Welcome to Katie Saxon, who has joined Hallam as an SEO Executive. She’ll be part of the team writing blog postings, and this is her Social Media Checklist for New Employees.

Welcoming a new member of staff into your company? This is a good time to run through the essentials of a good social media presence.

Build a LinkedIn Profile

An absolute must – not only does it help your company by boosting your online presence, but also new employees can connect with your staff, partners and clients in a quick and easy way.

Remember to include a keyword rich link to your company.

If your newbie is at all shy or not good at remembering faces, this is an ideal way to introduce themselves while showing their credentials.

Take a look at my LinkedIn profile.

Get Blogging

Does your company have a blog?  (If not, why not? Blogging is an important SEO tool, ignore it at your peril.)  Ask your new member of staff if they would write a post for your blog.

The exact angle is up to you – they could write about their first day/week/month on the job.  Maybe you want them to give a beginners perspective on some of your expert knowledge.  It could be as simple as asking them to write a short piece introducing themselves.
Just go with whatever will work best for your company blog.

Start Tweeting

If you’re on twitter perhaps your newbie could write some twitter posts for you.  It’ll take them less time than writing a full blog post, so they might be happier with doing this.

Maybe you don’t want them to tweet on behalf of your company, but could they use twitter professionally?
If they have their own profile, which establishes them as an industry expert and employee of your company they can tweet about relevant content that interests them.  It helps you to build your company profile, without you necessarily needing to monitor what they say.

Follow @ksaxoninternet to see my latest tweets on Internet marketing

Sign up to Delicious

This is a really good way for any new member of staff to start knowledge sharing.  I’m always stumbling across interesting articles online that I want to share with my colleagues and connecting on Delicious is an easy way to do this.

If your staff already use Delicious then this is a great way of pointing your new employee towards the articles you want them to read. You can see what I’m reading on my Delicious profile.

Create a Google Profile

This is another useful way to build your company’s online presence.  And if you’ve got your staff tweeting, blogging, connecting on LinkedIn and bookmarking on Delicious their Google profile can direct you to all of their other social media profiles.  Take a look at Susan Hallam’s Google Profile.

There are of course lots and lots of other social media applications that your staff can use to enrich their experience of working for you – and to increase your web presence.  My checklist is just a starting point – you just have to decide which are most appropriate for your business.

Hope you find this useful, I’ll be writing again soon, Katie.

You may be fantastic at putting pen to paper, but when you’re writing for the web things are a little bit different.  There are some basic guidelines you should keep in mind when writing web (and search engine) friendly copy.

1. Remember to Use Headings

There are two reasons for doing this.  Headings break your text up so that it’s easy to read on screen.  And they’re great for search engines – which use headings to work out what your page is about.

2. Keep it Short

I don’t mean that you can’t write a long page for your website, Google actually tends to prefer longer pages.  But you need to think about keeping your sentences and paragraphs short.

Most people won’t read a paragraph that’s longer than 3 lines.  And using one sentence (or even one word) paragraphs can be a great way to hook your customers.

Go on…

3. Ask Questions

Another good way of engaging with your readers and holding their attention is to address your text directly at them.  And an easy way to do this is to ask your customers questions – don’t you agree?

4. You Don’t Have to be Grammatically Correct

I dnt fink u shud rite lik this, but the web is a more informal medium, so strict grammar rules don’t always apply.  Indeed, sometimes more grammatically correct content can sound forced, because online copy tends to be more conversational.

You wouldn’t normally write a sentence starting with the words “but” or “and”.  But sometimes this is appropriate to keeping your copy flowing naturally.  As a rule of thumb, if it sounds ok when you say it out loud then it will work on your website.

5. Emphasise the Right Words

Using bold text and italics is a really good way to add emphasis to certain words or phrases.  But you have to do this right.  Consider the difference between these two sentences:

“Please get the emphasis right when you are writing for the web”

And…

“Please get the emphasis right when you are writing for the web”

The first sentence probably sounds more natural to you – you can imagine me sitting here, exasperated, begging you to get your emphasis right.  But stop right there.

Search engines think that you will emphasise the most important words in your copy.  And so, they will use text in bold or italics to decide what your page is about.  The second version shows that this page is about writing for the web and that’s why I should use it.

