Internet Marketing Course BLOG

Part of the 999 Internet Marketing Tips Series

By Dave Ingalls
November 22, 2010

If you read Internet Marketing Tip #1, then you have specific end goals in mind for your upcoming Internet/Web endeavor.

Before we get down to the specific Internet Marketing techniques that you can use to meet those end goals, let’s discuss one more general attribute your online presence should have.

Internet Marketing Tip #2: Your online presence should INFORM and EDUCATE, and that information/education should be FREE.

Why should your Internet/Web endeavor inform and educate? Because one of the most important Internet Marketing techniques we’ll be covering in future tips is Search Engine Marketing (SEM), specifically the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your online content.

If you start with the mindset that your online content is meant to INFORM and EDUCATE, then you’ll be more than half-way home at optimizing that content for the major search engines.

As an Internet/Web entrepreneur, you want people searching for information on the major search engines about the specific products or services you offer TO FIND YOUR INFORMATION FIRST.

Search Engines want to be known as the Internet/Web resource that provides the BEST ANSWERS to their visitors’ search questions.

Because of this, search engines spend countless dollars and man-hours optimizing their search formulas (“search algorithms”) to find and rank the BEST ANSWERS (content) to those questions as highly as possible in their search results.

» Continue reading “Internet Marketing Tip – Inform and Educate”

By Dave Ingalls
November 20, 2010

Am I really going to provide 999 Internet Marketing Tips? I don’t really know if there are that many, but I thought I’d give it a go!

What I’ll try to do is to start with the really big Internet Marketing ideas and try to give you an actionable item for each one. And I’ll keep “drilling down” ’til I get to Internet Marketing Tip #999!

So let’s get started.

Internet Marketing Tip #1: Start your Internet Marketing effort with a specific end goal in mind.

Why? Because knowing your end goal will help focus your Internet Marketing effort on those Internet Marketing items that are most important to achieving that specific goal.

There are a thousand different reasons that folks start some type of online endeavor. You might want to become the world’s most prolific blogger on model trains or you might want to create a way to sell your sister’s one-off wood carvings online, or…you get the idea.

It doesn’t really matter what your Internet/Web concept is, it’s just important that you stop and think it thru to the point where you can assign a specific end goal or set of end goals to that concept.

For example, let’s take selling one-off wood carvings online. If the specific goal associated with that endeavor is to sell wood carvings that get produced at the rate of about 1 per month and sell for $100 or less, then you probably should direct your Internet Marketing efforts at becoming an expert at selling unique wood carvings on eBay.

» Continue reading “999 Internet Marketing Tips”

By Dave Ingalls
B2B Internet Marketing Consultant
November 17, 2010

Everyone reading this post probably knows this by now, but I think it’s always good to be reminded by someone (me) who just saw why again!

I was just cleaning out my overfull email in box and the way I did it gave me a BGO – a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious!

To “weed thru” those emails, I only looked at the subject line and the author of each email and then made a split second decision – read it immediately and respond, if necessary (rare), save it to a folder (a few) or delete it (most)!

Why is my email in box overflowing? Because I subscribe to too many newsletters! So to keep my in box manageable, I could simply unsubscribe to a bunch of them. But I don’t want to because every now and then even the ones I don’t open/read frequently come up with a gem and I don’t want to miss them.

I also had a backup in my in box of emails I HAD to do something about and thought if I filed them away in a folder, I’d never get to it. Again, probably true!

So now that my in box is almost empty, how am I going to try to keep it that way? I’m going back to Business Correspondence 101.

Whenever I look at my email in box, I’m only going to allow myself “one touch” of each email, and that one touch is going to result in one of the following actions: open, read it and respond if necessary (then probably save it if I’ve already invested that much time!), delete it or save it to a folder for future reference/response.

And what criteria am I going to use to decide which action to take? You guessed it – subject line and author!

So back to my original point: if you’re not Mark Twain (or Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan – you get the idea) or someone I know, then you better have a GREAT email subject line to make the cut!

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By Dave Ingalls
B2B Internet Marketing Consultant
October 20, 2010

Great post by HubSpoter Emily Haahr!

You’re a small business owner who loves the concept of Inbound Internet Marketing, but only have a few hours each week to dedicate to it – how should you allocate your time?

The answer, in percent of time per Inbound Internet Marketing technique:

Blogging/Content Creation: 40%
Calls-to-Action/Landing Pages: 30%
Link Building: 20%
Social Media: 10%

To learn WHY you should split up your time in this manner, you need to read the full (but quite short) HubSpot blog post by clicking on the following link:

Breaking Down the Inbound Marketing Mix

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By Dave Ingalls
B2B Internet Marketing Consultant
September 1, 2010

Hey gang, check out one of the latest innovations in Search Engine Optimization, VIDEO SEO!

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jay Spencer and Andy Galeshahi, President and Sales and Marketing VP respectively, of SearchPro Systems, an SEO firm with a VERY interesting twist on SEO.

Jay and Andy started SearchPro Systems, located in the greater Boston, MA (USA) area, for the specific purpose of making VIDEO SEO the centerpiece of their SEO practice. SearchPro Systems offers a full array of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services, but VIDEO SEO is almost always at the heart of their overall SEO strategy.

What the heck is VIDEO SEO? It’s basically the optimization of video content to be found and highly ranked in Google and other search engines for particular search phrases. But it’s a lot more complicated than that to do it right!

Why bother creating video content and then optimizing it for search engines? With the advent of Google’s Universal Search strategy, VIDEO SEO has become one of the hottest SEO activities! How hot? Check out this brief video where Andy discusses the effects of Universal Search and VIDEO SEO on Google search engine results with none other than Bruce Clay, considered by many to be the Father of SEO:

Bruce’s read on Google Universal Search and VIDEO SEO is simple and straightforward: “companies either need to embrace both or perish!”

While their requirement that ALL videos be produced by SearchPro is a key component of their success, what I liked MOST about the way Jay and Andy have approached VIDEO SEO is the focus of these videos – every video they showed me was basically a 2-4 minute informational/educational video about a product or service that their client wanted to be found for in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Brilliant!

You can check out SearchPro Systems and VIDEO SEO at www.searchprosystems.com

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