Online Marketing – A Fisherman’s View

February 8, 2011 Filed under: Internet Marketing,SEO — Tags: Internet Marketing, SEO —

Picture your Online Marketing campaign as a fisherman casting his net over the waters of the Internet, looking to attract and catch the most desirable fish — those visitors who will come to your site and take the actions you want them to take. Just as a real fisherman doesn’t want bottom feeders or ‘trash fish’, you don’t want unqualified or disinterested visitors coming to your site. In order to attract the right fish, you need the proper bait and a strong net. On your website, that bait takes the form of keyword phrases. Your fishing net is the content on your website that allows you to reel in your visitors and entice them to take the next step on your site.

courtesy of freefoto.com

The practice of SEO is all about using your bait (keywords) and fishing net (content) to attract and convert the right fish (qualified leads). So, how can you put this fish analogy to work and perfect the sport of SEO? Here are some useful tips:

Choose bait that’s recognizable, tasty, and unique. To attract qualified visitors, you need to include on your website the words and phrases your target visitors will be searching for. Use words your audience uses, not company jargon or technical terms. Make your content readable and enticing. If you go after terms used by lots of competitors, you’ll be like a single fisherman in an ocean of huge trawlers, and few fish will be swimming your way — so strive to stand out. Keyword research can help identify which phrases are most popular and how much competition they have. That’s the science of the sport.

Place your bait where it can be found. Unlike fishermen, you have an invisible helper in your fishing expeditions – the search engines. You can place your bait where they always look – in HTML tags, link text, bulleted content, your first sentence, etc. – and they’ll help it get found by the right fish. Search engines are like every fisherman’s dream — an invisible ally to lead the fish into your clutches. SEO lets you effectively enlist the help of that ally by understanding how the search engines work.

Make your bait easy to identify. Make every webpage about one clearly identifiable topic and introduce it in the first sentence (remember what your English teacher taught about a topic sentence?). Be sure to use your keyword phrases in that topic sentence — this is the artful side of the sport. Then don’t use those same keyword phrases on any other pages – otherwise you’ll compete with yourself and dilute the ranking strength of your page. And your visitors will be like fish fooled by false lures.

Attract the influentials. Fish swim in schools. While they may not have individual leaders, they do follow the school. In marketing yourself on the web, you’ll want to attract the schools, which means getting links from relevant and popular websites, blogs, and social media influencers who can bring schools of qualified visitors to your site, along with links that will enhance your search ranking.

Make sure your net is strong. Once you bring visitors to your website, don’t let them swim out through the holes. Have a clear call-to-action on every page. Link fluidly from one page to the next and encourage them to stay for a while. Don’t include lots of outgoing links, and don’t link to an email address, as they may never return (use a Contact Us form instead). Have a clear strategy for what you want them to do (download a tool or ebook, sign up for a free service, leave an email address, etc.) and know how that fits into your overall marketing strategy and sales funnel.

Learn from your mistakes. Every fisherman has a story about how the big one got away. Your online marketing efforts might have a similar story to tell. But you can use web analytics to make sure you don’t make that same mistake again. Track each element of your online marketing campaign — keyword effectiveness, incoming link quantity and quality, traffic statistics, performance of call-to-action buttons (and more) — and learn what works and what doesn’t work. Then use those metrics to fine-tune the effectiveness of your online marketing tactics.

I guess this is where the fishing analogy ends. I’m not going to suggest that you fry, saute, or otherwise cook your catch…nor does catch-and-release seem appropriate. I trust you know where to take your customers from here.

NOTE: This blog post does not reflect my true thoughts about the sport or politics of fishing.

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10 Best Online Marketing Posts from 2010

December 16, 2010 Filed under: Fun Stuff,Internet Marketing — Tags: Internet Marketing —

It’s December, which means a good portion of what you’ll read and hear from media in the coming weeks is likely to be “Best of 2010” year-end wrap-ups. In that spirit, I’d like to share my favorite blog posts of 2010 in the world of small business marketing. They’re favorites because:

They’re topics that help small businesses grow through online marketing
They are plain spoken and to-the-point
They give practical, usable advice
They’re thought-provoking
All provide original insights on key aspects of Internet marketing and social media

Here goes:

What Do Your Customers Really Want? from M4B Marketing.

50 Can’t Fail Techniques For Finding Great Blog Topics from Copyblogger.

40 Social Networking Sites Specifically for Small Business, Entrepreneurs and Startups from Small Biz Bee.

How to Build a Community from BizSugar.

The Rich Get Richer – True in Organic Marketing from SEOMoz.

Local Search Ranking Factors from David Mihm.

9 Tips That Improved My Blog from Global Copywriting.

Is Social Media Really Anti-Social? from Partners In Excellence.

