Holistic Internet Marketing is Essential

I believe in holistic internet marketing. I don’t believe there is one magic bullet that will be the saving grace for a company. I think success is based on a lot of things that come together. I’ve experienced this with my own company and with my clients. It isn’t a fabulous website that sells the masses, or an SEO wizard that finds the best keywords, or even a social media guru who brings mentions, clicks, and likes. It’s all of it, working together in harmony.

You can create the best website, but without real traffic, a pretty website provides no value. You can have an excellent SEO campaign that drives thousands of visitors a day, but with a horrible website, they won’t convert. You can make friends with millions via social media, but you have to have something tangible for them to see to make them stick. It isn’t one tactic that drives success, but a cohesive internet marketing plan that is well designed and well executed.

The Two-Headed Monster Have Arrived in New York

This morning I sat in a session at Affiliate Summit East listening to my friend Rachel speak. She was coaching new affiliates on creating a plan and getting started. I’ve always have a hard time explaining to people what Rachel does, because it isn’t something tangible like the websites I build or the Facebook pages I set up. But Rachel’s gift is to be able to take an idea and form it into a complete plan that is executable and fairly guaranteed to be a success.

I think this is one reason Rachel and I get along so well professionally. We’ve been referred to as a “two headed monster” of internet marketing and that “it’s hard to know where one stops and the other starts”. I’ll take that as a compliment, because Rachel practices the cohesive marketing that I believe in. She may not know as much as I do about SEO, but I don’t know as much as she does about affiliate marketing and startups. But together, we’re a pretty powerful force because we have a consistent view of internet marketing and the need for cohesiveness with online promotion.

You may not believe what the two-headed monster preaches, but we do and we do because both heads of the monster have the Google Analytics data, clients, and revenues to prove cohesiveness works.

Rachel has been in affiliate marketing for over a decade and I’ve been doing SEO and website design for almost as long. From our own collective years of experience, we have both learned there is no easy fix or massive rewards without a solid plan and a lot of hard work.

Make no mistake, internet marketing is a battlefield.  You’re going to war against a million other websites and you need to have sufficient weaponry to compete and to walk away unscathed.  You need to know your enemy, you need armor for proper defense and you need a clearly defined plan of attack to win the online battle.

When was the last time you performed a marketing recognizance mission?  Have you looked at your competitor’s website recently?  Or even their general internet activity?  I’m always surprised that many small business owners, CEO’s, or marketing executives do not make this part of their overall marketing strategy.  I do this with my own company and with ever client that contracts me to design a website or engage in an SEO project.  I want to know the websites they compete with so I know how to best position them.  I want to understand the battlefield so we can plan an effective attack.

If you are a website design client of mine I expect you to take the time to perform your own marketing recognizance mission.  Since I will be doing one for you, I expect you to do one too.  I want you to look closely at your enemy and I want you to be prepared as we enter into battle.  Why does it matter?  You need to intimately know the enemy.  Your website visitors will know your enemy, so you should too.

In previous blog posts I’ve mentioned my client questionnaire.  I ask clients to complete this before we begin our engagement.  In many cases, I email prospects the document with the proposal so they know what they are in for and so they have realistic expectations of my marketing philosophies and me as a website designer.  The vast majority of these people don’t “get” why I require this step until they review the questionnaire.  It then becomes crystal clear that internet marketing is a war and that they are currently going to battle with a toothpick and not a armored tank.

So do you have a toothpick or an armored tank?  Most likely you cannot answer this question yet, so take the time to evaluate your armor.

Review the Website Battlefield

• Identify your key direct competitors
• Identify benchmark companies within your industry
• Review competitors’ websites
• Review benchmark companies’ websites
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the competition
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the benchmark companies

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Website Attack

• How does your current website and online presence compare to that of your competition and the benchmark companies?
• List elements of your competitors and benchmark companies’ websites that you would like to incorporate into your new website design and build.
• List gaps within your existing content that need to be addressed and consider the timeframe and resources required to develop said content.
• Evaluate your internal resources and their ability to create a website that can address your gaps and weaknesses.
• Evaluate your budget for obtaining outside assistance for web design, build, and optimization.

