#digitallyroasted

Because of its openness to bigger markets, small business entrepreneurs have now found it profitable to become visible online. By going online, they are able to gain new networks and deliver their goods and services to more clients. They also get to establish a name in the industry without taking too much time and effort, as compared to traditional business strategies used before.

But there are also a lot of online marketing mistakes committed by various small business owners today. These mistakes are often missed out, but their effects are usually felt later on. But what are these mistakes and how can you avoid them?

Mistake #1: Targeting a global audience

Small business site usually cater to local markets, as these are the audiences that they can easily reach out to. However, there are businesses which try to conquer bigger, global audiences despite their limited capabilities to deliver their goods and services.

Online marketing techniques that attempt to make a small business site go global can be a waste of time and money, as the returns of investment do not come easily. If you are running a small business and would want to make it visible online, gear it towards your target local audience instead, as they are the ones who could benefit most from your goods.

Mistake #2: Using different online marketing techniques all at the same time.

If you are managing a small business, you don’t really need to use all the available online marketing techniques at the same time. You can use only a few, particularly the most profitable ones for your line of business. You can go for either content marketing or simple link building, as you’re not after an overwhelming incoming traffic, but rather increased conversion to sales.

Perhaps it would be better if you stick to one online marketing technique first, depending on your business goals. Once you find more opportunities to expand, then that’s the time to use more tricks. Also, you need to build good relationships with your audience first-from there you can find better frontiers to grow your business.

Mistake #3: You’re everywhere.

Most experts believe that it’s important to be everywhere on the internet. However, this depends on the kind of small business you’re running. If you are catering to an online audience and are more into the line of consultancy and service-oriented niches, then it is just right for you to be everywhere-in blogs, PR sites, niche-related websites, and on social media. This is because you need exposure from the online audience.

Believe it or not, a sitemap can be make-or-break for your website. That might surprise you. To many novices, the sitemap is regarded as a tool used by Web designers, but not something that has any relevance to the end user, or any real value to the site itself.

This way of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s certainly fair to say that a sitemap is helpful for the Web developer, but that’s just one of its many uses. A sitemap is also helpful for those who use the site—that is to say, your human Web users! And a sitemap has implications for search engines, as well.

Here are the top three reasons why no website should lack a good, functional site map.

First, a sitemap is helpful for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the other search engines out there. If you want your website to be indexed by these search engines—if, that is, you want people to be able to search for and ultimately find your content—then it’s best to help the search engine out as best you can. Google loves to catalog sites in terms of topic and content. That is, Google wants to know what your page is about so they can list it accordingly. A sitemap will provide the search engine with the cataloging information it needs.

And that’s not all. What happens when you make a modification to your site, adding a new page of content or getting rid of an old one? Do you expect the search engine to figure it out immediately? Sure, Google will eventually figure it out, and make the necessary adjustments, but having a sitemap will expedite the process considerably. In other words, a sitemap provides the search engines with the most up-to-date information possible!

Second, a sitemap helps end users. Some websites are pretty self-explanatory, as far as navigation goes. Others require a road map just to find out where things are—or, as the case may be, a sitemap! The bottom line is that it never hurts to provide a sitemap to readers. And ease of use among human readers is something the search engine looks favorably on—so you can consider this to be another significant SEO perk, as well as a boon to your readers.

Finally a sitemap helps you. Do you have “orphan” pages or dead links on your website? Without a sitemap, it can be tough to ever find out about it. A good sitemap helps you keep your site clean, polished, and complete.

As an inbound marketer and SEO, there are many different ways to build inbound links. One of the most common ways to build inbound links has been for firms to create an infographic. 

An infographic can push tons of quality backlinks to your site if you have the plan and execution needed to ensure success. 

Here are some hard-hitting tactics that can help you propel your infographic to success.Publish on Infographic Networks

One of the best ways to launch an infographic is to make sure you publish it on some major infographic press release hubs. Most of these websites offer dofollow links and a great amount of publicity to your infographic. Not only that, many webmasters view these hubs and determine which ones to feature on their site. This proved to be very true for one of our infographics, The Rise of Mobile. John Pring did a great job of sharing a ton of these infographic release sites in a great post he did on SEOmoz. You can find those links HEREBreak Down Your Stats for Social Sharing

Another great way to make your infographic a link building machine is to spread it out over the social sphere. Here’s what you do, take each stat that is in your infographic and pair it with a link to your infographic page. List all of your stats on a word document and you should have a nice amount of facts that are no more than 120 characters each.

