Agito Internet Marketing Inc.

Single 'Tweet' Gets Company Worldwide Media Coverage

2009-08-28T13:49:00.010-04:00

As an internet marketer with a strong background in traditional public relations I’m constantly asked about the value of social media when it comes to generating news coverage – and leads – for companies. A recent post on Fast Company’s Brand U blog provides a powerful example of how just one tweet can unleash a flood of media coverage.

The post, From obscurity to Twittereity in one little tweet, summarizes how a tweet by San Antonio-based Pear Analytics helped the company generate worldwide media coverage:

Around 10 a.m. CDT on Aug. 12, Ryan Kelly, the founder and CEO of market insights and analysis firm Pear Analytics of San Antonio, posted the following on Twitter: "The Twitter Study we mentioned at #bmprsa is now available: http://bit.ly/17htXE interesting results..." BMPRSA is a San Antonio PR and social media group that Kelly had addressed a few weeks before, mentioning the upcoming study.

Almost immediately after he posted the tweet, a friend from sales and marketing company Sales by 5 sent him a Twitter direct message: "Please let me know when you release it, and I'll send it to Mashable."

By 5 p.m. that day, Pear's study was featured on the front page of Mashable, one of the largest blogs discussing social media and technology. By 6 p.m., the study was the top two trending topics on Twitter. Later that evening, Kelly was interviewed by Robert Scoble, formerly of Fast Company and now an evangelist for Rackspace. And from there it went viral.

Do a Google search on Pear Analytics today, and you'll see some 500 articles from everyone from the BBC to CNET to NBC.com to outlets worldwide writing about its study. It's the sort of publicity a company would pay a big chunk of change to get.

Perhaps the best part of the entire story is the fact the study in question reported that 40 per cent of Twitter messages are what Pear Analytics called “pointless babble”.

Ironically Kelly’s tweet certainly wasn’t babble and garnered widespread exposure on the Internet and mainstream media for his company.

Managing CPC Campaigns on a Cost per Lead Basis

2009-07-27T10:18:00.004-04:00

As a PPC agency, we get to review a lot of PPC campaigns that are run either in-house or through another agency for the purpose of helping prospective clients determine if we can achieve better results.

Since we tend to do more business in the B2B space, it’s surprising to me that many of the campaigns we review seem to be focused on getting as many visitors as possible for the allotted PPC marketing budget. The bids are low and the keywords are loosely and broadly targeted, resulting in the showing of ads to a large number of untargeted visitors, and generating low cost and low value visitors.

Generally, we’re seeing a focus on more traditional web analytics metrics that can be good for measuring visitor engagement, but are not the most appropriate for a lead generation campaign. The focus on these metrics is causing a part of the problems we see:

Avoid Too Much Focus on ‘Soft’ Engagement Metrics
There are certain metrics we call ‘soft’ metrics because they don’t correlate directly or even indirectly to sales ready leads generated. These include:

• Total number of visits
• Cost per visit
• Bounce rate
• CTR (click through rate)
• Time on site
• Number of pages viewed
• Conversions

It’s not hard to understand why this is the case. First, these are the metrics that are immediately available within in Google AdWords and Google Analytics (or any other PPC or web analytics platform), with minimal configuration. Secondly, and more concerning, is that they can easily and ostensibly appear to show ‘value’; an increased number of visits, and apparent ‘prospect engagement’.

These metrics aren’t totally useless, but viewed in isolation they can be dangerous and can lead to erroneous assumptions regarding campaign success. Just because a campaign demonstrates increases in site traffic and page views, which will very likely happen as a function of the paid search program, does not mean that it’s been successful. Focusing on these soft metrics can lead clients into believing that a poorly run campaign is actually driving business results. Yet other measures, which may be being overlooked (e.g. conversions and leads) may not be increasing at the same rate, which would paint an entirely different picture of the campaign.

For most B2B companies, paid search campaigns are run with the intent to generate leads. As such this type of campaign needs to be approached and run quite differently from one that’s intended to generate more site visitors and more page views (e.g. for a B2C portal that’s business model is based on selling advertising).

Managing PPC Campaigns through Cost per Lead and Opportunity
We strongly believe that PPC marketing campaigns that are intended for lead generation should be laser focused on cost per prospect, lead, opportunity and sale over any other metric. These metrics are the only true measures of value for a campaign that is focused on lead generation. Implementing tracking systems for accurate measures of these metrics is not necessarily easy, but it’s well worth the effort.

Creating targets for the cost per opportunity and sale and focusing on developing a laser targeted campaign that attracts exactly the right visitors (who are most likely to convert to a lead or sale) is a much more effective strategy for a B2B campaign. A monthly budget limit can still be used, but the number of leads generated will be typically greatly increased compared to the previous campaign. And if the organization has no problems related to inventory or fulfillment of the business (a surprisingly common problem) – it may well be determined that the budget should be increased based on success to scale as far as the search volume allows to deliver even more leads to the sales force.

Use of Industry Averages and Benchmarks
Developing targets and comparing against industry benchmarks for ‘soft’ metrics can be useful, but should be considered no more than a secondary goal to achieve.

In general, it’s better to look at industry average conversion rates, cost per prospect, cost per lead, cost per opportunity and cost per sale. But even then, industry averages can lead you astray because cost per click varies widely per keyword, and other cost measurements are affected greatly by the persuasion and nurture components of the campaign. So while comparisons to industry averages can help to some extent with goal setting, this should not be the only measure used.

Doing Your Marketing Math
It can be quite difficult to set up accurate tracking mechanisms to measure the cost of sales down to the campaign and keyword level, particularly in B2B markets with high value sales. Some of the problems include sales being closed offline, leads being delivered to partners or through a channel, multiple people in the purchasing decision, or even internal resistance to measurement where it’s perceived as a threat.

It’s absolutely possible to implement better tracking, however, and it will probably have to be done eventually. It might take some significant changes to the way the business operates, but that’s to be expected and should actually be embraced given the changes that the Internet is bringing to businesses in all industries.

Conversion Rates
Our experience suggests that it should be the target of a lead generation campaign to achieve conversion rates in the double digits over time, with a short term target of at least 3-5%. Considering the amount spent on Media over time – its well worth it to measure, test, and attempt to improve your conversion rate by campaign and traffic source. This is typically accomplished through the development of a large set up landing pages designed to provide perfect context for every visitor to the site, optimized conversion paths, and triggered nurture campaigns.

Every extra little bit of improved performance you can squeeze out of a campaign results in a higher ROI, and will allow you to pay more than your competitor for the traffic while remaining profitable.

Cost per Prospect and Lead
Multiplying your conversion rate by your estimated avg. CPC (cost per click) will give you your cost per prospect. You should probably aim to convert 15 - 50% of those prospects to sales ready leads through the second step form(s) and triggered nurture campaigns.

Calculating this, first as an estimate, then tweaked as necessary to create goals, and then measured with actual results will give you your estimated, target, and actual cost per lead.

Don’t just rely on Google data
It’s important to note that a ‘conversion’ as reported by Google Adwords, or a ‘completed goal’ as reported by Google Analytics is NOT the same as a prospect or a lead from a sales and marketing perspective. It’s very easy for these numbers to be distorted through multiple form submissions by the same person, test submissions by employees and developers, ‘fake’ or ‘invalid’ submissions by prospects trying to ‘beat the system’, or non-sales related inquires. Only through analyzing, filtering and reporting on actual prospects in the database is it possible to determine the actual cost per prospect.

What’s required to do this is a combination of the appropriate technology and correct campaign tagging that will accurately capture all contact source information including the website, campaign, keyword, and medium (CPC, Organic, etc.) that brought the contacts.

SELF-PROMOTIONAL SIDENOTE: We’ve been developing and refining this technology in our online marketing platform for a number of years. It’s easy, and perhaps natural, for an ambitious IT department to want to develop the technology in house, or have concerns about using 3rd party systems to track their own data, but I think it’s rare for this to be a cost effective approach since the technology can be ‘rented’ for a fraction of the cost of developing even a basic system from scratch. Data concerns can easily be mitigated, and you get the even more value from a platform is under constant development

Cost per Opportunity and Sale
Qualified opportunities and sales should be tracked by the sales team and reported back to the agency or PPC marketer through a CRM system integration (or using simple Excel files) so they can close the loop and determine the real cost per opportunity and sale. This provides the ultimate ROI for the paid search campaign, allowing clients to make informed decisions on which parts of the program should be expanded, and which parts should be discontinued.

It’s important to note that opportunities – even those lost – should usually be considered of good value to continue acquiring. It’s often the case that even though you may not have won the business that the opportunity was worth having. (Perhaps the sale was mishandled, etc.)
Predicting Campaign Performance

Typically, if we can analyze keywords, conversions, impression share and other metrics from an existing account we can project a number leads and sales that, if achieved, would more than justify the expense of implementing our technology, improving and continuing of ongoing management of a campaign.

The projected cost per lead and cost per sale usually compares extremely favorably against other methods of lead generation. What’s needed for comparison is the current cost per lead and sale from their other marketing programs. If that isn’t readily available, a simple estimation can be created by dividing last year’s marketing budget by number of leads generated.

It’s our goal to change the paradigm of measuring marketing effectiveness across all channels for all of our clients. We believe it’s a gamble worth taking because B2B industry reports unvarying report search marketing to deliver a lower cost per lead than any other channel.

Improving Exposure to the Most Targeted Visitors
A little known, but highly valuable, report in Google Analytics is impression share. This report reveals the percentage of time your ad appeared in the search results based on the total number of times it could have appeared if you weren’t out-bid for first page position, or didn’t run out of budget.

When we run impression share reports on many accounts it’s not unusual to see very low numbers.

This is a result of targeting keywords that are far too broad and limiting ad serving based on budget, and/or impression loss due to low position based low cost per click (bid).

Essentially, in these cases the campaign manager is abrogating responsibility to Google’s servers to randomly determine which visitors to show the ads. We believe it’s far more responsible to run a much narrower campaign focusing on the very specific keywords that have been proven to bring the right visitors and then managing the bidding and budgets to be in the results nearly every time.

Demand Metrics: There's more to it than that

2009-05-26T10:13:00.010-04:00

In early April I began my internship at Agito for the final leg of my Corporate Communications and Public Relations post-grad program at Centennial College. I’ve been assisting Barry with public relations efforts and content writing for Agito clients. In that time my work has varied from writing online news releases, website content and primers for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Online News Releases.

During my time here, I’ve read a lot about SEM as it relates to online lead generation for business-to-business (B2B). One example would be Demand Creation: Five Metrics That Matter, a Sirius Decisions research brief. (An overview can be found on the Canadian Marketing Association blog.) I’ve found through speaking with Keith, that Sirius’ metrics for converting a sale are pretty similar to how Agito measures its lead generation.

In the paper, Sirius splits the process into a simple “Demand Metrics Waterfall”. The graphic looks very simple and straightforward, and in my conversations with Keith about it, he said he found it quite accurate, though with one caveat. Agito goes deeper by breaking down Inquiries into two parts – conversions and prospects.

Here are the five metrics Sirius believes are most important to a company:

Keith made it clear to me that Agito pays special attention to how conversions are measured. Many pay-per-click (PPC) management companies only measure conversions. It’s important for clients to know that while x amount of conversions are coming in, the true number should be broken down even further.

The chart below shows how Agito varies from Sirius:

To start, Conversions are not the same as a prospect, lead or inquiry. They’re simply the submission of a form (ex. contacts, tests and queries, regardless if they’re valid or not) and they’re measured with Google Adwords and Analytics.

For example, the conversion metric on its own can be broken down into three categories.

Invalid Submission
An example of an invalid submission would be “tire kickers” or people who submit with fake e-mail addresses (i.e. mickey@disney.com).

Non-Prospect
Breaking down a non-prospect:

Test/Information – Web designers or developers of the website could be filling out forms for Quality Assurance (QA).

Non-sales related – Someone fills out the ‘contact us’ form to get in touch with an employee, ask about the company’s stock prices, etc.

Prospect
A prospect has these three qualities:

Not necessarily sales related – Someone who downloads a whitepaper or views a webinar. If that person only leaves their e-mail address, the only way to know if it was a lead or not would be to nurture it.

Valid contact – Someone who enters a valid name, e-mail and phone number into a form.

Not a test or internal – The corresponding e-mail is from an outside source and is deemed to not be spam.

Determining which prospects are worth confirming is done by taking the data collected from Google, and using the Bettermail lead source tracking functionality to break it down further. Here, it’s determined if it’s a valid contact, a non-test or internal and if its sales related. Confirming a prospect as a legitimate sale opportunity means going through the sorted data and determining if that prospect is satisfactory enough to be passed on to Sales.

The next step in Agito’s metric list is Lead. In this step there is a method used to see if a client is on the right path to completing a sale.

Keith believes using the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time frame) method helps determine which prospects are ‘hot’ and how to respond effectively. Leads are highly dependent on the potential client meeting the criteria asked in the BANT questions. For example, do they have…

… a pre-defined Budget to solve her problem?
… the necessary Authority to make the decision?
… the Need for the product or solution?
… a specific Time frame to make a decision?

The next step – opportunity – requires having the BANT questions answered satisfactorily for the sale to be forecast.

Finally, if your company offers the best product or solution, and all the metrics have been met, there’s no reason why the sale shouldn’t be finalized.

I’ve found both viewpoints to be pretty useful to making a sale. I like Keith’s additions because it explicitly shows the details of what’s behind two important steps. That being said however, the “Demand Metrics Waterfall” Sirius Decisions has come up with is a great overview for the most important metrics a company should follow.

Trending on Twitter: Splash Landings and Fear of Flying

2009-01-16T13:48:00.008-05:00

The miraculous “splash” landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on January 15th provided further proof of the incredible power of Twitter and its relevance for not only delivering news as it happens, but also connecting people during moments of high drama. Fortunately it was all good news this time, unlike Mumbai where on-the-spot tweeters kept us holding our breath as the attacks unfolded.

Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River during my Intro to Media Relations class and Centennial College – and coincidentally while we discussed the influence the Internet and social media tools are having on traditional PR and marketing. The conversation included Twitter, and we logged on without knowing about the drama unfolding in New York. I sent a message inviting my Twitter followers to say hi to my PR students. Almost immediately, I got this tweet:

Hi @TORONTO_PR_GUY 'S class :) Show them the power of Twitter - plane crash 1 hr ago - pictures up right away - http://tinyurl.com/8hj3ru

The link provoked a gasp from my class – click it and you’ll see why. I couldn’t have asked for a better real-time demonstration of Twitter at work.

The “Miracle on the Hudson” as captured on Twitter had another unintended lesson – illustrating how Adwords work. The program is set up to match keywords being searched with related advertising which can be dropped into a particular page. Searching the word “Hudson” on Twitscoop showed the class all of the tweets being sent in real time referring to the plane crash. Prominently displayed with the search results, however, was this:

Terrified of Turbulence? Sleep Like a Baby Your Next Flight – Guaranteed Cure! and Dr. Singha’s Travel Tonic: An amazing all natural remedy for nausea, travel anxiety and much more.

It made me feel a little queasy – and showed us that sometimes adwords do collide inadvertently. Who wants to see fear of flying ads while reading about a plane crash? Or was that the strategy? It got us thinking here at Agito about what selection of key words produced the ads, and whether it was intentional or one of those things that happen when various search terms come together. What do you think? Did the ads appear by chance or design? Ever had a similar incident where keywords you bought had you showing up where you least expected or wanted?

Talk is Measurable

2008-11-13T12:05:00.003-05:00

Last night Keith and I attended Centennial College’s Talk is Cheap 2.0 – an unconference on Social Media and PR (full disclosure – I teach at Centennial and helped organize the event). It brought together more 150 marketing and communications professionals, students and people just interested in social media for a series of thought-provoking participant-led sessions that covered the gamut from the corporate blogging policies, new technologies and how to use social media in a crisis.

Two thoughts really stood out for me this morning when I thought about the event and how it relates to what we do every day at Agito and the interrelationship between online marketing, social media and PR. One came from a discussion during the live taping of the weekly podcast, Inside PR, where David Jones from Hill & Knowlton pointed out that the lines between “earned media” and “social media” are being increasingly erased when it comes to RFPs. It’s the same when it comes to online marketing – years ago I think we called it “integrated” marketing – the point being that clients are looking for marketing partners that understand the “big picture” particularly when it comes to their online activities. And given that the results of traditional media relations programs, like newspaper or TV coverage, now find a way online, either on media websites, or picked up in blogs or sharing tools like Facebook, one has to look at how marketing efforts all work to influence each other. That includes integrating search marketing to make sure you are not only capturing the conversations that the marketing efforts are generating, but leveraging them to your advantage.

That leads to my other thought. There was a lot of talk last night about measurement and whether social media and digital marketing will be the first to be jettisoned during the economic slowdown because it’s hard to show any return on investment. I’d argue that done right, it’s not only possible, but also imperative, to show just how online marketing, including the effective use of social media, can prove its worth in spades. It all leads back to the ability to measure everything you’re doing online, and track it back to the source. At Agito, we won’t do it if we can’t measure it; and while it’s not always as black and white as tracking a pay-per-click campaign, we’re using the best analytics tools available (free, commercial, and home grown) to measure and correctly attribute site traffic and lead generation against everything happening in online media, the blogosphere, social networking spaces and beyond. On the Internet there’s a way to measure practically everything.

A shout out to everyone who attended Talk is Cheap - and to my colleague Christine Smith and the outstanding CC&PR Class of 2009 who did such a fabulous job pulling it all together.

So Google can NOW Index Flash? Really....

