There’s a fine line between trying to gain maximum reach for your business on the web and becoming a spammer. Here are five guidelines to help you avoid becoming an internet marketing spammer.
1. Don’t Use Social Media as A Marketing Bullhorn
Finding and building community around your business, industry, or niche can be a great way to increase your reach to your target audience. But with these ease of interaction and increase in transparency you need to concentrate on the message you are broadcasting. In order to build relationships you should try to become a resource for your audience and community rather than using the platform as to broadcast your marketing messages. If you are uncertain if your activities are spam behavior or not you can usually ask your community for feedback. Generally if you are providing value to the conversation then you should have no problem.
2. Use Permission Based List Building
Building marketing lists are essential for any businesses. One common misconception with these lists – which are generally used for email marketing – is that building a massive list is your best way to increase sales. I disagree with that and find it the quickest way to becoming a spammer. That’s why we teach businesses to build opt in lists using permission based marketing tactics. This guarantees that your message is delivered to an interested, targeted audience rather than a blasted message that has no relevance to the recipient. If you purchase or manually build lists you will experience low conversion rates.
3. Respect Your Community’s Time
If you have an email list or have built followers on social networks be sure to respect their time. Don’t blast them with emails, updates, copy, or blog posts. A general rule of thumb is to provide quality over quantity. One really good email a week is far more effective than 3 unthoughtful blasts a week. You don’t want to annoy your audience – you want to provide value. As long as you are doing that you will maintain respect with your community and build loyalty. This will pay off over time as you become a resource for your audience.
4. Optimize Your Landing Pages
The page where your targeted audience and/or community land is very important. If your landing page is not engaging you will likely lose your viewer. If you are interested in optimizing your landing page there are several resources. You should first figure out where on your site traffic is landing – homepage via advertisements or blog post via search engines are two examples of entry points to your website. If the bounce rates (you can find in web analytics) on your most popular landing pages are high you need to tweak those pages to retain those visitors and provide them the ability to browse to additional relevant content on your site. Also – use your landing pages wisely and perhaps you should setup different landing pages for different traffic avenues – ie: create specific landing pages for your Twitter account, advertisements, Facebook link, etc.
5. Advertise Contextually
If you are advertising online the quickest way to waste money is to pay for clicks and impressions on pages and in copy that is irrelevant to your business or topic. We recommend not buying links or advertisements on sites that do not pertain to your business. If you do receive a click the conversion rate will be very low because the visitor is has little intent for additional information on the topic of your site. If you do proper keyword targeting in PPC advertising campaigns you will see higher conversion rates as the content you are targeting is optimized to your business website or product.
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