 You can then schedule 2 to 3 tweets per day on your social media publishing tool like HootSuite. Schedule facts to post each day and when those all run out, rinse and repeat. This will allow you to vary the way your share the infographic and give your followers a taste of what to expect inside the link. Individual facts with a link to your infographic have a higher chance of being retweeted and increases its chances of going viral.

Be sure to share other content as well and you should see some great benefits to having a social media sharing plan.Optimize Your Email Pitch

Your personal outreach through messaging should be your primary link acquisition tactic. A great email template can increase your conversion rates and get you more links. When informing someone about your infographic you want to be as brief as possible. 

While being brief, you also want to be very punctual. Make it personal by putting the person’s name in the subject link and after your initial “Hello.” You then want to greet them with a salutation of how their day is going or how they feel. 

For example, “Hope you are enjoying your day.” It’s important that you start your message with kindness and being personal to ensure they read the rest of it. After you start your message off on the right foot, then make your proposition by just lightly informing them that your organization has released a new infographic that you thought would benefit their readers.

You should inform them of your infographic in one sentence. Then make a space and briefly state who your company or website is and what you do, in one sentence. 

It is important that you stay brief and keep the message spaced so the reader won’t be intimidated and not read the message at all. Once you have stated what your organization does, paste an embed code for your infographic in the message. You want to make sharing for them as easy as possible.

 The great thing about supplying them with the embed code is that you get to control your anchor text and the page they link too. We recommend you vary your anchor text and link back to your infographic page, to ensure you encounter no red flags from Google in the future.

After you have your embed code pasted in there, simply close the message with a kind “Looking Forward to Working with You!” and end the message with your contact info. Test different variations of your email template and monitor which layout converts more.

As most people know, comments are an absolutely critical aspect of any functioning blog. It not only means you have readers, but readers that care enough and are engaged enough with your content to respond back.

Blogs that have an extremely active user base and get hundreds of comments on every page are usually some of the most popular blogs on earth, but that fame doesn’t always come easy.

Such blogs usually require constant moderation for forums and commenting, and have built up a system of social media connection with users over many years.

There are 3 very important steps you need to take to ensure your site is getting the most out of its comment section.

The first and most important is to stop spam; 

the second is to incentivize users to comment; 

and the third is to connect with users beyond your blog.

The following three plugins will help you accomplish those tasks.

1. Akismet

The number one plugin for WordPress several years running, Akismet is still the best way to protect your blog from spam.

Any good blog should put stopping spam as their number one priority right from the get-go. Askimet’s filter works by storing a database of all spam links posted on the WordPress network, and then blocking those same patterns from repeating in the future.

If Akismet detects that a comment is definitely spam, it blocks it completely. If it thinks a comment might be spam, it holds the comment back for you to inspect yourself. If it is spam, you can report it and that type of comment will be blocked in the future.

You can also modify Akismet’s settings to hold ALL comments back for moderation, or block only certain criteria when users are posting (such as the words “Gucci Purse”).

2. CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a fantastic plugin that not only incentivizes users to comment, but also to leave as insightful and good natured comment as possible. It does this by allowing the users blog or recent posts to appear in their comment, even if the link system on the blog is “nofollow”

Users who post the best comments are much more likely to get other users, or even the blog owner, interested in their own site and subsequently click on the links. They don’t get a trackback bonus, but they do get extra traffic back to their blog.

Striking a balance between stopping spam and incentivizing users to comment is key. The above two plugins in tandem do that splendidly.

3. TwitterLink Comments

The third and final key to our comment plugin combo is to install the plugin Twitterlink Comments. This handy little plugin allows users to automatically add a link to their twitter profile in every comment they make.

This makes it much easier for savvy blog owners to connect with readers immediately outside of the blogosphere.

Doing so not only virtually ensures the commenter will be a “repeat customer” (visits your blog more than once), but does the invaluable job of “linking” your otherwise middle of nowhere blog into one of the biggest social networks on earth.

The same thing can be done if you chose to forego standard WordPress comments altogether, and instead install Facebook commenting. Or, simply add other types of Facebook integration such as a large “friend me” button and lots of “like” icons.