Remember that humans as well as search engine spiders have to read your website.  If you emphasise too many words you’ll make your text hard to read – and you’ll probably confuse the search engines too.

6. Make a List

Lists and bullet points aren’t just a good way to make reading your website a nicer experience for your customer.  They can be a tool in your SEO arsenal.

People love numbered lists (6 Tips for Writing Well for the Web, The 5 Best Tricks for Keeping Fit, How to Write a CV in 3 Easy Steps).  So if you want to write articles that your customers will shout about – and link to – a numbered list might do the trick.

For more advice on optimising your website try our SEO training, which will cover copywriting perfect webpages.

I am frequently surprised by the amount of people using Google Analytics who aren’t familiar with URL tagging. This is the process of adding extra information to a link, so that Analytics can identify it as coming from a particular source, keyword and/or advert.

In fact, URL tagging happens automatically for all AdWords users – it’s how Analytics knows the difference between “paid” and “organic” traffic in your Search Engines and Keywords reports. But its use reaches far beyond AdWords. Consider an email newsletter or “e-shot”. If you make a plain, normal link in your email, the traffic it generates will be split between the Direct Traffic report and the Referral Traffic report.

Why? Because if you use an email client like Outlook, clicking a link in an email is like copying and pasting that link directly into the web browser’s address bar. If you use webmail like GMail, Hotmail or similar though, you are already visiting a website (the webmail site) and clicking a link is a referral from that site. So visitors from an email campaign will be split between the two. Worse, they will be lumped in with the Direct or Referred traffic you got that day anyway. Hardly the ideal method of measuring the success of your email marketing.

If those links in the email had been tagged, you could identify every single visitor generated by that email as a distinct group. You could then measure their engagement (time on site, pages per visit etc.) and their conversion rate, as well as making them an Advanced Segment to delve deeper into their visits and compare them to other groups of visitors, or even the last email marketing you did (if that was tagged too).

How does it work then? Pretty simple, as it happens. You simply need to add some information in Google’s defined format on to the end of the link addresses in your email. It looks like this:

http://www.website.com/page.htm?utm_campaign=campaign-name&utm_medium=marketing-medium&utm_source=website-or-email&utm_content=advert-content

Looks exciting eh? If you break it down, you have a list like this one on Google’s help page:

So:

• Source is the place that the visitor comes from
• Medium is the type of marketing (cpc stands for Cost Per Click and is the standard term for defining pay-per-click advertising in Analytics)
• Term is the keyword used (or any other defining feature of the advert)
• Content is only really required for distinguishing between pay-per-click advert content for the same keyword
• Name is the name of your campaign, whether it is a specific campaign or maybe something like “Newsletters”

In the example of an email newsletter, I might define the Name as “Newsletters” and the Source as “December Newsletter”, thereby grouping all my newsletters in one campaign, but being able to distinguish between each month’s newsletter within that campaign.

You could also use the Content tag to define which link in an email someone clicks. For instance, you might link to the same page three times: once at the top of the email, then in the body copy and finally at the bottom in case people missed the point. If you don’t differentiate between those links, you won’t know which one got clicked on most, because they all go to the same page. So, my URL tag for the first link might look like this:

?utm_campaign=Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_source=December&utm_content=Top

My URL tag for the body copy link would be the same, but it would say “utm_content=Body” at the end instead, and so on. If you don’t want to mess around writing your own link tags in HTML, Google provides a URL Builder here.

The uses for URL tagging don’t end there, as you can tell from the table. If you do any pay-per-click (CPC) advertising anywhere but AdWords, you won’t be getting the URL tagging automatically, so traffic from the likes of Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter will be appearing as either Direct or Organic traffic, meaning you have no information on the performance of those paid-for adverts once the visitor lands on your site.

What about advertising on a site that also links to you organically? Again, all traffic will be referred, but you won’t know how much of it comes from the paid-for advertising. If you tagged your advert links, you would see those visitors as a distinct group. The same is true if you use Google Merchant Centre (formerly Base) to list your products in Google Shopping search results – if you don’t tag your Base feed URLs, all the traffic will be lumped in with normal Google organic traffic and you won’t see how your Shopping listings are performing. The screenshot below shows how Shopping traffic has been separated by tagging the visitors as coming from “base”, with Yahoo pay-per-click traffic also distinguished from organic Yahoo visitors:

By using URL tagging, we can then see the visitor engagement statistics for those groups, along with their conversion rate, per-visit value etc. It gives us much better information to use when deciding what works and what doesn’t in our online marketing campaigns.

