Download HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY FROM DIGITAL MARKETING

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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
HOW TO ACTUALLY
MAKE MONEY FROM
DIGITAL MARKETING
A Primer
for Local
Business
Owners
A Publication of
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
AN INTRODUCTION TO
DIGITAL MARKETING FOR
LOCAL BUSINESSES
By Nigel Edelshain
Nigel Edelshain is Wainscot Media’s head
of digital media and marketing. He is
responsible for delivering digital marketing
programs to Wainscot’s clients and
promoting the company’s offerings through
all channels. Nigel has developed a large
following for his own blog, sales2.com. He
has an undergraduate degree in microchip
design and an MBA from the Wharton
business school.
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This ebook is aimed at small business owners that
serve clients in their local area.
I’m going to do my best to speak plain English
throughout and not swerve off into speaking “Geek”.
I know from our day-to-day discussions that most
of you now have your “feet wet” in digital marketing
(i.e. you have a website and a Facebook page)
but many of you are not seeing digital marketing
“moving the needle” on your sales numbers.
This ebook is about how you can use the Internet to
actually make money for your business.
There are an almost endless number of ways you
can market on the Internet but many of them do not
present a clear path to sales. The approach in this
ebook defines a straight line to additional business
for you.
Take a look at the diagram to the right. This is the
Internet marketing approach we will be describing
in this ebook. It is adapted from the Inbound
Marketing methodology created by Hubspot.
(Wainscot is a Hubspot partner.) Each chapter in
this ebook will describe one of the stages in the
diagram to the right.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
CONTENTS
GETTING VISITORS /8
GETTING LEADS /20
GETTING CLIENTS /26
GETTING BETTER /32
CONCLUSION /38
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CHAPTER 1
GETTING
VISITORS
You need to get people to your website. Your website is your storefront
on the Internet. When people are on your website you have a chance to
convert them into leads and customers.
So the first (and biggest) challenge in Internet marketing is generating
visitors. The strategies we outline in this ebook for generating visitors are:
• Optimizing your website & blog for search engines
• Driving visitors from the major social media sites
• Driving visitors from print ads
We will go through a brief description of each strategy in the following
pages.
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
Search Engines
Every day Google is offering to share a bit of traffic with you. And for free. It’s a great deal because
Google’s search page gets about 114 billion searches per month.
The only problem is it’s such a great deal everyone wants in. So every business out there is
competing for their slice of the Google “traffic pie.”
Grabbing your slice of the Google pie (or Bing or Yahoo pie—smaller pies but tasty nonetheless) is
something we in the digital world call “Search Engine Optimization” (or “SEO”).
Your Website
To get some traffic from Google you need to score well in the “Google exam”. Google is
constantly examining all the websites in the world to see how they score for different words (called
“keywords”).
So Google’s search engine looks at your website and says “do you have a good site for the
keywords somebody just typed into me?”
How does Google define “good”? Google wants to know if one of the pages on your website uses
the words the searcher has just typed in. The other major factor that Google considers is whether a
lot of websites “point” to your website by linking to you, giving you a high “authority” score.
If you have the words I’m typing into Google on your web page and you have a high “authority” (lots
of people point to you), Google is going to put you high up on my search results page.
High up, especially on page 1, of the search results, is critical as research from Chitika shows the
search results on page 1 get 92% of the all the user’s clicks, leaving only 8% of traffic for everyone
else.
day Google is offering to share a piece
“ Every
of its traffic pie with you...and for free
”
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Your Blog
Up to this point, I’ve been talking about your website but secretly I’ve known that I’m really not just
talking about your website but actually about your blog as well.
Here’s the thing: A blog is just a tool to publish web pages. Blog software like Wordpress or
Hubspot lets you publish web pages easily by typing text into an editor as if you were typing into
Microsoft Word.
From Google’s perspective it does not matter if a web page is a “website web page” or a “blog web
page”. They are all web pages.
What’s cool about blog web pages is that they get updated. That happens because they are easy
to update. And when something is easy to do then we humans do it.
If you don’t have a blog and don’t have a content management system (a fancy word for
something that looks a lot like a blog on the administrative side) then what happens is you don’t
update your web pages nor do you produce new web pages very often at all.
