Hello my fellow marketing maniacs.  I am sitting here in deep thought, contemplating the new year and cant help but think there is one thing that will be a marketing accelerant in 2009.  What will motivate and drive you or your business in the new year?

I am holding an interactive poll to see what the views for business in 2009 truly are.  Out of the responses, I will pick a winner and that person will receive a FREE gift. There is one rule to this poll. Here it is ….

Your answer/reply must be in good taste, must be honest and not offensive in any manner.  Other than that … whatever your heart tells you when you read the below poll question:

POLL QUESTION: What efforts will bring the most fruit in 2009?

Simply reply to this post with your answers.

In the world of SEO & SEM, there are little nuggets of information that can vastly improve your ranking and overall traffic numbers, literally overnight.

What are they? I call this “The low hanging fruit”. It is the bits of opportunities that hang directly in your face just waiting to be picked. There are many out there, but where and what are they?

I am curious as to what others think their low hanging fruit consists of. Is it adsense, adwords, blogging, twitter or social media, facebook, myspace or something else that just seemed to work like Godspeed after implemented.

Reply to this and share your fruit of opportunity.

Easy. Write articles. Here’s how:

1. Write when you are inspired. it’s 1:35 am and I’m at the laptop. If I don’t “put this down” now – it’ll be gone when I get up at 6:30. Writing shouldn’t be hard. For me, my best creations come between 3 and 7am. (so I’m a little early today)
2. Tell’em “How-To” do it! I love how-to articles! You can tell a reader step-by-step how to do anything.What expertise do you have to share? Turn what you know into an interesting how-to article. Examples: “How Dancing Will Grab Womens Attention,” “How to Find the Best Vehicle for Your Lifestyle,” and “How to Overcome the Fear of Rejection.”
3. Use real life examples. I know many of us are solo professionals, consultants, coaches, etc. and feel strange writing about our clients, BUT where else can you get a real life solution to your readers problem?Keep in mind:
   • Perfectionism and procrastination will keep you from writing. Sometimes good enough is just… good enough!
   • Offer good useable information – not just fluff. And get to the point already! Reading online is hard enough, let alone trying to reach something that holds my interest.
4. Keep your articles to 300-500 words in length. AND forget about all the grammar and usage fluff you learned in school.Writing for the web is a whole different animal. Your style must be conversational. Like your best friend is sitting next to you. Write like you talk so people will know, like, and trust you. Keep sentences 10 words or less.
5. Direct response article writing. Your ultimate goal is for the reader to respond immediately to your article. Click on the link in the resource box and go to our website. Period.
6. Make sure your website is in check. There is nothing worse than having a curious prospect click to respond and the link is outdated or broken.

Action Steps:

• What would it take to write an article regularly? Make it happen.
• What info of value will I provide?
• What support systems do I need in place?

It doesn’t have to be highly complex or profound – just do it! Make it happen!

Jason Trump is the Head Web Guru of JTdesigns.com a web development, coaching and marketing firm, and is known as the guy to call when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Contact Jason today at www.JTdesigns.com

Website conversion is the art and science of getting more of the people who come to your website to take the action that you want them to take – fill out your contact form, read your whitepapers, sign up for your newsletter, or (in the case of e-commerce) buy something. For a company that is trying to build offline business, this action is typically something that gets prospects into the sales pipeline through some form of online registration. For a company or organization that is trying to build awareness, this action can be a number of things – getting visitors to a certain page of the site, getting them to stay longer at the site, or getting them to tell a friend about the site.

The critical point that is commonly overlooked in a ranking-centric mindset is that no number of high search engine positions will address the real problem if your website is not serving as an effective marketing and sales tool. And, as I have said many times before, the overall net effect of raising your conversion rate from one to two percent is the same net effect as doubling your traffic, and it is almost always easier. Increasing the number of visitors to a site that does not convert them effectively is like pumping high performance gasoline into a car with engine trouble – it might help the car to run a little bit better, but if you’d done repairs before adding the premium fuel, it really would have hummed.

In the early days of web development, business owners had learned the very expensive lesson that a Web site with no visitors is of little value. Once the business owner learned that methods could be utilized to increase their visibility through search engine optimization, it then became apparent that the traffic that really benefited them, was “targeted traffic”. It only made sense that if you were selling a solution, the person who will buy the solution are the ones experiencing a problem or challenge. It also became obvious that the best products and services to sell online were niche or specialized markets. Large volumes of “general visitors” (general volume traffic) may have looked nice on a statistics report but only the truly “targeted visitors” (target traffic) were usually the visitors making purchases or doing business at the Web site.

While some search engine marketers were simply offering placement for keywords chosen by their client, other SEO’s realized the value of researching keyword phrases and built strategies that were focused on attracting a specific target market. This is why you would sometimes hear conflicting stories about the effectiveness of search engine marketing. People often had their sites optimized for the wrong phrases. These might be keyword phrases that attracted no traffic all or perhaps even keywords that attracted high traffic but the wrong audience. If targeted traffic was important for success back then, it is absolutely essential that we optimize for targeted traffic now. The reason is that as the web continues to age, peoples behaviour appears to be shifting again.

Plan for the current shift in online visitor behavior

The early online consumer compared to today’s average user was thriving on search engine use most of the time. They’d search out one site then search out another site and literally travel all over the place half of the time, unsure what they were even looking for.
Back then people “surfed the net” but todays online consumer is not surfing as much. Today’s online consumer is becoming educated much more quickly and a whole new trend of online branding is becoming more increasingly important according to a recent survey.

Volume traffic is decreasing.

A California-based research company that measures Internet audiences, recently stated that “nearly 52 percent of Web surfers arrived at sites by direct navigation and bookmarks, compared with about 46 percent during the same period last year.” Even compared to just last year, clearly more people KNOW where they want to go and are directly entering the web address into the browser.

What does this mean ? To me, it is a great indicator that people who have been online for a while, are developing business relationships. People just don’r need to “surf” as much because once customers start doing business online and they like the service, why should they change? If they are happy buying a product from www.barnesandnoble.com, are they not likely to go back and just type in the web address or use a bookmark? As the web continues to mature, watch and see if a whole new wave of branding does not become of major importance on the Web of the future. Businesses who have chosen domain names that are easy to remember and have some branding built in, may see some significant increase