Why List Building and Email Marketing are So Important

Email Marketing and List Building go together like bread and butter or tea and sugar. It is like any typical dynamic duo that you know.  The just perfect each other and compliment each other’s features positively. This is one of the oldest practices in the Internet Marketing Sector. It is because they are truly a key to obscene profit if done well. This is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Think about all the products you’ve bought from an email. If you can think of just one product you bought through an email from a marketer then you’ve proven the effect of email marketing and list-building. There are so many merits that prove their worth together. Read carefully to understand why you need to get in on the action if you already haven’t. If you have its great to truly understand why you are doing it so you can be properly motivated and positively prepared in order to enjoy success.

Why is list building advantageous to your Internet Marketing Efforts? Simple business principles dictate the more people you can get to the more business and traffic your business has access to. Once you have these targeted clients and potential prospects on your list you can have access to them upon will. You are able to build relationships and generate money by sending ads, discounts and incentives, and keeping them informed with what is happening around your business. This literarily leads to more sales and better customer relationships.

“The money is in the list”. This is on of the truest saying in Internet Marketing. Think about it what else pays you to develop it. While your building your list you can be making money at any time. You can start with just 1 person, build a valuable relationship and scale your efforts easily. Its also fantastic that nowadays with the help of technology the whole process can be automated and made as simple as a few clicks in the morning. There are so many solutions out there to solve many email-marketing problems that you would have to be lazy to not do it.

Let us also not forget one of the most beautiful features of email marketing: the minimal cost required to run it successfully. Email marketing is basically the cheapest marketing and campaigning format available to an business. You can get started for basically $20, a pizza box or nice dinner at a nice restaurant. Apart from its cheap costs It requires very little investment in time to set up and run. Today you can even outsource your effort easily and successfully to virtual assistant.  If by now you have not realized the power of emails and lists to build a successful business you will never appreciate its power. Which is okay because all the profits you will be missing out upon can easily be put to use by the smart marketers who are already tapping into this source.

Want to find out more - then please check out my blog at www.graniteseo.com

Friday - Its Blog Carnival Day

Welcome to the January 18, 2013 edition of granite seo blog.

Jessica Smtih presents Prom Bouquet Ideas for 2013 posted at Flowers in Folsom, CA - Folsom Florist - Miracle Flowers, saying, "Prom is surely one of the most thrilling and unforgettable events of high school. After you have successfully chosen your formal wear, it is time for you to plan your prom flowers. The prom flowers should always complement you and your date's dress and reflect your own unique character. Instead of using conventional corsage, a small nosegay or bouquet is a stylish trend today. From flower to color selection, there are many different prom bouquet ideas that you need to consider."

internet marketing

Peter J. Buscemi presents Review Marketing's Performance in 2012: An Objective and Quantifiable Reflection : Four Quadrant posted at Four Quadrant, saying, "Regardless of whether December is the end of a quarter or the fiscal year, it's a good idea to Review Marketing's Performance in 2012.Marketing is responsible for developing and executing go-to-market plans that build the brand, help develop products and assist the sales organization in generating revenue."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of granite seo blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Top Tips For Local Businesses - Part 3

Ok, its Thursday and I'm knackered :) So, I'll keep this final installation brief. If you want to read part 1 and part 2 then you know where to look.

The last 3 top tips for local businesses wanting to maximize their search engine exposure are.. cue drum roll..

7. Get Social. Your social following usually contains a lot of people from your local area and those people know others who know... you get the idea. Twitter users can follow influential local businesses and spokespeople, and Facebook users can do likewise. Take time to build up a local following - personally I try to follow 10-20 people every day, and remember to un-follow those who don't follow you back. Eventually  you will have a good list of people to get your content, offers and promotions out to and, of course, being local they will want to pay you a visit and use your services. Social signals also form part of the Google ranking algorithm now and can help you get your blog pages or web content indexed much quicker than normal so remember to link back to your site at every opportunity. Generate a local buzz by tweeting or posting about local news stories and interacting with your followers. You don't have to go silly, just set aside a few minutes every morning and a few every afternoon and stay on peoples radar.

