The importance of Visitor Tracking

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Visitor tracking allows you to learn about visitor activity and trends on your website. It also provides a mechanism for you to check the results of your marketing campaigns, blogging, SEO and your other marketing and website optimization activities. In short, it provides you with intelligence as to how well your website is serving its purpose and what patterns/paths your visitors are following on your website and how long they “stay” on your website.

Visitor tracking also tells you where your visitors are coming from, what pages they visit, how they navigate through you website and what topics they find of interest. The intention is to find out what interests your visitors so you can fine-tune the content of your website to provide a more targeted source of information and to better serve your visitors and customers.

Furthermore, visitor tracking also captures search engine activity and provides a thorough analysis of which keywords are driving the most of traffic to your website.  Visitor tracking can also tell you how much of your traffic is direct, how much is coming from search engines and how much from referring websites. Advanced visitor tracking also lets you see the traffic originating from organic or natural search engine optimization and allows you compare that with any paid marketing campaigns. This way, you can fine-tune your content and marketing strategies to gain an better understanding of how to increase your online visibility and ultimately, result in more traffic.

Here are 3 popular visitor tracking systems:

StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) provides both free and paid services. You can choose to implement Statcounter in invisible mode meaning that there are no obvious links or counters on your web pages.

Clicky (www.getclicky.com) has picked up a significant amount of traffic over the last few months and provides a very comprehensive statistics.

Finally, you can always opt for Google Analytics, which is also free and also gives you great statistics and ties in beautifully with Google Paid Advertising (PPC).

What is Online Social Networking?

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What is Online Social Networking?

Let’s face it, the Internet has forever changed the way we live and it has become an integral part of our lives.

Instant Messaging, Voice over IP and Portals have become critical to life & business – a whole lot of us would have a hard time surviving without the Internet and a whole more could not imagine life without online social networking.

Today, you commonly hear phrases such as “Hey, check out my Facebook”, or, “Connect with me on LinkedIn” or “I will tweet you”. I can understand Facebook, Linkedin and the others, but I must admit that I am intrigued by “Tweet” and “Twitter”.

Online social networking is based on the use of specialized websites, aptly called social networking websites that allow you to directly or indirectly connect with individuals of your choice for various purposes. The purpose is to build online communities of people that share common interests or activities, or people that are interested in learning about the interests and activities of others.

The sheer beauty of online social networking is that it allows you to keep in touch with your contacts across the entire world – there are no limits to the number of friends you can have and they can be located anywhere as long as they have access to the Internet.

The concept is simple. You are either are invited to join a social network website or you join it on your own and you then search for your contacts and then invite them to become part of your network or you get invited to join your contacts’ networks. You interact with your contacts and continually grow your network by adding more and more contacts. The main purpose is to share all sorts of information within the network and keep each other informed about your activities, events and in general, life. You can share photos and videos, messages, updates, events and scores of other things.

One word of advice – be careful of who you connect with and how much information you share with them – protect your identity at all times and be sensible about your activity.

10 Valuable Internet Marketing Tips

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You can attract more visitors to your website, increase your sales and boost your company brand.

Here are 10 Internet marketing tips to get you rolling:

1. Start with Effective Web Presence – If you don’t have a website, find a company that fully understands web presence requirements, and not just website design and development and work with them to establish your presence on the Internet

2. Web Marketing Strategy – Work with your web presence company to create a solid web marketing strategy that fits in with your overall marketing strategy. Understand your products or services and your competition and then work to make your brand stand out

3. Work on Retting Ranked Naturally (Organically) – On major search engines using proper and ethical Search Engine Optimization. Remember, a natural rank is a strong indicator of credibility. Always follow proper and ethical SEO techniques. Stay well away from nefarious SEO practitioners

4. Paid Advertising – Jump start your Internet marketing using paid advertising (pay-per-click and such) via major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing. Paid advertising gets you in front of your prospects in short order.

5. Leverage Email Marketing  – Build an opt-in email list that you can use for targeted email marketing by sending special offers, newsletters and other material. Guard this list with your life and use it often and use it effectively

6. Use Affiliate Marketing – Become a dominating player in your industry and your niche by leveraging affiliate, reseller and associate marketing programs and work on building partnerships with complementary and supplementary providers to enhance your marketing channels

7. Publish Articles & Content – Relevant articles, case studies and white papers are an effective way to boost your credibility on the Internet – they help you become established as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) over time and that positively impacts your web presence

8. Publish Press Releases – Create and publish targeted and relevant press releases about your business to spread the word about your services or products via various news and PR channels/publishers on the Internet and make sure to provide an RSS feed so syndication websites can pick up your press releases

9. Blog Regularly – Create and maintain a blog to interact with your website visitors. A blog is one of the most effective ways to continually communicate with your visitors and keep them informed and educated about your services, products and important details about your company

10. Be Social – Understand and leverage Social Media by using Content Sharing, Content Publishing and Social Networking. An effective Social Media Marketing Strategy is sure to augment your Internet marketing strategy. We will be posting more details about Social Media Marketing in the near future.

