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5 Steps to Take If Website Hacking Occurs

Hacking is usually thought of as happening on an international level. Spies from another country trying to hack the mainframe of America’s national security system. It’s all pulse-pounding, underground, Lisbeth Salander stuff and very scary, right?

Actually, hacking occurs on sites of all sizes and hackers are looking for personal information, banking info, or are just malicious.

And, there are also pissed off or scammy outsourcers that can take your site down. There have been countless cases where a small or medium business outsourced work, the outsourcer put in a back-door entrance in the company’s hosting account, then attempted a virtual hold-up, asking for more money than promised or your site will stay down.

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For even small businesses, hacking can cost tens of thousands of dollars in business.

No matter how it happened, here’s what to do if you’ve been hacked.

Stopping Website Hacking

  1. Contact Your Host

If you see that your site is down, is re-directed elsewhere, or is displaying content that isn’t yours, you’ve been hacked. If you suspect that it could be a freelancer or employee, contact your host. Their techs will be able to close any entrances to the inside of your site, keeping the hacker out.

They can also take your site offline temporarily, and put up a simple landing page with phone number, if needed. This can lessen the damage of your site being down.

  1. Gather Your Info

If you have a web team on staff, get them on it. They’ll be able to access the site through FTP, hosting, and CMS logins. These are critical, as these give your tech team the ability to get inside and fix the damage.

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If you don’t have an in-house staff, find a well-reviewed local service provider, preferably one with both designers and developers on staff.

  1. Utilize Your Back Ups

Hopefully you’ve been backing up your site daily, or at the very worst, weekly.

If you run a WordPress site, there are a number of free back-up plugins. These can be used to automatically back up and store your site’s info (away from the site, so it’s safe in case of attack).

Have a Team To protect Your Website

If you don’t have tech people one staff, find a reputable freelancer or service provider to take your back ups and re-build.

  1. Check Your Lead Flow, Bank Accounts, and Phone System

Make sure that your bank accounts haven’t’ been hit, your lead flow or customer-tracking info is safe (good time to change the password and call the software provider to make sure no one is getting in).

  1. Clean Up and Recover

Even if your site was damaged, it can be re-built. You should not only be keeping back-ups of the site itself, but keep all content (articles, text, pictures, video) backed up on hard devices (flash drives, external hard drives, etc.). This allows your web developer to re-build even if data was lost.

Now’s the time to make sure all passwords are changed (these should be changed regularly).

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How to Bootstrap Your Digital Marketing

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts. You can bootstrap your digital marketing.

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts.

digital-marketing

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

Bootstrap your Digital Marketing

  1. Start with Social Capital

Using social media to promote your business on a budget is nothing new. In fact, it’s not even very effective when you try the totally cost-free route. If you have an amazing product or service that goes viral, great. But for most businesses, that’s not happening right away.

You start a Facebook page, an Instagram, a Pintrest account and are faced with the social media equivalent of a writer’s blank page fears: there’s no one there. You can promote to friends, like other pages, and go through the litany of low/no cost promotion options. You should do those. But, it’s going to be a long climb if you rely solely on these methods.

The good news is that Facebook ads are great for small or new businesses on a budget.

Promoting your posts and “buying” likes is amazingly cost-effective. If the thought of advertising, and losing your shirt, on Google’s pay per click program, Facebook ads are for you.

First, for a few hundred bucks, you can grow your audience to several thousand people. If you are focusing on ads rather than followers, the cost is largely the same. So, it’s possible to spend under a grand and get the word out to thousands of potential customers.

If your site, landing pages, product pages, and copywriting are on-point, you’ll generate sales and leads. Now you can use these profits to expand your ad campaigns.

Digital Marketing for Beginners

  1. Do Work In-House… for Now

You’ve decided to take to Facebook to run ads.

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Who’s doing your ad writing?

Who’s doing the copy for your landing pages, product pages, and website?

These should be done by copywriting professionals. Great copy equals leads and sales; poorly written ads and web pages cost you leads, sales, and losses in ad revenue.

But, early on, you may not have the budget to hire top copywriters. You may not even have the capital to hire mid-level writers.

You’ll have to either:

  • Write ads yourself – this is a free option, but comes with an enormous challenge: writing great ads is not easy.

