Internet Marketing Blog

Not only do people consider the distribution of Yellow Pages phone books obsolete. So does the law.

Last week, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed the first vote towards banning the delivery of Yellow Pages. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco is the first city in the nation to restrict the distribution of the book.

If the bill passes its second vote this week, the new legislation will launch a three-year pilot program, starting on October 1, 2011. That program will ensure that Yellow Pages are prohibited from being delivered to private residences and businesses in San Francisco unless they have been specifically requested. Otherwise, the distributor will be subject to administrative penalties.

What does this ban mean?

This bill indicates the government’s determination to protect both the interest of its citizens and the environment. Consumers increasingly consider online services before Yellow Pages as they make purchase decision. They are not interested in unsolicited mail. If they need some product or service, they can search for it in search engines or ask friends on social media.

How should you prepare for such developments?

You should keep building your online presence. Educate your target audience about your industry and how it connects to their day-to-day lives. As we have previously discussed, if you are ahead of the curve and following closely the shift in consumer behavior, you can own this new space and become a trusted advisor online.

Should we expect other governments to follow suit? Probably. In any case, act before your city does.

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I have enjoyed working with both of these clients.  Gus from Milestone Electric and Jason from Powell Electric both do fantastic jobs at running their companies.  The customer is always first and customer satisfaction is always the highest priority.  Everything else falls into place.

Posted in: Vital Storm by admin /
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Your website layout and navigation play a critical role in capturing attention and pulling visitors deeper into your site. If your navigation comfortably guides the visitor through your website or landing page, it will be natural for them to stick around. On the flip side, if your layout is distracting or confusing to the visitor, they will probably leave in a hurry.

To test your website navigation and layout, pretend you are a new prospect and ask yourself the following questions. (Or better yet, find someone who has never seen your site and ask them to answer these questions.)

  -  Where do your eyes go first?
  -  What is the most important thing on the page?
  -  Where do you think you are supposed to go next?
  -  Are there any distracting or confusing menu items or links that are tempting you to click on them?

A slight increase in your conversion rate can have a huge impact on your sales.  Stay tuned for more Proven Strategies to Boost Your Website Conversion Rate.

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Link building should be considered phase two of any SEO campaign (on-site optimization being phase one) and is a critical component of maintaining site ranking and establishing a trust factor with the search engines.

Link building is an ongoing campaign necessary for improving a website’s inbound link stream which can help promote your brand and overall visibility in the search engines. Link building can also help boost unique visitors to your site which in turn can lead to a boost in conversions. Link building efforts come in many forms including: local profiles, blogging and blog commenting, social networking, directory submission and online publicity, among others.

The overall goal of a link building strategy is to grow links from many different, but relevant, sources over time. Most link building strategies range from 3 months to a year and should incorporate 10-20 different scheduled tasks a month. It is important to create a very specific link building schedule and stick to it as much as possible. Growing links too fast raises a red flag with the search engines and can result in negative consequences. Growing links slowly helps establish a trust with the search engines, leading to better positioning in their results.

The first step in developing a link building strategy is to conduct a link audit for your website and its top three competitors. Google Webmaster Tools can analyze your site while Link Diagnosis (both free services) can be used to analyze the competition. Conducting a link audit helps establish a baseline strategy by determining how many one-way links are already pointing towards your site. Depending on the age and size of your website, an audit could return with 100, 1,000, or even 100,000 one-way links directing traffic to various pages on your site. It isn’t necessary to visit all 100,000 links, but you should take a good sample (roughly 1000) of the listed links and visit each one to determine what kind of link it is. This is called creating a link portfolio.

The person conducting the link audit should keep an eye out for “bad” links coming from places like adúlt or gambling sites. Search engines keep track of how many “bad” links a website has and the greater the percentage of links coming from these sites the more poorly it reflects on the website. Again, trust is the most important thing to establish between a site and the search engines. The number of “bad” links has a negative effect on a website’s trust factor.

