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Rockabilly Salon Stands Out This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The idea of differentiation and standing out in whatever industry you are in is such an important concept that I take the opportunity to write about it frequently. The key is to find something that makes it very easy for people to see you’re doing something different from everyone else in your industry. It can take some guts to reach out and be different, but that’s the point.

Over the weekend I visited a salon called Chop Tops . The name gave me some hint that this place was little different, but the moment you walk in the place their differentiation strategy hits you full force. Chop Tops is infused with a rockabilly , hot rod, chopper, retro feel from the concert posters on the wall to the Buck Owens on the stereo.

This is a men’s salon, but not in a cheesy macho way. They feature hair services, massage and a hot towel razor shaves.

The Chop Tops feel won’t be for everyone. If a stylist with pink hair and abundance of tatoos frightens then this isn’t your place, but that’s one of the core elements of a strong marketing strategy – don’t try to be all things to all folks – pick a strong statement and make it.

The Chop Tops strategy likely comes from the fact that one of the owners plays in a local rockabilly band and enjoys the culture, but the blending of a proven business (salon and spa) with a somewhat identifiable culture (rockabilly is pretty hot trend) is a solid way to create a differentiation. In this case Chop Top is differentiating their salon from cookie cutter fru, fru salons by creating a totally different feel – the services they provide may be very much like other salons, but their strategy will certainly allow them to attract a specific target audience.

Blending two proven ideas is a very powerful way to create a difference in an industry that may otherwise compete on price. (Think Marketing and Duct Tape)

So, what’s your differentiation strategy? How can you break through the we have better products and provide better service trap and truly put something out there that makes people talk?

Image credit: Mark Cummins

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This week I was surfing the web looking at different types of offers and couldn’t help but think about all of the different approaches to getting prospects further along in the purchase decision funnel. This is one of the most important areas that we, as marketers, can focus on.
One type of sales/marketing promotion that I’m seeing quite a bit of is the free trial . Online, the way this generally works is to offer a 7 day or 30 day free trial.  When signing up for the offer, you are asked to enter your credit card information. Upon trial expiration, you’re charged the full amount for your product or service.
Many services are subscription based too, charging your credit card a recurring fee. Subscription sites are a great way deliver information and provide a great deal of value. These sites, and others like them, are using free trials to allow you to experience the product or offering. Those who continue on with the product or service are more loyal and better informed about what they are buying.
I know a number of Internet marketers who offer subscription based services and they claim a much higher level of engagement among customers and higher degree of satisfaction. The question I have to ask myself as a marketer is how I can apply this methodology (free trial) to my own products and services?
This week, think about the products you’re marketing or selling. Is there a way to give your prospect a sample of what you offer? If you are offering an informational product, can you share the first chapter or first couple of pages (..as I have with my book, SEO Made Simple )?  Can you offer a small sample of your physical product? If you are a retail store, can you construct product samples that would allow prospective customers to take something home and try it out for a short period - charging them if the item is not returned or returned late?
I realize that free trials aren’t ideal for everyone or every product.  None-the-less, they force us rethink how we expose our prospects and services to our target market.  If free trials aren’t viable for your business perhaps they can encourage you to rethink the payment model for your products or services.  Can users buy a basic service (sample) and then pay for the standard or platinum service?  What type of upgrades can you offer - adding features beyond an initial purchase.
By rethinking the value of a trial you can take your marketing to the next level.  The key is to experiment with different offers.  Measure how many prospects take you up on the initial offer and then the upsell or ongoing subscription.  It’s important to focus on life time customer value, not just the initial purchase price.
Let me know if you’re usin free trials and how successfuly they are for you! For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.

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Weekend Favs February Twenty Seven This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I have a weekend routine where I share a handful of favorite things I tripped upon online this week. I usually about three and don’t go into much detail but suggest you check them out. The image featured in the post is a favorite creative commons image on Flickr.

Image credit: aufumy

TweetGrid – a number of interesting ways to set up views of things you want to follow on Twitter, but take a look at what they call Twitter Parties, interesting concept for hosting live chat sessions on Twitter.

Comapping – online mind mapping software to manage and share information. Good business interface that works well for brainstorming and project management.

Litmus – Testing software that allow you to see how your web pages and emails will render in numerous email clients and browsers. Could be a good investment to test new designs.

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Relevant, Consistently Updated Content + Flawless Technical Functionality & User Experience = Perfect Blog Launch

What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion.

Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers.

Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips:

1. Involve influential industry bloggers.

By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers.

But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time.

Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs:

• Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger: Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own.
• Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well.
• Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs . Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list.

2. Promote your blog via social media.

If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog.

For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages.
• Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner . But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media.
• Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting.

3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines.

Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog.

Try some of these ideas:

• Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.”
• Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week”
• Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “ 10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog ” (see image below)

4. Promote the blog on your corporate website.

It’s important to gain some valuable real estate on the homepage of your corporate site – particularly in the early stages of getting a new blog up and running. Create a button with a link to the blog to appear on the homepage, or at the least provide a link to the blog in the nav. The Otter Group does a good job of promoting its blog on the homepage of its corporate website (see image below).

In addition to the homepage, ensure the blog is included in the upper and right-hand nav on all website pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your blog.

5. Promote the blog offline.

For all of the online channels available to promote your blog, there are just as many offline channels to leverage. Don’t limit yourself to the online world. Instead:

• Add your blog URL to business cards.
• Promote your blog at industry events.
• Get print publications to pick up blog posts.
• Use word of mouth to let customers and business partners know of the new blog.
• Include the blog URL in the boilerplate of press releases (and in online releases, too).

Of course, these five tips are just a few of many ways to promote and market business blogs. Whatever promotional efforts you choose, look for tactics that will help you reach business goals whether they are increasing awareness, garnering buzz in the media or driving additional website traffic.

What tactics have you used to promote your blog?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 5 Sure Fire Tactics to Promote a Business Blog | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Making Referrals As a Job Creation Engine This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Following on the success of last year’s Make A Referral Week I am calling out to small businesses once again to stimulate the economy and create jobs through the act of referrals. During the week of March 8-12, I am challenging my readers to make 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses in an effort to highlight the power of referrals for small business. Help me spread the word? – This is not a money making event, the purpose is simply to change the focus from receiving to giving.

Individuals around the globe are invited to make at least one referral to a small business at www.makeareferralweek.com and share the referral details, including information on why they referred a particular business, in the comments section of the Referral Counter Page . (Of course, you might also consider using the Twitter function in the comment section to Tweet your referral!)

The weeklong virtual event also features guest contributors and panelists that will discuss how small business owners and other marketers can utilize the power of referral marketing. This blog will be taken over for an entire week to create an warehouse of referral and word of mouth related content so make sure you come back often throughout the week.

Featured guest experts include David Meerman Scott , author of New Rules of Marketing and PR , Chris Brogan , author of Trust Agents , Guy Kawasaki , author of Reality Check , Rohit Bhargava author of Personality Not Included , Dan Schawbe l author of Me2.0 , Anita Campbell , publisher of Small Business Trends, Ann Handley , chief content officer of Marketing Profs, Lisa Barrone , Outspoken Media, Scott Allen , author of the Virtual Handshake , me, author of The Referral Engine , Scott Ginsberg of Nametag TV, Janine Popick , CEO of Vertical Response, and Pam Slim , author Escape from Cubicle Nation . (More to come)

The highlight of the education series is a live online panel discussion on March 10th at Noon CST featuring Ivan Misner , founder of BNI and author Masters of Networking , Bob Burg , author of Endless Referrals and the Go-Givers Sell More , Ben McConnell , author of Creating Customer Evangelists , and moderated by John Jantsch. Register for the online panel here

?Through Make a Referral Week, small businesses have the opportunity to not only refer other businesses, but have their business listed as well. Hundreds of small business will receive added attention and daily events hosted on the site will offer tips and support from experts. ??

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Our agency TopRank Marketing has been working with Marketo providing SEO, content and blog marketing consulting services for about 2 years. I finally had the opportunity to meet Marketing VP Jon Miller in person today prior to his presentation at Online Marketing Summit: Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation.

Marketo is one of the fastest growing software companies in the U.S. and this session is a case study for how Marketo has achieved that rate of growth.

Marketo launched their main product about 2 years ago. In 2 years, they’ve signed up 400 customers at a value of about $30,000 per year in recurring revenue. The current run rate is over $12 million which is pretty impressive for a 3 year old company.

Marketo revenue cycle benchmarks show that Marketo spends about 50% more than comparable companies on Marketing but less on sales. Their customer acquisition cost are much less than other software companies. Marketo has a very efficient marketing and sales effort. How is that so? They use their own product and have made smart investments in their marketing efforts.

Rather than a sales cycle, Marketo focuses on the revenue cycle that starts from awareness to becoming a customer.

Awareness > All Names > Engaged > Prospect Qualified > Lead > Sales Lead > Opportunity > Customer

Marketo keeps their landing page forms very simple. They then actual manually check the company web site and decides if that inquiry is a worthwhile prospect. Since they’re marketing automation company, adding a manual process may seem contradictory but such activity helps sales people evaluate companies a lot more effectively.  Contacts are then nurtured and scored. If they score above a certain level, they become a “lead”.

Awareness – Investments in awareness and brand have paid off in a very big way for Marketo. They’v found it to be very effective to focus on content and thought leadership through tips, best practices and ideas that are available without registering.

Marketo’s blog is their single most effective marketing tactic. They’ve actually diverted marketing investment away from other activities and focused instead on blogging.   Woot! TopRank gets a shoutout as Marketo’s SEO agency.

PPC is the top converting tactic and their best leads are coming in from inbound: search and word of mouth. Once a prospect is generated, sales follow-ups are personalized and very soft touch.

What is Lead Nurturing? The art of maintaining permission to stay in front of your buyers as they educate themselves. The key to lead nurturing is relevance.

Types of Lead Nurturing: Stay in touch, Incomin lead processing, Accelerators, Lead lifecycle.  If you get a new prospect, about 1/4 are sales ready. Putting lead nurturing in place resulted in 50% more qualified sales leads at 33% of the cost.

Content mapping . Make sure content is relevant to where buyers are in the buying cycle. Think big, start small and move quickly. It doesn’t have to be your content either. You can package other content with your observations surrounding it.

Companies with sales people that spend the time to qualify leads ultimately generate more revenue.

Lead scoring rules focus on behaviors: Latent and Active. Latent means people engaging with content. Active means showing interest intent such as Googling Marketo’s brand name as well as downloading reviews, visit web site 2x in one week.

There’s a certain threshold that’s met to initiate follow up. There’s a huge drop off for leads that are not responded to with 5 minutes or less.

Inbound leads are segmented: target companies, enterprise companies, other. Also segmented by latent or active. Response time is based upon meeting scoring criteria.  Inbound calls, contact us forms, and qualified free trial requests get “Active” follow up. ie speedy follow up.

At the end of the 21 day lead nurturing period, a final email is sent giving options for recipient to self score themselves in terms of interest in Marketo.

No lead left behind: There’s an automated process that reminds sales teams to follow up. This dropped unresponded leads from 33% to 5%.

Lessons learned:  Focus on the entire revenue cycle, not just generating new leads. Do not understimate the value of creating content! Build trust and reduce risk vie thought leadership and social media. Leverage analytics.

You can learn more about Marketo on their blog and on Twitter .

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | OMS10 B2B Marketing Case Study: Marketo | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

TopRank ran a survey of journalists, reporters and editors on their use of search and social media in 2008. We found 91% use search engines like Google to do their job. 64% use social networks.   Published in Jan 2010 , a George Washington University and Cision survey of journalists reports 89% use blogs and 65% use social networks to research stories.

As prep for a presentation I’m giving Thursday at Online Marketing Summit on the intersection of SEO, Social Media and PR , I reached out to a few local journalists and industry news contacts and asked for examples of how they used search engines or social media to do story research.

Newsrooms are cutting staff and reporters and editors are hard pressed to do more with less. Tools like search engines and social media make available a tremendous amount of information in real-time.  The news world is a world of deadlines and it would seem the use of search and social networks to source experts or people/companies that fit a story angle would be ideal. Even respected news organizations like the BBC are encouraging their journalists to embrace social media .

This kind of insight is very helpful to understand how companies can make their news content more easily discovered via social web participation, content and optimization. Why is that important?  According to TV News Reporter  Jason DeRusha , “Private business does a horrible job cataloging their expertise in a manner that’s search engine friendly.  This is a real opportunity, as journalists become much more crunched for time, and use search as quick way to identify local experts.”

Here are a few examples of how journalists use search engines and social media tools to connect with story subjects. Not all of them are business situations, but are helpful as feedback on where to spend time creating, optimizing and socializing news content.

I begin every day at search engine. It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always starts with a search. I work on a segment called “Good Question,” so I often type my question directly into Google, and see what comes up. When searching for local experts, I’ll often take the subject matter, tack on the word “Minneapolis” and add the word “expert.”

For example, last week I did a story on whether cursive handwriting was vanishing because of e-mail. I typed “Minneapolis handwriting expert” into Google, and found several local handwriting analysts. Next, I searched for private schools (because public schools are often challenging to get permission to shoot at) and found the school we used for our story .

For my story on whether we get enough Vitamin D in Minnesota , I searched “Vitamin D” “Minneapolis” and “expert.” If a local company showed up very high with their own expertise in those results, I would have called that company.
Jason DeRusha, WCCO (CBS) TV News Reporter

Often times, the use of search engines and social media sites intersect. Here is an example provided in our initial survey:

I was writing a column about the planned partnership between Google and Yahoo. I tracked down potential sources first using Google and LinkedIn, and came across a white paper prepared by a senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute. While I could not easily find an e-mail address, I went to Facebook where I located him, then sent a message. He replied and we followed up with a phone interview.
Marketing Industry Journalist

In some cases, news publications also run real world events. Example: iMediaConnection has ad:tech, MediaPost has OMMA, Search Engine Watch has Search Engine Strategies. Here’s some great insight from MarketingProfs on how they’ve used social media tools for finding writers, case studies and speakers:

We do use social networks extensively to find key writers or speakers for our events or publications. I also use it to monitor key issues to cover in our newsletters, seminars, research, and so on: Social networks are a great way to take the “pulse” of a topic. What are people talking about? Is this a hot-button issue or not?

