1. You need to obtain a good domain name. A domain name refers to the internet address that allows computer users to find your site. In choosing your domain name make sure that it is easy to spell and easy to remember. Likewise, make sure that it has not been trademarked by another person.

2.Create a professional looking site. People often look for websites that they feel they can trust. If your site radiates an aura of professionalism, visitors will be encouraged to stay for a while and even make a purchase. Bear in mind that the website is a reflection of your business so as much as possible make it radiate the professionalism in you.

3. Build a site that is easy to navigate. Nothing can discourage a visitor than a site that takes ages to load or is hard to find the most relevant information. If your site takes longer than 5-10 seconds to load, chances are visitors will click away from your site. Make sure that it is easy for your visitors to find what they need to know. Take a look at some of the great sites out there. Studying their site can help you plan how to design your website.

4. Build an email list. Email marketing is still one of the best and cheapest ways to market online. It is ok to send email notices about your products or services to people who have shown interest in your company as long as you also send some helpful “non-sales” information as well.   This is one way of communicating with your customers and potential customers. You have to make sure though that you have set forth a Privacy Policy on how you will use any personal information. Likewise, remember that emails are still considered as personal forms of communication so make your letter conversational and friendly.

5.  Once your site is setup you need traffic.  Get educated on how to use social media networks to gain an online reputation.  Blogs are perhaps the fastest and most targeted way to attract visitors but is must be setup in a way that the search engines like.  Here at Digital Brand Makeover it is our goal to make sure all or our clients have a strategy for their Social Media marketing efforts as well as the education needed to make it happen

These are just a few tips to consider in successfully marketing your business online. There are other ways to make you business shine in the virtual market. But these tips are the foundation to a good plan.

See you out there!

It never ceases to amaze me how little business owners truly know about whether or not the money they spend is having the desired result.  Yet, month after month they continue to pay.

Here is what I mean.

This is a snapshot of the report we provided for our client.  In one quarter their total visitors went up 76% – that’s great.  But here is what I want to draw attention to.  Late last year we really felt like a bigger social media push would bring more traffic to the site and we suggested they pay us to create such a campaign.  This is where most marketing dollars disappear never to be heard from again.  But that’s not how we roll.  We track EVERYTHING so that we know if what we are doing is working and so our client can see the ROI on their investment.  In this case traffic to the website from social media rose by 322%.  Needless to say everyone is thrilled.

The morale of this story is that wherever you choose to spend your marketing dollars – make sure there is some accountability involved.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t measure ROI with online marketing - clearly that just isn’t true.

Until next time!

However, this is not your typical, what-to-do kind of article that will teach you in the most cliche of ways how you should manage your social media marketing efforts. In fact, instead of telling you the things that you need to do in order to excel in the world of social media marketing, this article will raise awareness on the biggest blunders that you might commit.

1. Don’t be deceived by the ease and simplicity of using social networking sites.

The usual trick that social networking platforms play on experienced users is the illusion of ease and simplicity. While one must admit that signing up to social networking communities is relatively easy nowadays compared to the laborious sign-up process needed during the internet’s early days, that doesn’t make it easier for any social media marketer. Signing up is just a little step in the whole complex process of starting a social media marketing campaign.

Twitter may allow as little as 140 characters in their thread but the length or even the lack thereof is not at all an important issue. The main issue is providing content which is interesting and relevant to the target demographic. Anyone can start a blog, join a community and start writing or submitting blog posts and articles. But think of what’s going to make your posts stand out from the vast sea of  social media content. Ask yourself is there is any value to the things that you write, post or share.

2. Don’t use just one social media platform.

If you think signing up on Facebook, creating your own page and posting content once in a while is effective enough for a social media campaign then you might be missing the boat.  You must ask if such a step contributes anything to the brand or company that you are promoting. If you think a thousand followers on Twitter is good enough then you are very mistaken.

Don’t get misled into believing your online marketing strategy is only about one application or one social networking platform. More than likely, you will need to engage in conversations across a variety of platforms and services. That is why a good social media marketing campaign encompasses all social media platforms like Facebook, microblogging sites like Twitter and content sharing sites like Tumbler and Youtube.

3. Don’t think that the same rules apply in all social media platforms.

While experience in using social media platforms help, take note that each networking site has it’s own reasons for being unique. Remember the social media characteristics that make up each community before making inappropriate assumptions when joining. Additionally, while there have been best practices written for almost every social networking site on the web, it takes time and dedication to understand the time and commitment required in being a successful social media marketer.

