But, I’ll admit it. Over the years my view on SEO has become increasingly negative and pessimistic. This conference helped solidify that view.

When I create sites, I’d like to think I cater to good, basic ‘on-site’ SEO best practices. I make sure the code and structure is well-made and semantically coded. I use header tags appropriately, I use descriptive names for divs – or more recently with the HTML5 spec – sections, articles , headers and footers. I do the basics to set a good foundation for clients to build on. But after that, unless I’m working with a great copywriter, much of the hard work to getting a good search ranking is very much down to the client. And their content. And I make that very clear.

Content is king

Content is and always will be king. I’m not naive enough to think that Google aren’t in it for something, but ultimately they’re trying to bring relevant search results to the masses as they drive their advertising cash cow. For the end user, like my mum or your dad, the ability to find something on the massive www is simple, quick and easy.

So back at the BrightonSEO conference, the first talk was about Google’s recent algorithmic update, codenamed ‘Panda’. Based on the tweets, this was a highly anticipated presentation, seeing as Panda clearly affects the work that the SEOs in this room do for themselves or for their clients.

During the presentation, the speaker gave a telling anecdote:

Some of our clients’ sites have Our main site has still not recovered from Panda, 4 months later.

I’ll get back to that in a second. First, some tidbits from the speaker of things to do in light of the recent Panda update:

• don’t duplicate content
• improve your site’s design to cater to your user
• write better content
• block weak content

Am I taking crazy pills? Isn’t all of the above just common sense to cater to the user > customer > conversion process? The utter nerve Google have that they updated their worldwide search algorithm – used by millions every second of every day – to ‘weed out’ all of the crap content out there on the web! Who the hell do they think they are?

As for that quote above… doesn’t the fact the speaker’s clients site(s) were still affected by Panda directly implicate them as an agency that doesn’t provide the necessary best practices, guidelines and quality content that Google and other search engines want to see?

As outlined in the comments below, the speaker worked in-house exclusively. As a result, any opinion on any client sites has been redacted.

In subsequent talks throughout the morning, an underlying theme was content. Both good and bad.

Shocking

The second speaker was utterly shocking. Speaking about creating a private blog network, he bluntly, openly recommended SEOs trick Google and the SE’s by spreading their sites over multiple IP addresses. Mix up the name servers (!). When creating sites, make them at least look ‘real’ by purchasing pro WP themes, and even go so far as installing Google Analytics, Adsense and make ‘real’ about us/contact pages. And, if they couldn’t be bothered to create multiple GA accounts, meh, just steal the code from bigger sites like the Daily Mail. Then, for content, just go to oDesk or similar and pay for any content, regardless of quality. ‘It’ll be fairly dubious, but…’. Yes, my jaw was on the floor.

The juxtaposition between these two opening talks couldn’t have been more clear. Google’s Panda update wants better, more relevant content. So do I. It has and will affect sites that don’t get in line by providing better content and better customer experience. The private blog network guy completely contradicted that, speaking about content farming, gaming Google and complete black hat practices.

One more time

Content is king. It ought to be, seeing as that’s what we do when on the web. We consume content pure and simple, and as users we want easy ways to discover and digest content. The best sites out there are designed to package content first. It’s a bonus if they’re easy on the eye. So when we and Google, MSN, etc experience bullshit fake WP blogs using the Daily Mail’s Analytics code, it affects not only my mum and your dad, but the web as a whole.

I’m understanding SEO less and less. As my clients will attest, I never recommend SEO. I recommend using common sense. Write good stuff. Sell good stuff. Get a site well built and designed. Enjoy it. Search engine ranking comes only after that.

Anyone who works in SEO or SEM… Your job just got harder.

Basically, when compared to the results for the same search term from 2005, Think Eyetracking have found that the way we use Google SERPs has changed drastically in the last 3 years. Whereas 3 years ago eyeball-tracking showed searchers viewing the entire first page, today searchers are looking at the top 3 results only.

Some very interesting stats generated from this experiment:

• The top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks
• 86% of the participants would alter the search query if they didn’t find what they wanted… and assumes they would continue doing this until the desired result entered the top 3
• 97% of the participants used Google as their primary SE
• 87% said they wouldn’t bother using another SE (!)

