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Self-Study Guide
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All rights reserved world-wide under International and Pan-American copyright agreements. No
part of this document can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without
the prior written permission of Velsoft Training Materials, Inc.
Courseware Version: 3.0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to Use This Guide ........................................................................................................................1
Session One: Course Overview ............................................................................................................2
Session Two: What is Internet Marketing? ............................................................................................5
What it Looks Like ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Popular Strategies ................................................................................................................................................ 8
Session Three: Creating an Internet Marketing Plan ............................................................................ 10
Leveraging What You Already Have ................................................................................................................... 10
Making Our Way through the Marketing Process.............................................................................................. 12
Session Four: Extending Your Influence.............................................................................................. 15
Sharing Messages ............................................................................................................................................... 15
Making Connections........................................................................................................................................... 16
Making it Real .................................................................................................................................................... 17
Session Five: E-mail Marketing ........................................................................................................... 19
You Can Do It! .................................................................................................................................................... 19
Getting Your Message Out ................................................................................................................................. 21
Session Six: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ................................................................................... 23
What is SEO? ...................................................................................................................................................... 23
Understanding Search ........................................................................................................................................ 24
The Search Engines ............................................................................................................................................ 27
Alternative Search .............................................................................................................................................. 31
Optimizing Keywords ......................................................................................................................................... 32
Working With Others ......................................................................................................................................... 36
Making Connections........................................................................................................................................... 37
Monitoring Search Engine Ranking .................................................................................................................... 39
Session Seven: Advertising Online ...................................................................................................... 41
What is Advertising? .......................................................................................................................................... 41
What Service Should I Use? ............................................................................................................................... 43
Making Commitments ........................................................................................................................................ 44
Recommended Reading List ............................................................................................................... 45
Post-Course Assessment .................................................................................................................... 46
Pre- and Post-Assessment Answer Keys .............................................................................................. 48
Personal Action Plan .......................................................................................................................... 49
Basic Internet Marketing
How to Use This Guide
This Self Study Guide is designed and laid out in a way that will guide student learning much in
the same way that an instructor would. This workbook is comprised of modules called Sessions.
Each Session focuses on a major concept in the course.
In each Session, we have included short-answer and (in some instances) multiple choice
questions which relate directly to the session material. Throughout the guide, you can take the
opportunity to internalize what you have learned by completing various self-reflection
exercises.
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Session One: Course Overview
Course Overview
This course is an ideal start for business owners and people new to marketing to learn the
basics of Internet marketing. We’ve included information on how to market online, and even
more importantly, how to determine what results you are getting. Then, you can figure out
whether you are reaching your target market, where your qualified prospects are, and how
they are engaged as a result of your efforts. This course includes sessions on search engine
optimization, e-mail campaigns, pay per click advertising, and more.
Learning Objectives
After you complete this course, you will be able to:
o Determine how your Internet marketing strategy fits with your overall marketing
plan
o Apply techniques to influence and engage your target market
o Weigh the value of using a distribution service for e-mail marketing campaigns
o Get started with search engine optimization
o Use online advertising to boost your marketing results
o Adjust your Internet marketing plan based on metrics and reporting
Why did you take this course? Use this opportunity to consider your personal learning
objectives and reasons for taking this course.
Pre-Assignment
Please gather a copy of your marketing plan, including an overall strategy for the company,
an Internet-specific marketing plan, and your social media marketing plan (even if they are
just a few notes on a napkin!).
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Pre-Course Assessment
1. If you have multiple web sites and pages which may also include a presence in social
media, your main site is referred to as your:
a. Internet site
b. Hub site
c. Home site
2. True or False: When we talk about Internet marketing, we really mean selling, so the
quality of your web site is not important.
3. True or False: Affiliate programs are a popular strategy for selling products or earning
a commission for selling someone else’s products.
4. SEO stands for:
a. Search Engine Optimization
b. Searching Everything Over
c. Search Engine Optimists
5. The marketing cycle has several steps, but not this one:
a. Consumer and market analysis
b. Analyzing the competition
c. Responding to proposals
6. True or False: People do not go through a process when they make a purchasing
decision. Instead, they simply buy the things they need or want.
7. E-mail marketing gives you the opportunity to reach out to _________________
through a distribution list.
a. Absolutely everyone you know
b. Friends of your friends and business community
c. Contacts who opt in or agree to receive your messages
8. URL stands for:
a. Utility Reference Line
b. Universal Recording Line
c. Uniform Resource Locator
9. The search engine that attracts the most attention (traffic) these days is:
a. Bing (by Microsoft)
b. Google
c. Yahoo
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10. In addition to the large search engines like Google, people also frequently use
________________________________ functions on web sites.
a. Alternative search
b. Beta search
c. Chronological search
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Session Two: What is Internet Marketing?
We are surrounded by the Internet. We can access the Internet from our smartphones, tablets,
laptops, and desktops. We can check it while riding the bus, sitting in a café, or while talking
with our best friends. (Actually, this is bad form, but people continue to do it anyway!)