If you can clean up these “don’ts” then there will be more room for your “do’s.”  Most important, don’t hesitate to ask for help when needed!

But what about the business angle?  If you run a business with a website promoting products or services then you need a Pinterest plan.  For starters there are certain business types that will benefit from image sharing – visual products such as clothes, photography, lodging and artwork to name a few.  Pinterest is a terrific opportunity to create some boards and push your business because your photos have the chance to go viral and create huge traffic to your site.  But what if you are not a terribly visual business? Well, every image has a link back to the webpage you are trying to promote.   If you don’t know, Google absolutely loves links on Pinterest and will reward your website with higher search rankings even if that links doesn’t bring direct traffic.  But the most valuable long-term approach from a sales viewpoint would be engage the community spirit of Pinterest for a little while prior to ‘hard-selling’ your products.  For example, ‘pin’ some non-business pictures and then over time add your stuff.

An example: If we take the holiday rental I mentioned earlier, it might be that somebody owns a home they want to rent out in Key West for the eight or nine months of the year it’s not being used by them. They have a problem on Google because the first 4 or 5 pages of results are dominated by the large agencies.  So they get a board on Pinterest and fill it with nice pictures of the house. They also upload images of the surrounding area, beaches, local places of interest, etc.  Next they start searching for other Pinterest users who have posted images of homes in Key West and follow and re-pin their material.  Eventually other Pinterest subscribers will come across the board, follow them, re-pin their images and ultimately the website featuring the home for rental gets lots of new traffic.  And of course, the Google rankings for the site will start to climb as well.

Pinterest has some good hype right now.  It’s hard to say if they will become the next mega network but they are very relevant and valuable for marketing.  What we know for sure is that many of our clients are seeing real traffic gains from Pinterest.  The Pinterest pendulum is in full swing so we recommend coming along for the ride.

In 2000, a client asked me to add a guestbook to his website.  I built this feature for him with a cool back-office where he could remove any comments that he didn’t like.  I added the ability for him to send a mass mail to all of the people that had contacted him, then later an ability to download the list.  He enjoyed his guestbook, but unfortunately — so did some spammers!   I setup e-mail notifications on new posts and implemented a honeypot — a secret hidden input box that viewers wouldn’t see, but that spambots would fill in – leading to their entry being tossed out!

Eventually, the client was interested in maintaining his own content.  I was equally interested in not maintaining his content for him.

I built a publishing platform with ‘documents’ and ‘folders’ and an what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor powered by TinyMCE.  Image uploads?  I built a media library too.  Statistics?  Did it.  Every visitor became a statistic with a trail of crumbs and the admin facility had a picture of the Cookie Monster from sesame street nibbling on a cookie.

After a while, there were over 50 sites running DynamicONE.  New features came with each client — forums, calendars, virtual tour building — even a full home builder inventory management system!

The goal was always simple — make powerful tools that work together and that are fun to use.

And then the something unexpected happened.

Everyone started blogging.

Do you remember when you first heard of a ‘blog’?  Do you remember life before blogs?  All of a sudden anyone with an opinion could have a quirky website about cupcakes.  Anyone could become an analyst — a commentator — an online celebrity.  Just sign up to get a blog, pick a theme and go.  ’Posts’ and ‘Tags’ became terms that everyone on the Internet understood.

And then everything went social.

Personal websites became a thing of the past … and we entered into a world of social media, open standards, and inter-operable platforms.  It was dubbed ‘Web 2.0′ by Tim O’Reilly, famous author and advocate of open source.

Facebook and Twitter replaced the guestbook and the user forums of yesteryear… photo galleries went social on Flickr… e-mail left the desktop and went to what we’re now calling ‘the cloud’… and navigating the Internet became just as second nature as using a computer.

What was even more alarming is that clients began to have an opinion on how their website back office should function.

This is when I discovered WordPress.

I needed something that I could build powerful websites in — and something that would meet the usability expectations of my clients.  I needed a tool that was growing with the web.

There was Mambo… which became Joomla… which is still to this very day an embarrassing mess of nerd terminology mixed with a publishing platform that turned everything into blocks where content could be shifted around…

Then there’s Drupal… which is an incredible development platform made by developers for developers.  But our clients aren’t developers and it’s enough work to build an amazing website without having to build an amazing back office and train clients on how to use it.

But I needed something that could be run by a blogger — a Facebook user — a Gmail user — something that gave just as much to the client as it did the developer.