2008-10-20T14:41:00.005-04:00

Every so often I hear that Google can now index flash files, sometimes presented as if it's a great gift to the world, and we can all now finally shed the archaic HTML system and build a beautiful new flashy Internet that we'll all be better off for.

This time it's started again with some big official announcements back in July:

And there's a lot of discussion about it again, mainly around the same topics that have came up before.

So is it real this time?
Yes it’s real, but there is still a big difference between being indexed, and being found on the first page of results.

Even now that Google can now index flash files, it is still is and will always be difficult for Google to understand the hierarchy of information in the flash file, so don’t think flash is going to be at the top of the search results any time soon.

Here are a few examples of the problems with flash, even now that Google can index the content:

What constitutes a page in a flash file? A flash file appears as a single page, and there is no way for Google to externally reference a specific section of the flash. Google likes to send visitors to the most appropriate page that matches their search, and visitors like going to the most relevant content. But you can only send someone to the home page of a flash file. This is not in Google’s interests, the site owners interest, or the visitors interest, so this factor alone makes it very unlikely flash files are going to start competing for top rankings.
Where are the titles, headlines, subheadlines and most important content? Since flash designers aren’t constrained to any of the HTML standards of defining title tags and headline tags, they may all do it differently, making the context and importance of content difficult to determine.
Images: Many flash files make extensive use of images and video. Google is still unable to parse words from images, so if your navigation or content uses images, it will not be indexed.
Meta data: There are standards for defining information about the information in HTML (meta tags, robots.txt files, no-index, no-follow commands, XML sitemaps) that help Google understand the information on a site. None of these exist in flash.

These are a few of the reasons why it will always be difficult to optimize, and get good search engine rankings, with 100% flash websites. Add to this the problem that it’s too easy for Flash designers to make non-standard navigational schemas and therefore make the site difficult to navigate, it still makes no sense to me why anyone would make a 100% flash website (except in cases where the site is intended to provide a unique “experience” and search engine visibility is completely unimportant).

This does not mean that you shouldn’t use flash. A marketer can still take advantage of all the benefits of flash by chopping it into elements that can be included in an HTML layout. It can still even appear as if it was 100% flash. The difference is that the site would be structured in a standard way that can provide context to the content, and the content would remain in a form that can be externally referenced (you can send someone to a specific page). It’s important when building a site like this that an SEO professional is consulted on how the content is built in Flash to maximize visibility.

It turns out I wrote a post about the difficulty of indexing flash and ranking in the search results with a flash site back in 2006. I wonder if I'll write about it again in 2010? My guess is yes.

Joe the "Plumbers" Win the Google Lottery

2008-10-16T18:06:00.006-04:00

Move over Joe Sixpack, meet Joe the Plumber. Joe was mentioned 25 times during last night’s Presidential Debate, primarily by John McCain in a last desperate attempt to get something to stick to Obama. Joe has become an overnight star: The Guardian reports everyone on Facebook wants to be his friend; people are “tweeting” about him like crazy; he’s rocketing to number one on YouTube.

Anybody need a plumber?

It occurred to me to check where Joe is on Google this morning. No surprise, he had already made it to the top on Google Canada, right behind the guy who might just be the luckiest plumber in Canada this morning: Whitby’s Joe the Plumber. In fact, across the world there are more than a few ordinary Joes that might have a right to feel like they’ve won the lottery. I’m talking about Joe Lara (joelaratheplumber.com), Joe from Seattle (joetheplumberseattle.com) and the grand prize winner, Joe from Amarillo – joetheplumber.com. They should probably all invest in larger servers – and hire a few more plumbers. After all, from now on, what’s the key phrase that will come to mind next time anyone needs a plumber?

And while these average Joes may get pushed aside by the Joe the Plumber on Google for a little while, it won’t be long before his 15 minutes of fame is down the drain. Unless he wants to pay a plumber in Amarillo a sink full of cash for joetheplumber.com. The only downside for Amarillo Joe? There goes his tax cut.

October is a Good Month for Linking Info

2008-10-07T11:59:00.011-04:00

October 2008 is a good month for anyone interested in Link Building for SEO. Three things have caught my attention:

1) A "public secret" for almost year (previously referred to with the codename "carhole"*), SEOMoz has unveiled their flagship SEO product on October 6th. And it's good. In fact, I'll say it's milestone event in the field SEO. It's called linkscape.

2) Google's Announced "Link Week" on their WebMaster Central Blog. Basic, but interesting reading for SEO professionals considering the source.

3) All three Search Engines confirm at an SMX East panel discussion that Links are #1

Here are the details:

SeoMoz's LinkScape:
What is it? Basically, these guys have built an application to save the entire web on some really big hard drives, and then analyze the entire linking structure of the Internet. No Kidding! They've actually tried to recreate the system that Google (and those there search engines) use to index and rank sites but keep so tight to their chests, so that SEOs like us can figure out how to manipulate site rankings better.

They haven't saved the entire Internet (yet), but they do have a database of over 30 billion of the most linked pages on the web. The index is already very similar to the ones used by the major search engines. They're updating the whole thing every three weeks or so, and they say they're working to make it bigger and refresh faster. It's a really useful tool for us because it exposes greater granularity and information about links and link graph based metrics.

Here are a few interesting pieces of Internet linking trivia they've pulled from the data so far:

Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.
1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."
While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.
About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.
From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)

Now that data is interesting, but it's nothing compared to what you get when you analyze your own site compared to your competitors! We're already using it to our client's advantage by:

Finding the juiciest links of our competitors that we can get, too
Finding out which of the links we've purchased, rented or acquired through any other means have the most value so we can focus on the most effective link building techniques
Learning which of the links that we have direct control over have the most value so we can channel the Google juice more effectively

Congratulations to SEOMoz on building a great tool.

Google's Link Week
The Google webmaster Tools team decided to declare "link Week" and spill some beans on what they think about links. Here are links to all of the related posts:

Top Three Search Engines Agree: Links are Number one.
During the search engine panel at SMX East, all three search engines concurred that links are the number one indicator for the importance of websites when ranking them: (Another quote from Rand Fishkin's blog for this one):

When asked if links are the primary signal for search engine rankings, the engineers generally agreed that, yes, it probably is. Aaron noted that links are a far less noisy signal than many others, including some forms of on-page keyword use and clicks in the SERPs. Sean from Yahoo! said that while it may not be the "most important signal" by itself, it's more important than, for example, title tags (which SEOs generally agree are critical to the SEO process). There was no mention that links would be fading away anytime soon - or that any competing signals had yet entered the marketplace as a potential usurper.

So Until Next Time, Keep on Linking....

* Carhole is a reference to the simpsons - it's what Moe called Homer's garage in the episode where Homer was running a counterfeit Jeans operation out of his.

Important Google Adwords Changes

2008-10-03T00:41:00.001-04:00

It's been two weeks since the implementation of new Quality Score changes at Google. What's been the effects?

(If you don't know, Quality Score is a factor Google uses to determine how much you have to pay to bid for any spot in the sponsored search results for a key phrase. A low quality score will force you to pay more than others for clicks on the same position.)

Quality score is getting more important - and more manageable
Since quality score focuses heavily on click through rate it does put pressure on advertisers to get more in line with Google's interests, but they aren't entirely against advertisers interests either.

Now that Google is showing us a score on a scale of ten versus the old display of a few words like "poor", "good" or "excellent" we can see to a greater degree of accuracy where the relevancy problems may exist and address them.

How do you improve your campaign?
Tightening the focus of campaigns and ad groups, more closely matching ads to keywords, having better landing pages - all of these changes will improve your quality score, and therefore decrease your average cost per click for the same traffic.

Below is my short hand version of the factors that affect the Google Quality Score:

Click through rate (based on keyword and your whole account)
relevancy of ad text to keywords (in the matched ad and the ad group)
quality of your landing page
and "other relevancy factors" (no kidding)

The bottom line is we need to keep optimizing
I just heard an interesting tip listening in to the PPC Rockstars podcast with David Svetela interviewing Brad Geddes:

Consider how Display URL is a factor. In display URLs the root of the domain has to match, but everything else is OK to change. This is important to understand. Giving the searcher information about where they are going to land, in the form of the display URL, is going to help.

Tweaks like this will influence click through rate, which of course influences quality score, which in turn helps us pay less for the same traffic. Or more likely - help stop from paying more.

The inevitable Integration of Search and PR

2008-06-24T21:47:00.009-04:00

Traditional PR is not sacred in the post Internet world. Anyone can get to be on the front page of the news on the Internet today. And smart SEO companies are all over it.

It's a natural for us, because the news has become a search medium. It's mainly text based so we can optimize it for keywords.

Today, for a small fee and completely online, we can insert press releases into Google and Yahoo News and get them syndicated on industry and niche sites all over the world. The reach is staggering.

What's different now is that it doesn't even matter if your release is picked up by any traditional media. There is no longer any need for the intermediation of a journalist to get attention.

Yahoo News is currently the number 1 online news source. It's a news media of it's own with over 1Million unique visitors a day. And our press releases are listed right alongside releases from AP and Reuters.

You submit your news, and there it is, coming up at the top of the news for all of your keywords. Here's the reach of online news:

Yahoo News is the number one online news source

Journalists are only a tiny fraction of the people reading this news. The press release isn't for the journalist any more - it's direct to public.

The secret to success is to optimize our press releases for our money keywords, the words that get searched the most by our potential customers. We can be at the top of the news for whatever we want, but we have to make it the right words.

A simple press release can get thousands or tens of thousands of views in a few days after it's release.

But it's not just the people reading your release that makes this a great medium. If we pay a little extra to have embedded links with our own anchor text, these links are distributed within the release wherever it's shown. Readers of our release can click through and visit our sites. Maybe become a lead, or buy something.

But those aren't even the reasons why SEO companies are doing PR. The two main reasons why every smart SEO company is doing it are:

Inbound links. The syndication of your release on niche sites propagates links to your site all over the Internet. The press release itself contains links that can be deep links into your site on whatever words you choose. And bloggers (non-traditional news media) may comment on your release and link to it or your site. All of which enhances the value of your site to the search engines and puts positive upward pressure on your search rankings.
Universal search. In May 2007, Google unveiled universal search. What this means is that the search engine results pages (SERPS) now frequently contain blended results from different sources. Instead of simply listing the top 10 sites as before, depending on the search it may contain only 4 sites, plus 2 images, 2 news items, a video, and local listing. This has huge implications for search engine marketers: There's less page one space for regular site listings, which makes it more competitive, but there's new opportunities to grab more page one real estate if your a broader thinker. It's natural, and in fact required, for SEO's to broaden out into optimization and distribution of other media such as videos, images and of course, news.

There's a tremendous opportunity in PR that may be missed by many PR agencies:

Traditional PR agencies can get up to speed with publishing through online news channels, but they look at it in a different way. Under traditional PR management the value of links, anchor text and effective keyword choice and optimization will be underused or missed entirely.

And it's not just the online news that is shaking up traditional PR. The tremendous growth of social media is a new kind of news. The long tail of news split into a gazillion niches. Traditional media targeting campaigns are losing their punch as many readers opt for popular blogs, forums and social media sites to get exactly what they're interested in, bypassing traditional media altogether.

PR companies need to understand search. When you get picked up by online media, many times you won't get a link to your site. And in print or broadcast? No link either. The news generated by media hits in turn generates search traffic - and our clients had better show up for their company names and the terms used in the story. Whether it's in the organic listings, sponsored listings, or better, both.

SEO companies are better positioned to take advantage of social media and online news, but most have a lot of growing up to do.

Struggling SEO companies will see it only from the other side, looking only for the value of links and immediate traffic. Generally, SEO companies don't yet have the skills in traditional PR, and will miss the opportunities to leverage the tremendous power of the mainstream media.

There must emerge a new breed of integrated Internet marketing agencies that will have excellent proficiency in both PR, Social Media, and SEM (Search engine marketing):

These teams must interact both strategically and tactically:

The PR team will still create their typical media targeting lists, media schedules, pitch ideas, sponsorship ideas, key messages and backup materials.

And working alongside them, the SEO team will create highly targeted keyword lists, and help come up with press release ideas that can include the right keywords, and create a schedule to publish a news releases into the online news every 30 days (to maintain constant exposure).

The Social Media experts will weigh in with ideas on videos, images and multimedia ideas to be included, and add to the media target list names of high profile bloggers and plans to get in or leverage highly traffic sites such as DIGG, Reddit, BoingBoing, or other sites that reach your demographic.

The Web Analytics guys will be consulted in the very beginning to create and track meaningful KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the real success of the campaign.

Tactically, PR will draft all of the releases, and SEO will optimize them for keywords, and place keyword rich anchor text that strategically deep link into our sites. The SEO team will submit them for online distribution.

Some releases will be purely for immediate traffic and links. Others will coincide with traditional media pitches by the PR team. Other articles and new content will be tagged or otherwise submitted to dozens of social media sites.

Everything will be tracked, trended and analyzed for traffic, links, conversions, media hits and of course, sales. This integrated approach is a must to maximize reach in the new world of almost infinity fragmented online media that is eating away at traditional media more every day.

--

If you want to read more on this, here's two older posts of mini-case studies of online press releases:

B2B: Software industry press release (May 2007)
B2C: Skincare industry press release (November 2006)

Business to Business Online Lead Generation 2008

2008-06-22T20:25:00.007-04:00

It's leads, more often than not, that a Business to Business (B2B) company needs from their web site. We don't expect, or even want, to close sales online. Even more frequently with larger sales, they're typically closed on the phone or in person.

But how does our web site generate leads? And when we get them, how do we know where are leads are coming from?

We don't expect an e-commerce site that is ringing in sales all day, but we do expect a steady stream of qualified individuals that our sales team can follow up and close.

We want good leads. But how do we do it?

In a recent survey by Enquiro, 80% of B2B customers found the vendor, vs. 20% of vendors found the customer.

In every industry, every business, people are searching for solutions. As marketers, You have to learn the language of your customer, and be there when they search and where they search.

And search is not just the top 'search engines', like Google and Yahoo. For example, the top 3 business directories are:

Business.com
Knowledgestorm
Thomasnet

And that just scratches the surface. In every industry there are blogs, forums, directories, vertical search engines, associations, trade magazine web sites... and then there's the news. There's Google News, Yahoo News (3x bigger!), industry news, newsletters, news sites and on and on.

When there's something on our mind, we start with search. Most of us have become adept with knowing where to search for what. Want a local business listing? Yellowpages. Need a book? Amazon. A Heath Question? WebMD. A funny TV commercial? YouTube. A Song? iTunes.

Research shows, and it's not hard to imagine, that almost every browsing session includes a search. And that search is usually with Google. Google is bar far the market leader in search and reach.

Our questions lead us to search. And so should our marketing program.

Why? Because everything starts with search. Offline media like television and radio spawns search. News starts us searching. When we need a solution to a very specific business problem? We search.

When our customers are searching for a solution we can provide, we need to be found. Whenever, wherever, and every time they search.

But what are they searching for? That is the key. THAT cannot be understated.

Figuring out what they're searching for is so important we can't just do it once and call it done. We need to do it all of the time. Or at the very least revisit it regularly.

We don't just need to be found or our company and product names. That's just the very beginning. We need to be in front of all of the people searching that have never heard of us, never used our products. But want something just like we have. Here are a few questions to illustrate how the thinking should go:

What are the generic names for our products and services? Not some of them - all of them.
What do people think the solution to their problem is?
What is the result or outcome that you provide?
Do your customers typically buy or have something else before they buy your solution? What are the generic phrases around that?

The number of terms in search queries are getting longer and longer as we as a society get better at search. Four word searches now outnumber one word searches. We are getting adept and pinpointing exactly what we want. But we do it in so many different ways. We need to find the most common ways to describe what we have, problem we solve, or what we deliver, and get found for that.

Great. How?

Here's a quick and simple overview:

Understand your audience. Segment into major buying types so you can treat different people differently. You may want to create full blown personas.
Give them what they want. People want to find more information online. More than what's in the brochure. They want to qualify themselves and qualify you before they ever make a contact. Understand what they want so you can give it to them. This is where segmentation comes in. Different people, different roles, need different information.
Be clear about what you want - and ask for it. You'll have to be convincing. What will persuade your different buying types to pick up the phone, send an email, or fill out a request form? A whitepaper? Free trial? Case study, ebook, coupon, online discount, free gift, special offer, free membership, webinar, calculator tool, what else can you think of?
Know what they're searching for. At this step your site plan may have what they need and what you need, but how are you going to be found? You may sell point of sale terminals, but they may be searching for card swipers. You may be looking to lend money, but they want to borrow it. You sell control room displays, they want a video wall. You have to get the words right.
Create the content you need to be found. You may have to be creative to come up with content around the funny ways people describe your solution. But it's not that hard. You can write articles, a glossary, frequently asked questions. You can create your own "University". You can have a section on industry news or information. You can blog about the industry and cover a wide range of topics. How about an entire section that describes the problem that people have before they need your solution?
Decide what you need to measure, set goals, and measure it. You want leads? How many? What kind? From where? Who are they? It's OK to be optimistic, but be realistic, too. How many leads do you get now vs. how many do you want to get? Measure your results every month.

That last point deserves more attention. You must measure what you actually want to get. Don't buy into a search program from a web developer that 'also does search' and wants to measure success by your rankings for phrases that they suggest. High rankings doesn't equal leads. More traffic doesn't equal leads. Leads equals leads.

Remember that like most things, a good search program requires sustained, iterative effort. And the Internet marketing agency must be held accountable for bottom line results. If you follow the six steps above with a good partner, and keep plugging away the results will come.

