Blogging is one of the more universal methods of online marketing – it has become essential for businesses to be taken seriously. There are many different styles that can get good results … some bloggers are fun, some are derisive, some are earnest and very personal, some are sarcastic, some are informative, and some are just amazing people! Today we are looking at several different strategies for online marketing with your blog that pro bloggers have been known to use. Note: not all are required at once!

1. Team blogging

You can make your blog a team effort, utilizing people from all areas of your company, as well as outsourcing and inviting guest posters to contribute to your blog. A breadth of opinion can be a good thing, as long as each blogger respects the basic tone of the blog.

2. Little posts published very frequently

There is a whole subculture of bloggers that do nothing other than blog … some of them post up to ten times a day! If you have ever written a blog, you might be able to relate that feeling to doing something else ten times a day, and quickly pinpoint borderline compulsive behavior. But for the readers who spend a lot of time on the net and take frequent brain-breaks, new and easily digested content can be a great reward for visiting.

3. Informative, middling sized posts published regularly

This is the road that many bloggers have success with. Posting info-packed but not excessively long posts around 1-2 times per week works well for a huge number of bloggers.

4. Big, long and deep

Some bloggers, including many that blog about online marketing, produce very detailed posts with highly original content … but only do so once every week or two. Tim Ferris is one that is notoriously irregular in his posting times, but the depth of content keeps people coming back.

5. Blogging every single day

This is like keeping an online journal, and is almost a surefire way to build up your online marketing efforts. Write often enough and people are bound to stumble across it – and even find it useful. You will need to store up plenty of posts as a safety net, though. Expert online marketing help is essential for small businesses wanting to employ the tactic.

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Do you want the short version of the Internet marketing strategies textbook? We’ve got it right here, in a few short paragraphs! For those who are new to the game of marketing on the Internet, the whole process can seem a bit confusing. Here we break it down into the three most important steps, and provide examples of some of the activities that you might use as part of your overall internet marketing strategy.

1. Product and website development

While it is not technically a marketing activity, it is so vital to the success of your campaign that it simply cannot be ignored as part of an essentials guide. Your product should fill some sort of hole in the market – it should offer something that either nobody else is, or create some other unique value. When it comes to your website, the importance of having a webmaster-supervised platform with a professional and unique design cannot be overstated. Work from a template and you will be seen as an imitator; have a buggy site and people will leave with negative thoughts in their minds.

2. Short term Internet marketing

This is not necessarily something that should be done before your long-term strategies, but rather concurrently with them. Short-term Internet marketing strategies include doing things like:

* Putting up banner advertising around the web
* Participating in forums – answering questions, offering opinions in your niche
* Putting up paid advertisements on search engines

These activities all need to be maintained to have any ongoing effect, apart from the background branding effect that any marketing activity naturally has.

3. Long term strategies

As mentioned earlier, do this from the get-go. The sooner you start with these Internet marketing strategies, the better off your site and business will be.

* Create profiles on social networking sites and start looking for people you know and promoting your page elsewhere.
* Start a blog, or even more than one blog, and start writing about topics within your niche.
* Give out samples of either your products or services to help build brand awareness and loyalty, both online and offline
* Article marketing is an Internet marketing strategy that can take some time to show full effects, and needs to be maintained. Start it early.
* Create a product or service or membership that requires visitors to your site to provide their contact details … and demographic details if possible. Use this to build an opt-in list for email marketing.

Internet marketing strategies can seem like a huge subject – but if you break them down into manageable categories, you’ll soon understand why people rave about them.

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Targeted traffic from expired domains is one Internet advertising strategy that really does everyone involved a favor. There’s nothing more frustrating to searchers than getting either a 404 message or custom hosting site message indicating that the site is down because the domain name has expired. “Darn it, I was interested in you!!”, people think in frustration. Redirecting traffic to a related site is actually one of the more useful forms of advertising on the Internet – we explain how it works.

Where does targeted traffic come from?

If you are unfamiliar with the concept, it can be a little difficult to get your head around! Here is a step by step of what happens:

* Someone who previously owned a domain allows the registration to expire, usually because they are no longer using the site as they once were.
* Programmers find these expired domains, or they are submitted to lists by the domain registers to help keep their profits up – a domain with existing traffic is worth more to people than a completely new domain
* A single company or an Internet marketing firm may purchase one or several of these
* When you are looking for visitors to your website, a portion of this targeted traffic can be delivered (redirected) to your site.
* Alternatively, some companies create duplicates of their site on the new domain.

