HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY FROM DIGITAL MARKETING

HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 1 HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY FROM DIGITAL MARKETING A Primer for Local Business Owners A Publication of

2 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 3 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES By Nigel Edelshain Nigel Edelshain is Wainscot Media s head of digital media and marketing. He is responsible for delivering digital marketing programs to Wainscot s clients and promoting the company s offerings through all channels. Nigel has developed a large following for his own blog, sales2.com. He has an undergraduate degree in microchip design and an MBA from the Wharton business school.

4 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 5 This ebook is aimed at small business owners that serve clients in their local area. I m going to do my best to speak plain English throughout and not swerve off into speaking Geek. I know from our day-to-day discussions that most of you now have your feet wet in digital marketing (i.e. you have a website and a Facebook page) but many of you are not seeing digital marketing moving the needle on your sales numbers. This ebook is about how you can use the Internet to actually make money for your business. There are an almost endless number of ways you can market on the Internet but many of them do not present a clear path to sales. The approach in this ebook defines a straight line to additional business for you. Take a look at the diagram to the right. This is the Internet marketing approach we will be describing in this ebook. It is adapted from the Inbound Marketing methodology created by Hubspot. (Wainscot is a Hubspot partner.) Each chapter in this ebook will describe one of the stages in the diagram to the right.

6 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 7 CONTENTS GETTING VISITORS /8 GETTING LEADS /20 GETTING CLIENTS /26 GETTING BETTER /32 CONCLUSION /38

8 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 9 CHAPTER 1 GETTING VISITORS You need to get people to your website. Your website is your storefront on the Internet. When people are on your website you have a chance to convert them into leads and customers. So the first (and biggest) challenge in Internet marketing is generating visitors. The strategies we outline in this ebook for generating visitors are: Optimizing your website & blog for search engines Driving visitors from the major social media sites Driving visitors from print ads We will go through a brief description of each strategy in the following pages.

10 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 11 Search Engines Every day Google is offering to share a bit of traffic with you. And for free. It s a great deal because Google s search page gets about 114 billion searches per month. The only problem is it s such a great deal everyone wants in. So every business out there is competing for their slice of the Google traffic pie. Grabbing your slice of the Google pie (or Bing or Yahoo pie smaller pies but tasty nonetheless) is something we in the digital world call Search Engine Optimization (or SEO ). Your Website To get some traffic from Google you need to score well in the Google exam. Google is constantly examining all the websites in the world to see how they score for different words (called keywords ). So Google s search engine looks at your website and says do you have a good site for the keywords somebody just typed into me? How does Google define good? Google wants to know if one of the pages on your website uses the words the searcher has just typed in. The other major factor that Google considers is whether a lot of websites point to your website by linking to you, giving you a high authority score. If you have the words I m typing into Google on your web page and you have a high authority (lots of people point to you), Google is going to put you high up on my search results page. High up, especially on page 1, of the search results, is critical as research from Chitika shows the search results on page 1 get 92% of the all the user s clicks, leaving only 8% of traffic for everyone else. Every day Google is offering to share a piece of its traffic pie with you...and for free

12 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 13 Your Blog Up to this point, I ve been talking about your website but secretly I ve known that I m really not just talking about your website but actually about your blog as well. Here s the thing: A blog is just a tool to publish web pages. Blog software like Wordpress or Hubspot lets you publish web pages easily by typing text into an editor as if you were typing into Microsoft Word. From Google s perspective it does not matter if a web page is a website web page or a blog web page. They are all web pages. What s cool about blog web pages is that they get updated. That happens because they are easy to update. And when something is easy to do then we humans do it. If you don t have a blog and don t have a content management system (a fancy word for something that looks a lot like a blog on the administrative side) then what happens is you don t update your web pages nor do you produce new web pages very often at all. Google does not like stale web pages. Stale web pages, especially ones that just promote your business rather than educate, don t get links from other websites either. These pages soon drop down Google s rankings and are replaced by nice fresh blog web pages. Bottom line: to get your fair share of Google s pie you probably need a blog. Bottom line: to get your fair share of Google s pie you probably need a blog.

