While there is no way to know the exact number, it is estimated that there are more than 100 million blogs on the Internet with an approximate 44.6 billion blog posts online right now and that number continues to grow every day.

In the beginning, blogging was just an online version of the telephone extension where people could express their personal opinions. It was more like an online journal that others could check into to see or share experiences. But today it has emerged as one of the most useful tools for marketing in the world. According to vtech-seo.com,

Blogging has emerged as a specialized industry in itself and is increasingly being used by individuals and enterprises alike for establishing and enhancing their online presence.

More and more businesses are using the power of the blog to boost their online presence in many ways.

Simple Start Up

One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get your online presence is to start a blog. The mechanics of blogging are much simpler than that of a regular website and gives you a more informal freedom to your expression. There is no need for the traditional business formalities that usually come with business communications but at the same time it sets your company up as an expert in your chosen field. Most blogging sites actually have pre-designed templates that you can simply select and then plug in your information without the need to hire developers or designers to help you get the project up and running.

Opens a Two-Way Channel of Communication

Blogging also allows for a two-way channel of communication between you and the reader. When your company sets up their blog and leaves it open for comments you can have a more natural and comfortable way to communicate directly with a large number of people. You can relate an informal message about your progress or experience in the business and stimulate visitor activity and feedback in a way that will gauge the success and direction of your marketing campaign. The knowledge you will gain from such an interaction will give you a clear picture of how well you’re relating to your target audience. With that information you are better able to adjust to your customers’ needs in a more realistic time frame than through other advertising and marketing campaigns.

Attracts New Business

People are mostly social in their every day lives. They like having someone to communicate with on a regular basis. In these days of automated answering services and machines it is refreshing for many to find someone who just wants to talk. A well written blog is a very effective means of attracting more people to your website or business. Your blog ranked by the keywords that people use to find what their looking for will naturally draw them to you. The result is an increased flow of traffic to your site as well as a higher level of awareness of your skills and expertise.

There are many reasons why a business will choose to use a blog for promoting their services. It is not only capable but it is also very effective in reaching a large number of people. As explained by the Queensland Government,

Using a blog as a key element of an online marketing and promotion initiative gives you a chance to reach new customers, and to present a new business face to your existing customers.

With the power of social media today, a single individual can share an experience with the entire world and reach more people than most businesses could have ever dreamed of only a decade ago. The power of the blog takes our own social tendencies and puts them to good use as an amazing marketing tool for any endeavor you’ve embarked on.

There are probably hundreds of companies in your town that may be like yours; each one offering the same exact product or service as you have. If in the past you’ve been lucky enough to have attained a certain level of success and recognition in your community, chances are that you’re very pleased with your position among them. However, with the world of marketing changing so rapidly in recent years it may place you in an incredibly vulnerable position.

As the way the world trades continues to evolve more and more, businesses are considering making the shift from brick and mortar facilities to e-commerce. Even successful businesses like yours have seen the need to adapt to the art of trading goods online. If you’re considering making such a shift then you might want to get a better understanding of what e-commerce is. According to Business News Daily,

Though purchasing items online is a major facet, e-commerce is more than that. This type of commerce can be useful at the enterprise level as well. E-commerce is not just on the Web.

According to Internet experts, there are at least four different categories of e-commerce that we all should understand before starting this type of service.

Business to Business

This type supports businesses trading with one another – for example, manufacturers selling to their distributors or wholesalers selling to retailers. This type of service is crucial to the survival of any business; they depend not only on your company providing them with the products they need but they rely on this service to keep their businesses up and running. They will demand fast delivery times and simplicity when buying online.

Business to Customer

Business to customer is the picture that everyone envisions when they think of e-commerce. This is selling to the general public through electronic shopping carts, without any human interaction. There are some very popular business to customer sites that many people use on a regular basis. It was on this platform that e-commerce got its start.

Consumer to Business

With consumer to business, the individual can upload a personal project online and companies interested could bid on the job. This is a great platform for many freelance workers who are not associated with any particular business. Artists, writers, musicians, and other forms of creative arts have thrived on this type of service making it very popular in today’s business world.

Consumer to Consumer

With this type of e-commerce, consumers use online classifieds for various forums to buy and sell their personal goods. The old fashioned way of the used car sale or a garage sale has gone electronic with this particular method of electronic trading. Whether you have one item to sell or a garage full of them, you can use e-commerce to inform, make the transaction and even arrange the delivery without ever seeing your customers face-to-face.

