SEO Pal No Comments June 15th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Traffic Tips

How To Create A Squeeze Page That Will Drive You Tons Of Subscribers

Attracting leads are the most important aspect of email marketing. Email marketing can’t be done effectively if you don’t have lots of subscribers in your mailing list. The number of your subscribers will be determined by the way you attract your leads. In other words, your squeeze page is responsible for your email marketing success. Here are 5 tips to create a squeeze page that will drive you tons of subscribers:

1. Be Different From The Crowd

There are thousands of squeeze pages on the internet, even in the same niche as yours. Most marketers are using the same template for their squeeze page. The result is that there are hundreds of squeeze pages that are similar to each other. If you are doing the same thing, then you are diminishing your chance of being recognized by the audience in your niche. That’s why you should tweak your squeeze age so that it will be different from the crowd. You can use the same template, but make sure to tweak it so that it will become completely unique.

2. Give Real Value To Your Audience

Many online marketers are not giving real value to their audience. Yes, they are offering free stuff to their audience, but they don’t make it valuable at all. As a result, their audience can’t extract any value from the free stuff that they are giving. The free stuff then goes straight to the recycle bin. If you want to successfully attract subscribers to your squeeze page, make sure to give the best for your audience. Yes, it’s true that you are giving them free stuff, but make it so valuable that your audience won’t dare to remove it from their PC.

3. Use Simple And Clean Design

Do not put too many clutters in your squeeze page. Your visitors don’t like that. Instead, use simple and clean design. It will help your audience to go straight into filling their email address in your opt-in form. If there is too much clutters available, your audience can’t see your opt-in. It will also be a sign of the quality of your mailing list. Of course, people will have a bad impression toward your mailing list if you are putting too much clutter on your squeeze page.

4. Don’t Have Too Much Talk

Your squeeze page copy should be short and to the point. Do not have too much talk in your squeeze page. Why? Your visitors will only see three aspects of your squeeze page. First, the headline . If the headline is good, then they will take a look at the second aspect. The second aspect is bullet points. What are the benefits of joining your mailing list? If they see that the bullet points are impressive, they will take a look at the third aspect before they decide to join your list. The third aspect is the free stuff that you’re giving to them. So, you don’t need to create a lengthy squeeze page. You just need to put three main aspects into it: good headline, interesting bullet points (benefits of joining), and enticing free stuff.

5. Put A Clear Call To Action

Ask people to join your list. Yes, give them clear call to action so that they can take action immediately. This is probably the best way to close your squeeze page. After giving them some good reasons to join, the closing phase should be to include a clear call to action. Let them know where to put their email address. Put a nice graphic in your squeeze page that tells your audience to enter their email address and hit the ‘Join’ button.

Those are 5 tips that you can follow to create a squeeze page that will drive you tons of subscribers. Remember that the quality of your squeeze page will determine whether people will join your list or not. So, you should follow the tips above to ensure that you have a squeeze page that really make your audience wants to join your list immediately.

Author Bio
Mike is a Blogger with special interest in blogging on SEO / Internet Marketing niche. Recently he has seen a surgen in number of website/blog owners who tends to buy pinterest followers to get backlinks for ranking purposes, and he wonders whether this is a ethical and good practise or not.

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SEO Pal No Comments May 31st, 2013 Blog, Marketing, SEO Services, Traffic Tips

Creative SEO Tip- Jacking The News Like A Content Marketing Pro

With content marketing quickly becoming the widest form of ongoing link building, traditional tactics are quickly going to become boring and overused. I want to fuel your content marketing toolset, and bring you a little creative tip that you can start using immediately.

Newsjacking is massively underused, and extremely rewarding. When used correctly, it can bring huge amounts of exposure, social signals and links for your site.

What is Newsjacking?

Newsjacking is very new to the SEO world, but is an obvious extension to content marketing. Whilst the term itself sounds negative, and a little black hat, it really isn’t. Newsjacking is a strategy where marketers capitalise on an increasing demand for a certain news topic, and use it to their advantage.

Breaking news can quickly become extremely popular, and smart marketers use it to their advantage by joining in with the overall discussion, by contributing a post of their own on the topic.

