Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies To Build Your Business In 2013

At netgenus we have taken a good, long, hard look at where we are going this year, and like you, we are aiming for the next level!

The nature of online marketing, from website to paid search campaigns, continues to evolve at a breakneck pace. For the past few years, netgenus has focused mostly on building awesome, reasonably-priced, Google-friendly websites for small businesses just like yours from Victoria, BC to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

We’re Here To Help!

This year, we are going to put more emphasis on the full-spectrum of services which our customers need to boost sales, build their businesses, and get that phone ringing!

1. STRATEGY - start with an overview, a budget, and a step-by-step plan

   The first thing you need to do is take stock of where you are and decide where you want to be. Make a realistic sales goal for example and determine a budget to achieve it. Everybody is different and we are happy to help you find the very best ‘bang for your buck’ depending on the market you are in, how much you want to spend (and of course we know you want the most for your money!), and a step-by-step plan of action

2. CONTENT - start a blog / newsletter today - we can help

   Why not give Google what it wants? Google is looking for GREAT CONTENT! At netgenus we use strictly pure-as-the-driven-snow white hat SEO practices – mostly great content – to get our customers to the top of Google!

3. SEO TUNEUP - if you haven't already, NOW is the time

   One-time SEO: $150 – We do a lot of search-engine friendly extras on your website included in the price, but if your rank on search engines is really important to you, netgenus can register you with Google Webmasters Tools (where we set canonical preferences & submit your sitemap), Google Analytics, add alt-tags to your images, add an up-to-date ping-list, and double-check your robots.txt, sitemap.xml, page titles & keyword density

4. GOOGLE PLUS LOCAL (was Google Places) - yes you need this!

   Google Places has been transformed to Google Plus Local – If you don’t see your little red pin on the map when you search for your business niche combined with your city on Google, give us a call and we can get you on the map literally & figuratively!

5. MOBILE VERSION - automatically formats for handhelds

   Check out *this website* on your mobile phone for an example of our mobile version. It’s really important nowadays to have a mobile version for people on the go. If you are a netgenus customer, your website is WordPress and for a limited time, you can get a mobile version of your site for only $50!

6. CHINESE VERSION - introduce yourself in Mandarin!

   Vancouver in particular has a large and fast-growing Chinese community who like to search for services in their native language! Getting a Chinese version of your site is a great way to introduce yourself to this vital community!

7. PAY PER CLICK - PPC is becoming a need-to-have

   Let us know your budget and your objectives and we can help you choose a program that fits you perfectly!

8. EMAIL LIST - - Best practices to start your opt-in list now

   Start collecting emails now – you’d be surprised how many of your customers WANT to hear from you

9. VIDEO / YOUTUBE CHANNEL - Who wants to read?

   Customers really connect with you when you have a video – there are lots of options! In case you didn’t get the memo, Google OWNS youtube.com and having your video on it gives you a whole extra layer of SEO…

10. SOCIAL MEDIA (facebook, twitter, linkedin) - a nice-to-have

    At netgenus we consider social media to be a nice-to-have element of your Internet marketing plan. Assuming you don’t want to spend your day on facebook.com (or pay your employees to), you can at least start out with a branded page or profile and use twitterfeed.com to push out your blogs automatically – give us a call to find out more!

Feeling confused about all of that? Just give us a call at (604) 440-3564 and we’ll go back to #1 and create a strategy together to get your phone ringing and boost your business to the next level for 2013!

Contact Us!

 

BCACG Presentation: How to Make Your Website Work for You

Thanks, BCACG, for inviting me to speak at your 2012 Symposium!

This post is designed as a step by step informative DIY (do it yourself) resource to help you buy, host, create, maintain, backup and generally get the most out of your website using WordPress as a platform.

 

STEP 1: BUY YOUR DOMAIN

Get your domain at GoDaddy.com – but just say NO THANKS to all the other products they offer during the signup process. Bless their hearts, they are masters of upselling and they are the very best registrar in the world, but for hosting, email, etc…. not so much – so remember: all you need is the domain, none of the other stuff: GoDaddy.com.

 

STEP 2: PAY FOR YOUR HOSTING

NEXT for your hosting, get started with the “Hatchling” plan at HostGator – you will never regret using them for your hosting needs, as their systems & support are so great that you feel like a VIP if you ever call them. If you have ever dealt with any other hosting company and then phone HostGator, you will not even believe your ears! They are awesome!

Click the big “View Hosting Plans” button and select your hosting plan (Hatchling unless you have some special need), and just sign up – it’s cheap and it’s amazing! Click Here to sign up at HostGator now!

