Starting off in Internet Marketing can be quite a daunting task.  As you can see on IMReportCard.com, an entire market has emerged over the years which is full of “gurus” and coaches in order to help address how overwhelming the full scope of Internet Marketing can be to someone starting fresh.  Here are a few quick tips to help anyone looking for a push in the right direction.

Plan Ahead – Before you create your website, make sure to set specific goals.  Define what you want to do with the website; this includes the layout and design.  A well planned site will go a long way to help keep visitors on your site longer and keep them coming back.  A disorganized site will have visitors confused and clicking away from your site within seconds.  Make sure to have a strong landing page and grabs their attention!

Analyze your Traffic – Free tools like Google Analytics will help you understand exactly which pages on your website are performing and which ones you need to improve.  Also, using an analytical tool can show you the exact keywords and sites people are using in order to find your website.  This is very powerful data which can be used to increase traffic to your site.  Additional tools, like heat maps ( I like ClickTale for this) can give amazing visual insight into exactly what your visitors are doing while on your website.

Start a Newsletter – As covered in a previous IM Report Card blog article,  Add Email Marketing to your Internet Marketing Bag of Tricks, starting a newsletter is a simple and highly effective way to build your Internet Marketing presence.  A newsletter is not only a great way to send important information to your subscribers, but also to get them clicking back to your site.

Write Blog Articles – Take time out to compose at least two blog articles a month.  This keeps your website content fresh and gives visitors a reason to keep coming back.  To make your blogging efforts even easier, check out some of the helpful tools we reviewed in “Blog Your Way to Financial Bliss”.

Get Social – We all know that Social Media is a powerful medium for getting into direct contact with your target audience.  The obvious sites to engage your audience are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like.  However, there are a lot of smaller sites which only cater to a specific niche.  A wise move is to look for those sites and get established as an active member of that niche.  Position yourself as a subject matter expert, if you can.

For more in-depth assistance with crafting your own Internet Marketing success story, check out our list of Top 25 People.

Facebook recently released Graph Search which is a powerful new way to search for just about anything you can imagine!  Facebook has a nice introductory page available which provides videos and information on Graph Search along with the ability to test out a search.  However, the really interesting part of the equation is how Facebook Graph Search will impact Internet marketers.

The most obvious impact is for your Facebook Page.  Properly categorizing your Facebook Page is now very important due to Graph Search.  In addition, making sure your Page has the correct keywords on it will help make sure it shows up in the most relevant Graph Search results.  SEO on Facebook is critical to being shown in Graph Search results.  Facebook has provided a helpful video about SEO for your Facebook Page.

If you spend any advertising dollars on Facebook, you will be happy to hear that Graph Search is making Facebook Ad targeting much more relevant.  How so?  Users are taking the time to be included in Graph Search by filling out their profiles and their likes.  More complete user data spells better targeted ads for marketers.

Facebook Graph Search also impacts your SEM efforts.  If Facebook has no results to display, it pulls in results from Bing.  Is Bing part your Search Engine Marketing strategy?  In the past many marketers have stuck only with Google for SEM but with the power of Facebook behind them, this is a huge win for Bing!

Overall, Graph Search looks like it is poised be a great asset for Internet marketers in many ways.

Today there are several web-hosting companies offering great deals to win you as their newest customer.  From hosting as low as a penny in cost, to going green with wind energy powering your online business, IM Report Card has a long list of web-hosting sites reviewed and graded by our members.  Here are some of the top web hosts, as graded by IM Report Card members:

iPage – (A rating, 1 review) 100% powered by wind energy and currently running a sale for only $1.99/month for the first three months.  Hosting comes with WordPress, SiteLock and generous advertising credits for Facebook and Google.

Site Build It (SBI!) – (A- rating, 134 reviews) Right now Site Build It is having a buy one get one free sale through Christmas Day 2012.  According to their home page, Site Build It “is the only all-in-1 step-by-step system of process-and-software that delivers thriving businesses.”

HostGator – (A- rating, 119 reviews) They have been known to offer hosting deals as low as $0.01.  I just got an email from them saying this Friday, December 21, 2012, they will have an “End of the World” sale like none seen before.  Don’t pass up that epic sale!

Yola – (A- rating, 156 reviews) This web host offers a free trial and packages starting at $4.95 a month. Plenty of add-ons, for things like accepting credit cards and PayPal payments, are available to help make doing business a breeze.

IX Web Hosting – (B+ rating, 35 reviews) Throughout the 2012 Holiday Season they are offering up to 55% off with the use of coupon Code HOLIDAY2012.  IX Web Hosting offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth.

FatCow – (B rating, 3 reviews) Offering a hosting sale for only $3.15/month which includes $50 in Facebook Ad credit, $100 in Google AdWords credit and a lot more extras to give your business a kick start!  Also, 100% powered by wind energy.

As Facebook reaches another historic landmark, we celebrate by counting down our top social media product reviews.

