Real Web Marketing Blog

Is Your Business Right for Pay Per Click Advertising?

by John Eberhard

It’s tempting to think that any business would be right for doing pay per click advertising (PPC) on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center or Facebook. It would be nice if it were so. But this is not the case. Some businesses get great results with PPC, but some do poorly. Here is a summary of a couple of factors that determine which types of businesses will do well.

a. High Ticket Items: Generally, high ticket items do much better with PPC campaigns than low ticket items. By low ticket items I mean anything below let’s say $200. The reason for this is that there is a fair amount of competition from other advertisers on Google AdWords and the other providers these days. Since the amount you pay for each person who clicks on your ad is driven by bids, more competition means higher cost per click.

Let’s say for instance that you have to pay $1.00 for every person who clicks on your ad. And let’s say you are selling an item on your website for $100. Not every person who clicks on your ad and comes to your website is going to buy the product. The percentage of people who come to your site who end up buying the product is called the conversion ratio. A typical conversion ratio for selling products directly on a website these days is anywhere from 0.5% to 3%. A 0.5% conversion ratio means that for every 200 people who come to your site, one will buy.

So if you were paying $1.00 for each person who clicked on your ad, then your cost for getting 200 people to the site via PPC would be $200. So now you get one sale out of those 200 people. Now let’s say your profit margin for that $100 product you’re selling is $50. You just spent $200 (which is in this case your cost per sale) but only made $50. So under this scenario you would lose money on every sale. Not a good business model.

The cost per click that you will end up paying varies quite a bit for various products, but $1.00 is not unusual (sometimes it’s less). So if you are selling CDs, books, or other low ticket items online, then PPC is definitely not the right route for you. There are other avenues such as blogging that will be much more cost effective.

But now let’s take a situation where you are selling a consulting service and the average sale is $3,000. Or let’s say you are a home improvement company and your average project is valued at $5,000. You can use a PPC campaign to generate leads, getting people to fill out a form for more information or to get some free item (like a free report) you are giving away that relates to your product or service.

In that case you can afford to do pay per click, because your sale amount and profit margin are higher. In a lead generation campaign the important factors at the end of the day are: how many leads you’re getting, and what is your cost per lead? Typically, depending on the industry and how many competitors there are in the geographical area in which you’re advertising, you can figure that your cost per lead will be anywhere from $10 up to $150. The most common is between $50 and $100. I know that’s broad, but it really does vary widely and depend on your industry and competition.

Budget: One aspect of all the pay per click programs is that you can set a daily budget, and thus a monthly budget to control how much money you spend. This may seem strange, but I have observed that campaigns with a budget of less than $500 per month are almost uniformly unsuccessful. Campaigns with budgets of over $1,000, when all other factors are done correctly, are nearly uniformly successful. This may have something to do with a low budget not being high enough to get enough momentum going. But whatever the reason, I have observed this on many occasions. For this reason I usually will no longer take on managing a PPC campaign with a monthly budget below $1,000.

If your company and your products or services are a good fit, pay per click advertising can be a great source for leads and sales.

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Why You Need to Do Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is the process of creating links on other web sites that link to yours. These are known as “inbound links.”

Google states that the number of inbound links to your site is the most important criteria in their deciding how high your web site will rank on Google for any given keyword. The higher your ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines for the keywords related to your business, the more traffic you will get coming to your site from the search engines.

Being on the coveted page one on Google for a high traffic keyword is the sure route to lots of traffic for your web site. But unless you do pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, getting onto page one for a high traffic keyword is not an easy or immediate task.

The first thing you need to do before you start doing link building, is to do some keyword research. You need to find keywords that have some decent amount of traffic (i.e. a decent number of people typing in that keyword) but not a ton of competing sites. That is the gold you are mining for. Because a keyword that gets low traffic isn’t worth your time, and one that has a large number of competing sites – well you’re just not going to be able to rank well for it, no matter what you do.