In this session, we’ll consider the reach and scope involved in marketing over the Internet and
some popular strategies.
What it Looks Like
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is just what it sounds like: using the Internet to leverage your marketing
strategy so that your company flourishes. Marketing strictly by the Internet is not the goal, so
you will see that we refer to an Internet marketing strategy as an element of your overall
marketing strategy.
If you are going to have an Internet marketing strategy, you need to be ready to establish (or if
you already have one, expand) your digital presence and reach. In this course, we will
sometimes refer to your website. Since you may have several sites that are related to one
company or one individual, we sometimes also refer to a hub site. Your hub site is your main
web site, to which any others are linked.
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Sample Site Structure
Here is an example of Velsoft’s different sites, which are built around the hub site
www.velsoft.com.
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Making Connections
What is the hub site for your company?
What other sites does your company own/use (sub-domains, blogs, social networking sites,
etc.)?
Do all your sites link to your hub site? If not, how effective is this for spreading your reach? If
not, why not?
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Popular Strategies
There are some preferred and effective strategies that companies use when it comes to
Internet marketing. You may find that only some of them fit with your overall marketing
strategy, but we recommend that you consider each of them. Your goal is to use the strategies
which best connect you to your customers and prospects, and also fit into your overall
marketing strategy.
Web Design and Development
Your business is going to be reflected in your website, so it needs to look good. Your website
needs to be a comprehensive and engaging demonstration of what you do with and for your
customers. It is no longer enough to have a brochure style website (which just lists your
products and services with a few pictures).
In 2007, I met a business owner who said that she budgeted $10,000 a year for her website,
which supported her two-million dollar a year company. This gave me a lot to think about,
because on scale $10,000 for a couple of million dollars in revenue doesn’t seem to be too
much. How much should a business budget for a website? The answer depends on what you
want to do.
There are plenty of templates available to get you started if you want to create your own
website. Some small businesses manage to start with a tiny presence and a free page on a site
like Facebook or Etsy. However, if you plan for your company to grow and be taken as a serious
member of the business marketplace, consider what your web presence will be, how much you
will spend on it, and what you want to accomplish. Bigger isn’t always better, but content is
most important. Unless you are putting good content on your site, don’t bother with a website
at all.
Affiliate Programs
With affiliate programs, you can use your web presence to recruit others to sell your products,
or you can sell products for other companies from your website. This approach can be helpful if
you do not have a lot of products to offer of your own, or if there are complementary products
out there that can help you get started.
As an example, if you write a blog and include posts about great books that you have read, you
could set up affiliate links to a bookseller, where you get a portion of sales (a commission) that
come from people who click on the ad on your blog.
If you have plenty of products available and you want people to sell them for you, then you can
set yourself up where you act like the book wholesaler in the example above, and people who
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sell for you receive a portion of every sale that originates from their web links, while you get to
keep the profits from the overall sale.
E-mail Marketing
You can create a list of subscribers and create an e-mail that goes out periodically and engages
readers. There are lots of services you can use (both paid and free) to help you get your
messages out in an appealing format that can be read on computers, tablets, smartphones, and
so on. Make sure you check the rules (often called terms of service) about e-mail marketing,
since the law in many places now states that you cannot just send these messages to
whomever you want. (Typically, you need people’s permission to add them to your mailout
lists.) We’ll get into more detail about e-mail marketing in Session Five.
Using Social Media
Social media is an effective and growing resource that allows you to connect with your
consumers. Whether you use one site or many, if the people you want to connect with are on
social media, you probably need to be there too. Social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and
Twitter are almost essential for companies with lots of consumers using those sites, but the
return you get depends on your business. Niche businesses may be better off using niche social
networking sites.
Social media marketing takes a lot of very skilled work and patience in order for you to see a
return on your investment, but it is an effective way to connect to lots of people.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There is now a whole industry called SEO (which stands for Search Engine Optimization) that
helps you get strong rankings in major search engines. This helps people to find you easily and
for you to engage with them. We use SEO to understand what our consumers want, how they
look for it online (through analyzing what search terms and patterns of usage they use), and
then we design our digital spaces so that they can find us easily. We’ll discuss SEO in more
detail in Session Six.
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Session Three: Creating an Internet Marketing Plan
Your Internet marketing plan is a part of your overall marketing plan. They must work together,
even though we will break them up in order to consider them in depth, one element at a time.
In this session, you’ll consider using what you already have and how the six stages of marketing
become part of your Internet marketing plan.
Leveraging What You Already Have
The Role of Internet Marketing
To be successful, you should set up an Internet marketing plan that supplements your overall
marketing strategy and complements your social marketing strategy. With this in mind, let’s
review some marketing basics. Remember that any marketing plan will undergo plenty of
revisions until you get it to a point where you are satisfied that all stages are working
effectively.
