The new age of marketing has turned back the clock 50 years, online marketing is local. Agent of the 50’s and 60’s went door to door on debit routes building their client base. In 2012 Google and Facebook are encouraging their communities to focus local on a natural market, linking and solidifying a foundation. Connect and reach out online and push out the content your network needs to thrive in this financial environment. Today, the financial marketing experience is more about engagement than impressions. It’s about creating a community around your firm and product, enlisting advocates to support your brand and through all digital mediums creating content that gives your brand a voice in the marketplace.

Consumers are looking for honest straight forward information to address their needs so look to your wholesales, carriers, product vendors and approved financial publishing firms for quality content. When you are read an article from a valid source and it rings true to you and you want your clients to read it, reference it in your newsletter and hyperlink the article title, referencing the source of course. Find out and note the publication sources which are approved by your home office. Check back with them for new and timely article for your monthly newsletter. Send out your newsletter via email, post it to Facebook and Tweet it to your followers.

Have a mindset of “create, edit, publish, administer and consume” quality content. It’s your job as a financial and insurance professional to produce and gather high quality content with purpose and make it available for your community to access.

Are you ready to get up close and personal and take your practice “Back to the Future” EDGE Marketing has all the tools you need to start marketing your firm. Click her to download the “EDGE Ultimate Guide to Marketing” EDGE Ultimate Guide to Marketing

Call 678-399-3229.

This post is available as a download. EDGE Ultimate Guide to Marketing

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing

Section 1: Meet the Ultimate Prospecting Management System for Insurance and Financial Services

The EDGE Marketing System provides guidance to financial and insurance service businesses searching for a simpler way to implement a marketing plan. No expensive books and workshops. No complicated forms and exercises. No gimmicky sales jargon. Just seven simple steps that act as a framework for developing your sales and marketing process, based on proven experts’ experience helping thousands of businesses grow.
Using the EDGE Marketing System’s Mini-site Hub and Communication Hub, you can implement a marketing plan designed to measurably grow your business through targeted communication and smarter lead management, leading to better lead conversion rates, increased sales and greater profits. Now that you understand the importance of developing a clear, structured marketing plan, let’s dig a little deeper into each of the steps.

Table of Contents

Section 1: EDGE Marketing Platform: 7 Steps to Lead Generation.

1. Attract Traffic to your branded mini-website
2. Capture Traffic with landing pages linked to your agency quote system
3. Nurture Prospects with your communication hub
4. Convert Sales with intelligent data about prospects and clients
5. Deliver and Satisfy with triggered responses
6. Cross Selling Clients with newsletters and quarterly communications
7. Getting Referrals through appreciation and incentives

Section 2: EDGE Marketing Hub
1. Marketing Automation Solutions
o EDGE Marketing System
o Features and Pricing
2. Digital Marketing & Consulting
3. Pay Per Click Management

Implementation: 5 Steps to Marketing in 15 Minutes

Join us for a Webinar with EDGE Owl and start marketing your firm today!

STEP 1: Attract Traffic
Consumers today have become highly adept at ignoring advertising in all its forms—they skip TV commercials, stream free online radio, block emails from unknown senders and are virtually blind to banner ads. Paid advertising alone is no longer a viable option for driving traffic to your website; you have to earn traffic by creating valuable content that attracts visitors.
Content can mean many things to many people, but really it’s any valuable piece of information or entertainment that attracts leads to your site.
Some content is naturally prone to lead generation purposes, such as reports and webinars. For example, if you sell business liability insurance, you could write a report called “10 Steps for Business Risk Management.” Other content could focus more on brand awareness, such as a blog post titled “2012 Forecast on Market Risk Planning.”
In both cases, you’ll attract traffic to your website with the lure of valuable information. More importantly, you’ll start to develop a trusted relationship with your visitors. When creating a content library, it’s best to create one piece at a time. Before you know it, you’ll have built a body of work that raises your brand equity and serves to generate leads and raving fans.
Once you have content in place, you want people to find it. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Get Discovered with SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of getting your content and website found when people perform searches on sites such as Google or Yahoo. Better search engine rankings mean you get seen by more people—and that increases traffic to your website.

