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Client excels at #DIY Inbound Marketing Strategy

Posted by iJoe on Feb 6, 2015 in Uncategorized

Paul Pelletier of Boutique Sarfari hired me to build up his web presence. Paul had a small budget for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We agreed on a price that would fit his budget and include his participation. I coached Paul through content planning, rewriting content to fit his brand, optimizing social media websites, marketing strategies and other resources for DIY (Do It Yourselfers).

Paul Pelletier is a trained corporate lawyer. He’s been a dream client. He was very motivated to do the leg work to get traffic to his website. Together we built a solid SEO infrastructure for Boutique Safari. Paul powered through the extensive work necessary to optimize his web properties and get found online.

It’s recommended to spend an average of 20 hours per week on your Inbound Marketing Strategy. Paul spends at least that amount of time getting his website found online. And, its paying off. Paul is seeing small but incremental results. Typical in SEO. The proof is in the Google Analytics reports and the social media counts. See his update below.

Stats are very positive – almost at 25,000 site views on Google, over 250 followers on Twitter (about 15 per day each day), more likes and followers on Facebook and a Special Photographer’s Tour announced last week. Blogging and posting every two days at least. Adding videos every week – people love them!

Read about Paul’s methodology below. I asked Paul to share His-Story.

BOUTIQUE-SAFARI.COM

WEBSITE

1. Ensure website is attractive, user-friendly, geared to primary client base and their interests
2. Create lots of helpful sources of information and useful links on site – show you are thinking about your client’s needs. Try to get other sites to link back to you (this is hard but pursue it every chance you get)
3. Have more exciting photos and insightful visuals than content whenever possible.
4. Test site with actual clients and use feedback to improve site. Site should be a constant work in progress – it should never be built and then ignored.
5. SEO SITE TO THE MAX!
6. Blog fearlessly and regularly on your site and poke journalist and bloggers. Get them excited about you and form partnerships.

We hosted 2 Canadian journalists on a short safari two weeks ago. They now are pitching stories to CDN newspapers about their experience. They have the idea of writing about the unfair impacts of the Ebola outbreak on tourism in countries with no Ebola risk. I’ve also sent you my reply to their idea in a separate email. I’ve already asked them to post and share on our Social Media sites and they’ve already liked us and are following us. I ask them to write a review too.

7. Identify your competitive advantages or markets you wish to penetrate and laser focus your blogs and posts on them. iJoe can run a report to assist you with this.

Open Site Explorer is a link analysis tool that closely mimics what Google or Bing’s linkscape looks like. You can use it to explore all web pages indexed by search engines and get a huge amount of information about your competitors website.

8. Be CREATIVE – think of ways to prove you’re as unique as you think you are. iJoe recommended a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis that focused all our resources on our strengths and knowing our weaknesses. In addition, We then focused our strengths in our marketing strategy to include our website, social posts, engagements and partnerships.

I wrote Ellen Degeneres to tell her about our Women’s and GLBT Safari Programs (with photos) and that no other safari company in East Africa does what we are doing. I told her about the 24 girls we are putting through school and shared photos of the high school grad ceremony of two of our girls. Also sent photos of me with my two biz partners. Asked if she would like to come to Africa and help us change lives, one safari at a time.

9. Ask clients to visit the website and to follow you on all social media they use.

iJoe used several Moz Pro Research Tools to track and improve SEO, social, branding, link building, and content marketing efforts. This gave Boutique Safari the ultimate advantage in building a solid SEO infrastructure.

GOOGLE + (See Demographic profile)

1. Learn about the G+ site (very popular among Photographers), and how to take full advantage of specific communities of interest.

I created the ultimate partnership for Safari lovers and photographers, a partnership with a world renowned wildlife photographer, Natan Dotan. Its called the Photographer’s Workshop & Safari. Both Natan and I created Special Tours pages on our websites. Safari lovers can capture a lifetime experience with a world renowned photographer on hand. Natan Dotan’s page: African Photo Safari Tanzania.

2. Join relevant communities to exponentially increase your potential impact (we joined almost 100 communities that had a focus that we shared or that represented a market we wanted to penetrate and represented a total of almost 7 million members). You’ll have to send posts individually to each community but if you’re focused, you can send the same post to millions of possible followers each time you post. I aim for at least 3 million members with each post blitz. In one 48 hour period, I was able to get over 5000 new site visits with two exciting posts – Now up to 25,000 Views!

3. Post FEARLESSLY and CONSTANTLY – but make sure each post is laser focused at highlighting your competitive advantages or geared to a specific market group (for us that meant, travel writers/bloggers, travel agents, women travelers, adventure travelers, luxury travelers, photography/wildlife/nature communities, & gay/lesbian travelers). DON’T POST JUNK – QUALITY BEATS QUANTITY

4. Whenever possible link your posts back to your website with a hyperlink
5. Use hashtags (#) throughout posts to bolster search value and on Twitter @mentions to include twitter partners.
6. Videos are HUGE – they attract enormous interest IF THEY ARE INTERESTING. Ijoe recommends you always host all your videos on your own branded YouTube channel. YouTube has great search value, universal platform allows viewing on most mobile devices and easy to share in a variety of formats.

7. If you see a post that gets tons of attention, review why and try to replicate that type of post. Learn what people like and service that interest.

8. Get personal – show that you’re human, use humor, share photos that include you to put a face to your brand

Hey Joe. thought you might like to see how I’m approaching Twitter users. I look at their focus and provide stuff that might interest them. Today alone I received 45 new followers so far.

9. Carefully think about what kind of client you’re trying to attract and put yourself in their world – then craft your posts to align with their values, interests, needs, questions. Be current and relevant.
10. Once you have a new client, ask them to post and comment on your posts and to post their own with links back to you
10. Track your stats and modify your strategy as needed.

Other notable steps to follow for FACEBOOK and TWITTER:

Whenever someone follows you on a different social media ask them personally to like and follow you on Facebook too. Ask your contacts, friends, etc to like you and follow you. Ask any new client to do same.

Constantly search for accounts that are relevant and follow them (we followed almost 300 accounts within first month that had a focus that we shared or that represented a market we wanted to penetrate). Look at each members number of followers, their focus, who they follow. This can really help you narrow your tweets and strategy to those that really matter.

Anytime someone follows you, tweet them a thank you and offer them a bit more about who you are. Offer to work with them (mutual advantage works)

Tweet FEARLESSLY and CONSTANTLY – but make sure each tweet is laser focused at highlighting your competitive advantages or geared to a specific market group (for us that meant, travel writers/bloggers, travel agents, women travellers, adventure travellers, luxury travellers, photography/wildlife/nature communities, & gay/lesbian travellers)