Email marketing can be a great part of your marketing strategy you need a well-conceived plan to make it work. If not, it could turn your emails into unwanted communications between your current customer base. Constant Contact does a fairly nice job for most small to medium businesses and organizations and they provide very helpful training and tips. They even have email marketing seminars throughout the country. Click on the link below to give them a try.

Build your business with Email Marketing and Online Surveys from Constant Contact. FREE 60-Day Trial.

Happy New Year! Although I don’t typically make new year’s resolutions, I do resolve to pay more attention to the iHOG blog. I am excited about the year 2011 because, well after all, it is the year of the hog (not officially but let’s just pretend that it is…). Last year ended quite well for iHOG, experiencing our best months ever from July through December. We are carrying that momentum into this new year and Matt and I are planning a new website, among other things. I feel a bit guilty because we have been helping so many of our customers establish themselves on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and on blogs but we have sacrificed our own iHOG presence on those sites. In an effort to practice what we preach, we promise to dedicate some time to those. So here’s to a great 2011 for all of us…

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. It’s been crazy busy these last few months. iHOG became the new publisher & printer for The Landscaper, the official publication of the LA/San Gabriel Valley Chapter of the California Landscape Contractors Association. I gave it a totally new look and it’s gotten rave reviews from its members. It’s a monthly magazine so it keeps us busy. They are a great group and I look forward to a long lasting business relation with them. We are also helping them out with a new logo and new media kit.

Here are the last few issues of the newly designed Landscaper magazine

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In addition to that, we also have some very cool new websites we are working on for some new clients. Matt has been busy on these. We hope to add these to our porkfolio soon.

Maybe this means that the economy is finally picking up…?

Wow, has it really been that long since my last blog post? Let me dust the cobwebs off this blog. It just goes to show that this takes quite an effort and commitment to keep it up. In my defense, for the last several months I was focused almost exclusively to marketing for one company, EcoAlliance. We developed a new website, a blog, a Twitter page, packaging for several products, logo and branding, along with some marketing collateral like brochures. I’ll post some samples of the work in my next post, or maybe on the iHOG Twitter page, which I have also neglected.

Anyway, we have some cool things planned for iHOG in the months to come – if we can only find enough hours in the day to accomplish them all…

By John Carranza

If I had one piece of advice on how to best use the internet to grow your business, it would be to position yourself as an expert in your field. Like never before, the internet presents several opportunities to communicate with your current and future customers and allows you to share information and valuable resources that can position you as an expert in your industry.

An effective website is just one small part of the bigger picture. Today, by using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can present information and resources to your target market that are of real value to them. In doing so, you gain their trust as an authority in your market. This will lead to loyal customers who seek you out as opposed to the more traditional (and less effective) method of searching for customers by pushing your message to them – inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing.

Marketing has definitely changed recently as the internet revolutionized how businesses find customers. In reality, it is now a case of the customers finding the products or services they are interested in purchasing. If you are like me (and the research has proven that a huge percentage is), you go to Google first when looking for a product or service to buy. If you take advantage of the power of the internet and use those services I mentioned like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, etc. then you increase your chances dramatically that you will be found online. And today, that can be the difference between having a business that is thriving, or one that is barely surviving.

by Matthew Montanez

I too was once a skeptic of social media’s actual ability to draw meaningful traffic to a website. On the surface, blogging appeared to simply be a method of publicizing your personal journal, lacking any real business-level value. Facebook appeared to be another MySpace-like application more about maintaining personal relationships than business relationships. Twitter appeared to be another method for those bloggers to post personal information irrelevant to anyone but themselves. Researching these applications online via tutorials and seminars turned me into a slight believer of social media’s business potential. It was only when I began utilizing these applications and measuring results myself did I become a true believer.

Since I have established my own blog, set up towards the end of August 09, it has become the number 1 entry point for traffic coming into my website. Twitter and Facebook currently contribute to 20 and 17 percent of all traffic coming into my website, respectively.

Just recently, I posted a blog about a weekend trip to San Francisco: My Trip to, from, and in San Francisco. Headlining the post, I included a photo of the city from my hotel room window. The very same day, the hotel, hotel Nikko, posted up my photo, with a link to my blog, on their Facebook wall. Traffic to my website quadrupled that very day!

There are obviously a large number of possibilities when it comes to online marketing through social media. It is highly significant for businesses to realize this now while it is still quite simple to take advantage.

