By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Is Your Brand Being “Heard”?

There’s a new marketing tool in town you should know about. It’s in Beta testing but it is not only free but produces mountains of great marketing information to help you improve your website. It’s called “Heardable.com,” and quite simple it is the easiest and most efficient way to measure how your online brand is perceived, performs and stacks up against your competition.

Just enter your URL in the free tool and you get a Heardable Score in return. The six measurable sub-scores that will help you determine you brand’s success against your competition are:

1) Portable: Is your site optimized for mobile search? The better positioned you brand is to take advantage of mobile, the higher your ranking and site’s effectiveness. Portability is determined by detecting auto redirects for the four top mobile device platforms; iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

2) Shareable: Sharing is a reciprocal exchange, giving and getting. Heardable scans for RSS feeds with the more feeds the more you are likely to share content and thus more engaged in social activity. The more you share, the more you will be picked up and shared as well. Social media is all about engagement.

3) Measurable: Does your website have analytics that track, monitor and optimize site activity, including on-page performance, ecommerce and online advertising? A low score would indicate you need to set up more tracking indicators for your marketing efforts.

4) Actionable: Does your website interact with your visitors and connect with them using visitor focused words? A higher ranking is achieved if your website speaks in personal tones to customers, using ‘you’ or ‘your’ as ways to connect with them. A low ranking focuses more on brand information and corporate policy.

5) Sociable: Word of mouth marketing is becoming a major player in brand image and how consumers react through the power of the purse. Make sure you have a brand blog set up with at least a few employees making regular contributions. Set up social accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and YouTube immediately and participate on a daily basis.

6) Searchable: Ranking in this category depends on search engine visibility, number of inbound links, and local search determinants. Keywords, original content and linkage to your site will improve your site’s performance and searchability.

Facing Down the Competition

Business is all about competing and the goal is gaining market share and customers. Heardable can give you a powerful tool to find the answers about improving your business and achieve web success. It provides you with real time data that you can use to make better marketing decisions, and turn them into an action-based plan backed by indisputable metrics. Your boss wants proof, well show them the stats!

Brand Comparisons

Heardable’s extensive research of category brand leaders mirrors a Heardable Score. This means you can now get the statistical intelligence to help you dramatically improve your site’s performance and take the lead of your chosen category of business. Heardable Category Overviews factor in over one million URLs covering seven critical areas of analysis.

Learn from the Best Brands

The Heardable 100 is a sort of gold standard of online branding. They share with you the best of the best and what makes them tick. Heardable takes the features and functions that these 100 online brand leaders have in common. There are plenty of take-a-way lessons in this batch to give your site that needed marketing boost.

Make Your Website Heard!

In today’s competitive environment, online branding is critical to building your business online. Getting qualified visitors is a marketing imperative. Tools like Heardable are critical in understanding your site’s performance and visibility. The Web Success Team can analyze and optimize your website, increase your Heardable Score to make it ‘Heard’ throughout the Internet. Contact us today for an complimentary analysis of your website and the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

Images: from Heardable, Inc.

The Web Success Team specializes in developing and marketing direct response websites that take full advantage of the latest developments on the Internet. The Team has an arsenal of effective web strategies, online marketing tools and proven customized social media techniques to promote your products and services. And we’ll show you ways to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

For more tips, tools and articles of interest, become a fan of the WebSuccessTeam Facebook page and learn more about online marketing, SEO and social media. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/WebSuccessTeam. Contact the Team today for a complimentary consultation to your web success!

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by Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

The human mind is a remarkable thing, but it can also be fooled. Everyday, whether we want to or not, we are bombarded by advertisements and marketing in magazines, on TV, radio, billboards, etc. Almost everywhere we look, we see ads and brands telling us what we need, adding to our own views and preferences even creating a placebo effect.

Perception Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Stan Reents, PharmD writes in his article “Don’t Underestimate the Power of Suggestion” about how placebos affect the human mind in various studies. One example was a taste test study on different types of vodka. The subjects were asked what their favorite vodka was before the test. However, the results showed that many rated their favorites poorly. Why did they insist that one brand of vodka was their favorite when their taste buds said differently? The answer can be said in two words: brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty is when a consumer buys and continues to buy a specific brand, because he or she believes the product’s features are better. This can be done either consciously or unconsciously. This explains why some people in the above study preferred certain brands of vodka over others despite their liking to them. Those brands favored must have had the right images, features and prices to create a higher perceived level of quality.