So, if your following along, the steps to mastering the comment kingdom on WordPress go something like this:First: Stop comment spam. You don’t want to be a backlink pin-cushion or an advertising venue, especially if your blog is very popular. If the standard Akismet doesn’t cut it, try plugins like “ReCaptcha” or “Simple Trackback Validation”.Second: Incentivize users to comment. You want to stop spam, but you still want genuine comments. They are critical to your blogs success.

The best way to do this is offering some free recognition to bloggers who comment on your site. CommentLuv does this very well, and likewise is one of the best WordPress Plugins.Third: Connect with users beyond the blog. If a user cares about your content enough to comment on your blog, you probably have a lot in common.

 Connecting through Twitter not only expands the reaches of your blog to potentially thousands of more people; increasing your chances of earning a paycheck for your blog, but is also a great way to connect with people who would otherwise remain total strangers. TwitterLink comments is the best plugin we have found to integrate twitter accounts into your comments.

That just about wraps it up for this post, be sure to install these plugins and leave a nice comment in the comment section

Online businesses can be the answer for many individuals needing a career change. While online businesses are still much like regular industry in many respects, there are some differences. Success normally grows in association with the willingness to work and the ability to make sound business decisions, much like any business. Here are some tips for both new online business operators and established digital business operators who are frustrated.

1. Evaluate the Potential Seriously

The Internet allows a global potential for anything that can be sold and success can occur exponentially with the proper direction and coaching. Merely establishing a website and attempting to monetize it will not always yield the result the new entrepreneur expects. Any life coach or mentor will tell you that dreaming is great, but I will also suggest you dream realistically.

2. Investigate the Parameters of Self-Employment

Online businesses are normally entities run by the business operator and are not always affiliated with another company. However, some online careers are private contracting situations for other businesses and excellent incomes can be earned when affiliated with the right business. The serious entrepreneur will need to consider what business structure they prefer, especially with regards to accounting and tax status.

3. Choose Products or Services to Sell Wisely

This is easier said than done, but there are many products or service industries available for online marketing. It is a good idea to speak with a mentor or life coach to inventory your own business strengths. Choose something that is enjoyable or familiar, always structuring the business to allow for maximum personal utility. Online business can be a dream job for those who chart their course accurately according to their personal mission.

4. Assess Inputs and Outputs

Inputs and outputs are accounting terms for the amount of cash flow a business experiences. Start with a comprehensive feasibility study regarding income potential and necessary expenses in operating a successful business. If necessary, contact an effective online business coach with the experience of going through the process for their own business.

5. Set Some Goals & Forecasts

Goals and forecasts are standard operating procedure for any solid business plan. Most businesses experience moderate increased expense at first, depending on the product or service line and the expertise of the business owner. Business upgrades will impact earnings also. Remember that each online business is digital real estate even if the products are virtual; your investment can grow revenues like traditional business.

6. Be Reasonable about Earnings

The get-rich-overnight sales pitches do not work. Some individuals may have enjoyed success, but nothing succeeds like drive and productivity. Online businesses are very similar to regular businesses with respect to time management. Solid earnings are indeed possible, but be reasonable and build for gradual sustainable growth.

7. Market Aggressively

Always remember that promotion is the same thing to online business as location is to brick and mortar establishments. The business is only a click of a mouse away and easy accessibility is the greatest positive of online presence. Get your business name out in the information highway and give the marketing plan some time to produce results.

Most small businesses have a limited budget for advertising, and that includes website design and search engine optimization. If you can’t afford to hire a professional, your only option is to learn to do it yourself. That’s why so many business owners are the CEO, accountant, service provider, cashier, and delivery driver all rolled into one. If you decide to do your own search engine optimization, you’ll need to learn how to write an article for SEO. That’s what this article is all about.Pick the Right Keyword Phrase First

Did I pick a good keyword phrase for this article? Maybe, maybe not. It should be really easy to rank for, but there aren’t many people searching for it—less than 10 per month. While I don’t recommend that you go out of your way to pick keywords with no traffic, one of my best keywords ever had almost no traffic, so I don’t completely discount these keywords. It turns out that many times, you’ll get traffic from similar keywords too, so it all works out.

