To most individuals and businesses, web marketing is a complex and comprehensive task that barely produces any productive results. However, the real truth is quite the contrary. Web marketing gives people the perfect opportunity to market their business online. After all, the Internet is the largest form of communication across the globe.
In this case, every business should develop a wide-reaching online presence to diversify their brand and obtain fresh leads through a variety of online streams. Often, the problem is that these businesses are completely out of touch with the latest web marketing strategies. Therefore, in order to help you venture into the productive world of online marketing, here are 40 of the top web marketing principles in 2018.
15. Use a First Person Perspective in Call to Actions
As you may know, a call to action is a brilliant method of personally convincing an individual to commit an action on your website, without actually letting them know your desire on a conscious level. The perfect call to action consists of a digital component, which is usually a picture detailing what it is that you are selling.
Also, a great call to action also includes a first person verb. For example, if you are imploring your website visitors to download a free eBook, try using the phrase “download our free eBook today” instead of “download”. This simple alternative is more personable and relates to your prospective customer.
There are many online experiments that prove that first person call to actions generate a higher click-rate than other traditional methods.
14. Create an Editorial Calendar
If you are creating content on your website as a means to market your brand, your goal should be to generate useful and fresh content on a regular schedule. Creating an organized editorial calendar effectively completes this objective, and it doesn’t involve a lot of steps. You can use the online tool Meistertask to arrange your editorial calendar to always stay on top of your goals.
By doing so, assessing your content goals will be much easier. In fact, CoSchedule used their own custom editorial calendar to increase their traffic by 299%.
13. Syndicate Your Content
Diversifying your content is an excellent way of getting your message out to different audiences. Therefore, if content marketing is your goal, make an effort to regularly post your content on third-party websites to maximize your content’s potential. There are a few byproducts of syndicating your content, which includes growing your email list.
James Clear, a well-known author and speaker, used this web marketing tactic to grow his email list to more than 100,000 subscribers. All in all, syndicating your content can give your personal website well-deserved traffic and online exposure.
12. Promote Your Business with SlideShare
SlideShare is the largest online marketing platform where businesses can share presentations related to their goals. There have been some convincing recent studies that suggest that this platform is a perfect marketing tool for B2B companies. A New York advertising company named Didit, conducted a study that proved that SlideShare receives 500% more traffic than other traditional marketing platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
In addition, Traffic Generation Cafe blogger Ana Hoffman, wrote a case study detailing how she accumulating 243,000 views from SlideShare in just 30 days. Hence, it’s fair to assume that SlideShare is a great marketing platform for businesses who desire to network with other prospective clients.
11. Use Highly Detailed Case Studies
Case studies are important marketing tools that can increase your leads, sales, and revenue by proving the value of a specific product or service you are selling. Web marketing pioneer Neil Patel, conducted a case study to understand the effect of case studies on his own website. As a result, his personal revenue grew by nearly 185%.
The key to creating a highly detailed case study is to include metrics and qualitative data that proves that your product or service has a unique value. By giving prospective customers this information, you can effectively boost your conversion rate by leaps and bounds.
10. Gain Backlinks from Partner Websites
Obtaining mentions from well-known websites in your niche can be extremely difficult to accomplish. Still, these mentions could lead to fruitful SEO opportunities for your website. One of the most solid web marketing principles is to build a network of partner websites to obtain awareness and increased traffic for your website.
A partnership of this kind is usually mutualistic. After all, your main goal of striking up this partnership is to obtain backlinks. On the other side, the publisher mentioning your brand will receive the extra benefit of supplying their own readers with useful and relevant information.
OutreachMama conducted a study to see the benefits of their partnership with Forbes and the Huffington Post. In just two months, the website received 350 backlinks from more than 100 different domains. From that data, you can only imagine the traffic and conversion rate the website received as a result of their massive backlink accumulation.
9. Try to Rank Higher on Review Websites
It is a common fact that online reviews steer consumer choice. In fact, approximately nine out of ten people view product reviews online before they make a purchase. With this data in mind, ranking higher on review sites can ultimately make or break your product’s marketability. Though, it often isn’t difficult to obtain high reviews if you supply quality products.
Many studies have shown that high online review rankings generally contributes to a boost in sales. Reevo’s in-house team conducted a case study to analyze the impact of online reviews. Surprisingly, they concluded that positive online reviews can lead to an 18% increase in sales. Increasing your online reviews tend to happen on its own, but the immense benefits of doing so are very clear to be positive for your business.
8. Follow Traffic Generation Trends
In the broadest sense, one of the main principles of web marketing is to intuitively predict traffic generation trends. Specifically, predicting the location of massive traffic is important so you can create content centered around the most trending topics. Google Trends is one of the most widely used tools for creatives to understand the trends that are popular on the internet.
