Tag : tips

  • The Best Way to Blog for SEO – A Beginner’s Guide

    Posted Aug 30th, 2011 By in Blogging, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) With | 1 Comment

    Are you clueless on how to blog for SEO? This beginner’s guide will take you through simple steps on how to get your blog posts in tip top shape for when the search bots come crawling.

    Why Blog for SEO?

    There’s two very good reasons you should do this, which lead me to put together this beginner’s guide on how to blog for SEO.

    1. Since you’re already taking the time to write the blog, so you might as well know how to blog for SEO.

    2. It will help drive extra traffic to your blog in the long term – which is why you’re blogging right?

    How to Blog for SEO

    First you should plan out your blog post. It might seem like extra work, but believe me it will make the whole process a lot easier. You can download the plan I used to prepare this blog for SEO here.

    Topic – First you’ll need to decide on the topic you’ll be blogging about. Ideally it should be a trending topic or something you know is popular with your target audience. There’s no point writing about something no one’s interested in.

    Keywords – Probably the most important consideration when tailoring your blog for seo is the keywords you’ll use. Once you’ve decided on your topic, the best way to select keywords is to head on over to the google keyword tool, which will show you a bunch of suggestions for the topic you enter. Ideally try to choose 2 or 3 phrases which have high search traffic and low competition. If you downloaded the plan I used for this post, you’ll see that the phrases I’ve selected are ‘blog for seo’, ‘how to blog’ and ‘beginner’s guide’, which all have low competition and searches in the thousands. (more…)

  • Retailers Use Mobile Marketing to Attract More Customers

    Posted Jul 21st, 2011 By in Mobile With | 2 Comments

    As a customer, you’ve probably experienced the benefits of mobile marketing to give you discounts, specials, and freebies from your favorite brand. Right? Well, as a business owner, you can use this same type of hands-on mobile marketing to reach customers more effectively than ever before.

    Even the most popular fast food chains like Subway, Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Wendy’s started marketing to customers with text marketing, iPhone apps, and mobile coupons just a few years ago. Many of these mobile apps will allow a customer to place an order online and pick up their food moments later. Simply brilliant.

    Even large retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy stay connected with customers via text for holiday specials and discounts and have introduced iPhone apps to give customers more options. Instead of visiting the official website, customers can read reviews, order products, and create a gift list directly through their mobile phone.

    As a business owner, you can take your mobile marketing campaign beyond just the standard text message. You can get creative with the following ideas:

    • Mobile Payments: Starbucks recently introduced Starbucks Card Mobile payments available at more than 1000 Safeway locations via the Android App. Customers can load up their Starbucks card on their mobile phone and use their phone to pay for their coffee at their convenience. This means that Starbucks mobile payment is now available on 90% of all smartphones to make it virtually impossible for a customer not to connect with Starbucks through their mobile device. (more…)

  • Mobile Marketing Trend: Texting Is Mainstream

    Posted Jul 13th, 2011 By in Mobile With | 1 Comment

    If you’re a small business owner who already uses text message marketing, then you’re on the right track. But it’s still important to stay up-to-date with the latest mobile marketing trends to ensure that you too can stay ahead of the pack.

    Currently, there are four times as many mobile phones in the world as opposed to PC users. Roughly 20% of houses in the US are mobile only without a landline.

    When you consider that we send 130 billion text messages each month, mobile marketing can be incredibly lucrative for small and large businesses if it is approached correctly. This is precisely why so many businesses have embraced text message marketing wholeheartedly as the most popular form of mobile marketing. Which is why text messaging is now becoming more mainstream than ever before.

    To best grasp the concept, text messaging should be compared to e-mail marketing and can be used in the same way that you would create an e-mail campaign. Of course, instead of encouraging your customers to give you their e-mail address for a newsletter or a coupon, you’ll be asking for a mobile phone number to send the same type of condensed updates to a mobile phone.

    Yet mobile marketing provides an even greater benefit. You don’t have to go to the trouble of creating a fancy e-mail campaign with images and video because you’ll only be using 160 characters of a text message. Even if a customer doesn’t make a sale the first time, 97% of your customers will still read your text message because it’s so short. You can’t beat those odds!

    Businesses have been using text messages to reach out to customers for several years. A Comscore study has confirmed that 25% of all mobile phone users have signed up for anywhere from 1 to 10 text messaging programs on a monthly basis. This means that customers are ready and willing, and you can reach them with your marketing message at any time away from home.

    And the text marketing trend continues. People of all ages are using texts for communication, meaning that businesses can use text message marketing for all generations. More and more customers are searching for mobile coupons as our economy recovers from the recession and programs like Groupon rise in popularity. As a result, a number of retail stores, grocers, and restaurants have launched mobile coupon marketing programs to reach out to more customers.

    Last but not least, the result that can’t be beat in text marketing is the impressive ROI. A text message will normally get seven times the response rate as an e-mail, meaning that the same message sent out to the same group of customers via text versus e-mail will be much more successful to generate even more sales and revenue.

    Guest Author:  Bethany Ramos is an expert in Internet marketing and social media marketing, and she also co-owns her own e-commerce website, The Coffee Bump.

     

  • How to Make Quick Gains from Location Based Mobile Marketing

    Posted Jun 28th, 2011 By in Mobile With | No Comments

     

     

    Under the broad umbrella of mobile marketing is location based marketing. Savvy smartphone users everywhere can pull up local search results on their phones at any time. These same smartphone users rely upon location based apps and social networks to share, interact, meet, and even recommend certain places to their online friends.

    Some top location based networks for mobile users include:

    • Foursquare
    • Gowalla
    • Loopt
    • Yelp

    As a business owner, the first step in the process to maximize this mobile marketing platform is to understand how each location based social network works. Most users will rely on the above apps on their smartphones to check in to certain locations to alert their friends of their whereabouts. The same feature can also be used with Facebook Places.

    In order to get acclimated, download all of the above apps to your smartphone so that you can understand how each is best used.

    The next step in the process is to set clear goals for what you hope to accomplish with the use of location mobile marketing for your business. Perhaps you want to increase local traffic to your retail store, raise awareness about a new shop that has opened up, or even bring back repeat customers to support your business. (more…)

  • 3 Mobile Marketing Musts for the Small Business Owner

    Posted Jun 21st, 2011 By in Mobile With | 1 Comment

    Sure, you can try your hand at mobile marketing as a small business owner, but what’s going to guarantee that you’ll be a success? How do you know that you’re not going to waste thousands of dollars of your advertising budget trying to reach your customers through text or smartphone apps?

    Fortunately, the answer is simple. As a small business owner, you can develop a clear mobile marketing strategy that will ensure that you avoid many common mistakes that competitors in your industry have likely made by now. When mobile marketing is approached correctly, you can reach your customers even more effectively, quickly update them about product news and specials, and boost your sales as a result.

    1. What phones are your customers using? This may be a no-brainer, but you need to find out what type of phones that your customer base uses on a regular basis. If your customers don’t have smartphones, then there’s no use in creating a smartphone app. On the flipside, if your customer base uses smartphones exclusively, then your best bet would be to create a smartphone app to market to your customers or to have a presence on a smartphone social media location-based app, like Yelp or Foursquare.

    Think about the fact that 33% of people in the US are using smartphones, and that number is only expected to increase. It’s likely that your customers are already using a smartphone, but it’s important to find out before planning your marketing strategy. (more…)

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