Why is targeted traffic from expired domains so valuable?

If your site is closely related to the one with the expired domain, you are getting visitors who are intimately interested in exactly what you are selling (targeted traffic!). Yet, you put in none of the search engine marketing dollars to get them there. This benefits the visitor, also; as we mentioned, it alleviates the frustration of going to a site and finding nothing there.

Checks to make when buying expired domain traffic

Of course, if you have chosen to use a reputable Internet marketing firm to redirect traffic for you, you won’t have to worry about these niceties! Still, no matter who actually carries it out, vetting the sites that you purchase traffic from is essential. Firstly it should be verified that any claims the host or domain owner makes about traffic levels are true, preferably through screenshots or actual log in to a web analytics site. Secondly, it should be checked that any SEO tactics used by the previous domain were not black hat – if Google discovers these in the future, your site might incur the penalty, effectively cutting off your supply of targeted traffic.

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The buzz is all about link baiting nowadays, and it has been for quite a while. This is a tactic that is innately valuable to search engines, because it is innately valuable to consumers. Eric Ward writes (no doubt causing more than a few giggles among those familiar with the term), ” Link Bait has been around longer than I have. Its what we used to call…content”. However, much like any other Internet marketing phenomenon, there is quite a lot of misunderstanding about what linkbait is, and the value that certain forms of it have. Don’t chuck out your traditional methods of web link building just yet … do a little more research on linkbait first.

Linkbait must not be misleading

A fake story at money.co.uk about a 13-year-old boy who used his Dad’s credit card to order hookers started a lot of debate about the ethics of link building. A top Google exec indicated that these tactics may very well be punished by Google if they were discovered. So whether you are repeating news you heard elsewhere to develop your own linkbait (for example, creating a list post with other resources), check the truthfulness of sources carefully – or you could face a Google penalty.

Linkbaiting must support general marketing strategy, like web link building must

If you run a conservative business making most of your sales from B2B relationships, then linkbaiting using a story that is mildly pornographic, politically incorrect or plain voyeuristic won’t get you far. Every piece of content you create must support your general marketing aims. There are both formal and informal means of link building – don’t assume that because ‘Kitten born with three eyes’ was front page on Digg for two days that you need something similar for your baited web link building exercise.

Estimate long term ROI of your linkbait

But more importantly, compare that information to what you know about how much the linkbait cost to develop. Include your time as well as any outsourcing costs incurred when calculating linkbait’s cost to your company, and actively measure links that came in from that campaign to see how those visitors to your site are converting. Web link building can be fun – but its main point is to make money!

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Marketing isn’t always just about marketing. Look at a list of the greatest ever (or most successful ever) marketing campaigns and you’ll frequently find simple solutions, with very sparing work, overlaid on a great product or service that the market really was missing. The business is the cake, the marketing is the icing. The same is true of business email marketing. Today we are looking at the best practices that your company should engage in, before you start sending out business email marketing messages.

Review the base product your business email marketing promotes

Your company probably has a range of different products and services. If you follow general marketing best practices, your emails will only promote one of these at a time. But are those products the most suitable ones for email marketing? Consumers aren’t stupid – their eyes cut right through all the adjectives and unsupported claims in any piece of text, and get right to the heart of whether the product is worth it, or not. If a peer review (anonymously conducted to ensure honest answers!) doesn’t feel that your product or promotion is worth marketing, go back to the drawing board.

Does your website creative and quality match the quality of your emails?
A website that either:

* Looks nothing like the design of the email message
* Is lacking in general design quality

Will sabotage your business email marketing efforts. If people arrive at your website only to find errors, loads of data jammed on pages, and insecure forms for ordering, all the marketing in the world won’t be able to make you money. It is best practice to build your campaign from the ground up – and the website itself comes much earlier in the priority list than the marketing.

Do you have expert opinions on your business email marketing?

Yes, DIY is always cheaper. But is it always more effective? Almost never. Unless you have specialist design, copywriting or marketing skills yourself, running your own business email marketing campaigns is likely to waste your precious time. Google has a million sites that will tell you about how to set up your own email campaigns in minutes for free … but they may even hurt your business reputation if they are executed with bugs. Expert help is always best in the long run!