 

STEP 3: CREATE YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION

Now that you have your domain and the hosting plan where you can ‘put’ your website, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of creating the actual website. You will refer to the Account Details email that HostGator sends you to log into your domain’s cPanel (the administrative control panel that controls your website from emails & forwarders to file management, scripts, and more!).

Using Fantastico script installer (there are other tools but HostGator uses the tried & true Fantastico installer which works just GREAT), you are able to create an instance of WordPress on your domain in just a few clicks – seriously – this used to take a team of developers and designers months back in the day. After you go through your 2-minute setup, you will have a website which is ready to go – quite presentable-looking right out of the box and will allow you to publish your content dynamically with NO HTML knowledge whatsoever.
Click Here For The Video Tutorial .

 

STEP 4: INSTALL A COMING-SOON PAGE

Chances are, even though you ARE ready to get going on your website, you may not have all the elements ready to go, and if you have never done this before, you will want several hours to complete and tinker with your new site before you want to have it ‘out there’ live on the Internet for anyone to see. I most frequently use the Custom Coming Soon by NetChillies plugin for developing when I am developing on a live URL – it’s pretty much seamless and you can even allow people to sign up to receive an alert when your site is ready!

Click Here For The Video Tutorial!

 

STEP 5: SELECT A THEME FROM STUDIOPRESS OR WOOTHEMES

Now that you have your WordPress installation complete and a holding page, you can start developing your site in earnest – there are a lot of theme companies to choose from out there and my top 2 are StudioPress (Brian Gardner is my personal hero) and Woo Themes. Both are great in their own ways and offer excellent FAQs, documentation, community forum, and support for their themes, so you don’t feel out in the cold once you have submitted your credit card information!

There is a long list of premium theme publishers (I recommend against free themes), and many are fine and great and I am not saying anything against them, but remember when shopping for a theme to look at the reputation of the developer and the company producing the theme.

I am linking to StudioPress and Woo here because I have personally used premium themes from both and can vouch that they have good documentation and stand by their products. You may choose a theme from the huge selection at ThemeForest.net too, but BE CAREFUL to check the author.

After purchasing your theme, you are able to install it in your WordPress installation (as above) – it’s simple to unzip your purchased content and follow the readme files or watch the video tutorial which many premium theme companies provide with their products.

Each theme has its own idiosyncrasies and you will need to follow along with the instructions, but with even a medium technical ability you should have no problem!

 

STEP 6: ADD YOUR CONTENT!

Pages & Posts

Now that you have a coming-soon page up and a high-quality theme installed, it’s time to start EXPRESSING YOURSELF!!

It is so easy to add your pages and posts with WordPress that tutorials are almost overkill – if you can use facebook, you’ll have no problem with the WordPress interface for adding text, images, hyperlinks and more. Just log into the WordPress admin dashboard, click Pages, and you’re on your way.

 

Beautiful Stock Images
Most modern themes now feature an easy-to-use home page slide show which you can configure with very little effort in the Theme Options under Appearance in your WordPress admin dashboard.

Need awesome royalty-free photography and illustrations to make your website POP? There are a lot of royalty-free image websites – the best-known being iStockPhoto and BigStockPhoto… here’s another one which is a bit lesser-known but less expensive in general and excellent quality: Fotolia.

 

STEP 7: MAKE YOUR WEBSITE STICKY!

A sticky website is one where visitors land on and stay… and return later too. If you are wondering whether your website is sticky, ask someone who won’t lie to you or better still, just check your analytics and look at the bounce rate. If you have a lot of visitors landing on your site and leaving immediately, you need to work on it!

Here are a few tips to help you make your site stickier:

• Use catchy images – face it – people want to click the pictures!
• Make it personal / personable – reach out and address your visitor
• Use social media – facebook & twitter particularly – check out WebFriendly.ca for social media
• Use standard navigation – people like to ‘know where they are’ on a website
• Use big subscribe buttons – use constantcontact / aweber
• Try polls & surveys etc if you like – use  constantcontact / aweber
• Install a ‘related posts’ widget like LinkWithin
• Check your analytics and kind of build-out very popular posts
• Update frequently!

 

STEP 8: GROW YOUR LIST AND KEEP IN TOUCH

There are a number of awesome services you can enlist to keep on top of your email communications. Remember that once your list gets to a certain size you risk running into deliverability issue (spam filters) and so on, even if your subscribers are properly opted-in. Some of the top mail services are:

• AWeber.com
• MailChimp.com
• ConstantContact.com

Check out the raging debate on the Internet about which one is best… This is a scenario where I have no evangelistic opinion – I have dabbled with AWeber & done a fair amount with ConstantContact, and have heard rave reviews about MailChimp, but it seems to be a matter of taste so do your research and rest assured that using one of these services is better than NOT using one! Check out the features lists and decide for yourself.