Given the fluidity of the Internet, you may be making more changes than ever. This can be
frustrating for people who are not used to working in such a changeable state. It will help you
tremendously if you work with marketing professionals who are good at what they do and have
a clearly demonstrated track record.
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The Marketing Cycle
Marketing uses the steps illustrated below. Your Internet marketing strategy will draw from the
information in the first three steps, and then become part of step four (creating a marketing
plan).
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Making Our Way through the Marketing Process
Stage One: Consumer and Market Analysis
In stage one, consumer and market analysis, you are conducting research about your consumer
and what they need. You have to be honest and look at their needs, which might be in direct
contrast to what you think of as your ideal consumer. Since we are looking at Internet
marketing, it makes sense to connect to your consumers through an Internet pathway to find
out what you need to know.
Your goal is to identify groups of people (called segments) who have related or similar needs so
that your marketing dollars can be directly pointed at them. There are several questions to ask
here:
o What do they need?
o Who is buying our product? Who is using our product?
o How can I leverage segmentation? Once you know which segment of the
marketplace is interested in your products, how will you make the most of their
interest in buying from you? Will you offer supplementary services or products?
How will connecting to them via the Internet help to spread your digital reach and
increase the influence you have over their decisions?
o What is the buying process? It generally follows the steps below:
Stage Two: Analyzing the Competition and Yourself
You need to take an honest look at your operation in order to create a plan that helps you to
exceed the competition. We can camouflage all kinds of things in an analysis, so be honest and
protect the viability of your business.
Some questions you must ask include:
o What are your advantages?
o What are your core competencies (the things you do well)?
o What are your weaknesses?
o Where are your shortcomings?
o What can you do to capitalize on your strengths?
o What can you do to exploit the competitions weaknesses and shortcomings?
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Stage Three: Analyzing Distribution Channels
There are plenty of options for getting your product to your customer. Deciding which ones to
use will have an impact on pricing, profit margins, servicing, and timing. There are plenty of
options available, and in choosing yours you may need to consider what your goals are and how
many layers of people are involved.
In a product that is typically used by an individual purchasing in a retail store, the product can
go from your production facility to a wholesaler, and then to smaller distributors to be sold to a
retailer. Each step in the process has to produce a profit, just as it does when you sell a service.
In a complex system, you may be surprised at how many people are involved. The flow below is
common:
At each stop on the chain, the participant does something that adds value to the product
(packages, labels, or adverting, for example) and earns a profit.
Stage Four: Creating a Marketing Plan
Your market research gets applied in a marketing plan based on the five P’s of marketing:
o Product (what it is and what it does)
o Price
o Place (Are you selling wholesale, retail, through a franchise, online, or from the back
of your car?)
o Promotion (The way you present what you are selling and your public relations
campaign)
o Packaging
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Stages Five and Six: Implement, Evaluate, Review, and Revise
Once you have decided what you are doing and take action, you’ll start to evaluate results,
make revisions as needed, and keep going. Remember that marketing is a cyclical process. At
any time in the cycle, you may need to return to an earlier stage to fix some kind of problem. If
you are in the midst of pricing and realize that the product is not going to be affordable for your
market segment, you’ll have to step back and adjust. On the other hand, if you realize that your
product is pre-selling in better volume than you ever imagined, you’ll need to make sure that
production can keep up with the demand.
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Session Four: Extending Your Influence
Are you selling by pushing an agenda forward, or are you able to interact, engage in a
community, and to influence others? The differences are subtle, yet they do have a significant
impact on your relationship with your consumers.
In this session, you’ll consider what it means to extend influence and just how it can be applied
to your business.
Sharing Messages
Marketing has changed over the years, becoming committed to and focusing on influence
much more so than about messages that reflect an approach to direct advertising. A part of this
subtle difference is a change from messages that say “This is why you should buy from me,” to
messages that say, “This is how we help people who have needs just like you do. Look at how
your neighbor/best friend/favorite uncle uses what we have.”
Consider what your products and services are. Position your messages to tell a story about who
uses your product and how it helps. Stop yourself from just explaining features and benefits.
Marketing over the Internet, and through social media in particular, allows us to connect and
share stories much more easily than print media used to. If you think of this in terms of
influence rather than selling, you can start to consider how you can share what your company
does, what it stands for within the context of a community, and how to present yourself.
The community is a big part of marketing and social networking today. You can create
connections to your community and influence their decisions without having to sell directly.
Sponsoring a team, helping out a charity, or offering people information instead of commercial
advertising all help to create an atmosphere of influence. These approaches reflect the
successes of relationship building and consultative selling rather than direct sales.
With the lowering costs of producing videos, we can quickly put together a video that has real
people who have used our real products talking about how they benefitted. Even better than
testimonials, you can show (rather than tell) people using and benefitting from your products
or services. If you think back to the marketing cycle and the research you have done about what
your consumers need, you can also create instructional videos, informational pieces, and more
that have some benefit to the viewer.
