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Internet Marketing Workshop

Internet Marketing is not totally different from traditional marketing as it is the process of marketing of products or services over the internet. The internet allows us to reach a global audience. Internet marketing is by its nature an interactive medium which provides instant responses this is unique to internet marketing. Using Analytics and feedback loops we can analyze and improve our internet marketing efforts. According to Wikipedia Internet Marketing includes:

  • Display Marketing

  • Email Marketing

  • Interactive Advertising

  • Social Media Optimization

  • Web Analytics

  • Cost per impression (CPM)

  • Cost per action (CPC or PPC)

  • Affiliate Marketing

  • Contextual Advertising

  • Revenue Sharing

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Paid Inclusion

  • Search Analytics

  • Mobile Advertising

That can seem overwhelming, but thanks to Wikipedia you can find out all about each of these internet marketing tactics and the differences, just click through and see what each item is about. Before we get started with all of these amazing tactics let’s take a look at one of my favourite web-based tools: Google Docs. Google Docs is a cloud-based office suite of software that allows you to have a secure mobile office. If you don’t have a Google or Gmail account please sign-up for one now. If you already have one let’s head over to and check out the features of this amazing free set of tools.

There are two reasons I want to show you Google Docs. The first is to show you the ability to create documents on the go no matter what computer you are using. Google Forms is the second reason. Creating feedback loops is a key part of internet marketing. There are two ways you are going to be able to analyze your online visitor behaviours: analytics on your site and by creating feedback loops. One way to create feedback loops is to create short surveys. Please take some time to fill out my survey below ahead of our Friday class on Social Media:

The above survey is a longer Google Form and can help to bring me some valuable information in preparation for Friday’s class. I strongly recommend asking 3-5 short questions for short surveys. If you would like to do a longer survey be very thoughtful about the questions you choose. Asking people for too much information will turn people off. If you would like to ask a lot of questions you should incentivize the completion of the survey by offering a deal or gift card to those who fill it out

We need to start by looking at the roots of our internet marketing strategy. The roots are made up of:

  • Research – Situation, competition, audience

  • Strategy – Attract, engage, convert, multiply

  • Branding – Focused, clear, brand message, compelling

  • Content – Relevant, benefit driven, organized, unique & valuable

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These items should sync with your business strategy with a focus on conversion and retention of visitors in your system. Let’s look at a number of tools that can be used to analyze and research other sites before you start building yours:One should also try to have more than one or two conversions on a website. What’s a conversion? Conversions can range from very soft conversions to very hard conversions. Here are five conversions from soft to hard:

  1. Facebook like or Twitter follow

  2. Blog subscription via email or RSS

  3. e-newsletter sign-up

  4. Request a quote, Inquiries, email, phone

  5. Purchase

Don’t give people too many choices as this can overwhelm and put visitors off. Let’s look at a few sites who are trying to serve so many customer groups that it can be challengingto navigatetheir websites. According to the tree chart above the website has two parts which will stem from the roots: research, strategy, branding and content. 

The two parts of the website are development and design. Development should involve rich media: video, photos and sound where appropriate. Development should be scalable. What if your site is a great success? You need to be ready to grow when your user base is ready to (See: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Your design elements should be usable, straight forward and flexible.  Imagine that a visitor of average intelligence reaches your website, will they know what to do? This is what I call the LCD factor and it’s something that I tried to incorporate into most of my thinking about marketing.

When building your website start from the top three things you would like visitors to do when they get to your site. Those things can be: call us, sign-up, subscribe or learn more about the company. The site should be framed around your goals. In the beginning of websites we want to put as much information as possible online. We were thinking that’s what users wanted from our sites and in the late 90s it may have been, but in reality too many options and too much information can cause visitors to get lost on your site.
Create some funnels or buckets for your website and try to keep the initial options for your visitors to five at the most. Your website will need to be optimized for search engines. There are number of levels to SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in search engines via un-paid search results. SEM or search engine marketing targets paid listings.

You can spend hours or thousands of dollars working on SEO. It is recommended that you build your site with SEO in mind but don’t spend too much time on this initially as you will learn more from your site over time. Today let’s look at keywords, link building, backlinks or inbound links and page rank. Here are some tools for link tracking and SEO:

The most basic level is keywords or how people search for your site. This can be optimized with tools like Google Seach-based keyword tool or Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. Each of these tools will help you to learn new ways that people find your products or services. It’s very important that your content reads naturally and doesn’t seem jam-packed with keywords for search. The ability of a blog to keep fresh content on your site and increase the frequency of keywords is important. For more on SEO and SEM be sure to see this massive list of blogs about SEM and SEO and here are 150 more.

This just brushes the surface of SEO; a deep and complex science when a company can afford it. Next look at Monitoring and Measuring everything you do online. This is a vital part of using the web effectively. The first thing I want to do is a short lesson in tracking everything. Click here to get started.

The most valuable thing you can do is track everything that you do to analyze the usefulness of each tactic. The first and most important part of this tracking is ensuring you have analytics on your site. Let’s go through how straight-forward that can be. The next most important thing is URL Shortening

These are tools you can use to analyze your own efforts.  Let’s talk about measuring and monitoring all of your activities online with these tools:

Email Marketing is a very important part of your internet marketing strategy. People who have subscribed to your email newsletter are the most likely to make a purchase from your organization. The name of the game with email marketing is value. You need to provide value in your e-newsletter. If you don’t provide value and continue to hammer your list with pushy sales messaging you will lose those subscribers over time.

What is value? It depends on your audience, but if you are real estate agents it could be 5 ways to increase the value of your home before you sell or 5 ways to quickly inspect a potential home before you bring in the professionals. If your audience is mothers then your value will be different. Front load your newsletter with the valuable information and supply more conversion opportunities throughout. These could be a survey, a coupon, an invitation to find you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. Mail Chimp is the best free tool for email marketing and Constant Contact is the best paid email marketing tool.

Landing Pages are a very important part of any internet marketing campaign. A landing page is a webpage specifically designed to receive visitors from a campaign or ad. It is often said that “A homepage is where clicks go to die.” Most often this is because we are trying to serve so many different customer groups on our home pages that visitors from ad campaigns don’t know what to do when they do when they get there.

Now that we’ve talked about the free methods let’s look more closely at the kinds of internet marketing we have to pay for. Today we will be discussing the following:

oDisplay Ads
oWeb TV Preroll

Blogging and why it’s so important to your site. Blogging is a word that has had it’s day. The word originated from it’s initial meaning of “web log” which was shortened to “Blog”. A blog is apublishing mediumfor ideas, opinions and thoughts. Some people blog about their personal life or interests while others use blogging to discuss ideas in their work and bring together insights gathered from others. The name of the game isvalue, provide it. Don’t know what it is? Ask your audience. The largest blogging platform isWordPress.com and it is the recommended option. I useBloggerbecause it’s what I am used to and it works for my purposes. Advanced users or those with access to capable technology professionals should useWordPress.org. The major differences between WordPress.com and .orgare listed here by WordPress. 


Your blog should be consistent and consistently create value for your target audience(s).

Social Media Marketing and it’s uses will be covered in detail in Friday’s class.

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