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The holidays are upon us, and with that comes the busiest shopping season of the year. Consumers are already spending at high rates, and they’ll continue to do so for the coming weeks. As a marketer, there’s a lot you can learn from the holiday shopping season…lessons that will help you be more successful this holiday season and in the holiday seasons of years to come.

Here are 5 of the biggest internet marketing lessons you should take away from the holidays.

Don’t wait to optimize for seasonal terms – If you haven’t already optimized your website for seasonal, holiday-specific keywords, it’s a little too late to start getting organic traffic from them this year. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too early to start preparing your website for the holiday seasons to come. The best keyword research tools will give you insight into search trends, showing you which phrases tend to get searched for most often during the holiday season. Make sure you optimize the relevant pages on your website for these seasonal keywords so you can start ranking for them.

Use holiday-driven offers in PPC ads – Pay per click marketing is a very effective tactic during the holidays. You can gain an instant search engine presence for the relevant keywords your customers are searching. But having just any old PPC ads isn’t enough during the holidays. Relevance counts. With that in mind, make your PPC ads and landing pages holiday-driven. Use holiday-specific words to make your ads timelier so they’ll stand apart from the rest.

A strong email list is worth its weight in gold – Email marketing is effective all year round, but it’s especially powerful during the holiday shopping season. If you have a good email list with highly targeted subscribers, temporarily ramp up the frequency of your messages during the holidays with great offers and engaging content. Throughout the year, you should always be focusing on getting more subscribers. The bigger and more targeted your list, the more money you stand to make.

Shipping rates matter – A lot of consumers will be buying presents online. They’re always in search of the best deals, and that goes beyond just the price tag. Shipping rates are especially important during the holidays. Your customers are trying to stretch their shopping budgets to the max, and shipping costs are very important to them. Make sure you offer your customers plenty of shipping options, and you might even want to consider offering free shipping during the holidays. It could be the difference between making the sale or not.

Holiday shoppers often have unique concerns – During the holidays, consumers tend to have different concerns than they might usually have. I already talked about the important role shipping rates play in buying decisions, and staying on the subject of shipping, your shoppers will need to know how long they have to place orders to ensure delivery by Christmas. Make sure these shipping deadlines are posted clearly on your website. Return policies are also of interest during the holidays as customers will want to know if the gifts can be returned or exchanged should they not be what the gift recipient truly needs.

What are some other holiday internet marketing lessons? Share yours by leaving a comment below!

If you’ve spent any time at all on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, you’ve undoubtedly come across that guy. You know who I’m talking about. The nuisance. The tool. The d-bag. The guy who just doesn’t seem to get it. The guy who you still wonder why in the heck you’re following him.

Then again, maybe you don’t know who I’m talking about. Maybe you don’t know because you’re that guy (or girl). Not sure if you are? Here are a few characteristics of the Social Media Tool.

1. It’s all about you, you, you – Self-absorption is a classic characteristic of the Social Media Tool. Every new post is about them. It’s not about starting a conversation. It’s about promoting a sale, pushing some offer, patting themselves on the back…you get the idea. The truth is nobody really care about you all that much. Social networking is about conversations. And to have a meaningful conversation, you can’t just talk about yourself all the time.
2. You post at a rapid-fire pace – There’s nothing wrong with having an active social media presence. It can be a good thing. However, there’s a very thin line between being active and being an obnoxious tool. If you post dozens of times each hour, you’re overdoing it. You shouldn’t be clogging the feeds of your followers. They’ll quickly grow sick of you and eventually disconnect from you.
3. You post the same messages over and over again – Occasionally, it’s okay to repost your messages at different times of the day to make sure all of your followers have a chance to see it, but if you’re constantly reposting the same things over and over again, you’re a spammer. And spammers are tools.
4. You think you’re an internet A-lister – What’s up with these people who get a few followers and suddenly think they’re some sort of internet celebrity? Let me clue you in. You’re not a celebrity. Nobody really knows who you are nor do they care. You’re insignificant in the grand scheme of things #realitycheck. You refer to yourself as a ‘social media guru’—Ugh. Do I really even have to explain this one? “Social media guru” is code for “social media tool.” In fact, if you refer to yourself as any type of “guru”
5. You think number of followers is all that matters – The Social Media Tool is always bragging about how many followers he has on Twitter or Friends or Likes he has on Facebook. What he fails to understand is that those numbers don’t tell the full story. Who cares if you have 10,000 followers if they’re mostly low quality followers? Give me 100 people who are truly interested in what I have to say over 10,000 who couldn’t care less.

Do you know any social media tools? What are some other key characteristics I left off the list? Share them with us by leaving a comment.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying “He who fails to plan plans to fail.” That’s certainly the case when it comes to SEO. If you don’t have a solid strategy, you’re never going to get the rankings you want.

When developing an SEO strategy for your website, here are 5 different things you need to look at first.

1. Your target audience – A lot of people think that developing an SEO strategy means just using a keyword research tool, generating a list of relevant keywords, and targeting them. That’s it. But that’s not the case. See, you have to start by considering your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? What type of content is best for getting their attention? What are their needs? Once you know these things, you can get a better idea for the type of content you need to produce and the keywords you’ll want to focus on.