If you plug away at it, the results will come. It may sound cliche, but it if you aren't doing it, your competitors are. Ask a good search agency to compare you with your top competitors. If you don't know where you stand, you should.

If you haven't started, nows the time. As each day goes by, the leaders in Internet marketing get more entrenched. It's not too late, but the barriers to entry get higher every day.

I'll sign off today with a few thoughts on where the opportunities lie:

The news. Google and Yahoo News get more than 1 million unique visitors searching every day. You can easily publish a press release and be inserted in the online news. There are far fewer press releases on your topic than there are web pages, and recency rules in the news. The premium shelf life of a press release in the online news is 30 days. Publish a new release every 30 days, optimize it for your money words, and you'll be nio the front page every day.
Universal Search. The search engine results pages (SERPs) are changing. Instead of 10 blue links in the SERPS, search engines are experimenting with blended results from many mediums. This is the future. So instead of 10 sites, we'll have a mixture of news, images, videos and sites. If you create the news, tag and distribute images and videos, you have a chance to not be in the search results, but dominate them.
Closing the loop. Knowing where to put your efforts is priceless. Work hard to create a system in your environment where you can track the source of not only every lead, but every new sale. Every new contact in your CRM system should have a source: tradeshow, search engine, keyword used, campaign clicked on, etc. Report on this and analyze it. What is delivering sales? Not rankings, not traffic, not leads, but sales. What is working and what isn't? Know this, and you'll be way ahead. You can optimize it further and your competitors and colleagues will wonder how you seem to be a media buying magician.

New Thinking After SES Toronto 2008

2008-06-19T22:14:00.007-04:00

My mind is racing. I started to write this post as my key take-aways from SES Toronto, but as I fleshed it out it got more infused with other thoughts I've been cultivating. So I've had to change the name. It's no longer "Key Takeaways from SES Toronto", but "New Thinking After SES Toronto."

I really am thinking in a new way.

1: Search has become the center of all marketing - and life. It's built into human nature - it's the only way to find anything in our over abundant world of choice. Everything is about search more every day. Tivo's are search for TV. YouTube is search for video online. iTunes is search for Music. Netflix is search for movies. Millions of us search for news and weather every day. On your phone you search for everything: people in your address book, a local restaurant in your browser, an address in Google maps.

SideNote: What's search for your keys or wallet? Can someone please give me some RFID tags to put on them and build a phone to search for them? I am joking but I am not.

2: Seriously: search is not an option, but a required component for integrating media. People are searching on words they hear or see in the media to find what they've become aware and interested in. Do you want your competitors gaining from awareness generated by your TV commercials, radio, outdoor media, etc.?

In Fredrick Markini's cogent and engaging Toronto SES opening keynote, he told a story of a company in Norway that ran TV ads but didn't pay attention to the effect in search. Their competitor noticed the increased traffic in the organic results, and bought 50 phrases in PPC related to the TV campaign. They had to shut it down after 30 days because they could take no more business. The company that ran the TV ads gifted thousands of customers to the competitor.

One of his stats:

"40% of people going online because of an offline campaign make a purchase."

3: Vertical search is becoming more important, and it will continue to be so. Giants like Google can't provide the context and expertise that a vertical site can. That's not to say that Google can't buy, build or otherwise own many successful properties, but the point is that people want and need the context provided by vertical sites. Google is used more and more to find portals, directories and other search engines on specific topics.

This means as marketers we've got to search for all of the new places that our audience is searching for someone like us. We need to be in front of our audience wherever and whenever they are searching. All of the time.

4: Social Media is real and it's time to start paying attention. It's so incredibly friggin' big and so friggin' broad. It's the natural evolution of life on the Internet and it will evolve much more. It is not going away. But we are now really getting our hands around it as an industry. Social Media (SM) is different than search in that it shows feelings and expressions, while search shows intent. What can we do with feelings and expressions?

Monitor reputation and brand attitudes. Reviews, blogs, comments, videos - there is a lot of discussion and data out there
Catch problems in their infancy and allow us to address them quickly before they get out of hand.
Join the conversation about our brands and make a positive influence. The conversation is happening with or without us.
With creativity and some luck, you can even create a community around your brand. (But really think it though first... that can be a huge undertaking.)

These are all useful from a PR perspective, but without diminishing their value, they are more difficult to draw a straight line to improved financial results. There are other ways to use social to more directly influence the bottom line:

Leverage comments, reviews and recommendations as third party proof sources to increase credibility and draw direct line to increased sales. The exact effect of various changes to content and pages used to be hard to measure, but with Google WebSite Optimizer and a skilled hand, it's now quite easy - and statistically provable.

Social video like YouTube offers excellent opportunities for improved visibility through optimized postings and clever content on themes directly, or maybe even indirectly, related to your business.

A directly related example: The company that makes information videos on their obscure product niche. People are searching for it, and there is no other video competition online.

Indirectly related example: A shampoo company that posts videos about hairstyles (because people search for hairstyles, but shampoo's - not so much)
You probably shouldn't get into SM just for the extra links to your site. But you can get a lot of extra links to your site. Links can produce traffic, improved search engine rankings (therefore more traffic), and traffic equates to more sales.

The incredibly targeted advertising promised by the very scary big brother stuff thats being built on demographics, interests and preferences has not really materialized in any big way yet. Facebook Ads are still in their infancy. But this has got a very long way to go, and it is going to get really interesting over the next few years. That's for both the incredibly targeting advertising and the very scary big brother stuff.

But now I have to stop. I have so much more to say but this is getting long and it's getting really late. To be continued....

Google having difficulty delivering to Gmail?

2008-06-19T12:28:00.006-04:00

We are doing informal testing on Gmail deliverability today after a report from a client that they are getting some of our mail in their Gmail Spam account.

So far we've sent emails to about 40 different internal test Gmail accounts, a mixture of old and new, and sure enough, a percentage of emails are getting thrown into the junk folder. It seems fairly random so far, with identical emails going to both the spam and to the inbox in the same account.

So I did a few searches to see if anyone else is experiencing the same problem, and we are not alone:

Just this month, Andy Beard noticed false positives, and then while checking his spam folder found a Google email alert in the Gmail spam folder! (oh the irony)

After a bit more research I can see this this phenomena started happening after the new year, and has been continuing since:

January '08: Another Google mail in the Gmail spam folder

February '08: Gmail-false-positives-are-on-the-rise

March '08: GMail spam filter is throwing up some false positives today

April '08: Fish out the false positives

May '08: Are Gmail's Spam Filters Getting OverZealous?

The good news is that it is occasional - the bad is that it's random and so far unpredictable. We've seen message headers, content and IP addresses that are identical being both delivered and junked at the same time.

Can it be fixed? We'll see...

Two New Web Analytics Tools

2008-03-31T09:57:00.003-04:00

This week a cool new tool came out that analyzes visitors in real-time. Techcrunch did a good review of Woopra here.

Google came out with something new of it's own through YouTube. YouTube Insight, as it is called, offers producers more details into the viewing of videos uploaded to the site.

Google Analytics Releases Industry Benchmarks

2008-03-07T13:43:00.002-05:00

I remember wondering what Google was going to be able to do with all or the data it is collecting about Internet user behavior with the widespread adoption of Google Analytics.

As I am sure is only a first step, they are going to share some of that aggregate data with the world in the form of industry benchmarking - as long as you agree to share back. I don't see the downside. Mind you, I can think of many downsides other might percieve - but I don't share the same feelings about them. All the arguments I can think of against this are either paranoid, arrogant or naive.

Read the casual announcement of Google Analytics Benchmarking.

I am going to go turn on data sharing right now.

Google Analytics Tagging Best Practices

2008-01-21T15:33:00.000-05:00

It's not as easy as it may first seem to get Google Analytics tags right. The decisions you make when assigning names to the various available tags in a campaign have consequences in the reports you are able to make. Getting the tags right allows you to make maximum use of the GA system. Getting them wrong may leave you frustrated when later you cannot get the answers you hoped to get. Trust me, I know this from experience.

Here are a few things that I have learned that have helped me:

1) No Cross Tabs
True cross tabulation is not available (A cross tab is a matrix of values with a one tag on the horizontal and the other on the vertical axis). You can build your own cross tab reports by exporting the data, but that's a time consuming pain-in-the-ass that you probably don't have time for.

Since you can't do a true cross tab, you'll want to plan in advance exactly what reports you want to see.

2) Tag your links the way the system was designed (and use a system yourself)
If you just guess and use whatever tags are seem appropriate at the moment, you'll find that you either end up with inconsistent data later, or the reports don't work the way you hoped.

There are two tags that must be used every time, and one that is highly recommended:

Medium (required)
Source (required)
Campaign (recommended)

Medium: This is used to define HOW the message was delivered; the mechanism or channel type. This is the one value you should NOT make up. GA prefills this in many areas to make out of the box reports work. Wherever possible, you should fill this field with an appropriate existing Google values so that your reports are consistent throughout the interface.

Existing values for medium are:

referral - it was a click (paid or not) from a site that was not on a cost per click basis
organic - it was a click from an organic search result
cpc - it was a paid click, paid on a cost per click basis

There may be others, but these are the most important.

Source: This is should almost always be the name of the site that sent the traffic. The only exceptions are when the traffic did not come from a site (for example, email) or when you have partnered with a site that shows your content on many different sites (for example, an ad network, in which case you would use the name of the ad network.)

Source and Medium are the only two tags that Google lists as required. Another parameter that should ALWAYS be used is campaign:

Campaign: This one should be your internal name for your campaign. I have found two different uses for it, both are valid:

Tracking the results of many different "sources" as one single campaign. For example, say you are running a banner on 5 different web sites. You would tag all of them with their unique source (the web site name), but give them all the same campaign tag. This way you can see all of the sources of traffic within that single campaign to compare the effectiveness of each site.
Tracking results of multiple "campaigns" within a single source. For example, say you are running ads in 5 different categories of a major web portal. You can tag each category as a unique campaign, but leave the source the same in each. This way you can see which category performs best by running a report on the source, and showing the campaign segments.

Other parameters include:

Term: Used for tracking keywords
Content: Should be used for tracking versions of creative

Google has provided a URL builder to assist in creating the actual URLs.

EpikOne has a great Google Anlytics Blog. A good post is their top 5 Google Analytics resolutions for 2007

Google Will Dominate Mobile Like it Does Search

2007-12-01T01:20:00.001-05:00

I think Google will dominate mobile phones like it does search, in just the same way that Microsoft dominates PCs.

Google announced, at the beginning of this month, their play in the mobile phone market - Android. This anticipated "Gphone" is not a phone at all - but an operating system. An open source operating system based on Linux. And they didn't announce this alone, they announced it alongside over 30 organizations all forming the open handset alliance - an alliance formed to develop free, open standards for mobile phones.

This alone may be a bigger play than the iPhone simply because any phone can be a Gphone.

Now if this isn't big enough - let's tale this a step further:

The connection of Google's open platform for mobile devices and their announcement of an open platform for social networking, opensocial, creates speculation about a combination of the two creating a massive mobile open social network that will help catapult the android phone platform into the same position in mobile as Google currently holds in search.

Networks already supporting opensocial, MySpace, Linked in, Salesforce, Hi5, Ning, Plaxo and Friendster to name a few, are already bringing well over 200 million registered users.

The potential for this mobile social network is clear once you've seen the incredible applications developed for android that are just waiting for the phones to be available.

Heck you'd think Google invented social networking on the web in this 57 minute campfire video on the announcement of OpenSocial.

Overall, I see the new mobile standardized OS battle playing out very similarly to the original Apple and Microsoft battles... you know, back in the day, when Apple made a beautiful operating system and sold it bundled with perfectly designed hardware, while Microsoft "just" made an almost as good operating system that ran on any hardware. Microsoft's OS approach proved to be the clear winner in the market. It created an almost universal platform for application development, and spawned an era of incredible pace and volume of application development and adoption.

This time around it's Google and Apple instead of Microsoft and Apple. Google takes the place of Microsoft this time, except with an open operating system - and the incredibly compelling advantage of built in, GPS enabled mobile social networking that's already well past critical mass.

Combine Android and open handset alliance with opensocial, and it's clear that Google is positioned well to make a play to combine and dominate the mobile phone market through an open standards operating system a mobile social network with critical network mass.

Google may well dominate the mobile audience as it does the search audience today.

Facebook Ads Launched, Google, Myspace also Launch New Initiatives

2007-11-07T09:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old CEO of Facebook announced his new advertising platform called Facebook Ads, a new way to for advertisers to target Facebook's 50 Million users.

The new program has three components, advertisers can:

create branded pages
run targeted advertisements
gain access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users.

The ability to create the branded pages and for users to become "fans" of products is particularly interesting. Here is the first coverage of the Facebook Ads launch.

Also this week, Google launched it's own new initiative, OpenSocial. While MySpace also launched it's own new advertising platform called HyperTargeting.

ConstantContact Goes Public and the Changes Begin

2007-10-11T15:20:00.001-04:00

Just last week Constant Contact went public and, as suspected, the changes are problems with this are already beginning. The first major fallout seems to be a quick change to their acceptable usage policy which now prohibits using the service for any communications related to gambling.

Gambling911.com was informed by ConstantContact yesterday that they would no longer be able to use the service. This started a flurry of blog posting from other people that are frustrated because of the number of telemarketing calls they receive from ConstantContact, or believe ConstantContact employees are masquerading themselves as happy customers on blogs. The latter does seem a little crazy to me... I can't image why a company with so much to lose would engage in such bad behavior purposely.

Anyways, for anyone looking for an alternative service to ConstantContact, we run a Canadian email marketing service called BetterMail.ca that you may want to check out.

B2B Presentation on B2B Lead Generation

2007-10-09T14:05:00.001-04:00

So I just sat through the new webinar from Bulldog Solutions on "The Four Costliest Mistakes Marketers Make in Support of Sales". Presenters included Bill Golder from Miller Heiman, Rob Soloman from bulldog, and Ellis Brooker from btobonline.com

The one thing about these presentations is that it takes so long to develop context for the "meat" of the presentations that sometimes you wish you would have a Coles notes version so you could get the point quicker. This is actually the point of this post - a short version for you...

Summary:
To achieve stellar sales results, Sales and Marketing need greater integration in their efforts. Companies are focusing so much on lead generation these days - but many of the leads are being wasted for many reasons. Some of these problems can be solved through better communication between sales and marketing.

Details:
It was said that typically about half of the leads handed over to the sales department can't be followed up on by sales people. At its worst, this causes sales people to view the marketing department as wasting money on lead generation that is useless, and marketing looks at the the sales department as not following up on leads.

Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus
The reason, it was suggested, that sales and marketing speak different languages. There is no cross accountability, and the hand off is clumsy. The CRM system belongs to the sales department and the marketing department doesn't have access to it. The sales department, on the other hand, has little or nothing to do with the lead generation campaigns. The sales department wants hot leads, and the marketing department wants volume.

A SiriusDecisions report (March 2007) showed that lead generation is the number one marketing priority (and biggest spend) within US companies today. If half of the leads are being wasted - this is a huge problem!

Driving Better Alignment between Marketing and Sales
These are the four solutions presented:

Define organization goals. You should define what is a win for every body. How many leads does sales need? What are the attributes they need? What makes a good prospect? What is the call to action?
Define Measurements. What are the industry groups, the job titles, the problems they have? On the other hand, what geographies can't you support? What industries do not work? What companies are too small? Bill Golder added that this was key to the Miller Heiman strategy. This point helps move part of sales (qualification) more towards marketing. And perhaps most importantly, this allows sales and marketing to develop benchmarks.
Prepare for Sales Engagement. This point deals with the hand off from sales to marketing. One major point was dealing with the timing of the hand-off. In some cases it is taking 4-6 weeks from a new lead to get to the CRM so the sales person can follow up on it! For the poor sales person following up on leads that are this stale, they might as well be making a cold call.
Assess Results and Focus on Improvement. The numbers seldom lie. To me, this step is the most important in almost any marketing process. They discussed "shooting the losers" is as important as keeping the winners.

For the complete details on this webinar, they were nice enough to let us download the PPT file as a PDF. I did it and uploaded it here.

Overall I thought this was an excellent presentation, ideal for heads of sales and marketing departments. For more info on this topic, I have written about these issues before here, and here.

Beautiful Visual Link Exploration Tool

2007-08-19T13:39:00.000-04:00

Neato. I am not sure where I can across this but it is really cool to play with.

http://walk2web.com/

Just type in a URL and it will give you a visual map of 6 related links. Incoming links are green, outgoing links are blue. Just click on any of those links and it will map the 6 inbound/outbound links for that page. Any links on that page that link back to previous pages will be mapped too.

What a cool way to visualize how neighborhoods are linked together. You could spend hours on this.

You can change the number and ratio of links if you want. I think I'll continue to play with this for a white to see if any real useful process can come out of it. Maybe not, but it is fun anyways.

Top Ranks for $10/Click Keywords Going to Doorway Pages

2007-08-18T00:23:00.000-04:00

I just did a random search for a top three word phrase for a client to see where they stand organically - and keep an eye on the competition. My client currently bids around $8.00 to be #3 for this phrase in the sponsored results, and is ranked #7 organically. The top bid for top position in Adwords is well over $10.

The top organic result for this phrase is extremely keyword rich to say the least. The three word phrase is repeated twice as the first six words of the title, once at the beginning of the snippet, and once in the page url.

The landing page is rather ridiculously over-optimized for the phrase; it begins the headline, begins the first paragraph, is repeated again in the first paragraph, and is the start of the next five paragraphs.