Review the Online Battlefield

• Is your competitor using pay per client (PPC) ads and if so, what keywords receive the largest portion of their ad budget?
• Is your competitor’s website designed around a set of core keywords?
• How does the competitor score for these core keywords in organic search results (i.e. natural search not attributed to paid placement)?
• Is your competitor active in social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, or YouTube?
• Is your competitor actively blogging and/or guest blogging on other websites?
• Is your competitor utilizing content marketing strategies for lead generation and potential sales?
• Is your competitor actively engaged in inbound link building?
• Is your competitor utilizing a drip marketing campaign or regular newsletter campaign?
• Is your competitor active on local search directories and are their profiles optimized?

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Online Attack

• What competitor keywords best align with your organization?
• What other keywords should you consider and target?
• Can you afford a PPC campaign?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for organic search engine optimization?
• What changes to your existing social media activity needs to take place to level-set you and your competitors?
• Do you offer any unique and authoritative content to help differentiate your from your competitors?
• How does your blogging efforts compare to your competitors?
• Are you utilizing content tagging websites and RSS feed automation?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for a link building campaign?
• Do you have a newsletter and would this apply to your target market?
• Have you claimed your local profiles and are they optimized?

As a website designer and SEO expert I cannot completely prepare you for battle.  This is a joint effort and we need to collectively prepare for and fight the battle together.  I can help in your internet marketing war, but I’ll need you to help in this effort.

One of my first website clients was a referral from a friend.  This client was going up against some savvy competitors and I knew he had a steep climb.  I built him a WordPress website and tried my best to prepare him for the battle that lay ahead.  With his new SEO friendly website I gave him armor.  Unfortunately he failed to plan his actual attack and he didn’t even walk onto the battlefield.  He sat in his little bunker doing the same things he had done for years.  He did not take the competitive analysis I had done seriously, nor did he believe in social media optimization, inbound link campaigns, or virtually anything outside his existing practices.  One year later my friend keeps asking me why the website did not grow in search traffic.  What?  Really?

In that same time-frame I launched a website for another client who did go to battle.  In his battle he was fighting against some of the biggest companies in America who had huge internet marketing budgets and a large number of internal employees dedicated to reaching page one search results.  This client not only went to battle with my armor, he kept me on to help him plan and execute his attack.  We were a force to be reckoned with and we beat the snot out of his competition.  Everything we did had purpose, we planned our attack and executed it as planned.  His search traffic grew almost 500% in one year and he even stopped spending hundreds of dollars each month on PPC ads.  But he reinforced the armor I provided, he prepared a strategic marketing plan, he went to war with eyes wide open and he fought and fought hard.

Initially the client I feel was a failure crushed me.  At first I felt like I failed him.  But then a fellow and very wise WordPress consultant reminded me that I cannot fight a battle for a client who does not want to go to war.  There are potential clients and situations where I have to retreat because I’m trying to win a war with someone who simply wants to spend his days sleeping in his bunker.  It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one.  I try to identify those people early on and I avoid them at all costs.  We are not well matched and we have two totally different views of internet marketing.

Don’t let yourself fall asleep in the bunker.  Rise up, go on a marketing recognizance mission, plan your attack, build your armor, and go kick your competitor off of page one search results.  It is possible.  You just need to decide if you have the fight in you and then you have to rise up and fight.

Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as “The emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.”   The term enlightenment reminds me of the small business owner and his undeveloped view of internet marketing and more importantly, how he and his company fit within today’s internet dependent culture.

Now don’t take that comment as a negative view on the small business owner or small business in general.  I love the average small business owner.  I am a small business owner and this segment is my client base.  More importantly, small business marketing and in particular, internet marketing, represent all that is possible in a free market such as the United States.  Anything is possible.  A newly created or existing small business can obtain substantial sales growth, reinvent a brand, or simply achieve market penetration just by successfully marketing over the internet.

