5 Ways an Internet Marketing Consultant can Help

By Debra Zimmer, The Expert Marketing Coach and CWCC Member

In the advent of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, companies have recognized the impact of these social media networks in their sales and profits. These websites have been used as an Internet marketing tool, to increase the traffic and page views of your website, and draw in more customers.

If you want to reap the benefits of internet marketing just like other companies before you, then you definitely need to hire an experienced internet marketing consultant.

What does a marketing consultant do?

He/she works by conversing with the people behind the company to determine their goals and objectives. With these in mind, she will develop an internet marketing plan which consists of different tactics to increase the website’s traffic and make it more popular. She will also provide the needed resources and tools in order for the plan to succeed.

How can a consultant improve your business?

Your consultant can increase your views, and consequently, your sales in five ways. One is search engine optimization (SEO), which goes hand in hand with content creation. These two techniques utilize keywords in order to put your website at the top of search engines.

Next is link building, wherein a consultant works with relevant websites so that they can direct links back to the company’s website. The fourth method is social marketing, wherein the consultant disseminates the company’s information and what products they sell. Social marketing can be done by writing a blog, participating in social networks, and viral marketing.

The fifth method is advertising and promotions. The internet marketing consultant can help you design and identify opportunities to drive leads via Pay-Per-Click campaigns and other advertising. There are also numerous opportunities to conduct promotions online that generate buzz and get the viral marketing in motion. The consultant can help you identify effective campaigns.

A consultant also helps your company by educating and training your staff so that they can perform internet marketing themselves. The lessons deal with internet marketing techniques and how the staff members can improve the rankings and sales of the website. If you can’t afford a consultant, you can attend these lectures or conferences so you can learn how to market your website by yourself.

If you want to see great sales and profits in your next business meeting, then you need to seek the help of a skilled consultant today.

Contact us to give your marketing a boost today!

After 15 years of growing entrepreneurial businesses at companies such as Microsoft, where she attracted 700,000 customers into an online community in 18 months and then launched a second online community, growing it to 250,000 members in 10 months, Debra Zimmer then struck out on her own growing an online retail store to 6-figures of income and put it on AUTOPILOT for 3 years.

With an engineering degree and an MBA from Columbia Business School, Debra is the undisputed expert in the application of business strategy to social media and internet technologies, helping experts, entrepreneurs and executives to focus their brilliance, magnify their impact, and make the world a better place. She now teaches her proprietary marketing systems to private clients and groups worldwide.

Debra is a Certified Executive Mastermind Coach, a Certified Inbound Marketer and the coauthor of “Lessons from the Recession” where she is one of 60 global business executives who provide valuable advice on starting or running a business from the trenches.

Customers Are Looking for YOU on Social Media

In this do it-yourself age, everyone from a small business owner to a mom working from home is expected to be a good marketer, and with the advent of social media marketing – it’s  well within your grasp. Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing shows you how with a simple step-by-step plan.

Chapter 6 tackles the five main social media portals you should be utilizing and gives examples of how to use them.

It might be daunting to hear that the hallmark of a great marketer is to make sure you’re everywhere. What constitutes “everywhere” in this social age? Well, obviously the social landscape is continually changing, and new social sites such as Pinterest and Google+ are getting massive amounts of press. (Click here  to learn how to use Google+ for marketing your business.)

But if you are just starting out with social, the Top Five Portals are still Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Blogging.

1. 1.      Blogs are considered social media, because their content is always changing and people leave comments and interact. This modality appeals to people who love reading and a steady stream of in depth information. If you are a solopreneur or an expert in any area, people want to learn from you and interact with you, so a blog is a fantastic modality.

• YouTube—video as opposed to text; something that people really like. You’d be surprised at how many ways there are to use video to market your business, and how inexpensive it can be.
• Facebook—still the biggest social media portal; therefore it’s your biggest opportunity to reach the most consumers.  It’s hard to imagine there’s anyone left on earth who hasn’t heard of this social media monster.
• Twitter—the “micro-blog” and site growing the fastest in popularity. Its appeal is hard to understand until you try it out. This site connects you to large numbers of people and up to the minute news and information in a fresh new way. Just because the length of a tweet can only be 140 characters – don’t discount its power.
• LinkedIn—a B2B portal, primarily for business executives and business networking. Fantastic for sourcing business information, finding out what your peers are up to, and recruiting expert staff, whether in-house or out-sourced.

Of course, depending on your particular business, one or the other of these portals might be more appropriate for you to use. But with a little “outside the box” thinking, you’ll quickly see how these five sites can all work together to give you an unprecedented online presence, regardless of whether you are a mom-and-pop operation or a huge multinational organization.

Chapter 6 also includes one of our popular Findability Makeovers: “A Social Media Advertising Strategy”, including the five “must-have” Social Media Profiles for a great marketing campaign.

Would you like to see how I utilize social media to market myself as an expert internet marketing speaker? I invite you to check out any of my profiles online, and steal any of my ideas for your own marketing:

Heather’s YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/hlutze

Heather’s LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marketingspeakerheatherlutze

http://www.facebook.com/FindabilityGroup

Follow Heather on Twitter: @HeatherLutzeHeather is the widely acclaimed speaker, trainer, and consultant who literally wrote the book on search engine marketing. Two books, in fact—The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing and the brand new Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing. Her writing and in-demand keynotes are delivered with the same witty, “no-geek-speak” style that has managed to demystify internet marketing for countless business owners. Breaking free of corporate “cubicle” jobs over ten years ago with nothing more than a dream of entrepreneurship and a computer in the basement, Heather built her business into a multimillion dollar company—the Findability Group. Today she leads a dedicated and slightly obsessed team of search marketing pros—their mission—to connect clients with their perfect customers online.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Keywords

By Heather Lutze, Founder & CEO, the Findability Group

What exactly are keywords—why are they relevant—and how can YOU determine the ones you need to use to make your internet marketing efforts more successful?

