I’ve found there are three main things that successful online marketing has. A clear goal, a real plan, and market feedback.

It’s time to get serious about your online marketing efforts.

In today’s digital landscape its easy to get distracted, jumping from one thing to the next. Yesterday I did a story on the Tech News You Shouldn’t Read. My main point was that the typical tech stories we see have no bearing on the success of you or your business. So why read them?

Information gathering, visiting blogs, learning the latest tips, tools, and strategies to engage social media is not what is going to help you become proficient at marketing online (okay except visiting our site, I have to throw that one in).

I’ve found that most people have enough information or an idea on what might work for themselves but they lack in one of the following things…

1. No Clear Goals

This is one of the most common reasons why people aren’t having results marketing online.

They put up a blog, create some content, bookmark it, share it in social media, and repeat. All this without having a clear WHY they are doing it.

This is the first thing you should do before you create a blog, website, or start to seriously engage social Media.

Sounds simple, but usually the keys to a foundation of success are.

To create goals for your efforts here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of my current marketing efforts?
• What am I hoping to achieve?
• What are specific goals I am seeking in all my advertising efforts online?

You might say this is simple and you know what your goals are, but — do you have it written down somewhere? Most people who are not having great success at marketing online do not have written goals.

Creating and writing down your marketing goals literally will manifest a few things for you.

First, it allows you to focus on what is important.

Second, it will start to get you thinking about the things you do on a daily basis to achieve these goals.

Third, it gives you a focus and a reason for all your efforts.

What type of goals should you define?

The goal I hear most often is…

I want more traffic to my website.

That is a good goal, but it’s really not the type of goal you should be defining.

A quick way to focus on the right goal is to answer the following question:

I need more traffic to my website because…

That really is the purpose of your efforts. That should be the focus of your goals.

Traffic and visitor goals are important, I’m just saying bring it to a higher purpose.

2. No Real Plan

Now you have goals your speeding in the right direction. Next start by creating a list of things that you can do to accomplish those goals.

It now makes it easier to figure out and stay focused on how you should spend your time and money.

A common goal for an example is growing your email list. What are some ways you could start creating a plan to do this?

Let’s take a website or blog:

• Write and promote a blog post X number of times a week – Creating blog posts gives reasons for people to visit your site, more visitors usually does translate into more people joining your email list.
• Re-purpose content- Take content you have created for your blog and use it in other places. Such as niche social networks or create a Facebook note.
   
• Engage social media – You properly engage social media, where people want to learn more about you. Usually visiting your profile and visiting your website.
• Comment on industry blog posts- You find the top blogs and influential bloggers in your industry and make comments. Very good strategy for targeted traffic to your website.

3. Not Gaining Experience or Market Feedback

This is the most critical part, there are two main reasons why people fail in this critical spot.

First, they didn’t create goals and a plan.

Goals + Plan = Market Intelligence.

When you operate without those two critical elements the experience you gain never ties back to something concrete.

In effect, you have no way to relate your success or failure to anything meaningful to you or your business.

The second reason why many people fail to have real success in this area is they don’t create a evolving feedback plan.

What I like to do with projects I work on is a Release, Review, Modify schedule. There is one more peice we will talk about shortly.

Internet marketing online - Release, Review, Modify

Release

You release a new type of doing something, new feature or a change. For instance, you change your call to action on your website.

You’ve been running the same one for the last 20 days, you have X amount of visitors, so you have a good idea of what the opt-in rate is.

You decide on the metrics you should be tracking to measure effectiveness and if you are getting traction. You craft this change and release it.

Review

Now in the review phase you look at the results. These are the metrics you have already identified will be the basis of your success. Usually it’s pretty obvious whether or not your concept increased results. Sometimes it stays the same. That’s when you move onto step into the modify section.

Modify

You take what you’ve learned so far.

You might say to yourself… before when my opt-in offered a free report I got a 7% opt-in rate across all visitors. With this change it’s at 9%.

Tip: sometimes it’s smart to look at specific vertical market visitors, example; opt-in rate of Twitter or social media-vs-organic traffic. Organic traffic vs paid traffic.

Questions you might ask:

• Is this rate acceptable and can it be improved?
• Next, If it can, what changes are necessary and what are the metrics?
• Does this fit within my goals and can I implement it?

This is something that is a continuous action in your marketing efforts.

If your success rate based on your goals is acceptable, that’s when you move to the next level.

Scale

Scaling is when you take what has worked and find ways to explode the activity.

Scaling your Internet marketing.

I’ll give you an example from our website.

Blog commenting gets a us pretty good traffic. This post here on Mashable where Brian commented on social media and ROI links right to our Social Media Magic Bullet Report.

The traffic from this comment has a very high opt-in rate for this report. It’s relevant to the topic so people that read Brian’s comment link over and already are interested in the topic of the special report.

So how do we scale this?

Two ways, you could use real time search tools to find other posts on social media and ROI, find blog posts and comment.

Set up a google alert for “social media and roi”, if you want quick results you set it up as it happens.