In practice, newsjacking works like this:

Pay close attention to breaking news topics that can be angled in a post to be relevant to your business’s niche.
Deep understanding of the key phrases that are being searched for surrounding the breaking news topic.
Produce a well-researched piece of content directly fulfilling the need for knowledge surrounding the topic.
Efficiently promoting the piece of content in order to be found predominantly when related phrases are searched for within the search engines.

It’s important to understand that you can’t simply hijack any news as it grows in popularity. Rather, it needs to be related to your niche, or intelligently angled in a way that makes it relevant. However, most businesses are not going to have a problem with finding breaking news related to their industry.

Newsjacking In Action

In order for you to fully understand newsjacking, I thought it would make sense to give you a couple of examples of it in action:

A high profile celebrity theft could be used by a home security business to highlight the importance of securing your property.
A house fire could be used by an insurance company to promote the idea of insuring your property.

Newsjacking is extremely similar to content marketing, and can even be considered a part of it. Similar to the fundamental aspects of content marketing, the content comes first and marketing second. Fulfill people’s desire for newsworthy content, and use that opportunity to promote your brand on the backend.

Timing is critical with newsjacking. A well-timed, expertly researched, excellently written piece of newsworthy content can acquire a massive amount of attention, and grow your brand hugely.

If this was a bit too advanced for you, and you are interested in learning the basic concepts surrounding SEO and blogging, I host a range of SEO training courses that you may wish to get involved in. We won’t delve too deeply into newsjacking, but we will cover basic concepts that will allow you and your business to get the advantage needed to rise above the competition.

Claire Jarrett, a qualified teacher turned internet marketing mentor, offers a range of SEO and adwords training courses via helpwithppc.com

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SEO Pal No Comments May 3rd, 2013 Blog, Blogging, Marketing

5 Often Overlooked (But Still Very Effective) Online Marketing Tactics For 2013, And Beyond…

The year 2013 welcomed new and dynamic methods of online marketing, and nowadays business of all sorts are enjoying the perks of social media, video marketing, and mobile marketing to boost their ROI. This scenario isn’t surprising, as these strategies are the ones in the current trends.

However, it is also interesting to note that there are other online marketing tactics that are still very effective, but are often overlooked because of their lack of pizzazz. These methods should not be placed aside though, as by using effectively on your campaign, the better the results you may get in terms of hitting your performance metrics.

So what are these online marketing tactics that are still effective today?

Blogging

The effectiveness of blogging has been put to the ultimate test last year, during the advent of social media. This is because marketing has become more graphic and visual, and there was a time in which users relied on what they saw and heard more than what they read.

But blogging actually defied the odds and remains to be one the strongest forms of online marketing, especially now that the trend is that of social. This is because apart from being a place to showcase a brand and its features, a blog helps a lot in humanizing the brand itself. And yes, its features are further fueled by the power of sharing via social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Many brands rely on blogs to promote their name in their chosen niches. Individuals who are capitalizing on their name to build an empire in a niche community likewise use blogs to serve as their freedom walls.

Guest posting is also a growing trend in the world of blogging; bloggers now post on each other’s blogs to create stronger network connections, and at the same time promote more valuable content that their target audience could use.

Email marketing

Email marketing may have become an underdog during the recent years because of the proliferation of spam, but when used wisely, it still proves to generate good results.

Email marketing is often targeted to prospective customers, or leads, those who have signed up on your website. While the main goal of email marketing is to convert these leads into actual paying customers, you can actually use this method to create more buzz to your audience.

Email marketing has become more dynamic these days; while it is still a must to sell your brand to your target recipients, you can actually offer them more perks, such as freebies that they can immediately use. You can also feed them with pertinent news and information on the topics that they find interesting or relevant, and from here you can work your way to making them into paying clients in the long run.

Reputation management

Reputation management is a kind of content marketing that boosts a positive image on a brand. This tactic can be very tricky, as you have to subscribe to already established websites that can help in increasing your brand’s online popularity. These include PR sites, big websites and news sites, as you will be pushing for the brand’s best and working assets to the fullest, for your target market to notice.

As you can see, search engines eventually push down the sites that once dominated their page rankings. You may use this to your advantage by creating positive sounding articles and press releases about your brand, these being fresh and new. By gaining popularity through these write-ups scattered across the web, the older, negative posts about you are pushed away from the top, making them useless in the long run.