Get Results with PPC
Paid advertising, or Pay-Per-Click (PPC), enables you to boost online traffic by paying a fixed amount to promote link clicks to your content and website. The best ways to get started in paid advertising are through Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
Google AdWords—Google is the simplest and most well-known platform for PPC advertising. Basically, you bid on keywords that are most relevant to your business, and then pay Google a certain amount for each time someone clicks on your ad. The more popular the keyword, the higher the per-click price.
Facebook Ads—Facebook is second only to Google in terms of site visitors per day. Where Google allows you to target based on what people are searching for, Facebook allows you to select what type of people your ad will be served to—say, yoga enthusiasts or moms in a certain ZIP code.
Get Social
Social media doesn’t have to be daunting. And since 75% of consumers use social media in some format to learn about products and services, you can’t afford to not be in the social sphere. Start a blog to talk about your services, industry news or company updates. Reward Twitter followers or clients who “Like” you on Facebook with exclusive offers and specials. And maintain your B2B connections on LinkedIn. All of these services are free and easy to manage with only a little effort. The keys to successful social engagement are being consistent and being real.

STEP 2: Capture Leads

Now that you’re attracting people to your website with the lure of valuable content, you need to entice them to give you their contact information so you can nurture them over time. Web forms are an excellent way to capture leads, but the reality for most small businesses is that the majority of their website visitors never submit a form. If this is the case for your site, there could be several factors dissuading people from opting in.
Your Content Isn’t Compelling
For visitors to fill out a Web form, they must be motivated enough to share their personal information and take the time to consume the content. If your opt-in rates are low, it could be because your content doesn’t seem to offer enough value.

The best content is informative and original. Content that is fluffy or simply rehashed from somewhere else will not perform well. Many businesses have a newsletter sign-up form, but this is becoming less effective as people look for ways to reduce the number of emails they receive in an already overloaded inbox. If you do offer a newsletter, be clear about the benefits of subscribing.
Make sure the way you describe your content motivates visitors to act. To do this, use a strong headline that entices them to action, clearly state the benefits of the content and help them feel rewarded for taking action.
You Ask for Too Much Information
Consumers are becoming more protective of their time and personal information. To maximize opt-ins, minimize the number of required fields on your forms. Typically, name and email are sufficient. If you sell to other businesses, you may also want to capture company name. A good rule of thumb is that the more information you ask for, the more value you need to provide. You can always ask for more data as your relationship grows.
You Don’t Inspire Trust
If a visitor is reluctant to submit a form on your website, it could be because your site doesn’t look credible enough. When a prospect visits your website, they should sense that you offer a comfortable level of expertise. Anything less means that they will continue to shop around until they find someone who inspires confidence. Demonstrating expertise can be as simple as including client testimonials or case studies, mentioning industry awards, listing credentials and certifications and linking to your privacy policy.

STEP 3: Nurture Prospects
The truth is, most buyers don’t see an ad and immediately purchase your product. They buy when they are ready to buy. To reach these buyers, you need a systematic approach for developing trust and converting leads. The not-so-secret weakness of small businesses is that they don’t follow up with leads as well as they should. But consistent, valuable follow-up messages can prove to be a huge competitive edge, as long as you approach the nurturing process with a clear communications plan in mind.
Set Frequency Expectations
Clients who opt in to your communications want to hear from you, but they don’t want to be overwhelmed by hyper-frequent communications. Create a consistent timeline for your campaign that fulfills the needs and wishes of your clients as well as your business. It’s best to set your clients’ expectations upfront—for example, “Sign up for our monthly newsletter” or “Get an ebook.” If you have a website with a quote engine, for example, you may want to send weekly emails with niche market rate comparisons or limited-time insurance rates. If you’re a motivational speaker, a monthly newsletter might be a better approach. Daily emails are almost never a good idea unless your subscriber is expecting it.
Personalize Your Communications
Studies show that clients respond better to communications that are personalized to them. Evaluate your follow-up communications—whether email, direct mail or other methods—and determine how you can customize them to each person in your database. It could be as simple as using their first name or as targeted as suggesting products based on past purchases.

Upgrade from Autoresponders to True Automation

How many times have you purchased something online and received a generic follow-up email that was supposed to seem personalized but was clearly automated? Did that email deepen your relationship with the company or simply annoy you?
Many businesses send immediate follow-up messages through autoresponders because they think it makes clients feel appreciated. But due to the limitations of typical autoresponders, which only allow for basic personalization and can’t adapt to client behaviors, today’s savvy consumers perceive these “personalized” messages to be a waste of time.
To really build relationships with clients, your automated follow-up has to be truly personalized and targeted based on client behaviors, such as past purchases or interests. Amazon does this all the time, and so can you. Imagine the difference between the generic message in the previous paragraph and a follow-up message like this: “Hi, Sara. Thanks for buying a blue smart phone. Here are a few cool things you should know to get the most from your phone. By the way, we also have blue accessories to go with your phone. As a new client, you can save 15% on accessories, this week only.”
My nurture sequence:
day 1 day 15 day 30
Newsletter Seminar Invitation Newsletter

