In a traditional market it is good to balance out your push/pull marketing. However in a market like the web, you want to have a much greater emphasis on pull marketing than push marketing. Here’s why. When someone gets on the computer, they choose where they are going to go. If they don’t want to go to your website, they aren’t going to go. Therefore, if you attempt push marketing on the majority of internet users, you’ll find that you will not much a response. An example is your website. If you put a website up online, and then market it using push tactics, not many people are going to go. They don’t want to be sold. They’d rather be on sites like Facebook, YouTube, or CNN. However if you make your site attractive, and give users a reason to go, you are using pull marketing, and you will see an increase in visitors to your site.

Although this defies some marketing convention, it actually makes a lot of sense. Think about it this way. A traditional medium is something like TV. Someone wants to watch their favorite show, but during that show, they are going to be served advertisements. They may not enjoy watching these ads, but they will do so to continue watching their show. This is push marketing. On a new medium like the web however, users choose what they see. Software exists to block advertisements, and people decide on whether they are going to click on them. In other words, most users don’t even need to look at ads to see the content they want. This is why a push marketing strategy will be largely unsuccessful on the web. The Internet is a democratic environment, so the users are going to decide what they see.

So how do you market to this new medium? Pull marketing. It is extremely effective on places like the web, mainly because of the ways the web works. Pull marketing on the Internet is highly related to Social Media and Viral Marketing. When using Social Media to market, you need to utilize the network so that users are attracted to what you are presenting. This is pull marketing in a nutshell. When using viral marketing, you need to create something that will attract users solely because it is something that will benefit them, instead of just advertising your brand.

Here are some ways that you can take advantage of pull marketing on the web:

• Perform extensive Search Engine Optimization on your website, so that when someone is using Google, your listing “pulls” them in.
• Use Google AdWords to serve ads to users that will pull them in.
• Create a new blog with useful content. Give users tips, news, opinions, ideas, etc. Use the blog to link back to your main site sparingly, but always focus on having the blog be beneficial to users.
• Commence a comprehensive Viral Marketing strategy. Come up with things that you can offer users that they will be attracted to due to the benefit they will receive. Then lightly brand the useful content, objects, etc before they are delivered to users.
• Utilize social media networks extensively. Post update about your business, or things you think may be useful on microblogging sites like Twitter. Create a page for your business on Social Media sites like Facebook.
• If you are a web related company, do something useful for the web community. Examples: release a free website template. Work on the development of an Open-Source project such as WordPress or Drupal. Provide industry insight.
• Offer something for free. Nothing sells, or pulls better, then the word free.

Now that you have some ways you can take advantage of Pull Marketing, get to it. There is a whole range of ways to get started. Not exactly sure how? Need some help? Want someone else to do it? Perhaps you should contact RP Design. (Or you can click on the banner to the right.)

Any Web Marketer worth his salt knows that you can’t be successful without goals. And you can’t set goals without being able to measure them. So how do you measure goals in something as obscure as web marketing? Simple. Web Analytics. Web Analytics is technology that tracks how your website is being used. For example it can tell you how many visitors you have, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your site.

There are two main types of web analytics softwares, server based, and client based. Server based software periodically scans the server logs to determine who was accessing your site. One of the most popular forms of server statistics software is AWStats The overview of AWStats is shown below:

As you can see, AWStats gives you an overview of information, mainly the number of visits organized by the time. There is a lot of other information that AWStats gives you. For example, The specific pages that were accessed, the countries of the visitors, their operating system, etc.

The second type of web analytics software is client based. What this means is that instead of the software running in the background on the server, it is activated every time a visitor accesses the website. This software can either be hosted on your site, or hosted externally. The most popular client-based analytics software is Google Analytics. Google Analytics works by embedding a small tag on each page of your site. This tag activates javascript hosted on Google’s Servers, which then retrieves data and information for analysis. The overview of Google Analytics is shown below:

As you can see, this overview is more intuitive than AWStats. It shows information in a more visual way, and is able to tell you if your traffic is coming from referring sites, or search engines. Google Analytics allows you to set up goals and conversions so you can get a detailed look at the traffic to your site(s).

This video should give you a nice overview of the Google Analytics Interface

As you can see, Google Analytics is very detailed, powerful software. However I would recommend you use both for your analytics needs. They each have their own pros and cons, so using them together is a better way to harness the power of the software.

Now that you know the basics of using analytics, here’s why you should:

• Gives you an overview of how many people are coming to your site.
• The only way to be successful is to measure success, and web statistics allows you to do so.
• Allows you to better focus your marketing efforts on the worst-performing parts of your site.
• Let’s you see the most popular keywords that people are hitting your site from.
• Allows you to set goals based on your traffic, so you can have measurable marketing results.

To get started with analytics right now:

• AWStats: Talk to your administrator or contact your web host to see if you have AWStats currently enabled.
• Google Analytics: visit http://google.com/analytics and sign up. Insert the provided tracking code into all of the pages of your site.