If you want to learn more about using Analytics, I have Google Analytics training events scheduled for next year in London and Nottingham. You can see all my planned training events here.

Link building is the magic fairy dust of search engine optimisation. How hard can it be? Actually, it’s pretty darn hard and link building tips are always welcome.

Last week I attended Ian Lockwood’s  “Top Link Building Strategies” breakfast briefing and he’s agreed to write up a recap of his top 5 recommendations.

1.  Get listed in Local Business Directories

These listings will improve your visibility in the Google Local search results, and provide valuable signals as to the location of your businesss.  They also help with general link building.  We’re only looking for high quality directories, with links that are indexed by Google.  As a word of warning, many of these will result in telephone sales calls (just say No).

http://www.accessplace.com/
http://www.zibb.com/
http://www.bizwiki.co.uk/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/
http://www.shoplocally.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
http://www.uk-local-search.co.uk/
http://www.bview.co.uk/
http://www.applegate.co.uk

2.  Get Testimonials.

So easy, this one. Think of all the suppliers you use who have a website, who you would recommend to others. Offer them a testimonial and ask that they link to your website, so that their visitors will know it’s a genuine testimonial.

3.  Run a Competition

Why not run a competition to link to your site? Offer a reasonable prize and a time limit on entries, then promote it to relevant websites, forums and blogs. It’s a good idea to post about the competition on your blog too, so people can leave comments with links to their pages when they’ve entered. Remember to state who the winner is when it’s over, otherwise you’ll get lots of emails!

4.  Offer Your Product or Service for Review.

This requires a bit of research first, as you will need to find websites who will review the type of product or service you offer. Assuming you can find some, why not ask them to review it in return for a free product/service? They will link to your site as part of the review.

5.  Get Links from Other Regional Businesses.

Whilst reciprocal links are, in the main, pretty useless for SEO, reciprocal links from other businesses just like yours will still carry weight. Why? Because they’re about exactly the same subject! Google expects sites about the same topics to be linked together, so these links still count. If you only operate within a particular geographic area (locally, nationally or internationally), why not search out companies doing the same thing in non-competing areas and ask to swap links? It’s a win-win, you just have to explain the importance of links to SEO, if they don’t already know.

Ian also talked about a number of other tips, including asking for links on your website (best done if you incentivise people through a free gift or money off coupon), writing guest posts or articles for other peoples’ websites and creating useful resources related to your business, which you can then promote and get links to.

If you are looking for other link building ideas, why not take a look at my blog archive of link building ideas.

And finally, I do offer a link building service so get in touch and we can discuss your requirements

What does your business do? If I were to limit you to just 25 words, would you be able to delight me with your business proposition?

Stop right now and think: are you able rattle off a succinct sentence that conveys the breadth and depth of what you do, as well as make it clear what makes your business special, and the benefits you offer me?

And do you have that 25 word statement slapped prominently on your web site home page?

The lack of a simple, clear statement like this breaks a number of cardinal rules of web design:

• Don’t make me think. I don’t want to hunt around to figure out what you do. If I can’t see it straight away, then I’m hitting the back button.
• Don’t assume I know your business. You know what you do, but I don’t. So make it simple for me, and tell me what you do.
• Don’t keep your light under a bushel.  You know your business is great, so go right ahead and tell me.  Tell me the benefits of using your business rather than your competitors.

This 25 word statement isn’t just for your Internet marketing. As they say, there is nothing new under the sun, and this statement means you have a handle on your business.  It might form part of your marketing collateral, or your elevator pitch (That’s the 30 seconds you get to clinch the deal with me if we were trapped in a lift together. Heaven forbid.)

Your 25 word statement is essential in Internet marketing because:
• My attention span is short on the web, I’m scanning your website, so keep it short and sweet
• Your statement is very likely to be naturally keyword rich, which will help in your search engine optimisation. And if it isn’t keyword rich because it is full of waffle, or using those wasteful words like “quality” or “solutions” then rethink your statement.
• You can reuse the statement when it comes time to include a description of your website in directories, or as part of your pen picture.

