Net-Zilla in the News – 02/02/2012
Excerpt from a February 2, 2012 article from The Times newspaper in Maple Ridge
Local Businesses Learn About Social Media
By Sylver McLaren, The Times February 2, 2012
ABOUT 30 PEOPLE ATTENDED THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS SOCIAL HELD AT THE ACT ON TUESDAY.
The Downtown Maple Ridge BIA is getting techie.
Net-Zilla Web Consultants have been retained for the next year to provide Social Media Marketing services for the business association.
“Early in our discussions with the BIA it became apparent to me that there was opportunity to help the BIA in Maple Ridge to use Social Media better to further the goals of the group,” said Doug Shortt, Principal Consultant for Net-Zilla.
Net-Zilla will be creating a Facebook page that is dedicated to promoting local businesses through a variety of methods. Such methods will include active daily posting, building connections with consumers in the Lower Mainland, and enlisting participation through the use of polls, questions, comments, contests, and coupon marketing.
In addition, a YouTube Channel will be set up for member training on how to use social media effectively in addition to another YouTube Channel set up to promote local business videos.
Net-Zilla provides services to set up their clients on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn.
“I feel the most important thing that we offer is strategies to help clients learn Social Media and what it can do for their business,” said Shortt.
“Local businesses that rely heavily on traditional promotion methods are missing a big opportunity,” said Shortt, who’s with the Maple Ridge-based company.
BIA executive director Ineke Beokhorst said there is a lot of interest in learning how Social Media works.
On Tuesday night the BIA held one of its most well attended monthly meeting.
“About 30 people came to the meeting. It’s obviously a popular topic. There was a lot of interest,” she said.
Affiliate Marketing for Niche Websites
Affiliate Marketing is a very effective way to monetize a website. The best ways to implement an affiliate marketing program are not widely understood and will be discussed in this post.
Affiliate Marketing Steps
Always start with keyword research. Start by entering a broad keyword into the Google Keyword Tool and refine your search from there.
Select up to 30 keyword phrases that look like they have a level of search demand high enough to monetize your site. To learn Affiliate Marketing you must learn this step. Try to keep it simple. Google makes setting up your affiliate campaigns a much easier task. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and role play what they might type into Google to find your promotion.
Research content for your site. If you are going to give away a report construct it so it begins to solve an urgent need for your target audience. It should have a action title and be no more than 10 pages long. The report outline will define the bullet points on your landing page which should be on the root domain of your site.
Affiliate Marketing Website
To learn Affiliate Marketing you need to be able to create a WordPress website. Anything you can’t do you must either learn it or pay someone to do it. A simple landing page can be outsourced for small change and Fiverr is a good solution. You’ll be tempted to learn it all to keep the cost down but this will delay your project. I suggest finding an out source when you first start Affiliate Marketing training. This will speed up the process and you can learn as you go if you’re interested.
Traffic Generation
There are two primary ways to get traffic to your offers. Paid traffic from pay per click ads or organic search engine optimization. There are many pros and cons for each method. Paid traffic is useful for short term testing of affiliate offer pages using split testing techniques. When first starting to learn Affiliate Marketing the most simple approach is to create content in the form of articles and videos.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The best way to manage an affiliate campaign is to use an SEO check list. There are a number of on page and off page requirements necessary to get your content well ranked in the search engine results pages or SERPS. On page factors consist of including your target and associated keywords in the title, description, h1 tags, image alt tags and video optimization.
Off Page factors include back linking, the number of backlinks, the quality of backlinks and the relevancy of backlinks. Off page SEO is a complex technical process best suited to being done by professionals. Mess this up and it can hurt your site instead of helping it. It’s good to learn as much as you can however and I recommend that all of my clients be knowledgeable about on page optimization at least.
Marketing Process Wrap Up
Marketing types know great ways to monetize a website and create long term sales revenue. This article has just scratched the surface of Affiliate Marketing but if you master effective keyword research and On Page SEO you will be more than half way there.
SEO Priority – On Page Optimization or Off Page Back Linking?
What should be the top priority for small businesses when an SEO Campaign is started? The most important thing is Back Linking.
Back Linking involves placing content on a variety of interactive websites that contains a link and anchor text back to your high converting landing page. These are the basic requirements of an Off Page SEO campaign.
An On Page campaign involves optimizing blog post structure, keyword density, keyword proximity, internal linking, link anchor text and image anchor text. It’s possible that you aren’t familiar with all of these terms but the upshot is this; On Page SEO is comparatively unimportant when compared with Off Page SEO and back linking activities.
No one knows for sure but it appears that search results ranking can be achieved without doing much On Page optimization. Before the pitch forks come out, let me qualify this statement. On Page work is important for SEO but more importantly for your human site visitors.
It also keeps you on track by focusing your thoughts on one key phrase per page which is important to your page visitors. In addition, it helps Google to verify the topic of your page and match it to the content of the anchor text of incoming back links.
Google considers links pointing to your site to be a vote for your site. They know that some of these links will be created by the site owner and some will be created by people that are referring to or recommending your content. It is estimated that 80-90% of positive SEO results are gained by off site back linking activity.
What are the requirements for a back linking campaign? You need a focused landing page that has a short sales pitch and a call to action. This call to action can usually involves some variation of this: “Leave your name and email address and we’ll give you something of value.” This is normally a download or a video with some valuable information. This is lead generation.
A well converting landing page is required to gather leads but also to track how many visitors you’re getting. Tracking your page visitors will give you an indication of the effectiveness of your off page campaign. If you find that you are only getting a small amount of available traffic you need to increase your back linking efforts.
A back linking campaign consists of work done on forums, blog commenting, social media posts, web 2.0 properties and article sites to name a few. It takes a great deal more effort and time than On Page work and Google rewards this effort accordingly.
An additional benefit of back link marketing is the fact that each link with anchor text can be seen by potential customers doing research or just surfing the net. Potential clients actually click on these links which will guide them to your money site for additional information. Think of back linking as the online version of ‘Working the Room’.
Check out this link for additional information about How to Market Your Business Online .
