There are 4 areas to consider before starting an online business

1. Read a lot. Get as much information you can apply to your personal growth. Do not let you stagnant in one area. Be resourceful, a lot of business books online, forums, blog etc. be part of it. You need to arm with knowledge and wisdom to success. 

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2. Focus your goal. Identify your strength. The more you know what you want to be, the more clearly where you want to go. Always surround with smart people, you will learn a lot from them. Be discerning what they’re doing and why they become successful in what they do. Do not be afraid to ask questions from the expert.

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3. Build a responsive website. Start to write your own content. This will help you to open door with bigger publications online. Start branding your business. Start to generate visitors to go to your site. Ask help or find an in house expert SEO company to help you the job. Make your website user friendly that is viewable in smartphones and other tablet gadgets. I can recommend you to ask help to this company FlexPoint Marketing. They are an expert online marketers and Seattle web design in Issaquah Washington.

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4. Develop a strategy. Make a name for yourself. Interact people and learn from there. Clients will pay your experience and your strategic leadership in a company. Learn from all different of industries and continue improve your knowledge.

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5. Do not be afraid to sell whatever you offer, offering something of value is must. Do not offer nonsense ideas product or services that adds nothing to your audience or customer.

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Absolutely Necessary-SEO Strategy for 2016

If you want your business visible online this year. Search engine optimization is the best for you but first you need to hire a company or agency to work for you. This strategy will help your business visible online in organic search results. Check and read below the essential tactics we need for SEO success.

Here are 6 Important SEO tactics for 2016

1.Create an influencer who is a subject-matter expert. Influencer marketing has been the big solution for this year. Most Marketers believe the power of connecting influential people online especially in social media users. This will increased their budgets this year, a report from http://www.augure.com/blog/state-influencer-engagement-20150618

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2.Develop a content –marketing strategy. Content is the most valuable asset. This is where you delves deeper into the creation, publication, and governance of useful and usable content for your target audience.

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3.Generate powerful backlinks to your site and pages. Links is still important factor to consider together with consistent content creation to your website or blog at least twice a month. Links are easy to get, if you don’t care where they come from or whether they’ll actually help you. An authority site is just like a person that can be trusted to give you what you’re looking for.

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4.Make your website mobile friendly. Web Development company converts your website to a professional looking mobile responsive user friendly website. This is very important because a lot of people in this generation used mobile phones especially in business online that need exposure to the SERP’s results.

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5.Move your website to HTTPs. You can find the full explanation here what and why it is necessary to implement to our website https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

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6.Add schema.org markup to your website. Schema.org is the centralized home on the web for the Schema project, a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Russian search engine Yandex (the one trying out search without links) to standardize structured markup. Here the sample set-up implementing to the site.

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Content Strategy Versus Content Marketing

Understanding these two is very important when creating a content to your audience. Before we dig in, let us know the meaning of Content Strategy from wikipedia, It says here "Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content—written or in other media." While Content Marketing is "Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers."

Content strategy and content marketing are two very different practices.

 Here are the basic practices of content marketing (from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/)

If you are an agency: Whether you are an SEO agency transitioning into content marketing, or a full service agency adding a content marketing practice to your suite of services, please recognize that there is a distinction. I’ve seen too many agencies that are simply throwing the title “Content Strategist” at someone whose responsibilities would be much better served by the title “Content Marketing Strategist.” They are not the same thing — and your business will be better served by respecting their differences and/or offering both categories of service.

If you are a brand: If you are putting together teams and processes to create facile management of content as a core marketing strategy — employ both! Don’t assume that a marketing team that knows how to tell compelling, engaging stories understands all the intricacies of content strategy (they might, but it’s exceedingly rare). And, don’t assume that the content strategist that you’ve got managing the consistency and hierarchy of your technical documentation knows everything about content marketing.