STEP 4: Convert Sales
You can attract, capture and nurture all the leads you’d like, but if they don’t convert into paying clients, you’re not going to make any money. Depending on your business type and setup, you likely use one of two methods for converting leads into clients: an online shopping cart or a sales team. No matter which method you use, there are a few strategies to realize the full potential of both.
Website Interaction
Your website and blog represents your digital face and should be as effective and easy to use as someone visiting a brick-and-mortar store. However, there are some advantages of selling online that can’t be realized in a typical retail environment.
First, an online presence gives you the ability to intelligently cross sell clients and prospects to increase your ultimate commission. Cross sell offers are most effective when they are closely related to the current product proposal. A good website will present a cross sell offer in a clean, sensible fashion that allows clients to easily request additional information on products or services. Some website systems will even allow you to offer multiple cross sell offers.
The second advantage of website service support is that you can use targeted campaigns to invite people back to your website if they leave before requesting a call by an agent or advisor. The most effective campaigns generally offer an article or ebook on the service the client was reviewing.

.

Personal Selling
For most insurance or financial service companies, clients must connect with an agent before making a purchase. Unfortunately, many of these sales-intensive businesses lose revenue because of a buy-or-die mentality on the trade floor. If a lead comes in that isn’t ready to engage right away, it can fall into a black hole of lost leads that could have become clients given enough time and nurturing. These wasted opportunities add up to a lot of lost revenue in the long run.
To prevent this, you must be able to nurture leads and identify when they are ready to distribute to your sales force. Your sales team is a valuable resource, the driving force behind growing your business. They can be much more effective if your CRM automatically evaluates certain behaviors and factors, identifies hot leads and intelligently distributes them based on specific factors such as niche market, industry criteria and geography.

In addition, every day your sales team engages in dozens of communications with leads. Automating some of these communications could free up your team to focus on only high-impact conversations instead of routine follow-up messages. This type of workflow automation can be used to automatically add notes to records, send thank you notes after sales calls, kick off educational emails and more. The best part is, by leveraging workflow automation to save time, your sales team starts to view your CRM system as a valuable resource—and not just a waste of time.
# of calls
It takes an average of five sales calls to close a deal, but most sales teams give up after just one or two calls.

STEP 5: Deliver and Satisfy
If you have ever received disappointing client service (and who hasn’t?), you won’t be surprised to learn that most companies spend more on acquiring new clients than keeping existing ones happy.
Winning lifelong clients requires the ability to not only get a prospect to buy again and again, but to do so happily. The benefits go far beyond inspiring loyalty and repeat business; happy clients become advocates for your brand, driving referrals by sharing their experiences with friends, colleagues and social networks.

Service as a Marketing Strategy
Great client service is a HUGE competitive advantage. Say you need something fixed at your office. Company A was an hour late, talked on their cell phone the whole time and left without telling you they were done. Company B, on the other hand, arrived on time, explained what they were going to do to fix your problem and gave you a coupon for your next service. Which company will you use next time?

The same warm, friendly, accommodating approach you take to nurture a client should be continued for the duration of the relationship. Positive experiences lead to repeat business and referrals. Service as a strategy has to come from the top and be truly ingrained in your company’s core values. Every process, every decision, every employee must act in alignment with this strategy in order to be successful.
Deliver as Promised—Automatically
Despite their best intentions, many service businesses over-promise and under-deliver simply because they don’t have enough time and energy to meet the expectations set during the sales and marketing process. Luckily, many elements of great client service can be automated, which eases the burden on the business and helps clients feel valued and appreciated.
For example, a client service challenge for many firms is industry market updates to keep clients abreast on how to protect their assets in the current market. Instead of speaking to clients in person or over the phone, which requires a big commitment from both parties, automation allows you to create engagement campaigns that slowly drip information over time.
Another advantage of automation is that it allows you to easily identify and segment happy and unhappy clients through a simple survey. Clients who are satisfied can be automatically rerouted to a testimonial and referral campaign while unsatisfied clients can be routed to client services for personal follow-up.

STEP 6: Cross Selling Clients
One of the very first statistics business owners learn is this: 80% of your profits come from the top 20% of your clients. Yet so many service business owners spend all their time focusing on attracting and converting new leads and clients that upsell and cross-sell efforts directed at existing clients completely fall off the radar.
As we’ve shared in the previous steps of the ultimate client lifecycle, consistent communication with clients is essential—and this shouldn’t end once a first sale is made. Clients who had a positive experience with your company are more likely to think of you the next time they need a similar product or service. Continue to develop relationships through lead nurturing, like letting clients know about complementary services they might enjoy.
The best way to accomplish this is to create automated follow-up campaigns based on a scheduled sequence that continues to communicate with clients in the form of emails or direct mail and other offline methods. You could even target these communications to feature new products, services or promotions based on your clients’ previous buying history, ensuring you’re always delivering something of value.

