.
• Keep site users up to date with the latest news in the field.

Pay Per Click Ads

This form of marketing is when you pay a host site (such as Google) to show your ad on their specific pages. The great advantages of Pay Per

Clicks Ads:

• Your ad appears right at the top of the list of relevant search results.
• So your ad is always well placed to generate immediate notice for your product or services.
• This means your potential clients will associate you with being authoritative and so feel more inclined to click to find out more about your products or services.
• You pay for the advertising only when a user actually clicks on it.
• So you can monitor how every penny of your ad campaign is spent.
• And you get great data feedback as to who is clicking and when and how long they stay on your site.
• All of which is great for tweaking the wording of your campaigns to make them more relevant and tailored to those who are interested in you and what you have to offer.

,h2>Optimize your Site Structure

Go back to the bare bones of your site structure and double check that its inter-linkages make sense and are easy to follow. Prospective clients must be able to move around freely and find what they are looking for with the minimum of clicks. This means:

• No one page should be more than three clicks away from the page your user is currently on.
• At the same time, the page that is interlinked to most within your web site (usually the home page) will carry most weight in the eyes of search engines. So be careful how you interconnect your pages to make sure you choose the right page to link to most.
• Every page should be linked to at least one other page within the site.
• Do not make closed loop linkages – your user should always be able to get to everywhere else in the website from each page.
• Don’t exceed three levels of navigation.
• Don’t have too many (unnecessary) interlinkages within the site. The idea is to make it easy to navigate to highly relevant content, not to overload the user with too many tangents to get lost in!
• Links incorporated within the page text may rank higher than links that are stuck on at the end.
• Links that include html markup (such as to off-site photos and images, for example) may help a site rank high.
• Every page must have a distinct title so that it can rank directly for itself in relevant searches.
• Blogs and topic posts are a great way to interlink back to products and services.

Make your web-sites visually appealing,/h2>

If your site doesn’t look good you might as well not bother having one at all. It is a proven fact that new clients will be turned off immediately by an unattractive site that is full of text with no illustrations or photos and is hard to navigate. 

This is especially true for cell phone browsers trying to look at sites that fail to adjust to the device being used. If your site is like this, make sure you set up a dedicated cell phone version or you could be losing authority instead of expanding your reach.

You need to periodically take a critical look at your site and see if it doesn’t need updating to make it clean, simple and at-a-glance attractive. What worked a few years ago may now appear tired or too busy – the modern look is crisp and clear without too much information competing for attention.

So remember – design is everything – at least for the first five seconds!

And design and navigability is particularly important if the device screen is small.

Courtney Dale