I started the Internet Marketing Course led by Peter Graves as an internet marketing novice, with the task of increasing visitors to a luxury products website (www.luxos.com), and with the uneasy feeling that if I didn't succeed, I wouldn't be website editor at Luxos for much longer...
That was in November 2009, so almost a year ago. The two-day course provided a comprehensive overview of the tools and techniques that I would have to use, from Analytics to DmoZ, including things such as keyword grouping, PPC, SEO, article syndication, social networking, link building, newsletters and much more.
Putting all this into practice has been a gradual process, mainly because of time limitations (I also write and edit), but things have improved and I'm still at my desk at Luxos! Every morning I take a look at the statistics, using Analytics to discover how many visits we've had to which pages, Webmaster to count the links, and so forth.
Over the last six months, our indexed URLs have gone up from 120 to 844, incoming links from 127 to 404, visits per month from 3,391 to 13,232, and the Alexa global rating has gone from 786,015 to 235,504.
There have been some interesting incidents that gave us an indication of how to improve traffic. One day in early September 2010, our visitors doubled. We did some research and discovered that an article that we had written on a fashion show and posted on line well before the competition received a Facebook link posted by the fashion brand itself on their own Facebook page. During the course, Peter had laid great emphasis on the fact that content is king, and this was an eloquent demonstration.
There's no doubt that we've still got a long way to go to get the site up there with the major players, but after thirteen months on line, things are going in the right direction.
The Internet Marketing Course was enjoyable and informative, and the notes that I made, along with the official Course Notes, are still an invaluable source of information for moving ahead. I have the feeling that Internet marketing is not a totally exact science, and that it requires not just knowledge and application, but also observation, and occasional strokes of good fortune that brighten one's day and provide clues of where to go. But it's essential to have an overview of the subject in order to know how to act, and the Course provided exactly this in a very efficient way. Highly recommended.
Henry Neuteboom
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