Analyzing a competitor’s website helps you determine if there are any good places you should be focusing your link building activities, but aren’t. It also lets you know what kind of competition there is online. If competitor X has 7,500 links, competitor Y has 12,000 and competitor Z has 23,000 one-way links, then a company with only 2,000 links knows it has a lot of work do to before it can effectively compete in the same space.

When developing a link building strategy, you need to create a schedule of diverse activities. Search engines want to see a blended approach because it demonstrates a commitment to site branding. It also lets the search engines know that your site is legitimate and employing white hat SEO techniques. These efforts can include creating social networking profiles, article marketing, and online video marketing.

The easiest place to start with link building is directory submission. You should submit your site to reputable directories like Yahoo! Directory, Dmoz and Business.com, as well as industry specific onlíne directories. Just double check that your website isn’t already lísted in a directory before submitting a new profile. Duplicate submissions look bad to search engines as well as consumers because it shows a lack of attention to detail and can appear spammy. If a website is already listed, make sure the profile is up-to-date.

Along with online directories, you could consider becoming a member of industry associations. While it often costs to join these associations, it helps lend credibility to your site and can help position you as an industry expert. You should try to promote your website as an “authority” in your industry by placing links in online arenas that correlate to your industry/products and that will drive appropriately targeted traffic to your site. Industry associations are also a good place to develop relationships with other members.

You can help promote yourself as an industry leader by creating, and commenting on, industry blogs. Producing your content as opposed to just re-posting work by outside sources lends credibility to your site and encourages consumer trust in the expertise of your company and you as a writer. It can also help create a conversation with customers as opposed to the one-way communication of a website. Blogs that allow for comments encourage consumer participation.

Leaving appropriate comments on other blogs (comments that actually contribute to the conversation, not just things like “Thanks for the post!” or “Great ideas!”) helps grow relevant links back to your website and promotes your company’s authority as a leader in your industry.

As you promote your website and build its authority as an industry leader, natural inbound links will develop overtime. As your company blog or white paper is discussed or cited, as your product/service is reviewed and promoted by word-of-mouth over social networking sites or as your online press releases get picked up by various news sources, your campaign will grow to include links not directly created by your website’s link building efforts.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to link building (just like most SEO efforts) is that it must happen over an extended period of time. It’s easy for website owners to get anxious and want to see immediate results and over-aggressively push link building efforts. Doing so can result in negative consequences. Link building isn’t just about boosting the number of one-way links pointing to your website; it is also about building and managing an online brand that resonates with consumers.

Posted in: SEO by admin /
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I must admit, I’m a Google addict. Their products and beta products are some of the best I’ve seen. I rarely find something I don’t like or at least admire. One of my favorite things to do when I have some down time is to visit Google Labs. I love to visit Google Labs because I can find the latest and greatest Google projects and test them out there. Sometimes these Google experiments have nothing to do with my industry and I just check them out for personal enjoyment but other times I discover new finds.

Follow Finder

Such an event occurred the other day when I discovered one of their works in progress, Follow Finder. Follow Finder is a tool that allows you to enter a twitter username and the tool then analyzes the info to suggest other twitter users whom you should follow. I haven’t put this tool to practical use yet but I have used it to see what it does. I was surprised by the number of suggestions it came up with that I was actually interested in.

Not only is this a great tool for you to use personally, but you should also suggest it to your twitter followers. They may find a wealth of information they would have otherwise taken much longer to find.

Google Moderator

Google Moderator is another recent experiment that I found interesting. This is similar to a forum. You can ask questions, respond to questions and vote on others queries and responses. Your audience can vote on your submissions and, all in all, this platform is a great way for every person’s voice to be heard.

Apply this to your social media strategy by keeping tabs of who is talking about you, your industry or major concerns you can address. This is a great way to interact with others in your industry or customers who have questions and concerns about your products or other problems they may have.

Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to enter search terms and track how often they are being searched. This is a great addition to the Google Keyword Suggest tool, as mentioned in the How To Use Strong Keywords blog. Not only can you see which topics and searches are currently trending across the internet, but you can customize this for your own purposes. Track your keyword search trends!

I like to use this tool because I often wonder just how often our target keywords are being searched. I can certainly check this out using the Google Keyword Suggest tool but I can do that with much more efficiency and in real-time by using Google Trends.