If you are a practitioner: Know what you are passionate about, and pursue that practice with all your heart. Most of the best content strategists I know really don’t want to be content marketers — and vice versa. As a content marketer, I couldn’t admire content strategists more. What they do, quite frankly, mystifies me most of the time. On every marketing team I have the pleasure of working with, I adore having a content strategist there who will help make sure we don’t blow the place up.

Other Important Key Aspects in doing content marketing. 

1.  Content marketing is strategic — it requires a plan: As our research shows, having a documented content marketing strategy is one of the key things that distinguishes effective content marketers from their less-effective peers.
2. Content marketing involves both the creation and the distribution of content: Your job is not done when your content has been created. 
3. You need marketing for your content marketing. At the very minimum, the content you create must be relevant and valuable: Not “just any” content will do (and there’s absolutely no room for spammy, farm-generated content). Think of genuinely useful content that does not pitch but, rather, informs. 
4.  Content marketing is consistently delivered: One-off pieces of content don’t count; nor do campaigns that have a finite duration. 
5. Content marketing needs to be executed on an ongoing basis. Honestly, this isn’t always easy to accomplish, and success won’t necessarily come overnight. But the results you are able to achieve can be staggering in terms of audience engagement and value. 
6.  Your content needs to attract and retain an audience, with the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer action: Said another way, don’t create content just for the sake of having content.
7.  It needs to do something that will help you reach your key business goal(s). You must have a clearly defined audience in mind for everything you create. Even if you think anyone and everyone can benefit from your product or service, it’s always better to focus your content on reaching a particular audience target or niche.

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How to Make Internet Marketing an Effective Tool For Lead Generation

Internet marketing, also known as online or inbound marketing, is how many businesses reach new prospects and stay connected with their current customers. By using the Internet (and its ancillary branches, such as email and social media) to market their business, they are able to get their message out to people across the globe in a fraction of the time it would take using more "traditional" methods. Because people are increasingly spending a lot of their time online, it's important to know how to use Internet marketing methods in the most effective way possible. Here are some tips and techniques you can use to take full advantage of this type of marketing.

TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FOR INTERNET MARKETING SUCCESS

Social Media Marketing

One thing people have always had in common is the desire to stay connected. Today, tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow people to connect immediately with friends and family as well as the world at large. Social media marketing is very important for businesses because it helps them nurture their current customer base while also giving them the opportunity to make contact with new customers.

Whether you want to leverage your online presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any of the many social media platforms out there, the aim is the same: giving your customers the chance to connect with your business on a more personalized level via a two-way interaction. You may utilize your social media accounts to promote your business,; however, your primary goal should be to establish a conversation with customers and prospects to find out how you can better solve their problems and deliver what they are looking for. Professional internet marketers agree that selling on these platforms should be minimized; the focus is on engagement, creating interest and curiosity. Continual and overused sales pitches will likely have the reverse effect, and posts will be ignored.

Mobile Marketing

Similar to social media marketing is mobile marketing. More often than not, your customers and prospects will be connecting with your business through their smartphones or tablets instead of their computers. It is much easier to check websites or social media on the go rather than to sit down at a computer, so it is essential your marketing approach is mobile-friendly. This means having your website transferrable from desktop to mobile without glitches, as well as utilizing apps or creating your own. Internet advertising also includes banner ads on relevant websites and SMS (short message service),or text message marketing. In the case of text messaging, the protocol requirement is for customers to opt in to an automated system by texting a reply or shortcode. Once the customer has opted in, text message specials or important product and service updates are welcomed.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing - Visibility Marketing

When a person is looking online for something similar to fit their needs, they enter search terms in a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. If your website or page isn't optimized for search engines, your page ranking may be so low that no one will find you - or you may not even show up at all! In order to be "found", your website needs to be visible to all of the major search engines. The way you make this happen is by SEO marketing, which utilizes specific tools (such as keywords, link building, and relevant content, to name just a few) to increase visibility and elevate page ranking. At 1st Straw, we refer to SEO as "visibility marketing", because every technique used is designed to make your website more visible to search engines. Improving your SEO marketing strategies will help get your business at the top of the search list instead of lost in all the other website links. Do this by thinking about what customers will search for instead of using typical words and phrases. The key to great SEO marketing is to think like a customer, and to create your keywords, build your links, and craft your content accordingly.