For events: Social media is integral to programming the agenda. We always distribute the proposal form for potential speakers via various social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

Same for our case study collections: We mine for good stories by asking Twitter/FB/LI. For example, “Who has a good story on social media ROI?”

We always harvest an abundance from this “social Google,” open-ended approach. Once we have harvested leads from those channels, our seminar programmer or writers can follow up via email or DMs, whichever.

LinkedIn is a great place to mine client-side folks. It’s especially valuable for us as we try to include a significant percentage of client-side speakers at our events, and often client-side folks are harder to uncover/book. And obviously, our case studies always feature client-side folks.

We also use Idea Scale to crowdsource topic ideas for our event agenda.

We use Flickr all the time to find creative common graphics for use on the blog (or for the contributed pieces I do for AMEX Open Forum); we use YouTube and Slideshare to see possible speakers or presenters in “action.”
Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

Sometimes the information found isn’t what companies or individuals would want a reporter to find:

I routinely track down potential interviews by sending out a Tweet. Most recently, we came across a number of Toyota car owners who fell under the recent recalls. It would have been very difficult to find those people in a short amount of time without this type of technology.

Just today I was feeding and getting information through Twitter on the house explosion in Edina that helped our crews navigate around the situation and get better pictures of the breaking news.

Also, I used YouTube to find video of a man who is being investigated by a Ponzi scheme by the Secret Service. It turns out he had many videos of himself giving sales pitches to potential customers. We used the video on the air where otherwise we would have never known what the man looked like.

We often use Facebook to get photographs of crime suspects and or victims. And police investigators tell me Facebook is one of the first places they check when investigating someone involved in a crime.
Chris O’Connell KSTP (ABC) TV News Anchor/Reporter

Sometimes it’s not your content that gets discovered, but a connection to someone else that leads to being found:

This fall I was working on a feature about ethnic weddings in the Twin Cities, for our Weddings magazine. I was looking for recently married couples of various cultural backgrounds. I posted a query on Facebook to my recently married or engaged friends. Their responses led me to three of the five couples interviewed (via email contacts). After initial email correspondence, I interviewed the couples by phone and in person.
Senior Editor, Mpls.St.Paul magazine

I think this quote from Chris O ‘Connell sums it up nicely: “social networking has changed the way we do business and how we are able to get news and sources faster when deadlines matter.”

We’ll be conducting a new survey on Journalist Use of Search soon and will be posting more detailed data on how stories are sourced, tools used, preferences of types of information and more.

If you are attending #OMS10 be sure to check out our session on Social Media, Search and Public Relations at 3:15 . It will be a very informative and engaging set of presentations from: David “dk” Klein, Dana Todd, Rand Fishkin, myself and moderator duties handled by Sally Falkow.

Does your company incorporate news optimization as part of your online marketing and content strategy? Do you optimize and promote news content differently than marketing content? Do you track whether the media finds your content via search or social media?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | How Journalists Use Search & Social Media | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Made to Switch with Chip Heath This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Chip Heath (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download) – Subscribe now via iTunes

Hopefully you recognize the title of this post as a play on Chip and Dan Heath’s wildly popular book Made to Stick and the recently released offering Switch . As I read through Switch in preparation for this week’s interview with Chip Heath, I was struck by the idea that these two book share information about the same struggle – how the human mind dictates what we do and how we view the world, but from vastly different points of view.

Made to Stick explored what makes ideas stick, but it also hinted about the challenges faced when trying to change an idea to make it stick. In Switch , the topic of change takes center stage.

I find that one of the greatest marketing challenges facing small business is the ability to find a unique point of differentiation, a way to stand out. The reason this important step is so tough for many businesses is that it often requires a massive change in the way they think about their business, the way they think about their products and the way they communicate how their solution is unique. The safety in sameness is that it doesn’t require change, but it also doesn’t manifest anything very remarkable.

To write Switch , the brothers Heath studied people trying to make difficult changes: People fighting to lose weight and keep it off. Managers trying to overhaul an entrenched bureaucracy. Activists combatting seemingly intractable problems such as child malnutrition. Their research revealed striking similarities in the strategies these people used. Switch outlines the game plan for making hard changes using these strategies.

Change is hard – everyone knows it, everyone says, but why?

According to Heath they were puzzled by the notion that some huge changes, like marriage, come joyously, while some trivial changes, like submitting an expense report on time, meet fierce resistance?

They uncover the answer in the research of psychologists who’d discovered that people have two separate “systems” in their brains—a rational system and an emotional system. The rational system is a thoughtful, logical planner. The emotional system is, well, emotional—and impulsive and instinctual.

When these two systems are in alignment, change can come quickly and easily (as when a dreamy-eyed couple gets married). When they’re not, change can be grueling (as anyone who has struggled with a diet can attest).

In Switch you’ll meet the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path – these three metaphors make up the core elements required to understand and make effective change.

Read this book and apply the principles of change to free up resistance in your business and as a bonus you might drop those ten pounds you’ve been holding on to.

Image credit: nathanborror

GoToWebinar is the presenting sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

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Online Marketing Summit 2010 in San Diego is host to a smorgasboard of internet marketing topics and this afternoon I am priveledged to participate on a panel about Social Media. Panelists include:

• Chris Baggott, CEO, Compendium Blogware
• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
• Michael Senger, CEO & Founder, StoneMass
• Caitlin McCabe, Founder, WhiteLabel Marketing
• Ben Hanna, VP Marketing, Business.com

That’s a lot of people for a panel, so moderator Jason Baer decided that in the spirit of Twitter, we’d keep bios, questions and answers succinct and at 140 characters or less.

For those that can’t be here I thought I’d share the prep questions and my short answers with you. If you’re at OMS and you live blog this Social Media Leaders Forum, please leave a link in the comments.

What’s your advice for individuals just getting started using Twitter?

Have some idea of what you want out of Twitter. Connect with people of similar interests and goals and engage with them.

What’s your advice for individuals just get started using Twitter?

Have some idea of what you want out of Twitter. Connect with people of similar interests and goals and engage with them.

What’s the #1 myth preventing companies from embracing social media?

To start when you’re ready. You’ll never be ready. But you need to do it anyway because it’s the only way towards progress.

What’s the best way to integrate social media with other marketing efforts like email, direct mail, etc?

Strategically. Learn what customers want and leverage social technologies across channels to make it easier for them to get it.

What are the main differences between B2B and B2C social media programs?

More romancing in B2B & emphasis on qualitative interactions. Mass appeal of B2C provides large audience engagement opportunities.

Is social media best used for customer acquisition, or for customer retention?

Both. Social media is essentially word of mouth and once you start facilitating that and customer conversations, you create a cycle of acquisition & retention.

How do social media and SEO work together?

Yin & Yang. Social network channels of distribution promote content & attract links. Optimized social content grows networks via search discovery.

What’s the biggest mistake most companies are making in social media?

Outsourcing customer engagement. Companies know their own business and customers best and lose opportunity by not participating themselves.

What’s the most overrated social media site or tactic today?

Google. LOL. Actually, the one your customers are not using.

When is it okay for companies to not engage with their customers in social media?

That’s like saying when should you not answer the phone at your business? For severe dissenters invite offline discussion.

Does it make sense to make a Facebook fan page at the core of your social media initiative?

If the audience to reach is all about Facebook, then why not? Only caveat is that you don’t “own” 3rd party web sites.

How can agencies work best with their clients in social media?

Be a guide, partner, educator, trainer and source of ongoing support and innovation. Help them help themselves.

What’s the one social media skill set that you wish more potential employees had?

Honesty about skills. Social media user & expert are very different. Passion, curiosity and ability to really listen, learn and create value using social technology.

How important (really) are geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla?

If you were a brand, how interested would you be to know all the most active people visiting your stores? Many Advertising & social networking tie-in opportunities.

With so many companies now using social media, what’s the best way for a brand to stand out?

Find remarkable people to curate & tell your brand’s story. Listen to, engage with & empower customers.

How can you measure the effectiveness of social media efforts?

Start with goals, outline a strategy and how to best reach audiences. Then pick the right tools and metrics aligned with those goals.

There you go. I think this exercise proves that shorter is not always better. There’s so much more that’s meaningful to say about each of these questions. I may come back and add to this post after the session or we might just use them as inspiration for a series of blog posts.  Until then, be sure to read this roundup of 25 social media marketing tips .

What are some of your most pressing questions about social media? About integrating social media with other channels?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 15 Social Media Answers From OMS10 | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Social Media Marketing This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Back in high school I had a great English teacher (I may not have left him with that impression at the time) that was very into science fiction. He made us read Robert A. Heinlein and all 1200 pages of Atlas Shrugged , but I also discovered Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (A series of books now known as a “trilogy in five parts.” If fact, if you’re feeling particularly smug some day go ask a bookseller for the fifth book in the Hitchhiker Trilogy and see if they flinch.)

There’s an underground of H2G2 followers that can frame any argument or challenge with a bit of advice from the series. The other night I was reading – The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time . It is a posthumous collection of previously unpublished material by Adams and consists largely of essays about technology and life experiences.

I stumbled across this bit of wisdom and thought to myself this is the perfect way to frame the reluctance some small business owners feel when it comes to new technology and, in particular, social media.

In the words of Adams:

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” — Douglas Adams

I don’t know what to do with this so much as to accept its reality, don’t panic, and be mindful of it as I continue to marvel and the brave new world we live in.

Image credit: jonathanjoni

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[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided.

Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table.

Beginning the reporting process:

1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package

If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app.

2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard

While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format.

3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives

More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place.

4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary

If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become.

In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report.

5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic

Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations.

Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO

A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic.

With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.

• Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms.
• Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic).
• Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site.
• Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic.
• Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for.
• Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary.

More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media

Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor.

Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity.

• Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy .
• Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise.
• Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate?
• Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination.
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge.
• Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence.
• Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic.
• Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates.
• Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat.

Wrapping up

Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth.

As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided.

Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table.

Beginning the reporting process:

1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package

If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app.

2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard

While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format.

3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives

More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place.

4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary

If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become.

In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report.

5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic

Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations.

Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO

A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic.

With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.

• Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms.
• Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic).
• Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site.
• Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic.
• Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for.
• Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary.

More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media

Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor.

Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity.

• Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy .
• Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise.
• Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate?
• Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination.
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge.
• Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence.
• Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic.
• Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates.
• Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat.

Wrapping up

Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth.

As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided.

Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table.

Beginning the reporting process:

1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package

If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app.

2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard

While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format.

3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives

More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place.

4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary

If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become.

In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report.

5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic

Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations.

Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO

A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic.

With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.

• Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms.
• Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic).
• Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site.
• Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic.
• Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for.
• Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary.

More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media

Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor.

Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity.

• Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy .
• Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise.
• Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate?
• Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination.
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge.
• Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence.
• Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic.
• Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates.
• Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat.

Wrapping up

Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth.

As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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7 Steps to Powerful Online Seminars This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For many businesses, particularly service oriented businesses, getting up in front of a group of prospects with the opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise is one of the best lead conversion opportunities going.

Holding workshops and seminars live and in person has long been an effective tool. The web makes this tool even more powerful and more affordable as it allow you to conduct online versions of seminars that don’t require you to rent a room or your prospects to leave their homes and offices.

Online seminars are a marketing tool every business should consider adding to the mix. Below are seven steps to consider to make your online seminars pay.

1) Get sponsored

Before you go too far down the seminar path consider getting sponsors to join you. This doesn’t have to be some big name corporate deal, give strategic partners the opportunity to join you in promoting your educational sessions for the right to call themselves a sponsor. Round-up prizes from related businesses that want the exposure their prize garners in your promotion. Free stuff drives enrollment!

2) Educate, don’t sell

Make certain that your “free” session is packed with content so good people would pay for it. That’s the expectation these days. If you create seminars that are basically veiled sales presentations, you won’t reap the benefits of this expertise play and people won’t come back or tell friends about your great seminars. There’s a time and place for the sales pitch, but only after you’ve established trust through sharing valuable information. People are OK with a “here’s the sales pitch” at the end of a presentation that was time well spent.

Consider creating a series of events and promoting them together. This can help build momentum and allow you to build a loyal following.

3) Pick your platform

There are dozens of online platforms for hosting your web seminars but choose your platform with some considerations in mind.

• Free may not be the best option if you are using this tactic to demonstrate how professional your business is.
• Look for a tool that offers some interaction tools such as polling, questions, chat, even video
• Make sure your chosen tool can handle the numbers you plan to enroll
• Be certain you can easily record your sessions for future marketing use
• Look for ease of use and follow-up reminder email automation

GoToWebinar (a sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast), Acrobat Connect and WebEx all offer the features above

4) Cause interaction

Use the functionality of your online webinar tool to get the audience involved. Polls are a great way to take the temperature of your audience and the results can make for both interesting discussion during your session and follow-up discussion in another form of content such as a blog post. With small groups you may want to allow video or audio chat, but it’s always a good idea to take questions from the attendees. Most platforms also allow you to conduct a survey at some point in your presentation. This is a nice way to end a presentation to get feedback from the audience and even let them vote on other topics they would like to hear in the future.

5) Create a backchannel

Lots of people attend webinars these days and share information they hear with their followers on Twitter. It’s become common practice to create a hashtag for your events so people who attend or those that don’t have an easy way to collect all of the comments made by listeners. Some presenters go as far as having an assistant monitor and tweet during the presentation to keep the conversation lively and accurate. This free PowerPoint Twitter Tool allows you to create tweets and have them posted automatically during your presentation.

6) Have bonus content

Because there is so much free information out there online the expectations for what you provide as free package have grown. In addition to the event itself consider creating a PDF workbook or collection of blog posts from yourself, related bloggers or strategic partners and delivering that document along with your follow-up. This gives you another reason to reach out and remind your attendees about the great content and gently about the products and services you offer.

