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In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing marketplace, entrepreneurs are seeking clear and solid ideas for growing their businesses. When it comes to internet marketing, this can be frustrating. This is mainly due to the fact that online promotion is such a complex and inter-related topic. This is one of the reasons we created this article, to give business owners and marketers a guide, a straight forward method for creating and implementing a plan for online marketing. It’s a technique we call The Wagon Wheel. The process we’ll introduce in this article will you will be able to grow your business in traffic, reputation and sales. This isn’t just a search engine optimization tipto, or a way to promote your company on LinkedIn or how to publish an article. This is a big picture approach to developing and maintaining a web presence for your business. First Phase – Create a Hub The hub is the focal point. The piece of internet real estate to which you drive all your potential and current clients. It can be anywhere you choose, but the hub is generally and arguably best if it’s your website. For those who don’t have an official company website, your Facebook fan page can work here if need be. The hub is a crucial component in your wagon wheel because more often than not, this is where people will interact directly with your business and probably choose to make a final buying decision. However, you must realize that their first visit may not be when they choose to buy. Even your hub can act as its own funne by urging the user to return oftenl. In addition to including methods for visitors to purchase, your hub should also provide multiple options for them to connect with your organization. For example, you might offer free offers in exchange for an email address, or a e-zine subscription or the most recent blog postings for them to comment on. You may offer a free membership, or a referral program. There are many choices here, especially on your own website. The idea is to keep potential customers wanting more and existing customers coming back for more. Second Phase – Build the spokes The spokes of the wheel are truly what drives traffic and improves your hub’s chances of being found in organic searches. The spokes will have, at bare minimum, a multi-pronged benefit. The spokes are those locations on the internet where you post content and even interact with a community interested in who you are and what you do. These locations include blogs, article marketing, posting videos on YouTube, participating in forums, online networking, creating info graphics, paid advertising and free advertising. This is just a partial list, so you can see how you can be quite creative. To get a good start, begin with at least six spokes. This might seem like a lot of work, because that means six independent areas where you must create and maintain content, as well as interacting with users. As if this werent’ complicated enough, each spoke has potentially many sub-categories into which content variations can be published. Of course, you can build as many or as few spokes as you desire. But as in the ‘real world,” a sturdy wheel needs adequate support. For beginners, six seems to be the best balance between the work and the results. You may choose to write articles with several variations, create one or more relevant blogs, publish videos on YouTube, participate in two or more discussion groups that relate to your company in some way, set up a Google AdWords account and create several social networking accounts. Each of the six examples we’ve chosen has a unique set of tasks and effective strategies to go with it: Articles: Write articles on topics you know well and that are related to your business and experience. It’s preferable to create at least two other versions of each article to be posted on alternate article directories. You can then blog, Tweet, link and post updates on your wall about them to help send traffic to your writing and cross-promote. Blogs: Similar to articles, with the notable difference that readers can post comments and interact with you and each other. Blogs are very effective at generating interest, promoting the formation of a community around you and improving search engine rankings for your websites. Video marketing: if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video might be worth millions. Videos can be produced as blogs, entertainment or informative. Not only do sites like youTube offer a system for publishing, you can also link to other sites, and interact with other users via comments and video. Very powerful and frequently searched. So this means that each upload and it’s associated information must be carefully optimized. Forums: These are a very effective method for becoming a resource. You interact with people on forums by answering questions, posting useful info and becoming a source of knowlege. You create interactions, links and followers. PPC’s: programs like AdWords are useful and effective because you have precision control over your advertising and costs. You control the cost of each click, your budget, where your ads are shown and the content of each of them. If managed carefully, pay per clicks are good for driving traffic and cross-promotion. Social Media: While it’s impossible to explore this topic in full detail here, this is an area where you can deeply connect with and interact with customers, clients, investors, employees and your peers. Using sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, you can promote and share information, generate strong links across multiple sites and platforms and build strong and long-lasting relationships. Your choice of social sites will depend somewhat on what you do, and how much time you can afford to put in. Third phase – The Rim Ties it All Together The last stage in creating your wagon wheel, although this is certainly not a linear process, is to link the spokes together with a circular rim. What is meant by this is that you link each spoke to all the other spokes. By doing this, not only does each spoke funnel traffic and interest to your hub, but it sends users and information to the other spokes as well. This is critical and not to be overlooked. It is one of the best strategies for creating a large and relevant network of back links to your website hub. Relevant back links are vital in improving your search engine traffic and rankings. It also provides existing and potential customers with multiple pathways to interact with you and to find the information they require. It might be that this article may have made the concept of creating a wagon wheel sound easy, it does require some hard work. Definite planning and foresight must be used here. While it’s true completing a wheel can be a long-term and ongoing process of diligent effort, it’s well worth the time. If you follow this basic concept, you will see remarkable results. If you feel overwhelmed and in need of advice or assistance, don’t hesitate to hire a consultant, even for a portion of the work. As we’ve stated, this method is well worth any time and money you put into it. Good luck in creating your own Wagon Wheel. Would you like to learn more about driving website traffic, SEO, quality writing, website design and business development, among other useful topics? Visit our resource center at: http://www.advantageadvertisingandmarketing.com/resources.php We’d also like to invite you to visit and explore the rest of our website while you’re there. In addition, we’ve created an interactive blog for those who are interested in an active resource on marketing and internet marketing. We invite you to come and take a look, comment and interact with us and each other. It is our hope that this blog will become a growing repository for invaluable money making knowledge: http://orlandoaam.blogspot.com
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