14 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 15 Social Media Just as Google will share its traffic pie with you so will the big social media sites out there: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. Most of you probably already have a Facebook page but from what I ve seen many fewer have a Twitter account and less still are on Pinterest. Which Social Media Sites? Should you be on Twitter? Or Pinterest or Linkedin? Here s the key point: it depends on your customers/potential customers. You should invest your time and energy on the sites that your potential customers use. If your customers are heavy users of Linkedin that s where you should be. Each social network has its own demographic profile. Broadly speaking Facebook is used by almost everyone these days. The demographic profile of Twitter users today is pretty broad and is not that dissimilar to Facebook. Pinterest has been a fast up-and-comer. It skews heavily female and towards the mature end. Linkedin is basically a business-to-business platform so if you sell to other businesses it s a must, if you sell only to consumers than it won t drive direct sales for you. You should invest your time and energy on the sites that your potential customers use.

16 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 17 The Marketing Approach Whichever social media sites you use, your marketing approach should be to get people from your social media pages to your website or blog. To do this you need to provide your social media viewers with reasons to visit. The approach we recommend is posting links to content (or offers) that are housed on your website or blog. Theses links act as teasers to the people visiting your social media pages. In addition to links to blog posts you can also post other helpful content on your social media profiles, such as links to other people s content that you believe your audience will find helpful. You can also make about 20% of your posts something more promotional about your product or service. We typically post links to every blog post on Facebook and Twitter. These links are a short teaser sentence or two about the blog post and a hyperlink next to a phrase like read more. This hyperlink takes the viewer to our blog where they can read the full post. Once you have a viewer on your blog you have the chance to take them further in your marketing process, read on to find out about that. The key to choosing which social media websites to focus on is what do your potential customers use?

18 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 19 Print ads If your goal is to drive customers to your website, you may be surprised how effective magazine ads are. Over 36% of adults will search out a product they are interested in and saw in a magazine while only 26% will search out a product in an email ad, 24% will search out a product they saw in a Web ad and 17% will search out a product they saw on Twitter or Facebook. Many businesses look only to the Internet and social networks to target younger audiences but almost all young people still read magazines. In fact, 96% of adults under 25 read magazines and they read more magazines than older adults. In the past month, the average adult under 25 has read 8 magazines, considerably more than adults 35+ (source: the MPA.) Research data shows that traditional print magazines may be a great way to bolster your online efforts. When considering ways to drive traffic to your website or social profiles it seems you should not discount magazines - even ones on paper. You may be surprised how effective magazine ads are

20 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 21 CHAPTER 2 GETTING LEADS Once people visit your website and blog, you need to convert as many of them as possible to leads. The goal is to turn anonymous web visitors into named contacts that you can market to. Once you have someone s contact information you can kick off marketing processes described in chapter 3 that enable you to convert leads into clients but first you need to create leads. There are two elements you need to build to generate leads: Calls-To-Action, and Landing pages We will go through a brief description of each element in this chapter.

22 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 23 Calls-To-Action A call-to-action (CTA) is a graphic or line of text that invites your website visitor to take action. CTA s are one of key elements that turn your content marketing from a nice-to-have library into an important sales machine for your business. A CTA takes your visitor from a content piece like a blog post and sends them to a landing page. On the landing page you give your visitor the chance to exchange their contact information for an offer often a piece of premium content like an ebook. Without a CTA in your initial blog post/web page none of this process would happen. Your visitor would still be anonymous. You would have no chance of ever selling them anything. When creating a call-to-action consider both design and message. (An example CTA we ve used in some of our blog posts is shown to the right.) A CTA is pointless if your visitors don t notice it. An effective CTA is bold so your visitors will see it. If the CTA blends into your design or text, it will be difficult for your visitors to notice. If you re wondering how you can actually produce an attractive CTA without a graphic designer, fret not. It s possible to produce a good-looking CTA using just Microsoft Powerpoint. See this nifty guide for details on how to do this. CTA s are one of key elements that turn content marketing from a nice-to-have library into an important sales machine for your business.