White Hat SEO

Yes, SEO remains to be among the best online marketing tactics that you can use. Just last year, there was a big debate that rose between SEO and social media, with the public asking which among the two is the best online marketing tactic ever formed.

But 2013 came up with its realizations. SEO is one thing, social media is another. Hence, if you are after immediate results, then go for SEO. This is because SEO targets actual users, the people making search queries on engines such as Google.

When using SEO as a primary online marketing tactic, you may want to stay away from the black hat procedures. Black hat SEO indeed offers fast benefits at a shorter amount of time, but its repercussions can be heavy to handle, including penalties, DDOS and getting permanently blacklisted.

Sitemap fix

Having a website that has poor design and navigation has always been a major booboo in internet marketing. Of course, if you are the owner of the brand, you would want an online marketing campaign that will matter to your target audience, and not just a few.

If there’s one thing you have to realize, that would be the fact that search engine algorithms also look at the design of the website, so it is just very important to take care of your sitemap. Make sure that the metatags are removed and replaced accordingly and updated over time. These include the navigational structure of the website, its layout and categories, and many other considerations.

Having a website that is easy to understand is very important in online marketing. This is because your website serves as your calling card to your potential customers by showcasing all the services that you can offer.

A sitemap fix also helps make your website a form of eye candy to your audience. This is highly essential-among many things, a functional sitemap increases the website’s ranking on search engines, as most of its features are already functional. Take note, being on the last spot on Google’s first page of search results is way better than being on top of the page 2 results.

A sitemap fix also makes your website more appealing to look at, both by actual users and search engine crawlers. With an easy to use website, the more potential customers you can find and lure to investing in your business.

Brock Hamilton is an author and owner of the Simple Website Tutorials website which is dedicated to teaching people how to build a website through free online tutorials and training. Follow him on Google+, Facebook and YouTube.

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 17th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Traffic Tips

Is Inbound Writer worth paying for?

Yes, it is worth paying for. All apologies for answering the question in the article’s very first word, but I am a blogger, and, therefore, this program is one that excites me. It’s like visiting your favourite animal at a zoo; you see it before any of the other ones, before the day is tired and the mass crowd starts gathering.

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To those readers who struggle to concentrate without the draw of a concealed suspense to spur them on I can only say this: read on to find out why I so readily felt as though I had to answer yes so soon in this article.

Inbound Writer is the writer’s plug-in in the sense that it entirely concentrates on the content. The process of the plug-in is this: the user is required to enter three search items and three domains after creating a new document; they then are able to see the keywords, all of which have been assigned a rating of between zero and five; the writer then writes the article, and after only 250 words they are able to apply the critical analysis of Inbound Writer to judge their content. One should note here that the majority of time spent when using this plug-in is the actual activity of the writing itself; this is the reason that Inbound Writer is the writer’s plug-in.

The feedback is varied and one might be surprised at the intricacy of the advice, such as, for example, a subtle suggestion to reorder the words in the title. The user is able to compare the effectiveness of the article before and after and make a measured and researched decision. Inbound Writer is the editor that writers, specifically of the blogger variety, dream about. Inbound Writer teaches valuable skills that will eventually save the user a lot of time. As the user becomes more practiced to what it is that makes a piece of writing more visible they will then spend less time making changes to it for the purpose of visibility and more time with their efforts solely on quality writing. Inbound Writer is an editor that actually helps improve the writing skills of a user.

Inbound Writer offers a free service as well as the more comprehensive one that requires payment. This offer of a free service gives the user an opportunity to see the real results of how the service might work for them. They will be able to compare the amount of traffic before and after while risking and paying nothing. An offer of a free service is something that installs within the user a feeling of trust. It shows the user that the company are reputable and that they most probably deliver on their promises. They would have to to make the model work. There needs to be a reason for the user to choose to pay for the service in order for the model to be profitable. The success of Inbound Writer proves that there are genuine reasons why users are choosing to pay for the service. It is a model that works. It improves a piece of writing and it encourages a larger audience to read it.

