Online Marketing

How Online University Marketing Plans Can Help You Attract More Students

by Leave a Comment

Online university marketing plans are an important way for attracting more students, even if you belong among the top performing schools, since the majority of young people these days spend most of their time in front of their computers. When the time comes for them to make decisions as to where they will go to college, they will make an online search as to what options are available for the courses they want to take. If your university does not make the top three, potential students will most likely ignore you since most people do not go beyond the first three or five results. If they fail to find what they want in the top-ranked results, they will probably make another search rather than continue looking at lower-ranked results with less relevance to what they are searching for.

For university marketing plans, the most important pages to optimize for search engines are those relating to their course offerings. In order to rank high in results index pages, you will need to include relevant keywords in these pages. When choosing keywords, make sure that they represent a search term that students might actually use when conducting searches. For example, if you are a college in Chicago that offers nursing courses, you might target the keyword  Chicago nursing degrees . Once you have identified your main keyword, you should include it in the title tag (the words that appear on your link) as well as in the first sentence of your page text, in page titles and subtitles. You should also sprinkle it throughout your text and include it in the last paragraph. To further add relevancy to the keyword, you can use variations of it in the text, such as  Chicago nursing courses or Chicago nursing degree.

Click on the PLAY button to watch video

You can also use keywords in your alt tags (the tags that indicate where an image is to be placed on a web page) or on image captions. When choosing a location to mention as part of the keyword, be specific but not too specific, i.e. mention the general location but not the specific town unless it is well known. For example, if your college is based in Springfield, Illinois, target the keyword  Illinois nursing degrees  rather than  Springfield Illinois nursing degrees  since the first keyword is what surfers will more likely be looking for, although you should also use the second keyword.

Online university marketing plans should also include provision for getting backlinks to your site. High quality inbound links are one factor that search engines take into account when ranking web pages. Pages with more relevant links will rank higher than those with fewer links. There are a number of ways that universities can get quality links. One is to ask their partner institutions to link back to them. Another is to ask professors who have their own blogs or websites to provide links. Or you can promote your course offerings to local or national news outlets, and then ask for a link back to your site. However, when asking for links, remember that quality is as important as quantity. Do not link for the sake of linking since poor quality links will drag down your rankings.

Online Marketing for a Law Firm – Techniques That Will Drive in the Clients

by Leave a Comment

Online marketing for a law firm is a great way for your practice to find new clients. With so many people spending an increasing amount of time online, they would also likely use the Internet to look for a lawyer if they need one, rather than using traditional techniques such as opening the yellow pages. And a search engine optimized website allows visitors to get an idea of what your firm can offer them as well as giving them an easy way to contact you once they realize how you can help them resolve their legal problems.

The first step in effective online marketing for a law firm is to decide what identity your firm has, and what law firm clients it wants to attract, since this will dictate your website design. For example, if you mostly deal with corporations, you might want a website that offers a more conservative design with photos of the lawyers in formal dress, which is intended to communicate to potential clients that you are trustworthy. If your firm wants to reach out to the man on the street that might be defending himself against a DUI charge, then you might opt for a more casual design intended to assure clients that hiring lawyers need not be a daunting process, with photos of smiling people on the home page.

Click on the PLAY button to watch video

The next step is to fill your website with useful content based on what particular area of the law your firm specializes in. For example, if you focus on corporate law, you should include articles that stress how knowledgeable your firm is about this legal field and what you have to offer. If you are offering your services to ordinary people with legal problems, then you might want to offer short posts or even videos on areas of the law that these people might frequently run into, such as drunk driving or traffic violations. You can then end the articles or videos with a call to action asking readers to call your office so you that can discuss how to help them resolve their problems.

Once you are satisfied with your website design, you can start using SEO online marketing for a law firm techniques to help it rank high on search engine results pages. Remember, if you rank within the top three or top five, you are more likely to see people click on your links, since most of them will not bother to go to the bottom of the results pages. You can do this by focusing on keywords that leads will likely be searching for, which will be your firm’s area of specialization, plus the area where your firm is located. So for example, if your firm specializes in defending those charged with driving under the influence and you are based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, you might target this keyword,  DUI lawyer Cedar Rapids Iowa .  Make sure you use this keyword in the header of your homepage and target a keyword density of about 3% of total word count. You can then use secondary keywords such as  Cedar Rapids DUI attorney  in the secondary web pages.

Online Luxury Real Estate Sales and Marketing Tips You Must Know

by Leave a Comment

Online luxury real estate sales and marketing is the wave of the future. Of course, this does not mean that there is no more room for traditional marketing techniques but going online greatly expands your reach and makes it easier to find prospects from all over the world that you can convert into buyers. However, it may take some effort to adjust to the new ways of online real estate marketing. Here are some tips that can help make the shift to realtor marketing online easier for you.