24 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 25 Landing Pages A landing page is a web page with a singular focus. Landing pages are used to capture visitor information or sell something outright. When someone visits your landing page, they can either leave the page altogether or they can do the one thing you want them to do, whether that is to fill out a form or buy a product. They should not be able to do anything else! Landing pages are all about conversion. Each landing page can be measured by tracking how many of the people that visit that page carry out the action you want. What percentage of the visitors to the landing page actually enter their contact information? What percentage of the visitors to the page buy your product? As you ll see in the landing page example to the right, one of the best practices for landing page design is to remove navigation and hyperlinks. At first it seems odd to remove the very things that make the Web a web. But that s where landing pages are different to regular web pages or blog posts. Once we have someone s contact information via a landing page, we will send them a series of emails with further offers that seek to move them down the path to becoming a client (see the next section on nurturing.) Landing pages are all about conversion.

26 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 27 CHAPTER 3 GETTING CLIENTS We re nearly there! You ve attracted visitors to your website and blog. You ve converted some of them into leads. One more step to actual sales. We need to turn leads into customers. The main tool digital marketers use to turn leads into customers is email. Leads are people you have contact information for. You ve worked hard to get that contact information and now you get to use it. The key to success in turning leads into clients is polite persistence. You need to stay-in-touch with people and wait for something to change in their world that will cause a need for your product or service. You need an excuse to stay-in-touch and that excuse is content.

28 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 29 Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing is staying in touch with leads long after they initially inquire/fill out a form on your website. Lead nurturing is most often executed using email. A lead nurturing campaign consists of sending consumers valuable, informative information on a regular basis. Why bother with all this work? Research from Gleanster shows that 50% of leads are not ready to buy when they first inquire. These 50% of leads are generally lost from your revenue if you don t nurture them. If you keep in-touch with people over a long period of time something may change in their environment that means they suddenly need your product. The key is to be top-ofmind when this change happens. This can only happen if you stay-in-touch. Lead nurturing is not about bombarding consumers with marketing offers via email. Consumers are sensitized to ignore this kind of spamming - as they see it. They will quickly ignore your emails or even unsubscribe. Nurturing is not having your sales people calling consumers over-and-over again to sell them something this is a quick way to be put on the Do Not Call list. Lead nurturing is about staying in touch Nurturing is about sending quality/valuable information. Something the consumer wants.

30 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 31 So are we saying you can never email consumers with marketing offers? No, we re not! You can definitely send offers as well as educational/informative emails. It s a question of mixing giving with receiving. A couple of things you can do: You can put CTA s (links or buttons) in the educational emails you send out. If the content you are sending out is high quality, including a couple of offers is totally acceptable to most consumers. Every so often (about 20% of the time as a rule-of-thumb) you can send an outright offer. Consumers will be OK with this if they are receiving quality content from you in the other emails they receive. Of course, you cannot carry out this kind of nurturing without content. This is a great reason to start a blog. Blog content once written is easy to turn into an enewsletter that you can then use for lead nurturing. Once you ve written a blog post you get to reuse it as a lead nurturing tool. Few local businesses have a lead nurturing program. It s a great shame as they could greatly increase their business if they did. Many companies make a big effort, and spend a lot of money, to acquire new leads. But once they have acquired these leads those same companies let those leads go stale. Lead nurturing changes this. The return on investment is large. The key to choosing which social media websites to focus on is what do your potential customers use?

