Strategies To Keep Your Readers Hooked

Operating a site means you'll have to have readers. Getting readers from links and search engine results may already give you a leg up. However, it's maintaining them that should be one of your priorities.

In order to keep your readers or "accidental" visitors, you have to keep your readers or visitors interested by following a few simple tips.

Always keep things fresh. Most readers come back in order to see updates. If you'll go on a month without at least an update, your readers may decide to look for something more interesting. Nowadays, almost every site updates their news or blog at least once day. Heck, there's even some that does more than that. You can entertain your readers with news or current events.

Share what you know. If you know something, share it. People appreciate that. However, make sure that what you know is somehow important to people reading it. Always make a point to make content that's worth reading.

Have a sense of Humor. A lot of people want to be entertained. That's why we turn on the radio when we drive. We listen to music; we listen to DJ's crack jokes. People like to be entertained even when they're in front of the computer.

Be unique. Though I may already sound like a broken record by saying this, I'll still emphasize that you need to be unique. People often read to know other's points of view. As an "expert" in your field, they would want to know what your opinion is on certain matters. Remember, it doesn't always have to conform to your readers' opinions. That way, if one of your readers disagrees, you can engage in a healthy exchange of comments.

Write something that people want to read. Create an article for readers, not spiders. There's really no point stuffing articles with keywords that may be able to pull in readers on the first round but fail to deliver in the next rounds. People are smart enough to know if an article really has value to them.

Share technical expertise. If you're an expert in something, share it. If you're not, find someone who knows what he's talking and have him make some content for you. Well, another way would be to write about someone sharing an opinion, what with he being an expert and all, about something he's expert in.

Encourage them. Ask and you shall receive. Did you ever ask your readers to come back? A simple "come back for the next issue of..." You may be surprised that there are readers that actually respond to these requests. Perhaps you should try "Bookmark us by pressing Ctrl + D."

Improve your design. How your site looks also affect your readers desire to stay or go. Make sure that it doesn't look like something that came out of the ADs Section of a newspaper. Also, you might consider putting in some plug-ins that may enable your readers to easily share your site. Put in some twitter, Facebook or even blogger plug-ins. People won't hesitate to share things that they find entertaining, informational and helpful.

Keep your readers coming back. Even if you don't make a sale, or even if they don't click your ads, sooner or later, someone's bound to come back and say, "Hey, that's just what I need!"

Website SEM: The Truth About Group Buying

Have you logged on to an online stoe and see that the shops are offering prices at 50 to 70% discount? They all sound too good to be true right? Well, as a matter of fact, they actually are.

What’s it all about? This is a new trend of online business strategy that takes advantage of bulk buying. This strategy was actually popularized by china where buyers group together in order to have bargaining leverage.

This results to a Win-Win situation where buyers are happy since they get the merchandise at a cheaper price and the seller is happy because he gets to sell a lot at one time.

Groupon was the first one to implement this strategy online since 2008. Because of its supposed effectiveness, a lot of major players have decided to join in like Livingsocial, Tippr, etc.

Now, if you’re a service provider (or perhaps a seller), this can be a great venue for you to increase your sales.

“How will it increase my sales when I’m lowering my prices?”

The Real Purpose

Well, the truth of the matter is, this initial exposure of providing massive discounts is only the first step. The purpose of availing of this is to let consumers know of your products. With prices dropping as low as 30% of the initial cost, you can only expect buyers to rush in. Some suppliers will even go lower than that just to make sure they are totally visible in the market.

As I’ve said before, this is only the first step. The next thing that you have to guarantee is customer satisfaction.  A lot of customers are willing to come back around as full-paying customers especially if they figured out that your products are worth it.

Remember, that in order for this to be effective, you’ll need to have a quality product or service being offered. Otherwise, you’ll just be concentrating on dropping your prices. This is a losing formula.

There’s Always Room For improvement.

In order to offset your chances of having more customers, especially returning customers, make use of customer reviews. Aside from positive feedback driving more and more customers in, the negative feedback allows you to improve and possibly reinvent your products and services in order to make it better.

In short, Group buying gets you customers. Customer Reviews are for you to continuously improve.

Website SEO and SEM Explained

Website SEO and SEM are being used interchangeably that it’s hard to tell one from the other.

If you are not familiar with the industry, you may possibly consider both the same as well. These two actually are different. The reason why they are so liberally used interchangeably is because of their purpose. Both SEO and SEM basically have the same goal and that is to increase your site presence.

Website SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is more concerned with increasing your site presence through the organic results of the search pages. Compared to paid advertising which comes out as “sponsored links” in search pages, this advertising is considered free. In order to come out at the top of all the search results, you’ll need to employ different SEO tactics.

Website SEO tactics can employ various strategies such as creating links to your site. It can also include modifying your website source code to make it more “search-engine friendly”. Another is to edit your content to increase the relevancy of your site to the keywords you’re targeting for.

As you may have noticed by this time, SEO is only a part of the whole which is SEM. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. This type of internet marketing encompasses everything that uses the technology of search engines in order to promote your site.