STEP 7: Get Referrals
Once you’ve established a clear process for funneling leads from their first contact to after-purchase communications, you’re in a great position for the final step in the ultimate client lifecycle: growing even more through client referrals and affiliates.
Get Client Referrals
People are more likely to do business with someone when they’re introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Based on that idea, client referral programs are a fantastic way to generate highly qualified leads. The key to getting referrals from happy clients is simple—just ask. And don’t forget to reward clients for their referrals with a thank you gift or heartfelt thank you card.
Leverage Affiliates
Affiliates are third parties who market your product on their website and through email and social media. They are an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. The best thing about affiliate programs is the ROI—you pay only for performance. You simply make a small investment in marketing resources and then pay affiliates for any leads or sales they generate. Because your investment is minimal, these programs can yield amazing returns.
You
Referrals
Motivate Partners to Act
When developing referral and affiliate programs, it’s important to clearly outline what you hope to achieve and provide the right incentives to encourage participation. A partner’s reason for participating is not always all about money. Take time to understand those motivations and develop incentives that best suit those needs—and your own. Think back to Step 5: Deliver and Satisfy. The same principles we outlined for making clients happy should be applied to your partners—always deliver as promised.

Section 2: EDGE Marketing Hub: Communication Management
Service business owners dream of striking the perfect balance between running a successful business and spending time doing the things they love. The steps in the ultimate client lifecycle are designed specifically to help service business owners realize this dream. Implementing a marketing plan based on this platform will help you rediscover the joy of running your own business AND give you more time to tackle other important items on your life’s to-do list. Launch a new product. Open up a new location. Coach a full season of Little League. Whatever you hope to accomplish, it will be well within your reach.

EDGE Marketing Hub: Intent-Intelligence-Integration

EASY To use and cloud based – Manage your marketing plan from one dashboard Consulting Support and a Defined 12 month marketing plan
Comprehensive Analytics and Quarterly Meetings

1. Marketing Automation Solutions

To successfully implement the ultimate client lifecycle, you need to have the right tools and resources in place to fully realize the potential of this powerful foundation. And that’s where EDGE comes in we bring the leadership, technology and advertising to fill your sales funnel with quality prospects.

EDGE Marketing partners with industry leader for an all-in-one marketing automation service that helps service businesses grow through better client engagement.
With EDGE, service businesses have access to powerful, scalable solutions that bring all of their marketing and CRM services into one integrated system, enabling them to reach the right contact or clients more effectively and increase profitability.
Landing Pages
Capture leads and automate your communication with professional-looking graphics that are branded for your firm and targeted to your pre-defined prospect.
Real-Time Lead Notification
Receive a call and an email when a visitor request information from your landing page. Speak live to your lead within 30 seconds of them submitting the quote request button.
Email Marketing
Automatically send smart, professional-looking messages that are personalized based on what you know about your leads and clients.
Powerful CRM
Identify hot leads, manage opportunities and track important client details that drive automated follow-up communications and workflow.
Smart Automation
Leverage automation technology to create highly personalized emails and offline communications that are triggered when clients take action by clicking a link or requesting an ebook.
E-Service
Centralize your client data and manage online quote requests and service request distribution, subscriptions and partner networks all in one place.
 
EDGE Marketing System & Pricing
Independent Agent or Advisor:
1. EDGE Marketing Hub: Branded for each Agent

One Time Technology and Design Fee $350 Annual hosting and IT Support $480

Some say “Social Media is free and everyone can do it”. I must disagree, I have lots of paper and pencils in my office and their cost is relatively cheap but the time and talent required to put words or drawing to paper is a different story. Internet marketing is cost effective marketing but requires action that is CONSISTENT, TARGETED and DEFINED. You can stay busy online and not create an “Action” that will create a “Reaction” this is wasted time and money.

You need a written marketing plan with a line of attack, you need systems to implement your strategy, but most importantly, you need to take action CONSISTENTLY if you want to see results.

And the best part is…

When you are consistent in your actions and follow your plan, your results compound and you’ll see exponential growth! Marketing follows Newton’s Laws of Motion, so let’s review them and make sure we have a line of attack or what marketers call a “Call to Action” on every page.

Need help or have questions call me at 678-399-3229. Every thing on this Blog follows simple strategies found in the “Noob Guide to Marketing”. Want an example of how I created a personal profile page for my website in less than 10 minutes. Contact Us:Ruth Goldstein

Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion
1. “Law of Inertia” Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

2. A force causes only a change in velocity (an acceleration) The relationship between an object’s mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector

3. ACTION/REACTION For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Need Action! Create MOMENTUM!

Instead of throwing a bunch of dollars into the black hole of the internet to see what actually sticks, focus on two or three powerful methods of marketing, and use them consistently. Don’t use Webinars or Youtube/Video Marketing if you don’t plan on creating more than one video. Don’t own a blog if you never plan on having more than one post that says “Hello I am BOB”. Don’t even register on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, the top Social Networking sites, if you’ll never get past 2 friends, one update and the default profile picture.

