You may have come to a point in your business where you have realized that in order to move to the next level, you’re going to have to bring a marketing company into the picture. While this may seem like a huge and sometimes scary step to most people, there are some things you can do to make it easier on all parties involved while as making it more effective.

• Know your outcome. If you can’t tell a marketing company what you want to accomplish, they won’t be able to help you. Do you want to increase the sales from your existing customers? Increase new business? Educate your prospects in order to simplify the sales process? This is the type of information that a marketing company will need in order to help you.
• Have a budget in mind. A marketing company will usually develop a custom proposal based on your needs and your budget. They can’t do this if you don’t know how much you can invest on a monthly or yearly basis.
• Be willing to let go of the reigns. You are the expert in your industry, but marketing professionals are the experts in their industry. Let them do their job and you will see far better results than if you try to tell them how to do it.
• Be open minded. Chances are high that a marketing company is going to take your marketing in a completely new direction ? don’t take this personally. If your current marketing isn’t delivering the results that you’re after then there is no reason to be attached to it.
• Plan for the long haul. The results from a marketing campaign often follow a bell curve pattern so it may be a considerable time before you see results. If you stick with it though, you will often see your results begin to grow exponentially.

An estimated 68% of active internet users in the U.S. had access to broadband as of February, according to a recent study from Nielsen/NetRatings. This is up 28% from 74.3 million in February 2005 to 95.5 million this February.

What this means to businesses is that you can deploy a more powerful web site that includes streaming audio/video, larger images and more interactivity with less concern over bandwidth restraints. It does not mean that you should add all sorts of bells and whistles just for the sake of adding them. A good rule of thumb is to only add new features that improve a visitor’s experience on your web site in some way. Other considerations on this subject are that you will still need to follow the same usability guidelines, ensure that your web site is able to be crawled and indexed by the major search engines, and should still offer a low-bandwidth version of your web site for those visitors who are still using dial-up.

During the month of March we are offering 5,000 free 2-sided, full-color business cards to all clients that invest in a web site design package or a search engine optimization package. You can choose 5,000 of one card or break them down in groups of 1,000. You have the choice of a 16pt gloss stock with a UV coating or a 14pt matte stock.

Blogging can offer many benefits for a web site, such as making it more sticky (keeping visitors around longer), making visitors more likely to return and making visitors more likely to tell others about it. What many people don’t realize is that blogging can also have a significant impact on your organic search engine ranking.

Many of the common blog programs have built in functionality that alerts various aggregators of your new posts. Some of these aggregators dynamically list links to the most recently updated blogs, therefore by posting on a fairly regular basis you will generate a number of high-power links with little additional work. Aside from the obvious benefit gained from these back links in terms of potential traffic, you can also expect to see the search engine bots return more frequently because of them. Once the bots begin crawling your web site more often your organic search engine ranking will improve because of how their algorithm values fresh, relevant content.

Another less obvious benefit to blogging on a regular basis is that while you are developing and posting original content, other web site owners who find it useful will often link to it from their web sites. Since the reciprocal linking that most people are used to has been pretty much devalued by all of the major search engines, these type of one way links are crucial to your overall SEO campaign. Possibly a more important factor is that the traffic that these links drive to your web site will be highly targeted and more receptive to your message.

If you’re ready to get your blog up and running there are a few tips that you should consider to maximize your results in the shortest possible timeframe.

• Ensure that the blog you choose is search engine friendly. We recommend Wordpress
• Ensure that your web site links to your blog from each page
• Ensure that your RSS feed is available on each page of your blog
• Ensure that all configuration settings generate the maximum SEO benefit as well as create additional exposure through the aggregators
• Post on a regular basis - preferably at least once a week

The following testimonial was sent to us by Adam Coyle

“We have run several sites for quite awhile and when we found a client who wanted to begin selling Yamaha generators online, we built them Yamaha Generator Store web site. It was doing well in MSN, but not in Yahoo or Google, and after several more months of not seeing results after our in house SEO, we decided to contract Wildfire Marketing Group. After the third month, our unique visitors are up just over 50% and we can see our site slowly climbing it?s way into Google?s results. So far in the fourth month with 9 days to go we have nearly hit last month?s mark and will exceed it with a full week to go and a few new terms and Google on the horizon.”

