Article Summary

Why is local marketing important?

1. Local online marketing can provide a huge advantage for small businesses optimizing for local online search.
2. Local internet marketing is an excellent  way of building a brand’s reputation
3. Improve lead generation
4. Helps acquire new customers

Local online marketing can provide a huge advantage for small businesses optimizing for local online search. It is a fantastic way to reach new potential customers and drive quality traffic to your site.

Helps build your brand

Local internet marketing is an excellent way of building a brand’s reputation, forming a relationship with a large customer base, improving lead generation, and acquiring new customers. 

Online local rankings and mobile accessibility, along with reliable local search engine marketing can make or break your business growth. Your future customers are searching the web and using mobile devices to find products and services in their community.  

Improves Lead Generation

Local marketing has quickly become popular, especially with bricks and mortar stores needing to move online due to the pandemic. 

But even before COVID-19 struck, almost half of Google searches showed local internet marketing  with a third of consumers checking local business online every day. 

Local marketing is vital for small businesses that rely on people who actually visit their stores to purchase goods or access a service, including shops, dentists, physiotherapists, bars, restaurants, and car dealerships.

There’s a danger lurking with local marketing though, and it has to do with setting your budget too big and waste money on the wrong location and audience. 

Helps get new customers

A lot of businesses base their marketing efforts on local referrals to bridge the gap and target a wider audience, let’s say regional or statewide.

A business or company that is local to a specific area is not able to compete directly with a larger competitor in another geographic location. A local company needs a targeted marketing strategy to attract the newest number of customers who may not realize that there is a local specialty business in the area. 

Local marketing is a technique that is done both in person and online. You can determine the local marketing strategies that will be the most beneficial for your business. 

In ending, its essential to focus your local marketing strategies on your target audiences as this will ensure a successful campaign.

If you like this article, pls do leave a comment below. Questions are also welcome.

You tube’s popularity keeps growing and as of this writing, there’s approximately 2 billion monthly active users –30 million daily active users. (That includes me). 40 minutes average viewing session.
With this statistics, isn’t about time you monetize your YouTube channel as well?

Article Summary

4 steps to monetizing your YouTube Account

• You need to have 1,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel
• Your videos have generated 4,000 Watch Time hours over the last 12 months
• You comply with all YouTube’s policies and guidelines
• You have an AdSense account set up
• As mentioned above, there are four critical steps to making money using your YT account.

Let’s go through them one by one and as quickly as possible.

Get 1,000 people to subscribe

Let’s start with the 1,000 subscribers. This one is pretty straightforward, it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get to 1,000 subscribers, once you hit that milestone, you’ve reached that requirement.
You can ask anyone to sign up, but I guest the best way to achieve this is by posting you YT on Facebook and encouraging your connections – Family, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances and just above anyone else who can see your Facebook post to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

4,000 hours watch time in a year

This refers to how much time your video content has been seen or watched over and over. It’s not about having 4,000 active videos but rather having accumulated 4,000 total watched time in a span of 12 months. So it’s a bit tricky. One proven methodology is to upload content that is generally likeable to all ages so that your channel also adheres to YT community policy.

Adherence to YT Community Policies and Guidelines

This is the rule book. If you want to make money off your YouTube channel, strict compliance should be observed.
If you’re a bit unsure as to what these are, you can check them out by visiting You tube’s guidelines.
YT will regularly check your channel to see if you are meeting their standards, policies and guidelines. The list is comprehensive and might take you some time to read but it’s safe to say that once you have exhausted the list, you’re off to a good start.

Set up your AdSense Account

If you want to earn money off your YT channel, then having an AdSense account is vital. Now, if you don’t know how to set it up, you might want to browse this Google FYI – creating an AdSense Account

Personalize your content

Content is king so does the famous marketing quote states. This is still very true. Always ascertain that you’re churning out unique and engaging content for your viewers. As to the topic? that’s totally up to you. It pays to know that whatever strikes you as entertaining, informative, relevant or just plain hilarious can be viewed as your choice.
So what are you waiting for? Start now.

Article Summary

What is a Heatmap?

• Data analysis software
• Uses colours as a data visualization tool
• Visual way to make decisions from
• Helps tweak your web page for efficiency

If you haven’t tried using any visual data analysis software, well, you’re missing quite a lot in trying to measure your online data.

What is so unique about this application is that you can pinpoint exactly which area of your page is being frequented by your visitors.

If you run a business or manage a sales and marketing team, you know how important efficiency is. There are countless ways to optimize operating costs or a combination of both. 

But one of the most effective ways to improve sales and marketing results is to understand geographical and customer data and use it to your advantage. This is where heat maps come in. 

It takes numeric data and plots it on an accurate geographical map, displaying different values by color intensity. The point of a heat map is to give visually inclined teams a precise idea of their current results and where they can improve based on what the map describes.

How does it work?