Quality content that is CONSISTENT, TARGETED and DEFINED where “Less is More” could never be more true! Concentrate on doing LESS with more focus, determination and consistency!

Your insurance or financial services practice will benefit a lot from various Internet marketing methods and attract new clients. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars just to get some decent exposure for your firm. There are ways to make you visible online by using the tools that are free for everyone you just need to select the 2 or 3 tools that fit your style of communication and implement them one by one. It takes time to market and that is the essential action (investment) that will generate website traffic.

EDGE Marketing will show you how to use of your online power – through Internet marketing. Here are simple methods that you may employ to boost the visibility of your practice without spending more than what you can afford. However, these techniques need patience and some skill that you will need to learn or pay for, if you want to create momentum on your website or blog. Last week I posted an article on the “Noob Guide to Online Marketing”. I am using this guide for my clients and will be glad to partner with you with a link or shared article so just reach out and Ask EDGE for help.

Firstly, you need a blog or website before you can make use of these low cost Internet marketing strategies. So go create one with WordPress or hire a EDGE Marketing team of web developers. It will display your products and services. Here is where WordPress blogs come in to play. Do be afraid of the word “Blog”. WordPress templates will act as your website and you don’t have to post daily, you can create static pages. Where this is important is for creating “Call to Action” pages or “Online Business Cards” that can be hyperlinked to your newsletter or emails.

This will be used in employing the following Internet marketing techniques.

1. Affiliate Marketing

This is the process of recruiting a network of smaller websites known as affiliates to drive targeted traffic to a website. Ad copy and links will be provided by the advertisers. You will have to pay a certain percentage of the sales profit to your affiliates. This is best done as a team so you get the traffic in your area and another agent get the traffic in his area.

2. Links

One of your goals should be to attain a good ranking with search engines. One way to do it is through link building. This could be done through trading links to other businesses that are related with yours. Have you created a wealth advisors council or strategic partnerships? Have the partners cross link to each others websites. Submit articles online and request a link to your website.

3. Newsletters

Sending out newsletters to your subscribers (those who signed up for your newsletters) will help greatly in establishing a good working relationship with your clients or prospects. It has to be short, sweet, consistent and written for a general audience. Newsletters can be mail merged and customized for each client very easily. Ask to see how you can send an e-newsletter monthly for 1 cents each or mail them for 27 cents each.

4. E-mail Marketing

As one of the best cost-effective Internet marketing tools, it stays as a very important method of keeping your clients aware of your products and services. Just make sure to avoid spamming or soon enough you will have to close down you email account due to complaints.

5. Articles

If you put quality content in the form of articles in your blog or website along with your products and services, search engines will have to index your website. Getting you website indexed by popular search engines means more traffic for you.

6. Forums

Expand your Internet network is through joining forums that mainly discusses stuff regarding or related to your products and services. Actively posting responses or answers and asking relevant information will build your reputation as that forum’s member and boost your company’s visibility through your signature files. These signature files are those that go with your every post. Links to your website could be included in this signature.

Introduction

Driving traffic or visitors to your website requires Search Engine Optimization (SEO, the process of getting your blog or website as highly ranked in the search engines as possible. There is a lot of talk about SEO and the majority of the time we are talking about moving a site’s position in the Google rankings. To a lesser extent, we can also talk about SEO with regards to a site’s position in Yahoo and Bing who are rival search engines to Google. They fought for the 2nd and 3rd slots in market share in the last year or two.

High Rankings = More Clicks = More Website Traffic = More Leads = More Money!

Of course, the end goal for a financial professional, insurance agent or advisor is to get more prospects and thus more revenue.

When your site ranks high for relevant search terms such as life insurance, retirement planning or annuity, you will get more clicks to your website and thus more website traffic, of this much we can be certain. The real concern is not just traffic but quality traffic which for you is a prospects looking for a insurance or financial solution to his need.

For example, if you are a agent in Chicago, you want your website to be as high as possible on the first page when someone searches for “insurance quote Chicago.” That much seems obvious.

However, a lot of businesses ignore going after search terms that are possibly more relevant to actually getting people through your door.

For example, when somebody searches for “bad annuity Chicago” or “annuity interest rate Chicago” they are clearly likely to want to compare annuities in the near future! If your site came up at the top for as many searches like that as possible, it could mean a huge increase in revenue and overall profit for your firm.

