I rarely walk in to a brick and mortar store to shop, well firstly because I rarely shop. Second reason is, shopping online is just more convenient, and I don’t end up feeling like an idiot cutting in to check out and someone telling me out loud, “there’s a line back here.”

To make a long story short, upon paying for the purchase I get asked for my email address, and while I could have probably declined, I thought I’d go with it to see how Old Navy will use the information they have about my purchase, and if they were going to send me any unsolicited email. I gave the cashier an email address I rarely use.

But what kind of information does Old Navy actual get from this?

Aside from what was purchased and an email address associated with a purchase, they know what items are most popular, for what pricing, in what location, and whole lot more which I will not get into now.

The most important question is, will Old Navy SPAM me with unsolicited email? The answer, YES.

When I was asked by the cashier for my email address, I asked what for and she replied “for the receipt.” She did not say any more.

When I gave her my email address, the understanding there is that is the only purpose for the email address request. If Old Navy sends me an email whether marketing or not, this is spam because I did not request for them to send me anything through email and would then be sending me an unsolicited message. They did not ask for my permission to send me email, and so did not get any so they should not be sending me an email.

Well, as it turns out.. they did send me an email immediately after purchase, sending me a copy of their receipt and a survey.

The rule of thumb in collecting emails for marketing purposes is, always get explicit approval and the person giving you their email address should know what you will use the email address for, otherwise you will be sending out SPAM just like Old Navy did.

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While there is some truth to the fact that a lot of SEO providers don’t really know what they are talking about and employ tricks to merely game search engines, I believe many legitimate SEOs fail to clearly set expectations and commitments with clients.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become very popular today because of the constantly growing number of people who find information, products and services through search engines.  As a result, more and more companies try to get their service offers across by being visible to their potential customers at the moment it is needed. This has created a greater demand for SEO service providers who work with clients to get their websites visible on a search engine, and by visible the ultimate goal is to get a website ranked number 1 for words or phrases that a potential customer may be using; to educate himself and or make a purchase decision.

Here are some points that both the SEO provider and client should be aware about and agree upon.

1. Top Rankings are not Guaranteed

This may sound appalling to the business owner who engages someone for SEO services, but the truth is no one can actually guarantee top rankings on search engines like Google, unless they own it. I remember a conference I attended some time ago that Bruce Clay spoke at.. he talked about how his clients want guarantees on rankings and he simply replies rather smugly, “buy me Google.”

Good SEOs are constantly up to date with what works and how search engines works, especially Google which constantly tweaks its ranking algorithm, as often as 500 times in a year, or so they say. I want to underscore the “so they say” part because no one really knows what Google does, they keep everything secret and for good reason. Spammers that learn how to rank well on Google will only abuse this knowledge.

The bottom line is, how to rank well is a mystery. SEO is not an accepted science with known rules. SEO providers try to keep updated constantly because what may work today may not work tomorrow, and they do more than just surfing the web and reading posts online but I won’t get into that now.

The practice of SEO is the application of current knowledge of the SEO provider to improve a website’s chances for ranking well for its target keywords and at the end of the day a business owner engages an SEO provider not for guaranteed rankings but for the legitimate process that a provider is able to show, that has yielded good results for other clients through a span of several years and numerous algorithm adjustments.

2. SEO is about Process and not just Results

It is important for the client to understand that SEO is a process to achieve a result, and results are not instant. In fact, the metrics you use to gauge results of the management of that SEO process can sometimes be erratic. What is important is long term consistency that helps build legitimacy and authority.

The business owner must realize that they hire a provider for an SEO management process that makes sense to them, that as revealed by past results of using that process, can lead to better rankings. Just stick to the plan.

3. Adapting to Google’s Changes Quickly

Regardless of what other people may say, I don’t really do much to optimize for rankings on all search engines, just Google. This is where most of the traffic comes from. Of all projects, websites and analytics data I have access to, among the top search engines, Google delivers up to 70% of organic search traffic. So I don’t really bother with Bing or Yahoo.

That said, Google does not only make several constant tweaks, they roll out major updates that is disastrous for many websites, even the ones that the update did not intend to target.

