There are many freelancers and small to medium business owners that want an active presence online. In this competitive world, it is impossible to survive without getting access to both the physical and the online market. People who focus on only one of these are bound to fail. The number of online customers is equal to the number of physical ones and the intention of internet marketing is marketing your business, service or firm on the internet.

If you want to take control of your business online there’s a couple of ways to go.

1. You can do it all yourself.

To do this you’ll have to take a big steep learning curve and become internet marketing savvy by actively working your websites search marketing, social marketing, article writing, pay per click advertising, affiliate marketing just to name some of the many aspects of internet marketing your business online.

A good way to start the learning curve is to read up on a lot of search marketing techniques that are freely available at reliable websites like Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/) or Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/) which are both great sites to take the plunge into. There are many search marketing sites available and doing a quick search will yield plenty of results. You’ll just have to start digging through and absorbing heaps and practicing what you learn as often as possible.

These two site are great resource to learn pay per click advertising too. In fact without being too “WooHoo” about it trolling through hundreds of pages at these sites will give you a great overview of what you’re in for, learning wise, and what you can expect to be doing for 20 hours a week (conservative estimate) for your business.

Of course there’s always the second option ..

2. Hiring an Internet Marketing person to do it for you.

If you’re not into a steep learning curve, trial and error type arrangement like most small to medium business owners, you can always hire someone (qualified) to do this type of thing for you. You just have to find the right one. The one person who “Gets” your business and understands the way you do business. They must and I mean must appreciate your product or services so they can “hook into” your business benefits that you supply to your customers.

Having a great understanding of your business must incorporate this type of mental attribute supplied by the internet marketing to achieve your business goals and obligations. Long gone are the days of NOT understanding a clients business cause there’s so much competition out there. All vying for the same exposure for similar product or services that your business has, it’s a mine field really.

To find the right internet marketing person, here’s a few questions to ask first before you sign on the dotted line ..

Q: How many years of experience have you had?
A: X amount will not cut it. If they can list the clients they have made a difference to (and you check that out) then that person may have ticked the first box.

Q: What, In Your Opinion Is Internet Marketing?
A: Oh Pay Per Click Advertising – Is NOT the answer. The answer to this question should include SEO (Search engine optimization, SEM (Search engine marketing – which is different to SEO), PPC (Pay per click advertising), Website Design, Website Development, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, HTML Code Compliance (W3C Validated Coding Experience) and a few more things added. (Well I can’t give the game away now can I)

Q: How much do you charge?
A: X amount per hour or month IS NOT the answer you’re looking for. Here’s some reasons why. A $X per hour means they’ll put you on a paying drip feed. Not all internet marketers do this but most inexperienced ones with little or no idea will be glad to accept your hard earned on an hourly basis.

Monthly payments are another way of saying, drip feed us and when we’ve had enough of your money we’ll do something.

A standard way of payment could or should be performance based. As in, if the internet marketer increases profits through the work they have done, then of course they’ll get some of the pie. Stands to reason and is a fair way of doing business. If you see results, you’ll pay for them right?

I think you’ll get the general idea by now. So if you’re going to outsource your internet marketing make sure you have a good understanding of those that want to “help” you (usually means free) as you’ll only get what you pay for, as we all know.

Of course, a final idea, you can always contact us if your looking to outsource your internet marketing strategies, we don’t answer questions with X and we defiantly do take the time to understand your business.

Have a great day and Bonn Appetite.

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard).

Great news .. take the tour then read on ..

This is great news for all of us that use WordPress as our main CMS website, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

The efforts of all those that have contributed to making the 3.0 version solid & workable should be congratulated, so Congratulations Everyone!! Thanks heaps.

For all that’s great about the new WordPress 3.0 release there always has to be the down side, as you would expect. I suppose calling this a down side is probably too strong a phrase more like Upgrader beware type issue instead.

While roaming through my Facebook domain I found an interesting post by Kimberly J. Castleberry who wrote ..

WordPress 3.0 officially launched today. Regardless of what you may be hearing, if you want the best odds of a smooth upgrade – and substantially less risk of losing data and needing to do a full restore after your upgrade – PLEASE wait to upgrade for ONE week!

This seemed an odd thing to post to me that is, as I thought “why not upgrade now”, as you do and Kimberly’s reply made absolute sense, which was ..

Because there are thousands of plugins in the repository that coders are still working to get updated. For example, Nile just submitted one to the repository yesterday that is broke on 3.0 and probably wont be approved for a day or three. So many times a new release comes out and because the increase in mass testing and fringe cases, we see a almost immediate push of a sub-release.

