When you compose an email for marketing purposes, keep these points in mind:

• Create a title for the email that will cause readers to want to open your email. People glance at the first few words of the email title to even decide if they are going to open it or delete it.
• Write interesting headlines. So you’ve gotten the reader to open your email, now give them a reason to read on. Glancing at the headlines should make you want to read the news item.
• Keep main articles concise, interesting and to the point. Get to your point quickly, whether it is an offer of some sort, or any other call to action. People’s attention spans are very short, especially in email.
• Create links back to your website when possible.  Readers will click on the links if they want more information.

There are many places you can source an email list for marketing purposes. Most of the time you must buy a list and the prices and quality of the lists you purchase may vary. A good place to start is by exporting the contacts from your email or address book.  They are most likely current clients, business associates and friends. The first time I exported my address book years ago, I was surprised to end up with a list of over 400 email addresses.  If you would like to purchase a list of email addresses, there are many options available to you. Remember to decide upon a target market for your purchased email list. For example, are you trying to source a list in Las Vegas of Small Business owners on the west side of town or specific to zip codes or is your target a national audience of dog owners let’s say.

Websites you can purchase email marketing lists from:

The process is fairly simple. You need to find an online company, set up an account, pay a monthly fee depending on how big your list is and how many times a month you email your list. They will have instructions on how to import email addresses from your address book or the list you’ve purchased.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.

Why should you hire a professional Las Vegas SEO company?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is critical in promoting and marketing your Las Vegas website. Business should reserve a budget to have Search Engine Optimization performed on their website to increase their organic search engine rankings. Despite its importance, many local Las Vegas companies ignore SEO for their website.

Here are some reasons why you should hire a professional local Las Vegas SEO company (like Perkolate):

• Do you know what constitutes a good SEO strategy? – To the naked eye, SEO seems simple. All you have to do is to optimize your website, and it’s done. Build some links and you are on your way to getting some traffic to your website. But there is more to it than what meets the eye.

You could attempt to do some research on SEO and do it yourself, but most newcomers to SEO face a daunting task in trying to manage the different activities of a good SEO effort. Hire a professional SEO firm, and you would be able to get all of these done in no time at all and by a professional that can help you get results.

• Do you know how broad SEO is? – Not long ago, SEO was thought of as an activity where all you did was put some keywords on the webpage, and allow the search engines to index them. Though that remains a basic SEO principle, a lot of other techniques have come up in the past some years, which has completely revolutionized the concept of SEO and how well you rank on an organic search engine result.

Concepts like Pay-Per-Click campaigns, Social Networking and Marketing, Link Building and others have changed the strategy of SEO completely. Most professional SEO firms would know how to implement each of these techniques effectively.

• Time consuming – Any good SEO professional would tell you that SEO efforts would give results only after a period of time and a lot of time and effort. You should realize this before taking on the task yourself. It is most time and cost effective to leave it to a professional company like Perkolate.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not a difficult set of strategies and tactics, but it needs skilled people to do the job. As a relative newcomer, you would still be able to do justice to basic of aspects of SEO, but mastering the entire gamut of SEO related activities would require you to be skilled to another level.

Cost and time constrains force a lot of business owners to outsource SEO works to professional SEO firms. It must be said here that these business owners have in fact gained a lot by the professional services offered by these firms that focus on Las Vegas SEO services, like Perkolate! ]]> http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/11/06/why-you-should-hire-a-professional-local-las-vegas-seo-company/feed/ 0 http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/08/24/top-ten-search-engines-make-sure-your-website-is-listed/ http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/08/24/top-ten-search-engines-make-sure-your-website-is-listed/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 05:13:50 +0000 Michael Gazzano http://marketinginlasvegas.com/?p=575 The following is a listing of the top Ten Search Engines, on which your Las Vegas website should be listed on. Do a search for yourcompany.com and see!

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN
4. AOL
5. Microsoft Live Search
6. Ask
7. Alta Vista
8. Excite
9. AlltheWeb
10. Lycos

Building your company’s first website can seem overwhelming at first.  It takes a bit of strategy and planning and really should be something you find blocks of time to work on during your work week or on the weekend. Be pro-active, not reactive.

Just keep in mind these simple rules and ask yourself the following questions to keep you on track:

• Do your have an online marketing plan?
• Do you have a logo, colors chosen and a corporate identity?
• Have you purchased a domain (URL), and a hosting plan? (It’s best to consult with a professional first)
• Do you have a basic outline of what will be on your website?
• Do you have copy written for your website pages or do you need the assistance of an professional copy writer?
• Do you have product photos, corporate headshots?
• Do you have collateral (brochures, flyers, etc.) available as downloads on your website?
• Research competitors near and far for ideas and figure out how you can make your unique selling proposition stand out.
• Create a clear and appealing call-to-action for your website (i.e. Call for free evaluation, 10% off first time order, etc.).
• Will your website require any special functionalty (i.e. ecommerce, shopping cart, flash animation, photo galleries, forms, etc.)?
• Do you have a professional company in mind to build your website (professionals companies know what they are doing, won’t close shop overnight and can help guide)

Focus on one piece at a time, and create a timeline for yourself for completion.

Here are some resources to help you out:

10 Tips to Planning Your Website

8 Simple Steps to Planning Your Website

Ecommerce & Shopping Cart Tips

Perkolate – Las Vegas Professional Website Design & Development

Online marketing methods are low cost, allowing businesses to draw in customers with something as easy as a Twitter update. Online marketing gives businesses more control over the sales funnel. With traditional marketing, businesses have to generate their own lists of customers and then market directly to them. With online marketing, customers discover online businesses simply through a search engine or through a friend on Facebook, providing the business with free marketing. However, some work is required to maximize online traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Customers mostly click on the first couple of links generated by the search engine organic results, which are search results generated based on the webpage’s relevance to the keywords. After looking at the first couple of links, customers usually type in new keywords. The key to getting an explosion of traffic is to maximize your website’s organic search engine rankings by including keywords in text of your website that customers are the most likely to search for, a practice known as SEO. However, do not include too many keywords. Otherwise, search engines like Google will give you a less favorable PageRank or even remove you from their search engine results. The keyword density should be at 3-7%.

Adwords Campaigns (SEM)

When you are using organic rankings, you are competing with other websites to get the ideal keyword density. However, if you are willing to pay for an Adwords campaign, you can create an advertisement that will appear at the top of the search engine results regardless of how your website is set up. While Adwords campaigns cost money, they are effective when the profit generated from product sales justifies the advertising costs. When setting up your Adwords campaign, you must include keywords that will help Google effectively place your advertisements where your most likely customers will see them. Choose keywords that are specific enough to get your advertisements placed in the most appropriate locations.

Social Marketing

Customers sometimes develop ad blindness, failing to see advertisements. However, when customers interact more with your business, they are more likely to take your advice. Social media are programs found on websites such as Facebook.com and Twitter.com. Through social media, you can ask your customers what they want, helping you create the products most likely to appeal to them. Your business can provide status updates through Facebook and Twitter about new product developments, instantaneously, with immediate customer feedback.