For online marketing there is a number as well.  It is the number of sales that you make in a set amount of time.

Your sales number, however, is an outcome.  It is the final result of all of your online marketing efforts – your work generating leads, following up and closing.  So while I always recommend that clients frame their ultimate goal in terms of sales, I recommend that on a daily basis they focus instead on tracking and continually tweaking the critical numbers that create their sales: Visitors, Conversion Rate, and Closing Rate.

Visitors: Visitors are the number of people who visit your site on a daily basis. These are folks who have some level of interest in what you offer and whom you may be able to engage in conversation.

Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who take action on your site.  For some ecommerce sites, this may the percentage of visitors who make a purchase.  For many companies, however, it is the percentage of people who opt into your sales funnel and become a warm lead by requesting more information, downloading a free report, or signing up for a free consultation.

Closing Rate: For ecommerce companies, the closing rate and the conversion rate are the same metric.  But for most businesses with a website, your closing rate is the percentage of warm leads that you ultimately close as sales.

So to achieve your sales goal you have three steps:

1. Get visitors.  If no one is seeing your site, nothing else happens.  This is where a well run SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns becomes crucial.
2. Convert visitors into leads.  Until they “opt in” and give you their contact information, you can’t complete the sale.  To increase your conversion rate, make sure that your website is built to demonstrate value, build trust, and prompt action.
3. Close your leads.  Not everyone is going to buy today.  For those who aren’t ready yet, make sure you have a great system in place for staying in regular touch through newsletters or social media.  This ensures that – as soon as they are ready to buy – you will have already earned their business.

Whether or not you are going to achieve your all important sales number is ultimately determined by your visitors, your conversion rate, and your closing rate.  So monitor these numbers on a daily or weekly basis and always focus on improving them!

5) Quantity Over Quality

There is a strong tendency to focus on raw numbers to measure your success – How many followers do you have on Twitter and how many fans on Facebook? The catch is that you can have 10,000 connections in your network and not make a dime from them if they aren’t the right people. So instead of raw numbers, focus on increasing the amount of highly target connections that you have. For example, if you have a maternity store don’t worry about your count of total followers and instead focus exclusively on building relationships with new mothers-to-be.

4)  The Wrong Place

There lots of great social media outlets – but that doesn’t mean that they are all right for you. “They built it, so I will come” is a dangerous way of selecting where you will invest your company’s social media efforts. There is an overwhelming number of online venues available for you, so pick the ones that are most popular with your niche market and focus your efforts there so that you can make the biggest impact.

3)  Not Connecting

Social media is like a coffee shop conversation occurring online. At its heart, it is about getting to know each other and building a connection. This means that you need to engage your network with questions, not simply one way communication. You need to search for feedback. And when you get that feedback, you need to respond. You know, just like you would in a coffee shop.

2) Selling

Social media is ultimately about connecting (see above). It is about getting to know your customers, allowing them to get to know you, and building a relationship. Bombarding your network with sales, discounts, and buy 2 get 1 free offers is a sure way to make them tune you out. So when you are running that amazing sale, sure, let your online friends know about it. But keep the majority of your content fun, informational, and the sort of stuff that you would want to read yourself.

1) R.O.Ignored.

There are a thousand and one marketing avenues open to you today, and it is your duty to pick and chose the ones that give you the biggest bang for your buck. With all marketing you need to track the impact that it has on your sales. This is all the more true with social media. Simple tracking software such as Google Analytics will allow you to see how much traffic you are getting each day from your social media efforts. And setting up a unique phone number (via Google Voice) will allow you to track any calls coming directly from your social media profiles. By tracking your ROI you can ensure that you are getting all the value available out of social media.

Testimonials are a crucial tool for inspiring confidence in your product or service. They are perceived as impartial third-party evidence of the quality of work that your company provides, and are an essential part of your sales arsenal both online and offline.

So let’s look at what you can do to make your testimonials even more powerful.

Third Party Publication: If you publish testimonials on your website, everyone knows that you could be making them up, editing them, or simply choosing to print the best ones. If your testimonials are on a third party website, however, people know that you have less control. Consequently, these testimonials are more believable. So encourage your happy customers to leave reviews on Google, Angies List, Epinions, Yelp, or any other review site that is relevant to your industry to get that “indisputable” seal of approval.

Script It: Wouldn’t it be great if you could script each and every one of your testimonials? You would make sure they focused on results and gave specific statements about the impact of your products or services. Well, unfortunately, you can’t script testimonials. But you can structure the testimonial by giving appropriate questions. Rather than just asking “Could you write a testimonial for our company” be specific. Ask questions like (1) How did our product / service change your day to day life? (2) How would you compare our product / service to those of our competitors? (3) What is the biggest benefit you have received from our product / service? These specific questions will produce powerful testimonials!