For example when 2.9 released it was badly flawed in maybe 5 or 10% of all blogs. There was an almost immediate patch to 2.9.1 at the end of the first week. Lots of blogs were crippled due to the 2.9 release that would not have been if they’d simply waited a few days. The real challenge is to not wait more than a week or two. This is a security release too so what we dont want to see is people waiting six months! LOL

Makes sense right?

So to everyone using WordPress have a great time upgrading and playing with your new toy and to Kimberly J. Castleberry (my new hero) I say thanks for thinking of everyone using WordPress, you rock!!

~ Bonn Appetite (as always )

From the WebCEO Team

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, wrote in his “The Art of War” treatise about the importance of knowing competitors before competing. The marketing revelations made by Al Ries and Jack Trout in “Marketing Warfare” (1986) also underline the same idea – marketing strategy and tactics are based on the same principles that military strategy and tactics are based on.

You should learn and analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies before you start developing your own strategy. In this way you will avoid mistakes your competitors made and employ their best practices. And to be a step or two ahead of your competition, getting information on what your competitors are doing at every moment must become your daily business routine. The good news is that to track your competitors’ online efforts, you do not need to plant a mole or steal their secret documentation. You just need a few online tools.

• Xinu Returns tells you how well your competitors’ sites are doing in popular search engines and social bookmarking sites. It shows a great variety of important sites’ statistics. Along with the SEO information such as Meta tags of the index page, its rankings in Google, Alexa, Technorati, Compete, a site’s number of backward links and indexed pages, Xinu will give you information on how many times the page’s URL was mentioned on social bookmarking sites and will let you see those mentions. Armed with this data, you can work out your own strategy to outperform your competitors: get more backlinks and add your interesting stories or helpful articles to the social media sites.

• Board Tracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it was posted. Search for your competitors names and be aware of what their clients say. And, of course, do not forget to monitor your keywords and your product names to react on time.

• Google Alerts notifies you when your competitors are mentioned in the news or when you have a new competitor in your area. Google will let you set up to 1,000 alerts for each account you create with them, so you can monitor all your keywords and competitors’ names.

• PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real-time across the Web. PostRank gathers where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs. With PostRank you will discover the best blogs, news, and articles by your topic, so you will see whether your competitors create stories that engage an audience.

• Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content gathered across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your competitors and you, your company, a new product in your market, or any topic across the Web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

• SpyFu. Frankly speaking this tool has nothing to do with social media, but since we’re talking about spying, we can’t help mentioning it. SpyFu allows you to browse competitors’ daily AdWords PPC budget, average position of ads, estimated value of organic traffic, paid traffic compared with organic traffic estimates, top ten paid keywords with keyword ad history, total paid keywords, total organic keywords, PPC competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords), organic competitors (based on semantic relationships). You will get more information as a subscriber, but free reports also help you get the general idea.

With all of the above mentioned, remember that success in marketing and promotion of your product can be achieved only if you keep the balance between smart copying of the best competitors’ practices and introducing your own innovative marketing ideas.

- Bonn Appetite

My brilliant sister in-law sent an email with this little game in it and …

OMG MY SANDY ONLY LASTED 30 SECONDS!!

Steer Sandy Seal through the dangers of unprotected waters and sign the petition to Save Our Marine Life.

From

Game on! Help protect Australia’s coast

Every site owner wants to see the results of his or her work. However, people who are new to internet marketing and search engine optimization often pay attention to the things that do not really indicate a website’s success.

Think, for instance, of Google PR. Google employees say themselves that Google PR is just one of 200 factors that influence a page’s ranking. So Google PR may be important when you seek link partners, but this factor alone doesn’t show the website’s success and is not the thing to be concerned about.

A rapid traffic rise is another metric that may confuse website owners and inspire vain hopes. A successful post in a social medium may attract thousands of unique visitors one day (such as a highly popular Digg story), but unless this happens regularly, you’re not a winner of the traffic race. Besides, aiming at hordes of visitors is wrong. Your goal is targeted visitors, people who are honestly interested in your services and products.

By analyzing Time Spent and Bounce Rate, you will know how targeted your visitors are. Though the time that your visitors spent on your website is not the best witness to its success, knowing about this will help you see better whether your visitors stop to read your content or just scan it. It is especially important for news sites and blogs. Bounce Rate is a percentage of visitors who leave your website right after they entered it. If your bounce rate is high, start with checking your high-ranked keywords – a high bounce rate may be explained by the fact that people find your site in search engine results when they look for different information.

The number and quality of backlinks is the next important indicator of your website’s popularity, value and authority in the eyes of visitors. Pay attention to both the number and quality of links. And remember that a link from an authoritative and relevant website will attract more targeted visitors than 100 links from poor and irrelevant pages.