When Google rolls out with an update, and if rankings take a dive, the SEO provider must know how to quickly react and adjust strategy to arrest any drop, maintain current rank or even regain the rank.

Again, this is why no one can guarantee rankings; because the SEO game is a game where rules are not all clearly known and are subject to change as Google deems necessary.

4. Trust

The business owner has to trust the SEO provider. Most of my successful projects were a result of having control of every aspect. Some projects had delayed results because there were too many people to coordinate with and get approval from, or the website owner had to consider other opinions before making a decision.

5. A Mutually Proactive Relationship

Some business owners may leave an SEO person to his own devices… actually there needs to be close coordination between both. Apart from being able to correspond constantly especially in trying to measure results of actions, the SEO provider needs to understand and know what is going on with the business and see how these things may have an impact on the SEO process. I believe for an SEO provider to help the business, he should understand the business and how it works.

6. A Marketing Plan

SEO is not merely link building or slapping on a few articles on some free blog sites.. it is marketing.

Some small business owners with brick and mortar stories, and several online business owners know little about marketing and may not have a sound marketing plan in place, in fact many think that link building is all that is needed. On a side note, this is why a lot of online entrepreneurs that turn to freelancers on sites like ODesk for writing or link building, end up closing up shop. They were made to believe that was all they need to do, by all these info-products and SEO / online marketing gurus.. inevitably their venture fails and they conclude that online marketing or SEO is not effective, when what was really lacking was a solid marketing plan.

There is a need for the SEO provider to connect and coordinate with the business’ marketing person, or directly with the business owner to ensure that whatever they do online is consistent with a decided marketing strategy.  If a client does not have a marketing in place and expects link building to be all that is needed, then the SEO provider needs to develop a marketing strategy for them. There are generally two types of successful SEO consultants, those with a programming and web development background and those with a marketing background. I belong to the latter, 15 years of traditional marketing has helped me develop sound yet cost efficient strategies to help clients achieve their ranking goals.

Anyone can build links and deliver results; short term results that get wiped out when Google does something to get rid of low quality low authority website. What is actually required to succeed is having a good online presence and a diverse marketing mix that would involve traditional marketing channels.

So what expectations should be set and agreed upon? What helps a client decide on a provider?

The answer, the SEO provider’s experience and methods of managing the SEO process, a verifiable successfully strategy that has delivered favorable results, prevailing over numerous search engine updates and changes, not by simply building links but by marketing the business’ brand unique service offerings on the offline and online space that both permeate to and support the other.

In practical application, people search for words or phrases on a search engine like Google, and a page on your website gets ranked visibly on the search results page, catching the searcher’s attention and getting him to click through to that page on your website. Pages that are highly visible, get more attention.

But why practice Search Engine Optimization?

Here are the top 3 reasons to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your website.

Increase Website Traffic
Every website has a purpose; goals that you can quantify and count. Websites are basically pages of information, created to conveniently serve the needs of people who need that information. Getting more traffic to your website means more people finding, reading, learning, and using the information you provide. In the online marketing space, websites are used to promote and sell products and services, or get leads for a business.

Regardless of purpose, any website can benefit from getting more visitors.

Build a Reputation
More visitors means a bigger audience for you and what you might have to say. If you are blogger or a writer who regularly publishes new posts that people find interesting enough to read and follow, you will be able to build your reputation amongst your chosen audience. A lot of people today use this to brand themselves or their businesses online; establish themselves as authorities and or credible sources of information about specific topics.

Create Opportunities
We have heard all to often that you need to grab opportunities that present themselves. However, in an environment where competition is fierce,you cannot simply wait for opportunities to present themselves, you need to create these opportunities. The proactive beat the passive.

The ability to put yourself, your brand, what you stand for or what you do out there helps increase your chances at opportunities coming your way. The Internet is just another medium of communication that you should leverage on in order to attract opportunities. Successful people do more than everybody else. They often fail more than everybody else, but that’s the idea.. doing more may mean failing in more things than the regular person but at the same time likely succeeding or accomplishing more than the rest.