E-Mail Marketing

For many of us, our first thought at the words "email marketing" brings to mind the annoying "junk" or "spam" messages that land in our inbox each day. This is a prime example of email marketing done wrong. The purpose of email marketing is to maintain contact with your customers and prospects. Effectively done, it can be a powerful tool to generate more leads for your business.

You'll want to design your email content to be compelling and relevant to your recipients. You can craft an online newsletter that's distributed on a regular basis (e.g., monthly or semi-monthly). A successful email campaign has a clear objective, includes an "opt in" technique, and gets through the junk/spam filters so that it can actually be read. Be sure to use an email marketing provider that allows you to track your results so that you know who is opening your email and clicking through to your website or other links.

Internet marketing is a significant marketing channel that can reap measurable results. Use these strategies to step up your inbound marketing game and improve your online presence. The end result is more leads to convert into sales! Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9229068

How to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

The online image of a company is becoming more and more important with the increasing popularity of the internet and the social media. The whole world is transforming into a big online community where every piece of information is available at the click of a button. So in such a scenario the role of a Digital marketing Agency is extremely important. And also more important is to select the right agency for your business. When you sign a digital marketing agency for your company you are not only giving them your business, you are actually giving them the power to build or destroy your brand reputation.

Experience

You need to understand what experience the company who would be handling your online reputation has. You need not give the handling of your online branding to a company who is just starting up and knows nothing about the business. What we primarily mean is that a company might be having years of experience in other domains but what is relevant to you is how much experience they have in your domain and your industry.

Response time

You also need to ask them what would be the average response time in case you have a situation or a query. You need not be waiting for hours or days to get your query handled. So ask them about the average response time for an email or a phone call. There might be situations when you would require them to act on an urgent basis. So keep that in mind as well.

It is important to hire a company which has its office locally as well. For example, if you are running your business from Sydney then you must hire the Best Digital marketing Agency in Sydney. You can’t hire an agency that is situated somewhere in Europe for example. This is because they would know the local market well enough. So when some situation or panic occurs local company would be able to handle it in a better manner. So always give value to the local advantage that will bring with it. And instead of hiring a global digital marketing company which doesn’t even have an office in your city; it’s better to hire the local Digital marketing Agency.

Ethical

Ethics in a company are very important for a long term relation. So you need to make sure that the company that you hire is ethical and follows only the legitimate and fair practices of digital marketing. This is because the search engines these days have become extremely strict on wrong and unethical SEO practices. The penalty that was just for the content has now gone on to increase to domain penalties as well. This means your entire domain would get penalized. The sites providing poor content and following Black Hat SEO tactics have been severely affected in the recent times because of penalties from search engines. So it is extremely important that digital marketing agency follows only fair marketing practices.

Diversity

One thing that might be important for you to know is about what is the diversity of the clients that they are handling. The company that you are going to hire must be catering to a diverse set of clients from all domains and from all levels. It needs not be handling just a handful of clients from the local area. Yes, we said that the local advantage is useful, but then a company must not be just having the experience of handling some small clients based out in the local city. Also the Local Company must also be doing digital marketing for its clients globally as well. It must be having clients of all levels i.e. from small to medium to large sector. This will make sure that it is well versed with the intricacies of the small as well as large businesses. So just hire local Agency so that you get that local advantage, but also make sure that it has diverse set of clients.

References

Yes, it is important to ask for references of their current clients. This way you can get an idea of how the company is doing by looking at what is the online image of their existing clients. You can even see if you reach out to some of them to know if they are satisfied with the company services or not and if you are making the right choice by hiring them or not. So please do ask for the references of existing clients.