Read Think Eyetracking’s full post here: http://thinkeyetracking.com/wordpress/?p=4

However, like any new website out there, a WordPress site needs traffic to meet your specific goals. The difference between WordPress and a basic website is that WordPress makes it easy to do the kind of marketing stuff that people pay substantial money for. How? Say hello to the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Offering more plugins than you even thought possible, the hyper-extendibility of WordPress is its killer app. Have an idea for your blog/site but don’t know how to implement it? Chances are that a savvy web developer has already done it, kindly hosted it in the WordPress plugin directory, and letting you reap the rewards. For free. From image galleries to recent comments, there’s a plugin that offers you what you need.

So, here are the top 15 WordPress marketing-related plugins that every SMB using WordPress should download immediately. I use most of these plugins already on www.CarbonGraffiti.com, and I also have a dedicated folder containing all of these that I activate immediately when I create any WordPress-powered site for a client. Enjoy, share, and please comment on any you feel are missing!

All in one SEO pack

This plugin auto-magically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates proper Meta tags, and allows you to create your own unique titles and descriptions for each and every post/page you publish.

Why? Better SEO means you get your site ranked higher in Search Engines, offering you free, qualified traffic to your site. What’s more is that organic Search Engine traffic is free, meaning this plugin offers you free traffic for very little work. Visit All in one SEO pack

Google XML sitemaps

This plugin creates a Google sitemaps-compliant XML sitemap of your WordPress site. Each time you create or update a post your sitemap is updated, and all SE’s that support the Google protocol are notified of the update.

Why? Notifying the SE’s when you update is like nudging them and asking them directly to send their robots to read your content. As soon as your content gets indexed, your SE ranking for the terms on your page can lift. Visit Google XML sitemaps

Sociable

Sociable offers a great way to let your visitors do the legwork. By adding a Sociable footer to your posts, visitors can quickly and easily add your beloved content to their favourite social bookmarking site, such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook and many more.

Why? Social bookmarking is a great way to get free, qualified traffic from like-minded visitors. Referral marketing is one of the strongest forms of marketing, and social bookmarking uses the same principle to deliver interesting content to peers. Visit Sociable.
Note: this plugin also offers a built-in ‘Send to a friend’ option. Other F2F plugins include WP-Email and Tell a Friend.

Digg This

This plugin automatically adds a ‘Digg’ button to your post, and auto-detects whether the post has already been Dugg. If so, it displays the amount of Diggs, enhancing the snowball effect Digg can have on your site.

Why? Digg can make or break your server with inbound traffic. If you create great content and get Dugg, you can expect upwards of 20,000 unique visits to your site. Great if you’ve just launched a new product or service! Visit Digg This

GA for WordPress

What site is complete without the ability to analyze its visitors? This plugin makes it a snap to include your Google Analytics tracking code to all pages on your site, making it simple to see where they’re coming from, what keywords they used, and what browsers they’re using (to name only a few).

Why? Web analytics is crucial to ensuring you’re offering the right content to the right audience, targeting the right keywords, and making it easy for your visitors to see the pages you want them to see (and convert). Visit GA for WordPress

cForms II

This plugin makes adding an advanced contact form a breeze – offering customizable dropdown menus, radio buttons, Captchas, and styling – so that you can focus on the important task of getting your visitors there in the first place.

Why? What good is a site that doesn’t let a visitor contact you? Good sites engage visitors and prompt them to interact with you. Depending on your goals, a contact form might be your lead acquisition tool, and a good contact form can be the last step in getting those leads. Visit cForms II

SEO friendly images

No SEO strategy is complete without optimized images. This plugin ensures you have full control over the image attributes so you can match it to your content’s theme.

Why? Because images can’t yet be indexed, SE’s rely on the title and alt tags to get a feeling for the context of the surrounding content. Visit SEO friendly images

Wassup

This plugin is for the online marketing voyeur in all of us. Watch in real-time as your visitors enter and interact with your site, or view a history over the last 24 hours of visits to your site, and filter by bots, referrals, search engines, or spam.

Why? Analyzing how your visitors actually interact with your site isn’t something most analytics programs can offer. Wassup’s functionality lets you address what pages result in dead-ends or loss of interest, and allow you to experiment with changes in real-time – a great plugin. Visit Wassup

Twitter for WordPress

This plugin makes it easy to add your recent Tweets to your blog, letting site visitors know there’s a real face behind the site they’re on.