However, writing passable ads isn’t impossible. There are dozens of books on how to write good Facebook ads. Pick one up, study it, practice writing ads (on paper), then try a few out online. Testing is the only way to know if ads work, so take mini-budgets and test two versions of the same ad. Pick the winner and run with it. Once it generates a few sales, take the profits and hire someone better than you.

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  • Hire a copywriting intern – there are a lot of talented copywriters still learning their way, or studying marketing in college. One of the easiest ways to land big copywriting gigs is to have a killer portfolio.

Newbies need to build their work, so will be willing to work just to build it up their portfolios. Find a few good writers, have them produce ads and your web copy that generates some capital, then use the profits to hire pros. This method is great because you can continue to utilize up-and-comers to produce content while you funnel profits into getting high-end work done on your sales funnel.

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5 Steps to Dominating Google Local

Google Local is a great way for start-ups and small businesses to grab a foot hold in their industry. It allows marketers to target local customers and consumers to search for local businesses and products. Here we list our 5 keys to dominating Google Local.

5 Steps to Dominating Google Local

  1. Consistency in NAP

Consistency in branding is important. It’s even more important when it comes to your listing on Google MyBusiness (Google Local) and across the internet on local sites. If you want to crack the top 3 in map listings, your business’ info must be on point.

Make sure that your business’ name, address, and phone number is the same on all sites. This can get tricky if you are using local numbers for different offices, but if you can manage to use an 800 number as your go-to, then add the locals as secondary points of contact, that’s a safe bet.

While it may seem trivial, make sure your address is the same on all sites that list your business. Sometimes this can be daunting because dozens of new sites pop up every day, and many of them simply scrape your info and post it. They make mistakes.

  • If your office is on 100 Third street, and one of them lists it as 100 3rd street, you will run into problems.

Your business name should be consistent as well. Keep it simple! If you’re Joe’s Plumbing, don’t get cute with Joe’s Plumbing Brooklyn, Joe’s Plumbing Staten Island, Joe’s Plumbing and Hot Tubs. Pick one, and stick to it.

Google Local Guidelines

From Google’s guidelines regarding business names:

Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., “Address“, “Categories“). Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

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  1. Choose the Best Categories

Don’t “category stuff.” Google views this in the same way they view keyword stuffing, ie, they’ll hit you for it. Pick out the minimal number of categories that fit your business.

Content Drives Google Local

  1. Add Content

Add as much relevant, helpful info as possible on your Google+ local page. IT’s possible to add video, photos, and long-form text. It’s no secret that Google thrives on content, and rewards content marketing. If you have videos of your product or service, add them. Link to your YouTube page.

  • Have pictures of your product? Social media-driven photos of your customers? Add them.
  • Go into detail (benefit-driven detail) about your products, services, staff, awards you’ve won, and what you can do for the customer.

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  1. Cultivate Customer Reviews

This is good practice in general, as user reviews are crucial to the health of your business. Having customers review you on your Google listing is important to both your business’ reputation, and your local ranking. Well-reviewed businesses have a leg up on the competition.

  1. Build High Quality Links

Links to your business site help with SEO. The stronger your main site is, the stronger your local listing will be. Links from quality sites helps build domain authority, which in turn boosts your local ranking.

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6 Key Questions to Ask an SEO Firm

Despite the insider blogs that proclaim that SEO is Dead, the reality is that as long as Google exists and dominates the market, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will be a huge part of the success of your business. Most people cannot perform SEO elements themselves and the key decision is which SEO firm they should hire. Here Retaliate1st list the questions you should ask any SEO form you are considering hiring.

Offsite SEO Factors

Offsite SEO Factors

6 Key Questions to Ask an SEO Firm Before Hiring Them

Even those who scream that paid traffic is superior miss the fact that unless your site is optimized, you’ll pay more for clicks and lose visitors, leads, and sales because your site is confusing to use, doesn’t have good content, or is poorly written. At its base SEO is taking great copywriting and optimizing it slightly for the search engines.

It is an art and a science, and should be done by a professional. But, the SEO field is rich with scammers, fly-by-night companies, and fraudulent freelancers.

Before you make the wise decision to invest in professional services, ask the SEO firm these questions:

  1. What’s Your Method?

How an SEO firm plans to get your business to the top of the rankings heap can tell you a lot about how successful they are.

Everyone has their own methods, and some are better suited for your business than others, but some are just plain terrible.

The SEO Firm Should Have a Method

For example, link building is still a key to getting your site ranked. It’s old-school, time-consuming, and requires an investment of cash. But, it works.