7) Promote the archive

Use your chosen platform to record your presentation. Upload your recorded session to a video host such as Vimeo or YouTube and embed the video in a web page surrounded by additional resources and further reading links related to the topic. This is a great way to use the session for future marketing efforts and create the kind of page and content that search engines love. Consider using a service like CastingWords to transcribe the session, combine three or four session with video, transcript, resources and your collection of blog post PDF and you’ve just created a product that you can sell!

Handling all the moving parts of setting up, promoting, running and archiving live events can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but the long term payoff in terms of expertise, content, and trust building is worth every bit of it.

Image credit: hildgrim

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Many business owners and managers are perplexed by the social web. The effect of customer participation with social media on brands is undeniable. The effect of employee participation with social media can be a bit of a quandary.  The range of acceptance for social web activity runs the gamut from IT blocking all internet connections to sites like Twitter and Facebook to the expectation that every employee spend work and personal time as social media brand ambassadors.

Being social on the web isn’t natural for everyone and certainly not for every company. Once people and companies “get it” and develop processes, listening programs and overall strategy, social media policies tend to lighten up and move towards being productive vs limiting.

Some people really shine in their social web participation and companies often see increased social networking and engagement by individuals as an uncertain area. Some see building personal networks and attention as a threat to the brand that prompts questions as to whether individuals are simply building their own brand, (brandividual) on the company’s dime or are they acting as they should on the company’s behalf?

This issue has come to light several times in the past. As an example, there are some interesting arguments surrounding Forrester’s recent policy decision to limit staff blogging to non company topics. Forrester’s product is their IP, so they want to control what IP is released. At the same time, analysts discussing those topics on their own blogs can build more attention and awareness of the products Forrester sells.

The issue of corporate brand and brandividualism will only increase in importance. The real and perceived loss of control for managers has to be dealt with eventually.  Concerns from managers are totally reasonable since not all individuals promoting themselves and growing their networks during business hours are doing so with corporate business goals in mind.

On one hand , the employee is paid to promote the company brand. Because of so many opportunities for self promotion with corporate brand promotion, there can be “distractions”.

It’s essential that the company and employees acting on behalf of the company operate with a congruent vision and mutually agreed upon expectations.

Many budding brandividuals have an over-inflated sense of importance because of what they perceive to be end goal successes which are often more like proxies or stepping stones to what’s really important for a business.

For example: attracting friends/fans/followers, being mentioned by influential blogs, networking with other “known” digerati can seem uplifting to an individual that seeks increased visibility and credibility.  Those are important events, but they’re not the end goals that help companies make payroll. They’re a means to an end (revenue, brand, customer acquisition and retention). I think a lot of the folks that get “amped up” by social celebrity confuse notoriety with the ability to generate revenue.

Of course customers might become aware of a company’s services because of their social connection with a brandividual and may even stay with a company due to their relationship with that individual. But that’s not the issue I’m describing.

I did a post about the crack-like addiction to online fame in the SEO industry a while back, observing newer SEOs giving away loopholes and “secret” tactics to gain notoriety. Seeing fame as an end goal vs. a tool to extend brand exposure and shorten sales cycles created a situation in the Search Marketing world where individuals would focus all their efforts on becoming “known”, missing the business objectives entirely. “It’s hard to pay the bills with a pocket full of famous”. 

On the other hand , empowering staff to become better known and influential with which to promote your brand can be a great investment. The employee gets something to take with them when that time comes (and it will eventually) and at the same time, they have more to work with when promoting your brand.

Some managers will look at such activity and try to control it. That’s not the productive move thing to do in my opinion. Others will embrace it and encourage their staff to be all they can be to meet personal goals and company goals at the same time.

It’s critical to set expectations and have a strategic perspective of what the brandividual’s efforts are to achieve. Managers have to talk to these staff members and get involved with what they’re doing more than other types of company marketing. That’s a bit of a rub sometimes because executives hire community managers or digital marketing managers for the purpose of promoting the company because they don’t have time and expertise themselves.

I think in most cases, the best thing to do is keep in perspective that the stronger the brand of the individual that is tasked with promoting a business, the more reach and impact they may have. Getting exposure themselves will indeed benefit them personally, but if they’re doing so as a member of your brand’s “team” then it’s no different than an all star on a sports team drawing more attention to the team franchise.

What do you think? Does “brandividualism” put companies and their brands at risk? If you work at a company and have become a bit of a brandividual yourself, how has the company dealt with it? If your company has some “rock star” social media staff, how do you best empower them? Or does your company prefer to try and control such activity?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Brandividualism: Dilema or Opportunity? | 2 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

I’m often asked, “What is the most effective form of marketing?”  To which I respond, “word of mouth.”  Nothing is as effective as word-of-mouth marketing.  The real question is how to generate word of mouth from your customers on a regular basis.  There are a variety of ways to generate word-of-mouth marketing and many are overlooked by companies large and small.
One of the best ways to generate a referral is with a strong customer advocacy campaign.  Do you honor and reward your best customers?  When customers are celebrated, there’s lots to talk about.  You can share their honor with others in their segment or group.  Additionally, you can repackage the information in the form of news or video, easily distributed throughout the Web.  This creates awareness and interest for your product or service.
I personally like using surveys to get at the heart of what your customers like and don’t like about your products or services.  By utilizing open ended questions like, “Who do you know who could benefit from our product?”  Experiment with different ways for generating referrals from surveys that are personalized and based on customer insights.
Another great way to create word-of-mouth is through a customer referral campaign.  Referral campaigns are simple to implement but require a solid understanding of your audience.  By asking and rewarding your customers for referrals, you can have them do the selling for you.  This type of personal selling is one of the most effective.  Consider low cost methods of rewarding your customers for referrals.  This could be a discount on existing services or added bonuses.
Other word-of-mouth campaigns may be effective in utilizing testimonials.  Today, with the help of blogs, video, and web sites, when customers have a good experience they have lots of ways to share it.  The challenge is to direct your customers to promote good experiences, not bad.  Although I’ve tried to solve this dilemma for over a decade, the only discovery I’ve made is that you have to take the good with the bad.
There’s actually a silver lining here.  Research has shown that when customer comments contain both positive and negative feedback, they are more believable.  The key is to encourage your customers to speak up about positive experiences and downplay the negative ones.  When you receive or come across negative comments, respond to them - work with your customers to make things right.  After that, let them go.  The balance of positive and negative works in your favor.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.  Think of ways to elicit positive feedback from customers.  If you focus on generating word-of-mouth, you’ll quickly find a number of methods for encouraging referrals from your customers.  For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.

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Weekend Favs February Twenty This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I have a weekend routine where I share a handful of favorite things I tripped upon online this week. I usually about three and don’t go into much detail but suggest you check them out. The image featured in the post is a favorite creative commons image on Flickr.

Image credit: Akajos

Good stuff I found this week:

Xobni – an Outlook plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts online and in social media fast and easy.

Kampyle – real time customer/user feedback about what works and what doesn’t work on your web site.

Mobile Marketing Watch – great site dedicated to covering all things related to mobile marketing (all marketer need to stay on top of this topic)

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Without a doubt, one of the most popular shiny new objects of many social media marketing programs is Twitter. There are Twitter books, Twitter conferences, Twitter blogs and numerous articles devoted to Twitter marketing .  Unfortunately, there’s not enough time left over after reading all the promises of marketing nirvana from using Twitter to actually implement recommendations.

Fortunately, social media masterminds at companies like Seesmic, TweetDeck and HootSuite — to name a few — have developed tools to make our Tweeting lives easier. Or at least more efficient.  We use such tools here at @toprank to grow own Twitter presence as well as for clients on a daily basis and have learned quite a bit about Twitter best practices and which tools work best.

Here are five Twitter account management tools to help you keep your Twitter activity in check – whether you tweet for one account or many.

1. HootSuite.com

HootSuite is a great – and free – tool for managing multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm accounts.

The Twitter and social media management tool allows you to personalize columns, so you can view multiple feeds from the same social networking account or multiple feeds from different social networking accounts. For example, with my personalized Twitter tab (shown above), I can view my Twitter home feed, Twitter mentions, sent Tweets and a saved search for “online marketing” – all from one screen.

Plus, HootSuite allows you to create a message and choose which social accounts you want the message to be automatically posted to.

2. CoTweet

Like HootSuite, CoTweet is a free and easy tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts – up to five – with a single login. It also allows brand and keyword monitoring through Twitter search.

This Twitter management tool’s true distinguishing feature is its workflow management capabilities (shown above). When an @ reply comes in to an account, you can assign it to a person on your CoTweet task to respond to.  They’ll be notified via email and on their own CoTweet page. Plus, the tool allows you to take notes on Twitter users for your co-users to see.

3. EasyTweets

EasyTweets is a low-cost Twitter management tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts – the more you pay, the more continuous searches, feeds and accounts you can track.

With this tool, you can automatically post RSS feed content and track RSS traffic in Google Analytics. That way, you can easily track traffic from Twitter and understand what users do when they get to your site.

Another useful feature, the Twitter management tool lets you set up continuous searches for brand mentions (shown above), and auto follow some or all users who mention your brand. Plus, you can be set up to send SMS or email alerts when people mention your brand. So wherever you are, you won’t miss your chance to respond to a prospect.

4. TweetDeck

This free desktop browser helps you keep track of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace activities from multiple accounts. Like the other tools mentioned here, you can update your accounts, follow topics with saved searches, and manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages from within TweetDeck.

But the social media management tool offers some more advanced features as well. TweetDeck allows you to record, share or watch video clips, and view YouTube videos, from within the tool (shown above). Plus, you can share and view photos, as TweetDeck now supports Flickr, Twitgo and mobypicture.

5. PeopleBrowsr

This Twitter and social media management tool, currently in Beta version, offers a very simple, visual browser-based dashboard view of social activity. PeopleBrowsr uses an interface similar to email, with the Twitter or other social feed appearing as a list in the center of the screen, and additional options in the left nav (see above).

PeopleBrowsr allows you to create and manage groups by adding public or private tags to any users from any of your different social sites. Then you can view everyone in a group in a widget of their own.

Whatever time you dedicate each day for Twitter – whether its hours or minutes a day – there’s a tool available to help you better manage activities. Try out some of our suggestions, and let us know what you think.

Of course there are more Twitter management tools than what we’ve mentioned here including:  Seesmic ,  Tweetvisor , Splitweet and others. What’s your favorite Twitter management tool?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 5 Twitter Management Tools You Can’t Live Without | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Microsoft Outlook 2010 Will Make Social Media Mainstream This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For many readers of this blog social media is mainstream, but I travel the highways and byways of this country and experience first hand in my workshops and presentations the amount of folks that “just don’t get” social media. I think they’ve heard the hype and know they should get it, but it still feels a bit foreign and geeky at best and downright silly at worst.

Microsoft Office 2010 , in beta release now, may change the game on social media and turn participation into email plumbing. The MS Outlook 2010 blog reveals the new features that led me to this conclusion. (Although in stunningly Microsoft fashion the first bit of info on the page deals with a crash report update.)

Here’s the deal – depending upon who you ask, Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers somewhere around 65% of enterprise email and probably more than that when it comes to the small business desktop. GMail and other SaaS tools have begun to eat away at this margin, but many a computer user sees the Internet through the eyes of MS Outlook. This post isn’t a plug for MS Office, I haven’t downloaded or tested the new version yet, it’s simply an explanation of the impact I see this new release ultimately having.

In November 2009, Microsoft announced both the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 as well as the Outlook Social Connector . The Outlook Social Connector brings together communications history, contact information, and professional and social networking information into the Outlook experience.

As of today, the beta release includes connection plans that give users the ability to add LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace interaction, giving every Outlook user the ability to enjoy the benefits of social media without any effort. This will get millions hooked and participating as simply a form of enhanced email – social media participation will become email plumbing and that will make it ubiquitous.

Here’s a list of activities, from MS site, that you can do inside Outlook 2010 when it comes to LinkedIn for Outlook

• Connect to your LinkedIn account to view your colleagues’ status updates and photos next to an e-mail message they sent you.
• Your colleagues’ latest contact information from LinkedIn automatically updates his or her Outlook contact. Whenever someone changes a phone number, e-mail address, or other contact details, it’s automatically updated in Outlook — you are always up to date.
• Synchronize your mobile phone with Outlook to stay up-to-date — you don’t have to worry about keeping track of new phone numbers and contact info — contacts’ information from the Web is synchronized to your mobile phone.
• Grow your professional network directly from within your Inbox — add colleagues with one click.

I’ve been preaching the merits of hacking together this kind of integration in your social media system for some time, but now anyone, whether they want to or not, will almost automatically have is handed to them. Combine this with Office 2010 Web Services version in the cloud and Office for Mac 2011 to include Outlook and you may see Microsoft regain some footing.

To recap, here is what you can do today to get started with the Outlook Social Connector.

1. Download the Office 2010 Beta at www.Office.com/beta
2. Update to the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector using the instructions on the Microsoft Download Center .
3. Get the LinkedIn download for the Outlook Social Connector at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook .

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Microsoft Outlook 2010 Will Make Social Media Mainstream This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For many readers of this blog social media is mainstream, but I travel the highways and byways of this country and experience first hand in my workshops and presentations the amount of folks that “just don’t get” social media. I think they’ve heard the hype and know they should get it, but it still feels a bit foreign and geeky at best and downright silly at worst.

Microsoft Office 2010 , in beta release now, may change the game on social media and turn participation into email plumbing. The MS Outlook 2010 blog reveals the new features that led me to this conclusion. (Although in stunningly Microsoft fashion the first bit of info on the page deals with a crash report update.)

Here’s the deal – depending upon who you ask, Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers somewhere around 65% of enterprise email and probably more than that when it comes to the small business desktop. GMail and other SaaS tools have begun to eat away at this margin, but many a computer user sees the Internet through the eyes of MS Outlook. This post isn’t a plug for MS Office, I haven’t downloaded or tested the new version yet, it’s simply an explanation of the impact I see this new release ultimately having.

