3 Key Steps To Starting A Digital Marketing Strategy

A successful digital marketing campaign is the dream of many business owners. With the help of this campaign, businesses won’t have to sleep and commerce can flow anytime and anywhere.

Digital marketing is usually defined as a marketing strategy that uses digital or Internet-based services, platforms, and tools instead of traditional marketing media. A typical strategy or campaign includes the use of email campaigns, social media, online videos, and banner ads on websites. This strategy is highly useful to every business, regardless of its type and size, because it has the potential to reach any customer or client who has a connection to the Internet, wherever they are at any time of the day or night.

But how do you start or create a good and effective digital marketing strategy? You can begin by following the key 3 steps and some additional tips below:

1. Determine and know your target audience.

A good digital marketing strategy starts with identifying the group you want your brand, product, or service to reach. To do this correctly, answer the following questions:

• Who do you want to sell to or who do you want to buy your product or get your services?
• How do they usually search for products and services they want info about online?
• Which social media sites or platforms do they normally use?
• Which sites do they spend a lot of time on when they are online?

By determining who your target demographic is, where they hang out, and how they like to engage with the brands they follow, you will have a higher chance of having your message being welcomed by online users rather than be lost the wide world of the worldwide web.

2. Put some thought into selecting the best platform to reach your audience.

At present, there are many ways of effectively reaching your target audience online. These include the various social media, search engines, display advertising, and direct email marketing. Generally, people who are of a consumer age have some type of online interaction. They may be researching using popular search engine sites, posting on various social networking sites, or reading content online. Most of these platforms have a measurable weighting toward a particular demographic. If you can’t understand the figures, get help from experts in comprehending them and with using them for choosing the best platforms to use in your digital marketing strategy.

3. Regularly measure and adjust.

Lastly, be open-minded when starting and even implementing a digital marketing strategy. Also, don’t be afraid to change what you’re doing. This is because the digital landscape is known for its rapid change. Although this may seem daunting, it’s actually one of biggest advantages of doing digital marketing. This is because the target audience, message, and placement of your online communication can be adjusted quickly and easily, unlike with traditional marketing.

Complete Nutrition – How To Tell If You Are Getting It

Someone who has good nutrition is easy to identify. People who have a healthy diet know that they are healthy. So how do you actually know whether you are getting adequate and a balanced nutrition? In this article, I will try to shed light on 10 signs of good nutrition. It is important that one is going through all of these signs. Only then will one be able to know that they have complete nutrition.

A healthy heart and good blood pressure are the best signs of good nutrition. This is especially true if one is of considerable age since heart and related diseases affect those of middle and advanced age the most.

Getting sick is a sign that we are not quite getting the nutrition we desire. Eating healthy foods boosts the immune system. It is likely that if you are not getting good nutrition, you are likely to get the flu or a cold.

Getting out of bed feeling energized is a sign of being healthy. In fact, many of us get out of bed feeling tired and not quite up to the mark. Moreover, our day does not really get any better as well and we feel tired all day.

Healthy eaters also have good concentration. They do not procrastinate and do not have trouble getting things done.

Eating healthy foods is also good for the skin. People who have a balanced and healthy diet have a fresh and glowing skin. Hence eating good food also has cosmetic benefits and can increase your beauty.

Eating foods that are good for you is also good for the hair. People who eat healthy foods have hair that is full of life and is shiny. It does not have that dull look and is not frizzy.

Great nutrition does not only have an effect on the body, it is also good for the mind. People who eat healthy are usually happier than those who do not. This is because eating healthy foods regulates hormones well which are partly responsible for our mood.

Eating healthy is also good for muscles. Good nutrition promotes cell regeneration and hence muscle mass so if you eat well, you will have bigger muscles.

You do not need to wear glasses if you have good nutrition. Good nutrition provides all the necessary vitamins and minerals that are needed to maintain proper eyesight.

Finally, people who have good nutrition live longer. So if you come across someone who has lived a long and healthy life, you can be sure that they ate well!

A Compatible E-Commerce Solution For Your SEO Campaign

The most ambitious Internet retailers, hoping to emulate the style and online influence of Amazon.com and other recognized brands, tend to aim for sprawling electronic retail websites that may look pretty but accomplish little else. If all the push is towards what appears on the front end instead of a concerted effort in choosing a reliable e-commerce solution from the get go, these decisions can ultimately impact the long-term success of any SEO campaign.

