If you really want to use your blog to get more business from online marketing, you might want to seriously consider the following:

1. Short – Write short snappy informative posts that make people curious
2. Personal – Be you, people like people who are honest
3. Easy to Find – Use directories, post to other people’s blogs and link from your main website
4. Commonplace – forget all the formalities and write as you would speak in the pub!
5. Interesting – So what makes your stuff interesting – slip in your unique value in a way to catch attention
6. Frequent – Keep doing it and do it often, people love new stuff
7. Interactive – Turn off moderation, allow people just express themselves – then you know what they think
8. Content – Make it real, with great content that adds value to the reader so they want to come back

An ebook, or, electronic book, as it is called, is simply a short or longer book you can view on the screen of your laptop, or even on your iPhone.

Don’t feel daunted by any technicalities – it’s a simple document, usually saved as a pdf file, which you can email your clients or prospects, or it can be available on your website for download.

Even if you are an expert on your, it sometimes might be a challenge to know where to start and how to approach writing this masterpiece. Remember, on every single page of the ebook you will put your contact details, so you better make sure it will only enhance your company image – so the quality must be excellent.

You can come up with free tips for your and give them out as a gift when somebody signs up for your newsletter or just use it as an introduction to your company. Make sure you make the use of all content you have already created – you can even put together your newsletter articles etc.

It is very important to make sure that your ebook has these items:

• Value adding content
• Contact details to your company
• Call to action – eg. “if you need more advice, call us now”

To promote your ebook, here are a few hints:

• Mention your ebook on your website and your blog
• Submit it to ebook directories
• Email your related websites about it and ask them to promote it
• Offer it as a free gift to your customers or prospects

After you have succeeded in bringing customers interested in your to your website, and maybe got them to read a few of your pages, in order to bring them to the next step, which could be for example contacting you about a particular product, you might need to keep in touch with them and make sure that they keep you in mind.

One of the options of involving visitors into happening on your website is to invite them to join your mailing list, so that you will be sending them a monthly online newsletter with free your tips – with links back to your website.

Writing a newsletter is an excellent way to stay in touch with your customers and to keep them updated on your special offers and news.

1. Write an article and create a special offer for the newsletter
2. Setup http://www.getresponse.com account
3. Create newsletter template and put together your first online newsletter
4. Upload your contacts, who will get a verification email with a link to confirm that they agree to be included in your list
5. Setup a sign-in form and send the code to your web designer who will put it to the website – preferably to every page to the upper half
6. Broadcast your first newsletter
7. Create a tracking sheet for the newsletter
8. Write up newsletter articles, broadcast monthly and track responses

Here all general rules for writing content apply, so don’t forget about using benefits, testimonials and irresistible calls to action as outlined earlier in this chapter.

The first step of your SEO (after you have optimised your website for customers) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for products type in Google. For example, one of your keywords may be “your”.

However, it is better to focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “your”, as there are many people searching for this word, but many of them might be actually looking for a job in your, for example. Also, the competition is usually much stronger with these words, so it will take more time to get ranked on the first page.

Instead, go for longer keyword phrases and combinations such as “your [YourTown]”, “your company” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right key words:

1. Organize a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends, relatives or even customers to find keywords relevant to your your business. Focus on the needs of customers, what they would type in when looking for products.
2. Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags (you will learn below how to do this). They could be a good tip for yours!
3. Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. It’s recommended to use a search term suggestion tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool). It will give you an idea what your phrases have been searched for recently. Just make sure that you pick the appropriate location.

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

• Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
• Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
• Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
• Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
• It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
• Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
• Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

While many online marketing handbooks would start with telling you how to drive lots of visitors to your website, we chose a different approach. There is no point in driving millions of visitors to your web pages, when nobody will do what you would like them to do – either contact you, or sign up for your newsletter or do anything else you want them to do.

Therefore we think the first step is to focus on optimising your website for customers, with relevant website content writing, and then you can look at how you can use search engines like Google, to bring more visitors to the website.

You will find loads of web directories where you can submit a link for free – which is an excellent area of website marketing; just make sure that you submit the right link, with the right description and keywords.

Web directories give you usually a free link, and all you need to submit to them is:

• Your website URL (make sure you always give them the complete URL, including http://, i.e. http://www.YourWebsite.com)
• Title of your website
• Your keywords
• Website description
• Company name
• Contact person, phone, email & postal address

On the internet, you will find countless number of general web directories where you can submit your website.

Even though they are free, some of these web directories might ask you to put a reciprocal link to your website – it means that you just copy their HTML link code they provide you with and paste it to your own website – it will then appear as a link to the web directory itself, so be careful where you actually place the link, so that it does not distract your website visitors.

Website owners usually create a separate page called “Links” dedicated to this type of reciprocal links and you might want to setup one.

To save your time a web-based service called Directory Maximizer will be a great help to you. Just logon to http://www.directorymaximizer.com, register and upload your details. They will submit your website for $0.14 per directory, which is an excellent value.

This service also enables you to upload more variations of your title and description tags, which is helpful since Google and other search engines do not like duplicated content which would happen if you submitted the same title and description to all web directories.

Another very important thing to mention is that there are both local web directories and even specific your directories. Make sure you submit to them as well – you will find them easily in Google by typing “[YourTown] web directories” or “your web directories”.

A blog is basically a special website which enables you to publish a post (an article) as often as you like, with an option for readers to sign up and comment on the individual posts.

It’s highly interactive, and these days there are lots of free blog software and web space providers, such as Wordpress, Blogger etc.

For your companies it is a great way of “showing the friendly face” of their business to people and talking to them in less official way, while offering invaluable content. If done well, customers will read your blog regularly and they will keep coming back to your website. Who knows, they might even contact you one day and become your customers, because you will build relationship with them through your valuable blog posts.

Google and other search engines love blogs because they are updated regularly with fresh content and it is also a great way of building external links to your website. Here is the how-to:

1. Download Wordpress free at www.Wordpress.org and send it to your web designer who will upload it to the server, put a link to it to the website and give you the login details.
2. Login, pick a template, update your profile and start posting regularly.

Once your blog is up and running, you can post comments to other websites/blogs with your blog profile or with a link to your website. So aim at having your comments with a link to your website displayed on high ranking websites. Of course, don’t forget that, if possible, all links back to your blog should look like this:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com/blog” title=”Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

Another way of promoting your blog is to submit its link to blog directories, which is very similar to normal web directories – and it’s free.

Click here to see a few most important blog directories where you definitely should submit your blog to.

1. For each of your main pages, go to the External Google Adwords Keyword Tool, pick your country target (just above where you are going to write the keywords) and paste the relevant keywords from your brainstorming and reviewing competitors’ websites.
2. Hit “Get keyword ideas” and sort the results by “Local Search Volume” by clicking on that heading in the table
3. Pick up to 7 best keywords – based on the average local search volume and relevancy.
4. In theory, those keywords with the highest search volume should be your target keywords. However, you might find that you need to go for a lower volume keyword that might provide better (and achievable) PPC marketing results.

The crucial step of online marketing is setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

• Fill in a contact us form
• Fill in an enquiry form
• Register for a free consultation/appointment
• Sign up for a newsletter with free your tips
• Download a free ebook with your advice
• Read articles for/about customers
• Take a survey
• Participate in a competition etc.

Ideally you will be able to put a value on each of your goals – i.e. how much is each step worth to your business? By stating this, you will be able to see clearly where your focus should be and how to work most effectively.