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In Google’s eyes, relevancy is king. Everything must be related. In some ways, it is like a mental disorder or compulsion! However, when it comes to Internet directory submissions, there are always a few prominent exceptions to the rule. If you are submitting your website to directories, you should look within your niche. However, there are also quite a few general web directories that are essential for all businesses to submit their site to. We’ve explored the topic before – now we complete the big list of essential Internet directory submissions.

Merchant Circle

With a free directory listing, the Merchant Circle site will usually get your site to the Google top ten for your business name, even when your site itself isn’t ranking that high. This is an essential directory for startups to submit to.

Yellowpages.com

If all of your customers come into the store, and you don’t offer online sales of any kind, then Yellowpages is a website that you must be on. There are millions of searches made on Yellow Pages every week, and even if you never see any website traffic from the listing, you could actually be seeing plenty of business from it.

Business.com

This Internet directory submission costs the same as a Yahoo Directory listing; however most of its value comes from the search engine ‘juice’ it generates. Companies generally don’t see a high proportion of human traffic coming in via Business.com … but after all, search engines drive 80% of the traffic to a given website anyway.

Pegasus Directory

When a site ranks well in Google for its on terms, it bodes well for its listers. Add an Internet directory submission to the Pegasus Directory for a few human visits as well as good search engine juice – it is human edited.

LinkCenter

This UK site is a paid one with a Pagerank of 3, and takes a fairly unique stance among directory sites of not allowing gambling listings or adult sites. They aim for a family-friendly feel, and this should be worth the Internet directory submission fee for corporate and kids’ sites. Nice interface compared with other directories, as well.

What to avoid

More is not always better, when it comes to Internet directory submissions for your website. If you hang with the wrong crowd, Google is likely to peg your site as a delinquent. Look out for these shady directory tactics to avoid being penalized for no good reason:

* Different directories run by the same owners
* Different directories hosted on the same IP address
* Directories with duplicate category structures
* Directories that have previously been penalized by Google.

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Article marketing itself has become quite common on the Internet. There’s no challenge for many businesses any more … so the consumer has upped the ante! Video article marketing is the new hottest way to promote your business. YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 4 … miles ahead of Ezinearticles’ ranking of just over 200. Today we are looking at ideas that every business can use to create video article marketing pieces for distribution.

DIY videos

These are one of the most watched categories of video on YouTube. Expert Village, one of the most successful promoters of DIY and learning videos, is huge on YouTube (although their own site is less popular). Just about any business can create a DIY video, whether your product is action-oriented or not. If the work you do for your customers is mostly stationary (you sit at a desk to deliver a service), animators can help fill that visual gap and still provide real value.

Online diaries

If you have a strong, camera-friendly personality in your organization, use them as the voice of the company in an online video-based corporate blog. They can tell your customers anything that you would write in a blog, as long as the content fits within a few-minute format.

Funny demos

There are quite a lot of businesses that can use this format for their video article marketing! The ‘Will it blend’ phenomenon, where a company that makes blenders puts something new in one every week (including things like iPods!), has been a great success. All you need is a creative view of your product or service.

PowerPoint presentations

This is an ultra low-budget way to do video article marketing – but of course, less effective than the higher quality ones. If your material lends itself to it, you can use recording software to create a voiceover of your reading a PowerPoint presentation on your topic. If you can present it, you can video-article-market it.

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In the red corner, weighing in at a collective 0.012 pounds, we have the school of thought that says that social media is the new black on the Internet, and distributing press releases is a waste of time. And in the blue corner, weighing in at around the same, 0.012 pounds also, we have the opposing school of thought … that social media is a waste of time, and only distributing press releases will get you any serious news space!

Which wins? The answer is neither, and both. In different situations, for different companies and with different products and services and target markets, one strategy will work and the other won’t. Here we go over the benefits and drawbacks of both distributing press releases, and using social media to promote a newsworthy event on your website.

Round 1: Distributing press releases wins

If your audience doesn’t use social media (they are over 55, they are not technologically savvy, etc), then social media is an obvious waste of time! Distributing press releases allows you access to the mainstream media, and if your audience still reads magazines and newspapers, that is a great thing.

Distributing press releases is also a much safer ‘bet’ – you can have a reasonable expectation of what the work you put into a press release will net you. The same cannot be said for Digg, social bookmarking, or social networking communities. Stats and risks have been calculated for distributing press releases, but social media is relatively new.

