I. Email campaigns.
These are best accomplished through having visitors submit their email address on any page on your site (ensuring that you offer a privacy guarantee). The input field must be made clearly visible on all site pages, and invite the visitor to submit their address in order to obtain a special report, newsletter, or some type of informative piece of great value to them.
A database is then built over time behind the scenes, as a result of this lead generation, and a monthly e-mailer is sent in order to stay in touch. This establishes, on a regular basis, expertise on the part of your company, exposing the receiver to many topics and aspects of your industry. In order to provide an additional pull, each email should also contain an incentive at the bottom for 10% off products or services, a free consultation, or the potential for winning a prize.
Many positive effects result from the above-mentioned actions and incentives. The email recipient is educated ongoingly, they warm up to what your company has to offer, expertise is established, and they are already educated when they are ready to hire you – meaning your company saves on time and effort getting them up to speed!
II. Landing pages.
Creating Landing pages is another effective, but under used, method of marketing.
A landing page is a detailed information page about a product, service or offering that users click through from an advertisement (Web, Print, word of mouth, etc.), email or search engine result.
Landing pages are superior to a home page because they are targeted to a specific task that controls the user's experience and leads them through a process (sale, email collection, survey, and so forth).
There are a number of ways to market a landing page and each strategy is specific to the content on the page.
III. Archive of articles.
The creation and addition of informative articles is a powerful way of pulling visitors into your site. These can be written by your company and/or others, and are simply placed on your server with a top-level menu that makes it easy for search engines to go through all the pages and index them for searchability. There are many writers who make their work available as long as they are credited and contact information is provided.
The benefit here is in placement with the search engines. By having a plethora of keywords on these pages, there is a greater likelihood that a visitor will be pulled into this domain when they search. Each page has the site's design "wrapper" around it which provides the visitor with navigation into the site, if they wish to pursue it.
These archives can be available through your main site via a link, or not at all. Perhaps these articles don't tie in well with the main site and are simply used as good information to pull in an audience. In other words, lead generation.
IV. The "chapter" concept.
Incorporating the following concept has great potential for enhancing your marketing efforts.
Simply place the chapters of a book or mini-course on your site as separate pages, where each chapter has fields at the bottom for the visitor to sign up and receive one article per week. Each article is then emailed to them and again, has an incentive at the bottom for further pull. Note: If you are publishing someone else's work, be sure there is no copyright infringement!
Once again, these can be simply sitting on your server to register on the search engines, or somehow tied in to the main site. A random chapter, for example, can be placed on your home page, which then leads to the signup page.
V. Building an online community.
One effective method of drawing people to a URL that can be easily tracked is by inviting them to answer a particular question or join a discussion. This can be in the form of a bulletin board, or a more simple method of posting their comments (as illustrated at the end of this very article!).
As always, the user signs up first, submits his/her comments in a field, and then gains access to a listing of all submissions for further reading. This not only allows visitors to see how others are thinking, but gives your company a wealth of information on people's views and attitudes for further shaping of your products, services, and marketing efforts.
VI. Tracking online.
As mentioned above, URLs for tracking are very powerful. Through Web statistics, all these mechanisms can be tracked to see what is working: hits on individual pages, emails submitted, responses to incentives, etc. It's all a numbers game!
Tracking, of course, includes constant monitoring and adjusting, in order to discard what is not working and to optimize the schemes that do yield results. We highly recommend Claude Hopkins' "Scientific Advertising" as a reinforcement on this core concept.
The key is implementing and maintaining systems that have proven to be effective over and over again. Email campaigns, landing pages, archiving articles, building an online community, applying the "chapter" concept, and tracking results are truly the tricks of the online marketing trade for the continuous growth and vitality of your business.
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Red Frog, Inc. is the Portland, Oregon ad agency that provides worry-free experiences and powerful results in the areas of Marketing, Print design, Video production and Web/CD-ROM development.
(888) 955-0550 | http://www.RedFrogInc.com
© 2005 Red Frog, Inc. You have permission to distribute this article as long as all of the text contained herein remains intact.
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