Ann Siegle

What happens if you stop developing content on your web site? What happens to traffic to your business web site? In a Russian-roulette-style marketing experiment, we’ll see exactly what happened with a client’s case. In August, this client blogged two or three times a week, and traffic rocketed up 129% in a month’s time. In September, we asked the client to hold on blogs for a few weeks, and these are the early October results: As you can see from the above chart, traffic is…

Effective internet marketing. What does that really mean? What if all of your online activities were aligned to create not just traffic, but leads? What if all of your internet marketing activities drove prospects to your web site (your hub of your hub-and-spoke model of marketing) where you could educate, inform, excite and capture their contact information for further marketing? Let’s dissect these charts below: These are ACTUAL client metrics. Prior to starting an inbound marketing program, this client averaged…

January 1st is the annual Setting of the New Year’s Resolutions. All across the world, people are vowing to work out more, eat more fruits and vegetables, get more work done, take the Facebook app off their smartphone and be nicer to everyone they see. Resolutions almost always get broken, why? They didn’t follow the S.M.A.R.T goal setting model. Specific Measureable Attainable Realistic Time-Bound The S.M.A.R.T framework for goal setting works because it frees you up from the nebulous “I will…

How can content development, lead capture tools, Facebook and Twitter can generate 30 new leads a week for your retail e-commerce store?  Lead generation tools, plus social media marketing and blogging are a powerful small business and retail e-commerce combination that works for e-commerce retailers. Let’s look at the combination that is working so well for a client that they’re generating more than 30 qualified leads a week, on average, and have boosted sales 500% in one quarter. We’ll first…

How to write a business blog post in 3 easy steps? Steps even your average first grader knows? Indeed, writing itself is one of the biggest hurdles that business bloggers face. Here are three easy steps to get your writing mojo going. Why learn to write better? The biggest downfall many business bloggers make is not blogging enough – 3-5 times a week is optimal to drive traffic. Yet many would-be writers are not comfortable with the process of concepting,…

Did you know Google changed their search algorithms last year? That flew under the radar of most business owners and a few marketing directors. They are heavily emphasizing new, quality content on web sites over things like meta tags and keywords, and other ‘behind-the-scenes’ coding. If you want your company to rank under a particular long tail keyword search (such as engravable awards Lansing, Michigan, or insurance agent west Lansing or East Lansing chiropractor) you have to have fresh, new content…

13 steps to, 7 top tips for, 9 ways to get more…. Why do we gravitate to lists in business blog posts? There are a lot of scientific reasons. But the clearest reason is this: While googling “how to make a bow and arrow, ”  a woman and her seven-year old child  selected the one titled “How to make a bow and arrow in 13 steps.” When asked why she selected that out of the top ten results, she said it was that…

Have you ever stumbled across a tweet that had an interesting topic that you wanted to read? I did, recently. It was about how large manufacturers in a particular industry listen to customers to influence business decisions. Who wouldn’t want to read that, right? In particular, they mentioned a brand that I love.  I was using my phone to read the tweet, which led to a teaser, not a blog, so I didn’t download it at that time. So I went…