Establishing Your Own Online Identity

Creating an online brand will give consumers an image of your company and add interest to your products and/or services. The job of an online marketer is to try to break the habits of the consumers that buy your competitor’s products by offering something fresh, new and better. If you suggest that your product is better, it puts the possibility out there.

Now I’m not advocating lying to potential consumers or offering products and services that are of poor quality. The idea is to sell the best quality that you can offer and to market a specific image in order to attract potential clients.

You want to distinguish your brand from your competitors but in an interesting, positive, and memorable way in order to leave consumers wondering if they should give your products and/or services a chance. Once you have a clear and strong brand image, your products and/or services become something more, a brand. They stop being items and start being something better, different and not something that can be imitated.

Momentum Marketing

Having established a branding, you now need to deliver your message online and keep the momentum going. Obviously your website is “brand central” but you still need to actively promote your brand through direct response marketing and the various social media network marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube. Also you need to support your brand by blogging and article marketing where you can write and post informative content that positions you as an expert in your field. Set a realistic budget for marketing and promotions. If done correctly, it will be well worth the return on investment and move you closer to web success.

The Web Success Team specializes in developing and marketing direct response websites that take full advantage of the latest developments on the Internet. The Team has an arsenal of effective web strategies, online marketing tools and proven customized social media techniques to promote your products and services. And we’ll show you ways to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

For more tips, tools and articles of interest, become a fan of the WebSuccessTeam Facebook page and learn more about online marketing, SEO and social media. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/WebSuccessTeam. Contact the Team today for a complimentary consultation to your web success!

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By Kristin Tomlinson-Web Success Team

With the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl just around the corner and with the World Cup taking center stage this summer, sponsors are taking a new and different approach to advertising their brands. They are scrambling to invest more in social media campaigns and less on expensive TV and print advertisements. Aside from the obvious cost savings, the big question is why social media? The answer is two-fold. Social media is personal and it builds relationships. Advertisers are fast recognizing that to build brand loyalty they need to connect with their consumers in new ways through online direct response marketing. What better way than through sports marketing where fans identify with athletes and their national teams.

Social media is playing a critical part in presenting brands and athletes in a manner that interacts with fans on a worldwide basis. It creates anticipation and excitement for fans that can communicate directly with their favorite athlete and connect with them on a more personal level. Social media is enabling brands to create lasting relationships with people around the globe that isn’t possible with television and print media.

The Crossover to the New Media

NBC, who has exclusive broadcast rights to air the Vancouver Olympics, is making a big play with online marketing as a major part of their promotions to achieve web success. It has partnered with the social media firm The Swarm Collective to produce Olympic Pulse, a place where visitors can look up tweets from athletes, Olympic blogs and top trending stories. The Super Bowl promotions have also been very active in social media on Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Athletes and teams are scrambling to hype the event and gain more followers.

In order to prep for the World Cup in the coming months, the corporate partners of FIFA, football’s world governing body, are moving away from the use of traditional TV and billboard campaigns. Instead they are trying out social networking sites to promote their brands, to sell their pitch and build their business online. Calum MacDougall, director of global marketing partnerships at Sony Ericsson, says 2010 will be the first “social networking World Cup.”

Changing the Way the Game Is Played

What makes social media so attractive to powerhouse companies is the realization that more and more people are resorting to popular social destinations like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to get their daily dose of their favorite brands and athletes. In addition to this, these sites come with major audiences and give brands a huge boost and a way to reach millions of consumers. As an added bonus, these sites give brands the viral, online hype that they’ve been searching for in their audiences and their markets. In addition to this, it’s cheaper than spending millions on TV, billboard and print campaigns, and they can get real-time results in relation to how many people are engaging in these sites and taking advantage of their promotional offers.

The consumer has changed and companies have finally recognized that they need to be where the consumers are most responsive. Is social media the advertising vehicle of the future, replacing more traditional media? Probably not, but it may run an effective second.

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Ask yourself which is more powerful when you are deciding on a purchase: a referral from a friend or colleague; a printed advertisement; or a sales person.

Not to second guess you, but I bet overwhelmingly it is someone you have direct contact with, someone who has actually purchased the product or service, or has heard good things about it from a trusted friend. Recommendations are sales gold.

This senario falls into the realm of social media networking. It is powerful, it is convincing and it is proven. Companies have spend millions of dollars to promote their brand and to deliver the right message to consumers through traditional advertising. Now the statistics are in and they are moving more of their marketing dollars to the digital/social media arenas.