How to Convert New Visitors Into Returning Readers That Act from Blog Tyrant.

Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps to Love & Success from Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

I invite you to leave a comment and share your favorite posts from 2010 about how to market your business effectively on the web.

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PPC Advertising – Using Your Results to Improve Your Business

April 27, 2010 Filed under: Internet Marketing,PPC — Tags: Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Pay per click, Search Engine marketing —

This is the fourth post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising. Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss. The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more. This is the last article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

What You Can Learn – And What To Do With It

A well-planned and well-executed PPC campaign can achieve your advertising goals AND a positive return on your advertising investment. Data collected from your campaigns can help you answer important questions about your ad campaign, your website and your business. What we didn’t cover last time – what this post is about – is what you can DO with all these answers. Certainly you can use the information to improve your PPC ad campaign (we can do that for you). But the insights you’ll gain can also go further than that.

Critical things you can learn about your market

What search terms are people using when they look for a product or service like what my company offers?
Where (what websites) are people are coming from to visit my website?
What words, designs, or ad copy get them to spend more time on my site?
What gets them to take the actions I want them to take on my site?
How much revenue am I generating for the cost of my PPC campaign?

How to Use What You’ve Learned (more…)

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PPC Advertising – Measurement and Analytics Tell the Real Story

April 20, 2010 Filed under: Internet Marketing,PPC,Web Analytics — Tags: Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Pay per click, Search Engine marketing —

This is the third post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising. Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss. The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more. This is the third article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

The Control Metrics – Measuring ROI

If it’s indeed about control and ROI, then the metrics are key to PPC. And they are. There are innumerable Web Analytics tools available to help you measure and analyze the activity on your website, but the easiest to start with (for free!) is Google Analytics. Anyone who wants their website to work for their business should use Google Analytics. If you’re running PPC ad campaigns, it’s a good place to start, and here are some key metrics to watch: (more…)

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PPC Advertising – Controlling the Inputs to Optimize the Results

April 13, 2010 Filed under: Internet Marketing,PPC — Tags: Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Pay per click, Search Engine marketing —

This is the second post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising. Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss. The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more. This is the second article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

The Control Levers

Picture us inside a big black box. Big – as in the size of your house. On one wall, picture rows of knobs or levers, and then imagine us, on your behalf, poised to turn them, pull them, or simply adjust and tune them. In reality, all the knobs and levers are on our computer, controlled with a simple mouse click. Best of all, they take effect immediately and will start generating immediate feedback. When it’s done well, PPC gives a level of control that’s superior to nearly every other form of advertising. Here’s what we’re controlling to make your PPC campaign work its best for you:

(more…)

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Pay Per Click Advertising 101

April 6, 2010 Filed under: Internet Marketing,PPC — Tags: Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Pay per click, Search Engine marketing —

This is the first post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising. Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss. The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more. This is the first article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

PPC Advertising: It’s All About Control and ROI

Many clients we talk with start out feeling wary of pay per click (PPC) advertising. Maybe they’ve tried it and felt it was a waste of their money. Maybe they’ve read about scams or been approached by PPC salesmen they don’t trust. Maybe they’ve seen false or deceptive claims in sponsored ads on Google. Whatever the source of concern, PPC advertising has suffered from undeserved negative attention because many people don’t give it the patience & attention it needs to perform well. It’s true that PPC can be wasteful if you “set it and forget it.” If ads are not tended and managed, they can burn through money FAST and never have a chance to achieve your goals. On the other hand, a well-crafted and well-maintained PPC campaign can achieve a greater return on your marketing investment than almost any other form of advertising. As in most things, doing it well makes the difference.

PPC Goals

The goals of your PPC campaign should be to reach your intended audience, deliver a compelling message, incent them to take an action, and measure your effectiveness so you can improve next time around. Ultimately, your goal is to achieve a return on your investment for every ad you run, e.g. make more money in new revenues than you spend on each ad. You do this by throwing a broad net when you start; then, over time narrowing it to a laser focus on just the search terms and ad copy that work for you. The immediate goal is to make constant improvements in your campaign; longer term, you’ll make statistically significant improvements in your bottom line and gain insights that will improve your marketing efforts overall.

How it Works

A PPC campaign starts with keyword research, to determine a broad list of search terms you want to test. The goal is to optimize your ad copy and landing page copy using the words that your potential customers use to describe your offerings. How do you find this out?

