Business Blogging

“Search engines drive website traffic; social networks promote brand awareness and blogs encourage community engagement.  But what about eMail?”  Wrote Peter Prestipino, Editor-in-Chief and Mike Phillips, Senior Editor for Website Magazine.com.

The article goes on to explain the importance of including eMail marketing in your company internet marketing strategy.  My take from the article is the importance to have a multi-faceted internet marketing approach.  In today’s market, relying on any one internet marketing strategy is a recipe for failure.

Rather than preaching, I’ll dive into the topic.

Who is your audience? Do you level best to spell out the nitty gritty details of your target customers.  Education, marital status, children, income level, hobbies and interests, social economic status, political believes, and anything else you can think of that will help you find search habits, locations, and motivating factors.

Since Google (and all the other search engines) are motivated by relevancy to keyword searches, the more specific your landing page content to the target audience and their search habits, the better.

If your website does not incorporate a business blog, you should meet with your web design team and start the site redesign process.

How? Stop thinking about your internet marketing effort as a sales process and more of an education opportunity (except in cases where a click and buy presentation is desired).  View your business as auditioning for clients.  Provide detailed, helpful information for “people” to digest and learn from.

Knowing the full demographic make up of your target customer will help you create highly targeted content for your website, social networking messages, blog articles and eMail campaigns.

You can have as many target customer profiles as is needed to reach your desired business level, but stay disciplined enough to create marketing collateral for every marketing channel for each customer profile.

We have all rolled our eyes at least once when we heard someone say our cell phone would be the next internet platform of choice.  Sometimes the best measure of the future is the actions of the mega companies.

Google has started following suit with Apple’s software add-on pay-per-app business strategy. I interpret this act as a strong indicator of Googles feelings regarding the future of cell phone internet useage.

What does this mean for you? As more applications become available for cell phone users, the more people will use their cell phones for commerce.  If your web-site and/or blog site are not built for optimal cell phone viewing then you just may be selling your self short.

While it is impossible to tell the future, I doubt anyone would argue that mobile phones are being used more and more by people to browse the internet.  Screen size limitations, flash exclusion, and tiny keyboards are just a few things to consider when updating your web properties.

Test your web page. Take a look at how your current web site looks on a cell phone then ask your self the following questions:

1. Is the text readable?
2. Is navigation easy?
3. Can visitors easily dial your phone number?

Most new cell phones have the ability to dial phone numbers right off your website, but only if the cell phone can read the numbers?  If your phone number is an image on your web page, then it becomes more difficult for visitors to click-and-call!

Ed Bejarana BusinessBlogging.net a division of Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

Source Article:  Google Opens the Door for Paid Android Apps, February 13, 2009 By David Needle

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