Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, let’s do “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.  In order to do this, make your website a hub for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through blogs, and through social media sites.

I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing. What if we flipped those efforts?

Maybe you’re ready for a more professional presence on the world wide web?

If you want your website to work for you, here are some points to think about:

- Keep your website fresh.
- Monitor the effectiveness of your website.
- Collect analytics to see if you need to change what you’re doing.
- Re-evaluate your goals for your website.
- Listen to your customers that go to your website.
- Keep new products / services in front of your website visitors.
- Have your website re-designed by professionals.

It’s time. The new year is right around the corner.

There are different ways to market your website and a campaign that works well for one client may not work well for yours.

At YourAdTeam, your website is developed using a multi-dimensional strategy uniquely tailored to your needs and specifically crafted to speak to your target market.

According to a recent ad effectiveness survey, SEO is the most effective online marketing tactic for generating conversions.

Here’s a basic SEO checklist to help ensure that your website is search engine optimized:

• Content is reachable by search engines
• Content is added often, periodically
• Content is organized locally – themes/categories
• Keywords exist in content and internal text links
• Quantity of quality sites linking in
• Monitor, adjust

The secret lies in the first seven seconds! The single most important change to fixing a page is eliminating confusion in the first few seconds a visitor spends on your landing page.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve invested in your shopping cart, incentive, or even product if your visitors don’t stay on your site long enough to learn about them.

Ready to start the new year right with an effective website?

• Early on, those who held possession of land were the ones with wealth.

• Then, during the Industrial Age, the wealthy were those who owned factories.

• Today, information is often the key determinant in one’s wealth and position.  As the old saying goes, knowledge is power!!!  So, the more you know, the farther you can go in life!

The same is true for your business success!

Ready to apply this principle to every area of your business, from advertising to social media to web design?

• Text links almost always outperform banner ads as advertising techniques because they look more like content and people are used to clicking on content (text links) far more than ads.

• Internet display ads perform best with Flash animation, motion, or video.

• The eye reads top left to bottom right and that impacts your click-through rate depending on where your text links or display ads are on the page.

• The page upon which the consumer clicks is just as important as the ad or link that got them there.

• Improving or optimizing your own pages and your own site has more impact than optimizing your advertising techniques in text links or display ads.

• Don’t assume that just because you built a website people will visit it.

• The most powerful advertising technique on the Internet is showing up in organic search results (ideally first page, in the first three results).

• Using sites such as Wordtracker.com is currently your best tool, along with Pay Per Click suggestion tools (from Google, etc), to discover which search terms get the most search volume.

• The best quick checklist to help you get in organic search engine results is the Vaughn’s list.

• After organic search engine placement, Pay Per Click search ads provide your next best set of Internet advertising techniques.

Need help implementing these techniques?

1) Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
2) Do we want people to call us?
3) How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
4) Who needs to update this site? How often?
5) Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost?
6) How much money do we have to spend? How much time?
7) Does the organization understand that ‘everything’ is not an option?

At the end of the day, who you hire to assist in your website development or makeover is just as important as any of these questions.

1) What is the goal of the site?  In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
2) Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does the boss want? Are we trying to impress a certain kind of person?
3) Who are we trying to reach? Be specific.
4) Are we trying to close sales?  Are we telling a story?
5) Are we earning permission to follow up?
6) Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
7) How do people find the site? Are they looking to answer a specific question?

In addition to these seven questions, the most important question is “Who?”  Who fits best with your company to develop your Web site or makeover your Web site?  Who can help you answer these and other questions you’ll have?