The first step in online luxury real estate sales and marketing is to have a well designed website. The first consideration for creating a good elite real estate website is to make sure it is user-friendly. Your leads should have no problem navigating the site and using it to find properties that meet their requirements. Avoid making it a website with flash animation that may cause it to load more slowly. Pictures should be a priority since leads are more [responsive to] listings with lots of photos that allow them to get a good idea of what a property looks like. If possible, you can also include video tours of the property since these will also greatly appeal to potential buyers. And you should have maps that detail the location of the property as well as satellite and street-level views. To make it more useful to your visitors, you can include applications such as a credit score checker and mortgage calculator.

Click on the PLAY button to watch video

Once you have a great real estate website, you can start optimizing it to rank high on search engine results pages. Ranking in the top three on results pages virtually assures you that a surfer will click on your link if they find it relevant to their search. One important way you can do this is to focus on one specific keyword per web page, rather than trying to optimize for several keywords. You might also rank higher by choosing a specific keyword, rather than a more general one. For example, instead of  homes for sale, Irving, Texas  you might want to target keywords such as  townhouses, Irving, Texas  or  Irving, Texas, multifamily homes . Make sure to include the keywords in the title, description and sprinkled throughout the content.

Apart from optimizing your website on search engine pages, you can also promote it using offline methods. Add the URL of your website on your business cards. If you have print ads for your company, add the website address at the bottom of the ad where it can be easily spotted.

Finally, one of the most important steps in online luxury real estate sales and marketing is to fill your website with valuable content. Apart from listings, you can also include a blog with practical posts such as buyer s guides and other articles that would be of interest to buyers. Make sure you include the appropriate keywords in the posts which should be used in as natural a fashion as possible. And always refresh your content by regularly adding new posts as often as possible in order to give your leads a reason to make return visits to your site.

Check this out: Deal Done Web

Success in Viral Marketing – 3 Steps to Harness The Power of Social Media

by 2 Comments

Success in viral marketing is best exemplified by the massive hit Angry Birds. What started out as a mobile application about poultry and pigs is now one of the most viral games throughout the globe!

Rovio released the Angry Birds app to be played in different social mobile platforms. It turned out to be a flop at first but when Apple featured it as a game of the week in UK, it started a viral social media campaign. The Angry Birds franchise is now worth about £760 million thanks to successful viral marketing and social media. Achieving such a feat as that of Angry Birds is not impossible. Here are just 3 steps to harness the power of social media:

1. See it to believe it

When Apple agreed to feature Angry Birds, Rovio came up with a YouTube video trailer of the mobile app with the goal of attracting interest. From being in the 600th in the game apps chart, Angry Birds jumped to 1st.

Remember the cliché “picture paints a thousand words”? Well, it operates on the premise that humans are very visual creatures. If one still photograph paints a thousand words, imagine the many messages a single video can send! YouTube is truly one viral media source!

Putting up a high quality video on YouTube or Tweeting a very interesting (read: catchy) photo are just two guerilla marketing ideas you can try. It’s all about out of the box ideas that are so unbelievable, people would want to learn more!

Click on the PLAY button to watch the video

2. The gift of sharing

Success in viral marketing happens when people share things without actually getting paid to do it. How useful are those tiny Facebook share and like buttons and that retweet button, right? Never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing. As long as your output for step #1 is creative enough, it has every possibility to emerge as viral advertising.

You may want to take advantage of sending viral emails with promos too! After all, who wouldn’t want to share freebies and discounts to friends and family?

3. Put it all together

Integrating social media is probably the best marketing strategy. Viral campaigns exist when they are visible in all forms of media. It is simply not enough to make use of just one social networking site or single form of viral promotion. Make full-blown invasion of social media your goal. Angry Birds rose to such fame because it was found on YouTube, talked about in all social networking sites and available in mobile phones.

Success in viral marketing may not be something that happens overnight but it is clearly achievable.

Next, if you are planning to start a viral marketing campaign and looking for tools to speed things up a little, you want to look at this.

Advantages of Viral Marketing – Top 3 Ways to Create A Buzz Online

by 1 Comment

Due to the tight competition in the business world, all business owners constantly look for successful marketing techniques to promote their business all over the world. A very popular free marketing strategy is called viral marketing.

In the next few paragraphs, we will be discussing the advantages of viral marketing and looking at the top three ways to create a buzz online.

Advantage #1: Low cost

Viral marketing operates on the basic premise of word of mouth marketing: peer-to-peer product recommendations. The internet is full of social networking sites, blogs, forums and review sites that are practically free for everyone to access, sign-up and participate at.

Use it: Marketing with social media is done by setting up an account or making a page for your business at every possible social networking site. Marketing with twitter and Facebook are the top choices because these two sites are known to have over a hundred million users on a daily basis.  Visibility is the name of the game—the more visible your business is, the more it is readily accessible to the public and the easier it is for you to deliver your message to your target market. Again, set-up profiles everywhere possible, it’s free after all.