Personal Connection: The stronger and more personal the connection between the author and the reader, the more effective that testimonial will be. This is why written testimonials are best accompanied by a photo. From a psychological perspective, this visual reference helps the reader to trust the person and their word. Any credentials you can attach to the person also help create a sense of connection and trust. Whether they are a mother of three, a published author, or a manager in their workplace, knowing a bit more about the author helps the reader feel that they can relate to them.

Video: Video is the best form of testimonial. First of all, it is the most entertaining. We all love TV and Youtube – and a video testimonial on your website isn’t all that far off. But more importantly, (1) video testimonials are more believable because they are hard to fake and (2) they create the most powerful relationship. A photo accompanying a written testimonial is a great start, but videos are even more powerful because they give the viewer the feeling that they truly know the person who gave the testimonial.

You know you avoid them. As hard as you try, you won’t be able to get anything more than a conversation about the weather from the wallflower standing in the corner. And the slick haired salesman at the other end of the room will spend the whole conversation tell you every nuance of his new product.

So know you avoid them. And you do it because they are boring – because you won’t get anything from them other than pleasantries or formulaic sales hype. You avoid them because there is no real connection.

But are people avoiding you for the same basic reason?

Are you boring?

The Danger of Vanilla: Vanilla is a fine ice cream flavor, a true classic. But no one is going to call you up to tell you about this amazing new cone they had of mouthwatering vanilla. The jalapeno mocha fudge ice cream, though, that’s worth talking about. So don’t be vanilla. You are unique and – to connect with people, get them interested in you, and get them talking to others about you – you need to let your flavor shine through. Holding back who you are just makes you not noteworthy and unmemorable, two characteristics that will quickly kill your potential for marketing yourself.

Being JUST Your Position: You may be a Sales Rep, a Senior Manager, or a Business Owner, but you are also a whole lot more. You’ve got a family or a new pinball machine, a hobby or a favorite band, and you have that story from last Thanksgiving when Uncle Bob’s dog ate the turkey so ordered Chinese food. In other words, the majority of who you really are (and a lot of the more interesting stuff) is outside of your professional persona. So let at least a little bit of it show through. It will make you more interesting and give people the feeling that they relate to you.

Selling When You Shouldn’t: People want to do business with folks that they know, like, and trust. Trying to sell before someone has gotten to know you and decided that she likes you is going to be an uphill battle every time. So don’t start by selling. Instead, connect with the person and allow them to get to get to know that true, non-vanilla, more interesting than just your work persona, you. After you have this relationship, then you selling becomes easy.

“Really, that’s actually a job?”

This is most people’s reaction when they find out that we have someone on staff whose primary duty is creating postings on Craigslist.

Craigslist is in the Top 10 Most Visited sites in the US.  It is estimated that the site receives over 7 billion page views per month. In other words, there is an enormous amount of people shopping on Craigslist every day.

“But,” most people say, “I’ve posted on Craigslist and it isn’t very hard at all – why do you have someone on staff just to do that?”

Craigslist is dedicated to making it easy to post a single advertisement. But the catch is that they are ALSO dedicated to making it very hard to post multiple advertisements. So if you have a car or TV to sell locally then you’ll have no problem posting your single ad. But if you have own a auto dealership and want to post hundreds of ads for the cars on your lot, or if you have an electronics company and want to advertise your TVs for sale in 100 cities across the county, it is a very different story.

Account Limits: Craigslist will not allow you to post more than 3 ads per account in 48 hours. And if you continually post up to that limit, the Craigslist system starts tracking you very carefully. So you ideally don’t want to post more than once per 24 hours per account. This means that for a campaign of any significant size you need to have many accounts.

Phone Verification: For the more desireable categories, Craigslist requires that a phone number be used to verify that the account is being used by a specific individual. In other words, each of those many accounts that you now need will require their own email address AND their own unique phone number.

Duplicate Content: If Craigslist sees the same title, content, or links being used in multiple ads, it will remove those posts. Therefore you need to use a unique title and unique content for each ad you post. The best way to do this (and to still have a memorable ad) is to create an image for your ad and upload multiple copies of that single image to a photo sharing website. Then you can insert some unique text into each ad (which doesn’t even need to be related to your product) and then embed a unique copy of that one image (which has your actual advertisement).

Location is Key: Craigslist checks your IP address – the unique location of your computer – and looks to see if too many ads are being posted from this one location. If they are, Craigslist will consider you a spammer and remove the ads. Consequently, you need to regularly change the IP address that you are posting from.

