What Online Expertise is required?
What expertise should I look for?
Research: What experiences and what tools are used to identify Keywords and Keyword phrases used in further research and future content? What practices are used to identify people and tribes of potential customers? What mechanisms are in place to identify optimum response rates?
Online Sales: How many years of experience and how much and what have they sold for their clients?
Copywriting: Copywriting should take into the consideration the language and the way of thinking of the online reader. The Internet is separated into groups or tribes. How many years of experience in writing copy specifically for the Internet and the vertical tribes?
Social Marketing: Is it known and understood how to connect and compound not just Twitter and Facebook but also other media marketing channels such as LinkedIn, Articles, Social Bookmarking, Blogs, Forums, Smart pages, Websites, Press Releases, to name a few?
SEO: When writing and submitting direct, indirect content, and linked content, is there knowledge and experience with using search engine and reader compliant internal and external outbound and inbound links to maximize SEO and conversion? Is there proper use of title, meta and anchor tags and text within web pages and all submitted content? Is there knowledge of keyword structure and density and how they relate to recency, relevancy, and other important SEO and conversion criteria?
Lead Nurturing: What is the experience in writing and conducting an automatic lead nurturing campaign? What email and affiliate software and services have they employed? What are the sizes of the client bases for the campaigns? How much experience is there with rapidly growing and maintaining an active prospect and customer list? Are their campaigns connected with auto-response campaigns?
Analytics: Are analytics being employed and are they trackable and reportable across any and all marketing routines? Are there best practices and experiences in place to navigate through the data and make intelligent based recommendations and decisions?
Conversion: Are there experiences and current talent in place to maximize conversion? Is conversion being measured? (lack of conversion can drastically reduce the ability for the anticipated ROI). Is there an
accurate understanding of the marketing conversion components?
Creative
Content
Connectivity
Relevancy
Linking
Message
Offer
Navigation
Cart
Mapping
White Space & Color
Web 2.0 and up-to-date Page Design
Split Testing & Multi-Variant Testing
Monitoring: It has been said that monitoring any event, campaign, function etc. is as much a matter of identifying the thorns before they grow as it is identifying the flowers. With that said, is there demonstrated
evidence that there is the knowledge and experience in place to provide a timely alert of any impending or rising negative issues? Is there also experience with providing a timely alert for area positive in nature? Can the benchmarks for negative and positive issues be knowledgably established?
Without a doubt the world of content creation has finally reached its Internet maturity. Just like Branding, content is the fingerprint of your image and authority.
The top seminar question these days is: how does someone decide on a strategy for Internet Marketing if you don’t have a starting point?