Can you believe it’s November already? I’m not really sure how that happened, but it happened nonetheless.
And while I’m always sad to see the Summer go, I love this time of year because it’s a great time to start preparing your 2010 marketing plan. But before you do that, you’ll need to evaluate which of your 2009 marketing strategies worked and which were not effective. Since email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for increasing your online presence, you should be constantly…
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Added by Karen Scharf on November 4, 2009 at 10:27pm —
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Now that you have gone live with your blog, what’s next? How will you know if it is successful; how will you know if you are delivering the content your readers, your prospects and your clients are after? You will definitely want to monitor your pageviews, traffic, clickthroughs, search engine rankings and other overall indicators of website success. Your number of blog subscribers, however, may be the most accurate and reliable measurement you have for determining the success of your blog.
Eas…
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Added by Karen Scharf on November 4, 2009 at 10:27pm —
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According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) small businesses enjoy a $43.52 return on every dollar spent in email marketing. That's the strongest ROI-yielding direct marketing tactic, and it's a result that even small businesses on a small business budget certainly can't ignore.
If you're not quite seeing a 4,300% return on your email marketing investment, why not consider one or more of these kick-starts:
*** Take Advantage of Personalization
If you're using an email service provider…
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Added by Karen Scharf on November 4, 2009 at 10:26pm —
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The great thing about Twitter is that it helps create a conversation with your clients and prospects and joint venture partners and other interested parties in a quick and fast-paced manner. Thanks to the 140-character limit, you've got to get to the point and move on very quickly.
I know several marketers who have replaced their email marketing with their Twitter feed. Personally, I wouldn't suggest anything as drastic as that, but I do recommend that you supplement your current marketing effo…
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Added by Karen Scharf on November 4, 2009 at 10:25pm —
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If you’ve added social media to your marketing mix, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is it worth all the time and effort involved?” That might seem like a difficult question to answer at first, but there are definite steps you can take to measure the return on your social media investments.
** What Are You Trying to Do?
First and foremost, you need to determine what your actual goal is. Are you trying to create brand awareness, generate sales, find joint venture partners, communicate with cu…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 29, 2009 at 3:00am —
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It's true that email marketing can get pretty technical. We've got HTML coding, and multi-part MIME messages, and cross browser compatibility, and designing for preview panes, and blacklists and blocklists and SPF records… It's enough to make non-techie marketers throw up their hands and give up on the thought of ever improving their email performance.
But sometimes we get so mired in trying to figure out the technical aspects that we forget that email marketing is, at its heart, marketing. And…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 29, 2009 at 2:59am —
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I think every website should have a site map since it does help in traffic generation. As the term suggests a site map is a map of the web site and can be a simple list of links or a more complex representation. The type of site map you’ll need depends on the type of website you have.
Your site map actually has two audiences: the search engine spiders and your human visitors. Since spiders and humans use the site map differently, it’s often a good idea to have different site maps for each purpo…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 29, 2009 at 2:58am —
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I've got to warn you – you're about to read about the pot calling the kettle black. That's because with each and every coaching client I have, I always discuss the creation of a testimonial capturing system. And yet I am woefully inept at using testimonials myself. Because I have non-disclosure agreements with most of my clients, I'm often hesitant to ask for testimonials. But I'm leaving a huge opportunity on the table.
That's because using testimonials can help ease your prospect's mind and r…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 21, 2009 at 2:03am —
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If you're trying to optimize your own website – and I strongly believe that all entrepreneurs and website owners should at least be familiar with optimization techniques – then there's a great possibility you've been researching and studying and reviewing all the information you can get.
But you need to make sure that you're studying current information. That's because the search engines changes their algorithms on a regular basis and if you're using outdated information you might be doing more…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 21, 2009 at 1:44am —
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My email in-box is jam packed, I have several calls from sales people that I haven't returned yet, my desk is a mess, and I'm finding it very hard to concentrate. What in the world is going on here!
Well, for starters, my friend Chris is undergoing her second brain surgery today (a 7 hour procedure that will hopefully eliminate what remains of the tumor), my husband is recovering from surgery that was definitely not as easy and painless as the doctor lead us to believe it would be, my staff is…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 21, 2009 at 1:22am —
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We often get inquiries from prospective clients who would like us to build them a new website. They believe that their current website must be “bad” because it's not listed in the search engines. They're convinced that a new website will automatically ensure a top ten Google rank.
