Epic Web Results

It’s tempting to play the pay-per-click game, especially with Google sending out $100 cards to help you get hooked. Before you decide to join the masses that rely on paid search for traffic, there are a few facts you should consider. Most importantly, trying to manage your own PPC campaign can have costly results. Hiring a professional will often increase your impressions, but rarely results in generated revenue.

A recent survey of 400 active searches conducted by Ask Your Target Market shows that very few people click on paid search ads. In fact, 33.3 percent of respondents stated that they rarely click on these links, while 23.8 percent stated they never click on the paid links.

Paid ads included in email marketing campaigns have even lower return on investment, according to the survey, with 41 percent of respondents stating they never click on the links found in emails. Mobile paid searches ranked the lowest for click through percentages, but did yield higher conversions of clicks to purchases, likely because people on the go are out actively looking to buy what they are searching for.

All in all, the results of the survey certainly show that time and money is much better spent developing organic backlinks and focusing on your site’s search engine optimization. If your site ranks high on local searches, your potential customers or clients can find you without needing to resort to using costly pay-per-click methods.

It is very confusing out there with all these Internet Marketing companies making every claim under the Sun.  Who do you choose?  Why choose Company A over Company B?  Company A promised me page one rank on Google and Company B did not.  Every person I have met with that is looking for a qualified Internet Marketing firm has told me they have no idea what to believe

1. Are your designs custom? And are the optimized for maximum conversion?

This is critical.  A website development & Internet Marketing firm has to have a firm grasp on what the bets designs are going to be for your particular business to help convert those visiting your site in those that are contacting your firm.

2. What is your onsite SEO strategy?

Most Internet Marketing firms do not know how to properly do on-site optimization and that means you are not going to get the maximum benefot for the dollars you are spending.  On-Site SEO is critical to a successful presence, especially in a highly competitive market?

3. What is your off-site SEO strategy?

Most Internet Marketing firms do not have an off-site SEO strategy and without one you will be left blowing in the wind, hoping for success but realizing after awhile that success will not come with the strategy set up for you.

4. Is all work done in America or do you have people in other countries doing the work?

Critical.  While some very good work can be done over seas, it is not ideal especially if you are spending a large sum of money each month for results. 

5. Am I limited in the number of pages of content?

If you are, then run.  That means the company offering that limited number of content pages is not concerned with your online success but instead is interested in only up-selling you at every opportunity.

6. How many firms that do what I do will you work with in my geographic region?

I work with 3 firms in a geographic region.  For example with Attorneys, I will only work with 3 attorneys per practice area per metro region.  This enables me to offer the best SEO possible and not have to compete against my own clients.  An Internet Marketing company that will work with lets say 10, 20,30, 40 or even more attorneys in similar practice area and geographic region will not be able to help you.

7. What if someone is doing more on their site than you are doing on mine?  Will you do whatever you can to beat them without charging me more money?

If I find that a website is doing more than what I am doing on your website I will increase the level of work I am doing and surpass them.  End of story.

8. What month-to-month acitivities will you be doing on my website and will you put it in writing?

Even if they tell you they are working on your site every month, make them put it in writing and get reports of the actual work done.  That way you will be keeping them honest.  And don’t be afraid to make them write out in detail what they have done.  A legitimate SEO firm will be happy to provide reports.

9. What is your Social Media expertise?

Social media is important to your overall web presence these days and a website without a social media strategy is missing a key component for online success.

10. Are you available 24/7?

Epic Web Results is available 365/24/7.  We are always available because you are our customers and you deserve to be able to get in touch with someone when you want to not when typical business hours take place. 

Internet Marketing Sales Consultant job available.  Epic Web Results is a rapidly expanding online marketing and social media firm and I am looking for the right sales people that are willing to work hard and put in maximum efforts.

We are a small but growing Internet Marketing firm located in the heart of the Denver Tech Center outside of Denver, Colorado.  We have been in business now for a bit over a year and we work with professionals like Attorneys and doctor’s offices. We have been extremely successful and profitable from Day 1 and we are looking for the right individuals to join our team and help us grow our company.  This is a chance to get in on the ground level of a start-up.  Who knows what the future holds?  I am sure the early employees at Google and Microsoft and Facebook had no clue either what to expect.

