Entries Tagged as 'Marketing'

Website Promotion Schedule for 2008

February 8, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

Online marketing and website promotion is a long and grueling task. You need to make sure that you’re staying on top of many elements and consistently moving forward. The easiest way to do this is by making a list or schedule of tasks that you want to achieve and stick to it.

Since you can market and promote your website in so many ways its best to pick out just a few routes and focus your efforts. We’ll take a look at a few of these options and explain effective methods for organizing your time into digestible chunks.
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Targeted, Personalized Email Marketing - How to Market to Your Clients

November 7, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Personalized and targeted email marketing is one of the easiest ways to promote yourself to your existing clients. Repeat business is always easier to obtain than new business. With existing clients you don’t have to waste numerous man hours convincing them that your services are worth it, but how to do market to your existing clients?

Reach out to your existing clients with a targeted email that’s personalized to them and their business marketing needs. By letting your clients know what’s going on with your business, you’re keeping them up to date with the latest trends.
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UPDATED: Why I Read Marketing Pilgrim

September 20, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Every morning when I get to work I have roughly the same routine. I check all my various email accounts then I log into Newsgator to check out all my feeds.

Since my feeds are setup up alphabetically I see: A List Apart, Aaron Wall, Andy Beal and Andy Beard right at the top. I have 36 feeds that I try and keep up on, but if I don’t have a lot of time I always read Marketing Pilgrim, Andy Beard, Copyblogger, Top Rank, SEOmoz Search Engine Roundtable and SEL.

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The Power of Confrontation

August 22, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Many professional bloggers will tell you that creating controversy is a great way to get traffic. You can read about some of them here, here, and here. Obviously you don’t want to seriously offend anyone but a heated argument is sure to stir the pot. This past week I wrote a post on my design blog, Stealing is Never O.K. and man it got some attention.

I usually only post one or two times a month on that blog because I devote most of my attention to this one. On average I only get about 5 visitors a day on drewstauffer.com, but this weekend that all changed.

I posted the article on Friday night and when I came into work on Monday I had 49 comments awaiting my approval and when I checked my analytics I had over 8400 visitors over the weekend. My RSS subscribers jumped from 12 to 63 as well.

Creating controversy is a powerful way to get people’s attention and it does work if you can play the right angle.

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Readers Poll: Clients vs Competitors

August 17, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

I was recently approached by one of my client’s competitors and they insisted that we do their new website. Apparently they saw their competitor’s site (our current client) and how well it’s doing and they want a part of the action too.

In my career I’ve worked with companies that only take jobs in a specific niche so naturally they have dozens, if not hundreds of competing sites. It was an international company so obviously the competition is very spread out, but in major cities you’re definitely going to get some competition on the same block. At the end of the day, business was business.

I’ve also worked with companies that will ONLY take on one client from each specific niche. Here again I can see the value in this business plan. When you take on a client you give them your absolute best. But it seems like in these cases you can keep drinking from the same well. You can consistently go back to that client with new ideas and keep the money coming in or have some sort of monthly contract. SEOmoz is a big believer in this business model:

“We NEVER work with two competing firms in the same space. If you work with SEOmoz, you can be assured that you are our ONLY client vying for your particular market and keywords.”

But then again their first bullet point about their services is:

“Our current contract minimum is $10,000 per month”

So if I can get a client to pay me 10,000 a month (minimum) for my services I’ll gladly only take one client in each specific niche.

But in all honesty, I’m not quite there yet.

What is a smaller firm to do?
View Results

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Easy Inbound Links

August 14, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

Here’s a Quick Tip:
Getting easy inbound links (IBLs) isn’t always the easiest assignment. The most straight forward way is to create good useful content that other users will naturally want to link to. This method is great but it takes time. Another technique for getting easy inbound links is to follow the leader. Just like with keyword research, it’s often suggested that you look at your competitor to see what terms they are targeting. This works the same way for inbound links.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer and analyze your competitor’s links. If you take some time and go through their list you can get a lot of the same easy inbound links for your site. Download SEO for Firefox from Aaron Wall and you can also analyze which links are passing PR. Visit each one of these sites and look for your competitor.

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Sphinn to Share This

July 18, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

The fact that Danny Sullivan launched Sphinn is a good enough reason for me to join. Now only few hours later I have found a way to incorporate Sphinn into my share this plugin.

Share This keeps all of my social media marketing icons in a nice and neat setup. Squareoak has altered the Share This file that allows you to add the Sphinn icon to your collection. To see the Share This plugin in action click on the green “share this” icon below each post.

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Niche Marketing 101

July 16, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

What is Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing is the concept of targeting a specific, small group of people or businesses that are potentially in need of your services. Business plans like these are often very effective because you can achieve a greater ROI because your marketing and advertising budget is more focused on the people who will be likely to purchase your services.

Much like long tail keywords for search engine optimization, niche marketing will be targeting people who are very close to the purchasing stage versus people who are just price checking or looking at various services. Target marketing can be the best way to market your products and services and put them right in front of your customers.

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Five Easy Ways to Monetize Your Blog

June 26, 2007 // Sujan Patel

We all know that running a successful blog may reward you down the road if you choose to monetize and go commercial with it. There have been many a successful blogger in the past 6-7 years and more and more are in the running for “A-List” status every single day. Some of you may be curious as to how these popular bloggers are making a healthy secondary (sometimes primary) income from their blogs. So to make it easy and to get a head start, below are five easy ways you can monetize your blog starting today. Keep in mind that there are several ways you can make money from a blog, but the ways listed below seem to be the most common and easiest to implement on your blog site. Feel free to post any questions in the comments below.

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Making Website Statistics Meaningful

May 27, 2007 // Jaimee Wolbert

Clients often request specific data to help them visualize the value of various online services. Whether it be visitor traffic, conversion stats, website positioning figures, or other characteristics that can help show growth and results, it is important to present the information in a clear, effective way.

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