Google does not like stale web pages. Stale web pages, especially ones that just promote your
business rather than educate, don’t get links from other websites either. These pages soon drop
down Google’s rankings and are replaced by nice fresh blog web pages.
Bottom line: to get your fair share of Google’s pie you probably need a blog.
line: to get your fair share of Google’s
“ Bottom
pie you probably need a blog.
”
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Social Media
Just as Google will share its traffic pie with you so will the big social media sites out there:
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc.
Most of you probably already have a Facebook page but from what I’ve seen many fewer have a
Twitter account and less still are on Pinterest.
Which Social Media Sites?
Should you be on Twitter? Or Pinterest or Linkedin? Here’s the key point: it depends on your
customers/potential customers.
You should invest your time and energy on the sites that your potential customers use. If your
customers are heavy users of Linkedin that’s where you should be.
Each social network has its own demographic profile. Broadly speaking Facebook is used by
almost everyone these days. The demographic profile of Twitter users today is pretty broad and is
not that dissimilar to Facebook. Pinterest has been a fast up-and-comer. It skews heavily female and towards the mature end.
Linkedin is basically a business-to-business platform so if you sell to other businesses it’s a must, if
you sell only to consumers than it won’t drive direct sales for you.
should invest your time and energy on the
“ You
sites that your potential customers use.
”
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
The Marketing Approach
Whichever social media sites you use, your marketing approach should be to get people from
your social media pages to your website or blog.
To do this you need to provide your social media viewers with reasons to visit. The approach we
recommend is posting links to content (or offers) that are housed on your website or blog. Theses
links act as teasers to the people visiting your social media pages.
In addition to links to blog posts you can also post other helpful content on your social media
profiles, such as links to other people’s content that you believe your audience will find helpful.
You can also make about 20% of your posts something more promotional about your product or
service.
We typically post links to every blog post on Facebook and Twitter. These “links” are a short
teaser sentence or two about the blog post and a hyperlink next to a phrase like “read more”.
This hyperlink takes the viewer to our blog where they can read the full post.
Once you have a viewer on your blog you have the chance to take them further in your marketing
process, read on to find out about that.
key to choosing which social media
“ The
websites to focus on is what do your potential
customers use?
”
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Print ads
If your goal is to drive customers to your website, you may be surprised how effective magazine
ads are.
Over 36% of adults will search out a product they are interested in and saw in a magazine while
only 26% will search out a product in an email ad, 24% will search out a product they saw in a
Web ad and 17% will search out a product they saw on Twitter or Facebook.
Many businesses look only to the Internet and social networks to target younger audiences but
almost all young people still read magazines. In fact, 96% of adults under 25 read magazines and
they read more magazines than older adults. In the past month, the average adult under 25 has
read 8 magazines, considerably more than adults 35+ (source: the MPA.)
Research data shows that traditional print magazines may be a great way to bolster your online
efforts. When considering ways to drive traffic to your website or social profiles it seems you
should not discount magazines - even ones on paper.
“ ads are
You may be surprised how effective magazine
”
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CHAPTER 2
GETTING
LEADS
Once people visit your website and blog, you need to convert as many of
them as possible to leads. The goal is to turn anonymous web visitors into
named contacts that you can market to.
Once you have someone’s contact information you can kick off marketing
processes described in chapter 3 that enable you to convert leads into
clients but first you need to create leads.
There are two elements you need to build to generate leads:
• Calls-To-Action, and
• Landing pages
We will go through a brief description of each element in this chapter.
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Calls-To-Action
A call-to-action (CTA) is a graphic or line of text that invites your website visitor to take
action.
CTA’s are one of key elements that turn your content marketing from a nice-to-have
“library” into an important “sales machine” for your business.
A CTA takes your visitor from a content piece like a blog post and sends them to a
landing page. On the landing page you give your visitor the chance to exchange their
contact information for an offer—often a piece of premium content like an ebook.
Without a CTA in your initial blog post/web page none of this process would happen.
Your visitor would still be anonymous. You would have no chance of ever selling them
anything.
When creating a call-to-action consider both design and message. (An example CTA
we’ve used in some of our blog posts is shown to the right.)