Here are a few social media facts and figures:

1. 300,000+ businesses use Facebook
2. 300 million people are active Facebook users
3. 100 million viewers are on YouTube
4. 14 million Twitter users
5. 346 million people read blogs; 184 million bloggers

Your new and current business will depend more and more on social media marketing. That’s were the hearts and minds of your customers will be focused. They are relying more on input and personal experiences in decision making that having some Madison Avenue wag influence your decision where to spend your hard earned money.

The paradigm has shifted. Power to the people. As James Frley, CMO Ford stated, “You can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other.”

Here are just a few real life examples:

• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media marketing. Using Twitter, they increased sales 67% of which 84% were new customers.
• An organized tweet-up for Susan G. Komen for the Cure netted 11,000 visitors in 24 hours and countless donations.
• Web host provider Moonfruit spent $15,000 on social media and increased their traffic by 300% — translation, a sales bump of 20%.

These stories are not uncommon. Creating and implementing an effective social media marketing plan is as essential to your business as your telephones. Implementing one is a must. There is no getting around that social media done correctly takes time and resources, but the return on investment is there for the taking.

The New Buying Reality

Buying habits have changed. Selling has to catch-up to this new reality. The better news is that it is affordable, considering its reach and appeal. You are building lasting relationships that will continue to pay dividends, or in business terms, profits. How’s that for a return on investment.

Get started today. The Web Success Team can tailor a social media marketing plan to fit your company and to promote your brand.

Source for this article: Socialnomics

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Note from Web Success Team: Here is part II of the article published on January 7th. When we run into an article that has practical application value, we want to make it available to our clients and our readers. This Guide takes the mystique out of PPC and offers excellent short-cut strategies to maximize your PPC budget and its effectiveness in driving more qualified traffic to your website.  — Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Creating Killer PPC Ads

1. Include your keywords in your ads (on every line if possible) for higher QS and lower cost per click.
2. Use your headline to grab attention, the first line to mention the top benefits of your products and the third line for a clear call to action. You can use the URL line for including keywords and calls to action as well.
   
3. Use Digg.com to come out with killer headlines. Look for the headlines with the most diggs.
   
4. Tie your ad copy to current events.
   
5. Always split-test ads. Have two ads that look almost the same except for one element. Find a winner and then write a new ad to beat it. Keep doing this again and again to constantly improve your click-though rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Start by testing the big stuff (offers, guarantees, marketing message) and move down to the small details. Changing one single word can double or triple your CTR, so test everything. This is a nice tool that allows you to calculate if you have enough data to make a good decision.
6. Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This is a feature that includes your keywords in your ads. I used to love it but then I realized that it made some of my ads look really bad if the keywords people searched for weren’t relevant to the ads. Stick to one keyword and one ad per ad group and you’ll do great.
7. Use numbers and special characters in your ad ($, #, ®, ©, ¼, &, etc.) They’re a great way to get people’s attention.
8. Call your readers. For example, “hey you, skinny man” or “hey you, bankruptcy victim”.
9. Use negative ads. For example, “Is Bob’s New Book a Scam? Don’t Buy Bob’s Book Before You Read This”
10. Try news-style ads. For example, “62 Year-Old Woman Happy with Husband’s Performance”
11. Try tease ads. For example, “The One Secret to Reduce Taxes by 87%. Get It Here for FREE”
12. Ask questions: “Are You Sick of Spider Veins?”
13. When you write ads for the Content Network, you don’t need to include your keywords. Your goal here is to grab people’s attention, so get controversial, use weird characters and get their attention in any way you can.

The Perfect Landing Page

1. Use landing pages; don’t just send people to your home page. The goal of a landing page is to capture leads. After that, you’ll need to do a good job to monetize those leads.
2. Avoid big headers and navigation menus. If you need a navigation menu, you can have it in the footer.
3. Have an attention-grabbing headline.
4. Use bullet points to get your point across.
5. Have 1 clear call to action. Make it clear what you want people to do.
6. This post will give you copywriting tips.
7. This post will help you understand how the subconscious mind works.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

1. The best way to ensure you pay as little as possible for your clicks is by using negative keywords effectively. Read this post on PPC negative keywords.
2. Eliminate keywords with no impressions after 7 days.
3. Eliminate keywords with no clicks after 14 days.
4. Eliminate keywords with low conversion rates after 30 days.
5. Eliminate keywords with low CTR or write better ads to increase the CTR.
6. Eliminate keywords that don’t appear on the first page or increase their bids so they make the first page.
7. Use the Opportunities feature to get ideas on how to improve your campaign.
   