Adam Coyle

Below is a promotional piece we’ve recently produced for Urban Body to promote their exclusive launch of 575 Denim. Be sure to visit our web site regularly to see how we implement this and in the meantime, drop by Urban Body for the best in exclusive men’s fashion.

Getting started with your company’s marketing campaign is critical to your success but if you’re like most business owners, you’ll likely make one serious mistake. Not having a goal.

Marketing is not the end all be all solution because your execution must mesh up with your goal. Much in the same way that when exercising to increase body mass you would have to include weightlifting in your training regime rather than focusing on aerobics, your marketing must correspond to what you want to achieve in your business.

For example, if you run a high profile legal firm, directing people to your web site would usually not be the most effective course of action since they would still have to call you to schedule a consultation. Of the people that ended up going to your web site, many would not take the additional step to call and schedule a consultation. On the other hand, if your marketing was directing them to call you and schedule a consultation in a single step, you would generally receive a much higher number of calls.

To get the most from your marketing campaign you’ll need to first determine specifically what you want to accomplish and then determine how to quantify the results so that you can make adjustments as needed.

Are you getting all of the exposure that you can for your web site? Sure, your web site is up and running, it’s been properly coded to make it easily spiderable and you’ve even invested in a linking campaign along with paid advertising. So you’ve pretty much got all of your internet marketing bases covered, right?

No.

Even with all of these things in place, you’re still leaving out a potentially huge part of your internet marketing campaign. A part that once implemented can provide additional exposure with minimal work on your part ? probably work that you’re already doing anyway.

It’s called RSS and it comes packaged with most blogs as well as some of the more popular CMS and forum programs. RSS is simply a file that is populated with a predetermined number of entries from a particular program like a blog. For example, our blog writes an XML file to populate our marketing tips feed each time we post an entry. This feed can then be displayed in a newsreader program, on a personalized home page such as My Yahoo, or even displayed as static content on other web sites. In the case of blogs, your feed can also be found on search engines that focus on blogs such as Technorati or Weblogs .

If you’re ready to reach into a largely untapped market, get your arse out there!

After a recent corporate identity make-over for Divine Discipline, the next step was to redesign their web site to bring it in line with their new image, increase usability and visitor conversion, and provide updated information and functionality.

Divine Discipline’s new web site features a streamlined user interface and along with a powerful and efficient information architecture to make it easy for visitors to quickly find what they are looking for in the fewest possible steps. Additional functionality has been added to improve the visitor experience as well as make it easy for the company to add to and update their content as they see fit, such as:

• A blog has been added to the web site allowing key staff members to add content through a simple web based interface (which can be securely accessed from anywhere). Additionally, this blog has been configured to help improve organic search engine ranking and increase traffic.
• A data base driven calendar has been added to the web site allowing key staff members to post and modify all live events, classes and seminars offered by the company. This lets visitors see which events of interest to them are available in their area, minimizing the need for staff to tell prospects this information, thus reducing their workload.
• Divine Discipline’s products have been made available for purchase online providing them with a new, residual revenue stream.

You can also expect to see even more features added to the web site in the near future. We plan to have video feeds available in the next 90 days along with several other exciting features. Be sure to book mark Divine Discipline’s web site today!

What are your marketing decisions based on? Most small businesses and even quite a few large ones make these types of decisions with little more than a “feeling” or “intuition” to go on. While you may have been in your industry long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, when it comes to your marketing, you really need to have some solid data to base your decisions on. In order to do that you need to have some sort of system in place to acquire that data.

There are quite a few good data base programs available that are well within the price range ( from free to just a few hundred dollars ) of just about any business. ACT, Goldmine and eGroupWare are all choices that are inexpensive, effective and customizable. For larger businesses, you may want to consider having a custom application developed from the ground up. The important thing is to accurately track your interaction with prospects and clients so that you can determine which of your marketing efforts have been successful and to what degree. As the amount of data that you have access to grows you will be able to more finely tune your marketing efforts and generate a higher ROI.

If you want an example of a company that is acquiring and utilizing their data to the fullest extent, look at Google. Aside from the information in their 2003 patent which was made public in 2005, you can find further evidence of their use and planned use of data in a document released during their recent analyst day.

If you take the steps to collect and utilize the data associated with your marketing efforts, you will out perform your competitors and increase your business.