Archive for May, 2008

I know this sounds like a tall order, but lets look at the facts. According to the recent SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) survey, people are going to spend more and more on Internet Marketing services. If you are not marketing your business online, that means your competition is edging you out by being where the customers are. (and what in the world are you waiting for, a recession? )

On a larger scale, I know of companies that still spend over $100,000 in direct mail campaigns year after year. This is not speculation but based on a conversation with a business owner I met after speaking at the AFSA Marketing Forum this past March. This company paid very little to their online presence, and my bet is that if they invest a fraction of that direct mail money on:

a) Building a user-friendly, search-engine friendly (optimized) website.

b) Perform a simple link building campaign, starting with basic search engine directories and business directories.

c) Allocating a portion of their money for Paid Search which will give them live prospects, which in my opinion is far better than branding via direct mail and praying that someone wants or needs your service.

d) Implementing a solid system for follow up both online using email marketing and off line now that they are warm direct mail prospects, which is a huge difference than buying lists.

How will this save the economy?
Businesses will spend less to attract more targeted customers, which will make them more profitable, assuring that much needed raise – along with keeping the door open. If you work in the direct mail field, you might be saying “he’s trying to ruin our industry”. No, but I am showing you where marketing is headed so you should take this to heart and find a search marketing firm to partner with (shameless plug here) to help your customers maximize their spending. They’ll soon figure this out and you will lose them so you are better off looking like a hero in their eyes by presenting the facts to them.

If it doesn’t save the US economy, I can bet it will change your personal economy.

I recently had a chat with a colleague about promoting a client using social media. Initially I thought it would be a great opportunity but when I found out what industry this person served (not your everyday market) I had to put my thinking cap on to think of out of the box ways to use Social Media to help promote this site. The real kicker came in when I found out that there wasn’t a website (or blog) to work with, which made me have to think even harder.

Never wanting to give up and always seeking to be creative we just started to “think out loud”. The idea of promoting other sites that this guys stuff was sold on came up, but I wasn’t so excited about that. Then I thought “what is the simplest way to create content exclusively for this person without having to employ lots of monitoring (i.e. friend requests, comment management, etc)?” Here is what I came up with:

1. Create a Squidoo Lense. While some may argue the ads are distracting, Squidoo has certainly been an effective medium for many to build a home on the web. A big advantage is that the Squidoo network is pretty solidly trusted by search engines and is gaining consumer popularity. Secondly, they don’t seem to have the blog-spam issues that many blogs suffer from and while there is a certain amount of interaction desired, it seems less cumbersome than with a blog.

2. Get Blog Reviews. I don’t mean paid blog reviews either, but I believe every good online marketer should have industry bloggers that they can turn to when they want an unbiased product review. If you serve a niche market exclusively, you might be able to pull it off yourself, but it would run the risk of bias or concern from other clients, so anonymity, might be in order here.

3. Create a Single Page Website. I always encourage people to have some sort of online real estate. Websites can be costly to build, especially if you want them to look decent and have lots of bells and whistles, but at a minimum, I would recommend putting a simple “about me/us” page with either a logo or a picture if it is promoting an individual.

4. Leveraging Social Bookmarking Sites. Do you remember #4? Now you have “something” to work with in terms of Social Media sites. You might have thought that was the purpose of the Squidoo page, but some people frown on promoting Social Media Sites or other Social Media Sites. I personally don’t think it is 100% taboo, but I understand the caution behind it given that if people can abuse a method of online promotion, they often do.

5. Leverage Social Media Networks. Do some research to find niche social media sites that would welcome content or reviews for the site, product, or service you are promoting. Next, add a Facebook profile (if you or your client doesn’t already have one) and build a Facebook page making both the profile and the page public. Lastly, consider doing a MySpace page and starting a MySpace group for your niche. Keep in mind that success on MySpace is often combined with lots of “maintenance” such as seeking friends to add, seeking groups to join, and monitoring friend requests and comments.

6. Use Public Relations (PR). The way media relations are handled is very different than before blogging and Social Media were such a big item. I would find a way to create news about an upcoming launch or product/service offering and leverage your press contacts (which should include trusted industry bloggers) and seek to not only get your press release picked up, but have a goal of being interviewed on noted industry blogs and mainstream media venues.

7. Hold a Contest. Let bloggers, colleagues, friends, and media contacts know about it and someone (if not many) will pick it up and run with it.

8. Go Viral. Closely related to promoting a contest would be promoting some sort of “freebie” – perhaps an ebook, a download, an MP3, a even a coupon for a deep discount. Anything that would get people excited enough to visit your website and most of all tell others about the giveaway.

Having a website and a blog are clearly the top ways to leverage social media because you get plenty of opportunities to provide much desired content to those you network with, which ultimately is pushed out to those that they network with. Once you have made your headway with the initial 8 steps mentioned, I would take the time to build out the single page website, maybe adding some articles to it and then try and push for a blog. A no-comment blog is better than no blog at all if keeping maintenance and monitoring down is truly an issue. Hopefully the success will be able to wake up the client enough to want to invest time in building community by opening comments and interacting with their audience (read – prospective clients).

