Revenue Optimization and Digital Marketing Consulting Services

Since getting started in digital marketing in 2004, I have worked with a wide-range of businesses across a variety of industries and business models, seen Internet Advertising revenue grow from $9.6 billion in 2004 to $36.5 billion in 2013, witnessed the dramatic shift from traditional advertising to digital, seen social media change the way we communicate and absorb news and information and engage with consumers, watched as Public Relations, Social Media, Link Building and content creation have morphed into inbound marketing, have been on a rollercoaster ride with all of Google's advertising products and SEO algorithm updates, seen explosive growth and market penetration for Mobile and Tablet devices and most recently ran across a few Pandas, Penguins and Phantoms. Here is how I approach working with most businesses:

Business Discovery and Product Optimizations

First, I would learn about the team, websites, business models, competition and industry:

• Go over P&L with authorized personnel to learn more about your business models and revenue drivers, understand potential future resource requirements and identify potential cost savings opportunities
• Gain an understanding of who you have from a personnel standpoint and what they do for your business
• Learn about any external contractors, vendors or service providers you use
• Invite and encourage team members to provide me with a list of the 5 - 10 greatest opportunities they feel you have for revenue growth and/or cost savings

• I would educate myself about your industry by reading various articles, whitepapers, case studies and books by industry thought leaders
• Do a comprehensive competitor analysis on your top competitors to learn about what they are doing well from a product/monetization/conversion/marketing standpoint

• Analyze traffic and conversion data (sales funnels, conversion rates) by traffic source (SEO, Direct, Referral, Paid, Email, Affiliate), by device type (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet) and by conversion type (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary) over time to identify and prioritize conversion growth opportunities
• Identify how we are making money, who we are making money from and how we can increase that by finding new advertisers, creating new revenue generating products or by simply charging more or tweaking your business model
• Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, SEMrush, Moz, Majestic SEO and the like to gain an understanding of traffic, conversion, ranking and link history and identify any significant declines in traffic due to a Google penalty, if you launched a new site that negatively impacted SEO traffic or overall conversion rates and etc.

Revenue and Traffic Optimizations

I would create strategies based upon my research and present them to your team to refine and gain buy-in:

• Prioritize what needs to be optimized for conversion based upon data analysis
• Work with product, creative and technology personnel / teams to plan, strategize and execute
• Monitor and adjust campaigns based upon the conversion test results
• View a conversion rate optimization case study to learn more

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - this is an obvious opportunity for all businesses. In addition to incorporating rich snippets (Schema.org) into your website, we would clean up the hierarchy of the site, ensure all necessary HTML elements are in place, ensure our content is unique, complete and up-to-date and drive a healthy dose of inbound marketing activity at your business. I have created a proprietary SEO analysis and optimization process that includes a 40-point manual inspection, but I won't bore you with those details.
• Paid Search - we need to start driving tier 1 (Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo Adcenter, etc) and tier 2 (TrafficVance, Adknowledge, 7Search, etc.) traffic to our sites. We could also discuss creating some lead-gen landing pages to monetize paid search traffic sources on a margin-buy basis after we get your main site cleaned up
• Email - Email marketing, or database marketing, is a powerful tool that can drive an incredible amount of traffic and revenue. Most people don't know how to get the most from their email lists. Improving email open rates and click through rates while ensuring we are not getting flagged as spam is priority number one. In addition, the amount of times per week we email people and content of those emails can all play a huge factor
• Affiliate - this can be an extremely lucrative and relatively non-resource intensive traffic acquisition method that is usually driven by sales people believe it or not. The right affiliates can drive significant traffic and revenue, that said, for every good affiliate there are hundreds of bad affiliates
• Social and PR - we can drive lot's of traffic and engage with our target audience but it is more than likely not going to drive direct revenue unless it's in the right market. Social can be a powerful customer service tool though, and that shouldn't be overlooked

• We need to establish an active Public Relations process that generates top-down inbound press (TV, Print, Radio) but with a digital twist (More Traditional Link Building)
• Influencer outreaches to find relevant, authoritative figures in your space and getting them to push your website to their followers is a great way to drive traffic and awareness
• Marketing the awesome videos, info-graphics and imagery you create is a great way to get the absolute most we can from the content we create as well as provide SEO value
• Social Media is something that most online businesses need to engage in. That said, social definitely makes more sense with certain industries

• You need to have unique, expert, complete and regularly updated written content both on-page and externally linking into your site
• You need to create White-papers, Case Studies, Research Papers and other types of Decks/Presentations and publish to sites like SlideShare and Docstoc
• Videos, info-graphics and other imagery are great ways to drive incremental traffic, engage users and establish trust with your community

If you want to take your business to the next level, contact me today