PS Check out this great infographic about content creation from Inbound Writer:

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 16th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Social Networks, Traffic Tips

Could Social Search Replace Traditional Search?

We’ve been talking about the eventual power of social search for quite some time now without knowing what it would look like. Now, we have a visual when using Facebook’s Graph Search. It’s a little scary how much information one website can aggregate about an individual from the shares, likes, comments, messages, games, movies, etc. you have on your profile. Some have left Facebook for this reason. It can be alarming to be presented with advertisements tailored to private conversations with your friends. But, we have to remember that every free website exists to earn money in some way; the gathering of information to resell to companies being a very profitable one. Google has been tracking your behavior online, but you may not be as aware because the evidence isn’t presented the same way.

Will People Prefer Facebook’s Search?

Millions of people are already on Facebook every day, but will they switch over from Google as their browser to perform every search on Facebook? The latest Facebook commercials are now showing Facebook home for mobile phones.

Graph Search is impressive: the sheer number of subcategories that allow you to narrow down your search is something Google hasn’t done. It’s a great way to divvy up the room at the top of the listings, rather than show irrelevant content and worry about algorithm updates to correct the problem.

The power of social will likely be driven by a business decision on Google’s part. Currently, Google Plus is years behind Facebook in regular users but they are finding new ways to drive people to it. Webmasters have long been waiting for a search engine to stand up to Google’s traffic sending potential, but up until now, we haven’t been able to measure Facebook fan conversions the same way we do clicks from the SERPs.

Is Social Better?

Yes and no.

Yes, because it’s a true measure of natural like or dislike of website content. The links don’t contain keywords and the traffic to your website is from people who are generally interested or are taking the advice of someone they know or trust.

No, because there are still plenty of authorative businesses out there playing catch up with the well-established businesses on Facebook. They might even have better quality content on their websites, but are not as popular because they got a late start. As more and more businesses set up their Facebook profiles as soon as they set up their businesses, we should see an improvement, at least on a local level.

And, no, because if a person with a lot of fans likes something but is not any type of authority in the niche he is liking or sharing, his vote should not count more than someone who is an established authority in that field. I would trust a like or share of financial website shared by an accountant more than one shared by a cook.

But, perhaps social will get there. Facebook has already helped make anonymity online a passing fad. Now, it just needs to take accountability and authority to the next level.

And we’ll have to see if Google can top Graph Search. Leave it to the internet king to think of something to secure their throne.

Featured images:

License: Creative Commons image source

Theresa Happe works with BuyDomains.com where businesses can buy domains in any niche for national and local website creation.

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 15th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Traffic Tips

Top Payment Processors For Selling Ebooks

If you’re planning to write and sell your own ebook then it’s essential you can accept credit card payments from your customers. However within the payment processing arena you might be surprised to hear that accepting payments for digital goods – such as ebooks, software downloads or membership site subscriptions – is really a niche in itself.

Indeed while some processors specialize in this particular niche, other processors keep well away from it because of potential problems involving customer complaints and chargebacks.

In other words, if you’re going to sell ebooks online you need to be certain that your payment processor allows such transactions. Too many people over the years have chosen to ignore the rules and use their current processor anyway – only to find their account gets closed and their money is forfeited.

Errors like this can cost you hundreds of dollars in lost sales as well as causing you major headaches in quickly tracking down a new payment processor so your customers can start buying again.

But if it’s such a specialized business model then the obvious question is which payment processors actively allow the sale of ebooks with their accounts? Fortunately there are a number of processors of this ilk which we examine below.

2CheckOut

Many years ago I was using a payment processor who changed their fraud prevention processes – which resulted in a number of genuine customers being unable to buy from me. I eventually got frustrated with the loss of sales (and wasting money on advertising) and so went out to look for another processor. The option I stumbled across was 2Checkout, a processor that I still use to this day.

2CheckOut allows you to accept payments for a range of different product groups. Certainly digital products is one group allowed, but they will also allow you to sell physical goods too – meaning that a 2CheckOut account can be used for a wide variety of purposes and is arguably one of the best “all rounder” processors. Setting up an account is quick and easy, and they are integrated into a range of different shopping carts and digital download applications to provide secure download pages for your products.

