The Power of A Newsletter

A newsletter is a great method of communicating with your customer base. It is sent out on a periodic basis, is an easy form of conveying exciting new products or events, and is something your customers can really look forward too. There are so many forms of communicating with customers, a newsletter can be the basis that gets snipped to Twitter or Google+.

Start the Newslist

A newslist can be a very valuable business tool for several reasons and can be established by placing an “Email Sign-Up for More Information” on your home page. This will begin to generate excitement among your customer base for new information, products, etc. After you have begun a newslist, it’s time to use it!

Generate Excitement and Make Money!

You have a database of potential customers at your fingertips now and it’s time to utilize it to build your business. There are several different methods that you can utilize with a newslist. You can use it to generate excitement behind new products and services. It doesn’t have to strictly be a monthly sales email. Use it to show happy customers, new services, coming soon, success stories, and more! Make it something for customers to look forward to.

 Additionally, use and monitor a newslist to test out new products. If you want to see demand for a product you are considering or in the process of making, then create a web page about the potential product, its features or services, and attach the option for joining the newsletter to learn more! If you see a shall influx of new signups, it may be a good sign that the product is in high demand.

Ultimately, It’s Worth It.

As you can see a newsletter is a very useful tool for interacting with customers to deliver information. It is worth it for your website to have a newsletter that customers can have the option of following. They may prefer to hear from you through email than over methods like Twitter or Google+.

If you’re looking to establish a newsletter, contact DBC Digital for help in creating a powerful design and implementation.

Written by Nick Rizzi. Connect with him on Google+ here .

What is SEO and Why is it Important?

I’m sure you have heard it or read it, “SEO is an important factor in the success of your small business.” But what is SEO exactly? And why is it so important?

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of taking steps to maximize the traffic to your website through the “organic” or “free” listings on search engines. In order to maximize website traffic, the site needs to have high visibility, which is achieved through a high ranking on the search engine. In other words, the site should appear at or near the top of the organic search results for any given search which may pertain to the business’s services or products.

So how is this achieved? There are four main groups of SEO ranking factors. These are On The Page ranking factors, Off The Page ranking factors, Violations, and Blocking.

On The Page ranking factors are the factors that are entirely within your control, and they include the elements of content, HTML, and architecture. The effectiveness of your On The Page factors is based on the quality of the posted content, HTML clues that successfully help search engines determine relevancy, and a site architecture that does not hinder a search engine’s ability to crawl the site.

Off The Page factors cannot be controlled by the publisher but rather are influenced by readers, visitors, and other publishers. The elements that make up the group of Off The Page group of include links from other, reliable websites, a respected reputation through social networks, a trusted authority, and the personal elements such as the country and locality of the person.

Violations are factors that you should be aware of and try to avoid as they may cause ranking penalty or a ban. They are spamming techniques such as creating content that is too thin or stuffing the content with words that you want your page to be found for.

Blocking is where searchers themselves decide that page is not relevant or they do not like it and block it. It does not necessarily involve any spamming activity, but it hurts the trust and personalization of your website. These factors work together as considering only one of the SEO factors alone will not achieve the desired results. It requires a combination of the positive factors to increase the odds of boosting your rankings and an awareness of the negative elements to avoid worsening the odds.

Why is SEO important?

Often times, clicks translate into profit for your business. In order to acquire those clicks, however, a high ranking on search engines is necessary. Why? Well, let’s look at some statistics.

• 70% of clicks on search engine results pages are on organic results
• The first organic result on Google typically receives about 20% of the total clicks
• 75% of search engine users never view the second page of search results

These statistics represent a majority of the clicks going to the highest ranked search results. A lot of clicks equate to a lot of profit. A lot of profit comes from a high ranking website on search engine results, and SEO is how you get there.

Interested?

If you or someone you know is interested in starting an SEO campaign, contact us today at DBC Digital for your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Today, there are endless possibilities as to what you can accomplish with digital marketing. For small businesses, I have given 4 tactics for the perfect digital marketing campaign.

1. Social Media

When it comes to social media, you need to make sure you follow a couple steps in order to achieve the highest ROI with social media.

First, make sure you define your goals and decide what you want for your business from social media. For example, you want to decide if you are trying to generate leads, share content, or create relationships. This all depends on the type of company you are working with and what you want.

Second, choose a social media platform that works best for your company. You can use one or all of the following platforms; Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr. I would probably choose as many as I could handle or that made sense.