2. Your current search engine presence – Take a moment to assess your current situation. What’s your search engine presence like right now? Are you totally invisible in Google? Are you maybe ranking decently for a handful of search phrases? Is your website optimized at all? Do you even know which keywords you should be targeting? No two people reading this will be in the exact same situation. You have to look at all of the details of your specific situation, so you can figure out what you need to do moving forward. Set small, realistic goals in the beginning, and take your SEO campaign one step at a time.

3. Your competition – It’s important to have a good understanding of the competitive landscape before you go full speed ahead with your SEO strategy. You need to see what the competition is up to. Are any of your competitors ranking particularly well? Which keywords have the most competition? Are there any overlooked keywords that you think you can grab top rankings for quickly and get good traffic from? Where are your competitors getting their backlinks from? Do any of them have online reputation management issues? These are just some of the things to consider when performing a competitive analysis for SEO strategy development.

4. Your on-page SEO – How is the on-page SEO on your website right now? Is the content on your website built around the right keywords? Do you have good, keyword-rich URL structure and title tags? How is the interlinking on your website? Do you have a sitemap? Is your website crawlable for the search engines (e.g. clean code, not Flash-based). Make a list of all the things that can be improved on your website, and start implementing these changes so you can have a well-optimized site that’s likelier to get good search engine rankings.

5. Your backlinks — The more sites that link to you, the more important your website becomes in the eyes of the search engines. If you don’t have a good number of links from trusted websites, your search rankings are going to suffer. The good news is there are many easy ways to build links back to your website. From guest posting on other blogs to promoting your own link-worthy content, the possibilities are limitless.

What are some other key components of an effective SEO strategy? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying, “Content is king.” While you might be sick of hearing it, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. Content is the foundation of marketing. It’s time to start thinking of your company as a publisher. You need to share content with your target audience that educates them and builds trust with them.

Before you start publishing content, you need to develop a content marketing strategy. You can do so in 5 simple steps:

Identify your goals – What are your goals? Who do you want to reach? How much market share are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to change the perception of your brand? Increase brand awareness? Make a list of clear organizational goals, so you’ll be able to track your progress more accurately.

Define the informational needs of your target audience – Content marketing boils down to giving your buyers informational that’s useful to them. Listen to your customers. Interact with them. Find out what’s important to them, and build content around that.

Know what action you want readers to take – What is it that you want your readers to do with your content? Share it? Get motivated to learn more about your company? Place an order? Sign up for an email list? Download something?

Figure out the medium – There are many different ways to distribute content to your buyers—blogs, emails, ebooks, white papers, social networking websites, press releases, articles, case studies, testimonials, reviews, etc. Find the right mix for your company.

Track your results – You can’t know if your content marketing strategy is working unless you track your results. For all online marketing, use web analytics to measure your traffic, traffic sources, visitor activity, etc. Measure everything against the initial goals you set. If you’re not progressing steadily toward those goals, you may need to reconsider your content marketing strategy. Maybe you’re not producing content that resonates with your readers. Maybe you’re giving it to them in the wrong format. Or maybe you’re just not promoting your content enough.

How has your business used content marketing? Share your experiences by leaving a comment below.

The times they are changing. If you’ve been keeping up with SEO news over the past year, you know that Google released an algorithm update that’s been dubbed the Panda update. The purpose of Google Panda was to put an emphasis on quality over quantity, as it relates to the content on your website and the back links you have from other websites.

Google Panda has served to reduce the rankings of low quality content farms, like article directories, press release directories, low-quality blogs, etc. This way, websites couldn’t any longer artificially boost their search engine rankings by getting thousands of low quality links from these types of websites.
This begs the question: How should you approach link building in the Google Panda era? Here are some tips to help you out.

Steer clear of low quality content farms — In the past, you probably got a lot of your back links from article directories and press release distribution websites. While those websites aren’t totally dead, most of them are on their way out. If you still want to use article and press release marketing, at least be more selective in which sites you publish your content on.

Look out for spammy-looking, ad-heavy websites — You are who you hang around with. If your back links are mostly from spammy, ad-driven websites, it will reflect poorly on your website in the eyes of Google. Do your best to avoid publishing your content on these types of sites.

Skip the blog commenting and forum blasting — Blog commenting and forum blasting used to be moderately effective for earning more links pointing to your website, but now, it’s a total waste of time. And even worse, it could cause you to look like a spammer to Google.

Guest blog on trusted blogs in your niche — Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to build links. You publish original, quality posts as a guest author on other blogs in your niche, and traditionally, you’re allowed to include a couple of links back to your website in your author bio. Pitch other bloggers in your field to see if they’ll let you submit a guest post to their blog.

Focus on creating link-worthy content for your website — You’ll get the most juice for your squeeze by creating content on your website that other people naturally want to link to. Think of the type of stuff that hits the front page of Digg or gets a lot of ReTweets. That’s the type of viral content you need to strive to publish.

How have you changed your link building strategy in the Google Panda era? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.