Maximizing your Website’s ROI can be done in four basic steps:

Step 1 - Analyze Your Website Statistics

Track and measure your Website’s current performance with Google Website Analytics Setup.

Website analytics will give you valuable data that will:

• Enable you to make informed, profitable business decisions regarding your Website
• Give you a baseline in which to measure your progress with future Website Marketing efforts
• Help you calculate your Website conversion rates and ROI
• Teach you about your Website visitors - which Websites or search engines they came from, search terms (keywords) they found you with, what they did on your site, which ones converted into leads and paying customers, etc.
• Mediatrunk can setup and customize Google Analytics for your Website.

Step 2 - Improve Website Conversions

Prepare your Website for more visitors - make sure it can effectively convert those visitors into leads and paying customers.

• How well does your Website convert visitors?
• Find out by requesting your Complimentary 10-point Website Conversion Critique.

Step 3 - Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Drive free, targeted search engine traffic to your Website with Search Engine Optimization.

• How well is your Website being found by search engines?
• Request a Complimentary Search Engine Visibility Report.

Step 4 - Do Website Marketing

Continually monitor and increase your Website visitors and conversions with Website Marketing consulting..

• Want to know your Website’s current and potential ROI?
• A Complimentary Website ROI Analysis will tell you how much money your Website is making now - and what it could make for you - for every $1 you invest in it.

• Website can be edited or "optimized" to be more visible by Search engines like Google and Yahoo.
• SEO involves making strategic changes to both the code and content (Website copy or text) of your Website.

Top 3 reasons why your Website needs search engine optimization:

1. SEO is necessary if you want your Website to appear on search engine results.
2. SEO is currently the most effective internet marketing tool for 2009.
3. Search engines view Websites differently than people. If your site has mostly images and multimedia content - and very little text - your Website will look like a blank page to search engines.

5 Steps of SEO

1. Get a snapshot of your current Website statistics.
   • Who is visiting your site? How did they get there? What are they doing there? Getting initial Web statistics is important so you can measure the results of your search engine optimization efforts.
   • Many web site hosting providers have a tool for viewing basic statistics. You can also get your site setup to a use a free, more powerful web statistics tool called Google Analytics.
2. Do keyword research.
   • This is the "strategic" part. A keyword is one or more words that someone would type into a search engine. Each page of your site should be written with a primary keyword as the main topic. Start with your home page and then do keyword research for the other most important pages on your site.
   • Think like a web site visitor - what would they type in a Google search box to find your primary product or service? Come up with a short list of keywords. Make sure the keywords are highly relevant to your web page content.
   • Test out keyword performance with a free online keyword tool such as Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. The secret is to choose a keyword that is popular but doesn’t have too much competition from other Websites (Websites that are using that same keyword).
3. Integrate keywords into your Website.
   • Keywords need to be weaved into both the HTML code and the written content of your site. There are specific strategies involved in both areas – so do some research on your own or hire an experienced Website and SEO copywriter like Mediatrunk.com.
   • We will edit your existing Website content and code for search engine visibility, and we will also give you key guidelines on how to write effect search engine optimized content for any future press releases, event notices, and blog articles that you may write.
4. Write specific content for each web page, and update your site often.
   • Be sure to create a separate page for each of your main products or services. Search engines will rank a page higher if it focuses on just one topic or specific keyword.
   • Update your Website often. Search engines tend to overlook a site that hasn’t been updated in a while – making it much less visible on search results. If you don’t know what to update your site with, consider adding photos, blog articles, news articles, event notices, and press releases at least monthly.
5. Submit your Website to search engines and local directories.
   • Submit your Website to the Open Directory Project, and your site will be listed on Google, MSN, and many other popular search engines – not including Yahoo. Also, consider paying for at least one year ($299) for a Yahoo Directory listing. Good news for non-profits – you can submit your site to Yahoo for free!
   • Submit your Website to free local listing Websites like Google Maps and Yahoo! Local – this is especially effective if your physical business address is in the same city as your customer base. Then if someone searches for "your product" + "your location", the local listing results will appear above the regular search engine results.