And the winner is… Joe Cheray from who “double blogged” about a very special lady; her grandmother. Congrats Joe and I hope you enjoy your massage.

Here are Joe’s winning posts:
http://wildheartsworks.com/156/in-memorial-of-a-special-woman/
http://joe.bloggingexpertise.com/223/in-memorial-of-a-special-woman/

Stay tuned for more blogging contests at OldSchoolSEO.com, the new home of Search Engine Marketing Exposed.

Is your companies website failing? Perhaps you’ve spent some money on it and it has just never produced for you. Maybe you have one of those companies where the corporate website was the owners kids school project and she is afraid to hurt the kids feelings (I am not kidding here – this was a real life scenario and no one in the company could bring the subject up).

In the course of my day I look at lots of websites; often people even pay me to look at their website and tell them what is wrong with it. Here are some of the more common challenges that I have run into. I urge you to take a look at your website and see if it suffers from any of these challenges – then take action and change it.

1. Takes Too Long To Load. Whether its flash or graphics that were never compressed or optimized for the web, most people showing up to your website want results – and they want them pretty quickly. It’s funny when you think back to the days of dial up and now we think our hi-speed connections are too slow. You don’t want to fall prey to this simple to correct issue.

My Advice: When testing your website, make sure you clear your cache, so you can know how long it actually takes between the time a user shows up and is able to read what’s on your site. Also, have others outside of your company test the site and give you their sincere feedback.

2. The Site is Composed Exclusively with Graphics or Flash. Assuming you care something about search engines finding your website, you need to know that search engines care more about written content than anything else. It is next to impossible for a search engine to visit your website and know what it’s about if it is all graphics or flash – without a little help behind the scenes anyway. Exceptions would be sites that serve arts, music, and graphics related communities.

My Advice: If you feel the need to show someone a flash presentation, give him or her the option to click and view it on another page.

3. It is a Hodgepodge of What Everyone Wants to See on the Company Website. This is one of the most frustrating things that I have personally had to deal with in a corporate setting. Everyone has an opinion about how the website should look – and none of them understand website usability (what the user wants and needs to see based on human psychology). It’s turning customers away, but they won’t tell you that and it will take someone taking a bold stand and a humble owner to give up their personal desires in exchange for winning over new customers – and it’s well worth it.

My Advice: Hire a professional design firm with usability expertise to build your website, or if you already have a website, hire a usability consultant to help you restructure it. How do you know if your web designer is a usability expert? Just ask them “what role does usability play in their design process?” If the phone goes silent or you get a glazed over look, move on. Of course, if you need a usability expert, you contact my firm, Web Traffic Team, as we have alliances with the top usability professionals in the industry.

4. Advertising? Yes, people often use advertising on their company website thinking that it is a good strategy for making money from the website. If you have a business with a website, the only thing you should be doing to make money is optimizing your website so that you earn your visitors business. It really doesn’t make sense to send customers to your competitors. If your website isn’t profitable, you need to take a hard look and ask why. Chances are it is a combination of not enough visitors, the wrong type of visitors, or somehow not instilling confidence in the mind of your prospect.

My Advice: If you have any kind of advertising on your website, get rid of it. Take a look at your web stats and if you aren’t getting at least 100 unique visitors per day then you need to look at implementing a solid web marketing strategy. If you are getting lots of visitors, but not converting customers, then you need to hire a usability consultant to find out why.

5. Not Capturing Visitors Information. I don’t mean deceptively, I mean you should be asked them for their name and email address so you can market to them, ask for their feedback, and be an informational resource for them. The most common way of doing this is to free ebook or newsletter in exchange for their name and email address so you can add them to your prospect database.

My Advice: Implement an email capture system on your website. As a Contact Contact Partner, my firm (Web Traffic Team) can offer you a FREE 60 day trial of the leading email marketing system available which offers simple to integrate tools for your website. Contact us today to get info on getting your free trial email marketing software.

6. Not Reaching Out to Your Customers. Closely related to #5 is reaching out to your prospects and customers consistently which should induce sales from prospects and repeat sales and referral from past customers.

My Advice: Once you have implemented your email marketing software, make a consistent effort to reach out to customers and prospects at least once per month. If you don’t have an email marketing software provider, I recommend getting a FREE Trial from Constant Contact.

SEO (search engine optimization) is clearly an important component of having a successful website, but as you can see there are many Non SEO issues that affect how successful your website is.

I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at seo(at)oldschoolseo.com or 800-461-6207

Download a PDF version of this article.

Many bloggers complain of comment spam, which of course is often remedied by a simple plugin (at least for WordPress users). Many others don’t seem to have a problem with spam, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. It may mean that nobody is visiting their blog. Personally, I hate spam but the fact that I get more and more of it confirms that my blog is getting more and more visibility.

If you aren’t getting spam, check your web stats and see if you are getting visitors, not just viewers, but “bots” as well, which is an indication of how often your site is being spidered by the search engines – which is related to how much online exposure your site or blog has. If no one is finding your site then building traffic is a great place to start.