Hitwise UK recently published a new report which confirms the benefit of creating and developing a Facebook business page to improve online awareness of your product or service and your brand.

According to the Hitwise Report, each new Facebook fan is worth an additional 20 visits to your website, over the course of a year!

The UK based study analysed data for the top 100 online retailers within the Hitwise “shopping and classifieds” section and compared this data with the total number of fans each brand had on their Facebook business page. The end result was that each Facebook fan created an extra 20 website visits.

The study also analysed the likelihood of customers searching for a specific brand after visiting the companies Facebook business page. The study established that Topshop outperformed their competitors, with over 50% of their customers more likely to search for the Topshop brand after a visit to Facebook, compared with traditional search results via the major search engines.

Other major UK retailers also experienced similar results. The Index column in the chart below details the likelihood of searching for a particular brand after visiting the companies Facebook business page.

This data is excellent news for website owners, as it helps to place a value on the effort required to market and maintain a Facebook business page.

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We have recently launched a new website, offering a comprehensive range of web design and internet marketing solutions. This new site will be marketed under the Internet Marketing Magnet brand name.

Internet Marketing Magnet is very different from the vast majority of web design and search engine optimisation companies. As a specialist Internet Marketing Agency, we don’t just build great looking, search engine friendly websites. We build total internet marketing and website promotion solutions, designed to expand your customer base, make your phone ring, and improve your profitability.

Most comprehensive range of internet marketing and web design products available from a single supplier

We offer the most comprehensive range of internet marketing and Web Design Services available from a single supplier and have made our programmes highly affordable, by offering a range of flexible monthly payment packages. In order to achieve success with internet marketing it is important that your website receives regular attention and is constantly updated. This can easily be achieved by investing in one of our monthly packages, which guarantees the ongoing development of your website.

To help improve your search engine ranking results, all of our standard web design packages are delivered fully optimised for all major search engines, including Google. Each web page will be set up to target a number of carefully chosen keywords. These keywords will have been identified from our keyword research results and will represent the most suitable keywords for your business, based on search volume and the level of competition.

WordPress Blog and Email Marketing software automatically included with all websites

We will automatically include a WordPress Blog as an integral design feature of all our standard web design packages. Your business blog should be viewed as the life blood of your website and provides you with the ability to add fresh content and interact with your customers on a regular basis.

Google and other search engines love blogs and this extremely important feature will help to improve your search engine rankings. This in turn will increase the number of visitors to your site and the potential number of sales enquiries!

All of our websites also include an email capture form as standard. This will enable you to start building a customer email marketing database from day one. Our specially designed Email Marketing Services software will automatically place all of your customers email details into a marketing ready database and will even send your customers a welcome email that could contain details of a special offer or discount.

Once you have built up a reasonable number of email addresses, you can then start to send out promotional emails on a regular basis. Email marketing is a proven method that will help you to increase your sales and is automatically included as a design feature, with all our standard web design packages.

60% of all customers visiting a website, ultimately purchase offline

It is estimated that around 60% of customers who visit a website will actually purchase offline. It is therefore vitally important that in addition to monitoring your websites visitor traffic, you should also monitor all offline sales, originating from your website. This will enable you to measure the overall return on investment, for your internet marketing strategy.

All of the websites designed by us automatically include the ability to monitor both online and offline sales as standard by utilising our specialist Phone Call Manager service. This new service also offers a host of additional features free of charge, including music on hold, customer queuing during busy periods, missed call notification by email and much more. For further details please visit our dedicated Free Phone Call Manager website.

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As promised here is the fourth  Google video from their webmaster educational series – “Speeding up in a Slowdown”.

In this video you will hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about how to attract new visitors to your site.

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project designed to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month.

Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract new visitors and I hope these tips will help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your own website.

Tip #1: Produce great content

The first tip is obvious, but it’s also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don’t get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don’t settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can’t resist sharing.

Tip #2: Learn to share

My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.

Tip #3: Make your community a team

Finally, I’d encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.

Hopefully Jack’s tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack’s tips, you may also wish to consider Professional SEO services or possibly an Internet Banner Advertising campaign to promote your site.

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Over the past few weeks, Google have been running a series of videos for website owners called “Speeding up in a Slowdown”.

I thought it would be useful to share this with you as it provides helpful information from Google on how to grow your online business, together with useful tips on how to use various Google tools.

I will be posting the complete series over the next few weeks, so remember to check back here on a regular basis, in order to catch the next installment.

In today’s post, you’ll hear from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s own Analytics Evangelist, about the importance of understanding your traffic, analysing how your site performs, and using data to make decisions.

Here are a few small to mid-sized ideas that — in Avinash’s own words — can add up to remarkable results for your website. They’re all things you can do today with free web analytics tools, like Google Analytics.

Idea #1: Discover what content and traffic sources keep people coming to your site again and again.