No legitimate business would ever want to do this because it kills your credibility, would destroy your brand, and cannot possibly convert very well anyways. You've to hand it to them though - they do rank #1 - so if that is the extent of their short-sighted goal then they have certainly achieved it.

Still, I can't believe that it is as simple as over optimizing a single page to end up number one for a phrase that costs $10 - $15 a click for the equivalent in Adwords. This position is literally worth thousands of dollars per day.

So at the very least, this deserves a deeper look:

At the bottom of the page there are links to dozens of similar sounding pages, under the heading "other articles". These pages are comprised of several groups of extremely similar variations of related high value phrases. Only one of the three words in the phrase are different in most of these phrases.

Each of these pages leads you to a unique page of content that is super optimized for that phrase. They've created a matrix of very similar, but unique, super optimized pages. They've created one page for each variation of their targeted phrases, and each of the pages are linked from every other page using the appropriate link anchor text.

It's classic, beautiful search optimized content and architecture, but one problem I see is that all of these links are buried at the bottom of the page, and therefore shouldn't be considered to point to pages as important as the links in the main navigation on the top of the page. So why is all this working so well?

A quick check of the source code reveals that those links on the bottom are very near the beginning of the HTML - Only a tiny amount of code and and text content of the page is before them. These links are also placed in a way that they appear to the search engine to be embedded in the copy, which will make them appear to be very important links.

The most unusual thing about about all of this is how close to the beginning that main text area is. It starts right at the beginning of the body! Where is the header and the main navigation area? The main navigation has dozens of links and sub links that should come before this. These links aren't even on the page anywhere! A few searches of the source code for URL's and visible phrases in the main navigation turn up totally blank.

Hmmm. Where are these visible links, where is the header?

Aha, the entire header, navigation and links are all hidden in 3 javascript files included in the head tag. Cunningly, the entire main web site main structure (this section is only the tip of the iceberg) is hidden from Google on this page, and all of the super optimized content and links have become the new site to Google. The visible navigation, which takes visitors to the main site, is quite prominent on the visible page. Their strategy, it appears, is to get visitors to this page and hope that they'll click any main navigation item to get into the "real" site - never to find their way back to this over optimized page again.

A lot of work has gone into this, but I couldn't see how anyone could allow their whole web site to look like this. It's a step above the old auto-generated doorway pages from the nineties, because each of these pages had to be written by a human, but I still couldn't see them as a serious business so far.

So then I go to the home page, and I see that the copy is written quite well, and they seem to have a lot going on. This company has actually been in business since the 80's selling packaged software. Clicking around I noticed that all of the very similar links found on the original Google optimized page were nowhere to be found. I looked at the site map, thinking that surely they would use this page to link to their optimized page section, but I can't even find the links there.

Going back to the optimized page reveals a clue, the breadcrumbs show that I am in a section titled "articles". Looking at the footer on the home page reveals a link to "articles" that is not even in the site map.

Except for the over optimized content, it's quite cleverly done. If they were a little less aggressive with the keyword stuffing in the content they could easily argue that these pages were all legitimate articles about key phrases that their customers were searching for. They would be "legal search landing pages" instead of the much feared "illegal doorway pages". Yes, it is a fine line, and one that they still walk very carefully even if they are stumbling over the edge.

Each of their optimized pages truly are a unique article written by a real human being. It may not be auto generated, but any sane human being would agree that they must be written for something other than intelligent humans. The search engines wouldn't know this, of course, because the content won't be picked up by a filter that is searching for extremely similar pages, for too many similar phrases, or even a filter to detect randomly generated content - so they get away with it.

I wouldn't recommend some of these tactics, because they could easily land you with an over optimization penalty and get you kicked out out of the the index all together for a while. I do , however, think it is a very good illustration how aggressive you have to be to rank well these days.

NY Times Explains the Google Search Engine

2007-08-04T21:47:00.000-04:00

If you are not in the Internet marketing industry, and want to get a feel for what exactly is all the fuss about search engine marketing, there is a good article on Google in New York Times last month that I just found, ironically, while searching for references to the Google search quality team: New York Times on Google

Keyword Research Secrets Revealed from SEO Book

2007-07-27T11:36:00.000-04:00

Aaron Wall provided some of his "secrets" to keyword research on the WordTracker blog. It's about ensuring you have developed the best possible seed list - because the final list is only as good as the seed list you start with. This goes pretty deep, so it is a good read for ideas on your next keyword research project.

http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets-1/

Search Optimized Online Press Release Case Study

2007-05-07T14:48:00.000-04:00

Here's how online media releases (press releases) help your search engine optimization program:

We just completed a project for Wild Apricot redeveloping and relaunching their Membership Management Software web site. As part of a larger search marketing program we planned and wrote a media release announcing the re-launch of their site. We planned and optimized the content and links in the release for their ideal key phrases and distributed it through PR Web.

The goal of a search optimized online media release is a little different from a traditional media release. Traditional releases are intended solely to get the attention of journalists who might be able to write or air a story related to the release. Internet distributed releases can do that, too, but are also intended to be indexed and rank in the popular online news search engines (Google News, Yahoo News) so that consumers searching for news on the topic will find and read the releases directly. The other benefit of online distributed releases - the benefit that helps your search engine optimization program - are the links generated from the release.

Online media releases are generally made available through RSS feeds. There are thousands of web sites that filter and re-publish these feeds on their web site, frequently with the original links intact.

At the highest level of payment through PR Web, it is possible to insert many links into the content and control the link anchor text of each link. If you have well defined key phrases for your search marketing program, this is an ideal opportunity to get links out there on the net that point back to your site with the words you choose.

The final release targeted several high value phrases. The most important phrases to our search optimization campaign, such as membership database management, event management, and association management were linked to appropriate sections of the site using the link anchor text we wanted.

The results? A quick search in Google for a unique phrase in the release shows 350+ pages displaying the press release. A few examples can be found here, here, and here.

Search Engine Site Maps Inclusion

2007-04-12T21:12:00.000-04:00

Google, Yahoo and Ask have come together to embrace a site map standard effective immediately. Microsoft promises to start using the standard later this year. Enhancements to the protocol were announced at Search Engine Strategies New York last week.

Information on the new XML protocol is available at sitemaps.org

Search Engine Watch has a good article covering the announcement.

Since the major engines are going to use this to assist in crawling the web, it makes sense to add this XML site map on your domain to help them index your content. We'll be adding it to all of our clients that contract us for search engine optimization.

Search Engine Strategies Discount

2007-03-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

If you are thinking of attending Search Engine Strategies New York, there is now a 20% discount coupon offered by Incisive Media. I will be using this next week to book my ticket. Check it out on the Google analytics blog here:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/03/ses-new-york-2007-discount-coupon.html

Email Marketing: Microsoft becoming an EMSP?

2007-03-12T01:31:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Outlook 2007 has a new feature called business contact manager, that among other things, allows you to send and track email marketing campaigns.

The obvious question for me, as the founder of an email marketing service, is will this enable users to do their own email marketing without using an outside EMSP (Email Marketing Service Provider)?

At closer inspection it appears to be a good solutions for salespeople sending small group messages to their clients, but is not something that a marketing department would want to be using, or even a small business managing their entire customer list.

Tracking
In the demo section about email tracking it shows only unsubscribed, bounce or delivered. There is no display of open, click, or forward. On the specifications page, it says that tracking requires a separate subscription to the listbuilder service. I am currently not aware of whether the list builder service is required to handle the unsubscribes and delivery tracking, whether it adds the open and click tracking, or whether tracking opens and clicks are even possible.

Costs
To get the basic email marketing features, you require Office Small Business 2007 or Office Professional 2007, not Office Standard 2007. Small business will run you $395 and 425 USD respectively at Amazom.com.

There is no mention of cost of the list builder subscription, and list builder stopped taking signups as of November 15th, 2006.

You may also need exchange server 2007. Here's what they do together.

Bandwidth and Processing Power
As soon as you start sending tens of thousands emails you are still going to run into the bandwidth and server processing issues that email marketing service providers take away for you. Many of our customers started with an in-house solution for marketing and moved away from it to use an outsourced EMSP because their in-house servers could not take the load. Once an email campaign went out, their server slowed to the point where office staff could no longer send and receive emails at an acceptable speed.

Graphics
Graphical emails will be created using the new Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine, which I have previously posted about. Presumably this will render fine in other Outlook 2007 clients, but how the emails will look in webmail clients like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, and in other popular mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird is your guess against mine.

Images have to be added as attachments, since there is apparently no way to edit the source code to add an image that is hosted on an outside server. This is going to be a certain flag for spam filters reducing the deliverability of messages. Another problem with sending images as attachments is that the file size of each message will increase enormously. Multiply this by thousands of messages and the bandwidth and processing problems I mentioned previously are that much worse. Both the sending of the messages, and the receiving on the other end will take far longer.

Not a solution for Marketing
Forbes magazine recently published a article on the Outlook bulk email solution, and said:

From an e-mail marketing perspective, Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager effectively solves yesterday's challenge: How to create and send bulk e-mails.

But today's e-mail marketing challenge encompasses much more: Cutting through the clutter, crafting a legal and effective message, managing subscribe and unsubscribe requests and tracking statistics.

Sending mass emails also requires ensuring that messages look like they should across a wide variety of platforms, which should still be left to professionals that know HTML and the idiosyncrasies of each platform.

You can find another opinion on the Outlook Solution from the folks at email-marketing-reports.

SEM, Email and SEO # 1, 2 and 3 in Online Marketing

2007-02-06T08:22:00.000-05:00

As a wrap up on 2006 marketing, MarketingSherpa and ad:tech created a survey to ask online marketers what worked in 2006 and where they expected to spend their time, efforts and dollars in 2007:

What I find really interesting is that Email is both on the top of the list - and the bottom. House lists rank #2 in effectiveness, while rented lists are on the bottom. Our email marketing business is reflecting that trend, with more and interest being shown every day - in an industry that I was thinking was starting to mature.

Another business I thought was starting to mature was search engine optimization - yet SEO showed the biggest jump this year.

SEM (PPC) slipped slightly, surely due to increased click costs and the increasing fear of click-fraud. I believe staying away from the content network in Google is your biggest hedge against this. All of the recent interest in PPC is most likely what's driving the growing interest in SEO. Now that marketers see that search marketing really works, they want to find new ways of getting that golden targeted traffic from search engines without paying the crazy costs per click.

Overall, It's nice to be validated in that the three main focuses of our company line up perfectly with what works in online marketing. And, yes, that's by design.

Microsoft To Mess with Email Marketing...

2007-01-15T21:22:00.000-05:00

I can't believe my ears. I am hopping mad!

Can it really be true? Microsoft - in the release of the new Outlook 2007 - has apparently decided to mess with Internet standards as only they can...

Ask yourself: What is the WORST possible thing Microsoft could do to make a mess of HTML email and ruin how it is going to look and work inside of email?

Answer: They could change the rendering engine to the most notoriously bad HTML tool on the planet - Microsoft Word.

As an email marketing service provider, all I can think about is the problems that this is going to cause our customers. We are going to have to figure out what this means to the hundreds - if not thousands - of email newsletter templates that have been tweaked to work well in different email clients, and then help people make changes to them to work in the new email environment. Just think of the millions of people in corporations that will naturally upgrade to the newest version, and then the follow up movement of all computer users to the new environment as they purchase new computers with the latest software built in.

If this is an important issue to you, CampaignMonitor has an excellent post on what these changes will mean to you.

If you want to see what this means to your email campaigns, Microsoft has an HTML validator for their new email client.

What are they thinking? The only thing that makes sense is that instead of supporting standards, they want to MAKE the standards. From a business perspective - with their monopolistic market share - it's a logical move to gain more control of the Internet.

Does that make them ... evil? I think that is an ethical/moral question that is up to each individual to decide for themselves.

How to choose an SEO Company

2006-12-12T10:50:00.000-05:00

Dmitry Buterin, President of Bonasource and Chief Apricot of WildApricot, the web site and membership database tool for non-profits and associations, wrote an excellent post on OneDegree yesterday on how to choose an SEO Company:

"In my experience, the best SEO companies are the ones which look at the whole picture - how SEO fits into overall online marketing strategy. (vs. narrowly looking at some technicalities of URL rewrites, meta-tags, keyword density etc.) Best SEO is also about balancing how content works for the user - vs. how it works for search engine (so conversion issues are given top priority)"

Dmitry is correct. SEO needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy. It can't just be one tactic that is applied without consideration for it's needs from and effects on the rest of the picture.

The rest of Dmitry's post goes on about the various other things you and an SEO company, should be considering. It's worthwhile to read the rest of his response to "Best in class SEO companies"

In addition to a list of points to consider, he goes on to write a glowing testimonial for me and my company. Thanks Dmitry!

PPC Keywords: Long Tail or Tall Neck? Fat Torso!

2006-11-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

Ralph Wilson's newsletter today brought a new term to the in the long tail discussion. I thought Tall neck was a cool addition - but now we have the "torso" (which I from now on choose to call the "Fat Torso").

The principles are perfectly sound - it describes where the real value keywords are for PPC campaigns:

It's not the tall neck, where all of the generic, one word, high traffic, sometimes very high priced keywords are. Those keywords are typically reserved for those with more money than brains.

It's also not necessarily the long tail, where you'll find thousands of three and four word highly targeted but infrequently searched words. These are great - don't get me wrong! It's just that on many of the phrases the trickle of traffic may not be worth the trouble.

It's the Fat Torso! The part in the middle with typically two word phrases that have a decent amount of traffic, a reasonable cost, and good targeting. Andrews suggestion is that most people don't spend enough time making the torso as fat as possible. He pushes us to think of all of the variations of your possible words. Have you really got them all???

All good (or at least great) PPC managers will know this, and revisit the list frequently to make sure, but Andrew Goodman just named it. Congratulations on coining a new term, Andrew.

The full article is here:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/goodman-torso.htm

And wasn't I pleased to see that Andrew is from my very own city of Toronto, Canada!

Hey Andrew - if you are looking at your link reports or referring sites and come across this post, please drop me a line.

Affiliate Programs Help Drive Your Marketing!

2006-11-15T16:58:00.000-05:00

Ken Shafer interviews Josh and Dallas, founders of DreamHost, about their affiliate program. Some good candid insights here for those thinking of starting affiliate programs.

Key concepts are:

How affiliate programs help drive customer referrals
How it helped them stop relying on paid advertising
How they used affiliate codes in special ways
How the blog helps drive traffic
Even though they give away a huge commission they make money on LTV (Lifetime Customer Value)

Email Marketing: Debunking Summer Campaign Myths

2006-11-07T12:36:00.000-05:00

Emails deployed in July and August actually out-perform those deployed in September - even in the B2B industry! That's perhaps the most surprising item noted in this Email Trends Report Q3 2006 just referenced in ClickWeekly.

What I don't like about this report is that 'clicks' are measured as a percentage of open rate, vs. a percentage of delivery. I think this is a misleading number because it makes your click through rate appear far better than it is.

It is being reported as such because the author of the report uses ConstantContact, a service aimed at small businesses, and they choose to report it that way.

Read the full report here:
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol101/vol101_b.htm

Mobile Web Best Practices

2006-11-05T18:48:00.000-05:00

With the new slew of mobile devices out there, and the increasing availability of wireless Internet, mobile web access is growing by leaps and bounds.

As a web designer, it is great to see some standards being introduced by the good ol' W3 org.

Written for designers of Web sites and content management systems, these guidelines describe how to author Web content that works well on mobile devices:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-mobile-bp-20061102/

Toronto News Release Optimization Success Story

2006-11-03T10:58:00.000-05:00

Finally, PR companies are seeing the value in optimizing for the online news search engines:
We just optimized a release for a PR company that is working for a skin care company. This company found us through Google, looking for "Toronto news release optimization". (We are number three if you select 'pages from Canada'... hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that because we can definitely do better there.)

Anyways, this is how it worked:

The first thing we did was research on the 20 or 30 appropriate terms to do wit their press release. Most of the terms are searched less than 10 times per day. One is searched more that 3000 times per day. So we chose the top 3 most searched terms and optimized for those. The release went out yesterday and here are the ranking results so far:

Google.ca News:
"skin care" - position #7
"lip liner" - position #1
"anti-aging" - position #1

Yahoo.com news:
"Skincare" - position #1 and #2
"Lip liner" - position #1 and #2
"Lipstick" - position #4
"Anti-aging" - position #1, #2

I cannot seem to find it in Yahoo Canada yet, which is strange. We'll check again later today. The results overall look very good so far! With the strong search traffic on the terms we chose it should be a huge success. Let's see what the traffic numbers look like in a few days.

If you are sending press releases, I highly recommend news release optimization and submission to Google and Yahoo news. The last release we did for ourselves quadrupled our daily traffic for several days, and we got a few very good leads in the first few days.

SEO: Top Google Ranking Examples

2006-10-16T20:30:00.000-04:00

Cool! I just checked the search rankings for Agito Internet Marketing for the first time in a few weeks and found these NEW #1 positions in Google:

Google.com:
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company

Google.ca:
toronto internet marketing company
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company
webtrends 8.0

Brilliant SEO Video by Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallen

2006-09-08T09:22:00.000-04:00

I was just e-mailed a link to this video by Andy and Brad. I've so far only watched the first few minutes but it is real Gold. I'll review the whole thing soon, but for now - check it out yourself:
http://www.convertlinks.com/whitehatseo

Links: How to Get Links for SEO

2006-09-04T11:02:00.000-04:00

I checked out Stundubl today and saw he posted a great article on the 12 different types of links and how to get them.

