Facebook Page in Lieu of a Website
With a Facebook Page you can create a dynamic online presence that is both relevant and cost efficient.
read moreGlobal Beer Network’s Digital Footprint
It all begins with defining your brand. Perhaps we start with a SWOT Analysis? Let iJoe walk through the steps parallel to generating some revenue. Check out GBN’s journey below: Global Beer Network (GBN) imports 42 brands of Belgium Beer to the US. GBN sells to 36 distributors in 33 states. GBN is the only importer of Belgian beer delivering full containers directly from the Belgian breweries to its US distributors. iJoe Services: Branding/Messaging, Advertising/Media Buying, Public Relations, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEM, Public Relations, Online Marketing Pioneering the Development of GBN’s Digital Footprint Challenges: -Limited Online Visibility -Limited Brand Education -Broad Portfolio of Brands to Market on a Limited Budget -Undefined Message Strategy Solutions: -Launch Social Media Marketing (YouTube channel, FaceBook, Twitter) -Content Driven eMarketing (201 campaigns, 35.7% CTR) -Promote/educate about brands with Authentic Storytelling Belgian Spokesperson via YouTube -Implemented Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Program Utilizing Existing 10k database. -Proposed Gateway Beer of Brands to Marketplace -Market High-end Belgian Beers Much Like Wine With Added Twist of a Special Glass (Promoted GBN Swag Shop) and Pairing Foods. Results: -Wildly popular Global Beer TV on YouTube/DVD – each vignette was created to educate and delight the viewer about a specific GBN brands – 22 full-length videos. -YouTube increased education among distributors and shorten the sales cycle -Data Driven Marketing Plan -CRM program – segmented/targeted messaging to brand loyal customers. -Pairing Belgian Beer with Food increased email eMarketing Opens and CTR by 40% -Focus on Gateway Brands increased...
read moreDo You Have a Blogroll Strategy?
A blogroll is a list of links that may appear in the sidebar of your blog. These links may be favorite sites or professional affiliations. Usually the links in a blogroll have a direct correlation to the industry or business of the blog owner. I have a strict criteria for choosing blogs for the blogroll. Typically I recommend listing five links in your blogroll. For many businesses this number allows for a good variety. Below are the criteria for settling on blogs in your blogroll. Relevance to your brand/company Traffic – see authority or total number of social media fans Frequency of Posts – recent? Comments – more than ZERO Advertisers on the blog? Relevance is very important. You want to attract readers to your blog that have similar interests. There’s an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that if someone lists you on their blogroll, you should reciprocate and add them. Link building is a high-level search technique to get you found faster online by Google. Not all parties may participate and reciprocate but it’s a great starting point to list another professional and/or relevant blog. Traffic is an important factor in choosing a blog for your blogroll. If you are trying to build your business you want to align yourself with some high traffic websites. Below are two blog search tools to find blogs within your industry and learn more about their popularity. Technorati Get familiar with Blog Rating System in Technorati Google Blogsearch Google blogsearch is an...
read moreLure Traffic to your Website with a Content Strategy
Most websites are like a dead body on the internet – static with no movement whatsoever. This statement from a WordPress developer got me started in the creation of open source Content Management System (CMS) websites for a living. It is also the statement that got me thinking about how a blog generates traffic to your website. By creating content on a regular schedule you perk up the ears of Google and begin opening your doors to website traffic. WordPress makes it easy for anyone to implement a content strategy. After building a solid website infrastructure on an open source CMS platform like WordPress, most marketers then try to find ways to generate traffic. Think of the content strategy as your maintenance plan. A customized content strategy can enhance any website, transforming it into a lively searchable website. Many clients ask, how often do I blog, vlog, tweet, facebook, google+ and/or email? Below is a sample content strategy. The primary components of the content strategy are media and frequency. Typically, the top performing Social Media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) are used. The content should be customized to the business and reflect the sales cycle. The frequency should be consistent. For example, one of my clients that sells beer preferred their tweets, blog posts and emails released later in the week. This practice enhances the weekend buying cycle of beer purchases. Tweeting food pairings with the beer brands further enhanced the effort! The key to success is creating content that...
read moreInbound Marketing: Create a Blueprint Before You Build the House
Building a website takes a great deal of time and money mostly spent in design and development. Much of the preparation and strategy can be done offline. In fact many of the IMU teachings guide you in creating a state-of-the-art and searchable website. Market ready websites is the concept of employing much of the effort offline, thereby saving you a bundle in design and development hours. Businesses know how important it is to have a user-friendly website that presents a product, their brands and their services well. And, most importantly, getting found online should be a priority. The goal is to have your website appear as the first business in Google search results. Getting found online organically could save you thousands of dollars in pay per click advertising. Each page is built to get Google’s attention. In fact, the whole website strategy is built around getting found by Google, Yahoo and Bing. iJoe applies the newest information about search algorithms. In addition, all the time tested methods are employed along with the newest algorithm research. IJoe creates a complete blueprint for the designer/developer to execute. No detail is left out. All the search strategies are built right into the infrastructure of the website before a designer even touches it. Even the best method of including keywords in the name of images (photos) is pre-planned and consistent with optimizing each website page. Watch this IMU video, Developing a Keyword Strategy, to learn more about keyword importance. “I’ve found iJoe’s website...
