From UTalkMarketing

Over the next few weeks, various UTalkMarketing folk will be writing a series of articles on digital marketing to help you and your business make the most of the opportunities it provides.

 We live in a time of both extraordinary change and opportunity for marketers. Digital marketing gives us the chance to deepen our relationships with consumers and drive enormous value for our businesses.

 We think marketers today have the chance to redefine marketing for the next 50 years. To give you an idea of the scope of the opportunity:

• 19% of all marketing spend in the UK will be on digital in 2009
• Google is already bigger than ITV in the UK in terms of advertising revenue
• By 2011, online commerce in the UK will be worth a staggering £52bn

Digital marketing comes with a language, skills, and techniques that can be picked up with hard work and trial and error. Many businesses spend thousands of pounds on agency’s who do the work for them. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the route for everyone – especially little businesses with no budget. Many of the skills can be taught and if you look beneath all the jargon – it’s really not that hard!

Here is an introduction to the different forms of digital marketing for you to get started.

How to get the most from digital marketing

They key to getting the most from online marketing is getting the basics right first. If you’re a small company, you need to think smart and think where the massive wins are with the minimal amount of effort (and guy power).

A brief introduction to search

Search marketing is the marketing technique du jour. Even up to CEO level, managers are concerned about their strategy for the massive expansion of marketing in the area.

Search companies like Google, Yahoo and Ask are like the operating systems of the internet.

You need them to find the information you want, and they are essential to users because of the sheer volume of content on the internet.

Search is a god-send to marketers, because people are communicating their intentions through the search terms they type.

Someone who types “cheap flights”, for example, is very likely to be booking a flight in the future. So if you sell flights and you can get them to your website, you have a very good chance of converting them into a sale.

 

PPC (Pay Per Click)

As the title implies, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad and is transported to your website. Whether they then buy anything is immaterial – you still pay.

PPC ads are the results that appear at the right hand side of the search results page (in blue) and also sometimes appear at the top.

The position that your ad appears in is crucial – the vast majority of the traffic goes to the top five adverts. How do you get your ad position higher? Spend more money! There are other, more complex techniques too, which will be discussed later and feature in our digital training.

Most businesses should buy the most important keywords relating to your business. You need to put yourself in the place of your customer. What would you search for to find you? Keep it relevant.

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Search engine optimisation is about how high your business appears in the unpaid listings that typing in particular terms brings up. This is also known as “natural” or “organic” search.

The order in which search results are displayed are crucial to generating traffic to your website. Less than 10% of people look at the second page, and the majority of traffic goes to the top 5 results. You need to be on the first page.

The rankings are determined by a complex algorithm which companies like Google guard closely, and these are explored more in our SEO Skills Accelerator course (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/seo.html).

The top determinants though are how many other sites link to yours, the relevance of your page to the search term, and the click-through rate your results produce.

Our view is that you cannot afford not to think about SEO. It’s free and despite the rocket science that most agencies claim to be experts in, the basics are very simple.

 

Online PR

The growth in traffic on the web has led to a gigantic rise in the number of places that you can place news stories. Many web sites boast audience numbers which are at least as gigantic, if not bigger than their magazine counterparts.

They are also more desperate for stories and exclusives, because they are frequently ignored. Once there, your story will live on and can be found through search even thought it’s not on the front page any more.

Community sites (and there are many!) also pose a PR challenge. The web allows your customers to talk to each other, and when you let them down, talk they will.

The key is managing what’s happening online and getting people to talk about your brand by giving them something good to talk about!

 

Online Display

There are a number of online advertising display options, the best known being banner ads. There are a range of other display options, such as MPU’s, interstitials and homepage take-overs.

A key debate over the benefit of online display is the post-impression impact. Research by a number of companies, not all of them web site owners, has demonstrated that web display advertising has an impact on brand equity, and on short-term purchasing.

So even though someone doesn’t click on your advert, you will get some benefit. Normally you will get around 50% more people being influenced by the advert and coming to your site than a simple measure of click-through would indicate.

 

Generally online display is not worthwhile unless you are spending at least £3-5k on a campaign (which not everyone has a budget for!) We run an online display course to help with this complex area (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/digital-display.html)

If you want to know more, UTalkMarketing run a variety of digital marketing training courses for all levels. See our training courses here: www.utalkmarketing.com/Training or email daniel@utalkmarketing.com

www.utalkmarketing.com is the first B2B user generated content site for the client marketing community set up by Niall Mckinney, ex Chief Marketing Officer for lastminute.com.

This is a fool proof way of building a simple 1 page site, getting indexed and included in the SEPR’s for niche search terms, getting long-tail keyword traffic that will convert into sales.

I’m going to do this step by step if you complete everyone as described you will be on to a winner

The Aim – To pick a keyword relevant to the drug your marketing, be included in the SEPR’s for that keyword; get highly relevant traffic quickly and for free! And make sales!

Step one! – Keyword Research

This is the most important thing you will do! You need to decide on 2 major points; firstly, what it is you are promoting, and then summarise it into short phrases.

Then secondly find out what phases people search for when looking for sites like yours.

So for example…

My site will promote Zotrim a weight loss aid, it will offer comparisons, medical research to back it up and offer the user the opportunity to buy the product.

So what keywords do people use to find the drug I want to sell? And how many people search for those keywords every month?

Zotrim tablets	110
Zotrim reviews	120
Does Zotrim work	91
Zotrim	360
Zotrim review	110

I can now go and use a traffic estimation tool to watch how many people are searching for my keywords try: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

What have I got, what have I done?