Most Internet retailers opt to use an out of the box e-commerce solution, eliminating the need to build something more suitable from the ground up. Out of the box software, however, may lack some of the flexibility that is required to implement a robust SEO campaign. On the other hand, building a fully customized e-commerce platform can be outright expensive. In an ideal situation, you will want to look for something that is somewhere in between. To help you bridge the gap, we’ve identified four major requirements when shopping for a suitable e-commerce solution that’s compatible with your SEO campaign.

The Proof’s in the Code

Ideally, we would always like to have the code available for us to modify if needed. This constant accessibility allows us to set up server behavior recommendations as well as change the way that things work or function in order to ensure that they are more effective for your SEO campaign. Many vendors will not give out their codes unless you pay them a premium, sometimes upwards of $10,000 per site using that code only, and many vendors may be reluctant to allow even that option.

Search engines only care about resulting code, meaning the HTML is sent to the browser post-parse. So, for an e-commerce website to have an effective SEO campaign, the SEO company you’ve enlisted may need the ability to modify how the software displays the code while the page is being dynamically built. This usually includes any category pages, product pages, or even some of the more “static” pages, such as the privacy policy, site map, and home page.

Customizable Product Administration

Sometimes we run across platforms that allow us to customize certain attributes of pages from the back-end administration, including Title tags, Meta tags, and body content. This is a great advantage when working with an e-commerce solution that does not provide any sort of code access, as that provides the only way for us to “individualize” the hundreds of dynamic pages that may be present on your website when working on your SEO campaign.

Occasionally, however, the administration sections for your e-commerce solution are not all that robust, and once we have proper access to the underlying code, we have to develop code “hacks” in order to get the recommendations for your SEO campaign onto the website. For instance, when adding these “hacks” to client websites, they often take the form of what appears to be a small configuration file with our recommendations attached to variables. And depending on the page, our configuration file will spit out the proper recommendations for that page, manually adding them where they need to go. Unfortunately, this is usually only accomplished with direct access to underlying code in your e-commerce solution. Furthermore, if direct access is not given, we’re often stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A Linux-Based OS

Until IIS can handle.htaccess files (tiny files allowing a wide range of flexibility for your website), an e-commerce solution that runs under Linux is highly desirable for myriad of tasks, such as flattening URLs. Some Windows applications have found ways around this, but they are usually not very aesthetically appealing and don’t function as well as a simple rewrite would. Linux, our operating system of choice, is able to run more applications, and the operating system and associated software are much cheaper than their Windows counterparts.

The.htaccess file is a very powerful tool that is becoming more and more popular in the creation of a suitable e-commerce solution. Part of its power comes from its ability to “flatten URLs” – for example, it takes example.com/products.php?id=437 and changes it into something more friendly, like example.com/products/Yellow-School-Bus/437/. By flattening the URL, we make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the website – ridding ourselves of dynamic querystrings, which, oftentimes, the spiders have difficulty crawling. Furthermore, flattening URLs allows us to add keyphrases from your SEO campaign into the URL to make them even more attractive to the search engines. And even though the URL may appear to be different, because of the.htaccess file, it will work exactly as it did prior to the flattening process.

Another key advantage of Linux is the ability to implement 301 redirects rather quickly. One of the most trivial tasks is to redirect the non-www to the www version of a website (for instance, http://example.com to http://www.example.com ) – which can be completed entirely on Linux in just two lines that are added to an.htacess file. Implementing this on IIS (Windows) turns out to be an arduous task that involves having root access to the server, which is not often granted by hosting companies.

Flexibility is Key

Often, an SEO company will need to change how a page is displayed or what is displayed and when, perhaps in order to boost rankings and traffic for your SEO campaign. This is where the flexibility of the software comes into play for any effective e-commerce solution. For instance, there is an e-commerce solution that can provide header, footer, and page templates directly through the backend administration.

However, there are some vendors that prefer to lock away the templates by hard-coding them into the site code. The real paradox is when they won’t give you access to the code to modify these things for yourself. This kind of inflexibility can spell disaster for any SEO campaign.

Avoiding Long-Term Hassles

At this point in time, there aren’t any specific recommendations to give on a top performing e-commerce solution as nothing we’ve come across thus far is anywhere near perfect. Unless your company has an in-house SEO technician, you’d be wise to engage a knowledgeable SEO company to avoid the headaches that come with finding out that you’ve spent a significant amount of time and money on an e-commerce solution that does not offer the flexibility needed for a successful SEO campaign.

If you end up choosing an e-commerce solution that doesn’t meet the requirements outlined above, you may just end up with a half optimized site that fails to achieve the rankings and traffic you’ve been hoping for at the outset of your SEO campaign.

(C) Medium Blue 2008