Also check the number of bookmarks on social sites. In the era of social media one cannot rely just on search traffic; many visitors have a chance to find your website through social bookmarking sites and other sites with user-generated content. A large number of bookmarks to your site not only delivers traffic to you, but also may show that you have a loyal audience. By the way, test if “mass appeal” is characteristic of your site on StumbleUpon, and not on Digg.

Search engine optimizers tend to think that top keyword rankings are the most important measure of a website’s success. But now people often use personalized search, so site rankings may differ from one computer to another. Of course, you should know the keywords that bring your site to the top on SERPs (you may use Google Webmaster Tools to find out how Google has defined you). Unless that traffic converts into buyers, think of it as an idle crowd.

High keyword rankings are not the aim of successful internet marketing, they are just a means. The most logical goal is to sell more through your site, i.e. to increase your visitor-to-customer conversion rate, or to raise brand recognition if your clients buy offline. And now we’re approaching the most important and dramatic measure of a website’s success – ROI (Return on Investment, i.e. how much revenue you have per dollar of your costs) and conversion rate (the ratio of visitors who have performed a targeted action to the total number of visitors).

Your website should bring you revenue – this is the Alpha and Omega of Web marketing. Pay most of your attention to the website metrics that show your website efficiency – in cash and targeted actions.

And good luck in your endeavors!

Bonn Appetite

From time to time we’re disappointed with the results achieved by self-proclaimed ‘SEO specialists’, website owners often decide to get down to optimizing and marketing their sites themselves.

Here’s some recommendations on what site aspects should be checked for mistakes impeding sites’ search engine visibility to grow.

First, check if your site is crawl able, i.e. if search engine spiders can access all the site pages that you want to be present in search engines’ indices.

Open robots.txt (http://www.yoursitedomain.com/robots.txt) and see if there are any wrong instructions for robots (for example: User agent: * Disallow /). If there is no robots.txt file, then it means that all robots are allowed to crawl your entire site, so it’s OK in case you have no specially protected site areas to hide from random visitors.

On all important pages of your site, check for the presence and content of a Meta robots tag. It should not have ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ commands.

On all important pages of your site, check for the presence of a Meta refresh tag.

Google doesn’t recommend it, so remove the Meta refresh tags and redirect visitors to a different URL with the help of a server-side 301.

Check if your site has a valid Sitemap.

Typically, you can find it at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml although it can be placed in a different location. If there is no Sitemap, create it – see more details in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

If you have a pure Flash-based site, you can’t hope for good rankings unless you have enough descriptive keyword-rich texts in your video. Find more information about flash sites optimization on Adobe Site. You can also think of creating keyword-rich static alternatives of your most important pages.

Second, make sure there are no technical mistakes that may cost you good rankings.

Ensure all your links have a consistent URL syntax, i.e. your links always begin only with http://www.yoursitedomain.com/ and never with http://yoursitedomain.com/.

Take care that your server correctly translates requests of http://yoursitedomain.com or yoursitedomain.com to http://www.yoursitedomain.com (Google names it ‘a canonical URL’) with a help of a server-side redirect 301.

You can also create a Google Webmaster account and use its tools to tell the preferred domain syntax specifically for Google.

Check all important pages for repetitive Titles. The content of the title tags should be unique and contain the key phrase that the page is optimized for. It’s especially important if you have a CMS-based website. The same check can be performed to detect the repetitive content in the Meta description tags, although this is not so critical these days.

If your site pages are dynamically generated, take care to use a solution for creating the SEO-friendly page URLs that contain keywords. Typically, the task is done by using .htaccess file, mod_rewrite or product/article/book/any meaningful name variables in the URL structure.

If you have no idea about the substitution of a dynamic URL by a more readable static alternative, you can get a general understanding by reading a Wikipedia article. With a static site, it is even easier for you to create keyword-rich page URLs.

Domain names can show people what business your in and what your about, quickly and easily.

Getting it wrong can cause problems. It can also be one of the luckiest niche marketing accidents that you’ll ever stumble upon.

Notoriety at it’s best.

Top Nine Worst (and possibly the best) Domain Names

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company… www.powergenitalia.com

6. If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always www.ipanywhere.com

7. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church . Their website is www.cummingfirst.com

8. Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:  www.speedofart.com

9. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe ? Try their brochure website at www.gotahoe.com

These are some of the best and worst domain names I’ve found. They make the visitor look twice, which in marketing circles is gold.

When you next trying to figure out your new domain name, remember this; not being strictly perfect makes us human. It also makes for some cheap marketing brilliance. Enjoy!