A CTA is pointless if your visitors don’t notice it. An effective CTA is bold so your visitors
will see it. If the CTA blends into your design or text, it will be difficult for your visitors to
“ content marketing from a nice-to-have “library”
CTA’s are one of key elements that turn
notice.
into an important “sales machine” for your
If you’re wondering how you can actually produce an attractive CTA without a graphic
business.
designer, fret not. It’s possible to produce a good-looking CTA using just Microsoft
Powerpoint. See this nifty guide for details on how to do this.
”
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Landing Pages
A landing page is a web page with a singular focus. Landing pages are used to capture
visitor information or sell something outright.
When someone visits your landing page, they can either leave the page altogether or
they can do the one thing you want them to do, whether that is to fill out a form or buy a
product. They should not be able to do anything else!
Landing pages are all about conversion. Each landing page can be measured by
tracking how many of the people that visit that page carry out the action you want. What
percentage of the visitors to the landing page actually enter their contact information?
What percentage of the visitors to the page buy your product?
As you’ll see in the landing page example to the right, one of the best practices for
landing page design is to remove navigation and hyperlinks. At first it seems odd to
remove the very things that make “the Web” a web. But that’s where landing pages are
different to “regular” web pages or blog posts.
Once we have someone’s contact information via a landing page, we will send them a
series of emails with further offers that seek to move them down the path to becoming a
client (see the next section on “nurturing”.)
“ Landing pages are all about conversion. ”
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING
CHAPTER 3
GETTING
CLIENTS
We’re nearly there! You’ve attracted visitors to your website and blog.
You’ve converted some of them into leads. One more step to actual sales.
We need to turn leads into customers.
The main tool digital marketers use to turn leads into customers is email.
Leads are people you have contact information for. You’ve worked hard to
get that contact information and now you get to use it.
The key to success in turning leads into clients is polite persistence. You
need to stay-in-touch with people and wait for something to change in
their world that will cause a need for your product or service. You need an
excuse to stay-in-touch and that excuse is content.
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Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is staying in touch with leads long after they initially inquire/fill out a form
on your website.
Lead nurturing is most often executed using email. A lead nurturing campaign consists
of sending consumers valuable, informative information on a regular basis.
Why bother with all this work? Research from Gleanster shows that 50% of leads are
not ready to buy when they first inquire. These 50% of leads are generally lost from your
revenue if you don’t nurture them.
If you keep in-touch with people over a long period of time something may change in
their environment that means they suddenly need your product. The key is to be top-ofmind when this change happens. This can only happen if you stay-in-touch.
Lead nurturing is not about bombarding consumers with marketing offers via email.
Consumers are sensitized to ignore this kind of “spamming” - as they see it. They will
quickly ignore your emails or even unsubscribe.
Nurturing is not having your sales people calling consumers over-and-over again to sell
them something—this is a quick way to be put on the “Do Not Call” list.
Nurturing is about sending quality/valuable information. Something the consumer wants.
“ Lead nurturing is about staying in touch ”
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So are we saying you can never email consumers with marketing offers? No, we’re not!
You can definitely send offers as well as educational/informative emails. It’s a question of mixing
giving with receiving. A couple of things you can do:
• You can put CTA’s (links or buttons) in the educational emails you send out. If the content
you are sending out is high quality, including a couple of offers is totally acceptable to most
consumers.
• Every so often (about 20% of the time as a rule-of-thumb) you can send an outright offer.
Consumers will be OK with this if they are receiving quality content from you in the other
emails they receive.
Of course, you cannot carry out this kind of nurturing without content. This is a great reason to
start a blog. Blog content once written is easy to turn into an enewsletter that you can then use
for lead nurturing. Once you’ve written a blog post you get to reuse it as a lead nurturing tool.
Few local businesses have a lead nurturing program. It’s a great shame as they could greatly
increase their business if they did.
Many companies make a big effort, and spend a lot of money, to acquire new leads. But once
they have acquired these leads those same companies let those leads go stale. Lead nurturing
changes this. The return on investment is large.
“ The key to choosing which social media
websites to focus on is what do your potential
customers use?