On my recent Nov. 3^rd appearance on the Brainstormin’ With Bill Frank radio show, I talked about the importance of optimizing the content on a business’ website with the correct keywords. After all, no matter how much money you’ve spent on your site, no matter how beautifully designed it is, no matter how state of the art, no matter how fantastic your product or service—if no one finds your site, it’s virtually useless.

So how do people find your site when they are searching online? By using keywords. Therefore, your site must be optimized with the keywords people are using to search for whatever you are offering. (This is called search engine optimization, or SEO.)

Simple, right?

But that begs the question, how do you, as a website owner, know exactly what terms people are using when they search for your type of business?

Keywords are literally the key (no pun intended!) to being found online. No matter what someone is searching for—whether it’s a product, a service, or just some information—they do so by typing keywords into the search box. So, whether they type in “padded gel bike shorts,” “hot stone massage Denver” or “indoor gardening information” they are hoping the search results will show them exactly what they are asking for.

That is, in fact, the search engines job… Google will “crawl” all the websites online, looking for the ones with those matching keywords.

These are examples of long tailed keywords to be exact. (Plain old keywords would be “massage,” “gardening” or “bike shorts.”) People use long tailed keywords when they are ready to whip out that credit card and make a purchase. They know exactly what they are looking for.

If you have a site that sells athletic apparel, but the term “padded gel bike shorts” is nowhere on it—your website will not turn up when a customer searches uses that specific long tailed keyword—and one of your competitors will likely make the sale, instead of you.

So, to be competitive online, you’ll need to do some research to determine the most common ways people are searching for your products and services, and include those terms on your site. In that way, Google will find you, and list your site in the search results page (hopefully page one!) and your customer will land on your beautifully designed, state of the art website!

On the radio, I highly recommended the Google keyword tool for optimizing your website’s content. Since then, I’ve received a lot of questions from people about how to use this tool. Many people are intimidated, assuming that it’s so technical only search marketing pros can use it, but just the opposite is true. In the next guest post, we’ll discuss keywords and pay-per-click campaigns, so stay tuned.

Want to learn more from Heather? Register for Clicks & Chics | SEO & Social Media Session to find out how to draw customers to your company online—when they’re ready to buy.  This high-energy, irreverent, and wildly-informative presentation is not just for geeks, but designed for everyone on your team responsible for attracting customers and driving sales.  Mark your calendar for March 9^th from 1:30 – 4:30.  Immediately following there will be a networking reception where you’ll get to know Heather and the other participants better.

Heather Lutze is a nationally recognized internet marketing speaker, trainer, and consultant in search engine marketing including SEO, Paid Search, and Social Media Marketing Findability. Her speaking engagements are conducted in the same easy, understandable style as her bestselling book The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing published by Wiley & Sons—delivering equal parts good information and good entertainment to audiences nationwide.

In July of 2000, Heather founded the Findability Group in response to all the web site owners who had paid for websites that weren’t performing. It was my clients’ frustration with getting traffic to their sites that was my inspiration for learning and mastering the art and science of search engine visibility. With fifteen employees and growing, the Findability Group specializes in customized Search Marketing Solutions in Pay Per Click, SEO, and Social Media Marketing for “World Domination By Keyword Phrase!”

Use Social Media Marketing to Enhance Your Company’s Reputation

By Heather Lutze, CEO, Findability Group Search Marketing and CWCC Member

One of the things that always surprises me with new Findability internet marketing clients is how little they know about what people actually think of their company. Of course, in the days before social media, you would never know unless your customer service department received a lot of complaints. But today, it’s a different world.

Do you know if people are talking about your business or your products online? Do you know what they are saying, and how what they are saying is influencing your success?

If you don’t, you could be in for a rude awakening at some point down the road. It might have been okay for Marvin Gaye to wait until he “heard it through the grapevine” but that sort of passive approach does not fly in today’s high speed internet marketing world. By the time you might learn of any negative comments or complaints about your business—the damage has been done.

Instead, why don’t you use social media to stay on top of your public image, and know right away what you need to respond to? My advice is never to stick your head in the sand and ignore problems. Instead, use social media to jump in and address them—pro-actively, sensitively, and openly. Social media provides any company with a golden opportunity, one that should not be trivialized, to engage with your customers and make them happy!

In my new book Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing, I address the importance of knowing what people are saying about your company online, and how social media can be used to repair and even enhance your brand’s reputation.

An excerpt from Chapter 13:

A Message to CEOs:
“Please don’t be a Chief Ignoring Officer … Be a Chief Listening Officer. Be willing to really listen to what people are saying about your products and services. Be prepared to give meaningful feedback. Be willing to monitor and listen to sentiment about your company.

No, it won’t all be good. You’ll have to be willing to accept the good with the bad. It can be very difficult to keep a finger on the pulse of what people are saying about your company–but you must do exactly that.”

Bill Gerth, of the communications giant Comcast, has this to say about using social media to make customers happier: “Providing customer service via social media is just one of the ways we’re working to improve the customer experience, and it’s really a win-win for our customers and for us.”

This is an excerpt from an interview with “Comcast Bill,” in which he discusses exactly how Comcast has used different forms of social media to build their brand and address any customer dissatisfaction. The entire interview, along with various other interviews with industry leaders, can be found in the Appendix of Thumbonomics.

Welcome to the Findability Group, an Internet Marketing Firm in Denver. 

If you market a business on the internet, or want to start marketing one, you have come to the right place. We know that nothing is more frustrating to a business owner than spending a lot of money on a fabulous, state of the art website (or any website!) and not having it generate any business—or even turn up in a search.