8. Put keywords with a lot of traffic in their own ad groups and write special ads for each of them.
9. Use Google Website Optimizer to test elements on your landing pages (headlines, calls to action, graphics, bullets, guarantees, etc.) This is the best way to increase your conversion rate.
10. Pick your winning ads and write new ads to beat the winners.
11. After 45 days, once your campaign has built a good record of high CTR and QS, lower your bids by $0.03 every couple of days and keep an eye on your traffic to make sure it doesn’t drop. Most of the time, once a campaign has a good record, you can lower your bids without losing any traffic.
12. Look for the “Campaign Limited by Budget” message. If your budget is limiting your campaign, set it extremely high. If you absolutely need to have a budget, lower your bids so you get more traffic for the same amount. Keep lowering your bids until the”Campaign Limited by Budget” message disappears.
13. Look for new traffic segments. For example, if you’re a chiropractor and a lot of people see you for their back pain, create a landing page addressing that issue and create a new ad group with back pain-related keywords and ads.
14. Compete with yourself. If your campaign is doing great, create a new website (in a new domain) and get almost twice as many leads/sales.
15. Buy several domains. Some domain names get 2-4 times as many clicks as others. Keyword-rich domains always win. Domains are only $9/year, so buy a bunch of them and see which one has the highest CTR.
16. Don’t limit your campaign to Google. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com also have PPC programs. They’ll send you a lot less traffic, but the conversion rates are usually higher.

How To Ensure an Excellent Quality Score
QS is extremely important. If you have a high QS, your ads could get twice as many clicks as your competitor’s while you pay only half of what he’s paying. In fact, having a poor QS is the reason why most people lose money with PPC, so pay attention and follow these guidelines:

1. Have links to a contact us page and a privacy policy page on your landing page.
2. Include your keywords in your ads as much as you can. This is where having one ad per keyword makes a lot of sense.
3. Include your keywords in your landing pages, but don’t overdo it.
4. SEO factors on your landing page are very important. Have a relevant page title, H1 tag, meta description and meta keywords.
5. There must be a connection between your ad and your landing page. If your ad promises a downloadable report and your landing page tries to sell a widget, you’ll be in trouble. You can offer whatever you want, just be upfront about it in your ad.
6. Avoid “trouble” words like “offer”, “guarantee”, “buy now”, etc. Put these words in images and call the images 1.jpg, 2.gif, etc. Don’t put the trouble words in the images alt tags either.
7. For all those images that don’t contain any of the “forbidden” words, use descriptive alt tags.
8. If you’re going after very different markets (such as “beach vacations in Costa Rica” and “ski holidays in Colorado”), have individual landing pages for each of your markets so you can keep your QS high.

I hope you guys enjoy this post. It took me a long time to put it together but it was a lot of fun. – Zeke Camusio.

Source: Zeke Camusio http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog

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Note from Web Success Team: When we run into an article that has practical application value, we want to make it available to our clients and our readers. This Guide takes the mystique out of PPC and offers excellent short-cut strategies to maximize your PPC budget and its effectiveness in driving more qualified traffic to your website.  — Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

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By Zeke Camusio

This is a very challenging post. I’ll try to explain my step-by-step Pay per Click (PPC) system in one single article (and I want to keep it short). This is the same system we’ve used to get millions of qualified visitors for pennies. I’m really excited about writing this article and I think you’ll love it.