Having said that, 2CheckOut isn’t perfect. They currently charge a $50 application fee while many competing processors offer free setup. They also don’t pay out as frequently as some processors. While many of their competitors will pay out every week – or even sooner – your earnings from 2CheckOut are paid every two weeks, so this isn’t the processor for you if you need rapid access to your funds.

Click2Sell

A relative newbie to the scene, this European payment processor is a strong contender for the best payment processor for selling ebooks. There are a number of reasons for this; not least the way that it is free to set up an account, that their processing fees are highly competitive and that they offer built-in affiliate software enabling you to recruit affiliates to promote your products for you.

Clickbank

Clickbank is in many ways the “original” payment processor for digital goods like ebooks. Indeed this is a niche they specialize in and they don’t allow you to use their services to sell physical goods.

Like 2CheckOut, Clickbank currently charges an activation fee of $50 so it’s not free to get started with. That said, their systems are tremendously reliable and they allow you to customize your payment page with your company logo, product image and so on in order to boost sales.

With their built-in affiliate software which provides you with instant access to tens of thousands of affiliates, this feature alone can make Clickbank a tempting solution that can have a surpring impact on the traffic you generate and additional sales you’d never have achieved.

Paypal

Paypal may possibly be the best-known of all the third-party payment processors as they were one of the first “ewallet” services ever. Now owned by Ebay, vast numbers of people have a Paypal account and they’re integrated into more shopping carts and affiliate applications than any other processor.

While it may be free to open an account, they don’t offer any built-in affiliate software like Clickbank and Click2Sell do and their operating procedures are best described as “draconian”.

While they may seem like the “easy” solution be aware that Paypal have a nasty habit of closing down accounts without warning and without explanation – something which can cause considerable distress if your website relies on them.

To illustrate the point there are now websites dedicated to Paypal’s odd idea of customer service and others still actively publishing lists of Paypal alternatives for customers who have been let down by them. Paypal is therefore likely one processor worth steering clear of.

Mike is a UK-based writer who publishes most of his thoughts at www.TechToucan.com

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 15th, 2013 Blog, Marketing

Lessons From Yahoo: 5 Steps To Ensure Working From Home Does Not Become A Burden

Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer recently decided to end all of Yahoo’s wok-from-home privileges. Although many in the industry claimed it was a step backwards, Marissa Mayer indicated that employees working from home were proving to be less productive. In reality, working from home may seem like a great idea, but the dream can turn bitter very quickly. Here are 5 steps to ensure that working from home does not end up becoming a burden.

Establish a dedicated work area

A very common complaint among today’s working men and women is the fact that their hectic lifestyles don’t allow them to spend enough time with their families. One of the best things about working from home is that it allows you to spend a lot more time with your family. However, if not kept at bay, your family’s presence can prove to be highly counter-productive. Establish a dedicated work area within your house. When you are working away, no family member should be allowed to interrupt you. How do they know if you are working? It’s simple. You are in the work area.

Stay motivated

When working from home, it is easy to lose motivation over time. The incentive to do well remains, but for some reason the impetus starts lacking. It is very important to make sure that you stay motivated at all times; failure to do so will have a direct result in the quantity or quality of your work. One way to stay motivated is to constantly remind yourself about the perks of working from home. Could you ever sit at the desk in your office in your favourite pair of shorts while sipping away from a can of Diet Coke? Probably not.

Don’t ignore your health

Research has shown that people working from home are more likely to fall ill than their office going counterparts. For many people, going to the office pretty much constitutes all off their daily activity. Once that activity is removed, people fail to replace it with some other sort of health or fitness programme. This inevitably leads to lapses in taking care of your health.

Keep up with your social life

When working from home, it can become very easy to get caught up in the work and ignore their everyday lives. People are often apprehensive that working from home may lead to a drop in performance. As a result, they overwork themselves at home and start ignoring everything around them; quite the opposite effect of what working from home tries to accomplish. A great way to stay grounded and not over-indulge in work is by keeping up with social life. Interacting with other people frequently helps deliver a sense of fulfilment and soothes any apprehensions you may have about work performance.