However, if you do a quick search and find that most links in your industry cost between 20 and 50-dollars, and the firm is pitching you on getting 10,000 links for $19.99, you can be sure they’re involved with spam tactics.

2. How Good is Your Content?

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Not all SEO firms will provide content, but they should. Content is the future of digital marketing. Without relevant, useful, well-written content, your site (and yoru sales) will suffer.

The easiest way tot get a handle on their skills is to ask for samples. Even if they’re new, they can mock up an article or two for you.

If the text reads like it was written by a foreigner, or by a computer program, they’re trying to scam you. Google hates garbage content and will penalize your business.

  1. Who Have Your Worked With?

It doesn’t matter if they’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, or a mom-and-pop shoe store, everyone outside of a complete newbie will have reviews. If not, don’t be shy about asking for references from past clients.

Don’t neglect this step! It can tell you a lot about the service you’re about to invest in. Even if they’re inexperienced, every SEO expert has done some free work to build their portfolio, so they should absolutely have a handful of references and reviews.

Is Your SEO Firm Producing Results

  1. How Will I Know It’s Working?

If your business site is new, it can take a while to show up on Page 1. Sometimes you’ll see your site climb slowly, going from page 25 to 20 to 16 to 15 to 8, and so on until it reaches number one. Sometimes, it will be lost in space then suddenly pop up on the top of page 2 before climbing to the first page.

In between, there are several ways to measure progress. Ask them what analytics they’ll share with you so that you can track progress together. If they’re unwilling to share data, or give you vague answers rife with meaningless buzzwords, don’t do business with them.

  1. Which Type of SEO Do Your Perform?

SEO can be broken down into:

  • On-page – optimizing text, photos, video, landing pages, and all content for your search terms. If they provide content, this should be done along with content creation as well as helping you optimize any self-generated content.
  • Off-Page – Link building either through paid links or building links by creating articles, guest postings, and blogs. Both should be used for best results.
  • Internal – Working on coding so that Google’s bots can “Crawl” your site.

Your best bet is to hire a firm that does all three.

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  1. Do You Guarantee Your Work

Few SEO firms guarantee their work. IF they don’t, they’re probably not very good. Yes, SEO is mercurial, but the best firms keep in step with Google’s temeprmental changes, and keep pushing yoru site to the top no matter what updates hit.

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Kill Cold Calling and Increase Sales Anyway

Do you hate cold calling but need leads?

You’re not alone. IT’s rare to meet anyone that enjoys being cold-called. Yet, countless businesses continue to rely on it for lead generation. At best, you are starting off on the road to a very difficult sale. At worst, you’re pissing off a potential customer and branding your business as “one of those telemarketers.”

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There are ways to increase leads and get cash flow rising without cold calling:

  1. Public Speaking

This is old school and underrated. When you speak in front of an audience, even if it’s only a handful of people, you are instantly positioned as an expert.

Most businesses and organizations are only happy to have you offer a free, educational talk with their members or employees. If you deliver a ton of actionable, informative content, and pass around a sign-up sheet, hand out promotional material, or better yet, ask for their business after the speech, you’ll find yourself with a steady influx of leads.

cold-calling

If you fear public speaking, either get over it (as a business owner you’re in a leadership position), or find someone in your company that thrives on the attention of performing for an audience.

Sell The Audience

You don’t want it to turn into one of those sleazy “free” speeches that do nothing but sell the audience the entire time. Speak, educate, and help your audience and they’ll be jumping to give you their business.

Also, this is a great way to spread the word about your brand. People love to tell their friends about the great info they learned during a presentation at the local library. They’re not so keen on telling them about the fascinating conversation they had with a cold-caller at dinner time.

  1. Internet Leads

If you’re new to marketing online, use paid ads to generate traffic to your site. IF you’re on a budget, use Facebooks ads, which are much more cost effective than Google.

Facebook

Utilize SEO for the long-term battle. It won’t help much at first because it takes time for your site to be found by the search engines, but it is critical for long term lead-generation. In the meantime, take any budget you have and pour it into a good ad campaign that leads to a well-written landing page, not your homepage. The idea here is to take someone from Facebook or Google to your page and get their information so that you can sell to them. Or, to take them from ad to sales page. Sending traffic to your homepage is a good way to waste money.