This is actually a more useful article than the 101 ways to get links (from SEO Book) that I blogged about the other day. Here's what I liked in Todd's article:

#1: Authority Links: Going through the Google directory in your niche - duh, what a great idea! I am shocked at myself for not trying this one. It sure beats searching for "keyword phrase + add url, add a site, submit link, submit site, etc". Not that the searching isn't a great method, but the directory method here offers some fast quick hit ideas.

#11: Comment and Profile links: Matt Cutts shows us a cool method of obtaining x-ray vision for no-follow links (It's a hack for Firefox). So it makes sense to use this if you are big on commenting on blogs (a great way to build profile and get backlinks to your blog.)

The other ideas were pretty straightforward, but kudos to Todd for creating a no-nonsense list of the 12 different types of links.

Free Internet Marketing Tool Collection: Part One

2006-09-03T23:08:00.000-04:00

I've been finding more and SEO / Internet marketing tools on sites these days, so just for fun I've decided to start a list. I've named this post "Part One" because I am sure there are PLENTY more out there, and I don't want to make this first post an exhaustive list. Here goes:

http://www.urltrends.com
Interesting trending idea upgrade for them to make some money.

http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
Linkhounds seems to be trying to create an all over linking resource site. Cool that their software is open-source. This requires some more looking in to.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Keyword ranking trending. Requires free login, but nice charts.

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Nice link popularity, search engine saturation and keyword ranking tools with many industry benchmarks.

http://www.submitexpress.com/tools.html
Really cool meta tag checker that shows keyword density and tag relevance to page content.

http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm
One of the more in-depth keyword density and prominence tool I've seen. The free access link is near the bottom of the page.

If any of my thousands of readers knows of any more, please feel free to add them to the comments. :-)

Update: September 4th: The Big List of SEO Tools:
Ok, these guys at seocompany.ca seem to have the biggest list of all:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/18-toolbars.html

SEO: Search Engines to adopt new link tags

2006-09-02T22:51:00.000-04:00

Want a laugh? It's about time all of the search engines got together and released some standards on linking that we can all use.

SEO: Link Building in 2006

2006-09-02T22:16:00.000-04:00

Aaron Wall posted a great set of tips for link building in 2006 here.

Here's a one I like:

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

This is still an opportunuty in many industries, but don't underestimate the investment required to make a great quality portal. Our own new business networking events portal, BizNetworkNews.com, increased it's own search engine traffic by 250% last month.

But of course that's nothing to the guy that is making a killing selling Viagra (through affiliate links) because his hilarious Viagra prank ranks number 8 in Google for Viagra, a very, VERY, competitive term due to all of the back links from the Viral nature of his site.

A classic example of link bait that I don't see on Aaron's list.

AOL Search Data Insights for Local Search

2006-08-28T14:31:00.000-04:00

Ken Mccarthy brought up an interesting point about the AOL data that was mistakenly published a few weeks ago. In his blog, attributing this point to Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal (published free here), these are the top 10 most searched words in the list:

1. free
2. new
3. lyrics
4. county
5. school
6. city
7. home
8. state
9. pictures
10. music

The fact that county, city and state are some of the top 10 most popular phrases seem to point to an increased number of local searches. This is huge to local search advertisers. Seems like my prediction of the death of the yellow pages (a fairly obvious prediction to me) is coming true (of course).

Another interesting point was the fact that so many searches start with the 5 W's: Who, What, When, Where, Why. It seems that searchers still like to put searches in the form of questions. You would think that AskJeeves would have done better than it did then, but there is still an opportunity here.

Perhaps we should be using more questions on our site linking to answers. FAQ's are an obvious place to do this. Also, working up personas and the questions each would have, and then posting the questions and answers on the appropriate pages would help bring search traffic.

The Long Neck vs. The Long Tail

2006-08-15T16:27:00.000-04:00

Sounds kind of like a research paper on evolution of a certain kind of pre-historic mammal, but it's not. It's a discussion on targeting web sites to a specific audience.

We've heard so much lately about the "long tail" - the long list of occasionally searched unique keyword phrases for every topic that follows a short list of frequently typed phrases.

Search engine optimizers and Pay Per Click marketing specialists like myself are quite interested in the long tail because there is so much value to be had there. For PPC the long tail is important because bidding on a huge list of less frequently searched phrases brings lower costs and better value for advertising dollars. For SEO the long tail is important because optimizing for these phrases is easier and more likely to succeed than optimizing for the most competitive phrases.

Well, Gerry McGovern, in his infinite wisdom, just coined a new one (as far as I know) with the "long neck"- and it is equally if not more important for the Internet marketer.

Check it out here: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-08-14-long-neck.htm#cc

Search Engine Spammers Say Big Thank You to AOL

2006-08-08T20:41:00.000-04:00

AOL, in an apparently innocent release of search history information to the 'research community' has released 2GB of searches over a recent 3 month period.

They thought they didn't release personally identifiable information because they didn't include user information, however in reality it is possible to identify many AOL users simply by their search history. The files released link each search together by a randomly assigned user ID number.

Since many people do 'ego searches', that is, searching for their own name, address, etc., this alone can identify users. Linked with location searches, hobby searches, etc., many users can be identified by those looking with almost guaranteed accuracy.

What about those searching for pornography, new jobs, dating sites, illegal drugs, and on and on? Over 650,000 users have had their online privacy violated.

Of course AOL apologized, and removed the link to the data quickly, but the damage has been done.

Search Engine spammers will use this information to build massive automated sites on the 'long tail' of searches; optimizing pages for thousands of rarely searched terms that are easily targeted and will each bring a trickle of affiliate sales or adsense revenue.

Others will use the information for honest keyword research. This Internet marketer was lucky enough to grab a copy from a mirror site last night.

Google's Matt Cutts Answers Questions on SEO on Video

2006-07-31T12:23:00.000-04:00

Fascinating that Matt decided to answer SEO mail via video.

Put a face and voice behind the always informative Matt Cutt's blog:

Links to his videos:

What he had to say in a nut shell:

It's fine to have multiple sites on the same IP, unless you have thousands of sites :-)
If you are publishing millions of pages at once (crazy I know) you should launch them more softly.
You should optimize for search engines AND uses (duh...) Keep users interests and search engine interests as aligned as possible.
Google has a lot of tools to detect spam, but they are not public. You can look at Yahoo's site explorer, there are tools to see which sites are on one IP address, definitely check Google sitemaps
Cleanliness of code is not of ultimate importance. Since 40% of all pages have syntax errors we can't exclude everything that does not validate. It is a good idea, but it is not at the top of the list - good content is at the top of the list.
About sitemaps: pageviews are not a factor on when things are updated on sitemaps. Each of the elements in the diagnostics are updated on a separate schedule.
In general, the number one mistake people make in SEO is not to make it crawlable. If you can get through your entire site through a text browser you will be OK. Try Lynx.
Have good content so people will want to link to you. Good idea to have viral kind of content that people will want to link to - something interesting that sets you apart from the pack.
Think about the people that will be interested in your content and make sure they know about you.
Google uses the Dmoz snippet instead of the valid meta tag when it is a better match to the query. Snippets are actually query dependent. Very interesting! You can use a meta tag called no ODP snippet.
Google favours bold over strong tags, just a little - but not much.

Fortune 500 execs DO use Internet for research and decisions

2006-07-17T09:47:00.000-04:00

Since it's often an uphill battle convincing some people that executives actually search and read web sites, it's very exciting then when reports like this come out:

This from DMN.ca:

A study dispelling three Internet myths confirms that marketing, sales and product development professionals rely most heavily on information from the Internet for their daily decision making.
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol85/vol85_c.htm

This study was apparently published by OutSell Inc., but I can't find it on the OutSell web site, and unfortunately DMN didn't quote the name of the study. Anyone that knows more about it please let me know.

Google SiteMaps Are Good For You

2006-07-09T23:45:00.000-04:00

Recent enhancements to Google's SiteMaps tool are a boon to seo webmasters.

I had previously questioned the value of creating Google SiteMaps because it did not make a measurable difference in search results - but the true value is appearing as something different than expected:

Matt Cutts just made a post that mentioned enhancements to sitemaps diagnostics that made me quiver. I quickly validated my site with the service and found it reveals fascinating information about your site:

What crawl errors were found
URL's that timed out
unassigned pagerank pages
top words in your site
top words in links to your site
and very interestingly - top queries that returned your site in the top results

This last point showed me that my web site showed up on the second page of an important query that I wasn't even tracking yet. This is clearly going to be one of the growing arsenal of tools for Internet marketers.

Kudos for Google for being so democratic in their sharing of information.

Top Ten Reasons B2B Companies Under Invest in Their Web Sites

2006-06-13T19:31:00.000-04:00

June's issue of Jacob Nielson's alert box inspired me to pound out all of the resistance I almost invariably see while speaking with our B2B customers and prospects about their web sites.

This is a little tongue and cheek, so if you've had any of these thoughts and don't like my comments please don't be offended. The Internet is changing so fast I can hardly keep up; I lose sleep over it. Just because it was true last year doesn't mean it's true today. Challenge your beliefs! You can use the Internet to generate leads and assist the sales process - and you can prove it for yourself.

Here we go:

#10: We are not involved in e-commerce because we don't sell our products online. (People don't buy cars online either, so that's why the auto industry isn't online as well!)

#9: Our sales process is much more complex than B2C sales so it can't be done online. (Or you don't know how?)

#8: We have never received a lead or sale from our web site so it doesn't matter. (Umm... Shouldn't that be your first clue there may be a problem?)

#7: Our customers don't look on the Internet for information in our industry. (Sure! The Internet is probably only used for e-mail and porn anyway.)

#6: Our customers come from referrals and is closed by salespeople so it doesn't matter. (And, of course, they would never check your site before a meeting, and especially not before someone else in their company authorizes the purchase order.)

#5: Nobody searches for what we do. (Because when you checked the numbers were...?)

#4: The people that do search for what we do aren't our customers. (Because you've never got a good lead from your site? See number 8)

#3: Our product information changes too frequently so we just don't put any of it online. (I suppose it is cheaper to cut down trees?)

#2: Our customers are CEO's and Presidents, and they don't have time to look at our web site. (So they also don't have time to do any research before making a major purchase?)

And the number one reason? We don't want our competitors to know what we are doing! (Eureka! It's better just to keep everyone in the dark about the company!)

So there you go. I've cautiously hinted at my feelings on the matters. In my next blog post I am going to deconstruct these arguments and turn them on their head. I hope I can give you some ideas.

But, then again, I am sure none of my B2B prospects are reading this anyways, so I am probably just wasting my time. Hmm.... maybe I should cut my blog budget....

Creating Killer Web Content

2006-06-08T15:50:00.000-04:00

It's pretty cool when one industry heavyweight interviews another. That's exactly what happened yesterday when Jared Spool, of Usability Interface Engineering, published in his newsletter his interview with Gerry Mcgovern. Jared is one of the top two usability experts in the country (the other being Jacob Nielson). Gerry McGovern is probably the most well known content and information architecture consultant in the world.

Here's a couple of great excerpts from the conversation with my comments below:

You've stated that only a small percentage (approximately 10%) of content really makes any difference online. Does this mean that the bulk of content is a waste?

Essentially, yes. Most organizations face two challenges when it comes to content: data management and content management. Organizations produce huge quantities of content/data that needs to be stored for legal and other reasons. Nobody’s interested in this sort of stuff, unless in exceptional circumstances.

Then, you've got a small quantity of content that the customer wants—that will help make the sale, deliver the service, and build the brand. This is what I call the killer web content. The other stuff is the filler web content. If you mix the two together, the filler smothers the killer. The job of a web manager is to identify the killer web content.

The lesson here seems to be that even if you need to put up all of that filler content for legal or other reasons, you need to be ruthless in determining what the killer content is and make sure it is front and center, so that your customers and prospects can easily read what is interesting to them without hunting for it.

The number one skill that every web team should have is the ability and desire to relentlessly focus on the needs of the customer. Web teams must enjoy being around the customer, they must be stimulated by thinking of the customer. You have those skills and everything else fits into place.

The number one skill of an editor is not the ability to write. There are many people who are technically good writers but their content is not engaging. The editor must know their reader/customer inside out. They must also have empathy for their reader—be able to think like them, feel like them.

I find many of the organizations we deal with to plagued by what I call "inside out thinking". They view their web site in their own frame of reference; what they think is interesting, what they want the customer to be interested in, speaking in their own language instead of the language of the customer, etc.

It's a tough discipline, but you need to practice "outside in thinking". Put yourself in the shoes and mind of your customers and prospects. What will they be thinking? What kind of prejudices, concerns, thoughts do they have about your business, your industry? What kind of problems do they have that they want to solve. You should only be focused on your customers problems, their concerns, their hopes and dreams. How can you help them move from where they are now (the problem that they have), to where they want to be?

You may find that thinking about your web content in these terms produces very different kinds of content that you have now.

The full text of the interview can be found here:

http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/importance_of_customer/

Google to become even more important for search engine optimization

2006-05-30T13:35:00.000-04:00

Google and Dell announced on Thursday that Dell will be pre-installing Google software on their computers.

This is another made another major breakthrough for Google in their fight with Microsoft and Yahoo to own the world's search market. Google has a 43% market share currently, growing for the ninth straight month in a row. With Google partners included, Google provides the search results for more than 50% of the worlds searches each day.

With over 5 billion searches each month, optimizing your web site to get in front of your relevant traffic has never been more important.

Toronto Search Engine Optimization Company

2006-05-25T14:51:00.000-04:00

Search engine optimization still has a long way to go to being a well understood and accepted marketing practice by most organizations.

For small and medium businesses, at least the ones I work with in Toronto, seo is often looked at as some kind of hocus pocus black magic that adds cost to a web design bill but doesn't produce any results.

Yet many online businesses today exist solely on the business provided by visitors from search. Many larger businesses get tremendous amounts of traffic from search.

What gives? Why are so many still so fearful of search engine optimization?

Part of the reason has to be the mis-information provided by web designers that do SEO as an afterthought. Poorly researched keyword choices, poor or non-existent reporting, lack of education to the client, and lack of accountability on the agency part are surely the problems.

Almost every web design company seems to be offering seo services. Yet the people that are doing the work are also responsible for so many other tasks within the organization that they don't have the luxury of focusing and specializing in the specific knowledge required to do the job well. SEO should not be considered a part time endeavor by a web designer or an IT person.

SEO is the rocket science of marketing, according to Robert Murray, President of iProspect, one of the most successful search engine optimization companies in the world. Robert is quoted in an excellent article revealing the results of a recent SEO study.

Search engine optimization requires a combination of skillsets; good copywriting, html coding, potential IT involvement on web server changes, reporting, analytics, analysis, changes and the persistence to keep tweaking and measuring until you get the results you are looking for. Not to mention you have to keep up with the constant search engine changes!

Moral of the story? Don't waste your money on SEO as an afterthought or a part-time endeavor. If you want results you should hire a professional SEO company like my Toronto Search Engine Optimization Company.

Agito Announces WebTrends Extension for Typo3 CMS

2006-05-16T15:43:00.000-04:00

We issued this press release last week for a web analytics extension we wrote for our favourite content management system:

Free WebTrends Extension for Open Source Content Management System Released

A leading Toronto Internet marketing company has created an easy method of integrating WebTrends, a web analytics software program, with Typo3, the popular Open Source content management system. The free extension enables Typo3 users to easily configure and add WebTrends tags to their sites to enable deep analysis of their web traffic.

Toronto, Ontario (PRWEB) May 8, 2006 -- A free WebTrends web analytics extension is now available for Typo3, a popular open source content management system. With this extension, users of Typo3 can bring professional web analytics to their Typo3 powered web sites. Agito Internet Marketing Inc., a Toronto Internet marketing company, wrote and released this extension on the Typo3 web site as a contribution to the open source project.

“Typo3 is a very well developed content management system with plenty of extensions that have been developed by a large developer community. One of the missing components, however, has always been professional web analytics”, says Keith Holloway of Agito.

“Since we provide web analytics consulting to our clients with WebTrends, and we build web sites using Typo3, it was a natural fit for us to program an extension to merge the two applications. We then decided to make the extension freely available to all users of Typo3. We simply wanted to give back to the Typo3 project by contributing a useful extension for web analytics professionals.”

The WebTrends extension enables advanced Typo3 users to configure all WebTrends SDC (Smart Source Data Collector) tags to their pages within the Typo3 interface without any additional programming.

About Agito Internet Marketing Inc.:
Agito is a leading Toronto based Internet marketing company that provides email marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and web analytics consulting to successful medium sized businesses worldwide. They help companies take advantage of the new marketing capabilities of the Internet to improve lead generation, improve lead follow up, improve customer retention and increase sales. For more information visit: http://www.AgitoInternetMarketing.com

About WebTrends, Inc.:
WebTrends is the acknowledged global web analytics market leader for more than twelve years. With an uncompromising focus on delivering the most accurate and actionable metrics, WebTrends enables thousands of web-smart organizations to easily improve campaign performance and web site conversion as well as build stronger relationships with their customers. Companies such as Microsoft, Ticketmaster, IKEA, Reuters, General Mills, US Bank and more than half of the Fortune and Global 500 rely on WebTrends as their trusted standard. For more information, visit www.WebTrends.com

About Typo3:
TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules. This enterprise-class Content Management Framework offers the best of both worlds: out-of-the-box operation with a complete set of standard modules and a clean and sturdy high-performance architecture accommodating virtually every kind of custom solution or extension. For more information, visit www.Typo3.com

For additional information on the release of the WebTrends extension for Typo3 by Agito Internet Marketing Inc, (or for a demo), contact Keith Holloway or visit http://www.AgitoInternetMarketing.com.

