Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 23rd, 2011
So, you remember back when the internet was first becoming popular? You remember how businesses would post their information online and make a sort of brochure of themselves back in the day? And do you remember how revolutionary that was, having a website?
It’d be easy to forget. The internet has become so ubiquitous that the idea of not having a website is considered something of a black mark. People don’t even want to work for companies that don’t have websites.
And the amazing thing about this? Mobile marketing looks like it’s going to be even bigger.
We understand that that’s a bold claim, and we don’t make it lightly. But there are a few things to consider in terms of why it’s going to be so huge.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 21st, 2011
Email marketing might seem a little antiquated these days, given everything that we talk about when it comes to maintaining conversations. But really, that’s exactly why you need to keep email marketing in mind.
Granted, you do have all these different ways to talk to and interact with people. But what you need to remember now is that back before all of these things were around, there was email. And email continues to be a relevant way to do business, to conduct communications, and just to keep up with people in general.
Maybe if email wasn’t so prevalent it might not be relevant anymore. But as it’s maintained its use, it has also maintained its usefulness to you.
So let’s go ahead and take a look at five ways for you to use it.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 16th, 2011
You might be wondering just what the difference is between increasing the traffic you get through your website, versus driving people to be there.
And it’s really very simple. What we talked about before is passive, SEO based stuff. It’s what makes you attractive. And it’s good stuff – but we also have to face a certain reality.
Bringing people by is not a bad thing. It’s a very good thing. It’s what generates those long term sales for you by letting you build the relationship. On the other hand, you also have to face the necessity of having people want to be at your website.
People shop at Amazon because they want to. Amazon does a good job of driving traffic by presenting products, as well as making themselves approachable. So here are some thoughts on how you can develop that for yourself.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 10th, 2011
We know what it is that you want. You want the most that you can get out of your website conversion. In other words, you want to be sure that the people who are coming to visit aren’t just visiting. You want to know that you’re making some headway with them and building your business.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of. That’s the entire reason for you having these social media conversations and the like. Let’s not forget that.
And if this is true, then it just makes sense to get the most of your connection with them. In other words, to optimize the conversion rate from your websites.
There are a ton of ideas floating around about this. Garry Przyklenk happens to have just a few:
1.) Paid Search Landing Pages
The biggest impact to start with is in your paid search landing pages. This is a good idea because it saves you money on your search engine marketing – your SEM – pretty much from the start. The best way to do this, Przyklenk recommends, is by changing it up on the landing page. You vary things like your value proposition, your urgency, your pricing, your product mix, and the length of your forms. Download our free PPC whitepaper for more optimization techniques.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 8th, 2011
Let’s face it: sometimes, PPC works, and sometimes it doesn’t. There are no guarantees in this kind of work. Still, there is no denying that the game has definitely changed and taken on a much more competitive aspect. More and more companies are competing for the same keywords, which drives the price up. You couple that with the fact that Google’s search algorithms are complex and don’t always play in your favor, and you’re looking at a different field than what some of the books might have told you to expect.
But hey. That’s what we’re here for, right?
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 2nd, 2011
LinkedIn is kind of like Facebook, only instead of it being devoted to things like drinking and hook-ups and stalking and shame, it’s dedicated to business. It’s an employee and business networking site that makes use of the social media paradigm as a new way to build relationships.
Naturally, since it’s a business relationship, it’s about businesses trying to generate profit for themselves and for each other as well. To that end, it’s possible to use this site as another means of generating leads for your business.
Of course, it’s easy to say that you should do it, but what exactly should you do? Far be it for us to leave you in the dark about this. LeadFormix did a research study last year. You can read it but it’s long and has charts and it’s really boring. Fortunately, we were able to read through it and find some pertinent information about how LinkedIn helps you.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on June 1st, 2011
Social media marketing represents a new paradigm. A new way of doing things. We’ve been writing about it for a while but the fact of the matter is that it still has a lot of untapped potential. Companies all over the place are waking up to the fact that building relationships with the customers is a good way to build business.
Presented for your perusal are just a few reasons for why social media is the next step.
1.) It’s cheap.
Let’s be honest. You have a Facebook page. I have a Facebook page. It’s getting harder to find someone who doesn’t have a Facebook page in point of fact. And you probably got it for the same reasons that I did – it let me keep up with my friends that I hadn’t seen in a while, and it was free.
The bottom line is, setting things up on social media sites doesn’t really have anything in the way of overhead. You don’t hear anything in the news about how Youtube is jacking up its setup rates for videos or how a Twitter account costs $80 per month. They’re free services. Just consider the success of Old Spice and its commercial line, and how they’ve managed to reach 18 million customers. For free.
Posted by Ryan.Graczkowski on May 24th, 2011
Weight Watchers represents success stories on a multitude of levels. It’s about several kinds of success such as the success of its clients in terms of weight loss and fitness attained.
But Weight Watchers represents more than that. It’s a 48-year-old company that has figured out that the paradigm of marketing interactions is changing. The success that it has had comes from its understanding of how conversations work and how to have them.
This was a company that was getting by on community support and peer-to-peer interactions before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. This is a socially oriented, content-heavy endeavor, make no mistake. And they’re still getting people to pay to talk to each other about their weight to the tune of $120 million per year.
So, you’ve got this web page. You’ve got some great content. People other than your friends have said that you just might end up going somewhere.
And just when we’d written off Myspace as unable to compete with Facebook. It looks like they found their way after all. A 