So, what exactly is is that you do?

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Your business leaves “footprints” all over the Internet.  Some of these footprints are your own which you can control, like your business website.  But many footprints are generated by other people who are commenting, reviewing, complimenting or complaining about your business.

A simple search on Google will uncover references to your business, but it isn’t terribly efficient at searching user generated content that forms the social Internet.

You might want to keep an eye on your company name, your products, your main employees, and indeed you might want to keep an eye on the competition.

SocialMention is a social media search engine, gathering information from a wide range of user generated content sites.  It will let you know if you’ve been mentioned on Twitter, or if people have bookmarked you on Delicious or Digg, whether they’ve written about you in their blog or written blog comments about you, published photos , report back on news stories, and will even let you know about YouTube videos or podcasts that mention you.

But I have to say it does not provide a comprehensive service:  for example it didn’t find me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Twitter, nor did it find my news or search Flickr images.

Social Media Firehose: This is a another social media search service using Yahoo Pipes. It taps into a range of social media search APIs directly, so it’s much more immediate and comprehensive than say, Google alerts. Available from @ http://tinyurl.com/firehose

But if you want a comprehensive overview then you should snoop around then you still need to use a number of additional sources:

• Serph.com is another social search aggregator
• Blogpulse is proivded by Nielsen BuzzMetrics and searches the blogosphere
• Trackur.com are offering a free 14 day trial

Google Alerts is a free alerting service that will email you when it discovers your key phrase being mentioned on the wider Google search network including blogs, news, videos.

And you might want to go straight to the horses’ mouth and use the search facilities on each service, for example search.twitter.com or blogsearch.google.com

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Would you like me to take a look at your website, and write up a review of the kinds of improvements I think you should make?

For £100 + VAT I’m offering a one hour review of websites during which I’ll take a look at your:

• search engine optimisation
• usability of your site
• legal compliance
• and give a general warts and all review

I’ve been offering this service to delegates when I speak at conferences, and I’ve been surprised at the demand.

Don’t expect a fancy-dancy report;  I’d rather spend my hour writing up plain speaking analysis of specific steps I think you could take to improve your site.  And if your feelings are easily hurt, then this might not be the report for you!

The kinds of people who have requested the report include companies who are:

• wanting to improve their rankings in the search engines
• doubting whether they are getting value for money from their search marketing agency
• needing a plan of action to use with their web designer
• planning a new website redesign
• wanting to improve the conversion rate on their websites

Get in t0uch by dropping me an email or use the Contact Us form on the website.  Tell me a little bit about your business and what’s going on with your website.

And I’ll get back to you by return to get the ball rolling.

Your Bounce Rate is that depressing Internet statistic that measures the proportion of visitors that look at one single page of content and then bounce away, immediately leaving your site.  Bounce Rate has to be one of the most talked about statistics of the year, and yet one of the least well understood or interpreted.

We all want to reduce our bounce rates, that is to say we want to entice visitors to look at least one more page of content on our sites.  And a high bounce rate is a generally accepted signal that something is wrong, whether it’s your website content, or bad navigation, or poor user experience, or lousy business proposition.  A high bounce rate means your site has failed to engage your visitor enough to look at another page, and it might be that simple design changes can often lead to significant improvements in your bounce rate.

But in my experience, small businesses actively pursuing a search engine optimisation strategy may well experience a rise in their Bounce rate.

You must keep in mind that  Not all Bounces are Created Equal. You need to look at your Bounces on their individual characteristics and merits, and decide which Bounce rates provide significant information for your business, and which need addressing as a matter of priority.

1.  Evaluating Bounce on a “Page by Page” Basis

Let’s start with your Home page.  It should have a low bounce rate, as it is typically one of your most visited pages, and it acts as a signpost to encourage visitors to explore further.   It typically will have a linear path of links encouraging people to click through for further information.

By way of comparison, your search engine optimisation activities will often result in a huge number of what Jakob Nielsen calls “deep dips” – visitors arriving on interior pages that are highly relevant to their search phrase.  Obviously, these pages should be of interest to your visitors because the page is exactly what they were looking for. A high bounce rate for these pages might be a reason to worry.