If you ever took a marketing class in school, you learned that word-of-mouth is the best kind of marketing. Wikipedia defines word of mouth marketing as:

Word of mouth is a reference to the passing of information from person to person. Originally the term referred specifically to oral communication (literally words from the mouth), but now includes any type of human communication, such as face to face, telephone, email, and text messaging.

In this article, I’m going to discuss how, when utilized properly, Social Media networks are the foundation of a new type of word-of-mouth. This new marketing is different than old marketing. Mainly because of the time it takes for one person to make a recommendation to someone else over an existing social network. We see this all the time, we just don’t know it. A great example is product reviews on things like blogs. One person posts the review on the blog, and people read it. This is word of mouth marketing, just in a different form.

The reason word of mouth marketing is so effective is because its personal. Humans are the most social creature on Earth, and this is directly reflected in marketing. Remember, word of mouth marketing doesn’t mean that it has to be someone that a person knows who is passing them information, just that it be a personal exchange. Either face to face, over the phone, etc. Information like this is passed in huge numbers all of the time. In fact, according to Internet Retailer Magazine, Facebook is now more popular then email.

Whenever you pass information on to someone using the internet, whether it be email, a blog post, a forum, or even something like Twitter, that is word of mouth. Now the question is, how do you take advantage of this enormous advertising potential? Simple, you pass on information. Write blog articles about your business, post comments on blogs, send emails, post in forums. Actively participating in social media is the only way to take advantage of it. Once you participate in the community, you become part of the community, and then you have the ability to spread your message throughout the community.

In essence, like normal word of mouth marketing, social media marketing is the hardest path to undertake, but the most rewarding in the end. By tapping into resources like facebook, blogs, etc however, your job can be a little bit easier.

Are you spending too much money on the Yellow Pages and not getting the results? My office building has a huge stack of the Yellow Pages that no one has picked. If you are an advertiser in the Yellow Pages, how does that make you feel? People are searching for your business online in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s local listing but the bulk of your budget was spent in the Yellow Pages.

We do not know about you; we search the search engines local listing to find a business.  Can we find your business online?

It is a good idea to become familiar with Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.  Bing is branded as the decision engine providing faster more relevant search results.  For instance, Bing is broken down in four categories: Travel, Shopping, Health and Local.

Bing Local allows users to find businesses near them, where they want to go. Listings are returned in search results, removing the tedious tasks of businesses searching for new customers.  The customers have already located the company.

For now we will discuss local search, which is an enormous part of Bing.

A free local listing to add your business is Bing’s Listing Center.  Visit https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx and check to see if your business is listed on Bing Maps Search. If not add your profile in the Listing Center.  Make sure if your business is listed to verify the accuracy of the information.

Add all of your business locations separately. The following information can be changed:

1. Web page
2. Business description
3. Hours of operation
4. Payment methods
5. Photos
6. Year established
7. Company tagline
8. Brands carried
9. Professional affiliation
10. Languages spoken
11. Parking options and personal contact

Fill out as many fields as possible that are applicable to your business.  The more information filled out will lead to a higher probability of doing business with your company. Remember, people like to do business with companies close to them and it is integral that you sign up in the listing center.

RSS, usually translated as “Really Simple Syndication,” and sometimes “Rich Site Summary,” is a standardized web file format used to publish frequently updated works: such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. An RSS Document (called a “feed” or “web feed,”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.

An Example of an RSS 2.0 Feed:

[xml]<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>
<title>Lift Off News</title>
<link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/</link>
<description>Liftoff to Space Exploration.</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:41:01 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<generator>Weblog Editor 2.0</generator>
<managingEditor>editor@example.com</managingEditor>
<webMaster>webmaster@example.com</webMaster>
<ttl>5</ttl>

<item>
<title>Star City</title>
<link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-starcity.asp</link>
<description>How do Americans get ready to work with Russians aboard the
International Space Station? They take a crash course in culture, language
and protocol at Russia’s Star City.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/06/03.html#item573</guid>
</item>

<item>
<title>Space Exploration</title>
<link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/</link>
<description>Sky watchers in Europe, Asia, and parts of Alaska and Canada
will experience a partial eclipse of the Sun on Saturday, May 31.</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2003 11:06:42 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/30.html#item572</guid>
</item>

<item>
<title>The Engine That Does More</title>
<link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-VASIMR.asp</link>
<description>Before man travels to Mars, NASA hopes to design new engines
that will let us fly through the Solar System more quickly. The proposed
VASIMR engine would do that.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2003 08:37:32 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/27.html#item571</guid>
</item>

<item>
<title>Astronauts’ Dirty Laundry</title>
<link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-laundry.asp</link>
<description>Compared to earlier spacecraft, the International Space
Station has many luxuries, but laundry facilities are not one of them.
Instead, astronauts have other options.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2003 08:56:02 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/20.html#item570</guid>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>[/xml]

Now that you have a general overview of how RSS works, you can use it to send content to your users. Remember that RSS is only useful if you publish content often. If you have a basic website that doesn’t get updated, RSS isn’t something you need to worry about.