So for a campaign of any significant size, posting on Craigslist becomes quickly becomes complicated. Hence, Dustin, our staff’s fabulous Craigslist guru.

Search engine optimization is sort of like going back to junior high all over again. Popularity is paramount.

This is because the programmers for search engines like Google are really, really smart. They know that the best code that they can write is still outclassed by the average website visitor who can quickly tell if a website is user-friendly and interesting.

So search engine programmers decided to harness the collective knowledge of these website visitors by factoring the popularity of a website into that site’s search engine ranking. The programmers figure that if lots of other people are linking to your site, well, you must have something interesting there.

Consequently, the quantity of links coming into your site has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on Google.

What do the cool kids think?

Search engine programmers also know that what the cool kids think always counts for a whole lot more.

In the online realm, a large, powerful, and very popular website is unlikely to refer its visitors to boring or hard to use websites. The fact is that this became large and popular by providing its readers with great content, and so this website has every reason NOT to link to poor websites. In addition, the people behind popular websites tend to know their industry very well and have many top quality sites to point their readers towards.

The search engine programmers take this into account by weighting links from popular websites much more heavily than links from small, unpopular websites.

So online, just as in junior high, popularity counts. The difference is that this time there is a very good reason (and lots of smart programmers) behind it.

As we have discussed previously, blogs are very powerful online marketing tools. They allow you to build your credibility as an expert in your field. They enable you to create a deep relationship through dialogue with your customers. And – perhaps most importantly – they get great love from search engines with regularly updated content and the ability to target specific, non competitive keyphrases.

However, you can quickly destroy all of these benefits with one little mistake: separating your blog and your website.

I am sure you have seen it. You are on a company website, checking out their services, and you click on “Blog” to see what they are writing about. You are suddenly whisked away to another website with a completely different look, a new domain name, and no easy way to get back to the main company site. This is NOT what you want to happen to your visitors.

Branding & Credibility: A key benefit of placing a blog on your site is that visitors read a few valuable articles and then see YOU AS THE EXPERT. If they are on a separate blog, however, that branding of you and your company as the go-to experts is not nearly as effective. Instead, your blog is becoming the expert while your company site (your ture online face) is left behind as some site the person visited ten minutes ago. People forget very quickly online, so you must always remind them who is giving out this great information by keeping your blog and your company site united.

Taking Action: A website is working if it gets visitors to take the next step in the sales process – contact the company, buy the product, sign up for the newsletter, download the coupon, or request that free consultation. So your website should be a conversion beast, continually urging your visitors to take action. But if your blog is separate from your website this becomes much harder. Once the visitor has read three articles and is finally ready to join your newsletter or chat on the phone… what do they do? How do they get back to your site, much less sign up for anything with just one click? Consequently, separating your blog from your website significantly decreases conversions.

Search Engine Love: As we’ve discussed before, blogs help with SEO big time! They allow you to target niche keyphrases, significantly improving the breadth of your website’s visibility. They also offer great content that will earn backlinks from other sites, improving the rank of your entire site. And they give search engines their beloved regularly updated content. But if your blog is separate from your company site (especially if it has its own domain name) these SEO benefits are all going to your blog and NOT your company website. If your blog was part of your site, all of the backlinks and new keyphrase ranking would be making you company soar in the search engines! But as a separate entity your blog performs well and your actual company site is just left in the dust.

Many companies today have multiple domain names. For example, if you get thirsty for a soda and decide to visit Coke.com you are automatically over to the company’s official website at Coca-Cola.com.

Purchasing additional domain names and pointing them to your primary website like this can offer many benefits. For example, you can redirect domains for misspelled versions of your company name to the correct website, or provide customers with a simple domain to type in (such as SRLaw.com instead of the user needing to type out SmithfieldAndRabblesteinLawFirm.com).

So there are many uses for having multiple domains, but what is the best way to redirect those domains?

Let’s check out the options one by one:

Javascript: One option is to redirect visitors with javascript code placed in the HTML of a webpage. This option allows you to create a highly optimized landing page and then redirect a visitor to ANY other site, essentially spamming search engines. Consequently, search engines – in their efforts to return top quality results – penalize this approach heavily.
Parked Domains: Another option is to park your domain and point it to the server for your primary website. This will allow visitors to navigate your website through the parked domain. However, it will ALSO allow search engine robots to navigate your website through that same parked domain. Search engines penalize duplicate content on websites, so if they catalogue the two domains as two separate but identical websites then your ranking will drop.

302 Redirect: There is this nifty file called ‘.htaccess’ that tells visiting computers how to handle specific requests. This file can tell web browsers or search engines that a web page has temporarily moved through what is called a 302 redirect. Many times the URL forwarding offered by domain registrars employs this type of redirect. The trouble with it is that – due to its officially temporary nature – some search engines do not properly pass on the credit for incoming links to the final destination URL. This means that important search engine rank is lost.

