Storytelling

Let me ask you a question. Where do you find inspiration from? Movies, music, books, magazines, seminars, friends, family, co-workers? – Maybe from all of those places.

Let’s face it inspiration comes from stories that we hear from other people tell. How they beat the odds, achieved growth, or found a better way, it’s all in the story.

You know storytelling has been around for hundreds of years. From the beginning of time, storytelling has been the means by which cultures and societies have preserved and celebrated their memories, passed on their values and belief systems, entertained, instructed and reported. Long before there were written records, storytellers taught through the oral tradition. It was true in the bush, it’s true in the boardroom and it’s true everywhere in between.

In fact I think true leadership is the effective communication of the story. Our American culture seems to underestimate the power of storytelling. But think about how powerful a story can be when you’re in front of a client. Tom Peters says, stories are the red meat that meets our reasoning process. Stories give us permission to act, they are photographs of who we aspire to be, and they cause the most emotional responses. Stories are how we connect with people.

Beyond Search Engine Optimization

Internet Marketing is essential for businesses of all sizes in today’s economy. At this point, most business owners have engaged in at least a normal Search Engine Optimization plan based around finding external sites to link back to their own site, and having employees or an outsourced provider writing unique content to place online. A few years ago, this would have been sufficient to ensure a high ranking for nearly any search term. With recent advances in search technology, however, it is no longer good enough to rely on traditional Search Engine Optimization techniques. Below are some non-traditional ways of generating search traffic that can have an even bigger impact on your bottom line than link trades and content building.

Use Landing Pages
Ensure that local sites from Google and Yahoo are being used:
Review sites
Community Pages
Create video content and You Tube Channel
Explore referral sites
Expand your use of social media sites
Explore the possibility of using a group buying site
Measure your results – Use the data and refine your efforts

We hope these tips help you refine your Internet Marketing efforts, and please contact us with any questions about how you can apply these techniques to your business.

We will expand on each of these topics over the coming weeks, so please be sure to check back for a further discussion of these topics.

Stop Burning Your Money (Part 2)

Last week we began a discussion of techniques used in effective Internet Marketing campaigns. To read that article, please click here: http://articles.markdeo.com/2010/08/stop-burning-your-money-like-dead.html

To recap, the 5 most important activities you can undertake are:

Keyword Selection/website copy
Inbound links
Landing Pages
Blogging
E-mail marketing

We wrote previously about keyword selection/website copy and inbound links, and now we’re moving on to landing pages and blogging.

To read more on these topics, click here, or request our FREE Internet Marketing Whitepaper by sending me an e-mail at mark@markdeo.com.

Stop burning your money like dead leaves!

While the country is currently faced with heat waves from coast to coast, in a few short weeks leaves will be changing colors, evenings will bring a pleasant cool, crisp breeze, and fall will be in full effect. In some parts of the country, people will be raking leaves into piles that they burn. Those leaves are a lot like the dollars business owners have spent on their websites- in a seemingly endless cycle, small businesses spend money on web design, copy, hosting, and with no return, they are burning their money just like those leaves.

Some persons, however, will take those falling leaves and turn them into mulch. They can use them to provide nutrients to the soil, and be able to have a great garden come spring. That’s exactly what a small business can do with the dollars they spend on the Internet- rather than just throw away their money on costs that bring no return, they can use that Internet budget to actually bring in new business in the future.

How do you go from burning your dollars to investing them in future sales? An effective Internet Marketing Plan is essential to getting the most from your efforts online.

Click here to read the full article and to get our FREE whitepaper on Internet Marketing.