Your Link Building Program

Once you have selected a group of keywords that you want to rank well for, now the task is to do search engine optimization on your site. Once that is done, it is equally if not more important to do link building. Your link building program should consist of the following actions:

a. Blogs: Put up a blog for your company, with lots of links to your main web site in the sidebars. Then post something to it once a week or more, making sure you use the keywords in the post that you are trying to rank well for. Make those keywords link to an appropriate page on your web site.

b. Free Blogs: I have started a technique recently of putting up blogs on free blog sites like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and so on. Then I hook these up to another site where I can post my article once and it automatically goes out to all the free blogs that I set up. I include my keywords in the article, linking to my main site. This post goes out to 6 blogs of mine, and if I put three links to my site in the article, that means I just created 18 new links.

c. Press Releases: Write a press release once a week and put it on your blog (or all your free blogs per #2 above), then submit it to several online PR sites. These create high quality links to your web site.

d. Put up a Facebook fan page, which always ranks highly in search engines as a link to your site. Just a note of caution, which is that everybody and their mother is putting these up today and emailing everyone on their friend list to become a fan. But they still count as an excellent link to your site.

e. Article Marketing: Post your article on article directories like www.goarticles.com. This is not as popular as it was 2-3 years ago, but I still do it for my own site and several of my clients, and find it still works just as well as it did 2-3 years ago. Each article posting contains a “bio box” which has your name, a brief bio, your company name, and 1-3 links to your web site or sites. Using this technique I can get a site with 100 or fewer links up to several thousand in 2-3 months.

Link building experts used to do what was called “reciprocal linking.” This is where you offer to some other web site owner to put up a link to his web site on yours, and he would then put up a link to you. Google changed their policy and has significantly downgraded the value of these types of links a year and a half ago, so they are no longer effective.

Summary

If you have never done any link building actions, your site likely has a couple hundred links or less to it. What you really need in terms of links depends on how many links the sites of your competitors have. But most sites need at least 5,000 or more links to start ranking for their keywords. Link building is a process you have to work on over a period of time, and you have to have patience. I find that it is good to have a list of keywords you are trying to rank for, and then each month check your rankings for all those keywords on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then count up how many #1 keywords, top ten, top hundred, and top 500 you have. I use a software program called Market Samurai to do this. By doing that and tracking it each month you can see what progress you’re making.

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Blogs: Use Them or Lose Them

by John Eberhard

I have written a number of articles about the benefits of blogs:

1. You write something and post to your blog regularly.
2. You have your blog set up so there are numerous links back to your main site in the sidebars. Plus you write your blog posts so that you link back to your main site within each post.
3. Every time you post something new on the blog, you go to a site called www.pingomatic.com, and use it to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines like Technorati.com. This causes them to include your new blog post in their search engines right away.
4. The combination of posting regularly, i.e. once a week, plus pinging the blog search engines, drives significant traffic to your blog, which in turn drives traffic to your web site. I have two blogs for my marketing business and month to month the blogs routinely are the #1 or #2 driver of traffic to my web site, running neck and neck with Google.

So this is all nice and wonderful. But a major breakdown occurs here if you do not post something to the blog regularly. Ideally this is once a week or more. If you post something to the blog once a week or more, you will start to really drive traffic and you will develop fans who follow what you write.

Unfortunately I have set up blogs for some clients who have then posted one or two things on it and then forgotten the blog for months (you know who you are). This defeats the purpose of a blog and is really a waste of a valuable resource for driving traffic to a web site.

So here are some tips on generating content for that blog on a regular basis:

1. I find that in my work with clients, something that happens with a client over the course of each week will often be a good topic for a blog and newsletter article.
2. A blog post can be anything from a long article (300-700 words), to a short comment on something (100-200 words).
3. If you find a video on YouTube or somewhere else that would be of interest to readers of your blog, then post the video on your blog. On YouTube, to the right of the video you can find the HTML code. When you go to post to your blog, select HTML editing, then paste that code there, and the video player will appear right in your blog. If you want to post a comment about the video, type your comment in using the text editor, then switch over to the HTML editor and paste in the code from YouTube.
4. You can post links to interesting articles elsewhere on the web, that relate to your blog topic. However, I will say that I see some other people doing this, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s all they ever do. My reaction is “Don’t you ever write any content yourself?” So this is good to do, but don’t make that the only thing you do.
5. You can do a Google search related to your topic and see what other items come up, or go to other web sites related to your topic, and get ideas for articles or shorter posts. You can also go to article directories like www.goarticles.com and search for articles related to your topic. But don’t steal an article or plagiarize it. Just use these for ideas.