If all of my pro-internet ramblings are true, then why do so many companies struggle with branding themselves on the internet and bringing in tangible sales?  A lot of prospects I talk to claim to have little or no website traffic and no real financial gain from their internet marketing efforts.  But why?  Why do so many make this brutally honest claim?  Because they are not yet enlightened!  They remain ignorant of the true meaning of internet marketing and they are immature.  They cannot see the true state their website’s or how this website compares to the gazillions of other websites on the internet.

I do my best to enlightened people with my overly frank assessment of their website, SEO, and competitive position.  Yes my phone conversations are as unfiltered as my blog posts.  Even with my openness, I many times fail to reach the small business owner because he/she is not yet ready for self-reflection.  They are not yet ready closely review the true nature of their marketing efforts or even look to see what the perception of others might be.

If you are a small business owner and you are still reading my post, good for you.  You have stepped onto the path of enlightenment.  You have taken the first step.  You’ve accepted my harsh comments as “passion” and not “arrogance”.  My unfiltered assessments are meant to provide value and my passion exists because I truly believe in what the internet can offer for those who embrace it.

When performed correctly internet marketing can liberate a company.  It liberated me and it has liberated my clients.  It can take transform or even create a business in a relatively short period of time.   But small business marketing on the internet takes effort and it takes knowledge.  You just can’t whip a WordPress website or blog up and call it good.  You have to extend you reach and touch your audience.  You have to work at it and do so in the right manner.

So now the question must be asked – have you embraced internet marketing?  I didn’t ask if you had a website, I asked if you’ve embraced the internet and all that it offers you as a small business.  I don’t know is not an acceptable answer.  Self-reflection can be both power and painful.  But the journey of browser-based enlightenment will end with a large reward.

Enlightenment Begins With Ten Simple Questions

1. Where do you show up in the SERP (search engine results page)? Think about what keywords or phrases people would use to locate your website and Google these terms to see if your website shows up on page one of the search results.  Please don’t tell me you are on page three, because page three does not matter.  Very few searchers ever look past page one.  And please don’t search for some obscure term a crackpot SEO consultant told you to optimize for back in 1985.
2. How many websites (other than your own) link to your website? If you have a Google account and can use Google Webmaster Tools, the answer is quick and obvious.  Since I know most small business owners have no idea what I’m talking about, we’ll go about it the old fashion way.  In Google’s search box insert link:yoururl.com.  Does anything come back in results?  Google won’t show all links, but you’ll quickly see if any exist.  And some should exist.
3. How many websites (other than your own) mention your website? You can view this on Google by simply inputting your full URL in quotations.  And how many did we find?  Five or ten is not stellar performance, so please don’t start smiling yet.
4. How valuable are the links or URL references that you found? Hopefully you discovered something tangible and not a bunch of outdated or irrelevant information.  Or worse yet, a bunch of negative reviews you didn’t know existed.  Inbound links and website references should exist in quality website properties and be relevant to your target market.
5. How is your company and website listed in local search directories? Here I am referring locally focused websites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Foursquare, MerchantCircle, etc.  Do you have a listing and if so, is it accurate?  Remember, if you don’t claim your local search listing, someone else can and will.
6. Are you active on any social media websites? Social media refers to Facebook company pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.   Do you have an active account and when was the last time you updated anything?  Is your Facebook page filled with spam or is it filled with content your target market would actually want to see?  And the most important question – do you interact with your online community?
7. How is your blog looking? Yes I said blog, because the world loves blogs and Google does too.  Blogs provide a means to communicate with website visitors in a conversational manner.  Proper blog management is critical to internet marketing success.  So do you have a blog and if so, how often are you posting fresh and worthwhile content?   Do you provide an easy method for visitors to share your blog posts to social media or content tagging websites?
8. How healthy is your RSS feed? An RSS feed is a listing of your recent content and/or blogs, which is used to distribute your blog posts to other websites.  Do you have one and is it active and accurate?  How about an XML sitemap for that matter?  Similar concept but used my search engines.
9. When was the last time you commented in a forum or on another website’s blog post? Again, blogging is conversational.  Conversation requires two-way dialogue.  This means you to your visitors and your readers’ comments and/or feedback back to you.  It also means other bloggers to you and your feedback to the blogger.

