Exposure Hacking with Doublelinx

A web strategist can provide constructive criticism to help you make your website more user-friendly and to help you generate more traffic. However, if you’re trying to save money or want to do some research on your own first, there are ways you can assess your site using the tips of an expert without actually hiring one.

Here’s what to look for:

Ÿ  Fast Loading Time: Your site should of course load quickly. To test your site’s load time and have it analyzed for free, use this great tool from Pingdom.

Ÿ  Visually Appealing: Your site should be visually engaging with an attractive color scheme. Make sure your background and font colors contrast and are easy to read. Use a basic font that is easy to read – no cursive. Make sure you have an excellent logo, and use that as the header for your site.

Ÿ  Uniform Pages: Every page on your site should have the same background, font, heading style, colors and navigation bar across the top of the page underneath your logo. Your pages will stand out from each other in content. There is no need for them to differ in format.

Ÿ  Don’t Forget The Basics: Make sure to have a Biography or About Us page. You may think that who you are is evident from everything else on your website or that people don‘t have the attention span to read a bio, but many folks do want to know details and will feel more comfortable working with you after reading about you.

Ÿ  Engage Your Visitor: Use multimedia when possible. Include a page of photos, and a page of videos if appropriate. However, don’t go overboard. Unless you are a musician, your site should not have background music. Most people find that annoying and distracting.

Ÿ  Keep In Touch: Post a link to your Facebook page and Twitter so that people can follow you beyond your website. Always include a Contact Us page. If you use a contact form, also include your email address in case someone prefers to email you directly. Include an option to join a mailing list, but never have a pop up form requesting email addresses for a mailing list.

Ÿ  Create Your Own Error Page: Instead of relying on the generic not found/404 error page, create your own and make sure it has a link back to your home page. If you’re so inclined, make sure it also has an option to report the error to the webmaster. Errors are always unfortunate, but having a customized error page will make you look more professional.

Ÿ  Link Your Logo To Your Homepage: So many websites now have this feature built in that most users expect every website to have it. If they want to return to your homepage, chances are they will instinctively click your logo, even if you have a “Home” button on your navigation bar.

 As a basic rule, think about what you like to see in a website as a user, and apply those qualities to your own page. If you need further help analyzing or editing your website, talk to a web designer or web strategist.

I pride myself in being a bit of a contrarian.

When the ‘masses’ start taking to an idea in large numbers, I start to get suspicious. More and more people are accepting search engine optimization (SEO) as a way of life in business. The phrase is thrown around with reckless abandon amongst business people and there are literally thousands of new articles about the topic emerging on the market every single day (this article being one of them).

But, what difference is SEO really going to make to your business? What kind of results has SEO produced for other businesses? How well does it work for small to medium-sized business?

Well, I decided to find out.

The Biggest Market Ever

The Internet is the biggest market of consumers there ever was.

There are currently two billion Internet users around the world and that number is projected to jump to 2.7 billion by 2015. That’s more people than any other media source and makes up 40% of the world’s population.

That’s a figure that could make even the most self-restrained marketer salivate. All you need is to get the attention 0.000001% of this market and you’re on a major gravy train, right? Well, not exactly. The perils of working in market that big far outweigh the benefits.

There are approximately 634 million websites on the Internet – 51 million of which were added in 2012 alone. How do you stand out with so much competition?

That’s where SEO comes in…

Don’t operate in a vacuum

If your business doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t exist. In 2013, if your business website isn’t search engine optimized, it doesn’t matter either way.

The first thing most people do before they buy anything, even if it’s offline, is search the Internet. Approximately 89% of consumers look to websites like Google, Bing and Yahoo before making a buying decision. Search engines are the number one source of traffic, beating social media by 300%. For these reasons businesses work very hard to make friends with the likes of Google.

  But, it’s not enough to be ranked on Google, if you want to have any kind of impact you’ll need to be on the first page because, and although as much as 61% of people look for products online, only 25% ever go beyond the first page of results.

Give The People What They Want

There are two main reasons people use the internet: To check their emails and to get information.

Although email marketing and search engine optimization is linked, the former is a huge field of study in its own right. SEO is more concerned with the second reason – giving people the information that they’re looking for.

Most of your customers go on the Internet to search for information on a certain topic, which is related to your product or service. They aren’t looking for your business, they aren’t even necessarily looking for products and services like the one you offer. However, if you can be the one to give them the information they’re looking for you’ve instantly proven yourself knowledgeable and reliable, which can be a doorway to a very profitable long-term relationship.

To answer the original question I posed in this article – yes, it really is that important. A good SEO marketing plan can mean the difference between a massive business success and operating with a vacuum.  

Video marketing can be intimidating for even the most hardened entrepreneur.

But for all the potential headaches it may present, the results can be phenomenal. Like in the case of the Dollar Shave Club.

The Dollar Shave Club is a business that delivers good quality affordable razor blades to its customers via the post– nothing spectacular right?

And yet one hour after they posted a particular video, the website crashed. In just 48 hours, they were recruiting family, friends and anyone they could pay to help them package 12,000 orders.