The video does not have to be directly about your products or services because you are creating
them based on the ideas of influence and creating community. You could create parody pieces,
interviews with interesting people, or share a piece about a project you learned from. The
options are numerous, and really only limited by your own imagination and budget.
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As Seth Godin has said in several of his books, what we really need is to be remarkable. So go
ahead and get away from your ordinary way of doing business, step out of the proverbial
cubicles and boxes, and entertain something different. Get your message out by daring to do it
differently than everyone else, including yourself.
Making Connections
Within your industry, what evidence do you see of organizations spreading influence?
Does your organization influence or sell today?
Come up with six ideas where you can influence your consumers rather than rely on direct
selling.
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Making it Real
You have created six ideas where you can influence your consumers and prospects. Starting
with your favorite idea on the list, draft a brief plan for implementation.
Idea One
Idea Two
Idea Three
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Idea Four
Idea Five
Idea Six
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Session Five: E-mail Marketing
How many e-mails do you receive in a single day? Are you someone who reads an e-mail from
beginning to end, or do you tend to skim and just look for action items or keywords? Different
people read their e-mails in different ways.
In this session, you’ll consider the best way to leverage e-mail as a part of your internet
marketing strategy.
You Can Do It!
If your customers have a computer at work or home, chances are they have e-mail. If you look
at your own e-mail inbox, how many messages do you receive each day? How many do you
send? Do you read everything you receive or do you just glance at them?
In one sense, every e-mail that you send and receive is a piece of marketing. Your company
domain is in the address and is also hopefully included in the signature block in the e-mail. You
might even have a tag line in those e-mail signatures or a link to your website or your Facebook
page. If you have a customer service representative who replies to online inquiries by e-mail,
those replies are a marketing opportunity too. They might offer to send a coupon, send free
information, or simply extend a sincere message.
A Cautionary Note
If you send out e-mails to a list of people, you should not be doing so from your personal e-mail
address! When you send a message to a large list of people, your own e-mail service will tag it
as spam, and then your subsequent messages also get flagged as spam or even get blocked
entirely. Once your e-mail address is blacklisted, it is extremely difficult to work your way back
into people’s e-mail inboxes. Save your personal e-mail for messages to one person or a small
group of people. Use a distribution service for reaching out to people in your database for
marketing and commercial purposes.
A distribution service can help you to generate some of the more sophisticated looking
newsletters, articles, and white papers that are part of the marketing mix. Many of these
distribution services come free of charge, which will allow you to experiment and see what
works best for you. It will also keep you from being blacklisted.
In some countries, you are unable to market commercially unless the people you are e-mail
have opted into your e-mail list. This is called permission-based marketing, and means that
everyone on your list has asked to be included in your contact list, or has at least given you
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permission to add them to the list. They can do this automatically with links on your website or
on your e-mail list, and your distribution service will help you do this.
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Getting Your Message Out
Distribution Services
You’ve probably already received marketing e-mails that come from distribution services. You
will know which services are being used by looking for their logo at the bottom of your e-mail
(although some companies will not appear there at all).
When you are choosing an e-mail distribution service, you need to make sure that they can
offer you some important support to your marketing efforts. You want to make sure that they
can:
o Maintain a list of your contacts (including their name and e-mail address) in a secure
database
o Merge your existing contacts into their database by importing a list from wherever
you currently have them stored
o Manage people who want to opt in and opt out
o Provide easy to use and attractive templates
o Include an easy to use unsubscribe button on the bottom of each e-mail
o Offer distribution that takes place on time
o Generate reports that tell you the number of e-mails that get opened (the open
rate), bounced e-mails and the related e-mail address, links within the e-mail that
are clicked, etc.
Whether you are using a paid or free service, you’ll have some peace of mind when you know
that your subscribers’ information is kept private and that you are in complying with the range
of spam laws in effect in different countries.
Some companies that you can review include:
o Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com)
o Mail Chimp (www.mailchimp.com)
o Vertical Response (www.verticalresponse.com)
o iContact (www.icontact.com)
NOTE: These links were accurate at the time of printing. Velsoft is not affiliated with the sites
and companies listed, nor does Velsoft accept any responsibility for the information provided
on any third-party site.
Keep it Rich
We cannot emphasize enough that, just as your website needs to have rich content, your emails do too. Give your visitors something to think about, talk over, and gravitate toward! You
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should always be offering the receiver something, whether it is a resource, a tidbit of
information, a strong visual, or links to these things.
One mistake that businesses continue to make is that their e-mail marketing always repeats a
similar “buy me” message instead of giving people reason to click a link within that e-mail that
takes them to your hub site for more information, a map with directions, or even your product
page and shopping cart. Give them a compelling reason to engage with you, and they will.
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Session Six: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an essential ingredient in your Internet marketing. SEO is what we use to direct people to
our website, social networking pages, and ultimately to deepen relationships so that they do
business with us.