10. Think about your industry’s overall presence on the internet. Are you and your company visible? To be considered an industry leader or even a local industry hero, you have to participate.  You have to be seen and you have to engage.  While your target market may not be visiting your industry’s benchmark websites, the search engines do and they should find you there when they visit.

Most likely you’ve read through this list and realized your internet marketing activities can be greatly improved.  Brace yourself, because we haven’t even looked at your competition yet.  I can only pick so hard and for so long at you without feeling a little guilty.

For right now I’ll let you stew over my ten questions and in my next blog post we’ll take a look at your competition.  And while you may tell yourself you are as good as your competition, you will be surprised to know you are wrong.  Dead wrong.

Why does it really matter?  For me, I only want to engage with you if I can help you and help make your project a success. To determine if that is possible, I have to obtain an idea of what success means to you. Most small businesses I speak with have not thought this far ahead. They know they have issues with their current website or web promotion efforts, but they don’t have a good feel for expectations.

An internet marketing campaign can be a huge endeavor or it can be a quick refresh of what you currently have in place. Until a needs assessment is done and project scope is defined, it is difficult for any website designer or SEO consultant to truly provide feedback on project budget or timing.

Common Internet Marketing Goals and Objectives

A typical internet marketing campaign can focus on improving six or more different goals, although I really think most projects can be broken down into five distinct areas.

1: Revenue

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of this goal because I think it is simply to broad. Everyone wants to increase revenue and there are many ways to accomplish this, so I’d rather clients be a little more specific so we can truly focus on tasks that will deliver tangible results. Narrowing the revenue goal to say increased profits via a reduced sales cycle would be more specific and would help us collectively target the right tasks within your internet marketing campaign.

If increasing profits and a reduced sales cycle were your primary goal, we could provide additional information (or better information) on your website for prospects so that they could be better informed before they reach out to you as a new lead. This could be through navigation changes, defining personas (your target market) and filtering content, or by providing clearer call to actions.

2: Branding

Branding is definitely an internet marketing goal I like and one that is problematic to companies of all sizes. Most small businesses don’t think about branding until they encounter a specific issue or talk to someone engrossed in marketing like I am. I believe in personal branding, corporate branding, and branding of your product or service. For small businesses, the internet provides a world of opportunities for increasing brand awareness.

If increased branding is your goal, we can work on your website, your SEO efforts, your social media usage, local search directories, your public relations, etc. I could go on and bore you to death, but I’ll stop. The point is you’ve given me a pain point that I can target with a solution.

What I also like about branding is that it is a measurable goal that we can track and quantify. From mentions in social media outlets to inbound links to your website, to searches for your company name or product – you can see changes and track improvements.

When I originally started my business, no one Googled my company name because it didn’t exist until I thought of it. Since creating my company and actively marketing myself on the internet, there has been a steady increase in searches for my company name. This means there are mentions of my company on the internet, someone has read it, and someone is trying to locate my firm to learn more me or my company. As a small business and a marketer, this makes me happy because it shows my efforts are working and I am making progress on my branding efforts.

3: Lead Generation

Increased lead generation is another business goal I love. Not only is it absolutely traceable, it is how I originally found my way to SEO, website design, and internet marketing. Years ago I was a salesperson for a small technology firm. My product was good, so I could easily close new business if I had prospects. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have enough new prospects and leads. The cheapest route for me to obtain additional leads was to teach myself internet marketing. I’m proud to say I did, I viewed the process as fun, and I found my true passion.

I used a CRM software package to track the source of my leads from origin to close. I could tell you exactly how many leads came from the internet and their close rate. The internet leads were farther along in the sales funnel than any other lead source and they had the highest close rate. This only fueled my fire to increase my internet leads. I went from virtually zero internet leads to the internet accounting for the majority of my sales in no time. I also helped the company grow 400% in two years. For me this proved lead generation was not only a great goal, but a goal you can obtain and measure along the way.

