In your Internet marketing be careful not to use one channel as you only source of leads. One of our clients was enjoying their SEO traffic, their phones were ringing and the business was flourishing. Along came the September long weekend and their host dropped their website due to a technical issue because the host was making some internal changes and moved their site to a new server, during this time Google spidered the site and found a 404 error page, plus some other problems! Now they have disappeared from the natural search and local maps, the phone is quiet and panic is beginning to set in.
The moral of the story is don’t bet on one horse, diversify your Internet marketing and utilize several channels.
Ebooks and Coupons
The power of FREE is very compelling to a lot of visitors to your website. Write an great ebook and give it away or coupons to download, each time collecting their email in the process, giving you a way communicate with them in the future. However beware, just because they gave you their email address, doesn’t mean they want to be instantly sold, intact that will turn them off, continue the power of free and make some deposits into their lives, after sometime the trust will build and you can make them an offer.
There are several great automated email systems, aweber, constant contact and mail chimp, nouri.sh adds a different spin they allow you to push your blog rss feed into a monthly email which can save a ton of time.
Statistics
According to the research by Exact Target 93% of U.S. online consumers users subscribe to at least one permission based email a day, 88% of U.S. online consumers use their email everyday. It is the default way in which consumers provide companies permission to market to them.
Cost
Aweber starts at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers. Constant Contact $15/month for up to 500 subscribers, both these have unlimited sending limits. MailChimp Free for up to 1,000 subscribers with a 6,000/month limit. Nouri.sh also has free for up to 1,000/subscribers.
Social Networking
The top three sites offer different ways to get in front of your audience. Yes it takes time to sign up for the account, create content, make friends and influence people, but the people and companies who take the time to engage are the one’s who win. They are also the one’s who learn from the comments what they are doing well and improve those products/services, plus take negative feedback and change/respond to make themselves a better company.
Statistics
According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, 175 million people log into Facebook everyday. Twitter COO Dick Costolo said Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day.
What does that translate into for the North American market? The numbers from Exact Target show 42% of U.S. online consumers use Facebook at least once a day and 38% U.S. online consumers are a fan of (i.e. liked) at least one company or brand.
5% of U.S. online consumers are Twitter users and 68% of daily Twitter users follow at least one brand.
In the business to business market?
According to Global Recruiting Roundtable there are 2,337,350 Canadian members in Linkedin on average 540,000 Canadians log-into Linkedin each week. One other interesting statistic is, you’ll find more middle age men with no kids and a higher income and education level than the internet average on Linkedin!
Cost
Sign up is free. Just your time is needed.
Blogging
If you could have a column in a local/national paper or publish a monthly magazine wouldn’t that be amazing, few have this luxury, but everyone has the freedom to express themselves and their passions on their blog. Create their niche and interact with others who have similar likes, influence others from your experience and knowledge.
This can all be done for free, WordPress is the more popular blogging platform and a lot of web hosts provide cpanel which has an auto install for WordPress into your website and there are 1,000’s of free themes to make it look unique. There are lots free sites that you can sign up for your own blog, blogger.com, wordpress.com (wordpress.org is the site that supports the version that you can install on your website), hubpages, livejournal. When signing up at these sites you get a subdomain of their site eg yourname.blogger.com
Statistics
There are over 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010:
11.4 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.
Canadians look at 94.4 million WordPress.com pages each month. Imagine what that number would be if they included the websites with their own blog installations, plus all the blogger.com, hubpages, livejournal etc sites!
Here you can see how WordPress compares to other popular platforms in Canada
Following stats are courtesy of “2009 State of the Blogosphere by Technorati”
77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann
Around half of Bloggers are working on at least their second blog
68% have been blogging for two years or more
86% have been blogging for at least a year
72% say they blog in order to share their expertise.
61% say they blog in order to supplement their income.
Cost
Sign up is free. Just your time is needed.
Video
This is the perfect way for your audience to get to know you. You will even find they will interact with you differently after you start uploading video, because they can look into your eyes and feel they know you and trust you. Now when the phone rings your customer will instantly feel comfortable when they are talking to you.
Here is the big secret that most people don’t think about. Video can be intimidating, a lot of people don’t even like to see themselves on video and to make one of yourself, forget it, they will come up with a list of excuses.
So be the company who does video, stands out from the crowd and makes a difference in their customers online experience.
Also think about get video testimonials from your customers, what better way of convincing new customers about your products or service.
Statistics
YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. According to ComScore U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos in May 2010, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property.
Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month (101.2 videos per viewer).
Cost
Sign up is free. Video cameras don’t have to be expensive, nor does the editing software, here is a good guide.