Follow a regular routine

People often wonder what the best way is to guarantee efficiency when working from home. The answer is simple: establish and follow a regular routine. Following a regular routine allows you to get into a comfort zone and helps you dedicate a certain amount of hours per day to your work obligations. Scheduling your breaks also helps ensure that you don’t take too many breaks at the cost of the overall work done.

Follow these 5 simple steps and hopefully you won’t have to head back to the office like the folks at Yahoo!

Lisa Bernshaw is the author of today’s guest post and specializes in writing custom essays. According to her, work from home is the biggest topic of debate today.

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 12th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Traffic Tips

How To Use Email Marketing For Your Spa

In today’s spa market, you have to be more creative in your marketing endeavors. That’s why email marketing for your spa makes sense. Email marketing can be fairly basic or you can create something that requires more time, but regardless, it has the potential to work wonderfully for spa owners and customers. Here is a rundown on how you can use email marketing for your spa.

#1. Understanding Email Marketing

Before you can use email marketing for your spa, you need to know what email marketing is. With email marketing, you are marketing and promoting items or products through an email campaign that you send to your contact lists.

You can also employ direct mail messaging which comes in the form of content or pictures. Both direct mail messaging and email marketing seem to work well with spa audiences.

#2. Collecting Email Addresses

One of the biggest steps in creating an email marketing campaign for a spa is to get the current email addresses of existing and potential spa customers.

There are a few different ways you can acquire customers’ email addresses; have a sign up form on your website, post direct links via social media, or just ask them for their email when they come into the spa. Here are a few other ideas you can use for getting emails for your spa marketing campaign:

Whenever a client calls you, ask if they would like to be added to your mailing list.
Networking events are the perfect place to get people to sign up for your mailing list.
Send out a newsletter and give customers the option to opt in to other emails from your spa company.

These are just a few ideas you can use for building your email marketing list over time. You can get creative and really start building that “ultimate list.” Also, keep in mind that you have to give people the chance to sign up for receiving emails from your spa company; you cannot just send random emails to customers in your database.

#3. Offering Specials through Email Marketing

A lot of email campaigns work because they offer customers perks for giving away their email addresses. Spa owners can really take advantage of offering their customers amazing deals and specials through a direct email marketing campaign.

This is especially true when you offer specials via an email campaign that you do not offer anywhere else. Encourage people to sign up and then follow through with hard to beat specials and deals for your spa (deals they can’t find anywhere else).

#4. Don’t Over-Do It

While email marketing can be beneficial to your spa, you have to strike the right balance of how often you send your customers marketing emails. Do you ever get dozens of emails from a company and it gets old really fast, causing you to unsubscribe or mark it as spam? The key to making your spa email marketing campaign work is to not over-do it. Do not send too many emails out to your email list because this increases the likelihood of customers unsubscribing. Strive to create a healthy balance of when you should send an email out to all of the people on your spa list.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a powerful tool to use with spa software, especially with the different advances in technology today. Spa owners should build up their list and start sending out creative and enticing emails to their subscribers. Just remember to be respectful and give the reader something to look forward to in the emails you will be sending them.

Written by: Molly Southern, of SpaBooker, helping to build your spa better.

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled April 1st, 2013 Blog, Marketing

Wise Investments To Make For Effective Business Advertising

Regardless of how much money you spend on it or the quality choices that you make in regards to it, business advertising does not come packaged with any particular type of guarantee. You will never be able to benefit from a guarantee that clearly states that you are going to receive your full return on investment (ROI) that you may have been dreaming about before you decided to commit to a specific marketing campaign.

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SEO Pal Comments Disabled March 31st, 2013 Blog, Marketing

How Do You Track The Success Of A Marketing Campaign

Marketing is a tricky business, and aside from spinning money-making slogans and enticing unwitting consumers with witty marketing antics and creative strategies – you need to be able to track your results. After all, what’s the point of creating an incredible marketing strategy when you don’t even know what aspects of it have worked or not? But how exactly do you track the success of a marketing campaign?

You may think that watching sales and monitoring product trends is the way forward, but let’s be honest – this is rather vague. So, it’s time to get your analytical head on and kick some marketing derrière! This is a brief overview to how you can track specific areas of your marketing campaign, allowing you to allocate your budget with complete confidence due to your insightful knowledge showcasing just how effective or ineffective certain area are.

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