The rewards will be tremendous.  We are a true start-up company that has been profitable from Day 1 and continue to be so today (We have been in business for a bit over a year now and I have been doing all the sales to date).

Desired Skills & Experience

- Sales Professional
- Internet Marketing Experience Desired
- Internet Experience
- Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube
- Blogging

Responsibilities:

- Cold Calling
- Closing Sales
- Networking
- Account Management
- Working with Attorneys
- Working with Plastic Surgeons
- Working with Dentists
- Promoting YOUR business via blogging, and social media
- Reporting via Salesforce.com
- Weekly Conference Calls

Some of the services you will be selling:

- Internet Marketing
- SEO
- Website Design and Hosting
- Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube)
- Blogging
- Google Places

The opportunity to make great money is there but you have to be willing to put the time and effort in to this job to be successful.  You will need to actively seek out your clients in order to sell them.  Experience with attorneys is a bonus

There will not be a set territory (in the beginning) so anywhere you can sell my Internet Marketing services is acceptable.

This is NOT an easy job and I am looking for the sales representative that knows his/her strengths.  You should be:

- Personable
- Outgoing
- Hard Working
- Persistent
- Knowledgeable when it comes to SEO

Contact me today at 303-947-1737 (ask for Jon) and we can talk in more detail about this opportunity.

Locations I am hiring in:

- San Francisco
- San Diego
- Los Angeles
- Dallas
- Austin
- Houston
- Portland
- Seattle
- Kansas
- Pittsburgh
- Philly
- New York City (All 5 Burroughs)
- Buffalo
- Chicago
- Phoenix
- Florida
- Cleveland
- Connecticut
- Washington D.C.
- Tennessee

Local SEO is short for localized search engine optimization. In other words, it’s the process of optimizing your website so that people can find you when they search for local businesses or news. Local SEO is extremely important for people who have physical locations or offer services only in a local area. Local SEO is imperative to driving traffic to your business location, while standard SEO is all about driving traffic to your website.

There are several important factors that go into local search engine optimization. These include both on-site and off-site techniques. Let’s look at a couple of important pieces to the local SEO puzzle.

Local Keyword Research

When working on local SEO, you need to know what search terms people are using when they look for businesses like yours. Google offers keyword tools to help you discover what phrases are most often used by searchers. You need to make sure that your keywords not only use the right terms, but also include your specific location. In big cities, you may have to use more specific locations that include your neighborhood or district of the city.

Local Directories

Do some digging online and find out what sites your competition uses to promote their business. Google Places is an absolute must, but depending on the area of the country in which you live, you may need to use other directories such as Yelp, Kudzu, Yahoo!, and the like. Encourage your current customers to leave you reviews on these sites after you have your listings live. Often, offering incentives or discounts for reviews is the best way to generate these important ratings on popular local sites.

Social Media and Mobile Marketing

Utilize Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter for an extra boost to your local SEO. Make sure that your profile on these sites includes all of the localized keywords people may search for. Also take the time to set up accounts for popular mobile-based applications such as FourSquare. All of this links your business to your location in search results, thus boosting your local search rankings and driving business to your physical location.

Few of us would have thought, back in 2003, that a little website called LinkedIn could change the way that professional people around the globe network, find jobs and market their businesses. Today, LinkedIn has over 131 million users ranging from students to freelance contractors to CEOs of major international companies.

Are you linked in to this massive network of professionals? If not, now is the time to do so.

Marketing was a challenge for the majority of small businesses and independent business people just five years ago.  Running a startup was an expensive endeavor that few succeeded at, mainly due to a lack of the means to get word out in the marketplace and network with the people that had the power to help your business grow. While running a startup in this economy may be challenging in and of itself, most small businesses can now drop the marketing budget and utilize social media marketing for next to zero cost.