”
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CHAPTER 4
GETTING
BETTER
You’re off to the races! You have visitors, you have leads and even some
customers. All done, right?
Not quite. One of the beauties of Internet marketing is that everything is
measurable.
As everything is measurable, to be one of the best in your field you need to
measure and to analyze. And after analyzing take action to improve. If you
don’t measure, analyze and improve, your competitors will and then they
grab your web traffic, leads and customers.
In this chapter we highlight some key metrics you should measure. You can
measure many (many) more metrics but this short list will get you off in the
right direction.
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Measure & Analyze
“What gets measured gets done” is a phrase from the Management by Objectives
movement pioneered by Peter Drucker, perhaps the world’s greatest management writer
and guru. I like to adapt this phrase and apply it to today’s marketing environment as
“what gets measured gets better”.
With the correct measurement of online marketing campaigns a local business can
test and tune all its online marketing activities. You can experiment with different offers,
language and media (for example search vs. social media); measure the results and adapt
your approach. You can shift your investment of time and energy to the activities that are
working best for you and pare down those that are not.
There are dozens of metrics a local business can measure related to its online marketing
but here are 4 key ones to get you started:
1. Website & Blog Traffic
How many people visit your website/blog? In today’s world, the number of people that
visit your website will have a correlation with your sales. You will want to check that your
website traffic is rising over time.
Look at the figure for “unique monthly visitors” in your web analytics software (many
people use Google Analytics – it’s good and it’s free.) Take a look at the main sources of
your traffic. Is your traffic mostly “direct” meaning people typed your website address into
their web browser (maybe getting it from a print magazine or newspaper ad or a printed
direct mail piece)? Is a large portion of your traffic coming from Google? Maybe you’ve
done some search engine optimization work and it’s paying off.
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2. Social Media Reach
A good number to track is your overall social media “reach”. “Reach” is simply the number
of people you are connected to on all social media sites, so your business’s Facebook
fans + your Twitter followers + your Pinterest followers etc. Like website traffic you should
track this number and see that is rising over time.
3. Leads Generated
A “lead” is someone that enters their name into a form on your website. Tracking how
many leads you generate each month is a critical metric in measuring the success of your
online marketing efforts.
4. Sales Generated
Ultimately, of course it all comes down to sales.
A goal to strive for is to be able to link each of your online marketing efforts right through
to the ultimate sale. This is not easy to do in practice but is achievable if you set up the
right tools and business processes. No doubt you track your monthly sales but how much
of those sales happened due to your online marketing? And which online marketing effort
generated each sale? Not easy to do but worth striving for.
“ The key to choosing which social media
websites to focus on is what do your potential
customers use?
”
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CONCLUSION
Thanks for reading this ebook. I hope it’s given you a basic framework to
think about and plan your digital marketing.
To feed the “sales engine” we’ve described you first need to get traffic to
your website and blog. You can do this many ways but in this ebook we
focused on the 3 fundamental ways of using search engine optimization,
attracting your social media followers and by using print ads.
Once you’ve got visitors to your website, the next step is to “convert” them
into leads. The key tools to do that are calls-to-action (CTA’s) and landing
pages that focus on getting your visitor to fill in their information on a form.
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The final step in the process is to “nurture” these leads into clients by using
email. The key is to stay-in-touch with leads until something changes in their
world that causes a need for your kind of product. Being consistently in front
of your potential customer will give you a great chance of being the business
they ultimately buy from.
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About Us
Wainscot Media is a full-service communications company
specializing in print and digital communications. In 2013, we
worked with over 1,000 local businesses to increase their
marketing reach.
The “fuel” that drives this “sales machine” is content. All the approaches in
this ebook assume you can develop some quality content.
It turns out that search engines and people both like content. Search engines
like content because their job is to help people find answers. People like it
because they have many questions.
In order to succeed in this digital marketing environment you need to be
committed to developing quality content on a regular basis.
If you’d like to discuss any of the subjects in this ebook, please drop me a
line—no strings attached. My contact information is below. Or click on the
link opposite to read about our digital marketing assessment.
For a FREE digital marketing
assessment—click here
Nigel Edelshain
Director of Marketing & Digital Media
Wainscot Media
(201) 573-5557
[email protected]
A Publication of