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The Comeback of Direct Mail

  1. Direct Mail

Direct mail is a bit like cold calling someone’s mailbox, but there’s a huge difference – direct mail pieces are not seen as invasive.

Junk mail is junk mail, great direct mail (DM) campaigns will at least get read.

This is best saved for when you have the budget to send test mailings and have a professional copywriter at your disposal. DM is competitive, and only the best pieces are effective. Wait until you have the budget, then unleash a DM campaign.

You can get creative by sending out “chunky” mailings (oversized packages, or mailings in bubble-mailers that have objects inside that would be relevant to your customer, i.e., if you are a marketing firm, sending a business a few one-sheets, a booklet breaking down where they’re going wrong online, and a pack of toy cavemen with the headline, Is Your Marketing Stuck in the Stone Age?)

Direct Mail Still Delivers

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  1. Writing for Magazines, Newspapers, and Online

Let’s bookend public speaking with another guaranteed credibility builder and lead generator, writing.

Even today, the newspaper is still seen as a credible source of news and information. Online, anyone can publish anything as long as they have a computer. In print, articles go through editors before being published.

While readership for newspapers is down, almost ever paper now has an online companion, which is great because you get double exposure for one article.

Same with magazines. You don’t have to write for Forbes or Vogue to get noticed. Local magazines and newspapers can bring in a ton of leads.

The downside is that the shelf-life is short, but you need to be consistent in your writing efforts. Every publisher, online or off, is in dire need of content. Provide great content and they’ll publish your work. Inform first, promote second.

If you are up for the challenge, write advertorials.

Get Creative Rather Than Cold Calling

Get creative and turn customer testimonials, especially customers that have a compelling story, into human interest pieces. These are guaranteed to get your phone (and inbox) ringing because human interest stories involving a business show that:

  • Your business helps people just like them
  • You’re an expert
  • You are a business made up of people, not a faceless corporation that will take their money and send them into customer-service hell hen there’s a problem
  • You’re trustworthy – after all, their favorite newspaper/magazine/website published a story about you, so you have their endorsement
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Why Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

For many businesses, Pay Per Click advertising is their go to tactic for paid media. Pay Per Click has been the largest spend for over 85% of online advertisers since its inception. However, with the market being saturated, it can be difficult to market your ads to maximize your clicks. The first thing any advertising team must do is to eliminate the mistakes. Here we list 3 of the biggest mistakes that PPC advertisers make:

3 Reasons Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

  1. Your Ad Stinks

Listen, no matter how many metrics you can drown yourself in… no matter what new analytic buzzword is being written about on the digital marketing blogs… no matter what new secret trick is being spewed by the experts, one truth remains about pay per click ads:

  • They mustn’t suck

Look at your PPC ads. Are you proud of them? Would you run them in a magazine? If you were handed budget to run that on page 3 of the NY Times, would you use that ad?

Granted, print ads have a different structure, but, the content of the ad is key.

Frankly, most PPC ads are nothing more than follow-the-leader, me-too marketing pieces that are written with weak wording, and yawn-inducing calls to action.

Your headline must be strong. If it wouldn’t pull in a newspaper, sales letter, magazine, billboard, or direct mail piece, then it won’t pull on Google, either.

You can take a different approach. You can get more creative since the feedback loop is faster. But, if the headline is weak, forget about sales.

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You literally have to drag someone by the eyeballs from the white, black, and blue jungle of the SERP to your ad. To do that, you need a strong headline.

You get very limited space in the body, so make it count. If you’re giving something away for free, say it now or lose the sale. PPC ads are nothing more than headline/subhead/CTA. Don’t waste even one character of space.

  1. Your Landing Page Stinks

You wrote a great ad. Congrats.

Now, go make sure your landing page matches the content of your ad, represents the product or service that you sell, and is written with a strong headline, strong benefit-rich copy, and a benefit-rich call to action.

Where most businesses fail with their Pay Per Click Ads

Where most businesses get into trouble is trying to send 100+ keyword-driven ads to the same (or a few) landing pages. Using broad match over a litany of keywords is fine… if you can match the content to the keyword. We all use the internet in a similar way. We are multitasking, multi-windowing, and listening to Adele’s new album while shopping for running shoes. And our phones are buzzing with texts, SnapChats, and Whatsapps.

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In that chaos, you can not expect your customer to make the subtle (but really profound) leap between what they searched for, what they saw in your ad, and what they’re now reading on your page. It’s kinda close but not exactly what I’m looking for… lemme go back to Google and keep looking.

