Your Internet marketing team should be focused on two goals – making you more money and creating a positive ROI for their retainer each month – but they can’t do this alone. If done correctly Internet marketing should be a team effort and a two way street for success. Let’s breakdown some examples:

Let’s use Google marketing as our case study. You can either pay to have your Ads shown on Google for potentially valuable keyword phrases, or you can invest in a company to have your website show up organically on search engine results on searches determined to most likely be performed by your target audience. Your Internet marketing team can get in you right in front of your potential customer and track things like phone calls coming in from their work, the amount of traffic your website receives and where the traffic came from. The two things they can’t do are close leads they bring in for you (except in the case of an e commerce based business) or calculate exactly how much revenue they bring you annually.

Your Internet marketing team will look at the numbers they can control. They may report to you things like an increase in organic search result rankings, the flow of traffic on your website, AdWords traffic, lead form submissions and phone calls. What really matters though? The same thing that matters to all business owners - RESULTS. It is up to you as the business owner to set up clear metrics for measuring your incoming leads.

Start by categorizing your leads and placing them into a CRM system like Salesforce. Be sure that all of your incoming leads are tracked and labeled; what you can measure you can manage. However you receive leads, be sure to have a clearly defined process for categorizing where they came from. Each month you should audit your lead flow and determine which marketing avenues are successful. Knowing this will help you determine ROI and where you can best invest your marketing dollars.

Again – please, don’t keep this information to yourself! Be sure to communicate to your Internet marketing team each month what the exact revenue numbers are from your website and from their other work. If the numbers don’t look exactly as you’d like your team can change their strategy to help make the work more efficient. If it’s a good source of revenue you can expand your investment – if it doesn’t work out then at least you have a better understanding as to what  does and doesn’t work for your business.

All marketing should be focused on finding a return. Measure and communicate your level of return with your Internet marketing team and your Internet Marketing efforts will have a far greater chance for success.

Trevor Emerson

President/CEO Local Search Masters

Below are a few reasons why you should think about swapping over your account if you are currently employing your personal Facebook account to promote your business…

- It’s actually against Facebook’s terms of use to use a personal page in this fashion.
- Fan Pages are set up for business use so they have much better usability.
- You can easily convert your page to a fan page without losing any of your “friends.”
- Personal pages are not searchable in search engines while fan pages are.
- Personal pages can only have up to 5,000 friends, while a fan page can have unlimited fans.
- Fan pages have analytics and statistical information for who sees your posts and also how they interact with you.

You may say, “But I’ve already put all of the time and effort into it, I don’t want to start from scratch!”

That’s fine, Facebook actually has a very easy way for you to convert your personal page into a fan page and NOT lose any of your previous work. It’s super-easy… check out the steps below for more information.

Step One:
First you need to save your current information just in case something goes wrong. Login to Facebook and go to Account Settings. You can download your information from here (it literally says “Download A Copy of Your Facebook Information,” in shaded letters on the bottom.)

Step Two:
Here is the link to begin the migration: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate *Please note that you’ll be asked to choose the type of page you want to create (examples include: Local Business or Place, Company Organization or Institution, Brand or Product… you get the idea.) It’s best to just pick the one that you feel identifies your brand the best way. It’s very easy to get confused, I mean if you have a company it can still be a local business and vice versa. Just try to pick the best one and move on in the process (I would suggest “Company” for a more B2B based set-up and “Local Business,” for a storefront type business.)

Step Three:
By migrating your page you have moved over your contacts and profile photo, however you will still have a profile page as your fan page will need this for an anchor. From here however, you can add folks to your business page as admins. This is reserved for people that you wish to have posting privileges (as the business) and to monitor fan activity on the page, so choose wisely.

For more information on this topic just Google “Facebook Business Page,” for countless slideshare uploads, articles and blog posts that detail out more of the finer points. For now, happy Facebooking!

Mr. Google himself, Matt Cutts

Upon entering the Google Analytics session on Wednesday I was honestly shocked at the amount of folks that were there to learn more about Analytics. Literally packed to the gills, there was almost no room, however I was able to squeeze in and settled down to learn as much as possible.

Unfortunately there weren’t a whole lot of the physical applications that I was able to take away from the session. Most of the tools/tips we are already utilizing, however it was brought to my attention during the session that Google is preparing to link up everyone’s Google+ pages with Analytics. This is HUGE, as it will have all kinds of connotations from a client, personal and in-house perspective.