The Value of a Google Click

Google has 10 spots up for grabs on its first page of search results, after a user has searched for something using the Google search engine.

It possibly goes without saying that the most valuable spot for your website and thus for your business is the number one spot. You will get the most clicks to your website if you are at the absolute top of the results page.

Research shows that you will get from 35%-50% or more of searchers’ clicks if you are in the number one position for a search term. This is your click through rate (CTR), meaning out of all the people who search for a certain term, usually 35-50% of them will click on the website in the number one position.

Obviously that number is the lion’s share so being number one takes high importance. By contrast, the number two result gets around 12% of the clicks, and the results at the bottom of the page, from 8-10, get around 1%-2% of clicks.

As you can see, your CTR fluctuates wildly based on where you sit in the search results.

Any SEO strategy you employ for your business website should focus on two things. First, you want to place as high as possible for your search terms, preferably number one or two. Secondly, you want to rank highly for as many search terms as possible. If you do both of these things you can dominate the search rankings and get more clicks and thus traffic and leads for your business. Once you identify the keywords you want to rank for, focus on those two aspects.

More on Keyword Research

Obviously when someone searches for “ surf board San Diego” and you are an insurance salesman in Atlanta, you do not want your website to pop up as it’s not relevant. That would be ridiculous.

However, there’s an important difference in knowing what search terms for which you should rank contrasted with for which search terms you think you want to rank.

You may think, as is obvious, that you should rank for “insurance agents in Atlanta” and that’s that, you have done your keyword research! While that can be an easy term to pick, you want customers as eager to spend money as possible so a more valuable term to you would be “buy life insurance Atlanta” or even “get life insurance Atlanta.” Those are what we call buyer keywords. Meaning, of course, that searchers searching for that term are obviously ready to buy and will be more of a hot lead than just “Atlanta insurance.” A search for “Atlanta life insurance” is again, a bit more specific and more likely to get a sale, as well.

As you do your keyword research, just remember that you want to go for several keywords, with buyer keywords as laser targeted as possible. While one individual keyword may not get a copious amount of search volume, if you are ranking high for several of those low search buyer keywords, it can lead to a successful overall strategy of getting as much traffic to your website as possible from the search engines.

Anyone can easily research the search volume of terms searched in Google by using Google’s free keyword tool. By this, I mean that you can see if “Atlanta life insurance quote” gets 50 searches per month or 500 searches per month. It will not be a 100% accurate prediction of search volume, but gives you a general idea which search terms could possibly get you more website traffic if you ranked in the first few few spots for those terms. However, remember first spot gets far more clicks than the other spots, and it can be easier at times to rank for search terms with a bit less search volume compared to those with more search volume. If you can rank for a lot of search terms with lower search volume it can make up for the fact that each individual term may not get thousands of searches per month. Always look at the overall picture with your SEO strategy and do not get too caught up in playing the search volume numbers game.

How to Rank?

Two main elements determine your search engine ranking. SEO specialists refer to these elements as “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO.”

In a nutshell, on-page SEO means that the website “page” that you want to rank for a certain term should be optimized for that term as well as is possible. For example, if you want to rank for the term “Phoenix Suns sports bar” then you should have some content on your page about Phoenix Suns sports bars. It should be in the title of a blog post, for example, and information about Phoenix Suns sports bars should be on the page and you should use that exact phrase and a variation of it, a few times. There are some tools you can use which get this down to an exact science, as well.

On-page SEO, however, also means that your site generally engages users of your targeted search term and keeps them on the page once they land on your site. Basically, on-page SEO should take a holistic approach in that you want all the factors to show the search engines that your site is absolutely relevant for that search term.

Off-page SEO can be summed up in one word, backlinks. A link on another site that points to your site, for example, is a “backlink” to your site. People have gamed the system in the past with this by using quantity over quantity and gettings thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of irrelevant backlinks pointing to a site to get it ranked in the search engines. This can be risky as Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to devalue these strategies.

Getting relevant links from a healthy, random variety of authority pages has worked for the last 10 years and continues to work today. One way to do this is to create a blog and write a high-quality post that other blogs in your industry would love to link to because it gives top quality, relevant information. You can follow another, similar strategy by writing another helpful article and asking authority blogs if they would like some free content for their site as long as they leave a link back to your site at the end of your post. Finally, you can issue online press releases when relevant and submit these press releases to as many news and information sites as possible. The more that accept the release and leave a link back to your site the more variety of valuable links you will have that can affect your rankings positively.

Want Help?

Thank you for reading the short report I prepared for you. If you want some help creating an SEO strategy or want someone to do all of this for you, just email me or give me a call.