Compared to SEO, which is more concerned in the organic results,  SEM extends its reach to paid advertising or often times called “sponsored links”, paid placement, and paid inclusions.

A very common strategy for search engine marketing is through paid advertising. If you’ve tried searching for a keyword in Google, you’ll notice in the upper part of the search results as well as the sides, there are certain links listed as “sponsored links”. These are paid ads.

Paid inclusion, another strategy of SEM, is paying a search engine to include your site in their listings. Normally, a search engine would have spiders crawling through your sites and eventually your site would get indexed. This strategy has its own advantages in such a way that your site will be indexed more frequently and you’ll be able to monitor the effects of the changes you’ve made.

Bottom line, SEO is only one shade of the whole spectrum which is SEM. Still, most tasks involved in SEM are also being done by search engine optimizers.

Website SEO & SEM For Local Business Search

Smaller Businesses Aren't Marketing Effectively With SEO & SEM!

According to a recent study by the Center for Media Research (As outlined by studies by Nielsen) although 63% of individuals and small business entrepreneurs utilize the internet first for finding nearby merchants and 82% choose search engines to do so...  only 44% of small businesses have got a web site and 50 % of those spend less than 10% of their own advertising budget marketing online.

The investigation discovers an increasing tendency towards multimedia designed for developing local SERP listings. Nonetheless, the study uncovers a noticeable
problem between how small company owners act as shoppers vs the direction they promote their own businesses on the web.

The study found that search engines are the most well known resource for finding local information by all potential buyers:

• 82% use search engines (Google and Yahoo)
• 57% use Phone Book directories (Yellow Pages)
• 53% use regional or local newspapers
• 49% use internet based Yellow Pages
• 49% use the local TV stations
• 38% use paper mail (postcards)
• 32% use the White Pages directories
• 50% stated search engines were the first place they looked when trying to find a nearby business.

More than 92% of individuals (potential buyers) say they're satisfied with results they end up getting when selecting search, although many potential buyers report commonly not being able to locate a specific known local business. This means, says the report, individuals may very well pick a equivalent company which has a more robust online profile.

The report determined that internet search (and email newsletters) are the only types of local marketing which are increasing for individuals that need to locate or track down a local business. Compared with the metrics from just 2 years ago, consumers use search engines and news letters a lot more, while they utilize newspapers, magazines, mail and radio stations much less...

However, in spite of the growing utilization of internet based search engine marketing for local searches, just 41% of businesses report turning to online search engines initial, whille 31% select phone book print ads first. In addition, it's still the case that only 44% of small businesses use a website.

When utilizing the search engines to chose a business they know is out there, 39% announce that they repeatedly have trouble finding a local business they're searching for (just 19% of survey participants said they rarely encountered trouble locating nearby business).

Despite the fact that less than 50 % small businesses have a web site, the ones which do are generally unsatisfied overall with their own internet advertising and marketing. Among small businesses which have a online presence:

• 51% believe both the quality and ability of their website to help find new customers is just "poor"
• 30% of business owners feel they commonly do a superior job of marketing and advertising in comparison with a rival
• 78% believe they advertise in the same spots as competitors
• 7% of local business owners state their leading marketing and advertising goal is to have more visitors to their websites
• 61% dedicate much less than 3 hours a week advertising and marketing their site
• 99% of small companies are closely involved in the actual advertising and marketing
• 65% believe it is very important to know where their new customers come from
• 9% will be pleased with their own web marketing efforts
• 78% of small company owners give 10% or less of the budget to advertising and marketing

During the previous 2 years, 43% of businesses say they have elevated the use of website seo - sem in their marketing efforts. In contrast, use of old-school marketing sources is decreasing rapidly:

• Just less than 23% use the Yellow Pages less
• Over 42% employ the newspaper less

*The term (local business) pertains to any kind of retail company within a participant's community, like theaters, bars etc. and services such as medspas, plumbers and real estate agents. The term "Internet Yellow Pages" pertains to internet Yellow Page web pages such as yellowpages.com, superpages.com, etc.

So what precisely will we all extrapolate from this if you own or run a small business and are trying to drive local traffic?

Search engine marketing and SEO is the fastest developing kind of selling for a very good reason. It positions your marketing message right in front of potential customers at the very point in time they’re hunting for your services or products.

There's no better, more efficient, or more cost effective way to market your business. It’s that simple. 

Website SEO For Medical Spas

Medical Spa MD (who by the way uses Frontdesk SEO) is launching a great new series of website SEO videos for plastic surgeons and dermatologists who own or operate medical spas.

Here's what Medical Spa MD says about the series:

Since we get a lot of inquires around online marketing and conversion, I'm planning to do these as something of a regular series that breaks down common mistakes and how to implement some simple tactics that will improve your search engine rankings and visibility, and your site's conversions.

If you've got any questions after watching the video, please post a comment and I'll try to answer it there, and address it in future videos. The goal is that these will start out fairly broadly, but get much more specific. After watching just a few you should be much better equiped to make better decisions that could really impact your business.

And of course, Medical Spa MD includes a link to our free website SEO reporting tool.