You do want to give yourself the best possible chance, though, so you need to learn how to pick keyword phrases that are more likely to be easy to rank and bring in some traffic. If you’re selling something, you also want to look for buying keywords. If someone is looking for a sale price or a review of your product, they may be getting ready to place an order, and that’s the best time to catch them.Use Niche Refinery for Keyword Research

Right now, my favorite keyword research tool is Niche Refinery. You can’t sign up directly through their site, though. You have to be a member of The Keyword Academy to get in. You can join The Keyword Academy through my affiliate link to show your appreciation for this article. There is a free one-month trial if you’d like to try it out before you decide, but I strongly recommend it.

I’m not going to walk you through how to use Niche Refinery, but I will tell you why I like it so much. It looks up the PageRank of the top four sites ranking in Google for the keywords you check and color codes them so you can see at a glance whether the keyword will be easy to rank for or not. 0 (easy) is green and 6 and above are red. In the middle are some oranges and chartreuse.

See how those keywords are all red? It’s the green ones you want to go after, preferably those that get at least 100 searches per month. If you check enough keywords, you’ll find them, but here’s a hint: Try filtering your keywords so that you see only those with at least 4 or 5 words and check those first. It takes a long time to analyze all of the keywords if you have a lot of them, and you are much more likely to find good keywords among the longtails. Analyze those first and you’ll save yourself some time.Writing Your SEO Article

Now that you’ve picked a keyword, you’re ready to write. Make sure the keyword is in the title, URL, meta title, content, and meta description. Need help remembering that? If you’re using WordPress, install the free WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin to help you out.

As you can see, the plugin makes it easy to get all of the SEO stuff right when you’re writing your article. Don’t stress about using your keyword a certain number of times; Google is talking about cracking down on over-optimization. Just use it at least once or twice in the content and you’re good.

As far as the content goes, you might be wondering how long it needs to be. The answer is that it needs to be long enough to give the searcher what they’re looking for. You’re looking for information on how to write an SEO article, and I’m giving it to you. Now look at that last sentence. See how I almost used the keyword phrase but not quite? Once you’ve used your keyword once or twice, if the phrase comes up again, try to change it up a little. This makes it more likely that your article will rank for more than just your primary keyword.The Quality of Your SEO Article

It should go without saying that the quality needs to be excellent, but a lot of people like to cut corners. Don’t do that. Write an outstanding article. If you can’t write an outstanding article, hire someone who can.

According to SEO by the Sea, Google has recently purchased patents from Xerox that will help it score document quality. The algorithms are getting more and more sophisticated, and the only way to ensure that you won’t be hit in the next update is to give the search engines what they’re looking for: good, quality content that answers the question the searcher is asking.

If you’re writing your own SEO articles, it might seem confusing at first, but it’s really not that difficult. If you can write for your customers or readers, you can write for SEO. It helps to have a cheat sheet to look over when you are getting started, so here is a list of 10 top SEO writing tips to keep in mind while you’re writing.

Use the keyword in the title.

The title is probably the most important factor in on-page SEO, so be sure to get it right. The title must include the keyword you are targeting, yet still be appealing to real people. Try to make the title enticing so people will click on it.

Include the keyword in your URL.

The address of the page should include the keyword. Take a look at the URL of this post. See how it includes seo-writing-tips? Yep, that’s my keyword.

Use the keyword in the meta description.

The meta description should be interesting enough to make a potential visitor want to read the article, and it must include the keyword phrase. Most search engines use this text as the description on the search engine results pages. If you use the keyword phrase here, it will be bolded, which increases the chance that the searcher will click to visit your page.

Use the keyword in your article.

This is easy. If you are targeting the keyword phrase “dog collars,” it will be pretty hard to write a post without mentioning the keyword.

Don’t go overboard with keyword usage in the article.

If you write naturally, without worrying too much about things like keyword density, you’ll probably do just fine. It’s when you start trying to cram the keyword in wherever you can that you get in trouble. Your page could be penalized if you overdo it.

Write for the searcher.

The best way to write for SEO is to try to write exactly what you think the searcher is looking for. For example, someone who searches for “dating advice for women” obviously wants dating advice for women. Give it to her, and chances are, your keyword usage will be just right without even really trying.

Try to write a post that deserves to be #1.

Are you serious about getting the #1 ranking in Google for your search term? Then write a post that deserves to be there. The better your article is, the more links you will get naturally. This means you’ll have less work to do when it comes time for link building.

Build internal links.