read moreOptimizing Your Title Tags for Impact
There are a number of best practices to optimize your website. This blog article will focus on one very impactful method known as the title tag. Focus your energy on the title tags to get found online. This is a powerful and intimate exercise. Its a great first step in improving your website’s findability by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Title tags are text that appear in the top line of a user’s web browser. Safari is a great browser to see these tags visually displayed (see screen shot). They appear in every browser but Safari displays a nice clean view across the very top. These are the keywords describing the content related to your web page. Think about crafting these keywords as advertising text. The url, title tag and alt text (naming graphics/images) correlate very well with high search performance. Many search pros believe the title tags are the only HTML meta tags on our website that search engines crawl to find your website online. There are 3 main tags but for purposes of this blog, we will focus on title tags. HTML title tags are not a meta tag, but it’s worth discussing in relation to them. For impact, lets focus on what Google practices in search. Title tags can only display up to 70 characters in your browser. It is recommended to keep your title tags under 70 characters. In addition, much of the research points to placing your most descriptive keyword/phrase to describe your page as...
read moreGetting the Max out your Google (gmail) Account
Online inbound marketing is the primary way to get customers these days. So what handy tools are there to up your inbound marketing game? Well, here’s a tip from us at Ijoe Inbound Marketing: try Google! Here are a few of their free online marketing tools: * Feedburner: This is handy popular free online tool. Have you ever seen an RSS (rich site summary) feed icon? Chances are you have, and it basically indicates that a user on any site, blog, newscast or otherwise, can choose to subscribe to that page (usually by clicking on the above icon). Subscribers then receive an automatic feed on whatever device or site they choose when the content is updated. Use an RSS feed to keep your clients up-to-date and to spread your service around on the web! * Webmaster Tools: This tool will, in a manner of speaking, educate you on how well your site is performing against other sites. If you submit your site to Google, they will run several ‘tests’ to look at basic things like if your site is ranking on search engines, if your site is being linked properly, monitor your site’s performance and gives you tips on how to create a successful site. It offers you the 101 on SEO for your site, and this is especially handy for those of you that are the real webmasters of your site/product. * Google Analytics: This is by and far the most popular tool for inbound marketing strategies. It...
read moreTraditional Media vs New Media
Traditionally, marketing strategies have always revolved strongly around what is often called, ‘outbound lead generation’. This involves using cold calls, snail mail, and more recently email, as the media by which to sell your product or information. Other traditional media used for outbound marketing have of course also been television commercials, radio, and –let us not forget- the myriad of billboards seen lining our highways. However, as quickly as outbound marketing media strategies have grown in the last 60+ years, technology to block this ‘traditional’ media has outpaced it. So we have had caller I.D., spam blockers, satellite (no ads) radio and TV (SKIP FWD), and now even our billboards are blocked by trees and given little regard. The point? Our traditional media forms used as outbound marketing are increasingly ineffective, and so we must turn to new media and new strategies. New Media and iJoe Inbound Marketing To successfully market our products these days, we make use primarily of the internet. More specifically, we draw the client in as they search for product and services -79% of all adult Americans use the internet. This is called ‘inbound marketing’. At iJoe Inbound Marketing we will create a strong web presence by creating CMS websites, blogs, optimizing social media, strengthening email subscriptions, demonstrating products through webinars, videos, podcasts, whitepapers and more. The client doesn’t waste time on a content management systems or SEO that doesn’t work, iJoe measures and analyzes all efforts. We track which effort will be most effective...
read moreLusso Receives Certification in Inbound Marketing
Certification Awarded by HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University Training Program Minneapolis – August 2011– Inbound Marketing University awards the Inbound Marketing Certification to Joe Lusso as part of its comprehensive Internet marketing training program (http://inboundmarketing.com). This certification acknowledges Lusso’s proficiency in inbound marketing principles and best practices. These principles include: blogging, search engine optimization, social media, lead conversion, lead nurturing and closed-loop analysis. Lusso joins an elite group of Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals. Over 2,000 individuals have successfully passed the IMU program. To complete the Inbound Marketing Certification, Lusso completed 16 in-depth classes covering each facet of inbound marketing and passed a comprehensive certification exam. (View the full list of classes: http://inboundmarketing.com/university/classes) The courses are taught by a knowledgeable faculty of professors, including New York Times’ best-selling author Chris Brogan, Google’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, Internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, best-selling author and international speaker David Meerman Scott, and more. (View all professors: http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university/professors) This certification is administered by HubSpot. About InboundMarketing.com InboundMarketing.com is an online community and certification program for marketers. The site’s content teaches a new style of marketing that emphasizes business uses of social media, content creation and search engine optimization for marketing. InboundMarketing.com is hosted and moderated by HubSpot, Inc. Register for InboundMarketing.com at http://inboundmarketing.com/user/register. About HubSpot HubSpot, Inc. provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and business owners to...
read moreWelcome to iJoe Inbound Marketing Blog!
HubSpot’s vision is to provide a (killer) marketing application and provide great advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into...
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Google Analytics Certification
