Tips and Tricks for Internet Marketing

When being an online marketer, it is important to stay on top of all the tips, tricks and trends out there to get the most out of your work. Since the internet is constantly evolving, staying up to date on everything is not the easiest, but I have created a staple list that I believe every internet marketer should follow to guarantee a good base start to their work.

Knowing your Market

It is crucial to know who your market is for many of reasons but, the main one is to get the best information in front of the right people. This may sound pretty basic, but if a marketer for any form of work is not getting the right information to the right people, they will never grow. This is the very first step in getting yourself/company off the ground and kick starting it into the direction of where you want it to go.

Figure out your Budget

After finding your niche, the next step is to find a base budget for how much you can spend. This first should be done as a rough estimate in the beginning to see what you can do for a bare minimum, see if you are getting the right outcome from this, then rediscovering your budget after the first run through, and alters to your company goals.

In the beginning processes, there are a lot of online marketing tools to use, most being free or extremely cheap. Looking at Optinmonster, they have laid out a huge list of marketing tools to “Boost Your Business.” The best part about this is that each website and tool listed has a description, if it is free or not, and images to match. Not only is it a plus that the majority are free, but the paid ones are usually cheap and come with free trials. These are great things to look into when it comes to factoring in your budget.

Set Goals

Setting goals, and re-writing them are a great way to keep your self, your brand, and your needs in check. Over time, your goals should change organically, as it is important not to stay in the same bubble. Reevaluating the wants of your consumers, and needs of your brand/business every couple of months is a great way to keep your ideas fresh and up to date with current trends. This could even be as simple as looking up new tools to use

Find your Brand

Finding your brand is one of the more critical things on this list because, of the total impact it makes on a business. Branding is how people perceive what you do, and it can be a big push for driving in new viewers and increase your brand awareness. The main take away when it comes to finding your brand are, branding will lead to recognition, increases value, will generate new consumers, creates trust in the marketplace, and can also double up and support advertising.

Create an Online Persona

When it comes to creating an online persona, it is important to make yourself appear as professional as possible, while keeping your brand in mind. Two major things to take into consideration when creating your persona (that have not been talked about in this blog) are; have a professional picture of yourself to show who you are across all platforms, and to establish yourself as an expert. People want to know who they are listening to, but they also want to know that they are listening to someone who knows what they are talking about. These two are the most crucial pieces in establishing credibility. Without them, your brand, and media platforms would fail, and most likely never even take off.

Blog

The 4 main reasons to have a blog are to; drive traffic to your website, increase your SEO or SERPS, position you brand as a leader in your industry, and to overall develop a better relationship with your customers.

Having a blog is a great way to create relevant content that your consumers can follow. This keeps them engaged and a reason to look forward to something to come back to. A blog can easily be linked to a social media account or website, and as mentioned before is a great way to drive traffic to your platforms, and keeping consumers engaged through different company links. A great way to continue this process would be to post inbound links directly to your blog posts, once again driving traffic to a specific landing page.

Blogs also are a great way to increase SEO or SERPS because, having new, fresh, and exciting content is the best way to get ahead of your competitors. This is in regards to search engine results and being at the top of the list. The main way to be successful when blogging, is by listing out keywords, topics, categories and blogging regularly about your business. Keywords and topics are the best ways to appear in Google searches, and can significantly rise your popularity if done correctly.

Social Media/Content Calendar/Schedule Posts

Stay active online consistently! The best way to stay on top of social media is by creating a content calendar, and utilizing a post scheduling service to have content automatically set for certain days. Two great websites that can do this are Hootsuite and Buffer. A content calendar is a layout of what you will be posting each day, and can easily be made on a spreadsheet. In the image below by HubSpot, we can see a basic set up of a four-day content calendar. What we can tell from this is that on Tuesdays, the topic is SEO tips through an Infographic, the specific content will be through expert advice, they have keywords laid out to use in their infographic, and have a specific persona that will be posting this.

This is a simple breakdown that allows posting consistency, and when companies have multiple social media platforms to handle at once (such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) it is common to have a dedicated posting day and time for each one. This allows reliability, and give consumers a purpose to keep checking back.

Engage

It is crucial to engage with your customers and to create relationships with them. This can be done through social media replies, email lists, and blogs. Getting consumers to engage with you is one thing, but interacting with them is another. By connecting directly with your audience, they are able to get to not only connect with your business, but they get comfortable with you and your product, by feeling like you hear their voice.

Building trust with your audience is huge, and you cannot do so without interacting with them. Your audience wants to feel informed and appreciated, all while teaching them about your content. So, by building a trust worthy, and informative site, your audience will be more apt to talk to you and give you feedback if they know you are willing to talk and listen to them.