Price

The last but not the least thing to note is that how the company charges its clients. You obviously don’t want to be paying too much to them for their services. There might be companies that charge on per hour basis and there are companies that offer fixed packages, and there are many more types of pricing mechanisms being followed. So this is up to you to decide which pricing type suits you the best. And after knowing the pricing also make sure to do a comparison for what is the existing range of rates being offered by other players in the market.

So now you are all set to go for hiring a good Digital marketing company for your business. And while you do that just keep in mind, you are not just choosing a service provider; you are actually choosing a partner. This partner will now be responsible for the reputation of your business.

Source

Reasons You Need SEO

The Top 10 Reasons You Need SEO

By now, most marketers and business owners know that SEO is a critical factor for driving website traffic. If your site and content aren’t properly optimized, both for desktop and mobile users, you’ll have an incredibly difficult time attracting traffic from organic search your site.

However, there are many benefits of SEO aside from increased traffic. This post will outline 10 other important benefits that stem from having a properly SEO-optimized website.

1. Proper optimization not only means better rankings, it means a better user experience

There’s no question that user experience is now a significant ranking factor. The search engines want to see a mobile-friendly design, good user signals (high time on site, low bounce rates, etc.) and good integration of relevant photos and videos. These elements are all important for providing a great experience for your visitors as well; in other words, by optimizing your site for SEO, you’re automatically also improving your user experience. And a great user experience means higher conversion rates, more trust, and increased brand loyalty.

2. Organic search may account for as much of 64% of all website visits

A study by Conductor of over 310 million visits to 30 different websites showed that organic search accounted for 64% of all referral traffic. While other research seems to indicate that social media has now overtaken search slightly in terms of referrals, there’s no question that search remains a critical source of traffic for most businesses.

3. SEO leads tend to have higher close rates than outbound leads

According to this article at Search Engine Journal, SEO leads result in an average close rate of 14.6%, compared to close rates of 1.7% for outbound leads. While I can’t verify the original source of this statistic, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were true; it makes sense that searchers who are looking for specific products or services are more likely to make a purchase from businesses who they seek out through search, rather than those who attempt to attract them using outbound marketing strategies (i.e. cold leads).

4. Inbound marketing methods (including SEO) result in more leads than outbound, paid media or self-sourced leads

According to the 2014-2015 State of Inbound Marketing report, B2B, B2C and non-profit companies all report inbound practices as being their primary source of leads. This same report found that among marketing professionals, SEO had become the #1 source of leads over the previous 6 month period. One question to ask yourself is: if you’re not generating leads through search, who is capturing these valuable leads?

5. Ranking in local search directly leads to increased visits and sales

If you run a local business, optimizing your site for local search is absolutely critical. More and more consumers are using local search queries to identify local businesses and to find locations, hours and directions.

According to Google, 50% of consumers who performed a local search on a mobile device visited a store on that same day. These searches also led to higher sales: 18% of local mobile searches led to a sale within one day. For more local mobile marketing stats, see my article 6 Local Mobile SEO Stats Every Online Marketer Needs To Know.

6. Marketers rank SEO as one of their most effective digital marketing strategies

To see how effective something is, sometimes it’s best to go directly to the source. According to the 2015 State of Marketing report, of the marketers who are using SEO and SEM as part of their marketing strategy, 66% find it “very effective or effective”. Only 7% stated that their SEO efforts were “not very effective or not at all effective”.  These seem like reasonable odds to me!

7. SEO leads to increased credibility for your brand

Ranking highly in the search results signals to searchers that you’re a key player in your industry. Conversely, ranking on the 2^nd or 3^rd page may lead to unwanted assumptions: that you’re a new business, that you’re not as well known or that you don’t have the budget (and thus sales) to afford to boost your rankings.

