Internet Marketing Post

SEO Primer

If you own a web site that generates business based on traffic and lead generation, search engine optimzation is your friend. SEO is a combination of strategies and techniques applied to site to enhance its "findability" on the major search engines. HUH? you say? It's all about keywords, content, competitors and consistency. Read on.

Keywords - SEO is discovering the keywords to target on your site based on how your audience talks about you and your products.

Content -Content is the structure i.e. menus and text and images on your site - does it support your search engines goals or detract from them? Too much? Too little? Unengaging? SEO addresses all of that. Links to partners online and offering streams of fresh content will also benefit your site ranking.

Competitors - Are there simple missed opportunities to beat your competitor's search engine rankings? If so, attack them and see your company rise to the top.

Consistency - SEO is about a strategy executed with consistency over time. Your search engine rankings will increase over time if you SEO frm is doing it's job.

Let me know if you have questions on this or if you need help getting your SEO strategy in place and executed. It's something we do and you will have fun seeing your site generate the business you desire.

Our Ukranian Adoption

Dear Family & Friends,

 

We wanted to share an incredible thing happening in our lives and about a special little girl that we have grown to love. Below is Sasha’s story and how you might help bring her home to a family of her very own.

Sasha’s Story

Sasha, is a sweet 7 year old Ukrainian orphan. She is a brown haired, brown eyed sparkly girl with spunk and smiles. Smart and active, Sasha is loved and enjoyed at her orphanage where she has lived all of her life. Sasha had the flu when she was 3 years old and as a result has rheumatoid arthritis and some heart health issues. She needs better and immediate medical care then the orphanage is able to provide for her. We are going to adopt Sasha and bring her to the United States to live with our family. Can you help?

 

If you would like to help with this journey, we need prayer and financial support. We are raising funds through grants and donations. My long time friend Teresa and her friends have a non profit set up for just these type of things. If you want to donate, please make a check out to:

Aloha Fellowship

4742 42nd Ave SW #426

Seattle, WA 98116

If you want to learn more about the ministry that has helped us through the process, or you want to host a Ukrainian orphan this Christmas go to Grace Adoption Ministry. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to think and pray for Sasha and John and Jennifer Norene’s travel to Ukraine in the very near future to get precious Sasha!

How NOT to Overdesign Your Email Blasts

I was thinking today about how simple good email post card design is.There is a simple brilliance to great email marketing post card design, actually. That old adage, "don't over do it", it applies here. Here's why:

Email, like most web mediums is scanned - more read then others, but still scanned. Of course in boxes are deluged these days, including mine, and ever changing email addresses and spam filters are a factor. List maintenance is another post, but don't ignore it, it's crucial. Email that stands out is simple, focused, well designed and brings relevant and useful content to it's recipient.

There are two major types of email marketing, (being very general here but hang in there with me). There is email you mail to an existing customer (my favorite) and email you mail to prospective customers. This post is about the former, the ones who love you already. Existing customers are a hotbed of opportunity for email marketing done right. Now for the "doin it right" part. There are (in general) 2 major formats for email, post card blast and email newsletters, this post is about the former.

Great email postcards with good response go something like this:

1. Use one maybe 2 messages, a strong tag and maybe a sub point. Don't over do the copy. Remember, they are scannnning....and they are in a hurrrrry.

2. Use colors that are the appropriate contrast or style for your audience. Older folks like high contrast, younger folks the more hip colors - check a fashion magazine or their favorite web sites and design within the realm of their ability to read and their liking.

3. Choose imagery carefully. Don't pick images that will limit the design appeal unless you plan to design several versions of the piece. For example if you are targeting men, age 40 and up that play sports, be sure to provide a general enough image to keep both the soccer players and the out doors men engaged. Be sure to vary your photos to include all the beautiful people in the world, within your targeted demographic. This is something you can schedule in over time, certainly not something to worry about in each piece.

On a budget or without a photographer, try these sites for reasonable and beautiful work:

www.corbis.com, www.dreamstime.com, www.gettyimages.com, www.istock.com.

Lastly, give your deep divers, or those that want to read more or better yet buy from you, a place to go. Include links to your web site with relevant content to that postcard's message. Specifically designed landing pages are not required, but definitely test landing pages vs deep dives on your web site. And do more of what works. (remember, simply brilliant.)

So, simple but relevant content, stand out imagery that your audience can relate to and links for deep diving.

Have fun, and send along samples if you want to brag on how great your post cards are. Cheers!

Email's Position in the Market - Real Life Thoughts

 

I called a business I frequented years ago today to ask them to please remove me from their email marketing list. The response I got was enlightening. Here is what I learned:

1. New adapters to online media often start with email marketing. Some would say email marketing is on the way out due to social media's onset. Not true. Online techies and long timers often usher out intellectually what the market is still adapting to. So as far as the salon goes, they have been emailing for a couple years now and still don't understand CAN SPAM or how to manage their email marketing agency.

2. New adapters in email marketing often times do not hire agencies or individuals that manage their email marketing deliverability carefully. This was the ninth time or more that I had asked to be removed from their list via email. There was not an unsubscribe link on the email and I had received 2 emails from them that day!

3. New adaptors to email marketing are at legal risk due to their lack of understanding. The woman that took my call repeatedly said "we have nothing to do with that" as if they did not control who was subscribed or unsubscribed from her company's list. (!) As a courtesty, I explained CANSPAM requires they remove me from their list within 14 days and she said "you are the one that gave us your email address."Scary misunderstanding of the legal risk their company is in emailing cluelessly.