Plan your content so that there are opportunities to link to other pages on your site. For example, I want the SEO writing page to rank #1 in Google for SEO writing, so I have found some additional keywords that will easy to include that phrase in, such as “seo writing tips,” “seo writing services,” and “seo writing tutorial.” I’ll write an article targeting each of these keywords, and all of them will link back to the page I want to rank well.

Get external links too.

Do you think you’re done writing when you have content on your site? Nope, you’re just getting started. You need to build links to your new page from other sites. The best way to do this is to write articles for other sites and link back to your article using the keyword or a variation of it as anchor text.

Try to make your external links look natural.

The year is about to end. It’s the best time now to wrap up everything that has happened this year that is related to online marketing. Whether you’re a copywriter, digital marketer or business owner, these strategies are good for you to know better and understand what you can still utilize for your next year’s tactics. Below we share 10 effective online marketing strategies that have emerged this year.

1. Domain Name Optimization

Readers won’t give you a high level of trust if your website does not have a domain name that is easy to remember. A good domain name possesses the relevant keywords that should deal primary with your primary subjects. For instance, websites which sell organic plant seeds named their domains exactly as such or with other concatenated related words. Domain name optimization has been greatly proven to create buzzes in many online communities.

2. Quality and Related Content

Google has updated its search algorithm for over 500 times this year. There were the likes of Panda and Penguin which have penalized poor content and reward websites with quality content. If anything, great content ruled this year. And many are thinking that this trend will continue to next year. So make sure that every post you publish must consist of more than 300 words to be able to make it to the results page of search engines. Invest your best efforts into providing educational and valuable content to get readers’ attention.

3. Frequency of Posting

Updating of your blog regularly and frequently adds good points to your online marketing score. This will make people more attentive to your latest updates. Also, this will trigger the Google crawlers and spiders to fetch data from your blog as they prioritize ones which are active. To level up the playing field, posting as many times as possible had kept posts at the top of the streams in social media. This helped a lot in creating brand awareness.

4. Sharing to Social Media

Many business owners have seen social media as a good avenue to sharing contents online. These are networks, aside from blogs, where they can share immediate responses and also receive more personal comments from different viewers. Aside from Facebook and Twitter, digital marketers have also used the former underrated social networking sites such as LinkedIn and YouTube this year. These are sites where they had successfully increased their business-to-business marketing reach.

5. Engagement through Email Marketing

As an excellent marketing platform, the web offers a lot of opportunities for marketers to communicate with customers and business users. One of the most emerging tools has been email marketing. Email marketing has been revolutionized to enhance customer relationship and keep them aware with the company’s offerings even when they are not subscribed to any social media or can’t check their accounts while they are in the office.

6. Online Contests

 Several online contests were ran, to attract more interest of viewers. Users of social media were more encouraged to participate in different contests to grow and expand communities as target market. Users were instructed to like Facebook pages, follow Twitter profiles and re-tweet tweets, post pins in Pinterest, upload a video in YouTube and add Google+ pages among others. These were all made to build new relationships and are seen to continue to the next year.

7. Keyword Optimization

Having an attractive website design is not enough in attracting viewers’ attention. If the website is not optimized with keywords which are friendly to search engines, no matter how great the design of your website is, online users will not be directed to it. So many webmasters had used the strategy of optimizing related keywords in each of the web pages. They researched on the most searched words and phrases and incorporated them in their contents to gain higher ranking than competitors.8. Pay Per Click Campaigns (PPC)

 The display of PPC ads has been another trend that emerged to help marketing agents increase promotions of business products effectively. Simply, they had to pay and bid for a certain amount to win the ads placement in search engines and websites. These PPC ads are based on keywords pointing to their websites.

9. Guest Blogging

With a vengeance, Google penalized webmasters which allowed unrelated guests posts to be published in their websites. These include those which are stuffed with own website links and repeated keywords throughout. In the next year, guest blogging is expected to decline. The only way it still can be used as a good strategy is when content is written with valuable information.

10. Website Optimization

A stunning website is one that has a user-friendly interface, fast loading pages and nice navigation to guide users. The ease of use tops as one of the most important ways to keep a visitor reading and exploring a website. Website optimization requires call-to-action catchphrases and buttons to ensure that leads will be convinced to purchase deals and thus make a sales conversion. This strategy will be expected to stay for the year to come.