Marketing Your Business Online
December 02, 2008 filed under: News
For those of you who live in Easthampton, I will be teaching a course titled Websites 102: Marketing Your Business Online. (I say Easthampton because, unfortunately, the class is only open to residents of our fair city.) The course is presented by the Valley CDC, a local organization that seeks to empower low and moderate income people and minorities to control and improve the quality of their lives.
I have spent over a month preparing for this class and I am very much looking forward to it. Among the topics that will be covered over the next two weeks are:
Evaluating / Planning Your Website
Setting goals for your website, making your website search engine friendly with website standards and a discussion about the importance of great content will all be covered.
Analyzing Your Website
This section will focus on Google Analytics and how it can be used both to understand visitors to your website and help you make better marketing decisions.
Free Things Everyone Should Be Doing
The list is too long to mention in a sentence here but the moral is never overlook simple little things that can contribute to your website’s success.
Search Engine Optimization
This section will have a detailed explanation of how search engines view and rank your website and things that can be done to improve your rankings.
Paid Advertising with Google Adwords
Determining keywords costs, split testing of ads and the importance of monitoring campaigns will be discussed here.
Email Marketing
Building a quality mailing list, methods of sending HTML emails (and understanding the pitfalls of HTML email) and establishing a regular sending schedule will be discussed.
Blogging / Podcasting and the RSS Feed
Regularly updating your website is important. Blogs and podcasts help make that happen and the RSS feed gives visitors a way to subscribe to your content. Win win.
Social Media Websites
They’re becoming more popular and are being used more for business purposes. No marketing class would be complete without a discussion of social media websites.
For those of you who have signed up I look forward to meeting you tomorrow. For those of you who live out of town I’d be happy to talk to you about any of the topics mentioned above. Don’t hesitate to contact me.