When we setup a PPC campaign, we use a calculated approach and a variety of specialized tools. We split an ad campaign into multiple ad groups to test effectiveness of ad copy, landing pages, and specific keyword phrases. If necessary, we’ll create multiple campaigns to test different geographical regions and different groups of keyword search terms. We then perform iterative testing of these multiple variations (called multivariate testing) — let them run, collect data, analyze the data, and improve. This is the essence of PPC advertising campaigns — ongoing iterative optimization. Throughout the process, using our experience and tools to constantly tweak and optimize, we keep the best performing variations and update the worst, in an ongoing process of improvement.

Look for my next posting, Part 2 of the series on PPC Advertisting, called “PPC Advertising – Controlling the Inputs to Optimize the Results.” Any questions so far? Want to share your own experience? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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Content or Die?

March 30, 2010 Filed under: Content Marketing,Internet Marketing — Tags: blogging, Internet Marketing, Marketing —

It’s a gloomy, rainy Tuesday in Seattle, and the weather is making me rather philosophical. So, rather than sharing my own tips and experience, I’m going to share my reactions to a recent blog post entitled “A Challenge: Content or Die“. Sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? The author’s point isn’t quite as extreme as the title suggests. I invite you to read it, but let me summarize it quickly: if you don’t keep creating new content, your web presence will stagnate, your search ranking will suffer, your revenues will drop. It may not mean death, but clearly it’s not good.

The author’s point is valid. I’ve been in marketing for a long time. Before the days of social media, marketing consisted largely of advertising, public relations, events and sponsorships. They were all ways of communicating your brand to your public. And they were all big, costly undertakings. Because they were big and costly, each campaign had to last a long time, so marketers got used to communications with a long lifespan. In advertising, you would pay big money to develop an ad campaign, and it would run for months. In PR, you’d need “big news” to compete for limited print stories, and big stories don’t happen very often. And sponsorships or events, well, they only happen a few times a year.

Now, we’re talking about search engines that come looking for new information multiple times a day. They’re hungry and they need to be fed. If you don’t feed them fresh, new food (content), they won’t regard you as highly as sites that do. And they may not come to visit that often, if they don’t expect to get fed. Online marketing, therefore, requires a major change in mindset.

If you want to keep the search engine spiders happy and well-fed, you need to change the way you think about the lifespan of your information. You need to deliver good content on a regular basis and you need to keep it coming. I don’t mean to suggest that content becomes obsolete as soon as it’s published; in fact, if it’s good, it may get shared, bookmarked, retweeted, and linked-to — and in the process get noticed by a far larger audience than you anticipated. But the more frequently you add fresh content to your website or new posts to your blog, the better your chances of ranking well, being found, and building your brand.

The Bottom Line: if you want to market your brand on the web, you need to adopt a new marketing rhythm. Think short and compelling content, frequent publishing schedules, and active online engagement if you want to do effective branding in the virtual world. And measure your results so you can continually revise and improve as you move along.

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What If I Don’t Twitter?

March 8, 2010 Filed under: Social Media Marketing — Tags: Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter —

My primary goal for this blog is to have it address the questions and concerns of our Sound Web Solutions clients. So, I take most of the ideas for my blog posts from questions I’m asked by clients. Let me share with you an interesting question – devil’s advocate approach – I heard from a client recently. Aware, as most of us are today, that Twitter is the hot new thing, this client felt compelled to do something — but didn’t know what. Should one person in the company become their “twitter expert”? Should all employees be told to start tweeting? Should we host a training session of some kind? Then came the devil’s advocate — what if we don’t do it at all? Is that really going to harm us as a company, brand us as a Luddite, leave us hopelessly behind our competition?

What I told this client and will say again is: there are no hard-and-fast rules here. Twitter is simply yet another way to “get out there” in the Social Media realm – both to hear what others are saying and also to be heard. I guess the downside of NOT doing it would just be the loss of an opportunity for participation. Not a dire loss, and not necessarily something that’s going to hurt you. I personally think the best way to get engaged in Social Media is to author a blog and to read, listen and participate on other people’s blogs in your industry. Twitter is a way to send your blog posts out more broadly, to pick up followers who may then become readers of your blog, and to be alerted to what others in your world are saying, writing, and thinking. A decision to NOT participate in Twitter is a little like a decision not to attend a social gathering at a trade show (or not to attend a party in college) – you can still get the content from speakers at the show (or lectures from your classes), but you won’t be plugged in to the commentary & social chatter that goes on around them. There’s certainly value in the chatter, and you gain perspectives and tips you wouldn’t get from the formal speeches.

As is true for much of social media, it’s hard to know what you’re missing unless you try it. There must be some reason why everyone’s doing it. Rather than decide against it because you can’t commit to daily tweeting, designate someone to devote 30 minutes a day for 1 month (even 2 weeks) and then share their impressions about what they’ve learned. That way you can at least develop a point of view on it. The important thing is to try it before you write it off.

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