After all these years--excerpted from a client email

How do I get on the first page of Google?
The biggest question I still get from clients after four years of web development is, "How do I get on the first page of Google?" With powerful technology at the fingertips of every web site owner in the world (not just Senscia clients), getting on the first page of Google is a very realistic goal given enough time and the proper amount of due diligence. So now that we know the world can find our web site, the next question might be, "Why aren't we getting more traffic?" The answer lies in what I like to refer to as the Field-of-Dreams analogy—just because you can build a better mousetrap does not mean the world will beat a path to your door.

How can I drive more traffic to my site?
The bigger question I would really love clients be asking is, “How can I drive more traffic to my site?"

Traditional advertising vs. E-Mail Marketing
Just like your stock portfolio your marketing efforts should be diversified. No doubt you are using or have used in the past tried and true traditional methods of reaching an audience through print ads in trade journals, product literature, direct mail, video, etc. All methods can take significant dollars to drive traffic to your site; some methods have little or no measurable results. Yet no single method can do the job by itself.

Enter email marketing. A dynamic HTML email program like Senscia's uChuz E-Mail Module can give you more bang for your buck than any other form of advertising. The cost of advertising is spiraling upward. Postage is now 42¢ a piece, color brochures that used to be 50¢ are now two or three dollars each, journal advertising that used to be hundreds of dollars grew another zero behind the price in the last decade. With the economy the way it is today every dollar has to account for itself. You can fight rising costs with a uChuz E-Mail Module. We have a client that replaced a printed newsletter mailed to 16,000 four times a year and saved the one time cost of a uChuz E-Mail Module in the first mailing. Do the math.

E-Mail is powerful
Email just might be the most powerful new tool on the market today. Its benefits are numerous:
• Email is immediate. You can think it this morning and reach an audience this morning (afternoon might be too late)
• Email can be scheduled to start immediately or scheduled into the future.
• Email is scalable. Mail to one or 90,000 at a time and to one or multiple groups.
• Email is flexible. Import lists from any comma delimitated file. Export and save to an Excel file.
• Email is dynamic. You can add color and graphics. You can add links back to your site or anywhere else on the internet.
• Email can be personalized. Dynamic fields make the message more personal by including the person’s name—or title, phone, invoice, hobby, etc.
• Email is trackable. Since email comes from a specific address you will know the name of the person who opened it and their email address. Reports also track visited links from the email to your site as well as forwards, bounces and unsubscribes.

Even with the proliferation of spam targeted email marketing works.

Define your audience
Where do you start? Becoming more proactive in an attempt to go out and define your audience and reach out to them is the first step. Think, “Who am I doing business with now and who could I potentially be doing business with in the future?”

Data mining
How do you find the email addresses of an audience? How did you go about getting the names and addresses of audiences in the past. More and more email lists can be rented or purchased just like traditional lists of addresses and phone numbers but there are other more cost-effective methods of collecting data.

Beyond conventional marketing
Even beyond email marketing there are new trends being talked about today that can drive traffic to your site. Social Media Marketing is the new hot topic. Stay tuned.

It’s not enough to have a website.

YOUR WEBSITE IS YOUR STOREFRONT--
SO WHY’S THERE A “CLOSED” SIGN IN THE WINDOW?

In these days of YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s not enough to have a website. You have to be interconnected with multiple sites and search engines for maximum exposure, awareness and traffic. It’s called Social Media Optimization. The more optimized your site, the more optimized your sales.

Senscia can help you navigate the terminology, assess the options and implement the best solutions for maximum connections and maximum return on investment. We’ll have that “open” sign up on your website in no time.

Social Media

Senscia can help you navigate the terminology, assess the options and implement the best solutions for maximum connections and maximum return on investment.

As web-based marketing becomes more and more sophisticated, you want to know how to keep your site on the cutting edge to attract attention and customers. Senscia can show you how to harness Social Media Optimization tools to enhance your site, improve your search engine ranking and increase your sales.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is filled with technical-sounding jargon. Here’s the bottom line: The more optimized your site is for Social Media, the more optimized your sales. Senscia can help you navigate the terminology, assess the options and implement the best solutions for maximum social connections and maximum return on investment. Call us today. There’s money in Social Media Optimization. We’ll help you find it.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PAGE TACTICS

"Social media marketing has two important aspects. The first, SMO, refers to on-page tactics through which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media. Such optimization includes adding links to services such as LinkedIn and Myspace

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is about building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues. Some social media marketers offer to write content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites, including getting involved in blogs, forums, and niche communities." Wikipedia

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IS...

"Social Media Marketing is all about collaboration between people. It is about participating with everyone and sharing information. It is as much about giving as it is about receiving from the group. The premise of social media marketing is engaging with the consumer and providing value.
Social Media Marketing is not about spamming. It is not about copying certain links and spamming it in discussion groups and forums. It is important to create value for the people with whom you are dialoguing." Wikipedia

FORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

"Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo." Wikipedia