The video in question showed the company’s founder, Michael Dublin, making a few jokes and telling a few people to buy his razors. The video, launched in March 2012, has now been watched over 10 million times and launched the Dollar Shave Club into massive success virtually overnight.

I’m not telling you this for the sake of it. There are certain lessons hidden in the Dollar Shave Club story that can help anyone thinking about launching into video marketing.

Lesson One – “That’s showbiz, baby!”

The Dollar Shave Club video that went viral was, in essence, a comedy skit.

The people who watched and shared the now infamous video weren’t searching for affordable shaving solutions. They weren’t interested in how good the service was. They didn’t crave the convenience of having their shaving equipment sent in the mail.

They simply wanted to be entertained.

In the 21st century everyone’s an entertainment junkie and that’s something you should always consider when making any form of video marketing you do for your business. Whether it’s a simple message from the executive, a how-to video or an elaborate online commercial – your customers want to be entertained. In fact, they demand it.

Of course, there are many different ways of being entertaining (comedy-skit versus documentary-style) but the point here is that if you want to get more bank for video marketing efforts, always give your customers some ‘pizzazz.’

Lesson Two – It’s a social, social world…

Your customers love to share information about their lives and their experiences that they think their friends will enjoy. Think about any email message you forwarded or any page that you’ve liked on Facebook. What you’re essentially doing there is saying “I think this awesome and I think you’ll enjoy it too.” What’s my Point?

The Dollar Shave Club video spread as fast as it did because of this same principle. When you make videos for your website (thinking of the potential of going viral) you need to keep in mind if the video is giving anything of value to your customer. It could be, like the Dollar Shave Club, entertainment value, or it could be valuable information they didn’t know (like in how-to videos), or it could even be a sense of becoming part of a community (like the Apple versus PC ads).

For most people it’s become virtually second nature to share everything they think is really great. Make your videos great too!

Lesson Three – The Power of video

There are certain things that are just expressed better in the form of video. Pictures, articles, social media simply can’t communicate a brand as succinctly and clearly as video can. When people watched the Dollar Shave Club video they didn’t just see what the product (razors) could do for them, they saw the businesses personality and identity which made it easier to buy into their brand.

When making videos for marketing purposes always remember to consistently represent your brand in how you choose to communicate with your customer and what you choose to say.

Get started today

Dollar Shave Club is an excellent example of the power of video marketing. This one video helped a little company with a weird business model become a household name. Imagine what it could do for your business.

Online marketing services aren’t new, but they are essential. Less than a decade ago, most businesses had a wide variety of choices available to them when it came to marketing and branding their products and services.  From word of mouth to television to print, depending on how far the audience was from the company, marketing was a fairly straightforward affair.  But now, in just a few short years, everything has changed.  The Internet has eliminated the distance factor between consumers and providers meaning that the way you market your product or service now only has one real path—online marketing services.

What are Online Marketing Services?

Online marketing services provide companies with an inbound marketing strategy that allows businesses to make cost-effective choices that drive traffic directly to the business.  Whether you’re already online and selling your product through an eCommerce site or are a traditional brick and mortar business, there is no way your company can survive the next few years without online marketing services.

Typically, online marketing services include things like article marketing, social media, link building, search engine optimization (SEO) and many other techniques.  Each of these services aims to help customers find your business rather than the other way around.

Inbound Marketing versus Outbound Marketing

The big switch in the outlook on marketing really came about with the rise of search engines.  It used to be that a company would spend a set amount of money on marketing and advertising, putting their name brand out there for all to see.  This was rather ineffective from a cost management point of view—for every advertising dollar you put out there, it was considered effective if 1 out of every 10 people saw your ad and responded.  Ten percent effectiveness is just no way to do business.

But with the advent of search engines, online marketing services provide your company a way in which you can market your product directly to the people who are looking for you.   That means for every marketing dollar you spend, 10 out of 10 people who see your campaign are in your target market, leaving you with a 100% cost-effective rate.  In fact, when people who aren’t in your target audience stumble upon your site thanks to proper link building (the process of having inbound and outbound links going to and from your site in order to increase traffic), you’re actually marketing above 100% effectiveness. 

This is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing: inbound marketing through online marketing services is far more effective.  Plus, when your customers are finding you through search engines, articles online, social media promotions and local tools such as mobile devices, you’re increasing traffic paths, directly leading to a higher return on investment (ROI).  Further, by freeing up the time and resources you currently spend looking for customers, you can reinvest and refocus that energy into your business and really blow away the competition.

Rising to the Top of Your Niche with Online Marketing Services

And that’s the overall goal of any good business: to be seen and used more than their competition.  Online marketing services allow you a way to do just that.  By building links on your site, optimizing the content on your web pages and various other techniques, when a potential client types in keywords looking for your product or service, it’s vital that you pop up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) before your competition.  This leads to increased traffic and consumer confidence, both of which equate to more sales for you.

So, if you’re looking for a way to stand out in your field, there really is no better or cost-effective option that enlisting the help of an online marketing services professional.