4. Opportunity abounds for solid email marketing companies to help these type of clients. Educating them on the importance of list integrity alone would provide a valuable service.

Had any of these conversations lately? Do share.

Solid SEO is Still Solid SEO

It almost seems boring to write a post about how something that has been around for a while hasn't changed that much. In the world of advertising and media, things that don't change seem a bit dry, but reality wins and so goes SEO. SEO, solid SEO that works i.e. drives quality traffic and brand boosting, requires strategy, time, thoughtful integration and that evil dark thing called "hard work". Having optimized many sites by now and being someone who is always looking for the latest, greatest improvement of web methodology for my own curiosity sake and the value of my client's...I have come to the boring conclusion that solid seo, is still solid seo, and requires, like I said, strategy, time, thoughtful integration and just plain hard work, over time. Yes, to make it worse, it takes lots of time, and the first couple of months sometimes don't yield any results. Yes, you read that right. From the client side you will not be able to control Google, Yahoo, consumer interest or the weather. Frightening, but true.

I asked an old colleague of mine yesterday, and incidentally, a brilliant SEO guy, what, after 2 years since we chatted about it, he sees as the top 5 SEO tactics. In other words, what is SEO to you?  Again, not a surprising response, but the answer is still, excellent site architecture, a planned and executed keyword and content strategy and lots of relationshiop building i.e. links. Also on the list is developing and executing a plan to keep your content fresh and inviting to visitors and search engines. It is mind boggling to many in the SEO industry that there are still sites being built today that take zero consideration for SEO. Since the onset of SEO in the mid 90's the means to gain visitors to your site has evolved and SEO techniques have rested on these 5 principles (they vary based on authors, but here is my take):

Excellent Architecture
Domain names that make sense,clean code, lack of search engine crawler obstruction, H1 and other tags and maintaining that "cleanness", all matter.

Keyword Strategy
Tuning into what your customers call your product, not what your sales team or marketers think your customers call your product is crucial. Focus groups and cross company brainstorms sessions work for this. Supplement this research with the many free research tools available (Google's for one) and you are off to a great start.

Content Strategy
What are the topics most interesting to your audience? What information compels your audience to buy from you? What are the key brand statements that need to be integrated into your content? What  Calls to Action work on direct mail and TV. That gets you started on a content strategy - test, test and test.

Link Strategy
I say "relationship building" instead of "Link building" because there are rumblings that Google is also eyeing your use of sloppy, meaningless mutual links. (SEO buyers beware, you should not be paying for this sloppiness) Sometimes links are mutual (like networking relationships) and sometimes they are not. Your site needs to reflect that. Enough said.

Change Cycles
So, SEO tactics may not have changed drastically, but the need to change and add to a web site on a regular basis, keep it dynamic, not static, has not changed. You would not let your TV or direct mail copy go untested, what has your web site not changed for a year? Quarterly, monthly and weekly, even daily schedules are in order for your site. It needs and editorial calendar just like any effective advertising medium.

A planning document with each of the above elements gives you a great launching pad for this effort. Whether you outsource the SEO effort or keep it in house, measure action -> results on a weekly  basis.  Actions that don't work, need to be changed, strategies that fail, rewritten, and on it goes.

The good news is that a well executed SEO plan can yield fantastic results, great brand exposure, clicks and sales from targeted traffic. The time and work yields results and is worth the effort. And so it goes, solid SEO, is still solid SEO.

Guerilla Market Research: Discover Your Prospects on a Budget

Who drives the marketing messaging in your company, really? The engineers? The marketing people? The CEO? The company mascot? The web master? Hopefully your answer to all of the above is "no" and many of you are answering, "our prospects, our market research methods, our online media results". So what's wrong with the technical writers deciding what to call a product?

I find over and over again that companies, especially small and medium size ones, drive their messages and venue approach to their prospects based on who they are and not on their targeted market. We are all better off asking  "Are our prospects watching TV?" "Reading online content?" "Blogging?" "Where are they found?" "What language do they speak these days?" "Do you use that language?" "Are we in their venue?" Or are they trying to find usand once they do they don't understand the language we are using to reach them?

No one has extra market research dollars sitting around these days, so here are some simple steps to take to get to the prospects you are after in their language and in their venue.

1. Online media results. Paid search, web site clicks, banner clicks etc. Which clicks turn to sale? What was the verbiage of the ad that got the click? Or the image? Paid search ad testing is a gold mind for new messages that work in other media t ypes.

2. Talk to your prospects. Have you called back the people who called you last week and didn't buy? Find out why they didn't or who they bought from? Did your process turn them off? Was your web site too confusing? These are all valuable questions to have answered.

3. Surveys Survey Monkey is inexpensive and easy to use. Use it to create simple surveys that survey your prospects and clients on their opinion of your brand and work. Be ready for he honesty the written word brings and put what they say to work for you.

4. Use social media to casually survey your prospects. Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites can provide a wealth of detailed insight into your customers wants and desires, irritations and even feature requests for your product!

Do you have a Twitter account yet? Think it is a waste of microchatting? Thank again. Search on Twittersearch for your brand name and industry terms. What are people saying on those topics? Once you have a Twitter account, search people to find your typical prospects. Follow a few of them for a week. What are they talking about?

 

Are your prospects runners? chocolate lovers? vacation takers? Fan a few of those types of pages on Facebook and observe and participate in the discussions. Where are their passions and motivations? Are they spending according to those online and in retail outlets? Yes.

There are many other means of surveying your prospects interests - these are a few low cost methods to get you thinking their direction, and have a little fun with social media outlets while you are at it. Have fun!