If you have any questions at all, you can reach me at:

LSP EDGE llc
Ruth Goldstein
678-399-3229

Internet marketing is not overly complicated but it is also not a process in which anyone can excel without making attempts to learn more about the subject. Business owners who do not know a great deal about Internet marketing but who wish to implement Internet marketing into their overall marketing strategy should carefully study the basic principles of Internet marketing before launching their online marketing campaign. Fortunately for these business owners there are a variety of options for learning about Internet marketing. These options may include online research, reading published books and studying successful Internet marketing campaigns.

Researching Internet marketing online is one method which can be used for learning more about this topic. This type of research can be very informative and can provide the business owner with a great deal of advice and other information. However, it can also provide the business owner with a great deal of misinformation. When researching any subject online it is very important to note that not all of the information available online is accurate. This may be due to a variety of factors including content which is written by those who do not have a great deal of knowledge about the subject matter as well as content which was written years ago and is outdated. This can be frustrating but fortunately business owners can still learn from the Internet. This just means they should be more cautious about accepting information as being accurate and may wish to verify the information they obtain before implementing an Internet marketing strategy.

Published books are another valuable resource for learning more about Internet marketing. There are a variety of books available which focus on this subject and provide a wealth of useful information. When selecting a book for use as research material it is important to seek out a book which received independent reviews which were positive. It is also important to seek out books which were published recently. This is important because the Internet marketing industry is evolving continuously and a book that was published only a few years ago may be outdated and may lack information on some of the new developments in the industry. The appeal of using published books to learn about Internet marketing is you can keep the books on hand for easy reference when you launch your Internet marketing campaign.

Finally business owners can learn a great deal about Internet marketing simply by studying successful Internet marketing campaigns. Try the Internet marketing blog at www.jeremyburns.com/blog for some great starter tipe. If your business offers products and services in a particular niche consider entering relevant terms in popular search engines and studying the websites of some of the highest ranking businesses. This can provide you with a great deal of insight into what these business owners are doing which may be contributing to their success. Examining everything from their website design to their search engine optimization strategies and even the content on their website can help you to determine why they are more successful than you. You should also consider how they are marketing their website which may include banner ads, affiliate marketing programs or other types of advertising. Armed with this information you can take the opportunity to implement changes to your own website and marketing strategy which may help you to gain a greater degree of success. Care should be taken to not copy anything directly from your competitors but to rather try to emulate their degree of success in your own way.

Around the world the market for skilled people, for professionals, for generalists and specialists, is increasing exponentially. Ironically, at the same time the market is demanding only specific skills, knowledge, understanding, experience and qualifications, and these are often not the traditionally known ones. Remaining marketable in such fast changing and demanding times is now essential if an individual is to continue to be successful in their work. It is not enough to have traditional skill sets, nor rely on qualifications which have been superseded by more modern versions or completely replaced. To remain marketable it is essential to continuously, appropriately, and visibly, update your qualifications, skills, knowledge, and understanding. Additionally, in many business sectors you will need to demonstrate that your experiences are also current, varied, and relevant.

Successful providers of goods or services adopt what is known as the Marketing Concept. This, in essence, is the producing or selling organisation focusing primarily on identifying the needs and wants of the customer, rather than the operational capabilities of the organisation. This customer driven approach ensures that the organisation is aware of current and likely future customer needs and enables it to provide products that it knows certain customers will purchase. Of course, other factors, such as competitor activity and background changes in the marketplace, are very important, and will be factored in to the strategies. It is this approach that must be taken by the individual seeking to be successful in their careers.

To remain marketable, to be successful in finding new opportunities, to make good progress in whatever field you have chosen, you will need to adopt the marketing concept to yourself. This means researching what your customers or clients want. If you are intent on staying within your current organisation, you must research and establish what are their current, but more importantly, future people needs, what skills, experience, expertise, qualifications, are they seeking from their key people. To highlight the importance of this, consider what an external applicant, applying for a post in your organisation, would do. Correct, research and present themselves in a way which matches the needs of the organisation as closely as possible. If you are planning to change organisations, or sectors, or to set up a business, the same applies, you must identify the current and future needs of your chosen target. If you do not, then it is highly likely that your profile will not meet their needs.

This is the most essential first step. You will need to consider which markets you are targeting, which customers. In other words, which business sectors and which organisations, or which clients and customers if you are setting up a business. This is not an easy task but it is critical that you do this well. If you are planning to remain employed then much information is readily available, directly from organisations and from business sector trade organisations, indirectly from sector reports, educational research, educational institutions who provide sector or profession specific courses, educational departments of professional associations, marketingcompanies, government departments. The danger is that many of these information providers may themselves not be up to date with the latest developments and trends, so you will need to cross-check most information. If you are planning to set up a business, then you will need to carry out market research on your potential customers or clients. Armed with information on the current and forecast condition and the current and future people or services needs, of your target markets, you can then move on to the next step.

