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Erin Ferree's Articles in Internet Marketing

  • Search Engine Optimization: It's Not Who You Know, It's Who Knows You
    Just as with prom queens, your small business's website's search engine ranking results are about popularity. It's not the links on your site that contribute to raising your ranking but the links coming into your site from other sites that help you to rank better.
  • Why You Won't Get Instant Gratification From the Search Engines and What to Do About It
    So, when it's time to get your website listed on the search engines, it's only natural for you to want to be up on Google right away. I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from clients right after I've let them know that their site is launched, saying "But, I Googled myself, and I'm not there! Why not?"
  • Why Starting A Relationship With The Search Engines Can Be Hard
    ...Search Engines have a lot in common with singles. They've been hurt, and they aren't so quick to trust any more.
  • Your Small Business's Search Engine Ranking Emergency
    No one wants an emergency—but if you've got one on your hands, it's good to know the steps to take to "stabilize the patient." If your small business emergency is that your website isn't showing up on the search engines, there a couple of steps you can take right now. You just have to check 2 things to perform Search Engine CPR on your site:
  • Do You Really Need To Come In First Place?
    Whenever I talk to a client about search engine placement, this track meet comes into mind. The client comes to me wanting to be #1 for their chosen search term. But for many small businesses, being ranked first is not truly that important—and depending on the search term, being #1 may hurt their business.
  • The Search Engine Trinity
    Like Cajun food, getting a small business listed on the search engines also is based on a trinity of components. These components give your search engine efforts a base to be built off of, and ensure that you'll be successful. Those are: the ease of getting listed, the effectiveness of your listing, and then finally, the level of placement.
  • How To Make Your Website Structurally Sound
    You've decided to build a website. Great! Your first step is to determine its structure—the pages you want to include and the information you want provide to visitors. But how to begin? Your first instinct may be to make your site different from everyone else's. After all, trying to differentiate your business is what you've been doing throughout your branding process.
  • How to Make Sure Your Website Won't Need a Do-Over
    When you were young, do-overs were an easy way to resolve an argument, fix unfairness or quickly change history. Why wouldn't you want to be able to do this with your business website? Unlike the playground game, designing a website takes a lot of time, work and money — it's just not a task that you're going to want to start over from scratch again!
  • Signs It's Time To Redesign Your Website
    Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. And finally, after all that, you're finished and it's time for the site to go live. Unfortunately, websites don't last forever.
  • Get Your Website Launched!
    There are many elements in a website design project. Elements may include the overall strategy, the site map, site contents, design, coding, and more. It's tempting to keep tinkering and adjusting the various components until they're perfect. But you should remember that while you're editing the website, it stays on your designer's temporary server for testing or on your desktop — and never gets launched.
  • Follow Up With Your Clients
    A follow-up tool such as a post card, HTML newsletter, or note card is essential to make sure that your services stay "top-of-mind" with the people that you meet. It's said that a prospect needs to hear from you seven times before they will make a purchase. So it's important to create tools and a system to enable you to followup with your prospects once you've made that initial connection.
  • The Art of Website Maintenance
    Now that you've designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it's important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information.
  • How Search Engine Optimization Helps Small Businesses
    You've probably heard people talking about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and wondered if it would help your business. The answer, in short, is absolutely!
  • Stop Making Excuses. Your Website Must Match Your Other Marketing Materials
    At first glance the title of this article sounds obvious — that your website would look like all your other marketing materials. Of course that's just something that would have to happen, right? But I run into more and more entrepreneurs who want to break this rule. Creating a website that looks significantly different from all of your other marketing materials just tends to be a bad idea.
  • Designing Your Email Newsletter
    Another commonly-asked question is how to design the newsletter to make it the most effective. This breaks down into several questions and considerations:
  • Why You Need To Get An Email Newsletter Service
    An email newsletter is one of the most convenient and easy ways to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. So you've made the decision to design an email newsletter to use as your follow up tool in your brand design toolkit? The next decision is how to manage the newsletter from a technical perspective.
  • Creating Your Home Page
    Clients often look to us at elf design to provide them with ideas about what belongs on a simple home page. In response, we often direct them to several home pages that we have designed in the past, as well as some other samples, to help guide them and to begin our conversation about what to include on their home page.
  • Pages to Include in Your Website
    Building a Website may appear to be very complex, but it's really an easy process. The best way to start is by developing a map of the pages and content that you want to include. This depends upon the type of business you have, and how informative you want your Website to be. Below is a list of sample pages for you to review while you plan out your site.

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