iMedia Ventures has relocated to beautiful Sackville, New Brunswick. We create inexpensive, ‘easy to edit yourself’ websites so you don’t have to hire a webmaster to make costly ongoing changes.

We can also get you more traffic by helping you get on the first pages of Google searches using little known techniques. Works great especially for local businesses. We can show you how to get more traffic, and collect leads by writing articles, newsletters and using social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Please contact us to discuss your needs.

Whether you have a  local ‘brick and mortar’ business or are strictly web-based you will want to use the Internet to obtain leads for your business. In order to do this you need to get traffic to your website. Many business often tell me ‘I want to be on page one for Google search’. This is a great goal to have, but the question I usually ask in treturn is ‘For what keywords’?

Many of us will put up a website and describe our products or services, features and benefits, portfolio, contact us page, testimonials/clients page and some of the more astute of us will even create a blog. But most of us have no idea what keywords we should be targeting and if we do we often don’t do the things that will get us ranked for those keywords.

1. Pick some keywords you would like to be ranked for and find related keywords – write down some keywords that you can think of for your market. Use the Google keyword tool to find related keywords
2. Find out if enough people are searching for them – look at search volumes for those keywords
3. Find out if these keywords have ‘commercial value’ – use the Google advertising rates to determine which keywords are worth more to existing businesses
4. Analyze the competition – find out how many webpages you’re competing with, and how strongly they are ranked based on a variety of factors (domain age, backlinks, HTML tags, etc). See where the weaknesses are and where you can get ranked more easily.
5. Choose the optimum keywords and get ranked for them – start a campaign using these optimal keywords (fairly high number of searches but reasonable competition), getting backlinks to your webpages from other websites (via articles, videos, social networks), and so on
6. Create a local Google business listing – a little known feature of Google! By creating a local listing for your business, you can often get on page on very quickly, and your business will be located on a Google map in the search results making it easy to find.

This can be done manually by using software such as the free Google keyword tool, but I use a powerful software tool called Market Samurai that integrates everything into one package and speeds up the process tremendously, especially for competitive analysis which can be tedious. For more information and assistance you can contact me.

When the Internet was fairly new, entrepreneurs would throw up a website that provided some contact info. Then they might add some information about their services, rates, clients, etc. That helped to reduce the number of questions that customers would ask. Instead you could send them to your website. So it was basically an online brochure

Today a website is much more important even for ‘offline’ businesses (typical brick and mortar businesses). Customers search for local businesses using Google and other search engines, much more than yellow pages these days. Will they find you?

Google and other search engines use the content on your website to determine when to send people to you. When people tell me ‘I want to be on the first page of Google’, I often ask them ‘Ok, but for what keyword phrases?’ You need to spend some time discovering the keywords that people are typing in to search for your business. And then put these keywords in your content which doesn’t always happen naturally.

For example if you are in the document serving business, do people type in ‘process servers’, ‘document server’, ”affidavit or ‘I need a restraining order’?

Getting found on Google is much more than just putting up a website and submitting your site to them. Google uses a series of criteria to determine how to rank your site. It also uses ‘backlinks’ which are links that other sites have that point to your site. These can be considered ‘votes’ for your site, and the more popular the other site is that links to you, the better you will be ranked as well. You can get links yourself by posting articles that contain your link to EzineArticles.com for example.

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.

I’ve been doing online marketing for years now and thought I would share a few things I’ve learned along the way:

• Determine your main niche keywords – for years I just typed whatever I wanted without giving it much thought. Once I determined which keywords I wanted to dominate I made sure I had those keywords in my youtube video titles, blog posts, pages, links, etc. I quickly started to dominate those keywords. Move from general keywords to more specific ‘long tail’ keywords
• Determine why people should buy from you instead of your competition and make this clear on your web pages. I went from offering ‘guitar lessons’ to ‘learn online with a guitar teacher’. This is the unique selling proposition. A well known concept but rarely implemented with clarity on the web pages.
• Create separate pages for different keywords. For years I just sent all links to the home page. We all know what to do but we often don’t do it.
• Stay consistent – do regular blog posts and emails. At various times, I’ve stopped posting or communicating with my customers.
• Use an email autoresponder – build a following of customers/fans. You can then communicate with them as often and for as long as you’d like.
• Track your visitors – use google analytics to see where customers are going, what keywords they use to find you, what is converting, etc.
• Video is huge – find relevant sites in your niche that will bring loads of traffic. Eg. I found youtube and ultimate-guitar.tv bringing in most of my traffic for a guitar lesson site (via google analytics).
• Offer something of value to get people to give you their email address. For years I said ‘Join my fan club’, or ‘Sign up for a free newsletter’. Make your free offering something of great value. Once I started offering guitar tab to my lessons, I started getting tons of subscribers each week
• Use tags on your posts. Google search finds these!
• Get involved in the conversation around your niche subjects – other blogs, forums, twitter, etc but be careful not to get into pissing matches with other marketers. And don’t waste all day surfing these sites!

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.