Keyword Research

1. Use the Google Tool ( https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to get keyword suggestions for your site.
2. Run the same tool on your competitors’ websites!
3. Use the same tool for “Descriptive words or phrases” as opposed to the “Website content” feature.
4. Use WordTracker ( http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ ) to get more keyword ideas.
5. Use SpyFu ( http://spyfu.com/) to find out what keywords your competitors are using and get ideas from their campaigns. Looks for the 800-lb. gorilla in your market and run SpyFu on their domain. They’re very likely to have a huge budget and a very optimized campaign. Let them do all the research, spend the money and learn from them.
6. Get synonyms from Synonyms.com ( http://www.synonyms.com/ ), Thesaurus.com ( http://www.thesaurus.com/ ) and Quintura.com ( http://www.quintura.com/ ).
7. Get misspellings using this tool: http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi. Almost nobody bids on misspellings so you can get clicks for very cheap.
8. Bid on competitors’ URLs. They’re dirt cheap and extremely relevant. A lot of people do a Google search for YouTube.com instead of typing www.youtube.com in the address bar.
9. Another way to get cheap clicks is by having geo-targeted keywords, such as “Seattle chiropractor”. Make sure that you only bid on the keywords for the areas you serve and that your landing pages contain those keywords. Otherwise, Google might think you’re not relevant and that will hurt your Quality Score.
10. Bid on action keywords, like “FIND local chiropractor” and “BUY PlayStation 3″.
11. Consider the buying cycle. “Costa Rica beach condos” will get you a lot less traffic than “Costa Rica” but it’ll be a lot more qualified if you rent beach condos. Because you’re paying for each click, you only want qualified traffic.
12. Consider “side searches”. Side searches are needs that you can fulfill but so can other products or services. For example, if you have beach condos in Costa Rica, you might want to bid for “honeymoon destinations”.
13. A lot of people recommend starting with thousands of keywords. I don’t think this is a good idea because when a campaign is too big, it’s really hard to manage it. Start small. Ten percent of your keywords will drive 90% of your traffic anyway.

Keyword Research for the Content Network
You’ll need a different approach for the Content Network. Some ideas:

1. Bid on thought strings. If you sell weight loss pills, try strings like “[brand] didn’t work for me”, “has anyone tried [brand]?”, etc. Look for things people would say in forums, blogs and discussion boards.
2. Bid on popular article titles. If there’s a very popular article out there called “The 4-Minute Formula to Lose Weight Eating Chocolate”, bid for it. Your ad will be displayed every time the article gets syndicated on a site running AdSense.
3. Do the same thing with book titles.

Campaign Structure and Settings

1. Have separate campaigns for search and content networks.
2. Have separate campaigns for broad and long-tail keywords. You’ll want to pay less for broad keywords.
3. Use the Google AdWords Tracking code to track your campaign performance.
4. Choose to show your ads more evenly so it’s easier to split-test them:
5. Choose the right geo-location for your campaign. This might sound obvious but you’ll be surprised by how many people ship products to the US only but advertise all over the world. If you are a chiropractor who serves the Seattle area, have two campaigns; one targeted to Seattle with keywords like “chiropractor” and “pain treatment” and another one targeted to the whole world with keywords like “Seattle chiropractor” and “pain treatment in Seattle”.
6. Choose “Accelerated ad delivery”. The Standard option spreads out your ads throughout the day. That’s not good because when prospects search for your ads, they might not be there. By choosing Accelerated Ad Delivery, your ads will show every time until you hit your daily budget. That way you know when you need to increase your budget.
7. If you know that most people will buy your product between 10am and 5pm on week days, use ad scheduling.
8. I set my budgets as high as possible. If a campaign is making me more than $1 for every $1 I invest, I want to invest as much money as Google is willing to take from me. If my campaign is not making me money, then I just kill it. There’s no reason to limit a campaign that is printing you money. Only limit your budget at the beginning, when you’re testing the campaign.
9. The best way to figure out how much you should start bidding is by using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool ( https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox ). Enter different amounts and see how much traffic you can get for each amount. Run your numbers and figure out what is the perfect bid. If you pay more than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be paying too much and you won’t make a profit. If you pay less than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be leaving a lot of profitable traffic on the table. There’s a sweet spot in between and Google’s tool will help you find it.
10. Bids should end in 2 and 7 ($0.12, $0.17, $0.22), etc.
11. There are two factors that determine how much you’ll pay for each click: your maximum bid and the Quality Score. The QS is a grade that Google gives to each of your keywords based on how relevant your ads and landing pages are to that keyword. The higher your QS, the lower your cost per click. You need to have your keywords in your ads and the best way to do this is by grouping your keywords into ad groups and writing one ad for each ad group.
12. Ideally, you should have one keyword per ad group. But, this is very time consuming. If you have a lot of time, go ahead and do it. If you don’t, this software ( http://www.speedppc.com/)can do it for you. All the pros use tools like SpeedPPC, but if you’re on a budget you can do it manually the first time. If you don’t have time nor money, you don’t absolutely need one ad for each keyword, but try to group your keywords in groups as small as possible; don’t just throw all your keywords into one ad group.
13. Put the three match variations of each keyword into each ad group. For example, in the ad group “Costa Rica Vacations” you want to have the keywords “costa rica vacations” (use quotes for phrase match), [costa rica vacations] (use brackets for exact match) and costa rica vacations (don’t use any special characters for broad match). More on keyword matches ( http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6100)here.