Why? Twitter is here to stay, and only recently has started to get exposure as a great marketing tool. Best used for transparency marketing and/or brand management, Twitter is a great way to interact with like-minded peers or customers. Visit Twitter for WordPress

WP SuperCache

Although I haven’t had the fortune of getting Dugg yet, this plugin helps to guard against site downtime in the face of traffic spikes by generating static HTML files from your normally dynamically-generated pages.

Why? Letting more visitors see your site at once – especially if you’ve just delivered great content that’s been Dugg (or similar), means more eyeballs, more exposure, and potentially more returning visitors. Imagine if all they saw was a 404 page? Visit WP SuperCache

Maxblogpress Ping Optimizer

Pinging is the art of notifying multiple indexing services (including search engines, Technorati, Google Blog search, etc.) that your blog has just been updated. I liken pinging to Google Alerts – the blog alerts you see in your inbox are often a result of pings. This plugin automatically notifies all services that your blog has just been updated.

Why? Similar to a sitemap, this plugin notifies services that a specific blog post has been created, and asks them to come take a look at your new content. Pinging is crucial to getting into Google Alerts and similar notification services. Visit Maxblogpress Ping Optimizer

WordPress related posts & Recent Comments

These plugins lets you keep your visitors/readers on your site for longer by engaging them with relevant content and discussions. Based on what they’re currently reading, both of these plugins serve up related posts (by matching tags) or recent comments, allowing a visitor to keep reading or interacting.

Why? Relevant content is the key to any site visit. Don’t let your hard-worked content go to waste in just one visit – keep the visitor reading or commenting and they might come back for more! Visit WordPress related posts Visit Recent Comments
Note: Also check out WP-PageNavi

Subscribe to Comments

This plugin acts as a retention tool – making it easy for those who’ve left a comment to be notified of subsequent comments via email (that they’ve opted-in to obviously).

Why? Anyone who comments on a blog wants to get involved with the discussion and see what others have to say. Keep them coming back again and again to get really absorbed in your content! Visit Subscribe to Comments

WordPress Automatic Upgrade

This plugin is a Godsend. Although not particularly marketing-related, this plugin makes the normally laborious process of upgrading your version of WP almost too easy.

Why? Security is the one issue of using an open-source platform like WordPress. By upgrading to a new release, you’re staying one step ahead of the hackers trying to get into blogs around the world. Visit WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Note: Also check out BackUpWordpress

WP-Polls

Learn more about your visitors by offering a poll to collect valuable information. Ask anything from first impressions to their favourite blog.

Why? Uncovering demographic or statistical information on your visitors can help in decision-making for content, style, or direction of your site. Polls are a great way to interact, and everyone loves to see the answer! Visit WP-Polls

Bonus: Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager using WordPress and FeedBurner

Although not a plugin, this is a great tutorial for the techies to show you how to use your regular WordPress website combined with Feedburner to make a simple email newsletter manager.

Why? Because WordPress has great potential to be so much more than even a CMS – it can even act as an email marketing campaign generator! Visit WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager using WordPress and FeedBurner

Honourable mentions:

Visit Quote Rotator
Visit MailPress
Visit WP-Affiliate
Visit podPress
Visit WPtouch iPhone Theme

Corporate Recruitment
Why bother to use an agency when your next star employee could be on the next site over? Although best used for freelancer-type roles, if you’re looking for white-hot web designer for your next project, try bidding on a term like ‘web design’ to display your 96 character job description to anyone viewing a site related to web design. Your Google content network-targeted campaign might deliver hundreds of applications, but isn’t that a good thing? You get to choose the perfect candidate after they’ve come to you – for a fraction of the cost of agencies and/or recruitment ads.

Personal Service Offering – with a twist
Although firmly in Facebook’s shadow, Linkedin offers a great social networking service for professionals. The site is constantly adding killer functionalities and expanding the service, and thousands of employees (including myself) and employers are active in the network.

So if you’ve blocked off some time for freelancing as a side income, why not use PPC to advertise the services you offer? Don’t worry if you don’t have a PPC-friendly website or landing page; using your Linkedin’s public profile is probably better – it comes complete with testimonials/endorsements, work experience, education and a contact channel, so you can easily promote yourself as an expert in the field matching your keyword. Your clients are as qualified as they can be, and depending on what services you offer, you’ve likely paid for your campaign several times over.