Keep doing SEO to maintain or improve your search engine results.

• After about 2-3 months, repeat step 1 (Web stats) to measure your results. You should be getting more visits to your Website from search engines. What keywords are visitors using to get to your site? What pages are they visiting? Once a month look up and record your web stats and analyze them.
• Keep your site updated frequently with content that is optimized for search engines.
• Periodically do more keyword research and adjust primary keywords for each page if you find something more relevant, popular, and non-competitive.
• Make sure you’re listed in the search engines, local directories, and other Websites that you submitted your site to. Find more of those sites on a regular basis, and submit your site to them.

SEO can be time-consuming but rewarding. You can do it yourself or hire some or all of it out to a web designer who specializes in search engine optimization.

Good luck with SEO and have fun seeing more traffic coming to your Website!

Email marketing is using email to send out your marketing messages - sending them to interested prospects who have opted-in to receive your email is a great way to increase your sales or donations.

Email Marketing is Very Cost-Effective

• Email marketing generated an ROI of $48.34 for every $1.00 spent on it in 2007
• Email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Email marketing was the top target area for investment in 2009 for 650 marketers from the Council’s Marketing Outlook ‘09 Report

Show Me the Money! - Calculate Your Possible ROI with Email Marketing

You will see a higher ROI when you have:

1. Lower email campaign costs - iContact costs as low as $9.95/month
2. Greater number of email subscribers – Hint: put your email subscription form on your website…you get this for free when you signup with iContact via Mediatrunk.com
3. Greater average price of your products, services, or donations
4. Greater response rates from your email - % of people who: visit your website or physical location, call, or email you
5. Greater conversion rates from your responders - % of responders who will buy

Use this free tool to figure out your possible ROI: Email Marketing ROI Calculator.

Why should I use an email marketing service like iContact if I can just send out emails from my own inbox for free?

If you send your email via your inbox to more than a handful of people at once, your message will most likely be considered as spam and won’t be delivered - and worse yet, your email address may get black-listed.

This is especially true if you have more than 50 recipients and you use the BCC field – if you don’t use the BCC field, your recipients will get upset that you are making their email addresses available to other people.

Create and manage your own permission-based email marketing campaigns using iContact for as little as $9.95 per month

• Easily create, send, manage, and track your own email marketing messages
• Trust email delivery rates between 98%-99%
• Setup and manage multiple campaigns
• Easily import and manage multiple subscriber lists
• Automatically handles all subscribes and un-subscribes
• Excellent training resources and customer support

Try before you buy

Sign up for a full-featured, 15-day free trial with iContact today!

During tough economic times, businesses are moving away from expensive, traditional advertising (print, radio, tv) and investing in cost-effective web site promotion strategies instead.

4 Reasons Internet Marketing and Web Site Promotion will Strengthen Your Business

1. It produces a higher ROI than traditional advertising
2. It targets your exact audience
3. It is cost-effective
4. It is easy to implement yourself or can be implemented quickly by an experienced web site designer

Cost-Effective Internet Marketing Strategies

• Web site conversion improvements - make it easy for visitors to do what you want them to do on your web site
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Research high performing search engine terms and strategically implement into the code and descriptive text in your web site
• Local Business Listings - Google Maps, Yahoo Local, etc.
• Link Building - Get as many other reputable, related web sites to link to yours as possible
• Email Marketing - eNewsletters and email marketing campaigns
• Social Media - Blogging, Podcasting, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Web site content development and writing - keep your web site up-to-date with valuable information for your visitors

Recent Trends: Internet Marketing Investments

Implementation is Quick and Simple

You may be surprised to know that you can easily (and sometimes for free)
implement some of these strategies yourself! Others may incur an initial
setup cost, but you can still maintain it yourself.