Click on the PLAY button to watch video

Advantage #2: Great Reach and High Efficiency

Most effective marketing strategies make use of social media word of mouth because of its wide reach in a short period of time. The technology today makes it easy to like, share and repost photos, articles and updates about your products and services.

Use it: Once you have an update about your business, whether it is a promo, a revamp in your establishment or website, freebies or coupons, a new offer or product, posting it on Facebook or Twitter as a status update is the first step. Upload pictures to appeal to the visual senses of the web community then ask friends and family to like, repost or share. Do so politely. If your post is attractive and catchy enough, you can monitor the turnout of likes and watch it translate to sales and revenue.

Advantage #3: High credibility

One of the advantages of marketing on the web is the rapid and easy feedback system. See, it is common nowadays to whip up your phone, take pictures of daily life and let your friends and family know about it. Instant messages, tweets and status updates are the quickest ways people express their rants and raves. I’ve seen it far too many times: friends tweeting away about that sale we saw as we passed by, asking people on twitter for opinions on an outfit being tried at the dressing room, ranting about a strand of hair found on top of a pasta dish. Yes, rants and raves. The point being: people want to share what they know in an instant. And the information that come from these people are regarded as highly credible by individuals in their own networks.

Use it: Maintain your business’ credibility by constantly checking on people’s feedback and responding to them. Small thank yous for rave reviews or responding to requests and even making changes according to people’s non-so-good reactions makes your audience feel important. Part of the advantages of viral marketing is that it information spreads really fast. Why not make the buzz about your business a good one?

Keep in mind however that as all things go, there are also disadvantages that come with the advantages of viral marketing. Successful marketing entails having the good side outweigh the negative aspects.

Next, if you are looking at how to start a viral marketing campaign, you want to check out this tool, it might help you save some time.

How Does Viral Marketing Work – Top 4 Secrets to Success!

by Leave a Comment

Viral marketing comes from the concept of the sinister virus: one that secretly creeps, transfers, makes use of resources until it is fully alive and winning by exponentially increasing its power. It is a marketing technique that is also sometimes called viral advertising, word of mouth marketing campaign or network marketing.
Creating a buzz online to help your business may seem like an expert’s job. Questions like” how does the internet work for my business?”, “What is seo and how does it work?” and “ how does viral marketing work?” always come to mind.
Well, we’ll discuss all that and let you in on the top 4 secrets to success!

Does viral marketing work? Definitely. It is time consuming, entails careful planning but generates income and great results!

Click on the PLAY button to watch the video

Here are basic elements or secrets that experts use in making viral advertisements and generating viral traffic:

1. Power of freebies
Free is probably the most powerful word in the marketing world. After all, who could resist something that doesn’t cost a cent?
The trick is giving away a product or service as a part of a promo or using what is commonly known as “delay of gratification”. Say, availability of a free downloadable trial version to entice customers to get a pro version with more perks. There may not be any income from giving away today but once people rave about the trial version, there will be an increase in demand of the real thing!

2. Effortless transferability  
Basic premise: Viruses only spread if they’re easy to transmit.
Viral networking happens when people can easily spread the word about your business, sometimes without even consciously doing so. E-mail, software downloads, websites, graphics and links are some of the easiest to transmit and replicate. From a marketing point of view, the simplest and shortest message works best. Something like hotmail’s “Get your private, free email at hotmail.com.” is a classic because it is brief, concise, informative and found at the end of every email message that people forward or reply to. Effortless, wouldn’t you agree?

3. Use of common human motivations
People desire to belong, be social, popular and more. Knowledge of these drives of human beings widely help in viral marketing. Take SEO or search engine optimization for example, websites want to be at the top rank of search engine sites to increase visibility, popularity and income. SEO works by feeding on widely searched keywords and incorporating them in websites to make some ideas and contents trend and go viral. Another example is the blogosphere which caters to people who desire for their opinions to be heard. Blogs can propel a business through word of mouth advertising on the internet, whether the bloggers are paid  to do so or not.

4. Taking advantage of existing networks and resources
Experts in the social sciences would tell us that each person has a network of about 8 to 12 close friends, family and associates. This is what fuels today’s social networking sites.  How does viral marketing work in these sites? Put your message across. It might be as simple as a link on Facebook or as complex as an affiliate program with other networks—the thing is, as long as it’s on a network, it’s bound to work.

The answer to how does viral marketing work doesn’t just lie on these 4 secrets we’ve shared with you. Information on the internet rapidly changes and nowadays, novelty is the name of the game. To keep your business afloat in terms of viral marketing, employing these secrets and keeping a list of creative and fresh ideas always help.