Check out an example for the Google search query ‘multivariate testing’ resulting in Niki Hignett’s profile page where he offers services for A/B and multivariate website testing: (Having trouble? Click here to see the ad on Google’s preview page)

Newsletter subscription growth
We all know email marketing is super cheap and effective, and that having a healthy opt-in subscriber base is a great way to launch new products, build brand loyalty, and up sell your product. Although organic is usually the preferred method of building your list, why not throw some money at it, and calculate the long-term revenue generated by your newsletter program? PPC can drive qualified, interested clicks to your newsletter program, although it’s likely you’ll need an incentive to entice them to click-thru. The argument is you’ll get some non-qualified clicks, but what better justification of a newsletter program for turning those subscribers into advocates and buyers?

Affiliate program promotion
If you’ve launched a new affiliate program, you want registrants ASAP. Use PPC to target potential affiliates by bidding on the same keywords your perfect affiliate might search for. Be up-front with the commission structure and tiers, and you can offset the costs of your PPC campaign with the sheer volume of sales generated by your super affiliate.

Synergize with your SEO efforts
SEO is free traffic, and PPC is paid… so it’s obvious which is better for your budget, right? If you’re on a tight budget don’t write off PPC just yet. When used in tandem (along with a good web analytics program) you can max out the effectiveness of both PPC and SEO with a little research and some sweat. By identifying your ‘head’ vs. ‘long-tail’ search terms, you can use PPC to target the search terms that are very specific to your product – low volume & high yield (and therefore low cost per click). Leave SEO to target the broad, brand-related keywords that are often high in volume and low yield, and you’re already saving a bundle and doing some semi-advanced marketing tactics!

Can you think of any more PPC ideas that aren’t your ‘run-of-the-mill’ variety? If so, I’d love to hear them!

This represents a fundamental change in the way Flash-based sites are perceived in the industry. For years, Flash sites have been increasingly marginalized into sites specific to ultra-creative type portfolios, online games, digital agencies and multinational brands like Coca-cola for use in their uber-engaging ad campaigns. The everyday SMB or corporate organization were always steered away from Flash considering it was never accessible by the Search Engines, meaning that a site built in Flash was effectively invisible to the outside world.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

This move by Adobe is 1) clearly a way to bring Flash back into the main stream for websites, and 2) a competitive move to align Flash with Microsoft’s Silverlight, who clearly did their homework and built SilverLight on XML, meaning it’s instantly indexable.

It looks like Google are already on it – phasing in the SWF-indexing technology, whereas Yahoo are rumoured to ‘have some work to do’. Microsoft, obviously, were not included for the competitive reasons mentioned above.

It does seem that although this is a massive step in the right direction for Flash-based sites, some issues will take a while to be resolved, for instance the production of a Flash site will have to change in an SEO standards compliance-type way and be built in such a way to allow deep indexing of separate SWF files. Having fiddled with Flash before, it’s easy to build a site as one complete movie/FLA, and in this case a user might be left at your homepage after arriving from a deep search, and be expected to navigate themselves to the correct level/page.

Except for the learning curve needed for webmasters and web designers in Flash, this advancement by Adobe might be monumental. Flash exists on 98% of all computers today, and there are 73 million Flash files on the web.

Read the official Adobe Press Release here.

http://feedcompare.com/
http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
http://www.keywordspy.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php
http://www.backtags.com/
http://www.websitegrader.com/ - Recommended
http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker
http://www.iwebtool.com/multirank
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/
http://www.touchgraph.com/
http://www.soloseo.com/tools/indexRank.html
http://www.xinureturns.com/ - Recommended
http://seodigger.com/

Video Marketing:

1. Create videos that research proves will do well on the sites you are marketing to. Usually funny videos and tutorials tend to do well.

2. Decide what video marketing stance you are going to approach with your video marketing: Cut the video and add branding before something funny or interesting happens to redirect the viewer to your site. Or allow the entire video shown to allow for more viewers and impressions.

3. Initiate streaming rich media ads on videos.

4.Purchase pre-roll or post-roll ads on videos.

5. Distribute your video across these multiple video sharing sites.

Conversational Marketing

6. Leverage sites like Sponsored Reviews in order to create a viral buzz online regarding your brand.

7. Join as many forums as you can adequately sustain a quality contributor.

8. Get to know who the industry voice is for your niche and post comments on there blogs.

9. Contribute to online groups like google groups and myspace groups.

10. Market yourself by adding a blog.

11. Use advanced techniques to gain RSS subscribers for maximum exposure.

Pay Per Click

12. If you have a larger budget create an account on the top tier pay per click networks, Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

13. If you have a smaller ad budget go with Google and some tier 2 and tier 3 networks.

14. A great way to get branding is to get those impressions. Try giving 3^rd tier networks a try but know that conversions may be lower on 3^rd tier networks.