In theory, by creating content relevant to the trending topics, your website’s awareness could exponentially increase. Fortunately, in actual practice, this method works wonders. In 2016, video content became a universally popular content marketing method. This trend was studied by Fire Brand, who concluded that 90% of marketers who followed the trend received significant increases in their ROI.
7. Create Content on Medium
Medium is one of the largest user-generated content publishers on the web. Posting your content on this website can lead to increased traffic opportunities for your brand. Lucky for you, you can publish virtually anything on Medium and receive millions of views from readers who will actually interact with your post.
Ali Mese, a marketer at Growth Supply, tried out this method and recorded his personal results after 30 days. After creating a 1000-1500 word article, he easily accumulated over four million page views and over 140,000 followers on Medium. With an endless traffic potential, you could sustain high conversion rates on your website just by marketing yourself and your brand on Medium.
6. Participate in Online Communities
If you are an expert or professional in a specific niche, participating in online communities is an excellent way to network and build conversion opportunities. Some of the most popular online communities for professionals are Reddit and Quora. Both communities are home to millions of people with a wide array of interests.
Namely, if you do consider yourself to be a profession in a particular niche, you can gain easy exposure on these communities by answering questions, participating in discussions, and meeting other creatives that share similar interests to you.
5. Always Use Personalized Emails
It cannot be stressed enough that personalized emails lead to higher conversion and click-through rates than non-personalized emails. The reason behind this fact is very obvious to figure out. People receive many emails per day. Most of these emails are important, and some are spam. If you send non-personalized emails, email providers will generally redflag them and place them in your recipient’s spam folder. Though, even if these emails make it to your destination, they likely won’t be read or taken seriously.
Sending personalized emails are very much important because they mainly introduce yourself to prospective customers and readers. Also, personalized emails boast more analytical rewards than its alternative. According to a case study from CMO, marketers who compose personalized emails receive an average 19% increase in sales revenue. The report also indicates that personalized emails have a 600% conversion rate, but only a small percentage of marketers effectively use them.
4. Reduce Friction in Email Signups
In simple marketing terms, friction is anything that slows the conversion process of a user. An ideal web marketing principle is to reduce friction and make user conversion a seamless process. While it’s technically impossible to eliminate friction, you can make changes to ensure that you can convert leads quickly.
One brilliant web marketing principle is to reduce friction in email signups, mainly because this avenue generates remarkable leads for your business. If you want to try this experiment for yourself, all you have to do is make it simpler for users to sign up for your email list.
For example, one way of doing this is to only require an email address for your subscription and eliminating the option to activate a subscription through an email. By doing so, you can reduce the friction in your email signups and make it much more easier for users to subscribe to your email list.
3. Create Email Subject Lines that Trigger Curiosity
Usually before a recipient opens an email, they will peek at the subject line. After all, the subject line summarizes the point of the email, and it’s the first thing the recipient will see before eventually opening the email. According to a study by Hubspot, 35% percent of email recipients open an email based entirely on the subject line.
Therefore, if you are going to gain attention through your email marketing campaigns, it will be best to create quality email subject lines that trigger curiosity. If not, you will simply be wasting your time creating emails that no one wants to read.
2. Collaborate with Influencers
In order for you to establish and maintain an online presence, you must be ready to think of and implement web marketing principles that no one has heard of. Common web principles are used by millions of marketers and can lose their magic if everyone has tried them. However, by collaborating with influencers, you can create your own distinct message that will generate awareness for your brand.
Neil Patel realized this concept and spent $57,000 on models who posted pictures on social media that read “Who is Neil Patel?”, along with the hashtag #whoisneilpatel. From this collaboration, Neil earned over $300,000 in just three months.
While some marketers may add that this was a cheap marketing ploy, Neil actually collaborated with influencers to market his brand, and he received a major boost in traffic and revenue, rather than create senseless noise that a “cheap marketing ploy” would generate.
1. Run an Advertising Campaign on Twitter
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, and it’s a great marketing tool for businesses. If you want to run an advertising campaign on Twitter, you can do so by promoting your account and your tweets. By signing up for Twitter’s promotion option, all you have to do is create meaningful and interactive content centered around your brand. Twitter will handle the rest.
In order to keep a sharp eye on your ROI, you can easily view the analytics of your tweets to assess your conversion rate. This indication will give you a great idea of which social media marketing tactics work best for your brand.
Overall, web marketing is an important method of creating an online presence for your brand. If you employ these effective web marketing principles, you can enjoy productive results that can benefit your business in 2018.
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
