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Like shopping malls and strip centers, websites rely on traffic to generate sales and leads. It might surprise you to know that more than half of all US residents and more than 75% of all US adults are online today. Source: Us Census Bureau, May 2011.

Business websites need traffic to add value and deliver ROI - Internet advertising can provide targeted traffic

In fact, 35% of US consumers spend more than three hours online every day (Source: The Media Audit, October 2010). I am sure the numbers today skew higher. It’s like the old proverb says, “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The analogy here is, if a website exists on the Internet but there are no mechanisms for people to discover the website, does it exist?

This post is part of a series that will discuss strategies to reach targeted markets with laser precision. Included in this series will be recommended Internet marketing and Internet advertising tactics. While writing the initial piece, the need to chunk the content into digestible posts quickly became clear. With that, the Terrific Time for Traffic series was born.

One of the biggest challenges that business owners face online or off is to be found. Discovery of a new website can be especially challenging. Business owners ask how can we cost-effectively market our website on the Internet? Another related question is how can we quickly ramp up website visitors? Not just any visitors, but targeted visitors otherwise known as qualified prospects? How can we connect with those businesses and consumers researching purchases online for the very products and services we offer?

The question is will these businesses and consumers in market for the products and services sold by your business find your website? If they don’t find your website, won’t they likely find your competitor’s website? This is a huge challenge for new businesses and for business whose name and brand are not currently well-known in the market.

Business owners have many Internet advertising options available to lead online researchers to their products and services on their business website, including:

Internet advertising and Internet marketing options to drive targeted, qualified visitors to your website

• Purchasing advertisements on search engines where ads are shown for search term bid on for placement in the paid search results.
• Purchasing display advertisements on websites; these can be contextually targeted based on context (what type of site they are on) or behavioral factors such as show ads to those who have already visited your website (remarketing)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website, mostly accomplished through obtaining non-paid links from other authoritative websites to your. These links are required to rank well for user searches that are relevant to the products and services offered by your business. More on this topic in an upcoming segment.
• Issuing press releases with links to your website; this can provide huge value if/when the press release get picked up by mainstream news outlets or niche news outlets in the case of a more targeted release.
• Writing and publishing articles and posting those articles to article directories with links to your website; this practice is referred to as Article Marketing. Other places to publish include newspapers, magazines and other publications looking for relevant content.
• Commenting on blogs whose content is contextually relevant to your website, focusing on blogs that allow you to link back to your website in the comments form. Avoid automated commenting software or leaving spam comments.
• Inter-linking multiple websites owned by the same company to create a network of websites, focusing on carefully worded links with preferred placement. This practice can also be viewed as risky as search engines may view as an attempt to manipulate search results, risking possible ranking penalties.
• Purchasing targeted advertising on social media networks such as facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn offer self-serve options including the ability to target your ads to specific user demographics and geographies (more on this in subsequent posts).
• e-mail marketing with messages that contain links back to your website; email marketing is safest when using a double opt-in list to avoid email marketing pitfalls.
• Listing your website in search engines and local directories under your business category or categories.
• Creating social media profiles and then using those profiles/pages to promote your products and services while networking and engaging potential clients online.
• Referencing the website address (e.g. www.eBizROI.com) in all marketing materials and communications, both online and offline.
• Purchasing text links to your website from other websites whose content is relevant to your products and services; Caution: negative impacts on search engine rankings a risk with purchased links.
• Create a blog and post content of interest to your target market which, according to HubSpot, a leading supplier of marketing software, results in obtaining 97% more inbound links that websites without a blog - Source: Hubspot, State Of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, 2010. Blogging also adds value to your clients while building trust.
• Too many more to list without needing to break this first post in the series into a series itsel, but you get the idea.

The key takeaway is that If you are a business owner, marketing manager or CMO with a marketing budget and better yet, an Internet advertising/marketing budget, there has never been more options for businesses, large and small, to target and reach well-defined niche(s) online efficiently and effectively.

In the next post in the Terrific Time for Traffic series, we will discuss data points that demonstrate the breadth of US Internet users and how they rely on search engines over 50% of the time to begin researching products and services that they are in the market for.

If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi(or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

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Web Analytics are essential to marketing on the Internet. Macro economic conditions have led to a surge in new business startups over the last few years with a large percentage of them just beginning to come online. Most new business owners understand the promise of accountability in Internet marketing, and clearly a large percentage of businesses now view web analytics as a key component of their Internet Marketing strategy. Web analytics provide the underlying infrastructure and capability to track Internet Marketing ROI.