8. SEO can be a less hands-on strategy than other inbound techniques

Social media and email marketing are both highly effective channels for generating leads, but both require some degree of continual effort. To remain top of mind for your customers and prospects, you have to be continually pushing out new content to your list and social media followers. However, once a page is SEO-optimized, you can often sit back, relax, and let it climb the rankings on its own merit. This, of course, largely depends on certain factors such as the competitiveness of the keyword(s) you’re targeting, and the quality of the content on the page, among others. But in general, once you lay the foundation of proper SEO-optimization for any given page, most of the hard work is already done.

9. Being on the 2^nd or 3^rd page of the search results means virtually no search visibility

Some business owners forgo any formal SEO efforts because they believe that being in the search results (anywhere in the results) is “good enough”. However, research by Moz shows that 71.33% of clicks happen on page oneof the search results. Properly optimizing your site and content are key to achieving top rankings; and therefore any degree of search visibility.

10.   The vast majority of consumers research products online before going to a store

Research from GE Capital Retail Bank shows that 81% of shoppers research and compare products online before making a local purchase. Other research puts this number as high as 94% for B2B buyers. Achieving first page rankings for your business and products is critical if you want consumers who are actively searching out your products to be able to find you.

Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Company for Your Business

Owning a digital marketing company, many people have come to me in regards to growing their business. Often, they are confused about not only what services they need but also how to choose the right agency. Digital marketing can sometimes be at the core of whether a startup has a higher chance of surviving, so it’s important that you bring on the right digital marketing company that stays on top of trends. This is a guide to help you choose the right digital marketing company for your business.

1. Understand: All Digital Marketing Companies Are Different

Digital marketing companies come in all different shapes and sizes. It’s important to find one that fits well with your business goals and, just as important, your budget. What makes digital marketing companies different? First, many have certain specialty services that they excel at. For example, a website design agency might say they offer marketing services in addition. Or a traditional marketing agency will tell you that they have a digital marketing branch. While you shouldn’t immediately dismiss these agencies, you may not want to pull the trigger and go with them. Digital marketing is an incredibly complex, ever-changing industry. You want the agency that handles your business to be up to date on the latest trends and unfortunately, if digital is only a side-service, they might not be.

2. Do Your Homework

The digital marketing industry is full of charlatans – businesses looking to sell you “snake oil”. They’ll promise you the world and when you see no results they’ll try to get you to pay more money. While they don’t represent the vast majority of marketing companies out there, they are still there. To make sure you go with a reputable agency, that has your best interest in mind (instead of just lining their pockets) you’ll want to do the following…

Check potential marketing agencies out on the Better Business Bureau. Be wary of going with marketing agencies overseas. Remember that you get what you pay for – less money usually means lower quality work.

3. Understand Their Pricing

“What do you charge?” seems to be the biggest question people ask when choosing a digital marketing agency. And this is for good reason – most businesses are on a budget. While I like a good deal as much as the next guy, you shouldn’t be bargain hunting when it comes to choosing an agency. Marketing not only takes experience and creativity, it also takes a lot of hard work and dedication. Trying to find someone, let alone a team, to take over your marketing initiatives for only a few hundred to a thousand dollars per month is impossible. If you don’t have the budget to hire a digital marketing company yet, check out Tech.co’s articles on marketing. They have tons of great resources for businesses of all sizes.

4. Ask for Case Studies

One of the best ways to determine if an agency is credible is to check their work. Case studies are the best way to do it. You want to go with a marketing company that is meticulous about tracking and improving their results. So ask for a few different case studies. You’ll especially want to read ones on companies in your industry. If the agency you’re talking to refuses to give them out, this can raise a big red flag.

5. Learn How They Measure/Report Success.

As mentioned above, measuring and reporting success is important so that both parties understand what’s needed to improve even further. Some agencies will purposely keep clients in the dark so they don’t need to prove their results. You’ll want to stay away from these types of agencies. Be sure to ask any marketing company you’re looking at going with how they measure and track their results. Reputable agencies will gladly keep you in the loop with monthly or even weekly reports/check-ins.