Our guest this session is Joel Fortner. Joel works with the Poimen Group with Chris LoCurto. He has experience and a great background in online marketing. You can find Joel at ChrisLoCurto.com and on Twitter.

Online Marketing Tips from Joel Fortner (1-14)Tell a little bit about how you got into marketing.

While working for the Air Force in Washington DC, He felt God calling him to do more than he was doing. He working at trying to figure out exactly what that meant. This led him to start a marketing business, Get Serve Keep.

His life purpose is not to be a marketer – it is to take his skills to help others change their lives by changing their business.

Every business has three businesses within it: Get, Serve, and Keep. Focusing on that first part, how can we get clients?

Marketing is not simple.

Getting customers is difficult, so you need to have a strategy in place.

  1. Find
  2. Identify
  3. Educate
  4. Motivate

What are some specific things that we can do to identify who our ideal client is?

  1. Take your own experience, see what you’re already trying to solve.
  2. If you have a way to solve a problem that you know is a major pain point for people, and you can deliver on that well, you have a business.

What are some places we can look to find potential clients?

Joel focuses on inbound marketing, which is trying to capture people doing searches (i.e. Google) and growing an e-mail list.

What are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices?

  1. Create content that solves problems.
  2. Make sure the headlines match what people search for.
  3. Include the right keywords in your content.

Excerpts vs. Entire post

These are different thoughts about how blog posts should be presented. Each strategy works for different audiences. The only way to find out what is best for you is to test them.