Full cPanel Backup… Or Lose Sleep At Night?

Here are the instructions to take a full backup of your WordPress website!
A full cPanel backup is a complete image of your website which you can download to your computer.

We can go through this on the phone if you choose to book a training session to learn how to create a FULL cPanel backup of your website ($50 for existing netgenus.com customers) – or you can do this yourself if you prefer. Written instructions are below.

HOW TO CREATE A FULL BACKUP OF YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE USING YOUR cPanel

First you need to log into your cPanel
(all netgenus customers are using cPanel)
LOGIN LINK: www.your-domain.com/cpanel
USERNAME: [your-username]
PASSWORD: [your-password]

Now, step-by-step to create a FULL cPANEL BACKUP:

1. Log into the cPanel
2. 3rd or 4th section down is Files
3. Select Backup Wizard
4. Left panel says ‘ Backup‘ – click the “Backup–>’ button
5. Now Left panel says ‘ Full Backup’ – click the “Full Backup–>‘ button
6. Red letters say ‘Generate a Full Backup’ – click ‘Generate Backup‘ button (enter your own email address in the box if you wish and leave the dropdown to the default ‘Home Directory’)
7. Now there is notification screen that your backup is in progress
8. Click ‘Go Back‘
9. Then refresh the screen every so often to see when the filename (ends with tar.gz) is a blue hyperlink which will allow you to download
10. Click the blue hyperlink when it’s ready and choose whereabouts on your hard drive to save it
11. Keep on file as a restore point, like an insurance policy – this is the full site AS OF THIS DATE
12. ON THE DAY that you want to initiate a migration or restore, you should do the backup again and use that (so the latest posts will be there). In case you don’t have a good hosting company, you may one day find yourself in a situation where a tar.gz is the best way to a known-good version of your website and you will THANK YOURSELF for having this on file!

It’s simple – you’ll see!

WordPress Website SPECIAL: $300

Back-To-Basics Sale: $300 + The Cost Of Hosting

                    

An AFFORDABLE Web Presence For Vancouver Small Businesses

If you need just a starter website with YOUR branding and YOUR Words and pictures but are not ready to make a significant investment in your web presence, this is perfect for you!

Here’s what you get:

• 1 Branded WordPress Website – Your choice of Light or Dark Theme: $300.00
  * Click For Light Theme Example  ||   Click For Dark Theme Example
  * Up to 10 pages of content – please supply one Word .doc with text & images
  * 1 stock image for the front of the website will be provided
  * If you have one of your own, we can use that
  * You may browse www.fotolia.com for a stock image, or we will select one for you
  * Your WordPress & Hosting logins to update the website / emails yourself if you wish

• 1 Year Of Hosting: $75.00 – netgenus is a proud HostGator Reseller
  *Webspace: 50MB || Bandwidth: 500MB || 3 Emails May Be Configured
  *You will receive an invoice for $75 once per year unless you cancel

What is NOT included for this very special price:

• Design Customization
• Content Writing
• Technical Support for your email programs

How to GET STARTED RIGHT NOW:

We require a $200.00 deposit to put your website into our work queue. Please note that turnaround time for a starter website is 1-2 business days after we receive your logo and the word document with your text and images. If you don’t already have a domain, you may either purchase one yourself at www.godaddy.com to keep costs down or we can purchase one for you for 2 years for an additional cost of $50.00.

Please click the PayPal button to start the ball rolling or phone (604) 440-3564 for more information. You may also inquire by clicking here.

 

When netgenus first started out, we focused on the smallest of small businesses around town and came in at a price point that nobody could resist.

At that time, not many people even understood all the advantages of having a WordPress website and believe it or not, it was sometimes hard to convince people that this is the best platform to develop on unless you have some need to go to Drupal and pay more, or you have a completely unique online requirement which can only be serviced by a custom online solution. For most small businesses, WordPress is the best solution.

Now, years later, our websites generally start out at $1,200, and MORE than worth that price tag.

Still, we want to be able to service the smaller companies or companies which just have not allocated much budget to a website for whatever reason, and we are offering a special price for this special service.

CONTENT IS KING (Yes, It Still Is)

At the end of the day, search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, et al are 100% aware that they are only going to survive IF SEARCHERS FIND WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR. It would be great to have a nickel for every customer who wanted to “add some keywords to the code to show up at the top of Google,” but sadly, it doesn’t work that way.

