Online Marketing 2013 Glossary: Key Terms in the Industry
This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility. The New Year can be stressful for new businesses because it’s a time to look back and improve—analyze different numbers, gather different data, and create new strategies. However, it’s also important that businesses consider what will be changing this New Year and what will be staying the same. There are quite a few terms in the online marketing industry, and the New Year is the perfect time to go over these terms with your staff and make sure that everyone is one the same page. Below are a few Internet marketing terms that will be important in 2013: 1. Content Curation. This term will become more important in 2013 as more and more original content CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Being Realistic About Your Online Competition Matters for SEO
It’s Marketing 101—define your competition. So who are your online competitors? Better question—who are your real online competitors? Let’s say you own a small IT consulting business that caters to the Boston area. Is your competition really companies like SAP or Oracle? Sure, you may offer similar products as SAP and Oracle but that doesn’t mean they are your direct online competition. SAP and Oracle are multi-billion dollar, global companies that cater to the needs of other global enterprises; meanwhile your IT consulting business targets small to mid-sized businesses in the Boston area so they aren’t really eating into your profit potential. But what if you were measuring your SEO success against the likes of SAP and Oracle (or whoever the giants of your niche CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Happy 4th of July!
Happy 4th of July everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying their mid-week holiday with a fantastic fire works show, good food, good friends and family and maybe even a trip to the beach! Since Brick Marketing is based in Boston, I felt like I had to share this great clip of the Boston Pops 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular! I might be a little biased, but Boston really knows how to celebrate the 4th of CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Are the Online Goals of Your Website?
It's important to know what your online goals are long before you start to worry about SEO. SEO is a great way to drive traffic, and hopefully new business, to your site, but it is not a magic solution to all your online marketing or business issues. If you don't have a clear list on online goals your SEO might not actually be doing much good for your website. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Domain Registration Best Practices – SEO Video Lesson
When you register a new website, always try to register it for at least 10 years. This is important for a few reasons. First off, it shows you long term commitment to the search engines, which will help build trust. Secondly, it ensures that you won't lose your website should the registration renewal deadline pass without you remembering. Watch this week's SEO video lesson from Nick Stamoulis here! For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Evaluating Your Online Competition
When beginning your SEO campaign, it’s important to get a good idea of the playing field you are about to walk onto. If you don’t have a good idea of what your competition is doing or how they are going about their own SEO you might miss the opportunity to beat them at their own game. Here are 4 things you can look at when evaluating your online competition to see how your SEO campaign measure up: Backlinks If the top three ranking sites for your most important keywords have 10,000 links a piece and your site only has 6, well, you’ve got a long link building road ahead of you. Generally, the more links a site has pointing to it the more valuable it becomes in the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Let Your Site Go the Way of Yellow Pages
A few months ago I wrote a post for SearchEngineJournal.com called “Why Yellow Pages Will Be Dead in Five Years” after a phone call I had with one of their sales representatives that wanted me to upgrade my account. You can read the full details of our conversation in that post, but the moral of the story is that it wasn’t going to be cheap and the benefits were pretty much nonexistent. It got me thinking about Yellow Pages—how does a company that dominates the offline space for years (decades even) fall so far so fast when it comes to online marketing. The answer is simple—they failed to adopt. First and foremost, the search engines have completely revolutionized the way consumers were able CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How to Lose Online Advertisers
Many websites rely on selling online ad space in order to turn a profit. Some will invest in a Google’s AdSense campaign, while others sell ad space for related companies. Many site owners, myself included, have invested thousands of dollars in display advertising in order to build online brand awareness, or maybe even take a more direct marketing approach with it to promote a white paper or webinar. And while paid advertising has its place in a broader online marketing campaign and can be incredibly effective (I’ve had display ads on sites where the conversion rate was 20-30%!), as a whole I find the practice to be just okay. One particular experience soured my whole opinion of display advertising, but it got me thinking—in the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Profile Magazine: Free Is Not Free