The key is not what we did but the process, it started with our goal.

Our goal:  Build a large permission email list where can can give tremendous value and people can learn more about what we do.

We created a special report and put it behind a opt-in form to increase this list. We then feature this on our website and drive specific traffic that is is likely interested in the report.

This is one scalability item. From there we test other options we have based on results we gather.

What Should Do Now To Effectively Market Online?

• Step 1 – Create and write down your goals
• Step 2 – Create a realistic plan to achieve your goals given your current capabilities
• Step 3 – Gain, retain, and learn from your results
• Step 4 – Release, Review, Modify, and Scale.

To your success.

Tomorrow we will release a post on some Metrics and Advice on how to track and gauge your results.

Sure PPC within the stream of a social network might seem like spam (I would kind of agree) but we are starting to see more and more users and influencers take to this model.

Watch Video Overview Below

Making PPC Income

The network allows you to do two things. First you connect your social accounts. This gives an influence score. This influence score defines you pay per click rate. This is the amount you get when someone clicks on an update you send out in the social sphere.

So far we are well on our way to retirement with your test account having made a bank busting $1.47.

Advertising

The other side of this network is the ability to advertise. We tested out a network on a few offers and I share one of those in the video above. Essentially you set up a campaign, how much you want to spend per click, and your budget. From there your off and running.

The Bottom Line

Networks like these are a crap shoot. Ultimately social isn’t a great place for inline advertising but if you have an offer that fits into entertainment and fun this can work for you. I’d still watch networks like MyLikes to see if they do get a larger user base and greater reach but ultimately in it’s current state it’s tough to really take it seriously.

Focus on Local Content (image by Editor B)

One of the best ways to get high search engine rankings is to create hyper local focused content.

If you aren’t doing this I would suggest that you change your thinking on content. The goal here is to be so focused on local relevant information so that the search engines see you as the ultimate authority in this area.

This takes advantage of what is called the long tail of search results. This allows you to get search engine rankings where there is less competition and usually more targeted traffic.

In this post I will share with you why and how you should create and promote this type of content. I’ve also created a video presentation below.

I’ll use an example to illustrate this. Let’s say you are a real estate agent. You have a blog and you live in a city called Plano, TX. You work with two types of people. People who want to sell their home and people who want to buy a home (I know pretty obvious).

Here is one suggest I would give to create a groundswell of content.

Figure out the major neighborhoods in your area then…

• Create a blog post very targeted and keyword focused on these same neighborhoods
• Create a video of you driving through each neighborhood (5-9 minutes)
• Create a short audio on these same neighborhoods all with a call to action to visit your website

Why neighborhoods? Well look at it this way. You could only create content about “Plano, TX” and “Real Estate” or “Homes for Sale, sell my home” etc, etc. But trust me this is too blatant. (Do you need to have some of this? Yes).

Your goal is to create an authority around Plano, TX. You do this indirectly but done correctly the search engines will reward you for this authority.

How Would You Promote Your Content?

You release your blog posts over the series of a few weeks. You structure your blog posts with the proper categories and tags that support what you think people would be searching for in this area.

The videos you put on YouTube with a very detailed description linking to your blog post about this neighborhood. You also aggregate this video content as well.

Audio is the last thing you should do but it completes the circle. Do the same as video except you use networks such as Podbean.com and BlogTalkRadio.com. For each episode you reference your blog post in the details section.

Why This Works

This works because first the search engines are getting really good at relational data, words, and places. Second the traffic from people that find you here is extremely focused; it’s the quality over quantity method.

Think about this, if I search for “sell my house in plano, texas” and a website that comes up number one tells me how I can easily sell my house and is built so I can get to know Judy both in a personal and professional way.

What Other Type of Content Should You Create?

When you start thinking about hyper focusing your content other ideas should start to spring up. Is there a local coffee shop you go to? How about a very well visited restaurant? What about shopping centers or parks? Coming up with local content ideas is not that difficult once you start looking at the area around you.

What Should You Have in This Content?

Include the business name and address. Also relevant description of what the business or place is about. Include pictures with title and caption that supports this information.

Give your opinion, share something unique about the place. You have two goals here, first capture search traffic but also engage the visitor. Often times people don’t do both, to be effective you have to do both.

Also don’t release this content all at once, do it on a schedule. Over the course of a few weeks and months. Being consistent is another key and a good way to do this is to create a schedule of your releases in advance.

Creating hyper focused content is one of the best ways to dominate a local niche.

Social Media Strategy
Here I’ve put together a  special report, a video overview, and 4 core audio recordings on the three pillars of social media engagement. Those are acquisition, engagement, and monetization. The report is full of great examples and some tips on completing each specific strategy.

3 Main Pillars of Social Media Marketing

I’m also releasing quite a few more articles on social media, online engagement, and other marketing topics. Some of the latest ones that I’ve released are… Content Development Strategy, Blog marketing strategy, and influencer marketing strategy.

My goal here is to provide high level actionable advice and tips–as I believe the how to’s and set up stuff is well covered throughout the web.