Search engine optimization is certainly a useful skill any website or online business owner would greatly benefit from. Unfortunately, it takes time to learn and master, and SEO enthusiasts and students need to cope and keep abreast with changes that regularly occur with these search engines. To be successful at SEO you need to know how search engines work, and how they work constantly changes. The established search engines safeguard their systems of ranking, protecting it like some esoteric knowledge that won’t make sense to the uninitiated, in order to ensure the credibility of search results and delivery of the most relevant to its users. It may just be better to consult with a Search Engine Optimization consultant who has a history of proven and verifiable SEO results.

Participants paid to be in this seminar, and now this is your chance to see the full video, free of charge.

“Social Media Marketing is marketing of the future; where companies, businesses or individuals leverage on available Internet and communication technologies and use these as tools to deliver customer focused messages that encourage participation and dissemination, ultimately achieving branding and marketing communication goals.”

MarketingSherpa has released some research that reveals that more companies are shifting a lot of their marketing efforts from traditional to social media. Why? These companies are seeing higher ROIs from social media efforts, and traditional media not as effective as they used to. You can .

This growing interest in Social Media Marketing has also created opportunities for a position that did not exist a short time ago, the Social Media Manager.

Everyone is going social media; these are not just Fortune 500 companies but any business or person who has a product or service to offer like dentists, mechanics, painters, wedding planners…. people who urgently need but don’t know how to run a social media campaign, and likely do not have the time to spend on Facebook or Twitter looking for new clients.

Forrester has published statistics showing that 99% of retailers are planning on developing an online presence specifically on Facebook by 2011. Now, here lies the the demand for social media marketers… people who are already experts on SMM and will deliver the results faster than a business owner striking out on an SMM (Social Media Marketing) learning curve.

But what do Social Media Managers do? Apart from creating and implementing your social media strategy, they are your brand’s executive assistants and perform tasks like:

1. Cleaning up your Twitter communications and weeding out the spam messages, leaving those messages that are important to you… or as in the case in customer relations / support, routing them to the appropriate individual or department in a company.

2. Blogging and all tasks related to blogging and functions that pertain to the maintenance of a blog such as comment approval and clean up; and in some cases for managers knowledgeable in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blog optimization and content development.

They also help ensure that your blog posts / content, get the most traction by getting them out on other sites at different times of the week, or getting them exposed to your Twitter followers at different times of the day so more people would catch it.

3. In social networking, grow your network or followers. In Facebook these could be your profile friends or fans in the case of fan pages, and on Twitter, these are your followers.

It’s all about numbers, the more people on your network the more people see or read your messages. Social Media Managers will find people who are your target audience, follow or connect with them and then facilitate engagement to develop relationships.

The three keys to success being, network growth, sharing content and engaging your audience.

These tasks can take as little as half an hour to 1 or 2 in a day to do, which is why hiring a regular employee might not be cost effective. Doing this yourself or training someone within the company to do it might not yield immediate or ideal results for a variety of reasons. Which is why it would be best to simply hire an expert to do it for you, get results faster, and you get to focus on more important aspects of your business.

Who says no one can make money from social media? Companies and business are, so do the people that do the social media work for them, of course the latter probably have more fun… making a good living getting paid to play around on Twitter and Facebook all day!

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Monitoring your brand online is important. You need to be able to keep track of what is being said about your brand, where links are posted and what people think of your product in order to build up and/or maintain a good reputation both online and offline. The internet is so widely used for communication, personal and work related, that a business must be informed of their presence and maintain control of their persona and credibility online because it can easily transcend into the business world on the streets and affect their credibility thus decreasing sales and setting a chain of events into motion that only lead into a downward spiral. Because the internet has made news and communication so easy you have to be especially aware of your brand monitoring online to be able to detect the rumblings of someone, like a competitor, trying to ruin your image or a descent in brand trust and loyalty. Monitoring is fairly easy and really only requires some basic research and tracking. These are some things to consider and places to look when monitoring your brand online.

One of the easiest, though not necessarily the most effective ways to monitor your brand is to create a Google alert account. How this works is you enter keywords and every time your brand name is mentioned or one of the other keywords you receive an email regarding this sending you a link to the destination online where the word was mentioned. This is all fine however it’s not the most effective way to really monitor your brand online because it doesn’t provide a full scope of what your brand is doing and the breakdown of where your brand is being discussed online in terms of percentages and so forth. For this you need to hire someone to track the figures or an advanced software that can do this for you. The best way is almost always through human work because they can determine the validity of a mention of your keywords or brand and analyze the context whereas a computer cannot or will make more errors in this regard.