The top five benefits to utilizing the massive power of LinkedIn, in no particular order, for marketing your small business include:

1. It’s free to start
2. It is not as time consuming as other methods of networking
3. You can join groups that target your niche market
4. It’s possible to reach your target demographic, be it a local network or an international audience
5. Provides a unique platform to showcase your company’s best talent

One of the only downfalls to LinkedIn is that it can be challenging to determine a strategy for marketing, as there are so many people to network with. Joining a few groups, starting a group for your company or niche and utilizing your existing contacts as a launching pad to connect to other people is often the best approach to get started.

Are you linked in to this massive network of professionals? If not, now is the time to do so!

You may think that the About Us page on your website is just a formality. If so, think again. Research has consistently shown that people pay attention to the About Us page of websites, and often make purchasing decisions based on what they read. The purpose of this page is to educate the reader about why they should use your services or buy your products. Companies that are transparent about their company or business appear trustworthy, and encourage more sales. Let’s take a look at what makes a good About Us page.

1. Credibility- Your About Us page should explain clearly your area of expertise, and what makes you an expert in your field. If you are an attorney, your page should give information about where you studied law, the path you took in your career, and so on. If you sell widgets, it should explain how your company was formed and what makes your widgets the best widgets around.
2. Like-ability- Your reader needs to know that you know your stuff, but he or she also wants to feel like you are human, or that there is a human running the company. Let your personality show, when appropriate. If your business requires a high level of professionalism, look to add a touch of compassion to your writing. If your business model allows, show some humor. These things will go a long way in making your reader want to do business with you.
3. Bragging Rights- Don’t be afraid to show off a little, just do it in moderation. Showcase your achievements, awards and success in a way that instills confidence, rather than being off-putting.
4. Images- Include a photo of yourself, or your team. People feel they can trust a professional or business more when they can put a face to a name.
5. Benefits- Wrap up your About Us with a short paragraph that shows value and benefits to the reader. This closing statement should not be overly pushy, but should include a call to action.

When your About Us page is complete, put it aside and reread it a day or two later before posting it. Make sure that it reads like a conversation, and hits all of the points needed. Would you buy from your company or hire your services after reading your About Us page, independent of your website? If not, get out the red pen and make changes until you can answer with a resounding “Yes!”

Quality one-way links, that is links to your site from other high-ranking pages, are one of the best ways to boost yourself to the top of the search results. Unfortunately, finding quality one-way links is time consuming and often downright challenging. If you are unsure where to start, consider these top picks for one-way links.

Testimonials

Review sites, online directories and testimonials from clients are great ways to generate one-way links that typically require very little work on your part. If you have clients that use your services, ask them for a link. If you have customers that come into your physical location or that you do business with online, ask them to leave a quick review on your Google Places page or other directory listing. Consider offering a discount for a future purchase when a positive review is left. Nothing motivates people more than saving money.

Press Releases

Another cost-effective and fairly hassle free way to get one-way links back to your site is by utilizing press release sites. Anytime you or your company does something press release worthy, write up a quick story about it and place it on one of the numerous free PR sites for a quick boost to your SEO.

Blog Commenting

Do you ever wonder why popular blogs get hundreds of comments for every post they make? If the number of comments seems extremely high, it’s probably safe to say that the blog author allows links to be left with the comments. Follow a few popular blogs for your field or niche, and take the time to leave comments. You will be surprised at the impact a dozen or so comments left will have on your search rankings.

Article Marketing

Everyone knows that the big article sites, content farms and the like have taken a major hit with the recent Google algorithm changes, but they still have value to your page ranking. Write a few informative how-to articles, or target popular topics for a quick boost to your rankings. Consider sites like Squidoo and Ezine, which are still yielding pretty good results, all things considered.

Are you paying attention to your bounce rate? You should be, and if you are not, you are doing your business a serious disservice. A bounce rate, according to Wikipedia, is “(sometimes confused with exit rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.”

Basically, it tells you if your landing page, or the first page your website loads when someone types in your URL in their browser, is effective. Realistically, it’s impossible to get a bounce rate of less than 20%, but if your bounce rates are creeping near the 50% mark it is safe to assume that your landing page, no matter how much you may love it, is not appealing to your visitors.