Look for part II of this article on our next posting “Creating Killer PPC Ads“

Source: Zeke Camusio, http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog

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By Bob Speyer and Eric Pangburn Web Success Team

You can have the flashiest and most visually impressive website on the Internet, but if no one ever visits it, then your site isn’t really doing you that much good. By the same token, an e-commerce site that pulls in a fair amount of traffic but very little actual sales isn’t living up to its potential either. In both cases, the one factor that can tip the scales in your favor is effective lead generation. And not just any leads, mind you; what you want are leads that are targeted specifically to build your business.

While there was a time when leads were typically gathered by way of telemarketing and e-mail databases, these methods have largely been supplanted by more currently accepted methods using online avenues. E-mail marketing is particularly deemed outdated, since this opens you up to accusations of spamming. In most cases, the customers that you’re targeting may simply be annoyed by your marketing efforts. Worse, they may even get you in trouble with your e-mail provider. For this reason, more and more people are turning towards online means of lead generation as opposed to cold calling, telemarketing and e-mail.

Below are some effective ways by which you could generate leads and achieve web success in the face of today’s changing online world.

1. Locate the Target: Find out where your customers are and how they can be reached. You can’t go after your target market if you don’t know where it is; it’s that simple. If you have written a book on gardening, the obvious places to look for leads are gardening websites and forums.
2. Join Relevant Communities: Once you have figured out where your potential customers hang out online, join in on the community that they are a part of. Resist the temptation to blatantly market your products or services to them, and instead strive to become an active contributor to the online community. This will allow you to build a rapport with your potential market base that can be used as a foundation for a solid marketing campaign effort.
3. Advertising and Link Exchange: Find out what other websites your customers visit regularly and check them out as well. They may prove to be fresh ground for your marketing and/or advertising campaign. Find out if the website in question accepts advertising and what their rates are. They may even accept article submissions in which case you will want to find out what the terms and conditions of use are. You may even be able to exchange links with the website owner. Don’t automatically disregard a site just because you deem it as a competitor. You may be surprised at the number of websites that are willing to work with the competition just as long as they can benefit from the arrangement as well.
4. Build Your Email List with Value: While unsolicited e-mail can definitely hurt your marketing efforts, a mailing list is almost essential for keeping your existing customers in the loop. Make sure that you do have something extra to offer your customers that are on your mailing list, so that they will feel privileged and being a part of it.
5. Paid Search: PPC or pay per click advertising has been around for a number of years now. While it has its fair share of detractors who feel that it is somewhat outdated and ineffective, it is still a pretty viable means of generating leads. Google’s AdWords is still used by many individuals and companies who want to achieve greater visibility on the Internet. The rates for such ads will vary depending on how crowded your particular field is and where on the page your ad will be placed, among other factors. The beauty of AdWords is that they offer you plenty of flexibility with regard to how much you spend on your ads. Furthermore, you only pay a fee when a visitor clicks on your ad.
6. Blogging: Developing and maintaining an active blog is critical to your lead generation efforts. Posting relevant articles, tips and tidbits peppered with keywords will help drive qualified traffic to your website. One of the weaknesses of a site owner is never having enough time to blog post. We cannot stress this strongly enough. If you don’t have the time, hire a freelance writer.
7. Article Marketing: Get published! A good way to generate new leads is by writing articles that your potential customers may be interested in and getting them published on relevant websites. Most of the websites that allow article submission will feature your author bio as well as a link to your website. There are article aggregators (paid and non-paid) that will circulate your articles on directories, newsletters, blogs, websites to save you time. You submit one article and they distribute it to hundreds of relevant sites.
8. Social Media Networking: Finally, don’t neglect the popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube. Such sites regularly pull in thousands of people every day, so you can imagine just how vast an exploration area that is for your marketing efforts. The field is wide open for you to reap the leads that your online business needs, and you would do well to explore them as a part of a holistic online marketing campaign.

As you can see, lead generation is a multi-faceted discipline that involves several different methods. The key to success is pinpointing which of these methods actually deliver results and focusing your efforts on them. Not all methods will work the same way for your site as it does for another, so you should carefully consider all your options.

The Web Success Team

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