Use these tips to write some new content for your blog regularly, at least once or twice a month, preferable once a week or more. The more often you post things to your (pinging each time), the more traffic you will drive to your blog and site.

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Affordable Surveys

by John Eberhard

I recently wrote an article about how important it is for businesses to conduct market research surveys of their target public now, because the so-called “recession,” whether you believe in it or not, has changed people’s attitudes about buying things.

So if you are promoting to your public the same way you have been for the last 3-5 years, you are most likely going to be missing the mark, because the public’s attitudes have changed. So your advertising message might be geared to the way their attitudes were a year or two or three ago.

Most business owners know that conducting surveys can tend to be expensive. But over the last few years I have been conducting surveys in a much more affordable fashion. Here’s how:

1. Find an email list of the right target public. By the right target public, I mean the type of person who tends to buy your products or services. If you’re a veterinarian, the target public is pet owners who live near your practice. If you are a business consultant, your target public might be small business owners. And so on. The trick is to find an email list of that public that you can buy or rent. If you are lucky you might already have a usable list. Figure that the list needs to be at least 10 to 20 times as large as the number of surveys you want to get done.

1. Write a survey that will find out things like what benefits your public think they will get from your product or service, or what problems they experience that your product or service solves. I recommend getting help in the writing of the survey from someone with a lot of experience in this area. Make sure you include questions related to their attitudes about buying your product or service in this economic climate.

1. Work out some item that you can offer to the people you will be emailing, as an incentive to get them to fill out the survey. Maybe 5-10 years ago you could just ask people to fill out the survey and you’d get lots of people doing it. But from my experience, today, you need to give the person some kind of incentive to do it. If you have some kind of desirable information product such as a report or white paper, that could work. Over the past few years I have offered a nice pen (with the logo and phone number of the company doing the survey), and I have also offered a $5 Starbucks card. Both have worked very well and I got plenty of surveys done. You can state that only the first 30 or 50 people who fill out the survey get the incentive. When you look at the fact that most phone surveys today cost $10-15 each or more, a $5 Starbucks card is a bargain.

1. Put the survey up on a web page form. Make sure you include fields for the person’s physical street address if you are offering some physical item such as a pen or Starbucks card as an incentive.

1. Create your email that you’ll be sending out to the email list. Make this an HTML email (that looks like a web page) so you can include a picture of whatever spiff you’re offering as an incentive.

1. Send out the email. Collect and tabulate your surveys. Analyze the results and find what the public’s attitudes are now. Find a way to modify your message to address their current attitudes and concerns.

Good hunting.

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How Much Traffic is Coming to Your Web Site?

By John Eberhard

One of the most important aspects of managing a web site is finding out and then monitoring regularly, how much traffic is coming to the site.

I have written some articles on Google Analytics, which is what I recommend for web statistics, because it is quite good, it is free, and most other web statistics software and services are pretty expensive. And the free ones you get with most hosting plans usually are pretty awful.

So you set up a Google Analytics account, then it will give you some HTML code which you put on every page of your site and which is invisible to users. Then it will start tracking your visitors, which pages they are viewing, where they come from, and which keywords they typed in if they found you on a search engine.

I recommend tracking how many visitors your site is getting weekly and graph this. You may wonder if the number of visitors you are getting is a good number or a bad number. This depends entirely on what type of business you have, whether it is local or national, and other factors.

Now let’s say that you are using your web site to do lead generation, i.e. getting people to fill out a form giving you their contact information so your sales guy can contact them and sell them. Now that you know how many visitors you are getting per week, you can compare that to how many leads the site is generating. This gives you a conversion percentage for your web site overall. Take the number of leads and divide this by the number of visitors, and move the decimal over two places to the right. That gives you your conversion percentage.