Modest Time and Financial Commitments Result in Dramatically Higher ROI

With a little knowledge, time, and sometimes a small investment, you can
greatly increase the number of visits to your web site and convert a higher
percentage of them into paying, loyal customers!

In this article I will explain how you can help search engines find your web site faster - and what things you should avoid doing so you don’t get blacklisted by them or so your web site content doesn’t become invisible to them.

Factors that WILL HELP your web site get found by search engines:

• Age of your web site address - older web sites are seen as more credible by search engines.
• Link popularity - search engines act like a high school: the more friends you have, the more popular you are to them. Get your link on as many local directories, industry specific directories, an individual web sites as you can.
• Number of pages on your web site - the more pages you have, the more content you have and the more interesting you are to search engines.
• Update your web site often - search engines forget about sites that aren’t kept up-to-date. Every so often, edit the text and photos on your site. Better yet, provide new information often. You can create an on-site blog, provide a list of articles of interest to your visitors, write news articles or press releases (and archive them), keep an events list or calendar, and update your photo gallery. It’s also a good idea to summarize new content in your site on your home page - providing links to the new content.
• Submit or resubmit your web site to search engines - when major changes are made to your site, like a redesign or a new page. At the very least, submit your site to a category in the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) - this is what powers Google.
• Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and keyword implementation - this is a very involved process, but some quick tips are:
  • Use specific keywords - not general keywords (example: use “organic landscaping service colorado springs”, not “landscaping”)
  • Include lots of relevant text copy on your site - and break it up with headers (h1, h2, h3…), bulleted or numbered lists, and linked text.
• Paid search engine inclusion - you can buy ads if you have the budget. Sometimes it is also helpful to buy a paid directory listing with Yahoo (approx $300/year)…even if you don’t renew after that first year.

Factors that will WON’T HELP your web site get found by search engines:

• Keyword spamming - search engines can tell if you are using your keywords excessively and may penalize you for doing this.
• Laying out your pages using tables - any text you put in your tables will be scanned last by the search engines…so design your pages using div tags and stylesheets instead.
• Embedding your text inside images - search engines can only read editable text, not images. If you have to put text in an image, then specify the “alternate text” for the image.
• Dynamic navigation menus that use JavaScript - search engines don’t read text in JavaScript. Create your menus using stylesheets instead.
• Flash and frames content - the text in flash and frames is not easily read by search engines.
• Lengthy page titles, keyword metatags, and description metatags - there is a maximum length for each of theses items, so keep them concise.
• Multiple web sites with duplicate content - doing this can get one or more of your sites blacklisted from the search engines.
• Redirecting one web site address to another web site address - by using anything but a 301 redirect.
• Multiple pages on the same site with duplicate content - search engines consider this spam, so come up with unique content for each page, and write a unique page title for each page too.
• Sharing web server space with a site that has shady content or a questionable reputation - there are tools online you can use to look this up, or you can contact your web site hosting provider to get a list.
• Broken links - check all your links to make sure they lead somewhere.
• Spelling errors - search engines frown upon misspelled words.
• Invalid code - validate all your code to make sure it is compliant with W3C standards.

These top 10 web site fixes will be much less expensive than a total redesign, and they will also contribute to your bottom line by:

• Making your site look better
• Help your site be found higher on search engine results
• Get your visitors to contact you or buy your product or service.