Now, if you do have a website that is frequently updated, it may already have a web feed. Go to Feed Validator, and type in the URL of your site, blog, etc. If it shows up as having an RSS feed, that means it is most likely automatically generated by your software, and there is nothing more you need to do. If not, I would recommend that, instead of hand-writing your RSS, you sign up for a site like Rapidfeeds. Their online tools allow you to create and publish RSS feeds for your site in realtime.

If your site doesn’t publish frequently, starting a blog can help. I will discuss using wordpress to create a blog in a later post. For now, keep on publishing!

In deciding on a search engine optimization firm make sure the firm uses an ethical approach. The ethical search engine optimization method is called White hat. White Hat SEO involves techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience as opposed to search engines. This technique completely abides by search engine rules and policies. A web site that is SEO optimized focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is optimized using White Hat SEO practices. Other examples of White Hat SEO strategies include using keywords, keyword analysis, back linking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

Although White Hat SEO might not have instant results; however, the lasting success is worth the wait.  The objective of White Hat SEO is to improve overall site quality and increasing the site’s ranking. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes.  Also that the subsequent ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines.   Then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, as opposed to attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.

White Hat SEO will not guarantee that you  top placement for keywords. No SEO company can guarantee top placement for keywords.  Search Engine rank is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the web. In fact, it was reported last year that the algorithm Google uses to rank sites changed over 400 times!  Make sure that they do not make big promises, because it is more likely they are unable to keep them.  Therefore, the search engines are always ahead in the SEO process.

The white hatters fix critical mistakes in design, set-up of their websites, so that the sites will rank well. The SEO experts discover and correct mistakes such as unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, and weak navigation structure.

White hat marketers implement a common sense, ethical approach to SEO. These techniques include:

• Creating quality content
• Building legitimate links
• Developing a solid keyword strategy
• Maximizing spider friendliness
• Building page rank over time
• Use description meta tags without excessive use of keywords.
• Optimizing tags, titles and other parts of the code is integral.
• Using specific keyword rich page titles, headers, subheaders, internal linking, and page copy.

Using WordTracker or Google Adwords Keywords Tool to find popular and relevant keywords and phrases to use for your site. Monitoring the various search engines to ensure that your URL gets indexed by using programs such as Web Position. Increasing the amount of unique content on the site. Writing quality content for the website visitors instead of the search engines.

People looking for your products or services need to find them easily and quickly. For the web is an impatient media and if they cannot find your web site or once there do not find what they are looking for within a couple of seconds they will click away to your competitor.

Blogs are a great way to keep your web visible to customers because the search engines love them.    They are global activity responsible for for a high share of Web’s content that search engines track.  Technorati reports that in 2008 more than 133 million blogs were tracked.  Google spiders love content that is fresh so updating blogs is beneficial giving you the opportunity to optimize for certain keywords that will lead people to your products and services.

Publishing a Blog, positions you as an expert in your particular field.  It is not easy, but worth the effort.  Expect to spend at least one hour per week writing a web blog. Topic ideas might include posts about your products or services, feedback you have received from visitors, something that interests you and is related to your web site, etc.  Start blogging and watch your Google rankings increase organically.

Some Blog Tips

1. Improve your search engine ranking by using key terms that you think users will look up your company.  It is recommended that your company update their blog at least three times a week  in the updates, always use keywords that you think searchers are likely to look for.

2. Find a domain that is memorable and meaningful. Try to use a .com if you can.

3. Request links from high traffic web sites. Google tends to give weight to links from major companies, trade groups, government organizations, and suites built on edu domains.   Target academics and remember that the links need to be relevant.   Also, target the colleges that would be relevant to your web site.   Send emails to colleges requesting links.

4. Target your competitors’ links.   Determine who’s linking to your competitors’ site and cut deals with them.    This can be viewed by putting a competitor’s website in siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Our first post is going to be the ever-so-popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing tips. First off, you should know that Search Engine Optimization may not work. I know there are tons of organizations promising top rankings, key placement, etc, etc. You should know however that even if you are at the top of the organic (normal search results) listings, it does not guarantee more sales. That’s why our first SEO post is going to be about content. I know you may have been expecting information about keywords, key phrases, metatags, etc, but in my experience good Seach Engine Optimization begins with good content.

In short, content that pleases search engine users, and fulfills and information need or prompts them to purchase something, is good. Content that’s highly optimized for search engine algorithms, but fails to satisfy search engine users, is virtually doomed to a fate of obscurity.

First off, you should know that most search engines look intently at the first paragraph of any given page, and then kind of skim over the rest of the content. That’s why you have to make sure that your first paragraph is top notch.

NOTE: Search engines normally determine the first paragraph by the first <p>, or paragraph tag.

The first step in writing good content is to come up with good keywords and key phrases. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about. In future posts I will go more in depth on choosing keywords and key phrases, so stay tuned!

Now that you have a list of good keywords, you must put them into well written copy. This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

This post has given you a basic overview of writing good content for your pages. Stay tuned for:

• SEO Marketing Part 2: Titles n’ Tags
• SEO Marketing Part 3: Navigation, Categorization, Linking

Thanks for Reading!