A good conversion percentage for a web site is anywhere between 0.5% and 2.0%. A 0.5% conversion rate means that for every 200 visitors, one person would fill out your form and become a lead. 2.0% means that for 200 visitors, 4 people would fill out a form. If it’s higher than those percentages, that’s even better. Internet marketing guru Ed Dale, who recently ran his 30 Day Challenge training program in August, says that none of his businesses have ever gotten over 0.5% as a conversion percentage, and he has made millions online. I would say that for sites where you are doing lead generation, your conversion percentage would be higher and if you are directly selling products online, you percentage would be lower.

So armed with this information, you then know what to do to improve your online leads or sales.

For instance, let’s say your site is getting about 200 visitors a week, and generating one lead per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.5% which is an acceptable percentage. But one lead per week isn’t going to make anyone rich, so you know that your correct target is to get more traffic coming to your site, by doing things like pay per click advertising, writing blog articles, or putting out press releases.

On the other hand, let’s say your site is regularly getting 5,000 visitors per week, and generating 5 leads per week. That’s a conversion percentage of only 0.1% which is pretty poor. So in that case you would know that you have to make adjustments to the web site itself in order to entice more people to fill out a form or buy something. This would usually be along the lines of making your offers more prominent or coming up with brand new offers that are more appealing to your target public.

Having these statistics and monitoring them regularly also makes it possible to make changes to your operation, either changes to the web site to increase the conversion percentage, or changes to your promotional efforts to drive more people to the site, and then see how effective they were.

So if you make some changes to the site to increase the conversion percentage, but then your conversion percentage goes down, you know right away that you have to put the site back to the way it was before (always keep the older version of a web site when you make changes).

It’s usually good to make only one change at a time, so that if statistics go up as a result, you know what change made that happen.

By monitoring these statistics you can truly manage your web site and make it more productive for your business.

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What Types of Keywords Do You Need, and What Do You Do With Them?

By John Eberhard

Some of my past articles have dealt with how to find the right keywords for a web site. This article will cover what types of keywords you need for different uses and what to do with them.

Pay Per Click Keywords

The types of keywords that one needs tend to be different for pay per click advertising (PPC) or for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

With pay per click, one usually wants to use the most general keywords he can find that are applicable and relevant to what he is advertising. For example, if you are advertising a physical therapy practice in Glendale, CA, you would use keywords like “physical therapy,” “physical therapist,” or “physical therapy practice.”

With pay per click, you would not need to use keywords, for instance, that included the name of the town, i.e. “physical therapist Glendale,” and similar variations.

I recently reviewed a pay per click account that had been set up by someone else and it was set up with all these types of keywords that included the name of the city they were in, but didn’t even include the more general versions of those keywords. I’ve even seen other companies similar to mine offering to set up PPC accounts with all these keywords using the names of the city and surrounding cities, and charging you X amount for each keyword, as if that’s some kind of great thing. It’s not.

Here’s why. Keywords that include more words, such as “physical therapist Glendale” or any other similar keyword, tend to have lower numbers of impressions, meaning that fewer people are typing them in. This type of keyword is often referred to as a “long tail keyword,” and is desirable for SEO uses, as I’ll explain in a minute.

But to set up a pay per click account using ONLY long tail keywords (especially keywords using the names of cities or other geographical areas) is a mistake. Because Google AdWords (as well as most other pay per click systems) allows you to select the geographical location of where your ads will appear. So if you’re doing business in Glendale, CA, you can set up your campaign so it only appears to people in Glendale.

So if your physical therapist in Glendale sets up his account only using keywords with the word “Glendale” in them, he will be missing the much larger group of people who will just type in “physical therapist.” So he’ll be missing out on those potential visitors. In the example of this account that I reviewed, he wasn’t even getting enough impressions to use up his relatively small budget.

That’s not to say that you can’t use keywords with the name of the city in pay per click, but you don’t need to. Using what Google calls “broad match,” you’ll get those people anyway just using the phrase “physical therapist” because it will include every search that includes those words, which would include “physical therapist Glendale.”