4: Product or Service Sales

Utilizing an internet marketing campaign to increase product or service sales is an admirable goal. It is both obtainable and there is something to measure, so it makes me, the marketer, happy. If you came to me with this goal, I’d want to brainstorm to discover why you think your sales are lower than their potential. Is it your website or is it lack of inbound traffic? Either one is fixable, we just need to narrow our focus and plan our attack.

5: Visitor Conversions

One area most small business owners overlook in website design is conversions. A conversion is the method of migrating your website visitors into prospects, sales, registrations, or whatever else you want the average visitor to do once they land on your website. While everyone “gets” the idea of conversions, many people forget about the concept during a website design project.

The key to a strong web presence and functionally robust website is defining your design and navigation around what you’d like your website visitor to do upon arrival. Most likely this will include multiple paths built around an individual persona (or visitor type). When you take a moment to consider your options, the process usually becomes quite clear.

Small website design changes can have a big impact on how you convert website visitors. An example of this is a newsletter sign up box. A lot of small businesses put this below the fold (low enough on the page you have to scroll to see it), which significantly decreases usage. Move it up to the top of the sidebar and you should exponentially increase your conversion rates. Change your wording to better articulate why people should sign up and again increase your conversion rates.

I had one client go from about 250 new subscriptions each month to around 700 simply because I changed the sign up box verbiage and placed the destination content more prominently on the website. The change was so drastic I was kicking myself for not thinking of this earlier in the year. I love this example because it shows how three minutes of coding can have dramatic and long-term results.

6: Engagement

Engagement is a total buzzword these days for us internet marketers. I use it with hesitation because of this painful truth. Buzzword or not, engagement is a valid and measurable goal.

So what does it mean for the small business owner? It refers to your interaction with your prospects and clients. While some will view this as simply “likes” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter, I view it as page interactions on Facebook, Twitter mentions, content sharing, blog comments, client reviews, etc. The modern web is filled with opportunities to interact with your target market.

While some skeptics view engagement as marketing fluff, internet users in 2011 will expect engagement and interaction from the brands and companies they follow. Actually they demand it and if you plan on ignoring the goal of engagement, you’ll quickly find yourself in trouble.

So What’s Your Internet Marketing Goal?

I really think your goals will vary based on your individual situation, your industry, and your product or service offering. The important lesson in this discussion is that you need to consider your business goals before you spend time or money on any internet marketing campaign.

After college I found a temporary position at a barcode and data collection distribution and before I knew it, I was a full-time employee running their operations.  Why?  Because I fell in love with the ERP system they installed three months before my arrival.  That and the fact that I was one of the few employees who “got” new their ERP system.  I didn’t just get it, I embraced it with my entire being.  For the next three years I worked 60-80 workweeks and spent much of my time on the applicable.  And while it wasn’t perfect, it helped me manage a national distributor with multiple branches and distribution centers.  Again, I was in love with my job and my ERP software.  To this day I miss the chaos and the challenge of fixing every operational woe with my ERP system.

Flash forward fifteen years and I’ve moved from my first college job through working ten years for an ERP developer and now I run my own Internet marketing company.  The trouble is my love for marketing and ERP rarely seem to connect as much as I would like.    While a VP of marketing at an ERP developer, I myself struggled with managing marketing via my ERP system.  While I lived off my personalized dashboards and workbenches, I used a lot of offline processes to help manage what my beloved ERP software could not.  Don’t get me wrong; I knew exactly where each lead came from, where it was at in our sales process, and how long the sales cycle should take before new business was closed.  I had lead generation and tracking, but I lacked the ability to proactively manage marketing.  Within my ERP software, everything I did for marketing felt reactive, which is not at all, what marketing is supposed to be.