8. Become A Local Hero. Following on from the point above, generate offline interest as well. Take part in 10k races - why not get a t-shirt with your web address on it? Get your car wrapped in your branding - its free advertising as you drive around town. Speak at the local Round Table, networking groups, charity events, in fact wherever you get the chance to raise your profile  Remember no publicity is bad publicity - unless you get caught weeing in the shop doorway  on CCTV!

9. Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive. Responsive web design isn't just another passing fad, its essential if you want to capture local buyers. Picture the situation; you are a restaurant just off the main street. People all around you are browsing for a good quality restaurant that specializes in organic cooking but they don't usually pass your door. These days, they are likely to go online, search for restaurants within a few hundred meters of their current location and check out the menu. Can your website handle this or is it a mess? Make sure that it works on tablets, smartphones and iPads and you may well draw people in that might otherwise have never found you.

I hope that you have found this quick series of posts interesting, and if you would like to know more then please swing by my main website at www.graniteseo.com

Top Tips For Local Businesses- Part 2

Hello again everyone. Lets continue part 2 of our mini-guide to ranking sites in Google Local places. If you missed yesterdays into post you can read it here.

4. Make The Most Of Your Titles. Having a great title is not just good for Sir Barnyard-Hall when he wants to get the best table in the restaurant, they are also vital for your local search engine rankings. A common mistake is to forget to put a keyword related title on every page and, instead, just leave the default title.This is an opportunity missed. The best format seems to be <keyword> - <place name> so, as an example, lets say you are an Aberdeen plumber who does heating and gas installations as well. To get the maximum benefit from your site you should set up 3 pages (including your home page) and structure them as follows

Page	Keyword	Title
Home	Aberdeen plumber	Joe Smith Plumber - Aberdeen 01224 123456
Sub-Page 1	heating engineer Aberdeen	Aberdeen Heating Engineer - Call 01224 123456
Sub-Page 2	Gas Installer Aberdeen	Gas Installer In Aberdeen - Joe Smith 01224 123456

Using this approach allows you to effectively target 3 different keywords on your site and, by placing the telephone number in the title you can even get enquiries without click-throughs.

5. Tag Your Rich Media Content. What? Well, basically, its a good idea to have video and images on your pages but the search engines don't understand what they relate to. So, help them out by using your alt tags for images or by creating a video site map and submitting it to Google. I'm going to cover this on my website at graniteseo.com in a few days so stay tuned for more info.

6.Install Analytics. Its amazing how many local businesses don't run Google Analytics. If you don't  then why not? Its a rich source of information about who's visiting your site, how they found it, what keywords are being used and so on. With even just a little bit of knowledge you can use this information to plan ad campaigns  spot new opportunities and even fine tune problematic bits of your site for better results. 

There we have it them, another 3 small tips to help local businesses succeed on-line. If you would like to know more then please feel free to check out my range of local SEO services on my website. 

Until tomorrow

dave

Rankings Update For Edinburgh Printing

One of my recent success stories has been the edinburghprinting.com As you might imagine, these guys are printers based in Edinburgh - whatever gave that away :)

The company are centrally located, making them ideal for businesses whop need high quality digital printing services at keen prices. They offer a copy shop services, promotional goods, short run printing, leaflet, brochure and invoice printing among many others.

The website was only set up, from scratch, about 6 months ago and started out life as Edinburghprinting.biz. However, when the domain name edinburghprinting,com became available we snapped it up and redirected the existing site there.

Since then, the site has performed very well in the rankings and, today has come from nowhere to hold 19 front page rankings and 4 #1 spots.

Work is now progressing to improve the conversion rate and also to drive traffic from new, as yet, untapped markets. Its all very exciting and I'm glad to say that the work is starting to pay off in terms of increased traffic, more leads and, of course, more business for them.