How many times does a visitor have to visit your site to be considered valuable? Use the Visitor Loyalty report in the Visitors section of Google Analytics to pinpoint the visitors who come to your site that many times or more. Put that data into an Advanced Segment and apply that segment to your core reports to understand things like where these valuable visitors come from and what content they consume. You can then use this information to optimize how you acquire new visitors and the content on your site for loyal visitors.

Idea #2: Figure out which pages to improve on your site.

Many people ask the question: “How do I know which pages on my site to improve?” Take a look at the Top Landing Pages report in the Content section of Google Analytics. This report tells you the first page people see when they enter your site. Sort this report by bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many people come to your site, only see one page and leave right away (or as Avinash calls it: “I came, I puked, I left”). Once you identify which of your top landing pages are not able to get a single click from your visitors you know which pages need to be improved.

Idea #3: Find out where AdSense performs best on your site.

If you’ve linked your AdSense and Analytics accounts, the Top AdSense Content report in the AdSense section of Google Analytics will tell you where on your website AdSense ads get the most clicks. This is a win-win for your business and your customers, as it helps you identify what type of content to produce more of based on what content people are most interested in as well as where people most often click on your AdSense ads.

If you haven’t already, Link Your AdSense and Analytics Accounts in order to take full advantage of what Analytics can offer. If you don’t yet have a free  Google Analytics account, you can Sign Up Today.

For additional Website Promotion information please visit our main website.

As ever, please feel free to comment, if you found this post helpful.

Customers are tough cookies. They are extremely media aware and increasingly cynical and it is a clever marketeer who can get through to them. Online Surveys breath new life into the traditional survey format and offer a unique way of interaction – providing you with all the benefits of the Internet without the programming. Here are ten reasons why they may be the silver bullet marketeers’ need, complete with examples supplied by Martin Day, managing director of Survey Galaxy – one of a new breed of websites making online surveys quicker and cheaper

1. It’s cheap as buttons
Select the right survey website and creating surveys can be free of any charge and the cost to publish is minimal.
Useful information harvested from surveys can be reused and repackaged in other marketing and PR for use in press outlets making it a very efficient form of information gathering.

2. It’s easy peasy
Anyone can create and design an online survey. Create professional looking online surveys in a matter of minutes, no programming skills are required and when published the surveys are simple to complete.

3. Multiple deployment options
Once the survey is online it’s a simple step to promote it, either through email (with a link enclosed), via a link from a website or referenced by other forms of advertising. Anyone who has the link can be connected instantly to the survey, at a time that’s convenient to them, 24×7.

4. We’ve all got an opinion – and we like to give it
Customers do not often view surveys as spam and the majority welcome the opportunity to voice their opinion and the chance to have an impact on a brand. Online survey’s are an ideal way for broaching sensitive subjects with concerned employees; a survey asking a workforce on their opinion of change allows the key issues to be raised in a positive manner and encourages employee participation. Online surveys allow the message to reach each individual and invite feedback in a manageable form.

5. Get inside your respondents heads
With traditional advertising you can lead a customer to an advertisement but you can’t make them think. Surveys engage the respondent, who think about the question before giving their response.

6. Build a relationship
It needn’t all end once a survey has been completed – while you have their attention you can ask if they want to sign up for more information or a regular newsletter – making the most of the window when you have their interest.

7. Link your survey to other online information
Take the opportunity to maximise the interest of those responding to your survey by referencing related information. By embedding links within the survey to other websites that offer more detailed information you are able to reinforce the marketing message.

8. Subtly does it
Surveys can help associate, in the mind of the respondents, a product with a number of positive attributes. By listing the many features of a product and asking the respondent how important they are, regardless of their response, the product will be associated with the features; if they are rated as important the positive impact is endorsed by the customer.

9. Not just selling
A survey is an effective, quick and easy method to help promote and gain acceptance for a difficult proposal; such as a public body trying to gain acceptance and support for a particular scheme.
Take the example of a city trying to gain support from the general public for their bid to host a future Olympic Games. Being able to explain each benefit will put a respondent in a much better position to appreciate your argument and that may be enough to combat any negative aspects. As well as promoting the cause, useful feedback is gained that can be used to fine tune the overall marketing strategy.

10. Fresh topics engage interest
Think laterally and a lively and imaginative approach to surveys can provide a ‘hook’ to engage respondents. The survey subject can be focused towards a particular group on a subject close to theirs hearts. A survey’s marketing message can take the form of a simple brand awareness message by stating that the survey is being sponsored by brand name, or by finding a link from the subject matter to the product – something that is surprisingly easy and highly effective.

Discover the benefits of including in your website a Public Survey section as many people who enjoy completing crosswords and doing word puzzles enjoy completing surveys. Having a public survey notice board as part of a website is a low cost and automated method that helps to increase traffic and establish a loyal and returning following. Unlike discussion boards there is no opportunity for people to disrupt the site by inappropriate remarks as the survey results are displayed in summary form enabling them to dispense with moderators and maintenance.

Customers do not often view surveys as spam and the majority welcome the opportunity to voice their opinion and the chance to have an impact on a brand.

Many of the techniques and a few more are contained in the following Sample Marketing Survey.