• Social Networking Academy – A grade, 521 reviews.  The Social Networking Academy is a comprehensive training program developed by Jo Barnes that will show you how to make money through the use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms.
• SocialOomph – A grade, 59 reviews.  Free members get (among other things) access to a tweet scheduler, they can automatically follow the Twitter members that follow them, and they can automatically send direct messages to their new followers. New members can also track links (and see how they are converting) by shortening them through bit.ly url shortener.
• Hootsuite – A grade, 2 reviews.  HootSuite is a social media dashboard that will allow you to manage all of your social media memberships from one easy to use location. Social media is one of the very best ways to promote your business, but keeping up with all of them can be extremely overwhelming and time-consuming. By using HootSuite you will be able to give each of the sites the attention it needs in a fraction of the time.
• SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide – A- grade, 8 reviews.  This tutorial contains information that is geared toward helping small businesses maximize their websites to attract more internet traffic and to boost sales of their products or services. It teaches about optimization techniques that can help business websites get more exposure through higher search engine rankings, and it teaches about advertising through social media websites.
• Tweet Adder – B grade – 24 reviews.  Tweet Adder is a software program that allows you to automate a lot of your Twitter tasks, such as following and un-following other members. Through this program, you can search for other Twitter users who might be interested in the products or services that you are promoting and hopefully add these people to your followers list.

Facebook Promoted Posts is a relatively new feature introduced by the social media giant, with the intention of helping Facebook page owners reach more of their fans through the regular status update posts. The users of this new feature are required to pay in order to promote their posts, something that has brought about confusion between this new feature and the typical Facebook advertising.

So, does Facebook now require page owners to pay so that their posts are visible to their fans? Well, a straight forward answer to that question is “No”. You can still have a free page and make free posts visible to the people who like your page. However, we need to get a bit more detailed in order to understand what Facebook Promoted Posts are and how they can benefit you.

Let us start by explaining an algorithm that Facebook uses to display posts on people’s newsfeed. If you did not know, what you see in your Facebook’s newsfeed is not absolutely everything that is posted by each of your friends or pages you like. That content is determined by Facebook based on the number of times you interacted with the page or person who posted it, what type of a post it is and how recently it was posted. Facebook calls this algorithm EdgeRank.

So how does EdgeRank link up with Facebook Promoted Posts?

As Facebook increases its users, which has been at terrific speeds, the competition for space on the social media’s newsfeed also increases at the same rate. Currently, it is estimated that an average of only 16% of the fans of any page get to see each of its posts. You can actually see the number of people who were reached by your post, thanks to Facebook’s real time post analytics.

So what Facebook Promoted Posts does is that it gives you the option to pay for a given post so that it is pushed into the newsfeeds of more of your fans. You don’t need to worry about costs because Facebook only charges you based on the number of extra people they were able to display your post to. You are also allowed to set a budget beyond which they won’t charge you.

2 important things to note about Facebook Promoted Posts

1. You do not have to use this feature and pay for all the posts you make. However, occasionally promoting your posts would increase the number of people who see your posts and interact with your page. This will in turn improve the EdgeRank score of your page and boost your Facebook advertising efforts.
2. The social media rule of posting relevant, interactive and useful content and avoiding messages that sound like a commercial still apply. If you break it, you should not expect that Facebook Promoted Posts will work for you.

We’ve talked about the benefits of inbound marketing in regards to generating leads, but there are several ways to use inbound marketing to retain your leads.  It costs 5-10 times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one.  With that in mind, it is definitely important to explore different ways to keep your existing customers happy!

Below are 4 ways to use inbound marketing to retain customers:

1)      Educate Customers- one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is to provide them with educational materials to help them learn more about your industry and your product.  You can create educational auto-responders, update your blog, or even host an informational webinar to teach customers about your product.

2)      Use Social Media- Social media is a great way to build and maintain customer relationships.  You can social media platforms answer customer questions and provide a continuous stream of industry and product updates.

3)      Create a Forum- Customer support is crucial in retaining customers, but can undoubtedly be time consuming and expensive.  Letting your customers talk to each other is like having built-in free customer support. Who better to answer customer questions (aside from you) than other customers?   People like sharing their experiences with others and creating a forum is a great way to do that!  IMRC members have good things to say about How to Start a Forum (A- rating, 295 grades).

4)      Ask for Feedback- An often overlooked option, obtaining customer feedback is a great way to stay “in the know” about what your customers like, don’t like, want to see more of, etc.  Simple ways to obtain feedback include surveys, blog posts or via social media platforms.

Posted March 14th 2011 to Blogging,Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (1)

Earlier this week we touched upon a few points to keep in mind for optimizing your Facebook page for business.  The last point we made stated that the news feed is one of the most important tools to utilize when promoting your business on Facebook and building up your Facebook presence.

There are only so many posts that make it onto the top news feed, so what determines which posts get displayed?

1) The number of times two people have interacted.   It is important to build up relationships with your followers and post content that people respond to (either via a comment or a “like”).

2) The number of times users have interacted with the content.  So, if you post something that gets a good response from some of your followers, it is more likely to show up on your other followers news feeds as well.

3) How recent the post is.  To keep an engaged audience, it is important to provide regular updates- just don’t bombard people with too many posts!

4) The type of content in the post.  Videos, links and images all draw more attention than standard text-based updates.

Posted March 04th 2011 to Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (2)

Social media is quickly becoming the norm in online marketing and business plans.  Facebook is a great channel for sharing your content with a large, active audience.  There are many things you can do to take advantage of this free and valuable social media platform and below are a few of ideas get you started:

1)   Search engines index content from Business pages on Facebook.  Take that opportunity to incorporate keywords into your status updates.

2)   Include images to create a more eye catching post.  Did you know that updates with an image get 54% higher clicks?

3)  The news feed is one of, if not the most valuable asset you have on Facebook.  Because it only displays about the top 1% of content, you need to do everything you can to get your updates posted in users’ news feeds.

Later on this week, we’ll detail more Facebook optimization ideas including how to increase your chances of ranking in user’s news feeds, so be sure to stay tuned!