  1. Your Bids are Too Low

In the early stages, it pays to overbid. The number of clicks your ad gets plays into how much a click costs, where the ad is displayed, and the overall adrank.

Early on, it’s better to pay extra and get those clicks so you can:

  • Get a better adrank
  • Formulate data about which keywords are working, which landing pages are testing the best, and which headlines are pulling leads

After you gather this info, you can begin to scale back, underbid, then work your way up.

But, this only works if the first two rules are followed. No matter what your bid, bad ads produce no leads. Check out Retaliate1st and our PPC services to optimize your campaigns and save you time and money.

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The Pitfalls of SEO

Getting to the top of the Google rankings can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive market. But, it is possible if you optimize your website in the right way. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so ubiquitous at this point that it’s very meaning has become lost in the shuffle. This leads to much confusion about how a business should optimize its website.

organic traffic

This causes two problems for business owners:

  1. You either have to hire an SEO firm. Finding a good one can take a lot of expensive trial and error.
  2. You need to learn how to do SEO by yourself. This can take years, and the rules of the game constantly change. If you’re not a marketer or computer genius, mastering it alone is near impossible.

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You can make your digital marketing life much easier by knowing what to look for when hiring an SEO firm. If you’ve handed your site over to a pro, but aren’t getting results, see if they’re making any of these mistakes:

5 Common SEO Mistakes for Business Websites

  • Entering duplicate material on your site’s pages or blogs – identifying duplicate content is essential because most of the search engines do not accept duplicate material. This will crush your ranking. There are tons of solid tools and software available to check for duplicate content.
  • Using bad backlinks – links to unrelated pages or directories; or to spam websites- spam links coming into your site is a sure-fire way to kill your rankings.
  • Over-Optimization of required keywords – Although putting your target keywords as much as possible can be a good idea, blatantly over-optimizing will hurt your SEO strategy. Make sure your text sounds natural, and you aren’t stuffing in keywords to please Google. If a human would have trouble reading your text, Google will penalize you
  • Bad Page Titles – When someone searches for the target keywords, the search engine displays the title page in search results. Try to make your title page with limited characters, while hitting relevant key phrases (again, naturally)
  • Image Optimization and Poor Meta Description – A search engine can recognize images in text form only, so it’s best to optimize your image with target keywords or phrases. Imagine describing the image to a non-sighted person. Meta data may not directly help with rankings, but Google does display it on the results page, so it is useful for drawing in visitors and helping you stand out in the crowd of results.
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5 Best Ways to Promote Your New Business Online

Starting a new business? You already know that a website is essential, but how else can you promote your new business online?

The reality is, if you don’t have a huge budget for pay-per-click ads in the beginning, you’re going to need to rely on organic marketing methods. These can take time. If you work them to their full potential, you’ll gain traction and the web traffic will start to trickle in. At that point, you can use some of your profits to invest in pay-per-click advertising.

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Until then, utilize these 5 proven ways to get your new business noticed online:

  1. Make a Stand-Out Website

Just about every business has a website today. But, most of them are terrible. If you want to dominate your competitors, make sure that you build a website that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Do your market research. A site aimed a tweeners buying Bluetooth earbuds should look and function differently than one aimed at seniors looking to re-finish their bathrooms.

But, no matter who your audience is, make sure your site is clean, packed with good content, and is easy to navigate. No matter how web-savvy the user, if they can’t find your product page, you aren’t going to sell anything.

  1. Establish Your Social Media Pages

While Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest and slew of other social media sites grow in reach, Facebook is still the king of social media marketing.

Their “boosted” post feature angered a lot of small business owners who went from reaching hundreds or thousands of customers with each post, to needing to pay between $5 and $1000 per post to be seen.

But, as the program has aged, many businesses have utilized the power of boosted posts to reach deep, defined, niche audiences.

Facebook

Combined with its pay per click platform, Facebook should be our go-to early on.

Integrate Facebook with the other social media sites that fit yoru business. Early on, you’ll have very few followers. But, stay consistent, use your budget wisely, continue to crank out quality content, and soon you’ll have a solid base of followers to market to.

New Business Targeting and Content

  1. Use Local Listings

Local listing makes the search easier for your business to be found locally. Make sure you are registered with Google MyBusiness (Google Local). Then, use the same address and phone number for all local listing sites. Google likes uniformity in their local results.