The essential second step is to carry out an analysis of your current skills, experience, qualifications, and ongoing development activities. The best and most simple tool to do this with is the SWOT analysis: identifying your strengths and weaknesses and then the opportunities available to you and the threats that face you. You can do this alone, but it is much better to seek help from others, such as a coach, mentor, human resource specialist, line manager, or friend who can give advice and support objectively. When you have identified your strengths consider how these can be enhanced. When you have identified your weakness (in relation to your target customer’s needs) you should plan how to reduce or eliminate them. In both areas, this will probably mean taking on personal and-or professional development activities, which we will discuss below. Opportunities will need to be assessed in two stages: firstly those available to you now, given your current profile, and secondly those that will be available to you after you have made yourself more marketable, by enhancing your strengths and taking positive action to eliminate or reduce your weaknesses. Threats are also best assessed in two stages: firstly those currently facing you, and secondly those that are likely to arise in the future. As you can see, identifying your current attributes is a major task, but one that is highly valuable and essential if you are to move forward successfully.

As we are illustrating in this article, your most valuable transferable skill may well be that of being willing to continuously develop yourself. That aside, there are other attributes that will be highly valuable. Whether you are considering moving into another business sector, or setting up your own business, then in the process of carrying out the SWOT analysis, you should add a category where you can list your current transferable skills. These are skills, experience, qualifications, knowledge, that you already possess and which will be valuable in your new work situation. These attributes can range through the hard to the soft, and can include contacts, experiences, specialist expertise, passion for certain type of work, qualifications, internet skills, foreign languages, and so on.

After you have completed the analysis of your targeted markets, and of your current skills, the next step is to draw up a development action plan that will fill identified gaps, enhance strengths, reduce or eliminate weaknesses, prepare you to take advantage of opportunities and equip you with the means to defend against threats. Preparing a personal professional development plan is a major task and should not be taken lightly. Advice and guidance should be obtained from appropriate sources, even if this is simply to research current best practice, by using the internet and-or textbooks. Your plan should be designed to develop yourself in a way which results in your profile matching that of the target markets. It is unlikely that you will achieve a complete match in a short space of time, but you must start the journey with that in mind. Considerable help is available, from professional associations, sector specific educational qualification providers, private business schools, public colleges and universities, and can be studied in distance learning, classroom, or on the job formats. Some development areas are widely useful, such as courses in general business and management, quality management, project management, and marketing, whilst other subjects can be highly useful if identified as a specific need, such as risk management, event management, financial awareness, strategic planning, and customer relationships. There are, of course, many more that could be essential development areas.

In addition to the necessary personal development activity, there are other avenues that should be explored. These include: networking, which is seen in some sectors as a valuable marketing tool for employed and for self-employed people; building a presence by publishing articles, in relevant journals or internet directories or publishing a weblog, or even writing and publishing a book on your business specialism; taking on public speaking; joining and participating in local branches of professional associations. These are but a few of the many ways of promoting yourself, which can be explored in more depth through research on the internet.

The message here is very simple. You must take action. Whatever your marketplace it will be highly competitive and highly demanding. You will need to be actively managing your participation, your self-marketing, in order to be amongst the successful participants.

There are some common pitfalls that can damage the process. The main danger areas are: Allowing current workload to prevent you from taking the action described here. You will almost certainly never be less busy, it’s the way of the modern business world that the amount and the pace of change is continuously increasing, and this translates into workload; You are tempted to focus on technical, operational skills, rather than broader, more conceptual skills, such as interpersonal skills, negotiation skills, or strategic approaches; You become committed to a position because it was easy to obtain. If this happens it is unlikely that the attraction of the post will last; You limit your opportunities by trying to match your existing skills with opportunities; You limit your opportunities by carrying out little or insufficient research; You limit your opportunities by not looking beyond your current business sector; You procrastinate and don’t take action. All of these are fatal mistakes. You must avoid them and take positive, realistic action, now.

Making yourself more marketable, more attractive, more credible, more interesting, is an essential skill in today’s highly competitive, complex, and fast-changing business world. The need to show evidence of continuous personal and professional development is no longer expected of the few, or in certain professions only. It is now mandatory in all business sectors, and in all organisations, be they private or public, commercial or non-profit making. The most successful individuals embrace this requirement and add it to the range of skills that they equip themselves with, and then develop it with passion and commitment. To make yourself more marketable you have to take that task very seriously, and commit appropriate effort and energy to it. If you can also add passion for continuous development and learning, the rewards will be considerable.