Here they are: Top 10 Quick Fixes for Your Web Site:

1. Make your web site load faster.
   If your web site takes too long to load, they will quickly leave and find another site that won’t waste their valuable time. Your total web site load time should not be more than 100-150 KB. This includes load time of images, multimedia (flash), JavaScript, stylesheets, and text. Here is a useful free tool that tells you how long your web site takes to load.
2. Display your logo and contact info at the top of every page.
   Visitors are used to seeing the company logo on the top left of the page – so put your logo there too. Also make it easy for visitors to contact you by putting your phone number, address, and/or call-to-action buttons on the top middle or top right of every page.
3. Create effective call-to-action buttons.
   Wherever you talk about your product or service, display an effective link or button telling your visitors how to buy your product or service. Linked images or buttons are more effective than text links. Include action verbs in your buttons, and make sure all your call-to-action buttons look consistent.
4. Shorten your contact forms.
   Better yet, put a mini-contact form on your home page or on the top or side of every page so visitors don’t have to waste time clicking on your “Contact Us” link to contact you. Keep the list of items they have to fill out short. Name, email, and one other field (comments or a dropdown menu) should be enough.
5. Write unique page titles for every page.
   A page title is the top-most text you see in your browser’s window when viewing a web page. It is also the first text that a search engine sees and often displays in the search engine results. Make sure each page has a different title and the text in the title matches the content of the page. Include your top keywords in the title and make sure the title is at least less than 8-10 words.
6. Review your web site copy.
   Make sure your copy is in text format – search engines can’t see text that is embedded in an image. You should have at least 250 words of text on each web page so search engines will give them credibility. Break up your text so visitors and search engines can scan it quickly: use headlines, bullets, and images to do this. Try to include your top keywords in headlines, sub-headlines, bullet items, and links in your web site’s copy.
7. Check your web site for errors.
   Make sure your site has no spelling errors, broken links, or invalid code. Both web site visitors and search engines give less credibility to sites that have errors. Go to the W3C web site to see if your site has broken links or code errors.
8. Check out your competitors’ web sites.
   Make a list of your top competitors, visit their web sites, and write down any good ideas they have for quality web site content that will make your visitors want to do business with you. Then brainstorm for some unique content ideas of your own.
9. Create a sitemap page.
   A sitemap is an outline, consisting of links, of your entire web site. Put the link to your sitemap page on your home page and every page in your site – the footer (bottom of the page) is a good place for this link. Some visitors also use this as a tool for navigating a web site.
10. Look at your web site statistics.
    Your web site statistics will show you valuable information about who is coming to your web site, how they got there, and what they do there. Read my previous article, Basics of Web Site Statistics to learn how to get your statistics setup and how to use that valuable information once you have it at your fingertips.

Keeping track of your web stats is especially important if you are doing any form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Web site statistics allow you to easily and quickly see if what you’re spending your money and/or time on is working.

Here are some key web site statistics to pay attention to:

• Unique Visitors - counts a visitor only one time  even if they visited your site multiple times during a time period
• Top Entry Pages - pages people first see when they visit your site
• Top Exit Pages - last page visitors view before leaving your site
• Bounce rate - percentage of people leaving a page without visiting any other pages on your site
• Referring keywords - keywords visitors typed into search engines to get to your site
• Referring web sites - sites that sent visitors to your web site
• Referring search engines - search engines that sent visitors to your web site
• Direct visitors - people who go to your site directly
• Repeat visitors -  people who have been to your site before
• New visitors - people who have been to your site for the first time
• Most popular pages - pages most frequently viewed by visitors

Be careful not to get bogged down with all the numbers. Web site statistics on their own will not help you improve your site.

What will make your web stats work for you is your ability to:

1. Analyze the statistics
2. Find what issues need immediate attention and prioritize them
3. Figure out the best way to make the changes to fix those issues
4. Make those changes in a timely manner
5. Analyze the effects of your changes…and start all over again

Want to find web site statistics on your competitors?

Visit Compete.com, and you can find competitor web site information for free. You can  look up competitor information such as:

• Unique visitors
• Referring web sites
• Keywords that send traffic to a web site

Google Analytics is a free web site statistics tool that is both powerful and easy to use.

Just sign up at www.google.com/analytics/ and they give you some code to put on every page in your web site that you want tracked.

Don’t know how to make edits to your web site code? Mediatrunk will setup Google Analytics for free when we design your web site. If you already have a web site, we can install Google Analytics for you. Contact us for details and pricing.