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!

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