In this session, you’ll get all the basics on SEO, from what it is, to using keywords, and
monitoring your results.
What is SEO?
No matter how popular your company is, or how unique your name is, people still have to be
able to find you online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) needs to be one of the tools you use
in order to help you gain and maintain a digital reach that is both broad and deep. When you
optimize your web pages, social media sites, blog, and wherever else you have an online
presence, SEO helps you to get as close as you can to the top of search results – preferably to
the top of the first page.
In order to get to the top of a search page, you need to select search terms and keywords that
people look for, and then optimize your content to make it easy to find, or “search friendly.”
Your best SEO results come from having great content on your sites. This will also help you
attract people who are interested in what you have to offer; the qualified prospect.
Throughout our conversations about SEO, it’s important to remember that nothing is effective
unless you offer good, strong content. Unless you appeal to visitors to your site, they don’t
become qualified prospects and convert to customers.
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Understanding Search
When it comes to getting found on the Internet, there are plenty of different tools that get
used. We’re fortunate that a shared language has developed around them.
Spiders, Crawlers, Bots (or Robots)
These are automated processes that search engines use to visit all your sites and index what
they find there.
Natural and Organic Searches
These are the lists of unpaid advertising sites that are generated after you do a keyword search.
They are the result of the search engine’s algorithm (a set of mathematical rules). They are
different than a non-organic result (which may include paid advertising). In the example below,
we searched for “how to paint furniture” and we got about 115,000,000 results. They are all
natural or organic, because there are no paid ads on the page.
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Paid Searches
If we search for something more specific, like “Benjamin Moore Paint,” the results show a paid
ad first (with a very pale yellow background) and even a map with the nearest location, before
the natural leads follow:
If you want to test how your site ranks by using different search terms, you can use a free trial
at WebPosition.com or an inexpensive tool like ZoomRank.com. (Neither of these sites is
endorsed nor recommended by Velsoft, but are simply provided here as a reference point.) If
you are working with a professional marketing company, they can and should be testing your
site rankings.
Uniform (or Universal) Resource Locator (URL)
This is the address of an Internet page. For example, www.velsoft.com is the URL, or Internet
address, for Velsoft Training Materials’ hub site.
How It Works
Search engines use tools like spiders, crawlers, or bots to trawl the Internet for new
information. They are working all the time! Remember, though, that they may work on a
different schedule than you do, so you need to prompt them to come look at what is new on
your site by sending them a message.
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You can update a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo by using their webmaster tools and
submitting the URL of the new or updated page. You have to submit to each search engine
separately, and they don’t like it if you are sending them all the same link.
Instead, you can choose to update one site and wait for the spiders from the other sites to find
your new content, or you can stagger things. For example, you could send one site the updates
for your hub site, another your blog updates, and the third an update to your social networking
page. As you can already tell, this could get to be a big job, so you might find this easier if you
use something called pinging.
Pinging is a process where you can advise the search engines that a change has been made. You
can start pinging with a third-party service, or you can set up your website, blog, and so on to
do it automatically. For example, large blogging sites such as WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad
have pinging built in to their service already. For other sites, you simply have to submit the URL
of the page you updated, the name of the page or title of your article or information, and then
click Submit. The service you are using will respond by broadcasting a message that your URL
has been updated.
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The Search Engines
Once you get started with SEO, you will probably start getting sales e-mails from companies
that want you to pay them a prince’s ransom to get your site submitted to hundreds or even
thousands of search engines. In reality, though, if you get ranked on the top sites, you will be
captured in about 94% of all searches. (As of June 2012, 82.63% of global Internet searches
were done using Google, followed by Yahoo at 6.84%, and then Bing at 4.46%. Source:
(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4 )
When you enter a search term, the search engine tries to offer you specialized results based on
your past searches and what it gauges as your preferences. If you do a lot of research about fast
cars, for example, that history also contributes to your results. Are you a researcher? If so,
you’ll see recent search topics in your results, too.
Let’s look at how the three top search engines responded to a query for “marketing online.”
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Bing
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Yahoo
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Google
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Alternative Search
Portals, directories, resources, multimedia, and social networking sites all offer search
functions, and your consumers are using them. We use search functions on sites like eBay, Kijiji,
Squidoo, Amazon, and others to look for almost any kind of product. According to researchers
at Comscore (http://www.comscore.com), we used all of them more in 2011 than we did in
2010, and the reliance on these alternative sources is growing.
Although these searches may not be what we would think when we think of search engines,
people are using them, so you must be monitoring them, too. What does this mean for you as a
company embarking on Internet marketing? You must be found by people who may not even
know they are looking for you.
Making Connections
Take a few minutes and reflect on your business, referring to your marketing plan that you
brought as your pre-assignment. You should think about which alternative searches your
customers are using, what is currently on your hub site, and what you should be thinking about
adding to that site so that your customers and prospects can find you.
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Optimizing Keywords
What Do They Want?