Honestly, I don’t think I’m alone.  While I doubt there are many marketing people reading this blog entry, I know they would concur with me if they did.   And I don’t believe ERP developers have reached the concept of automating marketing enough to work hard at developing strong marketing content for their user community.  They are side tracked with fuel surcharges, customer service needs, and compliance issues.  And really, who listens to marketing people anyway?  We are overhead plain and simple.

Today I received a feed from Web Strategy by Jeremiah.  He was covering CRM software (aka ERP software) and the newer functionality for social media management.  Yes, social media, the new darling of topics on the Internet.  Social media reminds me so much of ERP software, because just like a complicated ERP system, few people get it.  They think you can throw up a Facebook page or Twitter account and call it good.  Not so fast.  Just like an integrated ERP system, your social media accounts are fully integrated with your overall marketing campaign and search engine optimization.  There are rules to follow and there are reasons why you do what you do on Twitter versus Facebook.  Honestly, I think you either get it or you don’t.  I always felt the same about ERP software.  You need to look past your little piece of the ERP pie and you need to look into the entire pie or organization to see how your data input alters another department, process, or users.  Social media is the same.  Your tweet on Twitter will alter other marketing activities.  Good or bad.  The Twitter community is persnickety and they speak differently than Facebook or MySpace.  Make a mistake and you will be ignored or blocked.  Do the same in an ERP application and you’d just lose your program access.

Okay I’m running off track here a bit.  I have to really question the blog entry by Jeremiah, because I truly question if the ERP developers and their programmers get social media and marketing.  I question if they can truly meet the needs of marketing departments and look beyond a simple project plan, marketing budget, or lead-tracking program.  Marketing, and in particular Internet marketing, is like voodoo.  Hard to quantify and difficult to measure results, yet something I believe in.  Okay I don’t believe in voodoo, but I did catch your attention.  I do believe in successful marketing and I do believe in ERP software.

So Jeremiah, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Salseforce – do you really get it?  Are you writing software code that your marketing department lives and breathes by or are you writing code that helps your salespeople sell your ERP software?  Ask yourself the question, then ask a marketing person who understands both their functional role and your ERP software. The answer may surprise you.

I already subscribe to Avinash’s very popular blog Occam’s Razor, which provides insightful discussion on Google Analytics and the software’s newest functionality.  I enjoy his blog entries and cannot wait to immerse myself in an entire book of his Internet intelligence.

You can learn more about Avinash and his new book at www.webanalytics20.com.

Last week Google’s Internet marketing Guru Matt Cutts posted a new video in their Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube.  I love these videos because they are short and to the post and without any pitch or longwinded verbiage cluttering the real message.   The video that caught my eye was Matt Cutts’ discussion on Sock Puppet Marketing.   Yes you read that correctly.  Mr. Cutts is talking openly about puppets.

Puppets aside, the discussion was in relation to an individual or company creating fake Internet personas for marketing purposes.  While Matt did not go into how Google would react to such tactics, he did provide a very funny puppet commentary to illustrate the process.  While the entertainment value alone was good, Matt briefly described a real-world scenario where one company was fined over $300,000 for creating fake testimonials on the Internet.  He further talked about why he and Google felt this practice was harmful for all involved.

The short of this video is this – Internet marketing is powerful and effective.  People, companies, and the government now consider Internet marketing in the same ranks of traditional marketing techniques.  If a technique wasn’t legal in traditional marketing, it isn’t legal on the Internet either.  If marketing misrepresents anything, it isn’t marketing.  It is just bad business.

Matt summed this up with stating you should avoid anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see or read.   I struggle with this, because I am a mother and I know different mothers nag about different things.  I would be a larger nagger than most.  So, I would modify his statement to caution against any marketing tactic you have to think twice about.  If you question it, don’t do it.  You’ll be much better off in the end.

That being said, we Internet marketing consultants know that this request is not necessarily realistic. You cannot predict that a famous person will die or that Twitter will be attached and plan for a huge peak in web searches and resulting traffic around such events. You can however, peak into the future if you pay attention to search trending.