301 Redirect: We are finally there – the 301 redirect. This is also done through your ‘.htaccess’ file and functions similarly to the 302 redirect, except it is a PERMANENT redirect. This is the approach endorsed by search engines and consequently it transfers the maximum site popularity from the redirected domain to the final domain. But don’t take our word for it; here is Google’s opinion and here it is from Yahoo.

I see a lot of dedicated, hard working small business owners set themselves on fire during the startup process. They work so hard on achieving perfection for that first roll out of their product or service that once the product is on the market and the hard work ACTUALLY STARTS, they have already burnt out nearly all of their personal energy and financial capital.

The much more successful approach for startups is to stagger the investment of resources (both time and money) so that you can do what it takes to continue building momentum for the first year after your company has launched.

Branding: Many branding companies will recommend investing months and tens of thousands of dollars in planning and market research to craft the perfect brand identity for a new company. We don’t. (As a caveat, if you are well funded by VCs and have a longer time horizon, then that branding effort is definitely worth it.) But for the majority of new startups – where time and money are both quite limited – a few days and a thousand dollars is a much wiser investment. We strongly recommend that you think through what makes your product or service unique and how to engage your niche market’s emotions, and that you conscientiously build your brand around those points. But recognize that you will be able to tweak your brand over the next six months as you get feedback from clients. And instead of analyzing and perfecting for months, instead get on with the essential job before you: speeding your product to the marketplace.

Website Design: Clients are often surprised when they put their money on the table asking for expensive website features and I recommend that they put their wallet back in their pocket. Your final dream website is a great vision to have, but launching it on day one is typically more of an expense – both in money and in delayed product launch – then a bootstrapping startup should pay. Instead, we work with these clients to find ways to deliver 85% of their features but invest only 40% of the time and money to build. You can have your dream site, but you’ll be better off doing it in six months after your company is making money and you’ve had a chance to speak with customers and see what they REALLY want in your website.

Your Product / Service: Years ago Guy Kawasaki wrote a great article titled The Art of Bootstrapping. One of the primary principles in the article was “ship, then test”. You can perfect your product or service indefinitely, but it is not doing anyone (including you) any good until it is on the market. So get it to “good enough” and start marketing! Once it is being used you will get all the feedback you need from actual customers on what parts rock and what parts would benefit from more tweaking.

So whether it is creating your brand identity, selecting website features, or launching your product or service, remember the immense value of momentum.  Get it good enough, get it out the door, market, market, market, and then work on the polishing.

The organic search engine results are the ten listings that cover the majority of the page on sites like Google or Bing. Paid search engine advertising is responsible for the results above and to the right of those organic listings.

Search engines don’t charge you anything to display your site in the organic listings – you show up there automatically if the search engine feels that you are relevant for that particular search term. The paid advertisements, however, do cost.

Some of our previous articles have addressed when paid advertisements are a good choice, and we want to continue that discussion by shedding light on two other important factors you need to consider.

Terms You Are Missing:  Search engine optimization often takes a lot of work. In a typical campaign your website will score well for some keyphrase variations (such as “residential plumbing contractor”) but will not score well for some other relevant keyphrase variations (such as “residential plumbing installer”).

For this reason it is important to track the results of any SEO campaign. Once you see where your site is not performing, you can make the choice about whether or not to rework your site content with those keyphrases. When your site is already ranking well for the more important, higher traffic keyphrases, these sorts of changes to your site may not be wise.

In cases like this, paid search engine ads on Google or Bing may be exactly what you need. They will allow you to instantly get page 1 results for those terms you are missing, making sure you have a complete presence in the online marketplace.

Distant Markets: For geospecific searches (such as “denver plumber”) Google likes to return companies located in that geographical area. So let’s say that your Denver based plumbing company is offering a do-it-yourself plumbing workshop series in Los Angeles. Now when you offered this same workshop in Denver last year you immediately ranked #1 for “plumbing workshop denver” – but even though you have a great page on your site for your new L.A. workshop, you just aren’t ranking at all for “plumbing workshop Los Angeles.”

In a case like this, the search engine is favoring L.A. based websites for a geographically specific search phrase. As a result, it is refusing to display your Denver based website. In this situation, paid advertising is a great fit once again. It mitigates the location issue, puts you on even footing with L.A. based companies, and allows you to get an instant page 1 presence for a good price on a non-competitive term like “plumbing workshop Los Angeles.”

So while organic search engine optimization is typically the best investment for your company’s online presence, there are situations when paid advertising is clearly the way to go to round out your online presence.