***UPDATE! PLEASE READ THE EMAIL THAT I RECEIVED FROM PROFILE MAGAZINE AT THE END OF THIS POST, IT APPEARS THAT THIS MAGAZINE MAY NOT BE AN ACTUAL SCAM, BUT I RECOMMEND THAT YOU PLEASE READ THE WHOLE POST AND THE EMAIL AT THE BOTTOM, I HAVE ADJUSTED THE TITLE OF THIS POST AND REMOVED SCAM AS WELL...THANKS FOR READING!*** A few weeks ago I got a voice mail message from a representative at Profile Magazine. He said that Profile Magazine was interested in writing a feature article about my SEO company, Brick Marketing and that the first step was a 10-15 minute preliminary interview to learn a little bit more about me and the company. I was both excited and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Be Cheap with Your Hosting Company
I had a client whose site went offline for a few days through no fault of their own. They called me one afternoon in a panic, wanting to know if our developer had taken down their site for some reason. I assured them that my in-house developer would never pull a site down for any reason—your website is your business and your livelihood! As a business owner, I understand the damage that can be inflicted from having your site offline for a few hours; a few days can be disastrous! It turned out my client’s hosting company (a cheap, overseas service) had suspended their site for what remains an unknown reason. It took days of phone calls and emails before we finally got in touch CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Using SEO to Connect with B2B Decision Makers
In B2B industries, the decision makers are the ones that pull the trigger on all purchasing decisions; that makes them your target audience. You need to develop a B2B SEO campaign that allows you to connect with those decision makers via multiple platforms, numerous touch points and at every stage of the buying cycle to get their attention and earn their business. The competition to win the hearts, minds and dollars of those B2B decision makers is fierce, so a drop in the bucket isn’t going to get you anywhere. If you really want to earn their business, you have to take your B2B SEO campaign up a notch. Start with your content marketing How can you take your content marketing CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
10 Point Website Optimization Checklist
The first step of any SEO campaign should focus on website optimization. This is the process of making your website as appealing as possible to both the search engines and your visitors. A properly optimized website will eventually rank better in the SERPs and attract more targeted visitors. Here are ten components of website optimization: 1. Meta description and Meta keywords Even though Meta descriptions are no longer an important ranking factor, that doesn’t mean they don’t have their place in website optimization. Think of your Meta description like ad copy. Those 150 characters have to convince a searcher to choose your listing over another. The search spiders can still read and highlight related keywords, making your description stand out even more. 2. Title tag The title tag should be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Video Marketing Process Breakdown
Video marketing is only as complicated as you make it to be. It doesn’t take a huge budget and professional production team to make videos for your business that can help build your brand and educate your target audience. A valuable part of any SEO campaign, an online video does not have to be like a television commercial to be successful! Here is a breakdown of the video marketing process into 4 easy steps: 1- Create video using clip from workshop/presentation/speech/interview/tour etc… It should never be a struggle to come up with content for your video marketing campaign. Chances are you are sitting on a treasure trove of video content and you don’t even realize it! Every recorded speech, webinar, presentation, or interview CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Tips for Understanding Your Online Audience
It’s marketing 101—define your audience. If you don’t know who your target audience is, and know the in and out of their behavior and motivations, you’ll never be able to create an effective marketing campaign to reach and influence them. It sounds like a simple enough concept to understand, yet a lot of companies think that they can just transition what they know about their audience’s offline behavior to their online marketing tactics and everything will just fall into place. This isn’t always the case. Here are 3 things to take into consideration when trying to underdstand your target audience: 1. What they use the Internet for Does your target audience use the Internet for work or for play? Have the search engines become their go-to-place for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You a Lazy Marketer?
We are all a little guilty of taking the easy way out sometimes. Maybe we didn’t have the time or energy to give it our all or maybe we thought we could get away with doing the minimum for a while. Whether it was your personal or professional life, just about everyone has taken a few shortcuts here and there. However, if you’ve take the “good enough” approach with your marketing (either for your own business or on behalf of clients), you’re going to end up doing more harm than good. Here are 4 common “lazy marketing” tactics you want to avoid: Automated Phone Calls You know the phone call I’m talking about. (I probably get an average of 2-3 a day!) You answer the phone and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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Nick Stamoulis:
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