In November 2009, Microsoft announced both the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 as well as the Outlook Social Connector . The Outlook Social Connector brings together communications history, contact information, and professional and social networking information into the Outlook experience.

As of today, the beta release includes connection plans that give users the ability to add LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace interaction, giving every Outlook user the ability to enjoy the benefits of social media without any effort. This will get millions hooked and participating as simply a form of enhanced email – social media participation will become email plumbing and that will make it ubiquitous.

Here’s a list of activities, from MS site, that you can do inside Outlook 2010 when it comes to LinkedIn for Outlook

• Connect to your LinkedIn account to view your colleagues’ status updates and photos next to an e-mail message they sent you.
• Your colleagues’ latest contact information from LinkedIn automatically updates his or her Outlook contact. Whenever someone changes a phone number, e-mail address, or other contact details, it’s automatically updated in Outlook — you are always up to date.
• Synchronize your mobile phone with Outlook to stay up-to-date — you don’t have to worry about keeping track of new phone numbers and contact info — contacts’ information from the Web is synchronized to your mobile phone.
• Grow your professional network directly from within your Inbox — add colleagues with one click.

I’ve been preaching the merits of hacking together this kind of integration in your social media system for some time, but now anyone, whether they want to or not, will almost automatically have is handed to them. Combine this with Office 2010 Web Services version in the cloud and Office for Mac 2011 to include Outlook and you may see Microsoft regain some footing.

To recap, here is what you can do today to get started with the Outlook Social Connector.

1. Download the Office 2010 Beta at www.Office.com/beta
2. Update to the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector using the instructions on the Microsoft Download Center .
3. Get the LinkedIn download for the Outlook Social Connector at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook .

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• Designing HTML Email for Webmail Apps
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• The Crowd Spoke and Was Heard
• Office Live Will Turn Some Heads
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I attending the SMC event a few nights ago and one topic that came up was Forrester’s recent decision of not allowing their analysts to blog about social media unless it was on the official Forrester blog. Here is LaSandra Brill , Janet Fouts and Erin Robbins take on personal and corporate brands:

Photo credit: freezelight

Dear “SEO Consulting Services New York” and you too “Starting A Home Business”,

I have an admission to make: I don’t like comment spam. You are comment spammers. Our readers don’t like you. I don’t like you. You’re not welcome here.

Our Akismet filter has been doing a good job of filtering out spam and our commenting filters within Disqus catch most of the non-automated spammy comments. But they still persist. Most people active online have real names (obvious I know, but stay with me). If they don’t use their real name, it’s popular to use a “handle”.   I can see that it might be reasonable for some people to have a few different handles, but for the most part, singular identities are the norm.

Where the “identity crisis” comes is the persistent and pervasive use of what I consider, spammy handles in blog comments. Doing this is as old as blogging itself.   It started with legitimate beginnings though. For example, I used to put “toprank” in the name field when making comments on other blogs since that’s my handle. Today, I just use my own name.  Apparently, there are a large number of people named, “internet marketing minneapolis” or “insurance leads”. I don’t think so.

We “no follow links” within our blog comments due to abuse by SEO spammy types. Actually, most of them are not professional SEO’s at all. Pro SEO’s would not be so obvious and stupid as to blatantly use keywords as a person’s name when the links are no followed. It’s a waste of time.

So, to “internet marketing india” and “buy viagra and ciallis here”, I’m pretty sure those aren’t your names or your handles. My position with this blog is that if you opt NOT to identify yourself as a person, then the comment has no place here.

My preference is for readers to use real names. When people do that, their comments also tend to be more thoughtful, intelligent and useful to other readers. Additionally, when people use a handle or nickname to reference themselves online, it’s usually a good comment. However, with the popularity of Twitter, most people use their Twitter handle which is often a one-word name anyway.

I simply draw the line with people (or bots) that insist on using keywords they want to rank for in search engines as their “Name” in our blog comments.  Same goes for those that decide to use a two word name that then decide to link to a sales letter for some kind of “automate all your online marketing” software.

We’ve published a  blog comment policy several years ago, but after adding Disqus as our comment management system, we cannot link to it in the same way. However, there should be a link at the end of each blog post now so readers can our guidelines for commenting.

After blogging for 6 years, I’m not ambiguous in my thinking about this. I’d be curious to know if readers think this is extreme, but I have no problem saying that I’m pretty firm in this policy and not buying in to the argument that there’s an implied reciprocation that should happen when people comment that involves a keyword link in exchange.

If you’re a long time blogger, what decisions have you made about a blog comment policy?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Open Letter to Blog Comment Spammers | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

I often get asked the question – how do you keep up with it all?

And if there is one thing I pride myself on is being organized. As anyone on my team can tell you from having been in my office is that it is very organized which I feel spills over into my digital life as well.

I can say that life was a lot more chaotic before I found Google Reader (hat tip to Robert Scoble who turned me on to Google Reader).

A typical day starts at 6am with answering the new email that came in over night and then some morning reading in my RSS reader (see photo of this mornings Google Reader). I break out my reading by several meta-topics like Must Reads which is mostly keeping me up to date on things like Facebook because of my book and the new book coming out in November as well as B2B Marketing trends, Primary are blogs that I frequent such as the majors like Mashable and the individual blogs like Web Ink Now (plus a ton more), some personal stuff like Sailing blogs, Avaya blogs and Google alerts on Avaya and our Competitors, Novitaz which is an In-Store Digital Ad Network (who I am a marketing advisor for) as well as a feed of all my Favorite Facebook friends status updates just to be sure I don’t miss anything (note on how to do this – create a friend list – then take the RSS feed of their status updates and import that to Google Reader, then there is the Ye Olde Vanity search in case people are talking about me on blogs or elsewhere, my Delicious friends feed which is a great way  of seeing what other friends are tagging (such as Charline Li, and Brian Solis) I use this mostly as a “safety net” in case I miss something hot – they will most likely tag it, Research such as Forrester or MarketingProfs usually premium content, but stuff I want to know about as soon as it gets produced, then my SlideShare Technology feed so when folks post new presentations and tag them with the Technology category I get them in this feed – its a great source for ideas and keeping up to date on technology and  finally Magazines – I canceled every magazine subscription expect for BtoB Magazine and BusinessWeek – everything else comes in here such as Wired, Fast Company etc …

Things I share on Google Reader appear on my lifestream on Friendfeed which collects shared items from other feeds like:  my personal Delicious feed, YouTube feed,  SlideShare feed, my StumbleUpon, my Flickr, and my Digg feeds and then pushes them out as updates via Twitter.

Throughout the day I follow toggle between TweetDeck, retweeting good posts and reading new posts on my Google Reader and sharing them (during lunch or after work). Weekends are devoted to Blog posts and writing the new book.

With over 300 feeds coming into my Google Reader, Twitter alerts popping up all over the place and email coming in by the truck load its easy to feel overloaded fast. My advice would be don’t let Google Reader (or any social activity) over run your life – remember you are in control!

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5 Steps to Successful Facebook Advertising This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Currently Facebook boasts somewhere in excess of 400 million users and growing. You’ve probably heard this line by now, but If it were a country it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India only. There’s a pretty good bet that some members of your ideal target customer reside in and visit Facebook land, but the trick is to find them.

Facebook’s advertising platform is a vehicle worth exploring. The tool allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. At this point it’s not as effective in pure response as well targeted Google AdWords campaigns, but it’s not really the same kind of vehicle and you won’t find AdWords in Facebook, at least for now.

Like many things Facebook, setting up and running successful campaigns isn’t as straightforward as it could be. Below is a description of five steps to consider as you explore Facebook advertising. (Bookmark the Facebook Ad Help Center and return to get answers to the Facebook Ads process)

Target

One of the best things about Facebook advertising is the ability select who sees your ad using a number of variables, including keywords. You can target by geography, age, gender, education, relationship status, workplace and keywords. (I know someone who wanted to send a birthday message to his wife and targeted so narrowly that she was the only who would see the ad.) Demographics are pretty straightforward, the real trick is expanding your keywords to the point where you have a large enough audience to get the job done. Facebook used to have a tool that let you search for the hottest topics being discussed but they shelved it as they build a more robust analytics package. Check out all of your targeting options here

Attract and Engage

The first thing you must do is decide whether you want people to be directed to your own web page or something on Facebook like a Page, Application, Group or Event. If you are already the administrator of your Facebook Page, Group, Event, or Application, you can select it from the drop down option. The thing that’s nice about using ads to promote your pages and events is that Facebook puts a “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button right in the ad. People don’t even have to visit your page to take action. There are some pros to sending them to a link on your web site (better tracking options) but by sending them to assets on Facebook you have the ability to multiply their actions through the natural social wall activity that occurs when someone RSVPs to an event. (All their followers automatically see that action.)

Some users find Facebook ads a good tool to promote events or get new fans to the pages. From an engagement standpoint think in terms of using the ads to promote content and value and not so much to sell something. The most successful use of ads on social networks is to create deeper engagement so you have the ability to sell once trust is built. Think about putting white papers on your Fan Pages and promoting that content or creating a free event, like a webinar, and advertising that event. In both of these cases you’ll have the opportunity to sell a bit once you’ve proven you know your stuff. (One quirk of note – when you promote an event created with the Facebook event app the title of the ad will automatically default to the title of the event, so name your event wisely )

You don’t get much space in these ads so use it wisely. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately with a benefit. You’ll get another 135 characters to describe and entice in the body of the ad. You also have the option to upload an image. Take this option. It may be the most important aspect of your ad so choose wisely. Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad. This is an element you must plan on testing (see below)

Budget

Facebook advertising works a bit like AdWords in that you bid for keywords and compete to get your ads shown. How effective you are at this depends upon the competitiveness of your keywords. You can choose between a cost per click (CPC) model where you pay only for clicks or a cost per thousand (CPM) model where you pay per 1000 ad views. Most research I’ve read suggests that the CPC model is slightly more effective in terms of ROI. (Here’s a nice Glossary of Facebook Ads terminology in case this is starting sound buzz wordy.)

To start your campaign you must determine a bid per click and daily budget. You can set both of these numbers very low, but don’t expect much. Initially you are just testing so you’ll want to set your click bid somewhere around the Facebook suggested amount and a daily budget you can live with, something like $50 or more to start. You can always adjust these. Learn about the Facebook Ads Manager here .

Test

No matter where or what you should always test your advertising. Online applications like this make it pretty darn simple. You can and should create multiple ad versions. Once you create an ad you will have the ability to create similar ads and run those as well. You’ll be able to easily view which ad is performing the best based on clicks. Facebook does need to approve your ads so make sure you are familiar with their guidelines .

The simplest thing to test is your image. I’ve seen ads go from no response to mega response with a better picture. Mind you I had no idea it was a better picture or I would have used it in the first place, but testing told me so. Here are some suggestions from Facebook on improving your ads .

Analyze

Once you create and launch your campaigns you need to start tracking and tweaking. Facebook has a tool that gives you some information on actions taken inside the Facebook platform. So, if you are running an ad for an event or Facebook page you can use the Facebook Insights tool to monitor interaction.

Facebook Insights is a nice reporting tool as it can give you information about the actual, not targeted demographics and interests of the people clicking on your ads and keywords that drew that interest. This will help you narrow or broaden your targeting. Page admins can access Insights by logging in and viewing the box titled Insights in the left sidebar. This is only visible to Page admins. If you click on See All you will get full reporting. More information on Insights here and from the very useful blog Inside Facebook .

Facebook does allow you to run ads that point people links outside of Facebook and in order to track these ads you simply and monitor them using your own analytics tool such as Google Analytics . If you are using Google Analytics simply use the URL builder tool in Analytics to create a link to your page that contains tracking parameters and place that in your Facebook Ad as the destination link.

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Join the Mobile Webinar Win an HP iPAQ Glisten This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Join me for a free web panel discussion – Mobile Marketing for Small Business – February 18th at Noon CST – Register here for Feb 18 Mobile Marketing Event

As mobile devices evolve to powerful hand held computers, smart marketers are embracing this evolution with mobile centric marketing initiatives.

Everything about your marketing online and offline must begin to consider that entire market segments use the mobile device to find everything from food to legal services locally and abroad.

One lucky attendee will be chosen at random to win a HP iPAQ Glisten , a modern, feature-rich 3G world phone that meets the increasing demands of today’s mobile professionals. (does not include activation or AT&T service)

Join me with a special expert panel, Feb 18th at Noon CST as we discuss:

• Ways to get your business ready for mobile shoppers
• How to market through Text and SMS campaigns
• How to make your web site mobile browser friendly
• Integrating mobile technologies into your offline efforts

GoToWebinar is the presenting sponsor of this Duct Tape Marketing webinar.

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Just about every business with a web site does something to market and promote it. When those companies are asked about web analytics, it’s surprising how many look back with a blank stare.  This isn’t the case with mature online marketers but it does happen a lot with new business web sites and blogs.

For many companies that are new to web analytics the idea of digging in and finding useful information can be daunting.  It’s common marketing sense to measure what you’re marketing, but making sense of analytics data doesn’t always find time in the mix of duties a small business or new web site owner is responsible for.

The amount of information that analytics packages deliver isn’t always easy to sort through and turn into business decisions. So what should those that are new to web analytics do? Keep it simple and start off with the basics.

Each analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve. I’d suggest starting out with Google Analytics as it’s free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. Start off by looking at the items below.

• Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are are an important metric as it counts everyone as one for any given time period. This means that if you had 250 unique visitors, 250 different people visited your site at least once. If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in search engines, or need more content.
• Traffic Sources – Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? Referring information can help you see where your traffic is coming from which you can then use to make decisions on where and how to promote your future content.
• Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that someone put into a search engine and arrived at your site with. Ideally they’d be keyword phrases that related to your company. If not, then it may be an indication that you’re either not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases.
• Top Content – No matter what size your site is, knowing what pages get the most traffic can help you when building out new pages. Using the same format, or building out content on that topic, can help drive more traffic. These are also pages that call to action (CTA) buttons should be added if you want your visitors to do download a white paper or do something specific.
• Location – If your business wants a strong local presence, the location area in analytics can tell you country, state and city of where your visitors are coming from. Are your visitors actually local? That’d be a good thing to know.
• Campaign Tracking –  Track visitors from sources where you are marketing to a particular goal page or conversion.