Have you used any of these techniques? If yes, what has been your experience? Are there any internet marketing tips that you would like to share?

What is a Website Landing Page?

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What is a Landing Page?

A website landing page is the entry page your visitors arrive at after they have clicked on a link when searching for your website, or your services or products. Your website can have multiple landing pages depending on the number of services and products. Each landing page can cater to a distinct audience and can be used to build serious engagement.

  • A website landing page is an essential process of the online sales process and is excellent at providing a customized sales pitch for your website visitors.
  • A website landing page is a giant step forward in the selling process, so calls-to-action must be powerful and as easy to follow as possible
  • A website landing page can be created to reinforce the reason your visitors landed on your website

The best way to do this is to determine where your visitors have come from and who they are and by matching the results with top-notch website copy, your chances of engaging your visitors go up, as should your conversion rate.

When you get visitors through your pay-per-click or email campaign, these people have a higher degree of interest, because they were already looking for your product or service. So it is best to make sure that your landing page is relevant to the initial offer they clicked on, and not redirecting them to your home page. This is often overlooked – a lot of advertisers send people to their home page based on an offer but once the visitor lands on that page, the offer is nowhere to be found so they simply click X and go somewhere else!

You should create targeted landing pages anytime you can control where people will be coming from, and your goal is a specific transaction such as sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc. This is particularly true if you are paying for the traffic, with banner ads, sponsored links, or pay-per-click.

Have you relied on website landing pages to drive traffic to your website? If yes, how was your experience?

Benefits of Social Networking

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Benefits of Social Networking

One of the best ways to brand yourself and let people know who you are and what you’re doing is by joining online social networks like MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Orkut or Twitter. Today, social networking is one of the fastest growing, not to mention free means to reach your audience. And we’re not just talking about business people who know their way into online social networking to build and promote their businesses, but there are also artists and politicians (like Barack Obama’s social networking ambitions) that are using these online communities to reach their audiences. With the use of the Web 2.0 platform and the ability to upload a wide range of file formats and convert your materials to mp3s and podcasts you can reach your target audience far more rapidly than ever before.

Here is a quick look at some of the benefits of social networking.

Social Networking Is Good For You

The concept of electronic social networking isn’t really a breakthrough of the 21st century. It has been around since the 1990s and it is the dramatic improvements and innovation to previous networking services that helped along services such MySpace to rapidly become a global phenomenon. The year of 2004 brought the launch of the all-time favorite Facebook, the creation of Harvard Graduate, Mark Zuckerberg. This networking site was instantly gaining popularity thanks to the incorporation of externally developed add-on applications, which in turn enabled the graphing of a user’s own social network, thus linking social networks and social networking.

Because of our busy routines – by the way, when was the last time you sent a hand-written letter? – social network websites have become the foundation on which we build and maintain relationships with friends, family and even clients. The online communities are where we go to meet new people, explore our interests and activities and share all sorts of information, in other words, stay in touch with everything that’s shaking in the world. Basically, what social networking really means is grouping people or organizations with specific profiles and interests together. While many social networking websites are focusing on specific interests, there are others that don’t. Social communities without a specific focus on certain topics of interest are known as “general” social networking websites and they usually have open memberships, meaning that anyone can become a member, no matter what their interests or beliefs are. But once you become part of this online community, you will start creating your own network of friends and you can select the people you want to connect to, based on your hobbies, preferences and common interests.

The new social networking players, including Cisco, the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management, and a multitude of other start-ups like Ning consider that social networks will soon be as ever-present as the rest of the websites. They are starting to create tools that allow people, big companies and even politicians create their social websites especially customized for their own clients, friends, fans and partners. It’s not that the existing social networks aren’t great, but they tend to put their users in a rather limited space, by being somewhat restrictive about what they can and can’t do and they were not designed to be flexible. These social networking sites don’t really let people build and customize their own worlds as they please – which is the nature of what people want to do online anyway.

It’s possible that of all services in the new social spectrum, the social networking sites are more promising. Maybe the reason for this is that these community-driven sites have the ability to introduce their user base to other social web services. Just think about it, Facebook is also a photo-sharing service, MySpace also offers music sharing and LinkedIn is also a search engine for jobs. MySpace stays on top of them, but Orkut is rapidly coming from behind and Facebook is doing great. An interesting thing to watch is whether LinkedIn intends to expand its user base and broaden the offer. Right now, TagWorld doesn’t look very good, while Bebo isn’t all that strong, as it has been recently portrayed. The veteran Friendster network is not out of the game yet and it seems to be doing just fine. Anyways, it seems very clear that the battle for the winning places (MySpace, Orkut) is going to heat up, which can only mean bringing more diverse offers and services for the users.