Round Two: Social media wins

With social media, you get to tell your customers exactly what you want. I’m reminded of a press release I sent out a few years ago, with a photo showing an environmental disaster in action. There are two sides to every debate – and one of the highest profile publications that picked up the release chose to use the photo, and then argue against everything expressed in the press release. The complete opposite of what we expected! Social media gives you back that control.

It is also more personal, and by extension of the first round (where distributing press releases won), if your audience is in the demographic that uses social media heavily, then it would be crazy to ignore the platform!

Mutual Drawback: Both are notoriously fickle

A headline that garners a hundred thousand Diggs might be completely ignored the next month … and Facebook group that once had thousands of members can dwindle into insignificance over time just as easily. The same is true of distributing press releases – sometimes a product launch will net you several good news stories, yet a similar launch months later will be ignored. Sometimes you can’t tell in advance – and you just have to try.

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There are quite a lot of corporations blogging now. Blog promotion is incredibly important as part of your overall online marketing strategy – it has enormous amounts of potential, but there is also a huge amount of competition. The way to leverage the best the platform offers is to allow a little personality in your posts. Most businesses are scared to show any feelings other than passion for their products, scared that they will alienate their customers. In fact, your blog promotion could be suffering because your blog has no personality- we look at why.

Blogging is a chance to humanize your company

It is so much easier to interact with a real human being than with a computer … even if that computer is programmed to be as pleasant and agreeable as possible. Most people would much rather have a real conversation that listen to robot-speak … so unless you come across as a real human in your blogs, you won’t get a lasting readership. Make the aspects of your personality that stand out positive, and you will generally do well.

But what if people disagree with me?

For starters, you don’t have to express your personality by making statements that people can disagree with. One could argue that every statement that is made on your blog can be disagreed with anyway, whether it expresses personality or not.
If your corporate blog’s personality is a reflection of its brand (aimed at young people, has the wry humor and realism of a mother, or the no-bull attitude of a man’s man), then it will resound with your target audience. In blog promotion, there is little point trying to please all the people all the time …

I’m not as funny as all the other bloggers out there …

You don’t have to be anything that you aren’t. And in fact, if the person most suited to write the blogs in the company either doesn’t write well, or doesn’t express the personality that the brand itself does, there is a perfectly acceptable alternative. Hire a professional blogger long-term (often through an internet marketing company), and have them really get to know your brand before they write about it. Your blog promotion will be more professional, more interesting and achieve its aims better if you let a little humanity in!

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Banner creation has advanced immeasurably from the days when banners were nothing more than print display ads, squished into a size that you could read on a screen. Today you can make things move in your banners, include real videos, make sound play when the ad loads, force the ad to scroll down the screen along with the viewer, and make ads that only needs the mouse to hover over them to expand. So, is all of that technology in banner creation really worth it? We search for the answer, technology by technology.

Video banner ads

Video banner ads may start playing video as soon as they load, or they may wait for the viewer to click on them to play. The first option is the one more commonly taken. They are great if:

* You have already invested money in video advertising (perhaps for TV, or for a dedicated YouTube channel)
* Your banner ads are more for branding than for clicks
* You either have no particular campaign or goal associated with the ad, or an extremely compelling one (win an overseas holiday, etc)

Rollover banner ads

As soon as the user moves their mouse over these ads, they load – with either video or sound, or an expanded size (see below). Most of the rollovers will come from pure accident, but if you have a compelling offer or fascinating piece of information, that accident will often turn into purposeful investigation.

Expandable banner ads

Without user interaction, these banner advertisements are static and standard size. When a viewer either rolls over the ad or clicks on the ad, though, they expand to a much larger size. Therefore you only pay for the increased space when someone wants to interact with your ad. You probably won’t be able to design these ads yourself – leave it to the Internet marketing gurus.

Scrolling banner ads

For an extra fee, some websites will allow you to make your banner scroll down along with the viewer.

Floating banner ads

These have become more and more popular in recent times, and even the biggest sites and advertisers are using the tactic. When you load a page, an advertisement appears that the viewer must close before getting to the content.

Conclusion – is exotic banner creation worth it?

In most cases, the simple answer is that if you have an exceptionally compelling offer to include in your ad, exotic banner creation is worth it to get the extra attention. However, be wary of how many of these technologies you use and how frequently. They can be seen as intrusive and create ill will among viewers … which could spill over into your brand if you are too liberal with the scrolling, noisy, expanding video ads!

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