As you feel more comfortable with Google Analytics you can then start to explore other actionable data including conversions, trends and features such as the most often used search terms on your internal search engine. Features like goals, top entrance/exit pages, bounce rates, and time on site are also a good metrics to use in understanding how visitors are interacting with your content. Visit the Google Analytics Help page to find out everything you need to know to make the most out of GA.

Web analytics can be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to be analyzed and then decisions that need to be made from that data. Instead of trying to jump in and consume it all, take it one step at a time.

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Basic Tips on Web Analytics | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Your Business Is Worthless if It Depends on You This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with John Warrillow (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

The title of this post might sound like fighting words for some, I mean, you work and sweat and pour your life into this thing and I have the nerve to suggest it’s not worth anything? According to my guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Warrillow , author of Built To Sell , only 1 in 100 business owners is successful in selling his or her company each year.

It’s the biggest shame in the entire small business world to think that people slave away at something, often times sacrificing far more in terms of health, family and wage then those employed by BigCo, only to discover that there is nothing to sell at the end.

Creating a business that’s an asset is done intentionally and doesn’t happen automatically, even for very profitable businesses. As Warrillow and I discuss in this session, one of the first keys is to think in terms of building a business that can run without the owner. Any potential buyer is going to look beyond a P&L to discover if the business is really run by the relationships of skills of the owner. If that’s the case, if the owner can’t walk away without any dip in productivity, then the asset is significantly downgraded.

If you find yourself thinking, I want to start a business or I might want to slow down a bit in five years, now is the time to add Built To Sell to your strategy and planning must read list. It’s essential to start setting the value building process and tactics into motion and nurturing a view of your business as a potential.

The first step in this process is to find a way to remove yourself from sales and marketing and product innovation. Until you can successfully do that, you’ll have a hard time convincing outside buyers,

The next very important step is to focus on creating positive cash flow. I know every business has that as a goal, but if you began to look at cash flow as something over and above the debt service the buyer just took on to buy you out, it might look a little different.

Built To Sell is the first book I’ve come across that speaks about building a business to sell in the practical, simple terms that any small business owner can access in a systematic way.

My favorite quote from our interview – “Most small businesses run their business like they watch a movie, they have no idea what the ending will be.”

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The PR industry is in a state of flux with increasing importance on getting into the content and social web business. Consumers are spending more time with digital and social media. Advertising dollars are following. That means less budget to staff newsrooms and reporters, journalists and editors to pitch.

Understanding the needs of their “customers’ customer” is essential for PR agencies and communications professionals to remain relevant and productive. “Push PR” is increasingly being complemented by “Pull” tactics – optimization for discovery. Being able to provide value is essential and here are 3 ways a better understanding of SEO can do just that.

1. Fish where the fish are.

There were over 14 billion core searches in Dec ( comSore ) vs 285 million who watch TV in a given month ( Nielsen ). Consumers rely on search daily to find news and information. PR and communications types need to understand the consumer search behaviors and preferences (keywords) of their clients as well as the publications they want their clients to be covered by.

2. Journalists rely on search.

According to TopRank’s “Journalist Use of Search survey”, 91% of journalists, editors and reporters surveyed use standard search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing to do their job. That preference was mirrored by findings in a recently published “ Social Media & Online Usage Study ” (pdf) by George washington University and Cision where 100% of those surveyed use Google to research stories.

3. Optimization is about more than SEO.

Search engine optimization, digital asset optimization, social media optimization and even micromedia optimization (ie real time SEO) are buzzwords all representing opportunities for Media Relations and communications professionals to influence discovery by making it easier for various types of search engines to find, index and rank their content.

It’s imporant that communications people understand the different search options consumers and the media are using to distribute and consume news. If content can be searched on, it can be optimized. That includes everything from press releases to video to Tweets.

Search Engine Optimization or “ SEO ” as an umbrella term is typically concerned with any kind of work that influences any kind of search engine to do what it does best and hopefully in favor of the content being promoted. Most people mean optimizing content for better visibility in Google, Yahoo or Bing when they employ SEO tactics.

It’s important to note that many publishers are already using SEO tactics to make their news stories better suited for discovery and ranking on search engines. These efforts have resulted in substantial increases in traffic to online news sites, improving the attractiveness of advertising.

Digital Asset Optimization or “ DAO ” is a term TopRank has used and promoted since 2007 that makes reference to the different types of media search engines like Google have started to display (aka Blended or Universal search results) depending on the query. Search results are no longer limited to web pages and can include images, video thumbnails, news, blogs, books and local information. Optimizing for these different types of media involves understanding what digital assets can be created, keyword optimized and published online for search.

Social Media Optimization or “ SMO ” is a term initially made popular by Rohit Bhargava and added on to by several others in the SEO world including TopRank. While many social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn keep the bulk of their content behind a login and away from search engine spiders, many social interactions produce content that can be indexed and included in search results. Journalists and consumers increasingly participate with social channels to watch, share, contribute and curate information. If PR and communications can understand how to influence keyword use of social content then their news will be easier for analysts, reporters and journalists to find.

Here’s a story related to me by an editor in the TopRank Journalist use of search survey that illustrates the intersection of search and social media:

“I was writing a column about the planned partnership between Google and Yahoo.”

“I tracked down potential sources first using Google and LinkedIn, and came across a white paper prepared by a senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute.”

“While I could not easily find an e-mail address, I went to Facebook where I located him, then sent a message. He replied and we followed up with a phone interview.”

Micromedia Optimization is a new term that basically means real time optimization of status updates and content sources that are indexed and included as real time content by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. The same micromedia content can be shared and discovered on platform specific search engines such as search.twitter.com and across social networks that provide the opportunity to syndicate such content. Google Buzz, Facebook status updates and LinkedIn updates are also included in this category.

The takeaway that I think is most important for communications professionals is to understand the nature of search and how to match up optimization tactics with channels of disccovery. Using keyword research for both standard search and social search optimization of news content along with ongoing web analytics and social media monitoring are key.

I’ll be discussing these strategies, tactics and a lot more at SMC Louisville tonight 6:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. ET on at the Louisville Visual Art Association. I hope folks can brave the snow (safely) and make it out. You won’t be disappointed!

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 3 Reasons PR & Communications Pros Need to Know SEO | One comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Hat tip to my colleague at Edelman Digital , TJ Kelly for sending this to me last week.

As you can see from the chart above , more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25 up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008; thank you in part to celebrity adoption and the mainstream media mentioning Twitter over 20,ooo times last year on television (can’t find the source). Twitter has also extended its global reach expanding in Indonesia, Japan, Mexico to name a few.

What this means for brands.

Brands now have the opportunity to reach more people in more places  on Twitter.  They need to open up the firewall and be ready to engage in multiple languages by empowering their employee base to serve as brand evangelists. The important thing to remember is that Twitter is just a tool and if the masses move to something else (ah em … Google Buzz ), brands need to be ready and try to forecast consumer behavior in order to stay one step ahead of the game.

One model I use when creating strategic social media plans is to follow the Forrester POST Method (People, Objectives, Strategies, and Technologies or tools) in that order; and notice that technologies is considered last.

A friend of mine who is an experienced corporate marketer started a new business. The store just opened and being the good pal that I am, I was able to provide some advice regarding marketing on the web – specifically regarding blog marketing.

This is a new small business, so considerations for what to do about a web site included: cost, functionality, flexibility, ease of maintenance and marketability. The web site needed to serve as both an online representation of the business, but without transactional functionality, as well as a host for landing pages used with email and PPC campaigns.

My recommendation for a low cost, easy to use and search engine friendly content mangagement system? Blog software.

What often happens when friends ask for advice regarding web marketing is that I’ll make some recommendations in a casual setting or email links to a few resources like this one on blog marketing tips , then a few weeks or months later, the conversation will turn to, “So, how is your blog or web site doing?”, and I find out that the site/blog was either not started at all, it was created in a way that blows away any chance of SEO or marketability outside of advertising or it was built using resources with no cost of entry but without the capabilities to scale if successful.

Something along those lines happend with my friend’s blog.

What was the issue? The blog was started using Blogger.com, which by itself is not a problem, but the blog address selected was: nameofstore.blogspot.com. This is understandable because it’s the default URL selection when you create a blog with Blogger.com.

However, picking a third party domain for the blog address violates one of the most important rules in sustainable blogging: Always host the blog address with a domain name you control. That means yourdomainname.com/blog or blog.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainnameblog.com.

Otherwise, you give up control. How so? What if the blog host goes down? Free services rarely provide support. Also, what if the service does not support the functionality you need? You can’t change their entire platform to suit your individual needs.

There are other reasons for keeping the blog address as part of your own domain name including the ability to change blog software services without having to change your blog address.

Of course there’s also a benefit for search engine optimization if you host the blog as a sub directory of you main company domain name such as yourdomainname.com/blog. Blogs are very linkable entities and other blogs tend to be enthusiastic about linking, so any links to your blog can be percieved as a vote of credibility to your main web site since the blog and the web site share the same domain name.

Now back to our tale of the small business blog. My friend had only made one post on the blogspot.com URL so nothing would be lost by moving to a dedicated domain name. My own experience with Online Marketing Blog was different. After blogging for nearly 2 years at a blogspot.com address, I decided to move to a dedicated domain name and Wordpress. It took some talented optimization and 6 months of aggressive promotion to recoup the linking footprint (100,000+ inbound links) that was lost. Of course, now our traffic is multiple times more than what it was.

What my friend decided to do was register a domain name and setup a hosting account. Since there was no main company web site to attach the blog to, this makes the most sense. Essentially, the blog became the company web site. With more and more businesses, this is becoming a very practical, cost effective and functionally efficient way to manage web site content: Using blog software as a content management system.

As my friend asked what to do next, writing everything down in a notebook, it became clear that there’s a litany of things you COULD do with setting up a blog. Even if we filtered it down to what one SHOULD do, the list was amazingly long. As someone new to the whole idea of blogging and this not being a formal consulting arrangement, I decided to create what I think, is a short list of what a small businesses CAN do when starting a blog.

1. Decide the purpose of the blog.

Do this before going out and registering a domain name or anything else. Is the blog going to serve as a journal for starting the business? Is it a search marketing tool? Is it to be used to demonstrate thought leadership and create credibility? Will it be a communication tool for customers? Will it also serve as the main company web site? Is the purpose some or all of the above?

I could elaborate on setting up each of these types of blogs if I ever decided to write that book, but for now, we’ll stick with a blog that serves as a company web site, hosts landing pages, serves as a small business resource and marketing tool.

2. Pick a URL.

If the purpose of the blog is to support company brand and audience, then the URL should be part of the company web site. Ideally, the blog hosting situation allows for a sub directory such as companysite.com/blog.  Otherwise, a sub-domain such as blog.companysite.com will work and you can can host the blog elsewhere, separate from the company web servers. IT will like that.

If the purpose of the blog is independent of the primary company brand, or messaging, then a dedicated domain name such as topicgoeshereblog.com might work better.

It’s tempting to use a keyword only domain name, but those keywords will not be a silver bullet for search engine rankings. A catchy, meaningul brand name for the blog will go much farther as content can always be optimized for search engine rankings.

3. Pick blog software.

In most cases, WordPress is the way to go. An inexpensive Linux platform hosting account that supports PHP and mySQL can be secured for $10-$20 per month. However, should the blog get really popular, expect to upgrade to support increased demand. It’s entirely worth it.

The blog software will need to be installed on the server that will host it and the database will also need to be set up. This is fairly straightforward, but in all honesty, it’s best to have someone that knows what they’re doing help. As an example, I do very little of the technical work on our blog and prefer to have a specialist (Thomas McMahon) take care of maintenance, adding plugins, design and functionality updates. We have outside programmers do any heavy lifting in the application development department.

Wordpress software is open source, ie free, so if you are code/technically savvy and you have the time to figure it out, it’s certainly doable. There is no one “right way” to setup a blog. There are literally hundreds of shades of gray.

It can cost a hundreds to thousand of dollars for a blog consultant to install, setup and customize the design of your blog. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for expertise that will save you MONTHS of time and allow you to get to market more quickly and efficiently.

4. Customize the blog.

After installation of the core blog software, there are a number of customization tasks.

First, the blog design should be modified to match your branding. If you don’t hire a consultant to do this, there are many free templates that can then be customized, but many of them require a link to the author at the bottom. Personally, I’m not a fan of those, but they are a low/no cost place to start. Design customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and possibly a few database elements.

The second set of customization tasks involves plug-ins to improve the adminstration, front end functionality and the SEO friendliness of the blog. Thanks to Twitter and Thomas for this recommended minimum list of plug-ins:

• Redirection
• HeadSpace2
• Google XML sitemaps
• Gravity forms
• All In One SEO
• PostPost
• ACE WP Plug
• ComLuv
• Disqus
• Members only
• Cookies for comments
• Section widget
• Page order
• Related posts
• FeedSmith FeedBurner Plugin
• Sociable
• Askimet or WP-SpamFree
• Post Teaser

5. Create a content plan.

In concert with the purpose of the blog, it’s important to generate a basic editorial guideline for creating content. The easiest way to manage this is by creating categories for the kinds of content you plan on posting.

Before you create those categories, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research as the categories will become excellent repositories of related content. Why not make it even easier for search engines to understand and rank them?

Common keyword research tools include: WordTracker and Google . Paid keyword tools include WordStream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com

Once you identify which keyword phrases best represent the content you’ll be publishing, use them to name your content categories. Each time you make a blog post, that entry will be associated with one or more categories, creating a very search engine friendly repository of content.