When people look for your company or your products, they will put terms in a search box on
your site or a search engine page. People are different and live in different parts of our global
community, so not only do you need to know what they are searching for, you also need to
figure out how they will ask for it.
For example, fizzy sweet drinks in America are called soda; in Canada, they are called pop; in
the United Kingdom, they are called a fizzy drink, soft drink, or pop. In all three places, some
versions are referred to by their brand name (such as Coke, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper) as well. Even
though everyone is speaking about your product in English, they are all using different words to
express the same thing. This happens with other items, like anoraks, jackets, toques, knitted
caps, chesterfields, and sofas.
Keywords, Search Terms, and Tags
Allow us to introduce you to keywords and search terms (which in social media are referred to
as tags).
When a potential customer is looking for your product, they are only going to type a few words
into a search box. The total number of words can vary by search engine, but as a rule of thumb,
the fewer words they need to find you, the larger your profile gets. However, some marketing
resources also tells us that longer search queries tend to lead to more conversions (sales),
possibly because the searcher already knows exactly what they want.
Search engines ignore certain words, so you can leave them off your phrases. (You can leave
them in so they make sense to you, but just know that search engines ignore them.) This
includes prepositions (about, beside, of, than, under, etc.), conjunctions (for, and, but, yet,
etc.), articles (a, an, the, etc.), and punctuation.
To keep your keyword list reasonable, words that have the same root when in plural form can
be entered as a singular word. You would use the words dog, skunk, or car but you don’t have
to use dogs, skunks, or cars. However, knives, mice, and companies will need both versions of
the root added as a keyword, because they change from knife, mouse, and company.
Metatags
When the programmer (or you if you are a do it yourselfer) create your webpages, there will be
a space for a metatag where you can list and track your keywords. These metatags are not
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required for the search engines, but they do help you to keep track of your keywords. Visitors
to your webpage don’t see the metatags either, but they do appear in your coding. A good
strategy is to vary where you position search terms on different pages because the search
engines truncate the keyword tags at different lengths.
The images below show the homepage for www.velsoft.com. We have circled the keywords
that are right on the page:
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Here is how the keywords and metatags are captured in the source code:
Tips and Tricks
Here are five tips to getting a solid list of keywords:
o Brainstorm a list of every potential keyword and phrase that you can think of.
o Marketers should not isolate themselves. Ask your colleagues, friends, and
employees for ideas.
o Use the names of all your key products and services, company name, subdomains,
and nicknames.
o Include industry and geographic (location) terms and jargon. If you have a popular
name, try to secure as many versions of it as possible. For example, London is a city
in England and Canada.
o Use a search tool like the Google Keyword Search tool (used for Google AdWords) to
help identify lots of keywords and phrases.
Remember that searchers have to be desperate before they will look onto a second page of
search results.
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Making Connections
Brainstorm a list of 30 search terms (words and short phrases) that can be used among the
different pages of your hub site. You will have to consider the terms that searchers use to look
for your product and balance that with the goal of showing up on the first page of results.
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Working With Others
If you are having trouble thinking of keywords, you can also sit down with a few colleagues,
friends, and others to help you generate lists of keywords and phrases. Record their
suggestions below. If you are still having trouble, or you want to get more help, you can do an
Internet search for the term “keyword generator” to get started.
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Making Connections
What have you learned about Internet marketing so far?
What will you apply to your marketing efforts?
Why will you, or why won’t you, apply some of what you learned so far?
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How many places can a customer find your links?
Do you have products that warrant a domain name and would increase the options of your
company / brand showing up in searches?
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Monitoring Search Engine Ranking
Understanding Rankings
Now that you’ve invested all this time and effort on search engine optimization, you need to
collect, analyze, and make adjustments to maintain your ranking at the top of the results list.
Good rankings come from having popular pages, and popular pages come from having great
content and lots of traffic (visitors) to your site.
A search engine algorithm ranks your pages from 1 to 10. Right now if you were to visit
Google’s page, they rank as a 10, but if your page ranks at least a five, you will probably reach
the first page of search results (although there are no guarantees). In order to monitor your
page ranking, you can download the Google toolbar and then enable it for your browser (or you
can just use Google’s Chrome browser). (As of this writing, the link was
http://google.com/toolbar. Velsoft takes no responsibility for the accuracy or content of this
link, and does not endorse this plugin.) Then you can use the page rank tool to rate any page
that you like by following the directions.
If you want to maintain a decent ranking, you must commit to checking your rankings regularly
and to adjusting your content. Remember that your webpages must be visible and easy to
locate if people doing searches are going to find you.
Improving Traffic
If you measure your rankings and find that you are not getting enough traffic, here are some
suggestions.
Improve your inbound links (also called backlinks) by making sure that your links appear in
places that your customers visit. (Your blog and social networking sites may allow this. You can
also ask to have your links placed on other sites with complementary products and a shared
target market.)
