Free Website Marketing Advice from Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

Advantages of Business Blogs

What Are Blogs?
A blog is simply a place, other than your website, to share information about your company, new products or services or virtually anything that you want your customers to know, hear or see.

Why Should We Have A Blog?
There are two primary reasons to maintain a blog:

• Keep your customers informed
• Provides an additional form of media for the search engines to find you

Your Customers Come From Near and Far - Keep Them Informed
Providing a top notch user experience is paramount to securing new customers and keeping existing ones. Without updated products, services or company information, people will often look elsewhere for a solution to their problem. A blog offers you an “easy to manage” solution for keeping your customers apprised of new advancements within your organization without the costly price tag and time consuming efforts of email marketing, printed newsletters, etc. Don’t misunderstand, email marketing and newsletters do have their place and should be used but blogs can offer customers access to your updates on a daily basis.

The Search Engines Are Your Life Blood For New Customers
While keeping your customers happy is ultimately the most important objective, you do need to think of how you can secure new clientele. The most obvious and cost effective way is through website marketing, whereby, keeping a blog is a perfect complement to that program.
Ultimately, the search engines are looking for websites with unique or updated content that will help them serve their users. Google has recently decided that the best way to improve their users experience is to provide search results that incorporate more forms of media than just a website. In the near future, you will start seeing search engines return results from blogs, podcasts, video feeds, newsgroups, online articles and much more. A blog is a great way to make this jump into what the search engines have termed, “Social Media Marketing”.

Start A Blog Today -> See Results Tomorrow!

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

Everybody knows that if you have a product, there is generally someone looking to purchase that product but do you offer more than just a quick purchase?

As technology increases, peoples needs and desires for more grow and generally customer service decreases, so customers tend to look more for a solution to their need rather than just a product. Solutions not only include the product itself but product support, education and/or implementation assistance.

In an effort to create long term, repeat customers, you should try to identify the various settings your product may be used in, then develop valuable information to assist your customers purchasing decision. We call these application examples and they are often seen in white papers, data sheets, etc.

A customer is more likely to purchase a product if they see that your company not only sells and supports it but also provides alternative uses that they may not have thought of and could potentially save them time and money or help them to secure more of their own clients.

In order to turn your company into a solution based organization, you must know the industries that benefit from your products and have a basic understanding of how they will implement your product into their business. Taking on this task is not easy but it can be done by talking with current customers and letting them know that you want to improve their business by improving your product and/or product support.

Once you have determined the various ways or locations your products are used, you can share tips and tricks on installation and expansion using the product they purchased. From a website marketing standpoint, you are now creating content that can be promoted on your website, through published and promoted articles, podcasts, video demos, etc. all while offering your customers valuable information and time or money saving ideas.

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

Having multiple domains is great since it keeps your competitors from registering domains similar to yours and in the event you start another website in the future, you have a great domain specific to your business. However, it is not good to allow all of those domains to load up a current version of your website, even if there is truly only one site out there and believe it or not, this happens often. In fact, if you run multiple domains, check to see that each domain is either parked with the hosting company or redirects the visitor to your primary domain.

301 redirects are the only search engine friendly way of making sure that your domains or pages within a domain are being properly redirected to your primary URL.

Why Do I Need To Use 301 Redirects?

You need to use 301 redirects because extra domains displaying your current website are considered to be duplicate content and duplicate content is considered by all search engines to be a form of spam and that could eventually get your site penalized.

According to Google, the penalization for duplicate content is not the removal of your site from its index but rather they may choose to display one form of the content from one of your other domains rather than the primary. You say, “Well at least my content is showing!” Yes, at least it is showing but when you are focusing your marketing effort at yourdomain.com, you don’t want to devalue it by having the engines give you listings for myotherdomain.com.

Remember, ‘content is king’ and the more unique content you have focused at your primary domain, the better your search positions are going to be.

How Do I Redirect Domains?

Redirecting a domain is pretty easy, if you understand programming and have access to your web server, otherwise, leave it up to your designer or hosting company to do this.

Below are some common redirect codes for various programming languages:

PHP:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ColdFusion:

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>

ASP:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”);
%>

ASP .NET:

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP:

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

You can even redirect a domain by incorporating a little code into the .htaccess file (apache servers only):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For more information on 301 redirects, give us a call or talk with your hosting company but be sure and check to see that you don’t have more than one domain showing the same website.

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.