Create an editorial calendar or schedule of posts to keep you on topic for your audience and true to the purpose of the blog. Leverage interactions with blog readers as well as your analytics to know if your content and keyword picks are productive or not.

6. Pick your blogging team.

In the case of most small businesses, the blogging team is a team of one. That’s fine, just be sure to document what’s working and what’s not so when the time comes, you can get your blogging team mate up to speed quickly.

Since blogger’s block (like writer’s block) can really dampen a good thing for a small business blog, go ahead and keep a good number of posts in draft mode. Add to them as you get new ideas and inspiration. Or facts and examples. That way, you’ll have a steady stream of blog posts ready to publish in advance. In fact, you can schedule blog posts in advance using WordPress.

7. Make it easy to share.

Blogging in a vaccum is inevitable blogging death. It’s essential that you solicit comments in your posts, respond to comments quickly, create and enforce a commenting policy. Being responsive is an essential part of attracting subscribers .

Don’t covet the comments either. Visit other blogs in your industry and write useful comments. Those bloggers may notice you and it can become something more, like an invite for a guest post, collaboration or simply a new online friend.

Make it easy for readers of your blog to save and share your content with sharing buttons or widgets. It pays to create accounts on the more popular services and develop social networks there. Your contacts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar services will watch for your next post and vote for the good stuff, which can drive your content to be exposed on more popular areas of those web sites. More exposure can mean more traffic. The social bookmarks tool is handy for adding such functionality to any web page and Thomas offered several new blog promotion tips last week.

8. Get your social on .

RSS feeds come with blogs and it’s worth taking the time to make sure the RSS feed is readily available and obvious for people to subscribe. Submit your blog and RSS feed to our HUGE list of blog and RSS directories .

Set up social profiles on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as appropriate and automate the sharing of links from your blog posts to those services. In other words, you could use a service like TwitterFeed to publish your latest blog post to Twitter and Facebook automatically.

Be sure to publish your blog URL everywhere you publish your web site address.

9. Make static.

If you’re using the blog as a CMS for a small business web site, then make your static web pages such as those for About our Company, Product/Service pages, Contact Forms, etc. The blog can be customized to have a home page like any other web site as well. That way, visitors arriving on your site can see what they expect from a company selling products/services. At the same time, blogging creates a rich and frequent source of useful content that’s syndicated via RSS, promoted automatically to relevant social channels and leaves the door open for interaction via comments.

10. Measure. Test – Test. Measure.

It’s important that you set goals for the blog, a plan to execute tactics and most of all, measure progress. Most web site measurement is focused on web analytics and metrics specific to different types of marketing such as with email, SEO or PPC. Standard web analytics software such as Google Analytics will address the vast majority of your needs.

I would also recommend social media monitoring and analytics. Monitoring can be as simple as the RSS feed from search.twitter.com combined with the RSS feed from the results of a search on Google’s blog search. You could also use services like socialmention.com , trackur.com or more robust social media monitoring tools such as Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs or Radian6.

Social monitoring tools will help you understand what your customers are saying about you on the social web as well as uncover new interaction opportiunities with influentials. Real time search means real time marketing and social monitoring can facilitate that. One example would be if a competitor Tweets a deal on a product. Your Twitter search on that competitor or product would create an alert. You could then decide to offer a deal at a lower price or some other counter offer.

Another example is if a customer complains about your company. Before others jump on the bandwagon, your social monitoring tools would alert you and you can then qualify and address the situation quickly.

As web analytics and social media monitoring tools become increasingly intertwined, you’ll be able to identify many other key metrics for the effect of your social participation on bottom line business goals.

There you go. Ten tips for starting a small business blog.

This was a long post and yet, it’s nowhere near a comprehensive guide to create a small business blog. Even though there is plenty of free blog software and advice available online, many companies would benefit from having professional help with a business blog.

The funny thing is, my friend will look at this post and say, “This is the SHORT list?”. Blogging can be simple to start, but no one said it wasn’t hard work.

If you’ve created a blog for your small business, what has your experience been? Did you do it yourself? Do you get expert help? Have you set up a small business web site using blog software? we’d love to hear about your experiences, challenges and successes.

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Ten Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog | 3 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

div class=”separator” style=”clear: both; text-align: center;”a href=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5teyRpJfosk/S3hJ4xw0-lI/AAAAAAAAC8w/49serAY25M8/s1600-h/googleppc.jpg” imageanchor=”1″ style=”clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;”img border=”0″ height=”200″ src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5teyRpJfosk/S3hJ4xw0-lI/AAAAAAAAC8w/49serAY25M8/s200/googleppc.jpg” width=”200″ //a/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”div style=”display: block; float: right; height: 60px; margin: 8px; width: 52px;”script type=”text/javascript” tweetmeme_url = ‘http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2010/02/making-money-with-pay-per-click.html’; tweetmeme_source = ‘The Marketing Blog’;/scriptbr /script src=”http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js” type=”text/javascript”/script/divspan style=”font-size: small;”Whether you’ve been using AdWords for years or have never even heard of pay-per-click advertising (PPC), know that it’s an essential part of any Integrated marketing program.nbsp; I recently provided some of my most valuable bpay-per-click/b advertising secrets on an interview with Jonathan Taylor and Russell Portwood at Blog Talk Radio (a href=”http://www.blogtalkradio.com/beginnerinternetbiz/2010/02/13/how-your-business-can-profit-from-google-adwords-1″listen here/a).nbsp; During the interview we discussed how to get started with Google AdWords and some valuable secrets for making money online./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”If you’re not running any campaigns on Google AdWords, I suggest that you open an account.nbsp; The beauty of PPC advertising is that you only pay when an individual clicks on one of your ads.nbsp; You might have tried PPC in the past and generated a lot of clicks but no conversions.nbsp; Perhaps you tried it for a short while and found it too complicated to manage.nbsp; I know how you feel…/span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”bThe Long PPC Road/b/span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”When I started in Internet marketing, pay-per-click was just coming on to the scene.nbsp; The premise was great, only paying for an action, but the results weren’t so good.nbsp; Over time, as the tracking become more sophisticated and the quality of analytics improved, results started to improve.nbsp; I’ve spent over 5 years making small distinctions in pay-per-click advertising campaigns that have dramatically improved my results.br /br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b /b/span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b /bMany people believe that to get quality traffic you need to spend a ton of money or always be in the #1 paid position.nbsp; Nothing could be further from the truth.nbsp; Some of my highest converting keywords cost the least.nbsp; Additionally, and here’s a free tip, I often get higher conversions when my ad shows in positions 3 - 6.nbsp; I find that prospects clicking in the ’sweet spot’ are more buying oriented than just doing research./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”To be effective with PPC, you need to run a number of campaigns on your own.nbsp; I attended at least half a dozen workshops on pay-per-click advertising and spent close to $1,000 on so called PPC courses only to find that there wasn’t a lot of “new” information designed to improve the effectiveness of my campaigns.nbsp; What I learned through trial and error was certainly more valuable.nbsp; iAlways seek hands-on experience if you wish to be success./i/span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”bPPC Made Simple/b/span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”In a couple of months, I’ll be sharing everything I know about PPC advertising in my next book, i”PPC Made Simple.”nbsp; /iUntil then, I wanted to share a few tips you can use right away to start improving campaign performance./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b1.nbsp; Set a budget of $10 - $20/day.nbsp; /bIt doesn’t take much to determine if a particular type of PPC campaign is going to be profitable.nbsp; Start with a small budget to generate clicks and watch your campaign closely.nbsp; Usually, for around $100 you can determine whether or not you’ll be successful./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b2.nbsp; Do your keyword research.nbsp;/b Start with the a href=”https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal”Google AdWords Keyword Tool/a to find frequently searched upon terms.nbsp; In addition, do some competitive research using any one of dozens of tools that reveal what terms your competitors are bidding on.nbsp; Once you’ve compiled a list, focus on buying keywords.nbsp; Use the Microsoft Commercial Intent tool to optimize your keyword list./span/divdiv class=”separator” style=”clear: both; text-align: center;”a href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5teyRpJfosk/S3hKQ2P9tQI/AAAAAAAAC84/0mHE64-Ux8E/s1600-h/computer2.jpg” imageanchor=”1″ style=”clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;”img border=”0″ src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5teyRpJfosk/S3hKQ2P9tQI/AAAAAAAAC84/0mHE64-Ux8E/s320/computer2.jpg” //a/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b3.nbsp; Use a tool like the Google AdWords Editor to help manage your campaigns./b The tool costs nothing and can help you stay on top of the performance of your campaign.nbsp; Additionally, you can easily manage multiple campaigns simultaneously./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b4.nbsp; Use the AdWords Dashboard.nbsp;/b As usual, Google AdWords comes with it’s own resources for evaluating campaign effectiveness.nbsp; Learn the value of your AdWords dashboard.nbsp; This gives you information about your click-through-rate, cost per click, and overall campaign metrics.nbsp; The more you understand the data being provided, the more effective you can make your campaign./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”b5.nbsp; Implement Google Conversion Tracking./bnbsp; When you implement conversion tracking, you can quickly and easily see which keywords and ads drive sales.nbsp; This is the most important aspect of any PPC effort and essential for long term success.nbsp; If you know which keyword/ad combination is most effective, you can optimize your PPC budget./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”These are just a few tips to help you improve the performance of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns.nbsp; Again, it’s essential that you start using Google AdWords in order to learn how to implement successful campaigns.nbsp; Even though you may have four or five campaigns that don’t generate a favorable return, one profitable campaign can more than make up for it./span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”br //span/divdiv style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”span style=”font-size: small;”Once you launch your campaign, utilize the metrics provided by Google to refine and improve your campaign.nbsp; By learning the ins and outs of pay-per-click advertising you are improving your overall knowledge of Internet marketing and finding new ways to promote your products or services.nbsp; In addition to generating sales, PPC is a great tool for lead generation as well./span/divdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”For more free marketing advice, visit the a href=”http://www.marketingscoop.com”marketing experts/a at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/30060900-5761106680940562778?l=marketing-expert.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

Take a moment to think about, and count, the number of B2C social media success stories that pop into your head.

I’ll venture to guess that you could immediately name five to 10, if not many more. From Ford to Dell to Zappos to Best Buy , B2C social media winners – those organizations that caught on early and created a cult following of brand cheerleaders via the social web – are hard to miss.

But how about the B2B social media winners? I’m guessing these weren’t as easy to name.

And yet, there are just as many B2B organizations successfully conquering social media. While their stories might not be as well-known, we think these 5 B2B social media winners are doing a pretty doggone good job. Tell us if you agree.

1. American Express OPEN
American Express OPEN is the company’s division dedicated to helping small business owners succeed. It has based its marketing strategy around the social web, realizing that social media has become a priority for small business owners.

Since 2007, AMEX OPEN has relied on its OPEN Forum to provide business advice and insight. The social site includes a blog with frequently updated content, and a large collection of videos that users can rate and share via other social networking channels. In the site’s “Idea Hub,” forum members can network with one another and with industry experts, as well as customize topics to their specific interests.

The social site has been extremely successful, increasing unique visitors 525% over the past year – from 160,000 in December 2008 to nearly 1 million in December 2009.

2. HSBC
To target business entrepreneurs and provide them with an active forum to share and gain knowledge, HSBC has created The HSBC Business Network for both customers and non-customers.

It’s evident that the HSBC Business Network truly thrives on its members.

The site includes a network of blogs, and invites members to create their own blog to share their personal experiences with other entrepreneurs. Currently, the network is made up of 148 blogs from members.

The site’s homepage is populated with content from users: the most popular recent blog post, forum post and user profile.

3. Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising has been using social media as a vehicle to listen to, educate, support and market to their customers and potential customers since 2006. However, the past year has seen a distinct effort from Microsoft to reach customers through social web participation.

An AdCenter Community site as well as blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook presence, videos, photos and social media coverage of industry events along with proactive listening and community manager participation have been instrumental for growing the AdCenter community and providing customers with an opportunity to be involved with how Microsoft does business with them.

4. Archer
The social media strategy for Archer Technologies, provider of risk and compliance solutions, and a 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award winner for B2B social media, revolves around two components.

First, the Archer Community is an online social network that gives customers a forum to interact, share best practices and provide feedback to help drive Archer product development. The second component is the Archer Exchange (pictured above), an online marketplace that enables clients to download applications developed by other clients or by Archer.

The two social sites have been successful at driving website traffic and attracting new members: The Archer Community receives 20 new members, 4,000 unique visits and 400+ downloads every week, while the Archer Exchange boasts 17,000 unique visits, 90,000 page views and 1,200 downloads.

But the real benefit has been enhanced product development as a result of user feedback and sharing. Archer tells Forrester that its Archer Community directly helped form its Business Continuity Management, Mobile GRC and Data Feed Manager applications.

5. Cree
LED Manufacturer Cree is embracing social media to build awareness and promote the benefits of LED technology, rather than directly sell products.

At the center of its latest campaign, “ LED Revolution ,” is an interactive social website. On the site, visitors can submit their bad lighting photos (think bad 1980s office fluorescent lighting) to win LED recessed downlights. The site’s blog is posted to almost daily, and humorous videos encourage visitors to, “Break Your Fluorescent Shackles!”

Cree also leverages Facebook and Twitter in a push/pull approach for the website.

Hear from Ginny Skalski, Cree social media specialist — who happens to have a background in journalism and community management rather than marketing – in this video on the Social Media B2B blog.

Of course, these five B2B social media winners are only part of a much longer list of companies that are successfully interacting with customers, building brand awareness and driving traffic to their websites through the social web. What are your favorite B2B social media success stories?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 5 B2B Social Media Winners | One comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Well, that’s what I thought before I joined a PR firm and yes, I admit that I was wrong.  My analytics background stems from managing multimillion dollar search campaigns; where one tenth of a percentage point made a difference in the performance of a campaign. Every dollar invested was tracked, measured and easily backed by a strong ROI. Transitioning into social media several years ago has brought an entirely new set of metrics to the table that I am still learning to this day.