Wondering whether these are really any good or not? Go try them out! I am already biased toward anything Google publishes so you should probably find out for yourself. And remember to check the Google Labs website frequently for more amazing tools to help with your professional networking and blog marketing.

Posted in: Google by admin /
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If you don’t know what Facebook is, you certainly need to. The social networking website is a mega-giant among online communities, and boasts more than 500 million active users. That’s more people than live in the continental United States, in case you thought you hadn’t read it right. Facebook allows people to stay in touch with their friends as well as meet new people through existing social connections, and it offers an astounding number of virtual “groups” that let people interact through common interests, professions, schools and the like.

Facebook Places is one of the newest evolutions of the Facebook world. It lets people use their smart-devices to publish their location in the real, physical world on a map available to their Facebook friends. According to Facebook, the new functionality lets users share where they are, connect with nearby friends, and find local deals. Find local deals? That’s right. That’s where you, as a business owner, come in.

The idea is fairly simple: reward your customers for coming to your physical location. Once you setup your Facebook Place, you can offer customers benefits for “checking-in” at your business location – which of course requires them to be there in the real world. For instance, you could offer 10% off a purchase with every tenth “check-in,” an entry to win a gift certificate by “checking-in,” or any amount of other benefits associated with one or cumulative “check-ins.”

First things first, though. How can you setup Facebook Places to help build your business? Assuming you already have a Facebook account set up, you first need to “check-in” from your place of business. If you have the Facebook App for your iPhone or smart-device, you can do this by clicking on the “places” tab underneath your inbox.

For those who don’t use the Facebook App (you may want to start), you can browse to touch.facebook.com on your phone’s web browser. If your location doesn’t show up in the list of places near your location, you may have to add it. Once you’ve checked in, click the “Is this your business?” link at the bottom of the page.

At this point, you need to verify that you’re actually the business owner. By verifying ownership you can setup your Place with its own Facebook account and begin tracking check-ins from your customers and others. This process entails providing a variety of information such as your FEID, Articles of Incorporation, and possibly more. Simply follow the prompts to get your business listed.

Once you’ve completed the verification process you’ll need to wait for the “Okay” from Facebook’s team. As soon as you have it, your new Facebook Place is ready to be used.

So how do you start “doing it?” Well, talk to your customers. Print out business card sized promotions that explain the benefits of using Facebook Places and hand them out. Maybe get a simple promotion sign printed up to hang up in your windows or post in front of your place of business.

When it comes to building your business, every effort counts. Don’t miss out on your opportunity to use Facebook Places to your benefit.

Posted in: Social Media by admin /
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What It Does:

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.

Today, the most common way to measure the impact of these types of changes is to do a simple before-and-after analysis. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during or between the before and after, including holidays, weekends or changes to end user behavior or advertiser behavior.

ACE allows you to test and measure changes in real-time by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign. By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your Search and Content campaign changes produce statistically significant results.

Why You’d Use It:

By using ACE, you’ll be able to better optimize your account by seeing how changes to keywords, bids, ad groups and placements impact your campaign performance.

Posted in: Google, Pay Per Click by admin /
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What it does:

AdWords automated rules let you schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify. For example, automated rules make it easy to:

• Change your daily budget on peak shopping days
• Modify your Max CPC bids based on CTR or conversion rates
• Enable ad text directing users to a promotional landing pages late on a Sunday night

Automated rules give you the flexibility to make changes to a single part of your account or across multiple campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords at once.

Why You’d Use It:

Automated rules are designed to save you time and help you manage your AdWords account more efficiently. If you regularly log in to make manual changes to your account, we encourage you to give automated rules a try.

Posted in: Google, Pay Per Click by admin /
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This new AdWords targeting feature lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). However, synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) are not considered close variants. Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. Correct usage: +formal +shoes. Incorrect usage: +formal+shoes. Incorrect usage: + formal + shoes.

If you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today, adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an ROI comparable to that of your phrase match keywords. Compared to using only phrase and exact match keywords, using modified broad match can greatly reduce the number of keywords needed to generate desirable volume because each keyword can match countless word order and spelling variations.

