MacDonald on Marketing

Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Welcome to MacDonaldOnMarketing.com. I’m Catherine MacDonald, Internet entrepreneur and small business owner. I’ve been involved in Internet marketing since 1998.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the process of marketing products and services online. When my husband and I founded our web development firm Simply Brilliant Solutions and started developing websites for our small business clients, we noticed something. As our job of creating a website for a client finished, the client’s job was just starting: attracting visitors to the website and converting those visitors into new customers. Many of our clients, experts in their own industries but unfamiliar with online marketing, were unsure how to get started. That’s the reason for this blog.

I aim to make MacDonaldOnMarketing.com the place for small business owners to come for tutorials, tips and fresh ideas about web marketing. I’m not going to be writing posts full of insider jargon and obscure technical debates. We’ll be discussing the basics of online marketing in a way that anyone can understand.

The topics I’m going to cover include:

Small business websites: Internet marketing obviously starts with your website, and we’ll discuss tips and strategies to make sure that your site starts you off on the right foot.

Ecommerce: You may already be taking orders and payments online, or perhaps you are making plans to do so. Ecommerce can help you increase market share and expand into new markets, and we’ll be discussing the different options in easy-to-understand terms.

Search engine optimization (SEO): Everybody wants to get top results on Google and other engines, but most people don’t know how to make this happen. I’ll show you what needs to be done to improve your search engine ranking.

Search engine marketing: SEM is a fancy name for buying paid listings in search engine results on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Google Adwords is the most well-known example. Learn how to get the best value for your SEM dollar.

Blogging: Writing a blog (you’re reading one now) can be one of the most effective online marketing strategies for small business. Learn how to increase search engine rankings and build a loyal customer base by creating a blog your customers look forward to reading.

Social media marketing: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more — find out how to leverage communities like these to make it easy for your happiest customers to spread the word.

Email marketing: We’ll look at good and bad examples of email marketing and discuss how to build a list of people who want to hear from you about your products or services.

Analytics and feedback: How do you know what’s working and what isn’t in terms of attracting visitors to your site and turning those visitors into customers? We’ll talk about ways to track your website traffic statistics and invite feedback from your visitors.

Questions, comments, or feedback about these topics and my posts? Please jump into the conversation in the comments sections of the posts or email me at catherine@macdonaldonmarketing.com.

If you’re a small business owner interested in getting the most out of your Internet presence, subscribe now. Thanks for visiting and come back soon!