Monday 25 February 2013

Here are some tips for effective mobile marketing:

Here are some tips for effective mobile marketing:

Build a Quality Database: The success of mobile marketing is hugely dependant on the quality of your customer database. It is vital that you take utmost care while creating your database and make sure you only reach out to customers most likely to stick with your product/service.
Know Your Limits: It is easy to go overboard when you have access to a powerful tool like mobile marketing. However, if you use this medium too often, you stand a risk of being considered a spammer, and your plan may simply backfire.

Deliver Value:
 Mobile users are usually very busy, so any offer you want to communicate to them should matter in some way. Therefore, always make it a point to adjudge how your offer can benefit a customer.

Don’t Complicate:
 Whether it is in the form of voice, text or web, your message should be concise, and yet communicate your message without any ambiguity. Short and sweet is the mantra here.

Follow marketing etiquettes: Do not communicate with customers or send them messages at odd hours- and do not send them too often. Instead, encourage feedback when you can to further hone your mobile marketing campaigns.

Sunday 24 February 2013

Google Marketing – The only way to advertise in the 20th Century

Google Marketing –
The only way to advertise in the 20th Century

Take at this advertisement posted in the New York Post:
For Sale by owner:
Complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 45 volumes.
Excellent condition. $1,000 or best offer.
No longer needed.
Got married last weekend. Wife knows everything.



Google MarketingHold the laughs please! This advertisement has become null and void. Encyclopaedia Britannica have announced that they plan to discontinue the series. From now on out, Encyclopaedia Britannica will be completely digital. Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. was quoted as saying: "It's a rite of passage in this new era. Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia."

Britannica started printing in 1768 i.e. 244 years ago. The last edition namely the 2010 edition had more than 4,000 contributors, including Arnold Palmer who wrote the entry on the Masters tournament. After a legacy which spans over 2 centuries, the information age has managed to take over in just a few short years.

So, even the greatest of books has now gone COMPLETELY digital; but the question still remains: why haven’t you?
Why are you spending thousands of Rands on print media? How’s that print media working out for you?
Are people really aware of your business and what it can offer? Or are you advertisements being thrown away at the monthly car wash?

What do I mean?
Well, we’ve all become Facebook, Blackberry, iPhone, Twitter and Android addicts yet still we resist the urge to use Google Marketing. If you are a business owner, you utilize marketing tools. Why aren’t you using internet marketing? Online marketing is the effective and cheap marketing tool. Search Engine Land recently reported that (not surprisingly) Google is still ranked the number one traffic source for 23 of the top 30 websites. Furthermore, Google accounts for 65.3% of the total explicit core searches made.

Google MarketingGoogle marketing is ever evolving. Google saw that people were spending more and more time on social media sites so – enter Google Circles – Google’s answer to social media. If that’s not enough, there are a range of Google Online marketing tools available to you to keep tabs on your business such as Google Analytics, Google Map etc. The final question really is: has the internet truly become mightier than the pen? I would have to answer that question in the affirmative.

What is internet marketing? How can internet marketing promote my business?


All this talk of internet marketing and Google online marketing, yet you probably still have the question in the back of your mind: what is internet marketing? Let me shed some light on this matter. Internet marketing / online marketing is the promotion of products or services through an online medium. There are three types of internet marketing namely: PPC, SEO and Social Media.

SEO and Social Media have already been discussed so I won’t delve further into these.

PPC however, is short for “pay per click.” In Google Marketing terms this amounts to adwords i.e. the text, banner and rich-media advertisements we see at the top and sides of a Google search page. Even though we at Ipcoweb are an SEO Company, we have found that it is best practice to use adwords in combination with SEO to gain maximum exposure for company on Google. A recent study showed that the maximum clicks are achieved when a page has a page one organic ranking as well as adwords.

Mobile Searches are the latest online marketing tools.


Yes, as I have stated before, we have all become Blackberry, iPhone and Android addicts, but who can blame us?! Amidst the business and social rat race, convenience is key. With the use of 3G we can find a restaurant, using our mobile phones, within seconds. From there we just click a further link and we can phone and make a reservation in advance. It has been shown that 52% of mobile searches turn into calls. Then, technically, your business telephone should be ringing off the hook? No?
Then let us give you some free internet marketing advice to make sure the phones start ringing.
Free?
YES!!