32 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 33 CHAPTER 4 GETTING BETTER You re off to the races! You have visitors, you have leads and even some customers. All done, right? Not quite. One of the beauties of Internet marketing is that everything is measurable. As everything is measurable, to be one of the best in your field you need to measure and to analyze. And after analyzing take action to improve. If you don t measure, analyze and improve, your competitors will and then they grab your web traffic, leads and customers. In this chapter we highlight some key metrics you should measure. You can measure many (many) more metrics but this short list will get you off in the right direction.

34 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 35 Measure & Analyze What gets measured gets done is a phrase from the Management by Objectives movement pioneered by Peter Drucker, perhaps the world s greatest management writer and guru. I like to adapt this phrase and apply it to today s marketing environment as what gets measured gets better. With the correct measurement of online marketing campaigns a local business can test and tune all its online marketing activities. You can experiment with different offers, language and media (for example search vs. social media); measure the results and adapt your approach. You can shift your investment of time and energy to the activities that are working best for you and pare down those that are not. There are dozens of metrics a local business can measure related to its online marketing but here are 4 key ones to get you started: 1. Website & Blog Traffic How many people visit your website/blog? In today s world, the number of people that visit your website will have a correlation with your sales. You will want to check that your website traffic is rising over time. Look at the figure for unique monthly visitors in your web analytics software (many people use Google Analytics it s good and it s free.) Take a look at the main sources of your traffic. Is your traffic mostly direct meaning people typed your website address into their web browser (maybe getting it from a print magazine or newspaper ad or a printed direct mail piece)? Is a large portion of your traffic coming from Google? Maybe you ve done some search engine optimization work and it s paying off.

36 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 37 2. Social Media Reach A good number to track is your overall social media reach. Reach is simply the number of people you are connected to on all social media sites, so your business s Facebook fans + your Twitter followers + your Pinterest followers etc. Like website traffic you should track this number and see that is rising over time. 3. Leads Generated A lead is someone that enters their name into a form on your website. Tracking how many leads you generate each month is a critical metric in measuring the success of your online marketing efforts. 4. Sales Generated Ultimately, of course it all comes down to sales. A goal to strive for is to be able to link each of your online marketing efforts right through to the ultimate sale. This is not easy to do in practice but is achievable if you set up the right tools and business processes. No doubt you track your monthly sales but how much of those sales happened due to your online marketing? And which online marketing effort generated each sale? Not easy to do but worth striving for. The key to choosing which social media websites to focus on is what do your potential customers use?

38 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 39 CONCLUSION Thanks for reading this ebook. I hope it s given you a basic framework to think about and plan your digital marketing. To feed the sales engine we ve described you first need to get traffic to your website and blog. You can do this many ways but in this ebook we focused on the 3 fundamental ways of using search engine optimization, attracting your social media followers and by using print ads. Once you ve got visitors to your website, the next step is to convert them into leads. The key tools to do that are calls-to-action (CTA s) and landing pages that focus on getting your visitor to fill in their information on a form.

40 HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM INTERNET MARKETING 41 The final step in the process is to nurture these leads into clients by using email. The key is to stay-in-touch with leads until something changes in their world that causes a need for your kind of product. Being consistently in front of your potential customer will give you a great chance of being the business they ultimately buy from. The fuel that drives this sales machine is content. All the approaches in this ebook assume you can develop some quality content. About Us Wainscot Media is a full-service communications company specializing in print and digital communications. In 2013, we worked with over 1,000 local businesses to increase their marketing reach. It turns out that search engines and people both like content. Search engines like content because their job is to help people find answers. People like it because they have many questions. In order to succeed in this digital marketing environment you need to be committed to developing quality content on a regular basis. If you d like to discuss any of the subjects in this ebook, please drop me a line no strings attached. My contact information is below. Or click on the link opposite to read about our digital marketing assessment. For a FREE digital marketing assessment click here Nigel Edelshain Director of Marketing & Digital Media Wainscot Media (201) 573-5557 nigel.edelshain@wainscotmedia.com A Publication of