What’s Above the Fold?

One of the most important things to look at if your bounce rate is higher than you would like it to be, is what is above the fold? The terminology references the fold of a newspaper, but your website operates in the same manner. If the information or images above the fold of a newspaper, people were more likely to buy. If the information or images above the bottom of the screen, before people have to scroll, is appealing they will stay on your site longer.

To encourage lower bounce rates, and encourage your visitors to click to other pages of your site, you need a mixture of visual appeal and ease of navigation. Tabs, links or buttons to pages that are likely to attract the click of a mouse need to be integrated with a modern design, catchy colors or images, and a simple to navigate site design.

How to Fix a Perfect Site

Let’s face it: You have a website, so chances are you love your site design. If you love your site design and your bounce rate is too high, it’s time to enlist some help in the form of tough love. You can either ask your friends and family to critic your website, and likely get mad at them for the feedback they give (that’s if they are gutsy enough to tell you the truth) or you can hire a professional to figure out the problem and fix it.

If you decide to take the safe route, as in the professional, look for a web design company that also handles SEO. Let them dig into your analytics and the design of your site, figure out the missing puzzle pieces and, most importantly, allow them the freedom to make changes. After all, if your bounce rate doesn’t improve, you can always go back to what you loved.

If you have a passion for what you do, you likely read blogs on the subject. For example, if you owned a cell phone store, you’d probably read all of the mobile techie blogs to keep up to date on the latest trends, right? Well, if you aren’t reading other people’s blogs in your niche, you may be missing out on more than simply fascinating blog posts.

In fact, regardless of what type of blogs you follow, you should interact with the blogger. The comments section after the post of many blogs gives you a major way to impact your search engine ranking. When you leave a comment, there is a line for your name, and your website.  Every time you leave a comment, you create a permanent organic backlink for your site. Every backlink you generate gives your site a little boost in the rankings. For an extra nudge, target blogs with a high page rank and popularity.

It may be tempted to recommend your product or service and to drop a link in your comment, but this will likely get your comment deleted by the blogger as spam. Instead, leaving a valid comment and your link in the field where it belongs will keep you from being flagged and boost your SEO at the same time.

So while it may have seemed that taking an hour each day to catch up on your favorite blogs was a waste of time, you now have a perfectly valid excuse to indulge. Blog commenting is likely one of the most enjoyable ways to enhance your rankings, so enjoy!

With all of the hype over Google+, it may be tempting to just neglect your business Facebook page in favor of the current trend. It’s important to remember that Facebook still has over half a billion users, and those users aren’t jumping ship just yet. Facebook continues to be a marketing powerhouse, but only if it’s used to its fullest capabilities. We’ll take a look at a few things you can do to really leverage the power of Facebook below.

GET PERSONAL

Facebook is as popular as it is because people can post quick, up to the minute personal information for their friends and family to see. When people visit Facebook, they don’t want to see stuffy advertisements from businesses. If they follow your business, they do it because they love your product or service and want updates, or because they found your posts to be entertaining. Engage your followers, post fun posts and most of all give your brand a personality.

ENCOURAGE INTERACTION

If you just post links all day, unless you get lucky and your link goes viral, few people will bother to stick around or pay attention to your posts. Interaction is the key to Facebook. Post questions and polls, and give people a reason to participate. Give away small items from time to time, or run interactive contests that require people to spread the word about your brand.

PROVIDE CUSTOMER SERVICE

Don’t look at a negative comment as a bad egg. Instead, use a complaint left on your Facebook to show the world publically how awesome your customer service is. Check your Facebook wall often, reply to comments left, and go above and beyond to resolve any complaints for everyone to see. When your followers see there is a compassionate human being behind the posts, they will spread the word. If you don’t get any complaints, kudos! Take some time to post a thank you on the wall of random followers. You wouldn’t believe how far a “Thanks for following us, we appreciate you!” will go in the eyes of your customers.