Contact:
Keith Holloway, President
Agito Internet Marketing Inc.
416-597-2776
http://www.AgitoInternetMarketing.com

This release is listed on:

eMediaWire:
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2006/5/emw381649.htm

PRWeb:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/5/prweb381649.htm

e-Mail Newsletter Subscription Policies

2006-04-20T14:03:00.000-04:00

Creating a professional and appropriate e-mail newsletter policy:

If I sent you an e-mail, met you at a trade show, or downloaded something off of your web site - should I automatically start receiving your newsletter?

I think not.

Yet this seems to be the policy of many businesses with an e-mail newsletter. It's an easy trap to fall into because there are compelling reasons to do it this way:

You'll have far more subscribers, and grow your subscriber list faster if you simply subscribe everyone you ever have and ever will come in contact with - whether they know it or not.
It's just easier. If you have downloads on your web site then you'll have to create an extra checkbox for the newsletter and ensure that contacts choices are enforced in all future mailings.

Bigger and easier is not always better
At a recent conference I was chatting with a group of professionals who were lamenting about the frequency to which they were subscribed to companies newsletters just because they exchanged cards at a trade show. The general feeling was that a newsletter that arrived unexpectedly was considered both spam and unprofessional - even though they knew the company it was coming from.

It is far better to ask each person if they would like to receive the newsletter. Yes, it is more work, and yes, it requires procedures and policy enforcement - but the arrival of the newsletter in the recipients inbox is welcomed instead of being considered a breach of relationship.

What policies should be in place?

Opt-in on your forms:
First - for every form on your web site - have a check box for the newsletter. Ask your visitors if they would also like to receive your newsletter. The box should be unchecked if you want a true opt-in newsletter.

Some choose to have the box pre-checked to get more sign-ups, but that is what we call an opt-out newsletter. It's because you have to uncheck the box in order to opt-out of receiving the newsletter. Interesting, not asking people if they want the newsletter at all but still sending it to them is also considered an opt-out newsletter.
Opt-in in person:
Ask people you meet if they would like to receive your newsletter. At a trade show you could have a newsletter sign up sheet for people to write their name and e-mail. If you are collecting business cards for a draw, have the sign up sheet next to the draw box.

Why not also ASK each person if they would like to be on your newsletter as their card in the box? Always have a compelling reason to sign up for your newsletter, a free gift or some valuable information to maximize subscriptions.
Opt-in on the phone:
Ask each person you speak to if they would like to receive your newsletter and make sure the e-mail is entered in your e-mail marketing system. Give your sales reps an easy way to do so.
Manual e-mail entry:
Every person that manually enters contacts into your marketing database needs to be made aware that only people with the newsletter option 'checked' will receive the newsletter. A decision needs to be made for each contact being entered whether they should be receiving the newsletter or not.
e-Mail imports:
Same goes for mass import. A decision needs to be made for each list imported - or perhaps even each contact on each list, whether or not the contact should be subscribed to receive the newsletter.
Sending Policy:
Only send to those that have expressed their desire to receive your newsletter.

Benefits of having a newsletter policy

In future people can choose to unsubscribe from the newsletter, but still remain subscribed to the database to receive other important information like special announcements.

This is a way that you can actually help retain people on your list (reduce churn). For example, a contact goes to unsubscribe from the newsletter and they see a couple of options - newsletter, special announcements, press releases, etc. And they can manage their preferences without completely unsubscribing. If you do not have a newsletter subscription option they can only either be subscribed or unsubscribed.
Giving people the option doesn't risk diminishing the trusting relationship. If someone downloads a whitepaper and then starts receiving the newsletter they might be put off by it.

Permission policies pay off Being professional in your communications and practicing good permission habits pays off in your relationship with prospects and customers alike.

Some areas of privacy are fuzzy and you may get away with lax policies that maximize your subscriptions or save work, but if you do it the way you'd expect to be treated yourself you will gain trust and guarantee you are on the right side of the law.

--

If you would like more information on e-mail marketing best practices, e-mail marketing ideas, or services that can help you gain maximum value from your e-mail marketing campaigns, please visit the web site of our Toronto e-mail marketing company.

The White Hat Vs. Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Debate is BS

2006-04-12T11:00:00.000-04:00

That's the word from the CAC2006 conference in Amsterdam.

Rasmus Srrensson from Notabene.net, a 25 person search engine optimization firm in Denmark, proclaimed "there is no black hat or white hat search engine optimization. It is all just risk assessment", in his presentation to the audience of affiliates and sponsor companies.

Rasmus suggested you ask yourself: "are willing to have your site dropped? If no, maybe you shouldn't even be trying to rank in search engines... Search engine spamming and black hat SEO techniques are not illegal."

The CAC is the Casino Affiliate Conference. It is held twice annually, once in Las Vegas and once in Amsterdam. Over 600 affiliates and sponsor online gaming companies congregate to share information and make new business deals.

I feel that to be best the field of search engine optimization, one needs to be understand be able to apply the techniques of the best search optimizers in the world. The decision to go to the CAC2006 in Amsterdam was not a mistake.

By far the hottest topic this year is search engine optimization. The companies and affiliates that manage to secure the top positions for the most trafficked phrases are scoring the biggest new customers wins. With the worldwide online gaming market estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 30 billion dollars (USD) annually, the competition for search engine rankings is among the highest in the world.

Search optimization is all grey hat
Clearly, if so called "black hat search engine optimization techniques" are not illegal, then the option is available to all competitors in any industry. The most aggressive will likely use it and probably dominate the search engine results.

Rasmus has a good point. If you are concerned about your search engine rankings, and especially if you are in an already highly competitive online category, you need to be aware of the options available to you and your competitors to compete in the search engines.

Black and white are far too polarized terms to describe search engine optimization techniques. In reality, everything is a shade of grey. Often it's not what you do, but how you do it that makes it lighter or darker in the spectrum.

Take content for example. Increasing site content is an important factor in search engine optimization. The kind of content that you create, or how you create it, makes it black hat or white hat. Pure white hat would be adding relevant articles that you created from company resources. Pure black hat would be creating portals by scraping content off of other sites and mixing it up with other content so as to be unique.

The realist, the grey hat SEO, understands that in order to provide quality content for the user, and compete with the pure black hat optimizers, it must take a more aggressive approach to search engine optimization.

The grey hat SEO asks himself:
Where can I find quality content of interest to my audience?

Quality on topic blogs with RSS feeds?
News feeds?
Press release feeds?
Articles from other sites?
Partners: customers, suppliers, friends?

How can I create a page, or whole sections of content, targeted specifically at a two, three or four word phrase that I am most interested in?

How can I maximize the use of this content? Can I reuse bits and pieces of different content sources randomly to increase the uniqueness of each page? This is important if you have hundreds or thousands of pages targeting very specific, but similar phrases.

Can I create geographically targeted content? For example, can I build a separate page for each town and city that you sell in (taking care to have unique content on each page), and linking them all up through the site map for the search engines to find?

Should I create a portal for my industry? Can I create enough content to make a valuable industry resource, and then use it as both an advertising vehicle for my own site and a search optimization playground?

Does having a portal - or multiple portals - allow me to better take on the "black hat" seo competition without risking my own site's reputation?

These are just a few of the options for content alone. Then there is the actual optimization and linking strategies to consider. What about blogspam, linkspam, logspam and hijacking? What do you need to know about these activities?

What everyone needs to know:

the competitive landscape for your industry
the options available and potential rewards of each option
and costs and the risks of each option

To know these you will likely need a competent search engine optimization company. Not just a web design firm that knows how to make the meta tags correctly, submit your site to a bunch of search engines and make a monthly report. You need a company that understands the whole search engine optimization landscape.

My company, Agito Internet Marketing, specializes in SEO for small and medium mainstream businesses for the purposes of lead generation and online sales. If you are looking for a Toronto search engine optimization company, please contact me.

4 P's of Internet Marketing for Affiliates

2006-04-11T15:31:00.000-04:00

A new cottage industry has been spawned by the Internet. It's called affiliate marketing.

It's the marketing of other companies products and services via specially tagged links on the Internet. When a link is clicked through to a store, and something is purchased by that person, the company pays a commission to the affiliate (typically an individual, or small group).

Affiliates can find customers through paid search engine marketing (PPC, or pay per click), search engine optimization, SEO, banner ads, purchased links on other sites, email and more. All of this is perfectly legal and legitimate - and both sides win.

The company receives new customers and pays only a percentage of each sale or a pre-defined flat fee. The affiliate receives this commission for create thinking and marketing of the companies products or services a new audience.

Affiliate programs, in addition to providing excellent exposure to new markets, also provide an important boost to search engine visibility and traffic because of the large number of links to the sponsor company web site created by the affiliates. Special care has to be taken by the company in choosing an affiliate program to ensure that the links are created properly - or the links will have no value.

How do affiliates find new customers?
Online Portals and SEO:
The best method by many measurements is the operation of online portals. These are information rich web sites about a particular topic that provide links and sometimes reviews to companies for which they have an affiliate relationship. These web sites are highly optimized for search and capture many clicks from potential customers from the search engines. The best web sites have high quality information and provide value to visitors that have an interest in the topic.

e-Mail:
Affiliates may build large opt-in e-mail lists where they provide current information and advertising or recommendations for products.PPC:Affiliates are often experts in Pay Per Click marketing. They bid on clicks from certain search terms and send those clicks directly to their sponsors web sites with their special tracking code. Affiliates can often be far more effective in pay per click campaign management than the sponsor company, so there can be a large margin for profit for the affiliate. The sponsor company typically pays a flat fee or percentage per sale, so the affiliate takes all of the risk and work in attempting to purchase customers through efficient targeting of ads in search engines.

Banner and Link Advertising:
Affiliates buy banners or links on popular web sites targeting a specific audience and send the traffic to their portals or to the sponsors web site directly. Affiliates become knowledgeable in the places to buy advertising efficiently and can purchase links on thousands of web sites the sponsor would not know of.

Affiliate Marketing: An established industry
A large affiliate industry has grown up. There are affiliate networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare that provide the affiliate programs for thousands of companies. They provide the merchants with tracking and payment services, and provide affiliates with consolidated reporting and a convenient way to sign up for many programs. There are many smaller vendors that provide easy to set up and inexpensive affiliate program options as well.What are the industries that are benefiting the most?

There are businesses in virtually every industry using affiliate programs to provide a strong channel of online sales through their websites. One look at the Kolimbo Network (requires free affiliate account) will give you an idea of the breadth of this industry.

The most obvious choices for affiliate program adoption are the companies already selling a product or service online, but their are opportunities for way of selling in almost every industry - and the first coveted first-to-market positions in every industry are rapidly being filled.

One industry of note is online content, estimated to be worth $50 Billion Annually.The big money in affiliate marketing, however, are in the markets with the most online activity. The barriers to entry are as large as the profits. Interestingly, the industries that are most active amongst affiliates share something in common. I call these:

The four P's of Internet marketing for affiliates:

Poker. (Online Gaming Industry, $15 - 30 Billion USD worldwide in 2005)Top affilaites in poker, casinos and sports book operations have been reported to make $400,000 per month.
Pornography. Adult content continues to be an e-commerce dominater on the Internet. 30% of all internet traffic is attributed to adult content. A recent Nielsen/NetRatings panel study found that pornographic content was visited by 24% of internet Users .
Personals. (500M to 1B in sales in 2006) Top affiliates in online dating are reporting to be generating 50,000+ in commissions.
Pills. The total worldwide human drug market is estimated to be 543 Billion in 2005. The Canadian prescription drug market, with with substantial export to the US, has grown to eighth place in the world ($10B annually). Much of the sale of Canadian drugs to US consumers is online.

Of course there are many others, but these seem to shine amongst affiliates, these industries have even spawed largely attended trade shows and conferences such as the CAC - Casino Affiliate Conference, iDate - Internet Dating Conference, COPHARM, Online Pharmaceuticals Conference and others.

The affiliate industry is maturing
The four P's aside, 'mainstream' businesses in every industry are creating online stores or lead generating web sites that are trackable with affiliate software and reaping the benefits of an affiliate program.

As this industry matures, I see larger affiliate networks, larger affiliates, and more business partnerships. Businesses like my Toronto Internet marketing company are forming partnerships with companies in different industries to bring their products to market online through the use of search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, text link purchases, corporate blogging, e-mail marketing, web analytics speclialties and resources that are difficult and inefficient to maintain inhouse.

Is your web site invisible to search engines?

2006-04-06T15:34:00.000-04:00

I just reviewed a web site for a client that is completely invisible on the Internet.

While there are several hundred links to the site (measured by Google, Yahoo and MSN), none of these major search engines have indexed a single page of the site, which means the site will not come up in a search for anything - except perhaps the domain name.

If you want a quick check to see if the search engines have indexed your pages you can check it out with our free search engine visibility analysis tool here:
Free search engine visibility analysis tool

After you have run the report take a look at the search engine saturation score. This is the number of pages that each of the search engines have indexed. If it is zero - then you have a problem. The site I am looking at today has that problem.

The site in question today has a good amount of information on it, and could do very well in the search engines if it was properly structured. The structure as it stands now, however, is difficult to use from a user perspective, and impossible to index by the search engines. The indexing problem is caused by use of dynamic URL's like this:
http://www.domain.com/templates/main_template.asp?page_id=485

The bolded part of the URL above is what is known as a robot "stop". Once the search engines sees this dynamic URL structure it just stops and doesn't follow the link.

The moral? Before you spend any time thinking about search engine optimization you first need to make sure that your site is built in such a way that the search engines can actually see it.
So what if my site is indexed by the search engines?
Well that's great. Now you can optimize. The site I looked at today had not been optimized for search engines at all. The meta tags are incorrect and there is no use of proper title or headline tags. A good search engine optimization program on this site will make a huge difference to the search engine visibility.

My recommendations for the badly built site:

Phase One:
First and foremost, the site structure needs to be fixed for the search engines and the users. This can be done with existing content and new HTML while preserving many aspects of the existing design. The entire site should be re-built in search engine friendly manner. Once this is done, the new search engine visibility can be used as a benchmark for a phase two rebuild for a much better site.

Products required:
- Search engine optimization
- Site re-development in search friendly html (priced per page, standard web design fees)
- WebTrends integration. Basic is included in SEO package, advanced configuration includes training and configuring web trends to understand the site structure so reports can be viewed on most interesting key performance indicators for the site.

Phase Two:
Redesign look and feel of web site. (May or may not include a complete rebranding)
Write new content, edit, revise and update existing content.
Update existing web site templates build in phase one, and modify and add new content as created in phase two.
Create whitepapers, etc for downloads and other sign in forms to collect contact information.

This two phased approach is my best recommendation on taking an old site with a lot of good content and making it quickly visible, and then measuring and building on that visibility. Step two would focus on making the site a selling web site, and converting those visitors to leads.

Learn more about our search engine optimization services here:
Agito Internet Marketing. A Toronto search engine optimization company

How to Avoid Search Engine Optimization Scams

2006-03-27T12:08:00.000-05:00

Search Engine Optimization scams are nothing new. I've been watching seo companies offering all kinds of questionable programs since I started working in seo in the late nineties.

The troubling part is I see them getting worse before they get better. The seo industry is growing faster each year; 125% in 2005 and predicted to grow 150% more in 2006 according to SEMPO, a search engine optimisation industry organization. With professional seo companies charging anywhere from $2000 and 30,000 per month, the stakes are higher now than they were a few years ago, so the competition is getting fiercer.

We gained a customer last year who came to us to fix their broken seo program after they hired a company they met via e-mail. Their rankings had improved but the only pages that showed up in the search results were very ugly, spammy doorway pages that no-one would ever click on.

The first rule of thumb? Don't buy search engine optimization that is promoted to you via unsolicited email. You want to get to know a company that is going to be intimately involved in the your sites evolution.

Rule number two - get references. This can help identify companies that are more interested in cheap customer acquisition than providing value.

I have been recently been cold-called by a few ambitious seo companies looking for my business. You would think they would do a little more research so as to avoid calling my Toronto search engine optimization company trying to sell search engine optimisation! If you have ended up becoming interested in seo services after a call like this - do yourself a favour and get three quotes. And not only for price comparison but for more important service comparison. Seo is expertise, it's not a commodity.

Rule Number three - get educated on the issues of search engine optimization. When evaluating seo companies for your site, ask and take the time to listen to their proposed plan for your project and compare.

Simply put, seo requires about three or four general areas of knowledge and activity (depending on how you divide it). Unless your potential seo company has a good plan for each of the areas, your solution likely won't provide much benefit.

This is what needs attention on your site:

The content. The quality, quantity, depth and freshness are essential. One of the reasons why the good seo companies charge so much per month is because they need to work with you on the planning, creation and optimization of new content. You should be prepared to work with your seo on this, and they should be recommending quality, desirable content for your audience.
The code. This is also all of the technical stuff you don't see such as the alternate picture tags, the page titles, the coding of the important elements such as headlines and subheadlines, the page names, the javascript, the stylesheets and more.
The architecture. This includes where pages are located, how they are linked, which pages link to each other and what those links say.
Your site popularity. The above three are only as important as your sites linkage within the web of other related sites on the Internet. If few other related sites link to yours, your site cannot be very important and will be treated as such in the search results. Visit our site for more information on increasing link popularity.