Thanks to Google – yes I know I can’t seem to talk enough about Google these days – this is possible. Google Trends allows you to input one or more search terms and see trending data of these searches. In the example I tried, I entered Internet marketing, search engine optimization, and website promotion to compare the trends. Google Trends quickly gave me a relative rating of these terms based on search volume and rated Internet marketing a 1.0, search engine optimization a .50 and website promotion a .08. This validated what I believed, which was more people search for Internet marketing than they do for website promotion. More importantly it told me that these three terms stay fairly consistent with few dips and spikes in search activity. What I didn’t expect it to tell me was that Nevada was the highest subregion. This I am still contemplating.

While my test didn’t show anything significant, a test of the search term “Christmas decorations” did certainly provide insight and validate my own behavior. In fact, I will use this information come fall to show my husband that I am not insane or outside the norm. If you trend Christmas decorations as a search term, you will see a large spike occurs in late November and not December 24th as my husband would wager. We Americans begin thinking, buying, and decorating around Thanksgiving. It isn’t by chance that the stores start filling the shelves with Christmas décor this early in the season. They have marketing departments and they watch the buying trends of the consumer.

So if you want a peek into the search future of your product or service offering, take a moment to review Google Trends. If you see a decline in search terms over time, there is most likely a reason. Case in point is Web 2.0 and social media. The world was a buzz about Web 2.0 and then it seemed to dip, as social media seemed to rev itself up. Or at least this was my perception. While I not always accurate in my assumptions, I was correct in this assumption and Google Trends validated this for me as July 2009 activity showed social media overtake Web 2.0 in searches. Again validating what I already believed to be the case. I’d share this with my husband as well, but he will certainly ask me why he cares about Web 2.0 or social media. At least with Christmas decorations,our discussion can last more than a nanosecond.

If you’ve ever read these offers closely, you will quickly become suspicious. The emails come from gmail accounts without phone numbers or website addresses. They offer promises of first page ranking on Google and website traffic increases beyond your wildest expectations. And all of this is yours for little money and within record time.

Take note my friends, nothing of value comes easy. Your Grandmother was right. Positive results typically come from hard work. And so is the case with website promotion. Can a website refresh and an Internet marketing campaign make a difference? Yes, absolutely. But this difference is a result of a qualified Internet marketing consultant who can a implement proven Internet marketing campaign to work for your company. The consultant should have a real website with a real domain (www.something.com) and be ranked high on Google for keywords associated for their own website.

The bottom line is this – if an Internet marketing consultant cannot promote their own website effectively, they will not be able to do a solid job of promoting your website. If you can find them quickly on Google, then they are most likely a real, live, oxygen breathing consultant who can produce results. If you cannot find them on Google, keep looking for someone else.

From my own firsthand experience, I can tell you, a lot of hard work goes into promoting a website and reaching that coveted page one search ranking of Google. It doesn’t happen overnight and it is not something that just happens. Top search engine ranking requires optimizing each website page and promoting those pages off site via the Internet. While designing a visually pleasing website is important, designing one that can be easily searched and one that is supported by a solid online marketing campaign is critical.

If you ask your new or potential service provider a few questions or listen to the questions he or she asks you, you will quickly see the level of their expertise. A true Internet consultant will begin with your overall marketing objectives, your offering, and your target market. A website designer will ask what you’d like on your website. A quality Internet marketer will create a website that is visually effective and that directly supports all of your marketing efforts.

Your website is an ongoing and never ending campaign. Just like more traditional marketing efforts, you cannot expect to create a campaign and have the campaign manage itself. It will not happen. It needs a solid foundation and constant nurturing to make it a success.

Developing a world class website provides little value if no one finds it. If you are the thought leaders of your industry and you have a brand everyone knows and remembers, this may not be an issue. Visitors will find your website no matter what because they already know who you are and what your company offers. For the rest of us, we need help with the branding and marketing of our company, product, and service offering. This incremental need is where Internet marketing comes to play.

A strong website design firm or traditional marketing company will quickly discuss the necessity of having both a highly optimized website and solid Internet marketing campaign. Discussing one without the other is futile.