Third, you need to decide if you are going to be posting the social media aspect yourself, or if you want to hire someone to do that for you. It takes a lot of time to build relationships, and most of the time, as a small business owner, you have other obligations to tend to. If this is the case, I would highly consider hiring a social media guru for your company. If you do not want to go this route, you can always develop a social media calendar to remind yourself that you need to post on those certain days. This is so you do not get behind on your networking.

2. SEO

If you want your company to be found online, then you should definitely look into hiring an SEO professional. This is very helpful for small businesses because most people look for their business connections through the Internet. If you hire an SEO company or become proficient in it yourself, your business will thrive.

SEO is more trusted than paid advertisements. SEO’s return on investment fluctuates as PPC rises and falls.

3. Email marketing

E-mail is a great tool to use. Many emails are opened due to the subject line, quality, and deployment time. Make sure that your research is done and give the audience what they want to hear in order for them to become interested and for the email marketing to pay off.

4. Content marketing

Content strategy might be the most important part of marketing. This includes quality-written Web content and social media maintenance. It also includes content such as blogs, eBooks, Webinars, and many other content driven outlets. In order to successfully execute a content strategy is to first know who your audience is and what they want. This way you can relate to them on a personal level and keep them interested.

In the end, it all comes down to knowing your audience, coming up with a plan, and testing that plan over and over again to see if that plan works for your particular business. If you have any other great tips for digital marketing, please feel free to comment below!

If you need help with your Digital Marketing Campaign, call DBC Digital, Denver Marketing, at 303.357.5757 today!

Twitter Etiquette: How to Retain Twitter Followers

Twitter can be a tremendous resource for reaching a vast audience of like-minded people. There is so much to be gained from a loyal Twitter following from a business perspective including getting the word out about an event or promotion, brand endorsement, collaboration opportunities, etc. Once you have established this Twitter following by sharing great content and truly adding value to the lives of all of your followers, it’s important to ensure that you are not doing things that could jeopardize your standing with your followers. After all, each person that follows you on Twitter is an asset well worth retaining. Here are some simple pieces of Twitter etiquette to ensure that you retain those hard-earned follows.

Avoid Alienation

If you have a large Twitter following, the odds are, you have people from all walks of life. While a blonde joke may seem harmless, you may actually be offending a large portion of your follower-ship  and risk losing them because of it. If it could offend or alienate someone, Twitter probably isn’t the place for it.

Take Long Conversations Elsewhere

It’s one thing to tweet at someone and have them respond. But when your mention turns into a full blown conversation, you may be cluttering up your follower’s stream with mess that adds little value to their lives. In these instances, try moving the conversation to Google+ or even just direct messages.

Bonus tip: You followers can only see your conversations with others in their feed if they follow both you and the person you are conversing with. This is good to keep in mind.

Don’t Be Selfish

Twitter is great for promoting your own interests and content, but this can be overdone. Don’t forget to share content from others and give them credit in the form of mentions. Your followers will appreciate your willingness to reciprocate their generosity.

Have any tips to add? Please leave them in the comments below!

Written by Matt Green, from the marketing team at DBC Digital.

5 SEO Copywriting Tips

The most important way to improve your websites performance through the search engines is to make sure you are producing great content on your website that search engines, like Google, will respond well to. Your content has a huge impact on where your site is ranked on the search engines. Copy write for SEO is very challenging, even if you are the best writer, so I have listed 7 great tips for making your website more appealing to Google.

1. Write Well
Some people believe that it is only important to make sure you are writing content that is based on Google’s algorithm, but it is also extremely important to make sure you are writing for humans as well. This means that your site must have quality content that will be interesting for your readers, while still optimizing your website to rank for your keywords in the search engine results.

One specific example is that Google can tell when you are just stuffing the same keyword into every sentence. Google likes variety, that means using synonyms for that keyword. People will find it more interesting and you will not get flagged for having duplicate content.

2. Use h1 tag
Using h1 tags for your title will make Google take the title seriously. This allows you to achieve a large focus on your chosen keywords, provided you optimize the title for what you are targeting. Following this tip, will always allow you to improve your search engine results very quickly.You should also use h2 tags for subheadings, and h3 tags for sub-subheadings. Google will respect you for making your article easy to follow.