So first you need to develop a list of keywords. This should of course include your brand name and trademarks or copyrights you have associated with that name as well as clients, competitors, the names of spokespersons, high ranking executives, stock symbols, products, abbreviations of your company name or products as well as common misspellings that a person might type in a search engine looking for your brand or products.

People talk to others about brands and products all over the internet from reviews to consumer news to blogs, forum posts and emails about things they like or dislike. So there is a lot of ground to cover in tracking and monitoring your brand online. Every day you need to look through blogs, Twitter, social networks, social media sites, wikipedia, message board, forums, consumer news, article directories and the tags on video and photo sites. Track these mentions whether they are positive, negative or indifferent and the frequency of these mentions in order to monitor your brand.

With all the media bombardment at every turn, you’ve probably seen it all – exaggerated headlines, over the top testimonials and claims. It might be effective in catching the attention of your customers but it’s a lousy way of building long-term patronage and partnerships. What happens when the hype is over?

Here are a few rules to follow when creating your content or copy:

1. Simple = Good

Simple is always better. It’s easier to remember and harder to miss. According to Luke Sullivan (Whipple, Squeeze This)

simple breaks through all the advertising clutter. So before you start writing, don’t forget to check your cliches at the door.

2. Numbers aren’t always great

Lose 10 pounds in 7 days or 10 Tips to A New You will grab a person’s interest but this will only lead to a one-time buy (hopefully).
When your customer snaps out of the starry-eyed high and find out your product doesn’t work then the numbers will definitely spell trouble for your business.

3. Most of the time, there’s never anything more
We’ve heard of this line and some people have even fallen for it once or twice. It goes more or less like “But wait, there’s more! If you call now, you get the Super Pro Ultraxxx for a very low, low price of $99.99.” Would you seriously consider buying the product? Or for those who were cuckolded, would you want to buy another one? I don’t think so.

According to Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner of Editorial Emergency “It’s not just a matter of making sales; it’s a matter of making lasting connections and establishing a brand that offers genuine value. And treating potential clients with respect. And sleeping at night”

The bottom line is: Don’t treat prospects like suckers born every minute. Write good copy and establish lasting relationships. Long-term clients build your brand so talk to them and communicate with them accordingly.

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Article by Guest Author: Carla Marie Adlawan

Carla Marie Adlawan, fresh from university with Business degree in hand, decided to jump into the world of advertising as a copywriter. Four years later, she’s still spitting copy at the same agency and from the same desk. She’s had years of experience working with local and multi-national clients spanning various industries from IT to F&B, Real Estate to Communications, Retail and Merchandising to Transportation and the Academe.

During her free time she prowls the streets to rid the city of crime, which is another term for freelance.

Visit her blog, Writings of a Street Rat.

If you have comments or questions please use the comment form below. Please feel free to share, ReTweet or send this video to your friends who might find it helpful.

You must design a marketing program that offers a series of action steps to the prospective customer. The sooner you do this, the faster your Internet investment will pay off.

Direct markets use an acronym to remind them of what every marketing campaign needs: AIDA. This stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.

Attention is step one. If the visitor has arrived at your Web site, it had better grab his attention. I hope your site does this rapidly. Visitors get bored, fast.

I suggest that you make a promise or offer, stated early, and clearly visible on your site within a few seconds. I also suggest that you minimize graphics. Graphics reduce download time.

Let’s say that you have his attention. You must now interest him. You must find a way to present information to him that will keep him from clicking to another site.

Maybe you remind him of a problem he now faces or will soon face (fear). Maybe you present an opportunity that he has not thought of (greed). Fear and greed are the buyers’ great motivators in business-related sales.

You have his interest. You must now produce desire. The question is: Desire to do what? You are leading him to take action.

The action you should motivate him to take is to identify himself, so that you can contact him again by automated e-mail. You must persuade him to request something: a free report, a short course, a list of specifications – something. Whatever it is, by requesting it, he sends you his e-mail address.

