Search Engine Optimization SEO Content Marketing
My experience with large and small websites has given me insight to similar issues you might be experiencing with your business—increasing sales, building an audience, increasing traffic, fostering user engagement, and helping customers find information. One of the things I love about online marketing is the ability to monitor results much easier and faster than traditional forms of marketing. With tools like social media, site analytics, polls and surveys, you can quickly and inexpensively begin to learn more about the needs of your customers.
Below are some results I have experienced with various personal projects.
Search engine optimization - SEO
I am familiar optimizing a website’s on-page SEO factors to aid in indexing a targeted keyword. On my niche website for people looking to become heavy equipment operators, I have been able to rank for long-tail keywords from Canada by writing articles using geographic keywords and adding geotags to the pages to help Google position these pages. This process has taught me the importance of looking at analytic data to determine web content effectiveness and local traffic targeting.
Content marketing - Inbound Marketing
I created a drawing hobby site that contained a series of YouTube videos of me drawing and then provided links to download the drawings as coloring pages. In addition, I was curious to learn how podcasts worked so I also created a video based podcast for these videos on iTunes. In under a year, with 28 videos, I was able to get 40,000 unique visitors and 600 email subscribers.
Ebook Graphic Design and Development - PDF Kindle Apple
For my website UpliftingPlay I setup a Google Alert to monitor the keyword “drawing ideas” and was surprised by the number of questions being posted on Yahoo Answers for this keyword. I then created an ebook filled with drawing ideas and emailed a survey to my email subscribers to ask if they would buy something like this. The feedback I received from my followers pushed me to complete the ebook and post it on Amazon.com.
I had a few technical glitches in the beginning with the ebook formatting but was able to correct it and stop the negative reviews for the inability to open the book. The initial sales were steady although not as high as I anticipated. However, I have seen a high download rate on free promotion days that results in an increase in the number of books borrowed after the promotion. I also added link tracking to the ebook and have found this traffic views the most pages and stays on the site the longest. This data could suggest a strategy of offering free or low cost ebooks on the Kindle platform to attract qualified prospects to a website.
I recently ran a news feed ad on Facebook to test market demographics and was surprised at the high click through rate and post likes. My next step is to test conversions based on the best ad and landing page combination.