Here are 10 reasons why it is essential that every business deploy web analytics, which in lay terms, are simple to use mechanisms used to track and report on key website performance metrics such as number of visitors, traffic sources of visitors, keywords used by searches who were referred to your site by a search engine to name just a few. Web analytics can also be used to define, capture, track and measure business and website goals such as newsletter sign-ups, product and services sales and other user interactions which can be valued at some monetary amount and then used to calculate ROI (Return on Investment).

Why Web Analytics are Essential for all Business Websites

1. You can’t improve what you can’t measure: Without having the ability to capture , track over time and report on the number of visitors to the website, the engagement level of different visitors segmented among various dimensions (by source, content, keywords, etc.), it is difficult to know if your website is adding value to the business and what steps are required to improve the return on a website investment.

 

2. Track key website engagement metrics : Web Analytics provide the ability to track engagement metrics such as bounce rate, return vs. new visits and number of pages/visit, average time spent on site, just to name a few.

 

3. Provide traffic sources overview illustrating visitors segmentation between direct traffic, referral traffic and search engine traffic. The three traffic source segments in Figure 1 below show that 49.87% of the traffic of this website, over some user defied period of time, originated from Search Engines. The Direct Traffic of 14.24% came from visitors who entered the (URL) web address in the address window of the browser and the remainder of the traffic, 35.93% came from Referring Sites that link to this website, with visitors originating from links on those sites.


Figure 1 – Traffic Sources Overview Example with Search Engines, Referring Sites and Direct Traffic Segments



 

4. Provide and understanding of visitor geographic distribution which can drive website language requirements if your business is international and potentially uncover new market potential based traffic originating from Geographies that are currently either under served or not serviced at all. This information can be presented through an interactive map overlay which can be used to drilled down into Country, State/Province, County, City , and other defined marketing areas. You can imagine the power of the marketing intelligence this kind of web analytics information presented in this interactive visual format, can provide.


Figure 2 – Map Overlay Example Showing Visitor Origination Geography



 

5. Understand which content is viewed most/least often : This information can help focus and prioritize scarce development resources supporting many competing needs based on an understanding of which content is most consumed (i.e. most in demand) versus content that is less consumed and may be viewed by visitors, your target market, as less valuable. In the example in Figure 3, we see that this site, like many other sites, has the most page views on / which is typically the default homepage for the domain such as index.html or default.php, etc. We also see that the glossary and blog are the second and third most visited sections of this website. This information could potentially focus development efforts in those content areas to maximize return on development investments.


Figure 3 – Web Analytics Content Overview Example


 

6. Measure online impact of multi-channel marketing: The power and promise of Internet marketing and the measurability and accountability that web analytics can provide can be extended to evaluate the impact of traditional media used in multi-channel marketing campaigns which often drive website visits, registrations and online engagement. Often times, lifts in key website metrics are driven by a website mention in a print, radio, television or billboard ad. Using web analytics to track traffic to the website, dates of offline campaigns can be compared against online metrics. For example, a broadly distributed TV commercial with mention of the website on April 18 could drive a traffic as seen in Multiple Channel Marketing Impacts Example shown in Figure 4.


Figure 4 -Multiple Channel Marketing Impacts Example


 

7. Define and track sales funnels with multiple conversion levels: Online goals often tracked include opt-in email sign ups, contact request form submissions for lead generation and completed sales for ecommerce applications. These events add value to the business and can be tracked within the web analytics tools. Monetary values can be assigned to individual goals based on their value to the business. For example, each valid email address from a user Newsletter Signup is worth $2.00.

 

 

8. Track and measure top referring sites : Including number of visitors from each, pages/visit, average time spent on site, % of visitors that are new visits and bounce rate. Enlarge Web Analytics Top Referring Sites Image (will open in a new window)

 



Figure 5 – Web Analytics Top Referring Sites Example


 

9. Understand Visitor Browser Segmentation : Used to drive technology dependent features and compatibility testing , especially if providing content that is browser platform dependent. Web developers know that each browser has their own proprietary nuances Can also be used to drop support for older browsers if the segment of visitors using a particular outdated technology is small or non-existent. This can be useful when making design and technology decisions. Enlarge Web Analytics Top Browser Segmentation Image (will open in a new window)


Figure 6 – Web Analytics Top Browser Segmentation Example


 

10. Understand which search engines are driving the most visits: This can be a key input into search engine optimization strategy. Enlarge Web Analytics Search Engine Referrals Image (will open in a new window)