Anatomy of an SEO scam
One of my top reads these days is the blog by Black Hat SEO. I believe that as an seo expert you need to be at least up to date on the techniques in the black arts so you know what you are up against. He recently published a supposedly funny , but actually quite scary article on how to make $200k per year as a search engine optimization scammer.

The future of the search engine optimization industry:
Now contrast this with a fabulous article written by one of the best SEO's in the business, Bruce Clay. In the emperors new clothes, Bruce lays out his vision of the future of search engine optimization. He covers the main challenges and what it takes to rise to the challenge for the honest and professional SEO practitioner:

Google's take on the SEO industry:
Google has published a page of tips on how to distinguish between good and bad search engine optimization companies.

Information on my Toronto Search Engine Optimization Company:
Toronto Search Engine Optimization Company

Blogs Helping to Achieve High Search Engine Positions

2006-03-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

Blogging has taken the Internet by Storm. Not only do they provide an easy method of keeping your audience up to date with your news, help develop stronger relationships with your readers and raise your profile as an expert - they are incredibly effective at helping you increase your web site's ranking in the search engines.

Search engines are giving a large value to blogs. Why? Search engine's common goal is to provide users with the most relevant search results. Relevant content typically equals recent content. Therefore the most relevant results to searches are usually provided on recently updated pages.

Search engines love fresh content, but most of the content on the Internet is quite stale. Blogs, on the other hand, provide loads of recently updated content for the search engines to spider. In contrast, many corporate web sites have not been updated for months or even years.

Search engines also love sites with lots of inbound links. Many inbound links (links pointing to a site) give the search engines an indication that the site the links point to must be popular or important, and therefore valuable and relevant.

In the blogoshpere it is quite easy to generate a lot of inbound links very quickly. Bloggers and blog readers like to comment on other blogs (which link back to writer) as well as link to other blogs in the main copy and sidebars. If your blog has good content and you actively market yourself in the blogoshpere you will increase your inbound links very quickly. (More on marketing your blog in an upcoming post)

To rank well for almost any phrase in a search engine, you need search optimized content. This is as basic as including the keyword phrases you want to rank for in the content you post to your blog. I'll use my site as an example:

I would like my Toronto Internet marketing company to rank number one in Google for the phrase "Toronto Internet marketing company". If I use the phrase "Toronto Internet marketing company" in my blogposts frequently, the search engine spiders will see this and conclude that my blog must be about a "Toronto Internet marketing company".

Ok this is fine, you may be thinking, I see how I can use keywords in my blog to optimize them for search engines - but how does this help my web site?

In many ways. The first comes back to linking:

The context and content of links are another way search engines determine the content and relevancy of the pages they link to. Search engines are using the anchor text in a link (the text that is actually linked) and the context of the link as a method of determining what the page it links to is about. It's called latent Semantic indexing.

The search engines basically figure that what one site says about another site is a better gauge of truth than what one site says about itself. Compound this times lots of inbound links saying the same things, and the importance of the sites that are saying those things, the search engines have a very good way to measure the relevance of a page for any search.

You need to link to your web site and optimize those links. Since the search engines will read the text that is linked to your web site, they will use those links as a guide to what your web site is about.

I'll use my site as an example again. I have 3 main sections on my web site:

How to master search marketing to find new prospects when they are ready to buy
Learn how to use email marketing to retain customers and make new sales
Transform your web site into an Internet marketing machine

By creatively working these links into my copy, using the correct link text, and linking to the appropriate sections of my site, I am telling the search engines - and my readers - what my site is about. As I get more links and more readers to my blog, I also get the added benefit of more awareness and visitors to my site.

The second benefit is through RSS feeds. You can easily display the live feed of your blog right on your web site, therefore:

automatically updating your web site each time you post to your blog
increasing the keyword optimization on your web site
increasing the content on your web site

Other sites may also choose to display your blog's feed on their site (with each story linking back to you), creating even more links, more readers and more visitors to your blog and site.

Another way you can make the links to your blog help your sites search rankings is to host your blog on your own site. This is easy to do with most blogging software like Blogger, because you can have it simply FTP the blog to your site everytime you post.

Your blog can either be in a subfolder (yoursite.com/blog) or a subdomain (blog.yoursite.com). When you host the blog on your own site - all of the links to your blog are also considered links to your site.

In Summary: Blogs, written well and marketed well, provide all three of the components of a high ranking site - fresh content, optimized content, and lots of semantically relevant, important links.

Separating Qualified Leads from Tire Kickers

2006-03-03T11:47:00.000-05:00

B2B companies that sell expensive, enterprise solutions seem to have a common problem: They receive a lot of inquiries from their web site, but many are not qualified prospects.

Depending on the industry and solution they provide, they may receive inquires from small businesses or even the general public looking for solutions that the company may seem to have a possible answer for, but for the company, the economies just don't work for these types of customers.

One large company I work with recently came to me with this issue.

They were looking over the ways they have been addressing the inquiries coming in.
Sometimes leads are assigned immediately to the sales reps and other times they try to fulfill these contacts’ need for information first (with administrative personnel), and then forward to the sales reps.

They wanted other ideas to handle their web inquiries – they wanted to spend less time responding to FAQs and concentrate more on those inquiries that are of direct business consequence.

There are many ways to deal with this issue, but most companies never give it the full attention that it deserves. Here are my suggestions:

Send an automatic FAQ email. Send a self service email designed to answer the most frequently asked questions in inquiries. You can phrase it so that you don't have to personally answer each email, but still provide a timely, relevant, professional response.

For example, tell people that you get a lot of responses, and to serve inquiries better you've put together this list of frequently asked questions that address most of the inquiries you receive. You will read their email, but if their answer is contained in the message they are reading, you won't be getting back to them. After all, they already have the answer. Tell them if they have any other questions, they should contact you again.

Create inquiry forms on your web site that send out custom messages with dynamically generated content for additional personalization. A form can ask many types of questions to give you insight into the nature of the inquiry.

Create auto response messages that include different links and different content depending on the prospects answers from the form. If prospects answer a certain way to a certain question, or series of questions, have that lead forwarded directly to a sales rep.

Follow up more than once. Create messages that go out in a timed sequence after the initial inquiry. Follow up in 2 days to ask if they have the information they need, or if they need any more. Ask if they found the brochure or case study they downloaded helpful. Ask if they would like to speak with a sales rep.

Follow up again after two weeks or a month, with an announcement or information on a recent project or new case study. Follow up again after two months. Start sending your entire email audience a monthly newsletter with information on your industry, your company, and recent developments.

Ask them to qualify themselves. In the follow up emails, ask them for more information. To do this effectively, you'll need to provide them with an incentive to take action. Have a new whitepaper, a demonstration, a sample, a free book, free tickers, a chance to win, something that would interest your audience enough to take a minute and answer a few question for you.

Ask the BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timing) questions so you will see which prospects are 'hot', and respond appropriately.

Use Email polls and links that trigger other actions. With professional Email marketing software, you can trigger other email sequences based on which link a prospect clicks in an email.

For example, you can ask people if they currently use a product like yours or if they are considering it for the first time. Each answer has it's own link that goes to it's own landing page. Depending on which links the prospect clicks, you can send follow up emails that discuss your product in a different way. For the people that already use a similar product, you can provide feature comparisons. For those that are considering the product for the first time, you will want to focus on the benefits your product provides in a different way.

Use engagement devices on your web site to draw even more people in, and ask them to qualify themselves as part of the process. Create an interactive questionnaire on your site that promises to provide an answer to their problem. Ask a series of questions about their need, one after the other, in a small pop-up or embedded Flash or Java element on your site.

Ask questions that flag them as a prospect, a hot prospect, or an unqualified person or company. The end of the process give the answer you promised, and let them know if they should be talking with you or not. Follow up with an email campaign as discussed above, and have the good leads forwarded automatically to your sales reps.

Create more customer self service content on your site. Certainly 90% of the questions that come your way are similar questions asked over and over. Commit to a large, user friendly FAQ or knowledge base section on your site. Consider a forum. Use tag-based web analytics to monitor usage of the section and see how you can improve it. Add to it regularly. Review your search logs to see what the most common searches are, and increase the visibility of content you have, or add more content to address needs.

In Summary:

Focus on intelligent automation of customer self service instead of more efficient manual response to customer inquiries. Time and money invested in this will pay for itself quickly in costs saved, improved customer relations, and new sales.

B2B Lead Qualification Strategy

2006-03-01T16:18:00.000-05:00

Lately we've been asked to many business-to-business lead qualification strategies for our B2B clients. It seems now that we have search optimized their sites and put persuasive copy and compelling offers to download information from their sites, they are realizing that they are getting a lot of leads and they need to follow up with them.

Surprised? No. But this is still a great development. Now they are coming around the full circle of Internet marketing and finally, naturally see and want the next step to automating their sales process.

These are my recommendations for business to business lead qualification:

1. Don't get so caught up in the technology - figure out your strategy first
The technology is secondary and the strategy is primary. When you start planning, you should forget the technology and focus on what you want to accomplish from a sales perspective. Let the technology guys figure out how to do it once you've got the strategy. Of course you need to have an idea of what's possible, but why not assume everything is possible from the outset and then figure out how to do it once you have the perfect strategy. Don't be limited by technology.

2. The theory on creating the strategy is simple:

What do you know about them already?
They have downloaded something(s)
Whatever else they told us in the form
What does what they've downloaded tell you about them?
What would you say to them based on what you know to engage them further and deepen the relationship?
What can you offer them in exchange for them giving you some more information?
Here are some ideas: It could be, a chance to win something or something for free. Something for free could be a whitepaper, a demo, a flash demonstration, a free consultation, a free sample, competitive assessment, benchmarking data, etc.
What sort of information do you want from them?

These are the questions you would probably want to ask in return for giving them something they find valuable:

Was the content useful and would you like something else on this topic?
What is your role in researching or buying our product? (also what's your title)
What is your researching/buying time frame?
Is a budget authorized for this product or service?
How quickly do expect the buying process to be concluded?
Would you like to talk to one of our reps?

(ED NOTE: I must admit that I borrowed the above questions from Manhatten's Marketing Maven, because they were so good I didn't have to rewrite them. Thanks Danny. The articles on the blog great except a few points on how to engage people where I differ)

3. Dynamic Content. Sometimes, people may have downloaded more than one item on the site. Therefore I recommend that you should not send out one message per download because many people will then receive multiple messages. You should instead create one message for every contact, and craft segments of the message that are custom to what they've downloaded. It's like an IF/THEN statement. As each message goes out our server will go through a series of IF/THEN's to craft the message. For example:

Dear {NAME}:

We are following up on your recent download of information on our web site.
[IF they downloaded A, THEN tell them this]
[IF they downloaded B, THEN tell them this]
[IF they downloaded C, THEN tell them this]

As a measure of our thanks, we would like to make a special offer to you....
(your choice of X, Y, or Z) ....
... just click here to receive it**

Thanks,

Your Company

** The link should go to a form where you ask for the new information, and fulfill the offer.

4. Automate the process
In a perfect world, this would have all been done before you started getting leads from the web site so that this campaign would go out automatically to each new lead using triggered e-mail within 48 hours. People will tend to forget quickly what sites they've visited and why. You need to remind them quickly to keep their attention.

But in our imperfect reality, where clients want to see proof that extra traffic will come, and that people will download things before they decide to make a bunch of autoresponders, this the next best thing:

1. You create this campaign and send it out to all of the people that have downloaded something. 2. You take the same campaign, and you implement it as an automatic follow up 24-48 hours after all new visitors sign up on your web site.

What you have accomplished is a single follow up to every lead you've generated so far, and then you send an automated follow up every day, for every new lead, from now till you decide to stop.

The value of tag based web analytics

2006-02-26T05:55:00.000-05:00

What's the difference between the free stats programs offered by most web hosts and professional analytics applications like WebTrends 7.5 professional?

Most people are trained to think of their web stats as nothing more than a way to track unique visitors and page views. For a low traffic site, or one that is no more than a forgotten brochure for the business, the difference is perhaps unimportant. However, for anyone considering their web site as a valuable part of their marketing toolset - the difference is enormous.

Data without reference points is meaningless
Tag based analytics enables the marketer to provide meta data about the information on the web site so that the analytics software can provide relevant and interesting
information on the traffic and usage of the site.

A web server cannot tell one page from another from the eyes of a visitor or marketer. The un-tagged information on a free web stats program will not show if certain kinds of content are more popular than others. It will not show you organic search traffic from paid search, which types of visitors are more valuable, most popular paths through the site, or which groups of pages are more useful than others. To extract this kind of meaningful data about your site the marketer needs to teach the software about the site and its traffic.

Information rich data becomes action-able knowledge
The uses of tag based are as varied as the types of sites it can report on. Lead generating sites, e-commerce sites, advertising supported sites, customer service sites, portals and more can all use tag based analytics to provide business intelligence. It enable marketers to consistently improve their results in iteration after iteration of their web site changes. It enables them to target advertising more effectively. They can improve conversion rates, improve content effectiveness, improve user experience, and more.

Accuracy of Information
Before I move on to give specific examples of the information tag based web analytics can provide I think it is important to discuss an issue of accuracy provided by something called client side tagging versus log based statistics:

All free or low cost statistics programs, (and even higher end analytics software unless configured otherwise) will generate statistical data based on the log files created by the web server.

This has a serious flaw.

Web server log files are the raw data collected by the web server for every hit by a visitor. Every time s request is made on the web server, a hit is recorded as a new line in a text file. This can be a request for a page, an image, a PDF, an included object, or any other file on the web site. Each hit is recorded with a timestamp, and the IP address of the computer requesting it, the browser used, and other various and configurable information.

The statistics program simply reads these log files and organizes the information into human readable reports and graphs. Each unique IP address that shows up in the log file is considered a unique visitor.

The problem is, s unique IP address is not enough information to differentiate one user from another. Five users behind a DSL line in a small office will look like one unique visitor. One hundred users in an medium office may look like one visitor. Tens of thousands of AOL users all over America will look like one user. One user from Herndon, Virginia, in fact - because AOL uses a massive proxy server there so it can cache the most popular content on the intent to deliver it more quickly.

There are other log file methods, such as combining IP address and computer type to differentiate visitors, but the limited ways a standard web server can differentiate between one visitor and another is limited and ineffective. Because of this problem log based statistics should be considered by all to be inaccurate.

To solve this problem tag based analytics software uses a technology called client side tagging to uniquely identify each computer visiting it's website - regardless of whether they are in an environment that would otherwise fool the web server into counting them incorrectly. This "client side tag" is a few lines of JavaScript on each web page being analyzed by the analytics software. Each time one of these pages is requested, the computer requesting it automatically runs a script on the page, and reports back to the analytics server to identify itself as a unique computer.

The result is significantly more accurate statistics (nearly 100%), that typically show a large increase in the number of visitors being counted.

Tagging for content usage
Now that I have explained the accuracy of information issue in the two types of reporting, lets move on to the more exciting benefits of tag based analytics.

Paths and Pages
Starting from the most basic level, page name tagging allows you to provide meaningful names to the pages on the site so that it is easier to tell which pages are being visited.

Without tagging, the only ways to view a page in a report is either by URL (address of the page), which can be long, cryptic or meaningless, or the HTML title - which for un-optimized sites are often all the same, and for search optimized sites are often long and difficult to differentiate.

When you teach the analytics server what the pages mean to you - the results are just easier to read. Home for home, Products for products, etc. When you have hundreds or thousands of pages on a site, especially similar ones, this makes a big difference.

Web analytics software can also measure the order of pages visited by each visitor. It will then calculate the most common paths through the site. For example, an e-commerce sites most popular path may be - home, products, product a, product b, search, exit site.

This kind of information can be enlightening. For example, why don't most visitors go to product c? Why don't they add anything to their shopping cart? If everyone is searching what's wrong with the navigation? Is there something wrong with the search results? You can't test and measure without this kind of information.

Content groups and sub-content groups
On my own site, I have four major categories - email marketing, search engine marketing, web analytics, and reviews. Each category has many pages. Since I have tagged all of the pages in each category as a group, I can look at my online WebTrends reports and see which type of content is more useful or more popular with my visitors. This can be an indication of what the market is most interested in. I can check it against my sales and notice correlations or discrepancies.

To make it more interesting, each major section on my web site is broken down into products, services, and knowledge (frequently ask questions). I have tagged these as well so I can see which sub-sections are most popular.

Pages can also have more than one content group and sub-content group. This allows you to have pages show up in multiple group reports - if product A fits under category A and category B, no problem - just tag it correctly and you will see it in both category reports.

To continue with my example, I have tagged each page on my site to have two groups and sub-groups - in reverse of each other. So now I can look at the sub-sections as major sections to see which major sections have the most popular sub-sections.

Basically, any way you want to group your content can be achieved through a well planned tagging strategy.

Tagging for scenarios and funnels
Tagging for conversion is cool. Let's say you have a membership based site and you want to track how many visitors follow a certain path on your site. For example, you may want to track what percentage come to the home page, click the "learn more" page, click the "sign up" page, and then complete the sign up process. No problem.

In WebTrends, you would tag the series of pages as a scenario. You may choose to call the Scenario "perfect user", or "new signup", etc. You would tag each page as scenario step one, step two, etc., and name each of the steps. The end result is a beautiful graphical report that shows you how many visitors started each step, and what percentage went on to the next step.

Additional, invaluable information in this report is the "leakage" in the steps. Where do visitors go from each step besides where you want them to go? This is the information you need to make improvements on your site that will improve your conversion rates.