The most obvious thought that came to my mind relates to the main difference between Facebook, twitter and Google+. Search engines see Facebook and Twitter as private websites, this means that all of your browsing within these are not visible to Google bots, however pairing a social profile based site with a search engine and then giving it the tracking ability of analytics would have huge opportunities.

Another takeaway from the session was that the “old,” layout of Google Analytics will soon be retired (beginning of next year) so you will be forced to swap over if you haven’t already.

Other than that, the short session was really just an exercise in patience as the gentleman behind me proceeded to leave his messenger notifications turned up so every few minutes of the presentation was punctuated with the lovely dings of incoming chat messages.

Enjoy!

We are listening to the history of marketing and how it relates to Internet marketing. The LSM crew is excited to be here! Lots more updates to come.

Follow our feeds from PubCon on twitter: @LocalSearchMstr

So, what is PubCon?

PubCon is the premier search and social media conference and expo. Held yearly, this year’s conference is being held in Las Vegas during the week of November 7 – 10, 2011 at the Las Vegas Convention Center South Hall in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. PubCon Las Vegas 2011 will be the biggest and boldest gathering of search and social media innovators they have ever assembled, offering an unrivaled highly-productive conference experience at cost-effective rates, and with the leading technology and online marketing visionaries who will be in Las Vegas, as the committee is confident in the speakers and specialist that have descended upon Las Vegas, we are confident that every attendee will come away with valuable new ideas and solutions for search marketing. Content c/o PubCon, learn more by visiting www.PubCon.com/pubcon-vegas-2011

How often have you heard friends recommending their favorite professional service providers? From contractors to dentists people rely on their friends’ opinions on a regular basis.

I do it too. I recently moved to the Dallas – Fort Worth area and I know very few folks. For everything, from eyebrow waxing to local pediatricians, I’ve had to rely on recommendations from a very small pool of people.  Facebook recently made getting recommendations from your friends a whole lot easier.

The new “Recommendations from Friends,” feature on Facebook (and I say “new,” but really it’s a Summer 2011 development) has capitalized on this need for familiar input. Now when scoping out pages on Facebook there’s a right sidebar with information that includes any recommendations my friends may have written about a particular business or place. Not only that, but Facebook recently announced the addition of non-friend recommendations which will soon be present on pages, as well as a recommendations prompt, that will urge folks to write a recommendation as soon as they click the like button. All of these changes mean that as a small business owner, you have an exciting opportunity to further promote your business on Facebook.

In order to push recommendations on Facebook it’s important to integrate it with everything you do. From invoices to email marketing, include your Facebook icon with a call to action such as  “Like and Recommend us on Facebook.” Train your salespeople and customer service representatives to mention it in conversations and follow-ups. Chances are a large percentage of your clients are already using social media and they only need a reminder or nudge in the right direction to spread some social media love on your own page.

Establishing a pool of recommendations on your Facebook page is a great way to inspire confidence and trust for first time researchers. This will make their conversion that much easier for you as a business owner!

Overall, this Facebook recommendations addition is just another step in recent developments making it easier for business owners to reach a larger pool of potential customers. It’s up to us, as digitally savvy marketers to take advantage of these services and really see what converts for our businesses.

Currently, link building is the most important off site SEO technique. Without link building, no SEO campaign can succeed. In this week’s video blog, Trevor answers these questions:

• What is the importance of link building in SEO?
• What is the difference between a relevant link and a non-relevant link?
• Do you need different types of links?
• What are the absolute ‘best’ links you can build?
• Is there such a thing as a bad link?
• Is link building always going to be the best bet for SEO?

To discuss link building and search engine marketing with one of our sales executives, please contact us at 888-540-1190.

Aside from +1, other new releases include:

• Google’s new look and design
• Convert SWF files to HTML 5
• Hundreds of free open source fonts
• Highlighting content creators in search results

So, just what is +1 and how could it benefit your business?

Before the emergence of the Internet, think about the thought process you went through before buying a product. If you’re anything like myself, you asked friends or other family members. It was the ultimate vote of confidence in a product – that word of mouth affirmation from someone in your social circle could make up your mind one way or the other.

Now, think about using a search engine. You enter a keyword which may or may not include a product item and you find a friend or family member has +1′d a certain result in the rankings. You notice that this certain result in the SERPs has more +1′s than other results too. Naturally we are more inclined to believe that if your family and friends liked it, why wouldn’t you?

We can only speculate how Google intends to use +1 moving forward, but some tests have shown that not only can we be influenced by seeing our social circle +1 something, but that it can impact the actual ranking of a result. Search Engine Watch published a great post on this last month.

To implement +1 on your website visit Google’s +1 instruction page.