Ipcoweb is an SEO Company that offers FREE internet marketing i.e. free Google marketing workshops to help you learn about how to make Google work for you.
Call us today on 087 805 1783 to book your free Google workshop and get all our free SEO tips.

Bet you not even Encyclopedia Britannica could give you that much information.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Free Internet Marketing Tips

Free Internet Marketing Tips

Google PenguinAfter Google's recent Penguin update, much has been written about negative SEO. Does it really exist and can it be used to hurt your website? What can you do to avoid problems? One of the greatest free internet marketing tips that I can provide is to stay away from any negative SEO/ black hat techniques.


Ok great so number one free internet marketing tip = no negative SEO, but what is negative SEO? Negative SEO refers to tactics that companies use to manipulate the organic Google rankings of their competitors. This refers to techniques such as link farms and spamming. Google's Penguin’s update has now penalised ALL websites using these negative SEO practises.
If you want to make sure that your website doesn’t get penalised by Google Penguin, follow in the footsteps of an SEO company such as Ipcoweb in the following:
  • Stay away from spam methods to promote your website.
  • Use white-hat SEO methods to promote your website such as:
  1. Write new unique and interesting content. Fresh content amounts to 700 words minimum.
  2. Use Titles on each individual page. This is one of the simplest free SEO tips. If your pages are indexed correctly, then Google can correctly direct traffic to your site.
  3. Use Headers: An important factor when assessing factors on how to SEO. Google does need guidance in terms of what is most important on your page. Headers are a wonderful way in which you can indicate the importance of some parts of your content.
  4. Utalise social media and blogs.
  5. Host your website locally.
  6. Do NOT use flash. Flash warrants all your Google online marketing null and void as flash is not readable by Mac products.

Online Marketing

MarketingWhen looking into online marketing many businesses tend to shy away from Search Engine Optimization in that they compare it to some sort of dark art. The words such as “non-canonical” and “noindex meta tag” can have even the most technologically minded individuals running for the hills. An age old fact is that 95% of your results will come from 5% of your effort. The true task comes in figuring out what 5% to focus on when it comes to online marketing. How to SEO is all about that 5%
The main concept in regard to SEO that people need to realise is that because it is internet based, it is an ever-evolving practise. The main fib that a SEO company will tell you is that you need to GO BIG and get ranking on page one for a keyword such as “weight loss” and thus spend thousands and thousands of Rands in the process. This is where we at Ipcoweb differ from a seo company only out to get as much money out of you as possible. Search Engine Optimization is about the 5% - i.e. the simple stuff. For many businesses all they need are simple changes that will get the pages ranking and in turn send the business traffic that will result in conversions.

SEO is about People

Yes that’s right, SEO is about people. From the start you and Google are on the same page: Google is trying to do something very simple: send searchers to valuable content that gives those searchers what they need. You in turn want the right people to find your site that will result in conversion. SEO is about people – about people finding your sites and building relationships. Search Engine Optimization is about:
  • The customer that finds your website because you’ve learnt how to build an SEO friendly site that is indexed correctly
  • The second customer who’ll share your content via a Google +1, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs
  • Great headlines that will captivate your audience.

Search is still the most common online activity, with email next in line. If people don’t know about you then they can’t promote you. Get to Google Page one through an effective Google Online Marketing strategy. https://www.ipcoweb.co.za/what-is-seo/What people say about you is more important then what you say about yourself. Contact Ipcoweb today for a chance to see all these Google online marketing tips put into practise. For more FREE SEO tips click here.

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Website Design and SEO services


Hi all
Thanks for attend our last free SEO training session. As requested form many of you I am going to do a quick recap on the 5 important items that you need to address to get your page to rank on Google and then on other search engines.First thing before you look at your website design requirements, do you SEO planning properly as per the image below.

  1.  Analyse your requirements,  remember KPI
  2.  then  look at the words you use to describe your requirement’s
  3.  Then look at your competition—not your normal completion but the guys who come up first on Google for your search terms.
  4.   Then use the x-ray tool to see how they have done there SEO and make sure your SEO is up to scratch
  5.  Create a site map—remember Google webmaster tools –you should all have this by now
  6.  Using webmaster tools see if your  words are working or not
  7.  Get the back link thing going (word of mouth)


8.       Start again J
Good hunting