However, you may also find that your pages may also be ranking highly for search phrases that are not appropriate, or do not show intention to buy your products or services.  And so these visitors will bounce, and because they were never really a prospective customer, you just can’t worry about them.

The danger would be to start redesigning your pages based on this spurious visitor activity.  You need to identify a strategy to focus on the behaviour of your real potential customers, not the time wasters.

2.  Bounce Rate for Particular Key Phrases

Some of your phrases do indeed show intention to buy, and you will want to carefully monitor these specific phrases and have a strategy in place to drive the bounce rate down.

Use your Google Analytics to segment out these phrases, and generate reports that help you to keep an eye on them.  Lose sight of this bounce rate at your peril, because it is at the heart of both your search engine optimisation and customer conversion strategy.

3.  Bounce Rate for Entry Sources

Your search engine optimisation activities will result in visitors coming from sites such as Digg, or Stumble Upon, who may well be idly browsing the web, and to be frank will never become a customer. Their bounce rate may be high, and my advice is don’t worry about it.  If appropriate, segment this traffic out, and review their bounce rate separately from other traffic sources.

How about links from other websites?  Visitors coming in as referrals from other sites should have a lower bounce rate, after all it is a recommendation that led them to visit your site.  You need to determine if the inbound link is indeed a recommendation that shows some intention on the part of the visitor, or again is just driving in random traffic.

Visitors from search engines are showing a high level of intention:  they have searched and clicked through to your site, and they should start engaging in your content.  High levels of bounces from search traffic should be a warning signal.  Either there is something wrong with your landing pages, or there is something wrong with your search engine optimisation strategy.

And of course, for a Pay Per Click campaign, a high bounce rate means wasted money with serious repurcussions for the overall cost of the campaign.  Keep a beady eye on your paid traffic sources, whether PPC, banners or other forms of paid advertising.

4.  Loyal Visitors

What about all you lovely people who follow visit my website in order to read my blog postings using either the RSS feed, or my email  marketing newsletter.

If I were thinking purely in terms of Bounce Rate, then I have to say you disapppoint me:  you often read one article, and then you leave.

But you are loyal visitors to the site, you come back week after week.  And to be honest, I’m happy if you usually just look at a page or two, because I suspect you’ve read some of my other articles already, and I hope from time to time I’ll lure you into clicking on the shiny new courses I’m running.

And finally…

One of the best techniques for reducing bounce rate is to offer specific links to further information at the bottom of the page, and hope your visitors will be motivated to learn more:

Search Engine Optimisation Myths:  don’t fall for these scams (PDF)

What’s happened to my search engine rankings?

It’s 2009 – and I’ve decided to get on the Twitter bandwagon.  I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, but I just couldn’t see the benefit of using it.  But now I’m seeing clients getting lots of traffic and engagement with their users via Twitter, so in for a penny, in for a pound.

Let’s start with a brief introduction to Twitter:  it’s a service that lets you send small messages, no more than 140 characters, letting people know what you’re doing or what you’re thinking about.  It’s often called “microblogging” and it works either by using the Twitter website, or sending and receiving text messages on your mobile phone.

I found this big list of companies using Twitter to be very persuasive in demonstrating the business benefits of using this technology

It’s all about social engagement.  Having a conversation with your customers, building a community, engaging with your potential clients.  It could be a way of conducting surveys and getting your customers’ opinions.

What do you need to do to play the Twitter game?

1. Decide what you’re going to Twitter about. What will I be tweeting about?  My tweets will cover Internet marketing news and updates, using it as a way to quickly share useful information and resources. Restaurants could send Tweets about today’s menu.  Estate agents could tweet new properties.  How about tweeting about new products or new services.  Consider sending customer service tweets. Or even tweeting discount codes.
2. Get a sensible Twitter identity.  Use your real name, or your company name, or your brand.  Make it easy for people to recognise that it is you doing the talking.
3. Use a tool to make small web addresses. I like to embed web links in my tweets, and so use either www.tinyurl.com to generate small versions of urls.  With only 140 characters to play with, you need to use teeny web addresses in your tweets.
4. Get a Twitter icon to promote your Twitter on your website.  I got mine from www.twitterbuttons.com/
5. Think about how you will promote your Twitter.  Will you put an icon on your website?  Send out an email invitation to your client base? Include it in your email signature?  Put it in your product delivery notes?
6. Learn the Twitter Etiquette.  Spend a few minutes reading a bit:

• Mastering Twitter in 10 minutes or less
• Twitter Guide for Dummies,

And why am I using Twitter?  It is a way to reach new audiences:  some people like to read my blog on the website, some follow using an RSS feed, some subscribe to the email marketing newletter.  And now it is time to get involved with the Twitterati.