Check and see what kind of traffic your competition is getting. You can get help for this with
specialized sites such as www.alexa.com or www.quantcast.com or through an Internet
marketing specialist. (These links were accurate as of the time of publication. Velsoft takes no
responsibility for the accuracy or content of these sites and does not endorse the sites
mentioned.)
Know who and where your target market is. Links to your site from other related sites will help
direct qualified traffic to your web site. Get to know site owners and work with them to
increase traffic to your mutual benefit.
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Improve your page ranking. Make sure your page(s) score five or higher on the Google
PageRank tool. Highly ranked pages help with your own visibility and help increase your traffic
volume.
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Session Seven: Advertising Online
When you shop, what draws you to purchase something? Is it convenience? Price? Do you feel
loyal toward a particular business because of how well they treat their customers? Have you
done business there so long that you never consider anyone else?
In this session, you’ll look at how every communication that someone who works with and for
you is really marketing, and what pay per clicks are all about.
What is Advertising?
When your Twitter feed is peppered with interesting or helpful links, you are connecting to
your community. When your Facebook page offers a contest, you are highlighting your brand.
When you have a blog post that offers some kind of free download, you are providing content
to your readers. When you send out an electronic newsletter to a list of people who have
subscribed to your missives, you are waving in front of them.
Some of these methods will cost you money, and others are indirect without a particular cost.
Whatever you call them, all of these methods of connecting to your consumers can be
considered marketing and advertising, since both get defined as activities of promoting
commercial products or services.
An extremely popular form of advertising today is called pay per click (PPC). Using pay per click
is straightforward and allows a business to tightly control their advertising costs. In essence,
you pay to place an ad with a particular number of clicks. When that maximum is reached, the
ad stops running until the beginning of the next cycle.
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Pay per click ads appear on the top and sides of screens that display your search results. You
can see an example along the right margin of the page below, where we searched for “pay per
click:”
If you sign up for pay per click advertising, your job is as easy as signing on with a service,
providing a credit card number, writing up your copy (the words for the ad), and then setting up
your parameters. The parameters you set are important, because they control the cost of the
ad. You can set geographic parameters so that only people in your physical region see the ads.
You can also set up keyword parameters, so that if someone searches for “red shoes” (for
example), your ad for “red leather pumps” appears as an ad on their landing page. You can also
set a budget so that your ad stops running after a particular number of clicks. (See the next subsession for more information)
You can see examples of pay per click ads on any search engine page when you do a search and
on many social networking sites. These ads will always reflect the type of search terms you use
and your history, unless you tailor your browser settings not to allow that, or you use an ad
blocker.
Most pay per click advertising includes a comprehensive reporting element which is very
important. You will be able to determine a range of information about people who are clicking
on your ads, such as where they come from. (This includes which pages on your website they
landed on and what country they are in.) If you have a shopping cart or ecommerce feature
linked to your advertising campaign, you can also determine exactly how many of those visitors
became a purchaser (called the conversion rate).
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What Service Should I Use?
The three big search engine providers (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) have the most popular pay
per click advertising, but there are small niche sellers too. If you have a niche product, the
smaller providers may make more sense, but you also need to be confident that they are there
to serve you well.
If you are just getting started in pay per click advertising, check with the company that hosts
your website and see if they have an introductory offer. Many of them do, and this will allow
you to learn and experiment without as much expense.
For most services, the process is very simple.
o Set up an account
o Choose keywords
o Write your ad
o Set the limits
Set Up an Account
First, do your research and decide which service you want to use for your pay per click ads.
Depending on your campaign objectives, the number of products or services you want to
highlight, and your budget, you can set up accounts with different services. Just make sure that
your ads are different so you catch people’s attention and don’t end up putting three identical
ads up at one time.
Choose Keywords
Keywords are essential. Put some effort into creating compelling keywords and making sure
they describe you well.
Write Your Ad
Your copywriting is what is going to catch people’s attention. Even though these ads are tiny,
you need to make sure they get the same attention as anything else your company publishes.
Write well, edit, rewrite, and re-edit, and then launch your ad.
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Set the Limits
One of the best elements about pay per click is the ability to set limits. Your credit card will be
charged according to the number of clicks on your ad. If you are paying five cents per click and
have a budget of $5,000 per month, your ad will stop appearing on pages once there have been
100,000 clicks on your ad. The timer resets until the beginning of the next cycle (usually a
month). You can adjust the maximum number of clicks, the time of day (or night) that your ads
appear, and geographic location to help aim your ads at your target market.
Making Commitments
Use the space below to add notes for your marketing plan, or make your notes right on the
plan itself.
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Recommended Reading List
If you are looking for further information on this topic, we have included a recommended
reading list below.
Cialdini, Robert. Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition). Prentice Hall, 2008.
—. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2nd Edition). Collins, 2006.
Cialdini, Robert, Noah Goldstein, and Steve Martin. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be
Persuasive. Free Press, 2008.