If you are looking for high quality business printing services then please give Lynsey a call on 0131 226 2913 or visit edinburghprinting.com

And, of course, if you own a local business who would like to see the same kind of success as EP then please get in touch and ask about my range of SEO services :)

Top Tips For Local Businesses

If you are a small business owner then the chances are, your customers are mostly withing the local area.

Google realized about 3 years ago that local search was becoming more and more important and a growing number of people were typing a location name along with their search terms. After all, it makes sense to search for 'Aberdeen emergency plumber' rather than 'emergency plumber' if you have a burst water pipe and you stay in Danestone!

The Venice update (see SEOMoz for the full lowdown) rolled out a large number of enhancements to the local search and kick-started the process that has led to today's blended (ie it appears in the main search listings complete with map listing, reviews and Google+ integration.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

"Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user."

SEOMoz.com

The amazing thing (at least for me) is that, according to recent research, 63% of consumers and small business owners use the Internet as their primary source of information when looking to buy goods or services.

Even more amazing is the fact that 39% of them say that , quite often, they cant locate a particular business. That's a lot of traffic (and business) going begging! So, if you are a small business owner targeting the local market, you really need to implement local SEO techniques to tap into this growing market. Luckily, its not too hard to improve your local visibility if you follow a few simple guidelines.

Over the next couple of days, I am going to list some of my top tips for promoting your business using local search. Here are 3 to get started today:

1. Think Local and Link Local! There are loads of quality local websites and directories that will allow you to place links for free, for a small fee or sometimes just for contributing some content to their site. These sites often rank well in the search engines themselves and get local traffic. Links from sites such as hotfrog.co.uk, or even Best Of Aberdeen (just contact Harry!) give you local exposure and will drive local visitors to your site.


2. Consistency Is Key. Even if you have different websites or trading names, you need to present a single front to the search engines. Make sure that you use the same NAP - Name, Address and Phone number when listing your business in online directories because Google uses this information to tie these citations back to your business. By varying this information you are diluting their effectiveness and creating more work for yourself!

3. Get Reviews. Hopefully your customers are of the happy variety! If they are, then why not ask them to give you a review saying so? Many directory sites such as HotFrog and Yelp allow their users to leave reviews and,of course so does Google, providing you are logged in using your Google+ account. It only takes your customers a few minutes of their time and most are happy to help you (you could even incentivise them by offering a discount voucher etc). The more reviews you get, the better you will rank in the local listings.

If you want to know more about local SEO then please take a look at my website where I offer a range of professional local SEO services including bespoke consultancy and pre-defined packages., and remember to come back tomorrow when I will give you another 3 killer tips for great local rankings.

Page One Rankings For G5 People

I have been working on the rankings for local Aberdeen employment agency - G5 people for a few months now, and things started off very slowly! However, in the last couple of weeks, its been full steam ahead and the site is now showing good progress with a 2 front page rankings being achieved within the last week alone.

G5 People is a new start up employment agency run by local business man Keith Ogilvie and specializes in recruitment for the global oil and gas industry. The business was originally set up to address the recruitment needs of its sister company G5 Tech - an industry leading IT consultancy - but soon branched out into oil and gas.

G5 People pride themselves in the fact that their recruitment consultants are not sales-oriented; they are all industry professionals with a vast amount of experience in the global energy market. Because of this, the agency is well placed to provide an expert, tailored recruitment service for both employers and candidates alike.

Service is of paramount importance to their customers and they are gaining a solid reputation within the sector both locally and internationally.

The brief on this project was to raise the company's online profile both at home and overseas. Because of this I employed local SEO tactics as well as more traditional SEO link building, content generation and on-page SEO tasks as part of my overall SEO consultancy efforts.

Rankings are continuing to improve and traffic is increasing, along with a slow but growing trickle of leads. G5 People are starting to see the benefits of good quality, white hat SEO practices - could your business benefit from the same?

If so, please get in touch on 01224 515365 or dave@graniteseo.com and start achieving rock solid rankings with graniteseo.com