Keywords in SEO

The type of keywords you use in SEO, however, is totally different. Here, you want to use more long tail keywords. The reason is that short, general keywords such as “physical therapist” or “golf” or “software” are extremely competitive, because when it comes to ranking well on search engines for a given keyword, it is not limited to just your local area. It is international. So every company in the world that sells those products or services is competing for those keywords. And some have been working at ranking for those keywords for a number of years. So your likelihood of being able to rank well for one of those general keywords is close to non-existent.

So the trick with SEO is to find keywords that are longer tail, have more words in them, and which have some decent amount of traffic but not as much competition.

So in our previous example, for SEO purposes the physical therapist would want to use keyword phrases such as “physical therapist Glendale,” because he is much more likely to be able to rank well for that keyword. You don’t have to use all keywords that list names of cities in them, but in general the long tail keyword is best. You want decent number of searches per day, but not tons of competition.

Summary

It’s important to understand the processes for pay per click and search engine optimization, and understand which types of keywords work best for each.

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Now is the Time for All Good Businessmen to Survey Their Target Public

By John Eberhard 

Do you feel like your advertising and promotion is not working as well as it used to?

You may have heard that we're in a recession.

I say that facetiously of course, as how can anyone living on planet Earth have failed to hear about it over the last year.

Do you feel like your advertising and promotion has not been working as well since the beginning of this so-called recession?

One major component of any recession is the public's perceptions and attitudes. In other words, the public at large has a perception that there is a recession. They agree that there is one. And their attitudes about buying things can change rather dramatically.

So we could discuss or argue about whether the recession is real or manufactured, but one thing we could not argue about is that the public's perceptions and attitudes have changed.

So let's say you have a business and you are selling a product or service to some segment of the overall population, to a "target public" as we call it in marketing. And you are using the same marketing campaign and the same ads or promo pieces that you were using before this big shift in perception and attitudes took place.

Well, a marketing campaign should use what are called "buttons" in its headlines and copy (sales text). A survey button is something you find out from a survey, that when you say it or put it on a promo piece, it gets a reaction. Usually it is a "positive" button - something a high percentage of people told you regarding what benefit they think they would get from your product or service. Or it's a "negative" button - some problem or difficulty they expressed that your product or service would solve.

Whether you got them from surveys, or from talking to a lot of customers, or even from trial and error in your promotion, you are using buttons in any successful promo that you're doing.

But what if you're using buttons that you found five years ago, but the public's attitudes and perceptions have now changed? Chances are that promo using that older button or buttons will not be working as well. Is that happening to you?

It is usual after one does surveys and finds out what his target public's buttons are, to use that survey information for at least 2-3 years, or for that matter as long as it is working well.

But if you find that your promotion is not working as well these days, it may be time for you to do some new surveys on your target public. If you find out what their current attitudes are, it will be much easier to motivate them to buy something from you.

Some business people consider surveys to be too expensive. But there are some less expensive ways to get more affordable surveys done.

Surveying your target public newly at this time gives you a way to disagree with all the bad news and do something about it. It puts you more in control. And considering what's been happening in the world over the last year, better control sounds good to me. How about you?

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An Email Newsletter Drip Strategy

By John Eberhard 

When someone responds to you for the first time, responding to one of your free offers or asking for more information, he may not be ready to buy at that time. And despite whatever you say to him in the sales process, he just may not be ready to buy.

So of what value is that guy to you? He is actually very valuable to you! I try to make this point with salespeople sometimes and they often don't get it. They think that guy is worthless and they often throw him in the trash.

Well he responded to you, didn't he? In all probability he is qualified as someone who could buy your products or services. But he's not ready right now. He may be ready at some time in the future. But if you throw that sheet of paper in the trash, he will almost certainly not buy anything from you.

The answer is to stay in touch with this person, not necessarily by calling him, but by sending him a regular communication. And one of the best ways to do this is by sending him an email newsletter, either monthly, twice a month, or weekly. Many marketers refer to this type of strategy as "drip" marketing, because your regular communications to him are like a slow flow of water dripping on his head.

So the key, when that person contacts you, is to make sure you get his email address, because then you can send him your email newsletter and it costs you nothing, other than your time putting the newsletter together.