If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account today, you may consider using the modifier with keywords you’ve inactivated due to poor ROI or unwanted matches too difficult to manage with negative keywords. It’s also important to know that switching high volume existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score.

Posted in: Google, Pay Per Click by admin /
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We can all get a little carried away with the latest marketing trends and technological solutions but when all is said and done a Web business strategy must be based on delivering content in the form of text, images, audio and video in informative, entertaining, and above all memorable presentations that influence perception and trigger action.

Everybody understands businesses have to make monéy in order to survive, but all too often companies waste valuable resources following trendy techno-fads that don’t deliver meaningful, memorable content that influences market behavior, creates brand awareness, delivers service support, promotes positive public relations, generates leads, or increases sales.

Confessions of a Social Networking Misanthrope

There are two basic financial website models, sites that provide niche content that use advertising as their revenue source, and sites that provide content about the products and services they sell. If you’re in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers you want as much website traffic as possible; but if you’re in the business of selling merchandise or expertise, you really only want interested traffic. In other words, if you sell anything other than advertising you only want traffic that might actually purchase what you sell.

Of course there are hybrid sites that want it both ways, they sell a service and provide a blog that contains advertising in order to support the effort. The trouble is the advertising bleeds off a lot of traffic, the very thing the content was intended to attract in order for the company to prove its expertise and thus gain new clients. And with today’s sophisticated behavioral advertising these ads can be sending visitors to indirect competitors even if direct competitors have been restricted. Even if the advertising is totally non-competitive, it is still a distraction drawing people away from your ultimate objective of gaining new customers. 

This notion of distraction has even led to a new trend that supports putting all hyperlinks at the end of a presentation rather than spreading them throughout, which has been the norm and often recommended practice. The current thinking on inline hypertext links is that they are distracting and get in the way of the message so they should be relegated to the bottom of the page and used for reference purposes only.

Advertising sites want traffic, and any traffic will do; product and service sites want an interested audience. When all is said and done it’s not traffic that website businesses want, it’s awareness, engagement, and leads.

You Have To Influence Your Audience

It may not be trendy, and it sure isn’t easy, but if you want to make a pile of dough, you have to influence your audience, you have to change perception, alter attitudes, target emotions, and facilitate positive change.

I know, I know, you only sell shoes or the thing that fits inside the thing that turns the other thing that you don’t sell, but all that doesn’t matter because whatever you sell you can make a difference if you stop worrying about traffic and the latest social networking fad du jour.

And that statistical analysis that arrives in your in-box only tells you what happened, not why; it presents only a sterile snap shot of history, it doesn’t foretell the future; otherwise we’d all be driving flying cars, wearing Dick Tracey watches, and have so much free-time they’d have to legalize polygamy just to keep us busy.

Successful companies change the way we think and ultimately the way we act, and it usually revolves around the consistent communication of a simple idea or concept. Ever heard of a company called Apple? Wasn’t it the firm that all the Wall Street stat-geeks and techno-wizards told us just couldn’t conmpéte and was going to go broke not so long ago; so much for blind statistical analysis.

When Apple first introduced the Mac they talked about a computer that was “convivial,” meaning enjoyable due to its ease of use and quality of design. And with that guiding principle Apple has changed how we design things, how we communicate, how we listen to music, how we view video, and they’re on their way to changing how we read books, newspapers, and magazines. Apple has not just influenced its audience; it has changed society. Oh yah, they’re now the computer company with the largest market capitalization, and it’s all because they stuck to their core philosophy and message, and presented it in clever, meaningful, memorable marketing campaigns.

Business Websites are Communication Platforms

Poor communication is worse than no communication at all. Poor communication kills trust and credibility. You may be the greatest expert in widget technology or software engineering but if you’re a poor communicator or are represented by ineffectual media, videos, and websites, then you’re doing your business a disservice. If you want to make a lot of money you have to change attitudes, alter perceptions, and influence people, and you can only do that if you communicate effectively.

Posted in: Marketing Strategy by admin /
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