Dharmesh, Shah, and Brian Halligan. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media,
and Blogs. Wiley, 2009.
Godin, Seth. All Marketers Tell Stories. Portfolio Hardcover, 2009.
—. Purple Cow. Portfolio, 2003.
Halligan, Brian, and David Meerman Scott. Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Wiley,
2010.
Konrath, Jill. Selling to Big Companies. Kaplan Publishing, 2005.
LeClaire, Jennifer, and Pedro Sostre. Web Analytics for Dummies. For Dummies, 2007.
Ledford, Jerri L., and Mary E. Tyler. Google Analytics (Third Edition). Wiley, 2009.
Underhill, Paco. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping – Updated and Revised for the Internet,
the Global Consumer, and Beyond. Simon & Schuster, 2008.
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Post-Course Assessment
1. If you are not getting enough traffic to your site, one ________________ is to improve
your page ranking.
a. Strategy
b. Social media component
c. Thing not to worry about
2. Pay per click advertising is available through the major search engines and:
a. Retail stores
b. Niche sites
c. Electronic wholesalers
3. Inbound links are also called:
a. Backlinks
b. Diagonal links
c. Pinging links
4. When working with keywords and SEO, it is a good strategy to vary where you put
search terms on different pages because the search engines ________________ the
keyword tags at different lengths.
a. Complicate
b. Duplicate
c. Truncate
5. True or False: When a search engine reads a search term, they ignore prepositions,
conjunctions, articles, and punctuation.
6. Pinging is a process where you can advise the search engines that ________________
have been made.
a. Keywords
b. Searches
c. Changes
7. If you want people to visit your hub site, the most important thing to provide there is
_________________________.
a. Free giveaways
b. Content
c. A home page
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8. In order to avoid spamming your customers with unwanted e-mail, you need to set up
an opt-in list and use a ________________________.
a. SMART approach to sending e-mail
b. Database
c. Distribution service
9. Instead of a direct selling approach, we want to focus on consultative or relationship
selling, which is facilitated through the spread of:
a. Influence
b. Referrals
c. Marketing
10. When we discuss the marketing cycle for Internet marketing, we do so in terms of
_________________.
a. Four phases
b. Advertising
c. Six steps
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Pre- and Post-Assessment Answer Keys
Pre-Course Assessment
1. B: We use the term hub site throughout the course.
2. False: The quality of our web sites is very important. Throughout this course, we will
emphasize the need for good, quality content on web sites and all marketing materials.
3. True: Affiliate programs are a popular sales and marketing tool.
4. A: You will learn more about SEO in Session Six.
5. C: Responding to proposals is not part of the marketing cycle, but answers A and B are.
The rest of the steps will be discussed in Session Three.
6. False: People go through the following steps (although they may not spend much time
in any particular stage): awareness, information search, weigh options, buy, and review.
7. C: Permission based marketing (or opt in) is the best way to communicate with people in
your database. In some countries, it is the only way you are allowed to send marketingstyle messages and newsletters.
8. C: The Uniform (or Universal) Resource Locator is the address of an Internet page.
9. B: As of June 2012, 82.63% of global Internet searches were done using Google. (Source:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4)
10. A: Alternative search bars are frequently found on web sites. You may already have one
on your site already or have used them on sites such as eBay, Squidoo, Amazon, etc.
Post-Course Assessment
1. A: Methods for improving traffic flow to your site were discussed in Session Six.
2. B: Niche sites can serve a niche product well. Just make sure that you check them out
thoroughly before you commit your marketing money!
3. A: We introduced backlinks in Session Six.
4. C. We learned about keywords and SEO in Session Six.
5. True: Search terms do not read through extra words, although sometimes humans want
to see them so that we can more easily conduct a search. Optimizing keywords was
covered in Session Six.
6. C: We learned about pinging in Session Six.
7. B: The best way to attract visitors to your site, or to convince them to read your e-mails,
is to provide excellent content.
8. C: A distribution service will help you maintain a permission based mail list and to keep
your list and database of customers up to date, as we learned in Session Five.
9. A: Influence is an important aspect of Internet marketing and an effective way of
reaching your target market.
10. C: We reviewed the six steps in Session Four. They are: consumer and market analysis;
analyzing competition and yourself; analyzing distribution channels; creating a
marketing plan; implementing the plan; and reviewing and revising.
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Personal Action Plan
Now that you have completed this course on Basic Internet Marketing, how will you use the
things you have learned? Creating a personal action plan can help you stay on track and on
target. When you take responsibility for yourself and your results, you get things done!
In this session, you will be asked questions to help you plan your short-term and long-term
goals. This final exercise is a way for you to synthesize the learning that you have done and to
put it into practice.
I am already doing these things well:
I want to improve these areas:
I have these resources to help me:
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As a result of what I have
learned in this workshop, I
am going to…
50
My target date is…
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I will know I have
succeeded when…
I will follow up
with myself on…