With the worst recession since the Great Depression looming over businesses these days, its hard to spend money on marketing that doesn’t immediately impact the bottom line. Thankfully, we have internet marketing to help us out in these situations. Everyone with a website knows they aren’t free and maintaining the site and its content is an ongoing expense. But, considering alternative forms of marketing, web marketing gives the most bang for its buck.
The team members at Nelson & Co. have been doing web marketing since 1999, which is like saying “forever” when considering the speed at which technology evolves. In recent years, new tools have become available to internet marketers allowing them to take web marketing to a new level, one that gives them some control in contrast to the old SEO methods: optimize … submit … wait … evaluate … and repeat. That’s not to say the old ways aren’t relevant anymore, because they are. There are fundamental things to consider when seeking “organic” search results, and a good basic SEO program can take you far. Now, however, there are other options for getting “the word out.”
By now, everyone is well aware of the social media craze that’s as finicky as the trendy restaurant scene in Anytown, USA. MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have all opened our eyes to other means of communication and networking. Years ago, Google laid it out for everyone; they said there needed to be links to and from your site, and fresh content. This started the link sharing craze, which really doesn’t help a site in the long run. Sharing a bunch of links with irrelevant sites and strangers wasn’t part of the master plan; it was more of a parlor trick. What does work is feeding your content out to other websites, news services, and your customers….disseminating it to the masses. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was the answer. With RSS, someone can write an article like this one and push it out to the world instead of putting something on your site and expecting someone else to come check your site for something new and interesting. This technology bred a new kind of search engine, a content aggregator. Sites like FeedBurner collect rss feeds and propagate them out to subscribers searching for related content.
Nelson & Co. offers its clients WordPress, a news/blogging application, that once installed, skinned and configured, gives a website owner the ability to write fresh content for their site and categorize it. One category can be organized for press releases, while another focuses on industry information or product reviews. This content can be used in so many ways. Through the Nelson & Co. web marketing and maintenance program, these postings become listed in the news aggregator sites and get picked up by individuals, other sites and even news agencies. The content dates and titles can even be pulled to various sections of the client’s website offering fresh content and teasers throughout. A third benefit is that this content can also be fed into a clients Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages…if you don’t have one already, Nelson & Co. can help you with that as well. Finally, the fresh content gives search engines something to list, and better exposure is a GOOD THING.
By considering these new marketing avenues, companies will maximize their marketing dollar, improve their site’s interest (stickiness), and gain the exposure needed to stay in front of their customer.
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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (832) 532-7220.