The benefit of the newsletter drip strategy is that you are regularly reminding the prospect that you are there, what you do, and keeping your company and your products or services in his mind. Most industries these days have plenty of competition, some more than others, so if you employ a newsletter drip strategy, you may have an edge on the competition. Because you will be keeping your company in the prospect's mind whereas your competitor may not be doing so.

Now compare this to the earlier scenario of throwing that lead in the trash (which I have painfully watched some sales people do). It is most likely that some other competitor will catch that person's attention at a later point, when he is finally ready to buy.

When you consider the amount of money that you spend to get people to respond to your offers, it makes the most sense to fully utilize that lead.

About 8-9 months ago, someone contacted me to ask more about my services. At the same time they referred me to someone they knew. I tried multiple times to contact the person they referred me to, but they never answered my phone calls or emails. So I put them on my email newsletter list. I send out an email newsletter and put a new article on my blog once a week.

The other day this person who was referred to me called me and said he was finally ready to do something with his Internet marketing. This is a fairly regular occurrence, with people contacting me and saying "I've been getting your newsletter for a year," or something like that.

Not everyone who calls me like that buys something. But the point is that this system is a much better utilization of the leads you get, than throwing them in the trash if they don't buy right away. One person I worked for likened it to fruit, where you pick the low hanging fruit that is ready to be picked, but the rest has to be ripened more (by sending them further communication).

It takes patience, but I think you'll find that this system will help you with better utilization of your leads.

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The Fall Online Promotion Roadmap

by John Eberhard

Well, we’ve finally passed Labor Day which means the summer season is officially over. That means I hope you had a nice summer, but that now it’s time to end off on the summer mentality and get down to business with your business.

Now I know everyone has been vacationing and spending all that extra money everyone seems to have these days. So all that spending has probably caused people to kind of forget about promoting their businesses. Yeah, that must be it.

Well, whatever the reason, many businesses have decreased their advertising and promotional spending, with some dropping their promotion altogether. And from my observation this has gotten more noticeable over the summer.

If the above describes you, meaning you have cut back on promotion or dropped out promotion entirely for your business over the summer, or earlier due to concerns over the economy, then I suggest you might want to reconsider that decision now. After all, in September, vacations are over, kids are going back to school, football season is starting, and in general everyone is getting back to business.

And it is basically a law that you have to somehow let your prospects and customers know you are still there. In other words, promotion in volume is still a necessary part of doing business, regardless of whatever is happening with the economy. And I’ll mention that all of my clients who are still promoting aggressively are doing well. So it’s time to ramp up your promotion, including your online promotions.

The Roadmap

Here are some suggestions for what you should do to gear up for the fall and increase your revenue and market-share:

1. Blogging: I’ve been recommending blogging for over a year, as a great way to promote your business online. Once you set up the blog it is basically free. You post something, then send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines, and that drives volume traffic to your site. It’s best to post something at least once a week. Lately I’ve been setting up one main blog, then setting up other blogs on free blogging sites such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com, and linking them all together so I can post from one place and it goes out to all of them. Then send out a ping for each one. I call this “blogging on steroids,” without the dangers of a Congressional hearing.

1. Email Marketing: You need to set up an email newsletter if you aren’t doing one already, and set up your website so that every time someone fills out a form to contact you or request information, their name automatically goes on that list. Then send out an email newsletter regularly, i.e. at least once a month or more often. If this is set up and you get every person who contacts you on that list, this becomes a powerful promotional vehicle, because it keeps your name in front of all those people.

1. Facebook and Twitter: Start up accounts on these sites, then log in and start developing lots of “friends” on Facebook and “followers” on Twitter, so that lots of people will see your message. Then observe the types of things that other people post about. You can’t be posting “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff” all day long. You will annoy people and they will “unfriend” you faster than you can say “how come they didn’t buy my stuff.” Instead, just post things about what you are doing with your business. Such as “We are installing new plumbing for a client today,” or “Our clinic saw 100 chiropractic patients today,” or “Our software company sold 200 licenses today” and so on. In other words, you post things that are descriptive of what the business does so it reminds people of your business. I have found this approach to work extremely well and to generate leads. Some experts such as Ed Dale recommend posting links to interesting articles on the web, related to the topic of your business, and I see some other online marketing people following this lead.