Figure 7 – Web Analytics Search Engine Referrals Example

The Best Part – Google Analytics is Free to Use, Easy to Install

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather is the top 10 reasons why web analytics are essential to any online marketing efforts. The best part of all is that there free web analytics packages, such as Google Analytics, that are easy to install and use. Installation is as easy as adding a snipped of code to each web page that you wish to track. The following code is real code for use with Google Analytics:

Enlarge Web Analytics Google Analytics JavaScrip Code Snippet Example (will open in a new window)

Figure 8 – Web Analytics Google Analytics JavaScrip Code Snippet Example

If adding code to html pages is not your thing, many professional Internet marketing service providers will install Google Analytics packages for as little as $200 with no recurring fee. Isn’t it time that you claimed your free web analytics package today?

Recently I created a short video to provide an Internet Marketing Overview targeted for non-technical business persons.

Internet Marketing Video for Dummies – No Offense

Then after uploading the video to a few more sites, it dawned on me that Internet Marketing is going to be heavily driven by video this year. Video usage and sharing has never been more popular and easy than it is today and near real time indexing of video content by the large search engines is now common. Its no wonder given that the large search engines all have their own video acquisitions, Google with YouTube, Yahoo with Flickr, etc.

You know the old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth, a million perhaps? A recent headline on marketingcharts.com indicated that according to the comScore Video Metrix service, US internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. That’s mind blowing!

Thinking about further, with an estimated US population of just about 341M according to Internet World Stats, the 32.4B videos viewed in Jan 2010, means that on average, each man/woman/child in the US watched 95 videos online in January. If your target market is online and wired into social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, their video consumption in January was likely much higher than 95 given the very young (to young to use the computer) and the very old (nursing home old) are likely not watching any videos and thus driving the average video consumption number down.

It is my strong belief that this phenomena has been accelerated/enabled by popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr which have made sharing videos with large numbers of people incredibly easy. therefore mainstream. Since major search engines with large video content assets routinely index video content quickly and return links to videos in blended search results, video not only continues to represent a great branding opportunity, but also a useful tool to obtain natural search results for competitive keywords.

Convinced? The time for integrating video into your Internet marketing efforts have never been better. Remember, a video could be worth a million words and that by April, maybe users will averaging over 100 online video views per month!

The Rationale for Internet Marketing for SMBs goes something like this. More and more people come online and are staying online longer every day. These users are buying more online now than ever before with many relying on the Internet as their primary source of local products and services. Internet Marketing for SMBs is critical, especially for local services businesses competing to capture a growing segment of their local market, namely online shoppers and those turning to the internet first for local business information. For those that don’t invest, they remain invisible to a growing portion of the local market.

Internet marketing enables local SMBs to reach more users as today in the US, 3 out of 4 are online. More than 90% of the 170M+ US Internet users access their rich media content through high-speed Internet connections. These high-speed connections enable rich media experiences include online gaming, video with digital quality picture and sound and applications running as nimbly as if they were running locally. During recent years, the US online media consumption, on average, has nearly doubled from 2.1 hours/day to 3.8 hours/day. With increased online media consumption comes increased online sales. In fact, the US Depart of Commerce estimates that, as of November 2009, eCommerce has reach 3.7% of overall US retail sales as compared to .8% in 2000, representing a 362% growth during that period.

Further accelerating online media expansion and increasing the importance of Internet Marketing for SMBs is the emergence of popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Unless you consume zero media in your life, you no doubt have heard mention of these networks. The explosion of highly specialized user generated content available on these social networks and other popular sites like YouTube and others have increased peoples reliance on the Internet, which for many, now has become their primary source of local business information.

As more businesses and consumers turn to the Internet first for product and services information, it’s Internet Marketing for SMBs becomes even more critical, particularly if the business is a local services business where online visibility to the local market is key. Local services businesses, in particular, need to ensure that their businesses are listed in the local search results of precious in-market users for at least the most popular local search spots.

By way of example, imagine you are a financial advisor building a practice in the Albany, NY area you are probably investing in print (yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, etc.) possibly TV, Radio and maybe even outdoor (billboard) advertising, but late to the Internet Marketing game. Now image a potential local investor is online and performing the following search on Google Local: financial advisor, Albany, NY:

As you can see, the list of your competitors for this potential investor is long and if you are not in the search results, people using Google Local to locate financial advisors will not find your business. It is as if your business is invisible to a segment of the market which could be substantial. This kind of prospect garnered through Internet Marketing is valuable as they are actively searching for the very services you offer.

