All companies competing today have certain phrases that should be tracked either to connect with customers or keep track of competitors.  For instance if you are a mortgage broker in Toronto then “Toronto mortgages” is likely an important phrase to track.  It may take some revisions of your important phrases to find the right ones but once you do you can keep track of what is being said on the Internet and popular micro blogging tools such as Twitter.  How you ask?  Quite easy, Google Alerts for Internet data, just do a search in Google for “Google Alerts” and set one up for your key phrase, in this example “Toronto Mortgages” you will receive email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.  A popular use of Google Alerts is for online reputation management.  Setup an alert for your company’s name often offers some valuable information on what is being said about your company online.  Read more... (221 words, 1 image, estimated 53 secs reading time)

It amazes me how some companies profess to be experts in online marketing yet you check the organic or pay per click results and they are nowhere to be found.  If a company is good at SEO then the first thing they will do is ensure their position in the search engine is in at least the top 5 for the desired search result.  For instance in our city (Winnipeg) one of the key phrases that a lot of our web design clients search for is “Winnipeg Web Design”.  So the first thing we did was work on organic ethical Search Engine Optimization to get the number one position for this term.  Also we worked on our pay per click campaign quality score and acheived the top position on the pay per click advertisements.  Read more... (201 words, 2 images, estimated 48 secs reading time)

Its been an interesting last month dealing with a lot of prospects that are doing a great deal of research before purchasing.  Personally I think this is great as the more knowledgeable and the more questions they ask the more informed decision they can make.  I spend my time doing a lot of educating on our industry as some of our prospects are start up companies and some marketing people are still learning about online marketing.  It still blows me away that some prospects can not understand that their are differences in quality of products.  And yes the price is generally the determining factor.  I had one client choose to go with another Search Engine Optimization (SEO) package because the other company charged no setup and a monthly fee of $29.99.  Our price for our bronze package was $2,000 setup and $250 per month.  Well I wonder which package is going to be more effective.  If you are good at SEO you are at minimum charging $100 per hour (at minimum).  So this company can spend 18 minutes of their time on your site.  What this tells me is that they are not effective, their model is likely to get a large number of clients in a 12 month contract and make their money off of volume, doing little work and hence offering customers very little in the way of return on investment.  In our business you do get what you pay for.  Read more... (557 words, 1 image, estimated 2:14 mins reading time)

Lets face it to be good at anything these days you need to focus, study, research, implement learn from your mistakes then just maybe you will eventually become an expert.  They say it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  That is dedicating those hours on your niche expertise.   Read more... (491 words, 1 image, estimated 1:58 mins reading time)