This is the key to profitability. Your Web site should have several useful functions: to gain the visitor’s attention, to create interest, to create desire, and to generate an action step. Very few Web site designers have self-consciously applied AIDA. They are technicians and artists, not marketers. Not that many marketers understand AIDA.

His action steps should not cost him any money. You want his e-mail address. Offer him something of immediate value to get that e-mail address. Offer him several things, if you can.

Think carefully about what you would want from your site if you were a first-time visitor to your site. Empathize.

What do you want him to do after he reads a special report? What is the next action step you want him to take? Design everything in your free reports to generate one final action step per report. I suggest that you get him to subscribe to a newsletter. Then you can contact him regularly.

Another possibility: get him to sign up for a free e- mail course. For this, you should probably use a sequential or follow-up autoresponder. You can offer a course using only free one-shot autoresponders, but you must rely on the reader to click a click-and-send link to receive each subsequent lesson. He may forget. It’s usually better to have an automated system mail them at regular intervals. Your goal in sending a course is simple: you gain additional contacts with him. He requests these contacts.

Assume in everything you do on your retail sales site that your number-one assignment is to get his e-mail address. If he leaves your site without having identified himself, your site has failed to achieve its most important goal.

It’s nice to make a sale on your site from a first- time visitor. It’s also incredibly rare. Don’t try. Get him to order a free report.

For more tips go to
“Powerful Internet Marketing Solutions for your business!”

So what are those two things… I had recently completed a brief for a client which involved organizing and sorting out their huge mailing list of confirmed customers, which they have been unable to either maintain a relationship with nor leverage on it. The second thing was, I got an email from Megan Fox.

So we know for fact that a mailing list is an asset that any business or individual can leverage on, and that a business has a better chance of surviving with their own mailing list. If you have a mailing list, you can simply send out an email about a sale or promo, or about some product you are promoting; they get that email, the product appeals to them, they buy it, you make money… badda bing badda boom!

But what problems can you expect to encounter with email marketing?

Let us take a look at the processes that take place; first you got to send those emails out, then hope that people open and even read your email, and then click the link in that email that sends them to a web page with information on what it is you are promoting.

Email Delivery Issues

First problem here is something to do with your system or web infrastructure. I know some people who actually did this manually, mailing out to maybe a handful of people. Things start to get a little crazy when you actually have to mail out to hundreds or even thousands. But those who sent these en masse often found that the system they were using did not send out those emails to all recipients. Even if you try sending manually to multiple addresses, some email services will flag your activity as a spam attempt. So the remedy here is to actually use an email marketing system from a service provider, that is reliable, and by reliable I mean the highest delivery percentage possible.

Email Open Rate
Alright, so you are certain your automated email messages plugged into a reliable autoresponder service that you use to deliver your messages is indeed sending out your message, but “are your recipients even opening and reading your email”? They might be getting your messages but are they actually reading them? There are a couple of tricks a lot of marketers use to get people to notice their emails, but the bottom line is to catch attention. A catchy “subject” line can make it stand above all the other emails people get, or a catchy name.

Yes, I did get an email from Megan Fox… but well, not from actress that every man in America probably fantasizes over. Actually I got this email on my Entourage email client and the sender name was “Megan Fox”, of course I opened the email. It turned out it was a direct message notification from someone on my LinkedIn network. Do you see how that worked?

Click Through Rate

So your emails are getting received and getting opened and read, but are the readers clicking on the links that send them to a web page with the information you are trying to promote? If they aren’t then, your mail out, despite getting sent, received, opened and read.. is still a failure.

Remember that you mail out with the purpose of getting the reader to an offer, and readers not clicking on the links in your email can be attributed to either non-relevance of the email to the reader, or simply a poorly crafted email.

A poorly crafted email is self explanatory, so let me expound on non relevance. If you are a wedding cake creator with a mailing list of brides to be preparing for their wedding, if you send them an email with a story about bicycles and a link to an offer for bicycles, is that email going to appeal to them at all? However, if you send them an email about the top honeymoon vacations, that has a link to a travel agency that offers a big discount on honeymoon packages, this email would likely not only get a higher click through on your links to the offer, but even decent conversions/sales.

If you have questions or comments about Email Marketing, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.