Let’s take for example that you are looking at a particular webpage, a heatmap will show you which areas of that page are getting the most attention.

Seeing this will help you streamline your page so that the most important part gets the most notices.

A heat map can display the following data:

• Your most clickable headline
• Most attractive image and if people are clicking on it
• What distracts visitors from your web page
• Do people see your call to action or opt-in box?

Colours as Visualization tool

The way the Heatmap works is that certain colours are associated with actual cursor “clicks”. The intensity ranges from darkest (fewest to no clicks or browse) to lightest indicating the most clicks or browse.

The cool thing about using this tool is that you can continue to tweak your page to update them until you are satisfied with the result.

Once you have implemented this tool, you can easily integrate it to your business workflow, making it an integral part of your analytics.

The good thing about using heatmap is that organizations can use it in different ways depending on their goals and they can also pinpoint productivity, marketing efforts and any other considerations that need numerical tracking.

Do you think this tool is for your business? Absolutely, especially if you’re keen on tweaking your web page to deliver the best version that could make people interact with it in a superb way.

Article Summary

Reasons why people love podcasts

• Portable
• Packed ball of Energy
• Educational Value
• Pool of usable Ideas
• FREE

There’s a steady increase of podcast usage, not only for personal use but even to drive value into the marketing strategy. If you haven’t explore this entertaining niche, then it’s never too late to get your hands on one now and who knows you might just be a successful podcaster in the making.

So what is a podcast?

What is a podcast? Simply put: a podcast is an audio programme, just like Talk Radio, but you subscribe to it on your smartphone and listen to it whenever you like. – https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/what-is-a-podcast/

5 reasons to consider the use of Podcast

Portability

With podcast, you can literally carry them in your pocket via your mobile device. Sure, traditionally, you listen to podcasts using your desktop, live or downloaded. Now, you can subscribe to the ones prefer listening in increment or by episodes. You can have them synched to your daily walking or even driving routine depending on the time-frame you have allotted.

Ball of Energy

Oftentimes, best podcasts don’t talk down to their audience. Listening on how highly strung or energetic the podcaster always somehow rubs on me. I mean the whole vibes is contagious! I mostly listen to podcasts in the marketing/business/entrepreneurial space. Usually many podcast features people/influencers who have learned to overcome obstacles in their lives and this inspires me to persevere as well.

Educational

If you’re the auditory-type person, meaning you receive information better when listening to it, then a podcast is the perfect vehicle for you. Sometimes a 10-minute audio overview can explain the concepts better than a whole book.

Pool of Ideas

I realized that while listening to podcasts, my mind tends to get triggered and ideas starts pouring in. The thing that catches me off is I need to write down these ideas right away or they’re be gone as quickly as they come in.

FREE

Well surely, most podcasts would require you to subscribe and comes with a fee, but if you’re resourceful enough there exist in the online universe a whole plethora of FREE podcasts on just about any imaginable subject matter in the whole wide world.

So how does this all translate to your marketing efforts?

How about instead of just writing your content, you can also use podcast to deliver your campaign?

Article summary

Why Gamification?

• According to the International Journal of Education Technology in Higher Education, gamification increased retention by 12.23% and increased overall performance 7.03%.
• This is the one of the most effective ways to increase learner engagement, retention, and recall by reducing barriers to learning.
• Scientists studied the effectiveness of using gamificatiin in the form of video games to teach students diagnosed with autism.
• Results of this study showed that this training package is effective in teaching age-appropriate content through gamification.

The Art of the Game

The gamification of learning is an educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video games design and game elements in learning environment. In other words gamification is the introduction of game elements in a non-game situation. Aims to engage users to change their behavior in order to acquire and to adhere to a healthy behavior.

Brief History

The idea of embedding game techniques and mechanics in the business system to enhance customer engagement and experience is very recent in the business world.

This is called as gamification. Some experts view that gamification is the future of digital marketing. Hoping to outlast just a passing fancy or novelty, its influence is predicted to be widespread, sort of like this is the real game changer.

 The main goal of this marketing technique is to give more excitement and trill for your site visitors as they engage the game. This is to increase page visit duration and avoid high bounce rate or click outs

There are different gamification strategies, you must know what your users find interesting or engaging by giving more challenges at the same time offer more rewards as they put in more time playing.

Many companies so far have succeeded by using gamification in marketing like MapMyRun also known as MapMyFitness – a fitness website and also app of a kind  as one of the many examples of a business organization that has successfully employed a strategy of gamification in marketing. 

Gamification is considered as a way to influence online and offline behavior. The reason for this is because applications eventually lead people to do things like playing games or responding to certain situations.

There are many ways on how gamification is explained

Gamification is the process of game-thinking and the game mechanics to engage users to solve problems. Similarly, gamification is said to be a service design that has the objective to provide game-like experience to users as well as affecting their behavior.

More often than not, our efforts to engage with users usually fail. What we as marketers consider fun and engaging, our users often dismiss as dull, tedious and irrelevant. The world around us is changing as we are now fighting for hearts and minds, not just wallets.