15. Utilize keycompete to get a good base on competitor PPC advertising.

16. Do extensive keyword research to find optimal exposure and converting keywords.

17. Try to find niches and keyword markets to target that are not as heavily competitive but are highly trafficked so your cost per click will be way down.

18. Mind your ad quality.

Social Media Marketing

19. Stay as ethical as you possibly can.

20. To successfully leverage your social media for online marketing you need to really be active in your communities, ergo is best to have power accounts on a few social media sites rather then trying to manage many of them across multiple networks. Find your niche.

21. Initiate social bookmarking campaigns online.

22. Create content to support edits in wikipedia.

Email Marketing

23. Team with companies with double opt in lists

24. Sponsor mailing lists with companies who have a wide subscriber base.

25. Try to leverage DBA lists

26. Setup a network of sites geared towards lead generation. By capturing these leads you can use them for yourself or sell them to leading lead brokers.

Mobile Search Marketing

27. Create a click to call campaign

28. Develop a mobile version of your site.

29. Include jump links below your content as normal navigation on a mobile search page can cause problems when viewing on mobile devices.

Search Engine Optimization

30. Optimize all title tags and meta data according to your rev mix.

31. If you are having problems ranking internal pages for there given keyword terms consider developing an effective silo.

32. Develop search engine friendly html sitemap.

33 Develop quality internal linking structure.

34. Create optimized html source code.

35. Create optimized robots.txt

36. Create optimized XML sitemap.

Affiliate Marketing

37. Create accounts in the 2 major affiliate networks, link share and commission junction.

38. Evaluate your competitions affiliate program

39. If you do not have an affiliate option for your services or products then think about creating one because the chance to have others advertise your products and services is a great way to get exposure and build your branding.

40. Incentavize your affiliate deals to attract the affiliate and the consumers.

Banner Advertising

41. Examine potential sites demographics.

42. Get media break outs

43. Consider Portal Advertising

44. Weight your cost per acquisition model between the cost of CPM and CPC banner advertising.

Application Marketing

45. Create a marketing campaign on Instant messangers

Contextual Advertising

46. Initiate a PFI (pay for inclusion) campaign for in bound links with sites like Text Link Brokers.

47. Consider Pre Sale pages or Hosted Marketing packages.

On to offline Marketing

48. Clothing is one of the best ways to market a product and service on and offline. By creating clothing that is branded with your logo and services you can ad this clothing line to online shopping sites and having people wear your clothes with your branding obviously increases your brand awareness.

My last and final tip is to make sure that everything you do can be tracked and measured via an accurate web analytics system. If you can afford it I would recommend click tracks. If that is to expensive for you then you might consider web trends. Many of these tips can not only improve your online marketing success but can increase the value of your own site allowing you to be paid much more for your sponsored reviews..

– Joe Whyte

A laundry list of marketing tactics that have worked for others — and some of the benefits or features of each — is below. They are in no particular order because each Website is unique. The tactics that will help you reach your goals may be completely different than the tactics that are right for another Website.

1. Write and distribute articles available for free republication — Provides a “sample” of your writing or knowledge and creates inbound links to your Website.

2. Write and publish your own ezine — Develops a list of interested prospects and provides a way to communicate directly with subscribers.

3. Distribute Website or newsletter content via RSS (xml) feeds — Provides a way to reach prospects without email and creates more ways for potential prospects to find your Website.

4. Rewrite sales page(s) — Increases conversion rates for your product.

5. Start an ongoing SEO campaign — Improves organic search engine rankings and increases number of visitors.

6. Test different Website configurations — Improves conversion rates and profit.

7. Send postcards or notes to Website customers/visitors via “snail mail” — Additional point of contact improves conversions and recall.

8. Add a signature to your email — Increases exposure to your site and communicates your marketing message.

9. Spend one hour each day on prospecting new customers or visitors — Spreads the word about your product/service/Website and improves awareness.

10. Offer a podcast — Recipients can listen to the mp3 file while away from their computers. A way to verbally communicate with prospects.

11. Blog — You can easily share thoughts and resources up to several times a day.

12. Audio message on Website (With start and stop under visitor control) — An additional way to verbally communicate your message.

