SEO Consultant Ireland

Here is a short checklist for creating your online marketing budget. Print it and try to set a figure next to each of the activity listed below:

Copywriting

• Web site copy
• Blog
• Press Releases
• Whitepaper
• Newsletter

Link Building

• Related Industry Directory
• Geographical Directory (your Local, or your  target market’s Local)
• Link exchange with related sites
• Blog commenting
• Forum participation

Branding

• Social Networking activity
• Company blog comments maintenance

Paid Advertising

• PPC
• Banners
• Link Purchases
• Blog or blog post sponsoring

As a general rule the best results are achieved if the budget is evenly spread between the marketing activity groups above. The tasks should be performed more or less in the sequence as listed above.

Each online marketing plan is specific to the companies activity on the web. It will contain clear goals and targets to be achieved. Make sure your online marketing budget is adequate to achieve your online marketing goals.

There are three basic stands you can chose when it comes to Online Marketing.

I don’t care about the Web!

You can simply chose to ignore it. Here are the reasons for it:
Your target market might not the using the Internet.
Your product or a service might not be applicable to be advertised online.
The scenarios above are less likely as days go by. So sooner or later you will have to face the fact. Internet is here!

I am monitoring it all!

Cybersleuth is by definition a person who searches the Internet for information about a company, both positive and negative, to keep abreast of public opinion by using the Web, Blogs and Social Networks.
This defines the ‘Passive’ activity on the Web. Cybersleuth absorbs information, cybersleuth is not a publisher.
Understanding your digital footprint is the core and the first step before you start managing it. You need to understand where you are, what the starting point is. You need to set your media marketing goals, and define a path how to get there from where you are.

Online Media Marketing Manager

Online Media Marketing Manager replaces the Cybersleuth with active publishing. Online Marketing is not just monitoring the media but actively publishing. Blogs, and Social Networks, Forums, Directories and all related web sites are the publishing tools. Your own web site is the main one tool an Online Marketing Manager has. Search engine optimization has the major role since it will help drive the publish to your site – traffic landing on the marketing messages you control and serve to your visitors.

Managing Search engine Results Pages (SERP) positioning of your site via the search engine optimization (SEO) most important task.

How to plan, start and organise your Social Media Marketing?

To market yourself you can use a number of online tools. Here are just the main ones:

1. Your web site
2. Your blog
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIN
5. Facebook

The list is endless. What will work for you might not be the best for everyone else. You need to understand where your target market ‘hangs out’, and use those sites.

Your Web site

Using one of those tools by itself is good. The true success in social media marketing is when you start combining them. Years ago, having a web site was enough. Then the search engines came and it was important that your web site is search engine optimised. Otherwise no one has seen it! Today, the number of optimised sites is so huge, and the size of the data published online that SEO itself is not enough anymore.

What become the powerful tool is the subscriptions to ezines and newsletters. You captured the web site visitor and he agreed to get an email whenever you decided to send one. It’s all great but we all started getting far too much mail we really wanted. As a publisher of a web site you always wanted to ‘talk’ to your visitors. Here comes ‘The Blog’…

Your Blog

Blogs are a bit magical from a number of aspects:
1. Interaction with the visitors via the blog comments is unique. The web site visitors can have their say on your web site! Unique.
2. RSS feed subscription enables everyone to subscribe to your updates and read them where and when they like, in a very manageable format.
3. From the search engine optimization perspective blogs are almost always performing better than your own web site. In majority of the cases a blog will attract a multiplication of the total number your own web site can attract.

Twitter

So what do you do with all your blog visitors now? You get them subscribed to your feed or at least on Twitter. The best exit path from your blog after the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Subscribe’ (or whatever is a conversion on your site) is ‘Follow me on Twitter’.

LinkedIN

Let your visitors connect to you via LinkedIN. There you capture their name, phone, email and actually their whole professional life is logged there. It is quite easy to export your LinkedIN Contacts, and here is your perfect marketing list.

Facebook

Similar to Twitter as it is another permission based (marketing) message broadcasting channel. Facebook is more ‘feature rich’ compared to Twitter. Get your web and blog visitors to Connect to your on Facebook.

So why getting your web site visitors to the social networking sites to connect to you? Simply to capture their details, and enable them to start and engage in the conversation with you. You then use the social networks to advertise your new products, special offers, services… and back they come to your web site and your blog. The big red ‘Buy now’ button is jet again in front of them. And again, and again…

Any of the online marketing tools alone cannot achieve anything similar by itself. Your offering will determine what will you use, but you have to use either a web site or a blog, and you have to use at least one social network. The choice what to use will not be based on what you like, but based on what your target market is using .

Blogging is a way of building the inbound links. How?

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.