We don’t want people to just consume our product or patronize our service, but to authentically fall in love with our brand. That is what gamification is rapidly gaining popularity.

Gamification is also an application of game mechanics and game design techniques of traditional gaming environment. It is an excellent way to engage and motivate people to complete tasks and achieve goals by tapping into our basic desires, need and impulses. Can be addictive, enhancing the customer experience, encouraging return visits and building long-term loyalty.

Are you ready to use this technique in your marketing campaigns?

If you happen to like this topic, pls do leave a comment below, and share the word!

If you want your mobile visitors to have the best mobile experience, then optimization is the key.

So basically, what is mobile optimization? Did you notice that more and more people are using their mobile devices to do an online search? The trend has steadily grown these past years and as good as this gets, many websites are still not designed to render properly to varying mobile devices sizes and load time.
Mobile optimization is the process of taking account of site design, site structure, page speed, and more to make sure you’re not inadvertently turning mobile visitors away.

So How do you optimize for Mobile?

Best Practices to Consider

Make good your page load speed

It’s vital that you take all necessary consideration to upgrade your mobile load speed if it takes a long time for your site to load up completely. This means optimizing your images, minifying code, leveraging browser caching, and reducing redirects.

Don’t block CSS, JavaScript, or images

It’s no longer SEO savvy to block these items off as in the old days. The Googlebot want to categorize and see the same content that users actually see.

These elements are also critical to helping Google understand if you have a responsive site or a different mobile solution.

Mobile Friendly Site Design

It’s important that your site is mobile friendly. How would you determine this? You can use Google’s https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly to check.

If your site’s mobile version is not mobile friendly then you need to rectify this. How? You can ask your web developer to do this for you. Or you can read https://www.hostgator.com/blog/how-make-website-mobile-friendly/ to know how you can accomplish this.

Optimize titles and meta descriptions

With mobile, you’re actually working in a limited space, therefore careful consideration should be observed by the specialist.

It’s sensible to be precise and concise when crafting your url, title tags, meta descriptions etc so that they will show up nicely in the SERPs.

Optimize for Local SEO

With mobile, we can be sure that most if not all searchers are looking for local based queries. Standardizing your name, address and telephone number plus your city and state name will surely land your site in the top search results pages. Having a local element should always be considered in this aspect.

Separate mobile URL

Creating a second, parallel site for mobile users is another option you can use. This will give you the option to create completely custom content for mobile visitors. To avoid URL confusion, most parallel mobile sites use an “m” subdomain.

You’ll also want to make sure that your site redirects are all in place and as lean as possible to increase page speed. And to avoid duplicate content issues, you’ll need to set up rel=”canonical”.

There you go, hope to see you again here next time!

Mobile is to SEO as fish is to water. You can’t have one besides the other. It is the backbone regarding Google’s index.

Sure, the mobile-first index simply rolled abroad within 2018, but Google has been losing not-so-little pointers because of the past few years.

In 2015, Google announced that cellular searches outdone desktop. Then within 2016, mobilegeddon 2.0 rocked the search engine world. And, among 2017, Google introduced us in conformity with the mobile-first index.

But the query still remains:

What ought my mobile approach be?

It isn’t adequate to hold a mobile-friendly site.

The empirical developments of both Google and Microsoft will mean big adjustments in accordance with whether you optimize because of mobile, voice, and visualsearch.

This post wishes to inform you what you need to know first-hand about mobile SEO.

Dealing with Mobile Search Google Style

Clearly, Google puts a premium on mobile search. It will be a bit complex trying to understand how Google deals with mobile search.

Some common FAQs you should know bout Mobile SEO

When you have a separate URL for both Mobile and Desktop, which one does Google Index?

For desktop devices, the desktop URL will be displayed by Google

And, the mobile searches will get the mobile URLs.

But, the indexed content will be from mobile.

Will Mobile first indexing make me lose my ranking?

The mobile-first index does not affect your ranking position.
Since UX is vital, you should always remember to make your site mobile-friendly.
Mobile-friendliness is reviewed page-by-page, which means you’ll want to update your money pages first.

2 Best Practices for Mobile SEO

Mobile Content

One key factor to always remember is that your mobile content should reflect your desktop content exactly.

All content formats (text, videos, images, etc.) should be crawl able and index able in mobile.

Mobile Site Performance

It’s all about how fast your mobile loading speed is. So compress all those images, CSS and other requisite to drive the speed higher.

This is also why Google introduced the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to improve site speed and page load times for mobile content.

Mobile SEO is here to stay. In fact right now, millions and millions of mobile users are clicking on Google to make their searches right where they are, sitting on a park bench, waiting in line at the grocery store, inside the bathroom, bedroom, inside the car. Etc.

To be on the forefront or even to keep up with the rest, better observe the following tips and see the result in a month or so.