Starmark.com

To be a real player in the game of online marketing, you need to at least do what your competitors are doing, and preferably more. As I always say, “The competition doesn’t set the bar. The competition sets the floor.”

This means you can’t just launch your website and forget about it. Look at Yahoo! This is a company that didn’t keep up with the evolution of Google fast enough. They fell behind, and now they’re hurting. They should have done a competitive assessment.

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Level the playing field on Yahoo!, Google and other search engines by buying the branded key words of your competitors. Recently, we turned you on to the importance of buying your own branded key words. By buying your competitor’s branded keywords, you would ensure that whenever someone searches for the name of their business, your company’s name would also pop up in the paid search results. This is a common tool, and one you can use with a clear conscience. While most people think this is something the search engines don’t allow, they do, but with some restrictions. For instance, you shouldn’t pretend to be your competitor or even use their brand-name in your ad. As long as you represent who you truly are, you should be good to go. But you might want to check with each of the search engines you are advertising on to ensure you are not breaking their terms of service.

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With this free testing tool from Google, you can turn your website into a conversion dynamo. Google’s Website Optimizer divides visitors to your website into different groups, presenting each a version of your website in order to track how they interact to your site. You can do simple AB Tests that compare just two or three pages, or complex multivariate experiments.

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That web page title in the top bar of your web browser may be something you regularly overlook as an Internet user, but search engines know its true importance. In fact, they have placed a great deal of trust in what you put on the page title, and it’s a high-ranking factor in current search engine algorithms.

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In your industry, you’re an expert on something. And people want to read about it. Perhaps it’s “event planning,” if you’re a restaurateur. Or it could be  “saving in a recession,” if you’re in the financial industry.” Whatever your area of expertise, the Internet has forums that allow you to share your knowledge with the world.

Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com make it easy for people like you to compose articles on interesting topics. Within this community, you can also create a personal profile about you, your business and your accomplishments. Both of these sites allow you to create content related to your business and expertise. And if done in a thoughtful, compelling way, and updated or new content pages added (they are called ‘Lenses’ in Squidoo, and ‘Hubs’ in Hubpages) can create quite a following that could lead to new customers for your main business.

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