Within the past 6 months, I have experienced first hand the effects of a slow economy. Many of my clients made the choice that they could not afford to invest in advertising and marketing during these times. I continued to market my services (of course, since that is what I know…) and a few of my good clients continued to do so as well. Interesting enough, they are the ones who are not just ‘surviving’ as many like to call it, but they are doing quite well. One of my best customers (who’s become a good friend) recently told me that while his competition cut their marketing budgets, he increased his email marketing and also started a blog. Instead of experiencing a decrease in his business, he actually saw his sales grow (although nothing dramatic but in today’s economic climate, he’ll take it).

So for those of you afraid to invest in your business, you should be more afraid of what may happen if you just sit and wait and hope to merely survive. Your competition very well may be going after the customers that are out there.

I’m back. I was in New York all last week with my son for a baseball tournament in Cooperstown and had an amazing time. As you all know, it’s never easy coming back to work after a vacation. I have been trying to catch up but it’s an uphill battle. Before I left, Matt and I were brainstorming on several iHOG marketing projects and we came up with some great ideas. I think I’ve said it before but one of these days I’d like to videotape our iHOG brainstorming sessions – they are hilarious.

We hope to follow through on some of those ideas, especially the viral videos where we explain some internet marketing concepts. You’ll love those.

One thing we did start that we felt there was a need for is a guide to using Google. There is much more to Google than most people realize so we hope to explain some of its features, especially for business use. Look for this Google Guide ebook within the next month. Of course, it all depends on our workload and it seems like the economy is really picking up based on how busy we have been getting. Until then, here is one little Google tidbit that I bet you didn’t know about. Do a Google search for ‘find chuck norris’ and click the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. Check out the results. (I know this isn’t very useful but it sure is funny…)

by John Carranza

How would your business change if you had a dramatic increase in quality visitors to your website? For most of you, I’d guess that there would be some real value there. But how do you go about getting more traffic to your site? And at what cost?

I could write a book on how to attract more quality traffic to your website – in fact, I am writing an ebook on it – but for now, I will mention some key methods that you NEED to be engaged in to accomplish this.

The most obvious way is to get great (not good) search engine results. This means that when people do a Google search for keywords related to your business, you want to be on that 1st page. Good results may land you on the 3rd page but research has shown that unless you are on that top spot on page 1, most people will not see you. Getting on page 1 depends on your specific keywords and how much competition there is. For example, it would be nearly impossible to get top ranking for the keyword “attorney” since there is so much competition, but also it is a very general term. You would have a much better chance if you target “criminal defense attorney in Pasadena.”

To get high search engine ranking you need to make Google love your site. To do this, you need to focus on SEO or search engine optimization, among other things. Briefly, SEO means that your site has the correct structure and was built with your keywords in mind. Without getting too technical, your title tags should use your keywords, each page of your site should target certain keywords, and you should incorporate quality linking strategies. This is where your web developer should have excellent knowledge of how Google operates.

Other methods to getting more visitors to your site involve taking advantage of blogging, social networking sites, videos, and writing and submitting good articles to various content sites. All of these involve a big time commitment (or paying someone to do it for you) but the return on your time and money will lead to more visitors to your site and more customers.

In upcoming posts and hopefully that ebook I have been working on, I will be more specific on some of the methods to attract more traffic, such as creating videos and writing articles. In the meantime, if you have any specific questions or comments or would like some help in incorporating these methods to get more customers, call or email me.

John Carranza
jc@houseofgraphics.com

The proud Internet Marketing graduate

By John Carranza

Last week I found out that I passed the online Inbound Marketing University certification exam. I am now an official Inbound Marketing Certified Professional. Inbound Marketing University (IMU) was put together by Hubspot, a company that focused on, among other things, helping businesses get found online. IMU consisted of a week of live online 1-hour sessions on various internet marketing topics. There were 2 sessions a day and were led by some of the most successful and knowledgeable professionals in their fields.

The class schedule was:

Class 1: How to Blog Effectively for Business 
Professors: Ann Handley &  Mack Collier, MarketingProfs
Class 2: SEO Crash Course to Get Found 
Professor: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
Class 3: Social Media and Building Community 
Professor: Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs
Class 4: Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn 
Professor: Elyse Tager, Silicon Valley American Marketing Association
Class 5: Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves 
Professor: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and
World Wide Rave
Class 6: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research 
Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Class 7: Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices 
Professor: Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABS, Marketing Experiments
Class 8: Inbound Lead Nurturing
Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch
Class 9: Successful Email Marketing 
Professor: Eric Groves, Constant Contact
Class 10: Analyzing Inbound Marketing 
Professor: Marshall Sponder, Monster.com, Web Analytics Association for Social Media

Each class covered a lot of useful information and in upcoming blog posts I plan on writing about some of the things that may be very useful for most of you.