It’s necessary to respect Google’s intelligence (and the others too of course, but WOW, Google is so intelligent!).

Think of it this way: if you were Google and websites were always trying to fool you and trick you with “keywords in the code”  when in fact their content was thin and poorly-written, how would you rank that website?

How much respect would you give them?

Keep thinking that way, and you will have a better idea of how the Google algorithm works (but you will never really know for sure!)

 

And… by the way:

We Have A CONTENT-WRITING SPECIAL!

12 HIGH QUALITY ARTICLES (POSTS) FOR ONLY $600.00!

WHAT YOU GET:

12 well-written articles suited to your business needs (350-500 words): crafted with select, targeted, industry-specific key-phrases, released in weekly intervals over a 12 week period.

Deposit of $400.00 required & balance of $200.00 due upon approval of all content.

Get started now! Call 604-440-3564 or click here to drop us a line!

 

 

PODOMATIC.COM – It Works!

A client asked me today if I knew about audios….
“As in ‘Podcasting?’” I asked.

Well, all I could think of was podbean.com but … it wasn’t as much of a no-brainer as I thought and I wanted to slap up a demo to show how easy this stuff can be.

It is easy… right?

I thought I would take a look around and jumped right into podomatic.com.
It works, right out of the box as it were – I feel I could recommend it so far – it just took me as long as it took to fill out my particulars (and wrangle with my laptop mike!!):

MATT MULLENWEG: WordPress Mastermind & Automattic [sic] Founder

Matt Mullenweg, the mastermind behind WordPress – what a genius!

MOBILE FRIENDLY: netgenus.com Welcomes iPhones, Androids, & All Their Little Friends!

Check out this site on your iPhone – come on, whip it out!

What you will see on your mobile device is a completely different view from what you are seeing if you are on a regular computer right now, because netgenus.com is a WordPress website which is running an awesome premium plugin called WP Touch.

This is just one more reason to have a WORDPRESS website. WP touch uses the standard WordPress post & page structure to automatically re-theme the whole website for those teeny little screens.

On the left is what you see from your handheld when you type www.netgenus.com into the wee browser. Actually, if you are on a mobile device, the images is on the top

We think you’ll agree that this is a much more convenient way to browse a website than the ‘keyhole’ view you get of regular websites with a handheld. A lonnnnggg time ago, it became a web development standard best practice, that the visitor should NEVER have to SCROLL from left to right. Up and down: OK; left to right: bad design.

If you are interested in having this plugin installed & configured on your WordPress website, just drop us an email or give a call, and your website can be mobile-friendly for a ONE TIME cost of just $150.00!

If you don’t already have a WordPress website… ummm, what are you waiting for? Call (778) 387-7822

How To Add An Image To Your WordPress Post

All netgenus clients get a run-through on their new website admin panel, and the funny thing is that I barely get them logged in and tell them to click “Posts” before they are away to the races and tell me something like, “OK, I got it, you just type your post into this box and hit ‘Publish’, right?”
It’s that easy.
One thing that I’d like to mention is that images are important!
If you ever stop and WATCH an average person browsing the Internet, you will notice that all they really want to do (usually) is to click pictures!
They may be looking for something specific or they may just be surfing, but if there is an image, they will click it, and/or read the text that is right next to it.
Large blocks of text almost invariably result in a ‘page bounce’ (browser leaves almost as soon as it lands on the page).
Let’s face it: nobody wants to read a solid page of text unless it is specific information of interest.
So ADD IMAGES TO YOUR POSTS!
Your readers will love you more!
Here is a quick tuturial in case you haven’t found the little ‘Add an Image’ icon in your admin panel:

VALIDATING sitemap.xml & robots.txt Files on a New Website

Yes it’s important to let the spiders & crawlers & so on know how to index your new website!

At netgenus solutions, a site isn’t finished until your sitemap.xml & robots.txt are done – and validated.

Here’s a sitemap.xml validator: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
Here’s a robots.txt validator: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

For an extra $150, you get the ‘full treatment’ – a Google Webmasters Tools setup where we submit your site, sitemap, perhaps do a ‘change of address’ for you, Google Analytics, more alt-tags on your images, and more!

For ONGOING SEO (remember, netgenus creates your website with search engines in mind, but that’s just your start!), we can recommend a couple of different companies, depending on your budget and goals.

One thing is for sure: if you decide to launch a full-blown SEO program after your site is launched, your SEO company is going to be pleasantly surprised by the attention to detail in your site’s crawlability right from the get-go!

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