  1. Generate Content

Blogging, with no followers, may seem pointless. But, learn to create, or hire quality content creators, so that your site becomes loaded with search engine optimized quality content such as articles, blogs, videos, picture, and infographics. Google loves information like this, and gives it preferential treatment in the search engine rankings.

re-purposed content 4

Write content for bigger websites. Everyone needs content. Creating great articles for bigger websites will generate links back to your site. This can help drive traffic to your site.

Don’t neglect writing for your local newspapers. Certain demographics (baby boomers, especially) still read the local paper for info. PR pieces are good, but human interest articles related to your product or service can lead to a solid flow of leads and sales because it not only exposes your business to a large pool of customers, being in the paper also lends your business a great deal of credibility.

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4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing Less Overwhelming

For a small or medium business, using social media marketing can become overwhelming and frustrating. There are multiple platforms to choose from and some are clearly not right for your business. Figuring out return on investment can be tough, since most social media marketing doesn’t operate on a dollars-in v. dollars-out model. Converting likes into sales can be a multi-step process, and is best viewed in the long term.

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If you are unsure of how to get your social media marketing on track, check out these 4 tips. They’ll help you get started, or if you’re already going but find your efforts going in circle, these can help right the ship.

4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing

  1. Editorial schedule

If you are using typical social media marketing and networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest or twitter, you need to plan, carefully, what type of content you are posting. Keeping a simple schedule of what was posted, where & when & what type of content, is key. If you have a social media team, have them keep track of this – anything from spreadsheets to old-fashioned notebooks are fine for tracking content flow on social media.

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Scheduling not only helps you keep track of potential ROI, but it will help you re-purpose content, using it multiple times on multiple sites (even changed slightly), which breathes new life into your content marketing and ensures that all content is exposed to the maximum audience.

  1. Simplify

If you are overwhelmed, it is a sign that too much is going on. It is important to simplify. When in doubt, back off, check your content schedule and start again.

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  1. Stats

What is measurable can be improved and measuring metrics on social media can be tricky. Luckily Facebook offers excellent info in their “insights” section and it helps you track likes, reach, click-through rate, engagement, etc. If you are running ads on social media then these stats can help you measure real ROI.

  1. Free Help

Social media marketing is still fairly new and the game changes quickly. This is exciting for young marketers and finding interns to help with your social media campaigns is not difficult. Still-in-college marketers are hungry for experience and social media is time consuming. Bringing an intern or two on board can help you ramp up your production without costing a ton of money.

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Getting Your New Website Ranked

Promoting your new business website can be a daunting task and having your product or service found by potential clients is the number one priority of new businesses. There can be no cash flow, no earnings, and no profits without customers. Getting your website listed online is key to establishing a new customer base and brining in a steady flow of leads.

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Getting Your New Business Website Listed

Organic Search Results

Organic search simply means a website being found through a non-paid search. If you type “pizza delivery Philadelphia” into google and wait, you’ll find 7 – 10 listings. The listings are ranked by google in order of importance to the customer and need.

Dominating organic search through search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge undertaking. It works best when left to a professional. There are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling:

  1. Index Your Website

Check whether your website domain or URLs is listed on the Google by visiting google.com/addurl. If your site’s URL is not already listed, add it to Google. Many platforms, like WordPress, do this automatically for you, but it’s best to always check. This can speed up how fast Google finds out that your business exists.

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  1. Optimize Content

The next step is adding some relevant content to your website in order to make it more search-friendly. You should add text, images and video to your site. Focus on the keywords that people might use to search your products or services. The more relevant your website content is, the higher it will be listed in search results.

Optimizing it can be tricky but to start, just provide valuable information about your product or service, as well as ways to contact your or order from your website.

Paid Search

If you want more control over how quickly your business appears on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you utilize paid-search advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The most used is Google’s pay-per-click program that allows you to write ads that will drive customers to your website and unlike running ads in a magazine or newspaper, you only pay for these ads when someone clicks on it, taking them to your site. This can keep costs down, and allow you to keep track of what’s working, and what should get the ax.

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Paid search can wreck your business’ bank account. Especially, if you aren’t’ familiar with how to do it. A professional should be utilized herald if you have the budget for it, paid ads are a great way to get people to your site from day one.

Long term, you should utilize a mix of paid and organic marketing. This way you will capture the biggest chuck of potential customers possible and maximize the return on your marketing investment.

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