Sourced from Tylercia Systems - Austin, TX

 

7 Essential Stages of a Total Online Presence

 

 

Content Platform

 

So much of what happens online revolves around

content. It’s how you get found, why people pay

attention and how you start to exchange value. Without

a content platform to build from a great deal of effort in

other stages will be wasted.

 

To me, the content platform starts with building

a listening station with tools like Google Alerts,

TweetDeck, Trackur, Social Mention, Sprout Social

or Radian6. From this point you can gain insight into

your market, your competitors and important groups,

such as key journalists, while starting the work of better

understanding your most important keyword phrases.

 

Keywords are like chapters

in your total body of

content plan. Doing

research, using tools such

as Google Keyword Tool or

Wordtracker, are the most

important ways to show up when people search for a

business like yours, and creating blog posts around these

chapters, using an editorial calendar approach, is how

you fortify your content platform.

 

Once you start consistently creating content, you can

produce valuable eBooks that will be the pivotal element

of your email lead capture stage.

There’s really very little reason to play this game if you

don’t put the effort in at this stage.

 

2 Organic SEO

Having someone type a search phrase that is key to your

business and finding a blog post or page from your site

on page one of the results is the ultimate payoff and,

long-term, may be the difference between success

and failure.

 

Search Engine Optimization can be complex and time

consuming, but most businesses can generate significant

results without making it so, if you simply focus on the

following three elements.

Produce keyword rich, educational content – we covered

this above, but search engines live on blog posts and

other educational content. Use a tool like Scribe from

Copyblogger to help you write more search engine

friendly content.

 

Make it easy on the search engines – Make the

on-page elements, such as your blog titles, URLs, image attributes, subtitles and internal

links, work for you. Use XML sitemaps

that make it easy for search engines to

grab your latest. Check out Search

Engine News for a great primer.

 

Draw lots of links

naturally from other

sites – Simply writing great

content will start this process, but so will writing guest

posts, uploading content to places like YouTube and

Slideshare, making thoughtful comments on other blogs,

submitting online press releases and amplifying your

content in social networks.

(Covered below)

ges of a

Total Online Presence

3 Email Marketing

An engaged email list, eager to hear from you, is the

most valuable asset you can build. 1000 responsive email

followers trumps 25,000 Twitter followers every day

when it comes to actually promoting the things that

make you money.

 

Focus on building a list of email subscribers that want to

hear from you and social media will become a tool set to

help you do more of that.

Choose an email service

provider (ESP), such

as Constant Contact,

GetResponse, AWeber,

MailChimp or Infusionsoft,

and go to work on building

email capture forms with the

offer of your free eBook or weekly newsletter before you

move on to social media.

 

4 Social Media Marketing

 

This is certainly an area where you should

consider strategy before tactics.

The first step is to understand how your

current customers are using social media

and how you can use social media to

somehow serve them better. If you do that, you’ll get

immediate value.

 

Create Twitter lists of customers and add their social

profiles to your CRM tool. Add a tool like Rapportive

to your email.

 

Then claim and build your profiles on Facebook,

LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Picasa, Slideshare

and Pinterest.

 

Your plan to work and engage prospects in all of these

networks may not be clear yet, but the first step is to

claim the free real estate so you can start exploring.

Once you start to share content, build connections, reshare

other people’s content and discover best practices

in each individual network, you can begin to amplify

your content and start finding ways to drive prospects

to your eBook and newsletter in an attempt to start a

relationship headed towards conversion.

 

5 Online Advertising

Many people waste advertising and then conclude

it doesn’t work. Pay per click advertising can be very

effective when done right.

One of my favorite things

about it is that a platform

like Google AdWords

allows you to test your

thinking a dollar at a time.

Here’s my take on how to make ads pay – Use your ads

to drive content awareness instead of simply to sell. Drive

Facebook users to sign up for your eBook first and then

you can sell them over and over again.

The basics of PPC are this: Use lots of punchy, dramatic

ad copy, but test, revise and test. Create tightly focused

ad groups with highly relevant ad copy, work negative

keywords out of your list. Test some more.

 

6 Mobile and Location

 

Mobile is more of a behavior than a

tool. The first step is to analyze what

behaviors your customers are exhibiting

before you dive into or dismiss Foursquare

or text messaging.

7 Essential Stages of a

Total Online Presence

I can assure you this however, your customers are reading

content, searching for things to buy and using reviews to

make decisions on mobile devices. Claim your location

based profiles in places such as Foursquare and Yelp.

Create mobile and tablet friendly viewing options with

tools such as WPTouch, Tekora or GoMobi. Start

creating mobile specific ads, landing pages, coupons and

offers that take advantage of the growing use of mobile

devices as a major part of the purchasing process.

 

7 Analytics and Conversion

 

Like many stage-based processes there is a cyclical

aspect as well. For some, creating benchmarks and key

performance indicators is really the first step. So, if you’re

one of those folks you can start here, because no matter

where you are in the process this stage will always evolve.

Many people can’t start the process of measuring success

until they are measuring in real time or can’t start the

process of tweaking and testing until all of the elements

are in place.

 

As you build make certain you install

tracking code from tools such as

Google Analytics, Spring Metrics

or KissMetrics so you can begin to

build the data to test and refine from.

Then you can start building conversion goals, funnels and

events, tracking your ads and split testing your landing

pages, opt-in pages and sales pages to discover ways to

increase conversion.

Even something as overwhelming and complex as the

changing face of marketing online gets just a bit more

manageable, I think when you start to view it as a system

it is much easier to understand and grasp.

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