Your Strategy

Depending on who you are engaging with in e-commerce you need to have a strategy. Any business that is looking at taking their practice online needs to have a game plan to implement when they are venturing into this unfamiliar territory. From setting your first goals to the final delivery of your transaction, each phase needs to be thought out very clearly so that your switch to the electronic world will be manageable and successful. Making this type of switch is not just a fad the world is going through but it represents the future of doing business. As explained by IML,

Many traditional methods of purchasing things are becoming obsolete because of the convenience and speed of online transactions…. Even established retailers that have sold their products in the same way for decades have had to offer their products online to compete with emerging retail sites.

The Internet is quickly becoming a major business thoroughfare in the world and will continue to grow and influence everyone more and more in the future.

Each year as the business world better adapts to the new online way of working the new techie terms are becoming more familiar. Perhaps as little as 10 years ago the thought of an online reputation or social media marketing were terms that most people would have never heard of. But today, businesses large and small are working out their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies so that they can guarantee their spot in the future world of online businesses.

So, if you’re thinking about hiring an SEO firm, chances are that you’re doing all the basics that need to be done. You’ve gone online and did a Google search of all the SEO firms you could find that meet your criteria. The list you came up with is rather lengthy so your next step is to start an interview process and begin to narrow it down to a workable number. But now you’re faced with a difficult conundrum. As you talk with each one you’re finding that they all say pretty much the same thing. This is now a serious problem, as you don’t know how to distinguish between all the different choices you may have. But take note that your difficulty is not unique as explained by Joshua Steimle of Forbes Magazine,

SEO is surely the greatest con ever. Can anyone here tell me how every would-be Internet Marketer on the planet can promise every client to get them on the first page of Google natural search?

The goal of a good SEO firm is to boost your rankings so that your business name shows up in the first page of a search engine result. So, how can you determine which of these SEO companies will be able to deliver on their promises? Here are a few things you can look for.

Know Your Needs

The purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to improve your ranking in different search engines so as to attract new business. When it comes to SEO there are many different directions that a company may need to go. Some may be looking at removing a link from a website, managing your online reputation, PPC management, or content marketing among many other things. But before you can hire the right company you need to be absolutely clear what direction you’re expecting to take your company in.

If your focus is on sales growth there are some SEO companies that will help with that direction but if your goal is to build a chain of communication then you might choose another totally different company. When you know exactly what you expect to achieve from your SEO direction, then you’ll know which of the many businesses on your list to pursue. This point is explained by experts at Let’s Talk SEO,

You need to choose the one that you feel can improve your website’s ranking effectively. For this, you may have to seek the assistance of a search-engine optimization expert, who can suggest to you’re the most appropriate SEO methods.

The amount and the kind of traffic you will attract will depend on the technique you choose.

Consider Your Budget

When you set out to look for an SEO company, you will find all kinds of people promising to bring you to the top of the search page. We all know that everyone of these services won’t be able to deliver on their promise. For some the only way for them to get you on the top is with an advertisement. For this no real work has been included in such a task but they will charge you $50,000 just the same.

Before you begin anything, you need to determine exactly what is required to reach your goals and how much you are willing to spend. This move alone will probably eliminate many of the choices on your list. Keep in mind, however, that price should not be the sole deciding factor for your venture.

For those who are new to SEO it is important to understand that this is a service that is best done on an ongoing process. Finding the company that can get your site several pages higher in the ranking order can mean a lot to any business but it won’t be able to maintain that position if you don’t have someone in your corner that is actively working to keep it there. So keeping your budget flexible enough to pay a certain fee on a monthly basis is very important.

Check Their History

While many of these firms will offer customer testimonials, they are no guarantee that they reflect a true picture of the company’s real performance. Chances are they are a reflection of a few of their best clients and perhaps their only successes. Ask for the contact information of at least three different companies that you can talk to directly to find out their personal stories.

When you interview these referrals you’re not interested so much in their success stories but you want to know details like how long did it take before you saw results, what was the level of communication like, did they meet all of your expectations, and did they follow through on all of their promises.

The bottom line is that a company’s promise is only as good as their ability to deliver it. With hundreds of SEO companies out there all promising to deliver the same thing, you will need to be very skilled at sifting out those who may not be what they claim to be. There are many reasons why a specific SEO company may not be just right for you, but as SEO experts explained to INC.,

Whatever path you choose, make sure you’re reevaluating your search strategies every six-to-twelve months. Search engines continue to morph, shift, and become more sophisticated. If you want to be successful for the long haul, you’ll need to change to.

Most people do not fully realize that just like everything else in this business world, things will never stay the same. Just because you’re able to attain a level of success with the SEO path you choose, always be prepared to make adjustments as time goes on. This way you will be able to not only raise your rankings but stay at the top almost indefinitely.

Are you trying to build a squeeze page that will convert well but you are scared to make some deadly mistakes that could potentially reduce your bottom line to nothing? Squeeze pages are an extremely important part of internet marketing that if you can get them right you will have much better conversion rates. Imagine the difference it would make to increase your conversion rate from 1 in 50 people to 1 in 20, or even 1 in 10. That equals to a lot more sales, and all it requires is the avoidance of making some big mistakes on your squeeze page. If you would like to know what these mistakes could be so that you can avoid them, read on.

Sign up Form Has Too Many Fields

There should only really be one field on an e-mail capture form, maybe two at the most, and that is the e-mail address and the name. No more information is required and if you ask for all sorts of info then the visitors may simply leave without completing the form when they would have if all they had to enter was their e-mail address.

Furthermore, if you end up needing more data then you can acquire this at a later date, as an expert from The Tyson Report explains:

I’d suggest that name and email is quite sufficient to begin with for most businesses – if you want to get further details, like postal address, you can always do this later. If you don’t need it, don’t ask!

The simpler and more visually attractive the e-mail capture form is, the more likely will people fill it out, and in turn that will increase your conversion ratio.

External Links

Having external links on your squeeze page is a very bad idea because you will lose some of the visitors through these links. The whole point of a squeeze page is to capture the e-mail of the visitor or get them to buy something right there and then. You can do some split testing to see how external links reduce your conversions. Such leaks should be identified and removed or minimized, as an expert from Site Pro News explains:

Your squeeze page has one purpose, to capture your visitors details. Therefore don’t go including a bunch of links to other pages on your squeeze page, that just gives them the option to leave without subscribing.

Not Bothering to Do Some Split Testing

One of the most important aspects of creating a great squeeze page is to do A/B type split testing. This is where you compare two squeeze pages that have one difference. For example, it could be the presence of an extra email capture form, or the positioning of the various elements is different. By making the effort to do some split testing you can actually get some big increases in your conversions which could result in a substantial increase to your bottom line. Once you do the testing for one squeeze page and find out what works and what doesn’t then you can use that layout for all of your other squeeze pages.

Weak Headline

The headline for your squeeze page is extremely important because it sets the tone for the whole page. If there is no urgency in your headline then the viewer will not get intrigued enough to take the contents of the page as seriously as when the title is bold. As an expert from Liza Shaw explains the title is so important you should consider hiring a copywriter to do it for you:

It is important for your title (also your headline) to actually capture folks’ curiosity. It isn’t easy to create headlines or titles. If you can afford the cost, you need to employ a professional copywriter to do the job for you.

The headline is another element that you need to do some split testing on, and once you do, you will see how powerful a headline can be, because by just changing that one element alone you can get a big increase in terms of conversions.

Using Standard Site Design

Most people use WordPress nowadays simply because it is easy to use and requires next to no coding ability to make cool looking websites. However, when setting up a squeeze page it is a bad idea to use your standard WordPress layout because there are far too many distractions and you can’t control what the viewer will look at first when they land on the page. Copy Blogger explains how the standard layouts are too congested to make good squeeze pages:

While your typical sidebar and header approach to a blog post is fine, when it comes down to traffic hitting a landing page with a singular focus on specific action, all of that extraneous stuff causes confusion, distraction, and reduced conversions.

There are many template squeeze pages out there that are even available for free if you know where to look. Some of the claims are that the squeeze pages you can get for free are as good as any out there, but even so you should still do a lot of testing to see what results you get for yourself.

Call to Action Is Missing

Some squeeze pages don’t actually have a clear enough call to action for the visitor to know what to do. When creating a squeeze page you have to be very specific about what it is that you want from the visitor; if possible take them step by step through the process that you have in place.

The call to action can be made in a variety of forms such as in a video, a paragraph of captivating words, or even by using graphics. The point is that the call to action must be enticing enough so that the viewer has no choice but to take you up on your offer and fill out the e-mail capture form. And from there you can market to them your products many times over until they finally buy, or decide to unsubscribe.