If you believe that line of thinking, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, you don't need an entirely new website (assuming your current site is built on W3C standards). The bad news is there is no way to…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 7, 2009 at 3:36am —
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First, I want you to understand that I am NOT giving you license to steal other people’s content. There ARE repercussions to using duplicate content, but it is not a penalty per se.
There continues to be a lot of misinformation surrounding the so-called "Duplicate Content" penalty. I actually have one client who was extremely reluctant to start repurposing his articles and distributing them on article directory sites because he was concerned about getting hit with the duplicate content penalty.…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 7, 2009 at 2:53am —
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If you’re utilizing email marketing, you should be utilizing email testing. But it can seem complex and costly, and many small business owners aren’t quite sure where to start. If you’d like to use email testing, but aren’t sure where to start, here are 4 of the easiest tests to get you going:
** Test Your Subject Lines
Your subject line is basically the headline for your message. And any good copywriter will tell you, the headline will determine whether the rest of the copy will get read. So,…
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Added by Karen Scharf on October 7, 2009 at 1:52am —
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If you're a local business on a tight budget, you can save money on your advertising budget by targeting only specific locations with your AdWords campaigns.
It's pretty easy and straight-forward to use the geo-targeting feature in AdWords. Simply log into your campaign setting, the specify the areas you want to target. Your ads can be limited to certain countries, to certain states, to certain cities, or even a specific geographic radius, such as a 5-mile circle around your store. One of the n…
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Added by Karen Scharf on September 22, 2009 at 12:08pm —
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When we hear the words Landing Page we generally think of PPC campaigns or some other form of internet advertising. But I like to use landing pages for all of my off-line advertising also. However, you’re using it, a landing page is a web page, typically hidden from the site’s menu bar and other navigation – meaning the only way you can get to the page is to type the URL directly into the browser.
The web page is directly related to the ad campaign that listed the URL. Since only the people who…
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Added by Karen Scharf on September 22, 2009 at 12:07pm —
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Designing the HTML version of your email message can be difficult since there are so many different email client and operating system combinations out there - and they have their own way of rendering HTML. And there really is no way to be positively sure which client your readers will be using to view your messages.
If your reader has a Hotmail address, it's generally safe to assume that he will be reading your message through the Hotmail web client. But what about your readers with private ema…
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Added by Karen Scharf on September 22, 2009 at 10:10am —
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You might have heard the term "link juice" before in the discussion of search engine optimization and traffic generation. Link juice is actually a loosely defined term, but it generally refers to the combination of link relevance, page importance and anchor text.
If we can assume that each web page is awarded points and these points were distributed to the links on that page according to the importance of those links, that points distribution would be the link juice.
And just to set things str…
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Added by Karen Scharf on May 28, 2009 at 11:23pm —
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As a small business owner, it's highly likely that you're wearing many hats, and one of those hats happens to be Chief Marketing Officer. And I can tell you that I've met more than one entrepreneur who felt that was the hat that just doesn't quite fit.
Most of our small business activities involve right-brained thinking. We run numbers, we analyze, we crunch data, and we do all the "stuff" that we do as the technicians of our business.
And then along comes this marketing thing... Now we're for…
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Added by Karen Scharf on May 25, 2009 at 10:56pm —
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If you have any interest in email marketing, you've probably heard me extol the virtues of using a dedicated IP address for sending your mass communications. The rationale is that if you're using a shared IP address, you're basically at the mercy of every other marketer who is also using that IP address.
Let me back up just a little bit here... First, as a small business owner / entrepreneur, chances are you never realized that the IP address you send your email messages from even matters. Well…
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Added by Karen Scharf on May 6, 2009 at 12:09am —
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Often times we're approached by entrepreneurs at the end of their financial ropes, and they ask us to perform a search engine optimization miracle in the hopes of saving their drowning business. So, let's set the record straight on what SEO can and can not do for you.
First, let me say I am a big fan of seo - I believe that today, your website is basically the marketing hub for your business. Even if you are not doing business online (i.e. selling something) your website serves as your ad cente…
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Added by Karen Scharf on March 25, 2009 at 12:27am —
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