This is when I fell in love with WordPress.

WordPress elegantly replaced each of the areas that I’d carefully designed in my own content management system.

The documentation (http://codex.wordpress.org/) is the best written documentation for any platform I’ve seen. It provided me with the resources to quickly understand WordPress from top to bottom from a technical standpoint. For the end-user — the usage documentation was so well written that I could direct clients there to learn how to operate their sites!

There are unlimited possibilities for creating new admin areas using Advanced Custom Fields.  Amazing e-Commerce power with grouped products, cross-sales, scheduled promotions and complete control over shipping and payment with WooCommerce.  Clients asked about SEO and from WordPress’s built in structure and permalinks to the awesome Yoast SEO plugin – I knew without a shadow of a doubt that WordPress was the solution without peer.  Want a mobile version of your site?

Perhaps the most exciting part of developing with WordPress is actually seeing the client use their site.  We love when we hear from a client that they’ve seen other systems and by far, this is the best looking site with the easiest tools.

So here I am today, writing a blog post as a team member of dBrandMakeover.com in WordPress.

I’m not going to make a habit of this.

I’m addicted to WordPress, but not to blogging — that’s where the SEO and Social Media Marketing guys step in!

Unfortunately, most online marketing “professionals” either don’t bother or don’t know how to dig into the numbers and find out if the strategies and solutions that they have sold to their clients are working.  Not so at DBrand!  When we tell our clients that we can use social media marketing to drive new traffic to their website, we can back it up with real numbers.

Here is a snap shot of what is happening with one of our top clients:

The top line represents total visits, the bottom line represents how many of those visits came from their social media accounts that we created and optimized for them.

Can you tell which month they hired us?  yep, September.  Let’s just say that they are thrilled to see their website traffic go from 1,000/mo to 4,000/mo.  But the social media traffic is actually more amazing – from 96 to 791.  That is almost 700 new social media visitors each month.  Remembering how high quality a social media click is makes these numbers pretty fantastic.

The social impact for this client has been felt in their bottom line and of course that is why we are doing this.  If you need to see it in the numbers at your business give us a call!

The fundamental approach is to grow our account with as many targeted followers as possible.  Marketing your business on Twitter is all about volume.  Your tweets will race by your follower’s timeline quickly so you need hundreds if not thousands of targeted followers in order to attract some of them to your website or maybe even a twitter conversation that leads to new business.

So how do we grow a Twitter account?  First, we target Twitter users based on what is good for business.  For some businesses that is all about location, others it might be about certain interests.  Twitter and other services offer great search tools that allow you to discover your target audience.  We then follow these targeted users and most of the time they will follow us back and we grow our audience.  The great thing about this approach is that most “spammers” (Twitter users not interested in engaging their audience but only in sending them links) are not interested in following us back so our accounts stay pretty clean.

But that does bring up an interesting question – how do we keep who we follow and who follows us free from “unsavory characters” and does it even matter?   First off, you cannot control who follows you on Twitter or any other social network unless you start blocking folks and that kind of defeats the purpose of using social media in the first place.  Whoever wants to follow you will follow you, that’s the deal.  Next, we need make a distinction between a Twitter account for personal use and one for business use.  If I am using an account for personal reason then I would like to keep the number of people I follow to a minimum or else it makes it hard to stay caught up with what everyone is tweeting.  However, Twitter knew that you might start following a ton of people so they created lists.  This allows you to create lists of only people that you really want to listen to without unfollowing people (which is considered quite rude on Twitter, as is not following someone back who has followed you!)

For Twitter accounts being used for business, however, we just want to follow as many of our targeted audience as possible in hopes that they will follow us back and get engaged with our brand and message.  When we are trying to grow our twitter audience we follow everyone that our target search brings back.  Does that mean that we might follow someone who is not really in our target audience? Sure? Does that really matter though?  Not really.   For starters, they are not going to comment on our timeline.  Second, if they are a spammer then they will be banned from Twitter in a matter of weeks or months and the “problem” solves itself. Third, almost no one looks at or cares who you are following when you are a business!

So let’s say we are marketing a local business in Houston.  If we can grow our Twitter following to 1,000 then that is a very good thing.  Could 200 of them be folks who are completely out of our target, say Indonesia or a spammer? Sure.  But that means that 800 of them are Houstonians very possibly interested in our message.  That is an awesome, free, targeted marketing opportunity!  Now, do the math if we grow our account to 5,000, yep – you’re getting it!

Check out DBrand on Thumbtack HERE!