I have a short list of keywords, relevant to the product you wish to promote and know how many people search for those keywords every month.

 

Step 2 – Choosing you Domain name

Based on my short list of keywords form the keyword research I did, I am now going to pick a domain name based on these 2 main factors:

Domain extension – I want to promote in the UK so I really want a .uk

Keyword rich URL – I want one of the keywords on my short list to be in my domain name

So after a bid of digging around I’ve found DoesZotrimWork.co.uk

•  Plus points: 
  •   [does Zotrim work] on exact match gets 91 searches on google every month
  • “does Zotrim work” on phrase match gets 110 searches on google every month
  • The whole keyword is in the domain name in order
  • It’s a .uk extension which is great for the UK market

 

Step 3 – Your website copy (text)

Remember your aim (to get in the SEPR’s, for your chosen keyword) so now you are looking to write interesting copy, with a balance of keyword density (how many times your chosen keyword appears in the text) and information for the visitor on the pill.

Choose an angle – Conceder what you are trying to do: review, promote, compare, etc

Bolding – bold important words and phrases, a lot of people “skim” information websites get their attention as the scroll down the page!

Be clear on your call to action – set people’s expectations if you’re passing them to the merchant’s sites to buy, tell them!

Use features and befits – point out features but emphasise benefits, think about the demographic, what objections they might have…

Think about the layout – use images to break up text use product images with a mix of life style images (find images in the moreniche resource centre).

 

Step 4 – Website layout

So you have a keyword rich domain name, you know what keyword your going after and you have keyword rich copy (text).

You know need to think about how you are going to present your copy and most importantly what your call’s to action you care going to use!

How do I insert calls to actions? Your copy will find natural breaks insert calls to action there for example:

During a customer intervention, 61 overweight women took Zotrim for a period of 4 weeks. From here their hunger and eating patterns were recorded, whilst their weight loss and waist measurements were also taken at the beginning of the study, during week two and lastly on week four.

•  Weight Loss Study
  • Average weight loss: 4lbs in 6 weeks
  • Average waist reduction: 4.3cm in four weeks
  • Subjects consistently felt fuller for longer
  • Changes witnessed through Zotrim over these four weeks compared favourably with long term weight management therapies

Get your 4 week supply with free shipping click here

So as you can watch there is a clear call to action, with a reason and a befit for the visitor to complete the action and with relevance to the text it follows. Keep the calls to action regular but make them reliant, a user should easily find what to do and how to do it!

 

Step Five – putting your site together

There are many HTML editors the best is Dreamweaver however at £400 it’s a bit steep, try http://www.net2.com/nvu/ it’s free!! There are various HTML templates you can find all over the internet, and on the moreniche resource centre

Things to think about….

Meta Data and Titles – include you main keyword and any other secondary keywords example:

 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 
<title>Does Zotrim Work | Zotrim does it work</title>
<META content=" Does Zotrim Work – get the facts backed by real medical research to make up your own mind!" name=description>
<META content="Does Zotrim work,Zotrim does it work,Zotrim review,Zotrim reviewed" name=keywords>

H1, H2 and strong tags…

Now break up you copy and use H1 and H2 and strong to indicate keywords to prove relevance to the user and search engine for example:

<h1>Weight Loss Study - <strong>Does Zotrim Work</strong></h1>
<h2>Here is some evidence that should go some way to answer the question <strong>Does Zotrim Work?</strong></h2>

Remember if you mention you primary keyword put <strong></strong> round it to bold it and illustrate its importance to the visitor and the search engine!

Then use the rest of you copy as the body of the site, including a mixture of life style images and treatment images. Don’t for get to use alt tags on your images, why not use a keyword there are various images you can use in the resource centre at moreniche.com.

Summery…

So now you should have: in-depth keyword research, a primary keyword, knowledge of how many searches your keyword gets, a keyword rich URL, keyword rich copy, search engine friendly layout and some strong relevant calls to action…

 

Step 6 – GET IT LIVE!

Remember we were getting in the UK Google SEPR’s so you need UK based hosting, a very basic package ideally with FTP access should cost no more than around £2 per month!

Use http://filezilla-project.org/ to upload your web site (it’s a free FTP solution)

 

Step Seven – get indexed

Now it’s time to get Google to notice your site, Google suggest using this http://www.google.com/addurl/ however think about getting your site noticed faster by getting links to your site, think about sites that get indexed or crawled by Google regularly many social sites, digg for example gets indexed almost hourly! However make sure it’s relevant we have done a lot to make this site as relevant as possible to our keyword let’s not spoil it now!

 

Step eight – chart your progress

You can check to watch if your site has been indexed by typing Site: domainname.co.uk in to Google.com. Once your site has been indexed find it in the SEPR’s for your keyword. Chart its progress day on day, week on week.

Depending on what position in the SEPR’s it’s at, you may want to start building links with relevant sites to increase your sites natural position in the search engine page results.

What you should have: 

• Summery  
  • In-depth keyword research
  • Keyword rich URL
  • Keyword traffic
  • Keyword rich copy
  • Strong calls to action
  • Search engine friendly website hosted on a server in the country you want the traffic from
  • Knowledge of how to get the site indexed, and increase SEPR’s position

 

I hope this has been of help to people, this is 1 way of getting targeted traffic and there is nothing to finish you from doing it again and again and again! In fact know people who make a lot of money that way! If you need any help or advice I‘m offering Moreniche – Zotrim affiliates one to one coaching on this, contact me for more information.

 

Luke Wallace
Luke.wallace@moreniche.com
MSN: lukewallace@hotmail.co.uk
Skype: lukewallacemn