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… is there such a thing?  Yes and no.  The one question I get asked is whether there’s a system, package, or “secret sauce” to online marketing success.  Its simple and complicated at the same time…

The secret formula depends on what your goals are, who your audience is, the combined efforts of your online marketing arsenal, and many other considerations need to be made.   My next comment?  Why chase a secret sauce of some so-called guru?  Why not create your own sauce… you know, in case your not up for chasing the secret weapon of the month.  Just a thought.

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Daily blog tips brings a great post on direct traffic, which is often overlooked.  Direct traffic can be some of your largest numbers - coming from domain recognition, branding, and your social media marketing efforts… and should definitely not be overlooked.

The blog post, “Direct Traffic: 5 Reasons You Should Care” covers where direct traffic can come from and why  you should even care.  Great read too.

To Your Success,

Maria Reyes-McDavis

Web Success Diva

“Don’t Pimp Yourself on MySpace” free online marketing teleseminar coming in 6 days.  Don’t miss this very informative free call.

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… to initiate a conversation with your audience. At the very least, make some point of contact and let the chips fall where they may. Why, you ask? Its really three-fold.

• Its just another opportunity to engage in conversation with your audience.
• If done right, you could encourage blog RSS subscriptions, a very good thing.
• Your helping encourage more comments which helps you in the end too.

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… it really matters. Why? Because your results will be very different between the two. If you are always following the pack — you will always get the butt end of the stick. Period. Social Media, by its very nature, is very dynamic and ever-evolving. Tools that were effective last week, may change (in various ways…) that should cause you to change your marketing tool focus.

Let me illustrate, using examples of factors that should have affected your marketing strategy in the past months:

• When Scribd (a social media marketing website - was once a great tool), changed its linking structure - all links became not valid, making it useless as a search engine marketing tool. Most online marketers dropped off Scribd because of it. However, if they (and in turn you) had done a little investigating - it would be known that by using their new editing tool, all past links could be updated after the change AND new links could be used. Knowing this, kept my team ahead of the game - because we were able to capture a significant amount of traffic knowing what we knew.
• Squidoo. Huh? Yep. It’s likely you have no idea what this is about. Squidoo, another place to develop great conversations in your marketing efforts, has had its relationship with Google changed in the past months. Understanding how Google is treating Squidoo in indexing and ranking would really be helpful to understand the changes necessary in your Lenses to keep the traffic coming.

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… Yep. Its true, something of Google can be of use to you… And, you will actually enjoy this tool that Google has for you: Google Alerts.

Coaches, consultants, speakers, writers, book authors, trainers, lawyers, online entrepreneurs, and really anyone who is:

• … wanting to develop a solid online brand.
• … wanting to build online and offline expert status.
• … wanting to network and build potential contacts for joint ventures.
• … wanting to “get your name out there”

… should, dare I say, must use Google Alerts.

How you ask? So glad your on top of things Here’s a list of how the Diva companies use Google Alerts as a tool in our online marketing arsenal:

• by entering my name (Maria Reyes-McDavis) and our company names (Peas and Carrots Company, Web Success Diva, and MariaReyesMcDavis.com) we are able to track what is being said, linked, or noted about our companies online. This is critical for monitoring your online brand and reputation. Information travels fast online - you need to be aware of what others are saying — your potential clients will be seeing this same information.
• we enter the names of who we consider to be direct and indirect competition. Not only will you get a lot of information about your competitor (I’m assuming we all understand why this is very important), you also will pick up great information on what is online in your industry or niche. Your smart competitors are searching for what you are, follow their lead to cut your work in half.
• we will also enter the names of those who we want to network or connect with on professional levels. Let me illustrate.  We travel to conferences at least 20 times a year, while we are at these events, we make sure to network, network, network.  Fly home and enter those contacts which interest us most - we watch what their doing so we can network at a deeper level with them.  Just last night, we sent a congratulatory email, for an award received by one of our