I’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime take a look at my twittering at www.twitter.com/susanhallam

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My top 5 Internet Marketing tips for fighting the credit crunch.

The economy may be turning ugly, but the Internet offers small businesses opportunities to survive, and even thrive, during this recession we are all calling the credit crunch.

Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost effective ways of delivering our products and services.

And our customers are doing the same:  but they are still spending money.  They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on.  And they don’t want to risk wasting a penny.  They want to buy the right products, from companies they can trust.

And our customers’ use of the Internet will continue to grow – after all, it is free.

Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts.

But canny business owners will be taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet has to offer.

Here are my top 5 top Internet marketing tips for fight the credit crunch:

1.  Work Smart to Retain your Existing Customer Base

Out of sight means out of mind.  You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them.  And it is always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Email marketing is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way keeping in touch with your customers.  I’m not talking spam, and I’m not talking about marketing to get new customers.  You need to be sending out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.  And well crafted email messages make sales.

• Blogs are another free and easy way to publish information anbd keep in touch with your clients.  I am of the personal opinion that the majority of the UK population doesn’t know what to do with an RSS feed, but they sure know how to read blogs.

• Getting Social means engaging in conversations with your customers.  Qype, Facebook, Twitter:  these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business.  Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market.  And remember it isn’t about advertising, your contributions ot the conversation need to be valuable and appropriate

2.  Get Even More Visible in Front of Your Potential Clients

You have to get visitors to your website to make the sales.  And one of the best times to get found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling.  You need to get found on the Internet, which means Google, but also means a range of other places on the Internet that your customers visit.

Spending on online marketing is continuing to grow, competition is getting more intense, and as a result it is becoming more expensive.

Now is the time to review which of the visibility tools are going to give you the best return on your investment.  Put together your plan of action for building your visibility on the Internet.

Your Tools Checklist:

• Search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, classified advertising, online press releases, affiliate marketing, videos, sponsorship programmes

3.  Make Your Business Transparently Trustworthy

You an do all the advertising you want, but consumers trust each other more than they trust your carefully crafted marketing messages.  I have previously written about the importance of customer reviews in building trust.

If you’re selling business to business, then recommendations from colleagues, friends, accountants, and business advisers all have the greatest impact on building trust.

• Case studies and positive stories about your business form an essential part of the content on your website

• Plain speaking in the words you write may look easy, but it takes time and effort to write well.  Make your web copy and email messages sound genuine, and not hollow marketing drivel.

• Cultivate customer reviews.   Sites like Google Local Business Centre, TouchLocal and Qype are platforms for customer reviews and ratings.  I know businesses are scared of negative reviews, but remember even bad reviews contribute to the sense of honesty and trustworthiness.  Keep an eye on your reviews, and listen to what your customers have to say.

4. Measure, Measure, Measure

If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage.  And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend.  You need to be measuring against your success criteria.  You may want to measure sales, or email enquiries, or phone calls, or visits to your website.

• You may be using low-tech ways of measuring, like a clipboard near the telephone, and making a tick every time a person says they found you on Google.

• You might be using a dedicated telephone number that is associated with your Internet marketing activities, and when that phone rings you know the web is working for you.

• Or you might be using a web statistics package like Google Analytics, and set up your Goals and Conversion Tracking to see who well your website is performing.

If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.

5. Test, Learn, Test

And finally, there is no one size fits all answer to the Internet marketing puzzle.

You need to try something new, experiment with a technology or technique you haven’t used before.  Measure your success, and learn from the experiment.

• Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

• If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.

• And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on.  No harm done.  Be quick and be ruthless.  You will have tested something, learned from it, and moving on to test something new.

Have you found this article useful?

Why not contribute to the conversation by adding a comment, or bookmarking the site using your Social bookmarks.

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