The takeaway is that Internet marketing represents a great opportunity for local SMBs, particularly local services business. Internet Marketing, and local search in the example above, provides valuable visibility to a growing segment of the local market who turn to the Internet first to find information on the local products and services they are interested in.

Internet marketing solutions for small and medium businesses are affordable with directly measurable results. Getting started can costs less than a single print advertisement!

When times are tough, business owners and leaders look closely at discretionary spending, scrutinizing each line item expense based on its potential to grow the business and demonstrate clear ROI (Return on Investment). As a small business owner myself, that is exactly what I do. While considered “discretionary spending” by some, marketing and advertising investments are necessary to grow any business. Internet marketing and advertising investments, whose impact can easily be tracked, enable businesses to increase marketing ROI while being able to directly correlate investments with incremental results. A business website is the central component of any Internet marketing strategy, regardless of the products and services a business sells.

The most important benefit a business website provides is visibility, including company, product and service visibility. What portion of the target market is a company and its offers visible to? If its not 100%, then there is room to grow. Imagine the opportunity cost of a company not being visible to its prospects that are actively searching on the Internet for exactly what it is that business offers. Recent studies have shown that a majority of buyers rely on Internet search as their primary source of local business information. Businesses that rely solely on the print yellow pages, classifieds and word of mouth are missing a large part of their addressable market. If a business is a services business as opposed to product business, its primary (and in many cases only) market is local. Like the saying goes, “You have to be in it to win it.” In other words, a business has to be visible as an option before it can be considered.

Since more and more businesses and individuals are now using the Internet to research products and services before buying, companies must provide online prospects with ready access to company, product and service information positioned with unique selling points. Buyers expect anytime access to this information since many companies are and have been providing it. For example, many restaurants often have websites that provide hours of operation, locations, driving or walking directions, menu content, email contact and a phone number so that those interested can email or call to make a reservation. Restaurants without business websites miss out on potential customers who are planning online.

Understanding what a company needs in a business website and how that website supports business objectives is critical. At a minimum, companies going online need a domain name relevant to their business. A company domain name becomes a pivotal part of that company’s online corporate identity. An email address with the same domain name is also very important. This provides much more credibility than using a free email account from a Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail domain. Email from these domains is often blocked by filters since much unsolicited email originates from them. All business websites should include a company background with mission and values, up to date offer information, hours of operation, contact information, and directions (if applicable). It is also important to budget for basic website promotion to ensure that the business website is visible to those searching online. Many cost effective options such as search engine optimization and pay per click advertising exist.

If the business objective is to grow revenue profitably while increasing marketing ROI, then a business website is absolutely a necessity and not an accessory. The good news is that there are a number of affordable Internet marketing solutions available. The cost varies depending on how much initial and ongoing support a specific business requires. Having a business website today does not necessarily set a company apart from its competition, but does afford increased visibility and a chance to cost effectively compete for customers online that would otherwise be forfeited.

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There are too many web pages available in the internet. Outshining the competition seems to be the goal of every webmaster. Advertising and marketing their site is what they have to do. Online marketing techniques are taught almost everywhere in the net these days. Some of these advertising methods are listed below.  But take note that Delta Squadron teaches the best internet marketing training.

1. SEO. Optimizing your website is one of the first things you need to do when promoting your business.  With SEO, many have already achieved success.  In this technique, pick a keyword that has good traffic.  Then, optimize your website by including the keywords in your title, h1 tags, meta description and keywords.  Sparingly use the keywords in the articles in your website. This will eventually make your website become visible to the search engines.

2. Link Building. Creating good links that point to your website will help you in your SEO efforts. This advertising method includes placing your link on as many highly ranked sites as possible. You can place these links in social networking websites, article directories, blogs and many more.

3. Marketing through Articles. This method has long term results since your articles stay in the articles directories for years. Write articles that are related to your business then add a link to your website in the bio or resource box. Use keywords in the title and throughout the article, submit it to article directories and you create a back link to your business website.

4. Form Marketing. Posting in forums help you build your credibility and persona. When posting in forums, make sure you make sense and do not look as though you are spamming. People tend to buy from people they trust. Try to answer questions and give advice about things that you are knowledgeable. If you need some help do a little research first.   You can also add a link back to your website using your forum signature.

5. Blogging. Making a blog is easy and anyone can do it. Simply look for a free blog service, sign up and write something about your business. Use keywords so your posts will be found in the search engines. Add fresh content to your blog at least once a week, preferably more, especially in the beginning.

These advertising methods are just some of the many ways to advertise your product or service. These guidelines will help you have a bigger online presence.