1. Other Social Media: You should also start accounts on MySpace and LinkedIn and do the same strategy there: getting friends and posting regular stuff about what you’re doing. There are also other social media sites that I would call the “second tier” social media sites, where you can also develop lists of friends and post updates, including Plaxo, Plurk, Mashable, FriendFeed, Xanga, Vox and more.

1. Leverage Your Time: So who wants to log in to 10 different sites each time you want to post something. Not me. You? I didn’t think so. So start an account on Ping.fm, then hook up your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Plurk, Xanga and other accounts to it. Then post something and it goes out to your friends on each site. Ooh, the power! Save time and multiply the results of your efforts. Of course you still have to log in to each of your social media accounts to interact with people, add new friends and so on. But for outgoing communication, you can’t beat Ping.fm. I also use another site called Posterous.com now to post my blog posts to seven different blogs at once.

So now that the fall has begun, it’s time to get your online marketing in gear. 25, 54, 72, Hike! Good luck!

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Leveraging Your Time in Website Marketing

by John Eberhard

There are many things you can do to market yourself or your business online. The thing is that many of these things can be quite time consuming. So it’s smart to find ways to better leverage your time – in other words, to get more done in a given amount of time. I want to discuss a couple ways to do this in this article.

Microblogging from One Source

Microblogging is a term that has sprung up recently to describe social media web sites like Twitter and Facebook where people are posting short little updates on what they are doing. You can also do this on other sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, and many others.

First of all, you should get on a few of these sites and see what types of things people post in their “status updates.” As I have stated before, you should not be pitching your stuff all day long because people will just “unfriend” you, or on some sites like Facebook they can hide your posts so they never appear even though you are still a Facebook “friend.” So first observe how other handle this (or mishandle it) before you start posting tons of stuff. My personal experience has been that it’s OK to post stuff about your business as long as it is not always a pitch, and as long as you also sprinkle in posts on other aspects of your life.

So a problem that comes up when you start microblogging, i.e. posting status updates about your life and business, is: how do you do this without spending all day on it? How do you get around logging into eight different sites and posting things on each one?

The answer is to use a site that allows you to connect up to all your social media accounts, and send out one message from one place that goes out to all of them. I use a site called Ping.fm, and I currently have it set up so that when I type something in the status update box and hit submit, it goes out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Plurk, Mashable, FriendFeed, Xanga, Delicious, and Vox.

There are other sites that do this as well, such as FriendFeed and Posterous.com. However, I just learned this week that FriendFeed was bought by Facebook and there are rumors that that site may be going away soon. And I will be recommending another use for Posterous.com in the next section. so I recommend Ping.fm. Once you have your accounts set up on these other sites, it’s easy to set up a Ping.fm account and hook up your other accounts to it.

Of course, bear in mind that you still have to log in to each of these sites at least occasionally, add friends, see what other people are doing, and interact with them.

Blogging on Steroids

Now I’m going to talk about regular blogging, i.e. with longer articles or press releases. There are a number of blogging sites. The most common ways to make a blog are with Wordpress or Typepad. But there are also some free blog sites where you can sign up and put up a free blog, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com (which is affiliated with Google), Tumblr.com and more.

So you set up your multiple blog accounts on these various blog sites. Then you set up an account on a site called Posterous.com, and hook it up to all your blog sites. Now you can post an article or release within your Posterous.com account, and it will be posted to all those blogs at the same time. In fact, you can even send an email to an address they give you (after you set up all this stuff) and it will go out to all your blog sites and be posted there. I prefer to do it through the online interface because it allows me to put in links and pictures.

You can also use Posterous.com to post to Twitter, Facebook and other “micro” blogging sites. But I am separating these out and using Posterous.com for the regular blogs, and using Ping.fm for the micro blogging because you can’t really send a whole long article via Ping.fm.

By the way, I found out about Posterous.com through the Thirty Day Challenge, a terrific online free training program being run by Australian Ed Dale.

I believe these two tools are a great way to maximize your time spent on website marketing.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous