Omar Aviles

Here are some marketing tools that I have been using this past August to hopefully boost pageviews on the Brooklyn Indie Market website that I manage.

Marketing Tools :

• Google Analytics – This a must have tool. This displays your visitors views, bounce rate, time on a page, new visitors, loyal visitors, where your visitors are landing and where from. In addition, it has 4 goals that you can put to see if your visitors are getting to them. One goal example is to have Vendors signups, so I set the goal on the vendors page and if they do a the required action it will show on the analytics. But their is so much more. Google has a dashboard where you can display to your liking what stats you want to see from your website. Comparisons features which I just started to understand. Although I did not go into great detail about the tool furthermore , you should have this tool for it is essential for your SEO Marketing goals.
• Google webmaster tools – A vital tool to help you with meta tags, seeing queries about how users are looking for you in the google search engine and setting up a site map which is important for google to rank you as well.
• Social websites- Facebook, twitter, myspace, technorati, wordpress,blogger just to point out the popular ones are very important to have if you want your business to be seen by the millions of people on the web. I also would like to include delicious and digg as well. All these websites have a powerful tool. That power is social networking. Make friends on facebook and myspace. Then send out maybe at least once a week a event going on in your business. Twitter it daily. Blog about it on blogger or wordpress, or if you want to see if it worth it to blog on both sites and see if you get more visitors hits, try that. I’m have been experimenting with that and will let you know how that is going. As for stumble upon which is a website that is like bookmark app, it lets you comment about other people sites and share your likes and dislikes. I have at least commented(positive comments only) at 10 sites a day for like 5 days a week. When you do the numbers that is like 50 comments which leave your website link if people do decide to see who you are. In a month It could be 200 comments and that is more chance of people going to your website because of the comment you left. I also been trying technorati which is basically following blogs and putting them as favorites. I have not been able to figure out a simple way that this site can help me with traffic to my brooklyn indie market blog yet. Since this is my first time experimenting with this, I will also let you know how that is going.
• Press Release – This is not exactly my strong point. I can barely write correct english and not forget about past tense rules. Sitting for half an hour to one hour and write a rough draft about an event you want to promote. After you have done that, revised, revised, revised and spell check, make sure the address of the event, time, name of people and even it makes sense to you. Look at the press release and ask yourself: would I understand this? is it quick and to the point? Here is a website to get you started on more rules. OK, now that you have your final polish press release what are you going to do with it? send it out of course. Post it on your site. Send it your local newspapers or city papers. But who do I exactly send it to in the local newspapers? Go your local newspaper site and look for a contact link or page and send it to them stating you would like to send our your press release so people are aware of your event. Try at least 30- 50 newspaper and blog sites in your local area. Again try, try, try and do not be discourage, it will take some time to build a relationship with these other organizations.
• Have clean Xhtml and css code using w3C standards – this is the defacto of web standards right now. Using their validation tool will put you on the right track for google search engine spiders to find you without errors. It is free and I like to use it. It makes me feel good that I wrote up good code and it follows structure, unlike my English grammar. Also check your css validation tool as well.
• Meta Keywords and Meta Description – In your xhtml code you should have at least 40 meta keywords that describe your site. I have been changing at 10 or adding 10 keywords a month and monitoring on google anayltics to see if any users found us through such words. I believe you can have up to 100 keywords, but not sure as of this posting. I will get back to you on that as well.
• Track your work – I use google docs to track what websites I left a blog message or what site I left a positive comment using stumbleupon. In addition, I keep track of how many social sites I have and have one document containing the url, username and password info. That way I can come back just in case I cant remember what site I should do my seo on that half hour or hour.
• Get your webiste listed on dmoz, yahoo,and of course google.

In a couple of days I will try to show some screen captures of my own personal site and see how it is doing in terms of visitors coming and if it drums up any business. If you have anymore suggestions, or felt I left something out, or some information is not correct or clear please comment. It is always good to start a rapport and begin working on projects together.