In the past, I have always reported into some sort of web marketing organization and due to the nature of my job, I have worked closely with internal PR teams on various projects. To be completely honest, I’ve always had this particular perception that PR metrics were soft. Although I never said anything out loud, I would consistently chuckle under my breath when I saw something like the following on a “what we are measuring” slide:

• Media Coverage
• Sentiment
• Impressions

And now a new chapter emerges in my career and I find myself working for a PR firm, Edelman Digital .  From a metrics perspective, I honestly thought that I would bring to the table significant metrics experience due to my “direct marketing” background. Boy was I wrong.  I am probably the dumbest person in the room when it comes to measuring social media.   I am surrounded by colleagues that not only understand metrics but are pristine in the way they can communicate those metrics to others and correlate them back to business value.  I guess the key takeaways for me are – assuming is bad (very bad), stereotyping is bad (very bad) and I work for a pretty kick a$$ team and learn something new every day (yay for me).

But the reality is that social media metrics in general are soft.

What I mean by soft is that most of it is based on assumptions.  Now this isn’t a bad thing at all; in fact, brand marketing and advertising is even softer, yet less scrutinized than social media.  I have been asked questions like “what’s the value/ROI of corporate blogging?” and my response is something like “well, what’s the value/ROI of billboard advertising?” And to take it one step further, I really don’t see the ROI of organizations that have 50+ people on a web team to support a corporate website that no one really goes to anymore, but that’s just me.

But the issue is that we now have 10 , I mean 100 different ways to measure social media that the metrics become diluted and meaningless. I can’t walk into an executive’s office and show him/her X number of slides with a multitude of different ways to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. They want to know how much they are investing and how much they can expect to see in return. Number of comments, RSS subscribers, twitter followers, retweets and a sentiment analysis is meaningless.  Until we in the industry (and some smart entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who can create the technology) can confidently attribute a valuable metric to some action or interaction on the social web; the metrics will always be soft.

The best case scenario would be data that can accurately attribute a monetary value to thinks like:

-          Tweets/Retweets/Lists/Followers

-          Comment/Likes on wall posts/fans

-          Comments on blogs/subscribers/RSS

-          Everything else..

Until then, we do the best we can and … assume most of it.

So what is a valuable metric?

For most it’s sales. Dell Outlet can confidently attribute a few million dollars to their twitter engagement which I am sure cannibalized a percentage of sales from Dell.com and the products they sell at full price. For others, it could very well be reach, sentiment of just growing a community. However, if this is the case, the metrics should then match the objectives.  Executives and marketing managers cannot expect an increase in sales if the business objective is to grow the community.  A more effective strategy would be to build a community, earn their trust and delicately ask for their permission to market your services; a wise proverb from Seth Godin .

Bottom line is this.

Social media is important. It gives brands a chance to be human and do the things that humans do; listen, converse, love, give and at times ignore.  Measuring these behaviors is difficult yet we all know that it makes a tremendous difference when brands actively engage in the social web.

Metrics are behind; we all know that and I am sure they will catch up. Until then, we have to do our best to identify the right KPIs for each engagement and limit those metrics to 4 or 5 data points.

If a brand engages on the web for the sole purpose of selling products, they are in the wrong place.

So now that this post is going all over the place, I will stop.

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Free Live Training Mobile Marketing for Small Business This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

You know mobile is the hottest marketing tactic going right now. Maybe you don’t feel it yet, maybe you’re not sure if it’s really time to get on board or not. Join me for a free web panel discussion – Mobile Marketing for Small Business – February 18th at Noon CST – Register here for Feb 18 Mobile Marketing Event

As mobile devices evolve to powerful hand held computers, smart marketers are embracing this evolution with mobile centric marketing initiatives.

Everything about your marketing online and offline must begin to consider that entire market segments use the mobile device to find everything from food to legal services locally and abroad.

Join me with a special expert panel, Feb 18th at Noon CST as we discuss:

• Ways to get your business ready for mobile shoppers
• How to market through Text and SMS campaigns
• How to make your web site mobile browser friendly
• Integrating mobile technologies into your offline efforts

Panelists include:

Kim Dushinski

Dushinski is the author of the Mobile Marketing Handbook . As an advocate for smart, effective mobile marketing Kim leads workshops and speaks internationally about how to profit with mobile. In 2008 she was a System Seminar faculty member, received rave reviews and was invited back in 2009 as the only mobile-focused speaker at this cutting edge conference. She was the featured speaker for the Houston chapter of the American Advertising Federation and at the first Thin Air Summit.

Shane Neman

Shane Neman founder and CEO of premier Mass SMS and Group Text Messaging service EzTexting.com , Shane Neman has brought his entrepreneurial ambition to the sphere of mobile marketing. Under Neman’s leadership, Ez Texting now sends more than 120 million text messages per year on behalf of over 50,000 clients across the nation for a multitude of purposes.

Igor Faletski

Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify , a service that makes websites mobile-friendly. With Mobify, anyone with basic web design skills can quickly create a mobile version from elements of their existing site. Founded in 2007, Mobify is powering mobile for SPIN, BoingBoing, Smashing Magazine and top US fashion retailers. Mobify is based in Vancouver, Canada.

Register here for Feb 18 Mobile Marketing Event

This webinar is presented by GoToWebinar as part one of a three part series

Related Posts:

• A Mobile Marketing Primer
• R U Collecting Mobile Phone Numbers Yet?
• Mobile friendly blogs the easy way
• The Mobile Phone as a Local Marketing Tool
• Free Live Training Facebook for Small Business
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

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3 Ways to Use the Google Wonder Wheel for Visiual SEO This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Google has a tool buried deep into the core search functionality that doesn’t get talked about much. The tool is called the Wonder wheel. Essentially, it’s just another way to view your search results but it focuses on creating a visual wheel of the search terms Google thinks are related to your primary search. You access this view by doing a search and then hitting +Show Options at the top of the page. A sidebar will appear on the left, scroll down to the view options and hit Wonder wheel . (If you’ve never explored the more options sidebar there’s really a lot to play with there.)

This is a Wonder wheel view of the search for small business marketing.

What I like about this is that I think it gives a very simple map for optimizing your web pages, blog posts and entire site and a great starting place for building much more effective PPC campaigns. There are many more sophisticated ways to all both of these, but sometimes simple is better!

1) Optimizing your site around important and related keyword phrases . If you’re going to win the search battle for your most important search phrases you’ll need to think strategically about it. The more competitive the terms, the more you have to optimize very specifically. Using the Wonder wheel approach you could focus on the optimizing your home page for the core term and then building content pages specifically focused on each of the spokes in the wheel. This basic approach allows you to take huge cue from Google as to how they view your term. OK, there’s lots more to it, but this is the basic foundation.

2) Creating more effective PPC campaigns . The more targeted any ad is in both audience and message the more likely it’s going to perform. Using the Wonder wheel approach you might ditch the core phrase because it’s likely too expensive and crowded, but focus on building separate campaigns and ads for each of the spoke terms by creating numerous ad groups by Wonder wheeling those spoke terms for another good 5-6 phrases. You can then add Google’s keyword suggestions to finish off your groups with no more than 10-15 for each. Make sure you create specific ads for each group. Again, a very simplified approach to what can be done in far more complex ways, but this might be a great way for you to get started right.

3) Shaping your blog content . The Wonder wheel is a great tool to use along side your post writing. You can determine what you are going to write about and use the Wonder wheel suggestions on the spokes as phrases you might also want to work into a post. Or, you can use the Wonder wheel to suggest topics that you should be writing about and including as phases in your blog post titles. This approach might be one of the easiest ways to keep your mind buzzing about topics for posts while keeping your SEO efforts focused as well.

Related Posts:

• Google Keyword Tool Now Offers Search Volume
• I’ve got a funny feeling about MSN
• Using Google AdWords for Testing Organic Keywords
• Every company has two wheels
• Keyword Research for Targeted Web Site Traffic
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

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Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content  for search.  The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar and while I’ve done several such presentations with our client PRWeb , I had not done one with Search Engine Watch before.

The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent promotions by PRWeb and SEW plus Mike Grehan’s smooth handling of moderator duties amidst technical difficulties. Over 7,000 people registered, there were over 400 questions and 650 Tweets using the #prweb hash tag during the webinar.

The way it goes with many webinars when you’re invited by an organization to participate, is that the topic and title/description are determined beforehand. The speaker adapts themselves to that.  This presentation content focused on optimizing writing for the web with a particular emphasis on optimizing content common to public relations.

As promised, I’ve sorted the bulk of the questions out and will present several here along with my responses. I hope they are useful.

If I’m not currently optimizing my site and I have a limited budget, where do I start?

The first thing any marketing activity needs to start with include setting goals, understanding your audience and the market. The lowest cost method of outsourcing that kind of activity where search engine optimization is concerned, would be to hire a consultant or agency to do an audit.

An SEO audit represents the initial evaluation and research along with recommendations to be implemented by the client. Typically this involves: competitive research, keyword research, web site code/template evaluation, content optimization recommendations, link building research and recommendations, tips on content creation/promotion/repurposing and to varying degrees, social media recommendations. Web analytics, monitoring and ranking tools are also often recommended.

An audit does not take the place of consulting since it’s an evaluation and recommendation, not implementation and guidance on an ongoing basis. It is however, a cost effective start. Here are a few resources:

• Top 3 Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings
• Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
• Do’s and Don’ts of On-Page SEO for Public Relations
• 5 Online Marketing Resolutions for 2010

Should your newsroom blog be placed under the site’s domain, or maintained separately under the blog software’s domain to allow for incoming links to your main site that are coming from a different site?

There are two parts to the answer for this question. First, the reference to “blog software’s domain” sounds as though the blog is hosted with a third party service such as blogger.com or typepad.com. Example:  yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.typepad.com

My advice is to avoid using third party hosting services for your blog. If you’re too invested in such a service or have other reasons for using them and cannot use something like WordPress installed on the server where your web site is hosted, then use domain aliasing options so that your blog URL is part of your company domain name or a domain name that you own. Example:  yourblog.com or yourblog.companydomainname.com. This puts you in a position of more control since the blog content lives under a domain name you own vs a domain like blogspot.com, which is owned by Google.

While links from your blog/newsroom hosted on a blogspot.com to your company web site do count as inbound links, there’s not as much value from many links to your site from one other site vs many links to your site from many other relevant web sites.

Which leads us to the second part answer to where the newsroom should be hosted. My preference is to host the newsroom either as a sub-domain or a sub-directory of the main company web address. Example:   newsroom.redcross.org or in the case of TopRank, it’s  toprankmarketing.com/newsroom/

The links that you attract from other relevant web sites to your newsroom pages will build PageRank back to the rest of your web site. This is more true with the subdirectory than the subdomain. Also, keeping your newsroom address as part of your company web site address is useful for branding and user experience.

Some advice on subdomains and subdirectories from Matt Cutts of Google and here’s a good post discussing the SEO pros/cons.

Should you post press releases on your own website (before distribution)? How do search engines deal with the duplicate content issue in this case?

If you’re a publicly traded company, publishing financial announcements need to happen on the wires first, or at least at the same time as publishing the press release on your own web site.  For other companies not constrained by such requirements, posting a release to your own site first is fine.

As for dealing with duplicate content when your press release is published on your own site as well as on the wire service, it’s a pretty common situation. In fact, it’s often a goal for companies that distribute their releases through a newswire service to get as many other sites to copy and republish the release as possible. If the release is properly optimized, each time another web site with a unique domain name publishes a copy, it creates a link back to whatever web page on your corporate site you’re trying to draw attention to.  This sends more traffic and can affect the search ranking of the destination page.

A long standing problem with situations where the same content is hosted on different domain names has been debated and worried about by many, many webmasters. Search engines like Google don’t like to show multiple copies of the same content in the same search results. It’s not a good user experience. Therefore, when duplicate copies of the same content are detected, Google likes to pick a canonical version and only show that one.

Duplication with press releases is quite common because of distribution on wire services and to influence search engines to rank a certain version of your press release, there are a few steps you can take. One piece of advice many webmasters try to follow is to publish the release on your own site so Google crawls it there first.  However, if there are more links to another version of the same release hosted elsewhere, the other copy might be perceived as deserving to rank in search results instead.

For more tips on how to deal with duplicate content in a press release situation, watch this video interview with Adam Lasnik of Google that I took at SES London. Adam offers advice on making sure copies of your content attribute the source and all link back to the original to provide Google information about what version is canonical.

Is it useful to submit Press Releases to Social Media sites in addition to submitting to PRWeb.com?

Deciding what to share on social media sites should take into account what types of content members of the social community are best responding to.  Press Releases are often formal marketing communications, not exactly conversational. As you understand the community you’re trying to reach with the press release, you should know whether it’s appropriate to share a press release with them in a social media setting.

The big mistake many marketers and PR professionals make is to register with a variety of social network, news and bookmarking sites and then self submit, vote and rate their own press releases without having ever participated in the community.  With no network paying attention to what you’re sharing, few will ever notice the press release. If you do have a network on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and others, then you will know first hand whether it would be acceptable to the community to share content in a press release format.

Outside of social media news release, your best bet to take advantage of social media distribution of a press release would be to make it easy for the press release to be saved, shared and submitted by interested readers. You can do this with widgets or plugins offered by ShareThis and similar services. Many wire services already support those features as well.   Additionally, you should monitor pickups of the release on the social web.

If you see someone submit or share a release you’ve sent out on a social media site, reach out and thank them, answer any questions and show interest. That can generate interest from others in the community.  One tip I recommend is to write a blog post version of the press release and share that content with social media communities. Then include a link to the full press release within the blog post for people that want more information.

What you should not do is treat social media sites as a place to dump press release content thinking it will get a lot of exposure because there are many members of the community.  Here are some additional newsroom SEO tactics .

What is a good Social Media approach for a company which generates little in the way of genuinely newsworthy material?

Companies that say they have nothing “newsworthy” to publish are more common than you might think. There may be deeper issues to deal with than a social media strategy if there’s nothing new, innovative or unique to talk about.  A good social media marketing program cannot fix a broken business.