3. Keyword density is important
As I said before, make sure you are not stuffing your content with keywords. Place your keywords, strategically, at the beginning and somewhere at the end of your content. The rest of the copy should be focused on writing good content that serves a purpose and is not spammy. If you produce spammy content, the search engines will be able to tell.

4. Use Meta Tags
Use your title’s keywords in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION. Google will love these tags because it gives them set information about the page. Make sure you are not making these identical to any other tags because Google will consider this spam.

5. Don’t Ramble
Try to avoid rambling and try to wrap up your content about 500-750 words. A lot can be said in 500 words, so make sure you are staying focused and relative to your specific keywords. Running off on tangents that have nothing to do with the subject matter will pollute your copy and confuse Google about what you are trying to rank for.

If you, or someone you know is interested in SEO, contact us today at DBC Digital for your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

SEO vs SEM

In this day and age in digital marketing, there is a large amount of keywords being flung around that many are confused by the meaning of, most importantly the dreaded acronyms. For those who are just starting to get their toes wet in online marketing, we wanted to provide you a quick explanation between SEO and SEM and the difference between them.

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Marketing, which refers to the process of increasing your site’s search engine ranking for a specific set of keywords or individual keywords. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, look for specific things both on and off your website that will determine whether or not it’s relevant for a specific query. This is the goal of SEO.

SEM

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is the strategy to increase your sales and traffic through the search engine channel. Search engine marketing includes SEO as well as paid search. Paid search, also known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click), refers to those sponsored advertisments you will see at the top and right hand side of Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. Businesses are constantly bidding eachother for every click that drives people to their website. The more relevant your website landing page is, the more you pay. And the more you pay, the higher you’ll appear on the search engine results page (SERP).

Why are they important?

Did you know that 93% of all online experienced begin with a search engine? This means that all your potential customers and prospects are finding or not finding you by visiting the first listings in Google, etc. They will type in a search query such as “Denver car accident lawyer” and begin to visit the websites that they see first. What should be important to you is that you are ranking well. You’ll more than likely be noticed if you’re at the top of the search query rather than at the bottom or in the back pages.

Interested?

If you or someone you know is interested in starting either a SEO or SEM campaign, contact us today at DBC Digital for all of your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Tips and Tricks For An Email Newsletter

While they seem to be less common in the technology world today, email newsletters are still a very large part of the information tree. When you decide to use an email newsletter, it is important that you understand what you’re going to write about and how to effectively market and reach to your audience. Here are a few tips on how to write an effective newsletter:

 

A. Establish your objective(s) in the beginning.
Well performing newsletters have a very singular objective and maintains that focus throughout the entire content. If this is a customer retaining email, than the content needs to focus on adding valuable information for the email’s recipients. If your newsletter is intended to cross-sell, it should be informative and provide valuable content that informs and educates the readers on why they should get the certain product and why they will need it from your organizational skills.

B. Your subject line matters.
If you create the best content ever, there’s a huge change it will never be seen unless your subject line gives your recipient a good reason to even open it. People need to know that your email is even worth their time.

C. Give your reader value, not what you pertain as valuable.
Your reader never wants their time to be wasted. Tell them how they are able to save time, save money, stay fit, etc. Give them information that is valuable to them and maybe not necessarily you.

D. Keep your email short and skimable.
When you use your email body, make sure to highlight key points and deliver your main points in the newsletter. Make sure not to overwhelm your readers with too much content in the actual email. As to the newsletter, it is often recommended to stick with 3-5 articles. The landing page should make it easy for your reader to find the content they’re looking for.

E. Keep it fresh.
Readers will want you to keep both the concept and look new and different. Don’t stick to a certain subject line, email template, or design for extended periods of time. Make sure you use new concepts.

F. Create your newsletter mobile and preview friendly.
When creating your newsletter, try to minimize the amount of images. Plan for your important content to be above the fold in the first 300px or so above the preview pane. Your newsletter should be simple enough for mobile devices.

G. Have a plan.
No matter what, make sure to have a plan whether it be a test plan, editorial content plan, Facebook/Twitter plan, etc. The most successful newsletters are proactive in design and development. While they may leave out some areas for large stories or content, the majority of the content and testing, the integration with any social networks have an established flow and pattern to it.

H. Promotion.
Make it a point to ask your readers to share your newsletter, you can be amazed at the success of word of mouth whether it be socially or personally.

Contact

If you or someone you know is looking to move forward with a newsletter or maybe needs a little help refining it, contact us today at DBC Digital, your #1 source for email marketing service!