13. Online radio show — Attracts visitors to your Website on a regular basis and is a way for visitors/listeners to know the “personality” behind your Website.

14. Survey visitors as a research method — Helps you understand the needs and problems of your visitors.

15. Include a daily (weekly, monthly) interactive survey for visitors — A way to make your Website “stickier” and is a reason for repeat visits.

16. Provide a discount coupon, available only online, and advertise it offline — Pulls new and repeat visitors to your Website.

17. Offer a free ebook that you wrote/developed and allow reprints — Creates a viral marketing effect and provides a sample of your work.

18. Show others’ advertisements on your Website (examples: AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network) — Adds a source of revenue for you and more research options for your visitors.

19. Implement a customer loyalty program — Increases repeat purchases and builds a more loyal customer base.

20. Offer a gift with certain orders over a certain amount — Increases average order size.

21. Write press releases to announce important news — Spreads the word about your business and creates additional avenues of contact with those interested in your industry.

22. Hold an online chat — Interactive way to communicate with prospects and draws visitors to the site.

23. Launch a direct-mail campaign, sending 3 to 6 postcards – spaced a week or so apart – to prospects – Draws new visitors to your Website.

24. Partner with other online businesses by mentioning each other’s products/services in your ezine Websites — Opportunity for synergies between businesses.

25. Launch an affiliate program — Creates a sales force for your product.

26. Offer different versions of your product — Provides a “tiered” choice for customers.

27. Participate in others’ affiliate programs — Develops an additional source of revenue and expands your product offerings.

28. Open a merchant or third party processor account — Increases your ability to take payments online and improves customer service.

29. Offer free shipping — Improves customer service.

30. Have a limited-time offer — Encourages customers to buy now rather than later (or never).

31. Conduct a workshop or class — Builds credibility and attracts prospects.

32. Add testimonials to your Website — Helps establish credibility and shows experience.

33. Participate in interviews — Displays your expertise and attracts new customers.

34. Study your competition — Helps you understand what is happening in your industry and better address important issues and needs.

35. Launch a pay per click advertising campaign — Attracts new prospects to the Website pages you want.

36. Hold a teleseminar — Provides a way to attract potential prospects and customers get to know you better.

37. Put a “refer-a-friend” link on every page — Reminds people to tell others about your site and encourages viral marketing.

38. Set up an autoresponder course — Is a value-added service to visitors and increases exposure to your product and Website.

39. Continually split-test your sales page(s). Change a single element (headline color, for example) and test against the current version. Replace anytime you get a page that converts better than the current – Over time, this dramatically improves profit.

40. Develop a mailing list of “hot prospects” and send them a brochure about your Website — Improves awareness and attracts new customers.

41. Communicate your URL and tag line at every point of contact with customers and prospects — Increases awareness and interest; improves recall; and attracts new customers.

42. List your Website in appropriate directories — Provides more points of contact with potential customers, helps search engine rankings.

43. Install a “bookmark this page” script on each page — Encourages repeat visits.

44. Improve a marginal product — Increases sales and provides an additional opportunity to communicate with customers.

45. Provide a “co-branded” product or service — By partnering with another Website to create a new product, improves both businesses .

46. Offer a contest — Provides additional “stickiness” and encourages repeat visits.

47. Become active in online forums and groups — Establishes you as an authority on your subject, improves credibility, and increases points of contact with potential prospects.

48. Move your primary call-to-action “above the fold” and test different page positions — Can dramatically improve Website conversions.

49. Install live customer service on site. Staff with knowledgeable people so potential customers can get immediate answers – Improves customer service and conversion rates.

50. Develop different versions of your products (example: print book, audio book, ebook, etc.) — Meets needs and preferences of customers in more ways.

51. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONLINE MARKETING TECHNIQUE: First, implement to your greatest ability. Then, persist. Improve upon and tweak implementation of each marketing program until it works for you.

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About the Author

Bobette Kyle draws upon 15+ years of Marketing/Executive experience, online marketing experience, and a marketing MBA as inspiration for her writing. Bobette is proprietor of the Web Site Marketing Plan Network (http://www.WebSiteMarketingPlan.com). She is also author of the marketing plan and Web promotion book “How Much For Just the Spider? Strategic Website Marketing For Small Budget Business.” You can search all articles on the network through the marketing directory by going here: http://www.websitemarketingplan.com/directory