A business exists to make money fulfilling unmet customer needs. A perspective to consider would be to take the focus off the company and put it on the customer. Use social web participation as a way to better listen with and connect with customers to find opportunities to serve them better. Develop relationships with influentials and encourage feedback. Innovation can certainly come from a customer base as can the spread of a great idea. Focus on connecting with customers and helping customers connect with each other in a social context and there may be more newsworthy material than you ever expected.

Here are a few useful resources on Social Media and PR:

• Improve Public Relations with SEO & Social Media
• Why Use Social Media For Public Relations
• 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media For PR

There are so many shady SEO people and firms – how do you pick a good one?

There are no more “shady” SEO people than there are “shady” clients. Professionals that provide effective SEO consulting are reputable, experienced and in my experience, probably more talented than most traditional marketers you’ve ever worked with.  People doing shady things in the name of SEO are NOT professionals and the absence of that word, professionals, in the question is the problem.

Picking a good consultant or agency means doing homework. Know your market, set goals, understand your competition in search and start asking for referrals from others who have hired SEO companies. Word of mouth is powerful both for companies that need to hire good SEOs and for good SEOs to attract business. Our agency, TopRankMarketing.com for example, has relied mostly on word of mouth to attract new business since 2001. We also get a lot of new business from search itself (practice what you preach) and from networking on and offline.

Here are a few resources on hiring a SEO and one on “shady” SEO:

• How to Hire a SEO Firm – According to Google
• 5 Tips on Hiring and Getting the Most Value from SEO Consultants
• Dear Fox News: SEO Is Not Search Engine Scamming (Unless You’re Scamming Yourself)

Part of the issue is demand.  Take the next question for example:

“Can you use article spinning software to publish Press Releases? Or is there an Press Release spinning software to create many press releases based on one press release? Other words, is there a difference between article marketing and press releases?”

Article spinning software for press releases? Demand for shortcuts, silver bullets and “we want everything now” helps create the shady side of SEO as opportunists take advantage.  Automatically generating garbage pages in press release format will help NO ONE.

That’s it for this round of questions. I’ll post another round next week. Thank you to PRWeb and Search Engine Watch for having me participate on the webinar. What are your questions about optimizing news content?

If you’d like even more in-depth information about SEO and Public Relations , AND you happen to live in the Louisville, Kentucky area, be sure to check out the event Social Media Club Louisville is having next Tuesday night, Feb 16th.

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | 7 Answers to News SEO Questions You Should Know | 2 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

I know I did an upcoming events roundup last week but the upcoming Online Marketing Summit in San Diego is certainly worth a post of it’s own.  Besides, I get to announce that one of our clients from Zoomerang (MarketTools), won a free conference pass! Congratulations to Amy Lindahl!

Last year OMS came through Minneapolis and I had an opportunity to present on building a case for social media through a  Social Media Roadmap . Feedback comments like “lived up to the hype”, which is a compliment not too dis-similiar from, “it didn’t suck”, renewed my appreciation for Minnesota Nice.

But I digress. Back to the upcoming OMS in California.  The annual OMS conference is, to my great pleasure and happiness, in sunny San Diego.  I’ve had a chance to connect with the event organizer, Aaron Kahlow several times and appreciate the invite to present at OMS a great deal. One of my goals for 2010 is to vary the conferences that I speak at to reach different audiences.

OMS is held in conjuction with ClickZ Feb 22-24 at the Paradise Point Resort and Spa with a day of pre-conference training and a Search Engine Strategies day on Feb 25th.  I will arrive in the morning on the 23rd and will unfortunately, miss the morning sessions. But I do plan on attending “Social Media Inside The Brand: DuPont Case Study” which promises to cover the legal aspects of Social Media, how to develop a proper Social Media Marketing policy, and how to sell a “word of mouth” project internally. Sage advice for client side marketers.

There are some big names in search that will be presenting at OMS such as John Battelle, Tim Ash and Marshall Simmonds as well as marketers from brands including: Planet Holloywood, IBM, REO, New York Times, Jack in the Box, Eastman Kodak and Ogilvy 360.

Later in the afternoon (3:40 pm) on the 23rd I will be on a Social Media Forum which is part of a new “Leaders” track with a total of 5 savvy social media marketers on the panel. (Chris Baggott, Lee Odden, Michael Senger, Caitlin McCabe, Ben Hanna)

Luckily, we have Jason Baer as moderator who has taken the “Twitter approach” to Q and A in light of the inevitable time constraint. Jason will be asking questions and we are to provide answers in 140 characters or less.  Topics to be covered include:

• What’s the best way to integrate social media with other marketing efforts like email, direct mail, etc?
• How can you measure the effectiveness of social media efforts?
• What’s the #1 myth preventing companies from embracing social media?
• What are the main differences between B2B and B2C social media programs?

It should be a great panel!

Day two OMS includes a great mix of sessions. I’m looking forward to:

• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Wharton Dispels Myths of Social, Viral and Online Marketing through Cold Hard Research
• Social Media Measurement Best Practices
• Integrated Marketing Forum
• Lunch Keynote: “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election”
• Acquiring New Customers with Email and Social Media
• Demand Generation Secret Sauce (Jon Miller from Marketo, our client)
• Using Social Media for eCommerce

On Feb 25th, Search Engine Strategies Day, SES has programmed a series with Search Engine Strategies conference speakers covering the gamut of SEO, PPC, Local, Social, Analytics and of course, PR/Social/Search.

I will be on the “ PR, Social Media and Search ” panel at 3:15 to discuss the intersection and future of these complimentary channels. If you know my agency TopRank Online Marketing and the content we publish here at Online Marketing Blog, you know the subject matter of this session is a perfect fit.  Panelists include: David “dk” Klein, Dana Todd, Rand Fishkin, myself and moderator duties will be handled by Sally Falkow.

I know there are a lot of people attending OMS and there might even be some tickets left if you’re not.  I’m really looking forward to it (and not just because I get to escape the snow for four days at a resort in San Diego).  If you’re attending OMS later this month, please say hello. I’d like to get feedback from other attendees on this conference for our blog coverage.

If you’ve been to an OMS event, what was your favorite thing about it?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Get Smarter at Online Marketing Summit | 5 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

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PR is Only Dying If It Isn’t Evolving This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Brian Solis (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I asked Brian Solis , Principal of FutureWorks and co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations , about the future of the PR industry as we know it.

There’s plenty of doom and gloom surrounding the practice of public relations in the social web world, but Solis suggests, and I totally agree, that there’s a tremendous opportunity if firms and departments understand how to evolve and grab it.

In a sense, old school PR was about control of the message, but ironically, we lost control the minute the press release went to distribution. In PR 2.0 we can listen, in real time, to how a message is being received, accepted and talked about. With that aspect in play we actually have more ability to jump in and shape or reshape how a message is perceived and shared – actually more control.

Social media has evolved to the point where it impacts every department, whether they choose to participate or not. The new PR agency and department must embrace the social web as an umbrella that links HR, Interactive, Marketing, Management and Finance. The role of the PR agency should expand in this new model.

The new PR firm has the awesome responsibility of helping every department realize that real people exist on the other end of every interaction and message.

GoToWebinar is the presenting sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

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5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Constantly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. If you’ve never done this before, do it immediately as it is one of the best ways to discover what you do that actually differentiates you from your competition.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a small business that had no idea what its competitive advantage was until we heard it right from the mouths of happy customers. Seeking feedback is also a great way to get better and plug gaps. I can tell you that if you’re not receiving a large amount of your business by way of referral or word of mouth, you’ve probably got some gaps in your processes.

Below are five questions I like to pose to customers as they can provide a great discussion base for getting at what’s truly important to you and your customers. Create a form and get in the habit of surveying a handful of customers every month. I think you’ll be rewarded with tremendous insight and you’ll also find that your customers enjoy being asked what they think. One word of caution, don’t accept vague answers like “you provide good service.” While that may be true and good to hear, you can’t work with that. Push a bit and ask what good service looks like and maybe even if they can tell you about a specific instance in which they felt they got good service.

1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us in the first place?

This is a good baseline question for your marketing. It can get at how effective your advertising, message and lead conversion processes are working. I’ve also heard customers talk about the personal connection or culture that felt right in this question.

2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with?

In this question you are trying to discover something that you can work with as a true differentiator. This is probably the question you’ll need to work hardest at getting specifics. You want to look for words and phrases and actual experiences that keep coming up over and over again, no matter how insignificant they may seem to you. If your customers are explaining what they value about what you do, you may want to consider making that the core marketing message for your business.

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

On the surface this question could be looked at as a customer service improvement question, and it may be, but the true gold in this question is when your customers can identify an innovation. Sometimes we go along doing what we’ve always done and then out of the blue a customer says something like, “I sure wish it came like this,” and all of a sudden it’s painfully clear how you can create a meaningful innovation to your products, services and processes. Push your customers to describe the perfect experience buying what you sell.

4. Do you refer us to other, and if so, why?

This is the ultimate question of satisfaction because a truthful answer means your customer likes the product and likes the experience of getting the product. (You can substitute service here of course.) There’s an entire consulting industry cropping up around helping people discover what Fred Reichheld called the Net Promoter Score in his book The Ultimate Question .

Small businesses can take this a step deeper and start understanding specifically why they get referrals and perhaps the exact words and phrases a customer might use when describing to a friend why your company is the best.

5. What would you Google to find a business like ours?

This is the new lead generation question, but understanding what it implies is very important. If you want to get very, very good at being found online, around the world or around the town, you have to know everything you can about the actual terms and phrases your customers use when they go looking for companies like yours.

Far too often businesses optimize their web sites around industry jargon and technical terms when people really search for “stuff to make my life better.”

Bonus: I’m a big fan of building strategic partnerships and networks. Another question I would suggest you get in the habit of asking your customer is – “What other companies do you love to refer?” If you can start building a list of “best of class” companies, based on your customer’s say so, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a list of folks you should be building strategic relationships with.

Image credit: Karen Elliot

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With  search engine optimization , small businesses have two advantages larger competitors often can’t match: creativity and agility.

By embracing these two philosophies as part of their digital marketing DNA, small businesses can carve out a search marketing strategy that runs circles around larger competitors.

Today, we’ll briefly explore why creativity and agility are advantages small businesses have for search marketing, and some quick tips to activate each.

Creativity as a search marketing advantage

Large = more risk management – Small = creativity/individuality can shine

Larger corporations are naturally risk-averse. Most won’t create blogs that take sides on issues, create controversy or linkbait, push the envelope with snarky ideas or allow shining examples of individuality. Which is why individuals and smaller companies have a continued advantage: there are far less stakeholders so it’s easier to sell creative, controversial or compelling ideas. The more creative your content is, the more editorially earned, organic links you’ll attract from the web community that content builds.

Tips to activate for SEO benefit:

Develop creative linkbait – small, creative groups have the perfect environment to brainstorm linkbait. Where larger companies will mostly follow proven archetypes, a small business can break the mold with clever, catchy and outside the box linkbait ideas. It’s an opportunity to create the kind of linkbait social web influencers are looking for but larger competitors do not understand. By embracing this it’s possible to outpace those who can only engage in manual/mechanical linkbuilding efforts because the content they are working with is dry.

Create controversy – success in small businesses comes from dedicated team members passionate about their industry of choice. Due to this passion, they will naturally have strong feelings about the industry they are in. Why not turn that passion loose on the web to attract others who feel the same? It’s going to be more authentic, let you leverage an angle larger competitors can’t or won’t use, and more closely connect with an audience. Even those who disagree with you play into this strategy, because as they respond to you in droves, they bring an influx of links and referral traffic. Individuals in your niche are dominating the SERPs by leveraging this approach and it’s an opportunity if your small business can artfully direct controversy.

Leverage a creative CMS - where large competitors are stuck using SEO-unfriendly CMS platforms, your small business can take advantage of cheap/free SEO-friendly online publishing tools like Wordpress . Creative web developers can turn Wordpress into an entire CMS to power your site at an extremely reasonable cost. If you need something more powerful, a CMS like Expression Engine is both affordable and natively search engine friendly. Small businesses have a choice where larger companies frequently get locked into complex systems or dated technologies.

Agility as a search marketing advantage

Larger = slower moving – Small = the advantage of speed and agility

Agility isn’t just a factor for influencing the social web . It’s an effective way for a small businesses to create an SEO strategy disruptive to competitors. Because larger corporations naturally have complex layers of approval processes, lawyers and committees, smaller businesses have an opportunity to exploit this by being first. Many small businesses try to act like large corporations, however this is not embracing the advantage possible by being able to turn on a dime.

Tips to activate for SEO benefit:

Flip your mindset about web content from formal to improvisational – particularly with content published through a social channel such as a blog.  According to the recent TopRank Marketing survey on  blogging and SEO 94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months. A majority see benefit, since more content  equals more hooks in the water for search engines. Data from Hitwise showing search phrases are getting longer reinforces this, showing you should feed the tail now more than ever. By having an agile content development process, smaller companies can and do outpace larger competitors who have more resources, but can’t get out of their own way.

Embrace personal brands – when a company embraces their team members having personal brands, this will as a by-product provide a search marketing advantage. For example: in interviews, on their own blogs and through their own exposure, a company and the individual both benefit since both parties frequently get mentioned/linked together. It’s a win-win situation. Where larger corporations use their many partners as an advantage for links, small businesses can encourage and embrace their passionate, trusted team members to develop personal brands in their industry.

Break news – as we’ve noted previously in social media marketing applications (and also discussed by Brian Clark at Copyblogger): every company is now a media company. By breaking news right along with media, you’re going to attract links and referral traffic. Instead of relying on external entities for attention, your company will start to become a trusted source as its own brand of media. To embrace this in a way that matters, agility is essential.

The more small businesses take advantage of their ability to be more creative and agile than larger competitors, the more their online content marketing and SEO programs will succeed.

What other advantages do you think small businesses have for search marketing?

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© Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Two Biggest Advantages of Small Businesses SEO | 18 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com