Tagging for conversion and sales data
For e-commerce and lead generating sites tags give you the information you need to improve your marketing spend. With tagging you can pull sales data into your WebTrends reports. WebTrends can pick up the items purchased and total sales from your 'thank you' page and display this information in your reports.

For search engine marketing (paid and natural search) you can break down your sales activity by keyword phrase and search engine. You can also see it by e-mail campaign, links form other sites, type of visitor and more.

Geographical reporting
It's one thing to see your visitors broken down by country, but what about province/state, city, area code, company, or designated marketing area? All possible thanks to the built in, up-to-date geo-IP database called GeoTrends. The GeoTrends database knows the location of every IP address in your reports and can therefore provide detailed and accurate visitor location information.

Getting the most from web analytics
A professional analytics program like WebTrends essentially allows you to track whatever data you need and turn it into action-able business intelligence. The functionality for this exists out-of-the-box, however to generate the most interesting reports for your business requires some effort on your part.

The ability to tag information on a web site comes with a responsibility to think through the data on the site and what kinds of reports need to be generated from the data collected.

At Agito, we go through a detailed process on every web site we track to ensure that we have identified all of the information we need and tag all of the pages properly. We go through a mapping process to define all of the desired paths through the site. We consider email campaigns and advertising campaigns and plan landing pages that can be tracked. We build spreadsheets of the web site to list every page and the tags that need to be associated with every page to achieve the desired outcomes.

If you want the most out of your web analytics, make sure you go through a process that will uncover your needs and then teach your software to deliver the results you want. You will be way ahead of those who use only free tools, or even professional tools with only out-of-the-box functionality.

Don't buy into useless search engine submission programs

2006-02-17T19:29:00.000-05:00

I can hardly believe that many web design companies are still offering search engine submission programs and calling it 'search engine optimization'.

Let me be clear - submission to search engines is a waste of time and resources. It comes from flawed reasoning that your pages need to be submitted to search engines in order to be found. This is simply not true.

Search engine technology works with spiders that crawl all of the links it can find on the web. The spiders index every page they find. If the spider cannot find your page this is indicative of a larger problem that will not be solved with submission.

Pages that cannot be found are either hidden behind internal site links that cannot be crawled (for reasons like poorly designed Java script coding, complex dynamic URLs or pull down form navigation) or completely hidden from the rest of the web because there is not a single link from another site pointing to the page.

If your pages are not indexed in the search engines, then your site has much bigger problems than submission can solve.

Search engines derive a great deal of information about the content of pages from the sites and pages that link to them. The quantity of inbound links to your pages, the quality of sites and pages that link to them, and the words in and around the links themselves play a major role in the ranking of web sites in the search results. Even if your poorly linked page is in the search engines index because of submitting, it won't have a hope of ranking in the top results without better linking.

With a good linking strategy, your pages will be crawled and indexed by the search engines regularly. With our search marketing dashboard, we monitor the various search engines spider activity on all our clients sites. Typically, we see the spiders on our sites every day.

A note to a possible question that may be in the minds of some - even though search engine submission is useless, you shouldn't confuse this with directory submission. Submitting to directories is an important part of inbound link generation. Search engine spiders often start with crawling the major directories as a jumping off point to find sites and links to crawl.

We recommend submitting to all of the major directories, local directories, and researching industry specific directories related to your industry. It is important also to regularly check the directories to make sure your listing has been accepted and is posted. Many volunteer edited directories, like Dmoz, can take many months to be included.

Search Engine Optimization Now to be a Factor in the YellowPages

2006-02-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

Now search engine optimization will affect your yellow pages listings as well:

The Canadian YellowPages are about to launch a new service that will do keyword searches of your web site. Results will be displayed in the YellowPages directory based on the content in your site and in combination with how much you are paying them.

The following information is directly from YellowPages, in response to my evaluation of advertising options for our company:

AGITO INTERNET MARKETING: How can we show up in searches for "internet marketing" "email marketing", "web analytics", "content management system", "Search engine optimization"? eg: do we get to apply keywords to our ad.

YELLOW PAGES: Interesting that you ask because in the not to distant future (June) we are changing the layout of our site to incorporate keyword searches. Those searches will return results of businesses that mention those keywords (in the text of their ad, but also in their websites when linked from the Yellow Pages site).

The important thing to note here is that the results will be re-ranked based on advertising that the business currently does in order to ensure that if someone is for example a national advertiser that they are in fact appearing ahead of someone who is not (even when keywords are used). This will ensure that the value of those products does not diminish in anyway as a result of this more user-friendly interface.

This bodes well for the search optimization industry. It further legitimizes the field and will help it bring the concept into the forefront of advertisers minds. After all, search engine optimization - done well - is really just the perfect classification of your business, the content on your web site, and the linkage to your site.

If your company relies heavily in YellowPages advertising, you should treat this as a wake up call rethink your online marketing. Search Engine Optimization has now become an important factor in your YellowPages advertising.

The YellowPages are still an important method of advertising your business. While SEO is a powerful tool for bringing in traffic and customers, you also need to promote your business where all of your prospects are looking. Our prospects look in the search engines, in the online yellow pages, in the yellow pages book, or ask friends for referrals. We know that - and promote accordingly.

iDate 2006 Online Dating Conference

2006-02-09T13:27:00.000-05:00

Miami - February 2006

The iDate 2006 Online Dating Conference was an eye-opening look at the current state of online dating. I enjoy staying on top of the highest traffic industries on the Internet because the advances and opportunities for testing are more frequent and interesting than in lower traffic situations like the average corporate site. The knowledge I gain from working in industries such as these are immensely valuable in my work in lead, traffic and sales generation for medium sized companies in every industry.

I was a guest speaker at this conference, speaking about promotion of online dating web sites from the affiliate perspective.

The main theme of the presentation was maximizing conversion on web sites from initial visit to free profile, and then maximizing conversion from free profile to paid subscriber with email. Many of the smaller dating sites have not got this figured out yet, while the bigger ones are taking the perfection of this art and science to a new level.

Insights I shared were effective home page and landing page design, including focusing on giving the visitor what they want (the ability to immediately search members) while getting what the web site owner needs (getting permission to market to the visitor via email). It's surprising how many owners thought this was golden information - but when I looked at some of the sites of the attendees after I got home I could how badly this info was needed.

Corporate customers outside the dating industry should take heed to this concept, too. What is it your visitors really want - and how can you give it to them while enticing them to give you their contact information?

The key, of course, to getting conversions to sale is to get the email. Let me repeat that - get the email, get the email, get the email. Do whatever you have to do to get the email. Give away a free e-book, a free prize, access to something incredibly cool and impossible to resist. Once you have an email address you can (and had better) start a calculated campaign to educate, entice, remind and persuade the prospect to become your customer. It is getting incredibly expensive to get a qualified visitor to your site. It is equally expensive, if not impossible, to get them back if you didn't get permission to start a communication with them. Get the email and then start working to get the sale. Very few visitors will become a customer on their first visit to your site, but many more email contacts will become customers over time. If people get one thing from my Internet marketing talks I hope it is this, because this will help them the most.

My other thoughts in this area included the growing importance of niche sites. Since the industry is now maturing, it has become impossible to create a general dating site to take on the leaders unless you have more money than Microsoft. (And Bill, I wouldn't recommend it to you either). With a niche site, at least, you have a hope of becoming the leader in your category. All the profits tend to go to the leader - so be the leader or find something else you can lead in. Niche sites also convert far better, because you can advertise to niche audiences and speak directly to your prospects while having an offer even the leading generalists can't compete with.

Here's another idea - take a page from the adult industry and offer a free tour on your site. New customers appreciate the hand held walk through of your site, how it works, and what they can expect. Visits to tour pages (from my direct experience) are very high. You can tweak them using what you learn from your web analytics software and achieve high conversions at the end of the tour.

One more idea - be different. Don't be a copy cat. Find something that you can do or offer that is truly different. PerfectMatch has their 'Duet' matching system and an ask the expert column called "Dr. Pepper'. Why aren't other sites offering something special like this? It's perceived value that helps the visitor differentiate you from the other sites that they are considering. I heard Match.com offering a free e-book on how to meet someone special in 90 days.

Hello! What do people really want? Figure it out and give it to them.

On the topic of affiliate programs, I suggested to the bigger ones that they adopt revenue share and maximize pay-outs because the CPA (cost per acquisition) is getting higher as competition gets more intense. Affiliates take all of the risk and cover all of the expenses in their promotion of your sites, so owners should never think that they are paying too much for sales that they would otherwise not have had. Owners must think in terms of lifetime customer value of sales generated by affiliates. Most good affiliates promote many sites and will send the majority of their traffic to the sites that convert the best and payout the highest amounts. In this respect, web site owners (in any online selling environment, not just dating) are competing for the best affiliates just as they are competing for customers.

I had one very interesting comment from the audience when I hesitantly brought up trust and honesty in payment reporting. I say hesitantly because I didn't want to offend all of the honest owners I suspected were in attendance, but obviously I am naive in this area. I like to believe that most people and companies are honest. Perhaps I am wrong about that because one well dressed attendee immediately commented that "all dating affiliate programs are skimming".

So what I occasionally suspected is true? Is this really why they resist putting my tracking gifs on their pages - because then I will have bonafide proof that they are skimming? This is terrible! I knew the temptation to skim must be too great to bear - but I honestly had no idea that it was the rule, not the exception! At least if this one attendee was correct.

It just plain makes sense to treat your affiliates honestly, because (for me anyways) it's all about the conversion. If I can get I higher conversion rate from site A than site B, I'll do more A and less B - it's that simple.

Some owners mentioned that they only focus on their top affiliates, giving them high payouts and the like. This is a mistake as well. I said, what makes you think that only your top affiliates are super affiliates? I, for example have two sites that consider us "super affiliates". Yet I promote dozens of dating sites via various online portals and such. I am sure the other dating sites that I promote think we're lame ducks - but they have no idea of the traffic we are able to send to them! If you only pay your top affiliates well, you will never know how many sleeping super affiliates are lying in your database just waiting to be activated.

A Pay per Click Success Story

2006-02-07T18:56:00.000-05:00

NationalPayDayExpress.com got so many leads through our pay per click and search engine optimization program that they had to ask us to stop!

I am not kidding. The program was so successful at start that they ad to ask us to turn it down for 2 months because they ran out of money to loan out!

How we did it:
They first came to us to help with Internet marketing to the Canadian market for their online payday loan business. After reviewing their site, we recommended they build out a lot more content based around the words we targeted. We told them that a pay per click campaign would get quick short term results and provide valuable research for a long term search engine optimization strategy. The high natural search rankings from the search engine optimization program would provide a better value over the long term.

We came up with a shortlist of keyword phrases and then queried the multiple search phrase databases we use to expand the list and come up with all of the possible variations. The databases we use contain about 300 million of the last search phrases on the Internet and are an invaluable tool for keyword research. We expanded the list to a large number of alternative phrases and then weeded out the ones that would be searched by ones that would probably not be the target market.

The Pay Per Click Campaign:
We created a pay per click campaign based on 768 keyword phrases. We wrote about 50 ads which are specific to the keyword phrases so they convert better, and made multiple versions that we could run a/b tests on them to optimize for the highest converting copy. We set this up in Google (targeted only to Canada), Yahoo (using geographically targeted phrases) and Kanoodle (targeted only to Canada).

We then instrumented the site with our 3^rd party bid automation and conversion tracking software. This allows us to automatically raise and lower bids on all the phrases until we find the sweet spot between traffic and cost.

We worked with the client to determine the desired acquisition cost for loan applications so we could set the bidding rules and targets. Because competition was fierce, we also discussed lifetime customer value, so we could consider setting the acquisition cost targets higher if needed to get the customers in, considering that many would come back over and over again.

We now generate weekly reports on all of the costs and conversions so we can see the ROI for each phrase in each engine.

DayParting:
In our regular review sessions with the client we noticed together that the conversions from loan applications to funded loans was following some patterns on time of day and day of week. After discussing the possible reasons for this we came up with an action plan to turn up the advertising during the highest converting times, and stop it during low converting times. This would not be possible without automation software because it requires changing the bids on the 768 more than 20 times per week.

The results? Less money for higher conversions – essentially we get all of the loans for a fraction of the original cost. Competitors will wonder how we can out-bid them and still make money. It’s because we are only bidding on the highest converting terms during the highest converting times per day – and we don’t waste money on the rest.

Search Engine Optimization
First we created about 20 new pages of content on their web site based around the keyword research we did. We weighted heavily the top performing and highest traffic keywords that we found in the pay per click campaigns. The content and code was optimized, and of course we optimized the architecture and internal linking within the site.

We then instrumented the site with WebTrends 7.5 Professional (web analytics software) so we can track the conversions on the natural search vs. paid search and see what cities and provinces the traffic is coming from. In future this will allow us to work with the site design to find out where visitors are having trouble so we can improve the content and the conversion.

Finally, we set up our search marketing dashboard, so we can see the search rankings for all of the phrases in all of the search engines, monitor page rank, spider activity, and more – so we can fine tune our search engine optimization. We give nationalpaydayexpress online access to all of our tools so they can review our work, see the results, and call and ask lots of questions. (which they do!)

It’s still a little early to tell just how good the results are on the SEO campaign, because the new content has only been online for about 6 weeks. However they have gone from zero top ranks to 91 ranks in the first two pages, 47 on the first page and 12 cherished number one spots across the 17 search engines we are reporting on weekly. Rankings are going up fast, and when the directory links kick in, we should be sitting pretty.

I expect that the search engine optimization will drive more traffic than the pay per click very shortly.

Outcome:
We are restarting the pay per click campaign now that some of the loans are maturing.
It sure is nice to have happy customers!

What - They Don't Want My Pay Per Click Traffic?

2006-01-27T19:44:00.000-05:00

I've been promoting dating sites for a few years now. Last year we were doing really well. We made 17,000 profit in January. This year sales are down.

Pay per click marketing campaigns that were profitable at 100% last year (by that I mean for ever dollar we invested we got back two). They are down to -10% this year. Well, there is a lot more competition I suppose. So we had to get more scientific about it. Doing it manually was a drag anyways. So we invested in some agency pay per click management software - an ASP service. It's expensive, but it allows us to set targets for acquisitions of emails so that we can put it almost on autopilot. There is a steep learning curve and a lot of configuration - but hey - autopilot sure beats the hell out of logging in and checking your costs and exporting them into a spreadsheet along side your sales.

Sounds like a plan right?

Well it works just fine for our paying clients - where we have control over their sites. We got so much business for one client that he had to ask us to stop for until March so he could catch up on inventory (but that will be another post).

I think that anyone doing paid search manually will not be able to compete with professional automated marketers any more.

But what about the dating? Well, when you are an affiliate you don't have control over the sites that you are promoting. Therefore you can't put your tracking codes on the landing pages and the thank you pages. Therefore it doesn't work.

Well, you would think that if you are sending $10,000 per month in business to a site - through pay per click alone - that they would make an exception, right? Well in theory yes - but I am still waiting month after month for them to 'implement their solution' to allow all affiliates to post tracking codes on their pages.

What happened? Well I stopped promoting them of course! To hell with them - if they don't want my 10k a month in sales then screw 'em. I can't afford to lose 10% on investment for long. And I don't have time to manually tweak it back up to a profit. We still have our portal sites and our advertising and our regular paying clients and we'll keep going with that for now... but sheesh - it must be nice not to have to be concerned about losing that kind of coin because you just can't get your developers to pump out a simple bit of code to show one tracking image or another based on referrer. Especially when your affiliates are taking all of the risk.

So Google's Gonna Solve the 302 Redirect

2006-01-26T22:26:00.000-05:00

So the big news is big daddy - Googles biggest search engine update in years.
You can test your search engine rankings in the new algorithm with these IP addresses:

66.249.93.104
64.233.179.104

Guest Speaker on Affiliate Marketing

2006-01-25T22:05:00.000-05:00

Next week I'll be speaking on affiliate marketing at the iDate2006 conference in Miami, Florida.

The audience will be mostly dating web site owners. I expect and hope the discussion of conversion from visitors to emails to sales will be of much interest to those attending. For affiliates, your web sites conversion is of utmost importance.

I'll be reviewing top dating web sites and giving my opinion on what works and what doesn't on dating home pages. Actual stats on conversion numbers will be discussed, and why some do much better than others. Business focus, home page focus, special features, free tours, innovative pricing models, and niche marketing are in the presentation.

I will be pushing the importance of detailed conversion statistics and access to add tracking codes to sponsor web sites so affiliates can use automated pay per click marketing software such as atlas one point or keyword max.

I'll also be presenting ways to promote to your affiliates, get more out of your affiliates and how to communicate with them more effectively. Wish me luck!

Current Search Engine Market Share

2006-01-21T14:07:00.000-05:00

Found this on Search Engine Watch today. It's funny how many clients think that only a Google listing is worth anything. It's true they have the lions share - but do you want some of the customers or all of the customers? Optimizing and measuring for all of the majors is and will remain my choice.

If you only do PPC or SEO on Google than you are missing out on 53.8% of searches. That is missing the lions share in my opinion. Not to mention that in the PPC world bids are just a lot cheaper elsewhere to Google.

Think it's to much work to do PPC on a dozen or so search engines? Well, you are right. It is a ton of work to manage all of the those bids and listings. That's why you should hire professionals that have automated bid management software and the expertise to use it effectively.

Don't bother with automated link programs unless you only care about MSN

2006-01-21T13:46:00.000-05:00

We found a way to get to the top of MSN very easily by using a program that gets you about 4000 backlinks measured by MSN within a few months.

The service asks you to post a link directory on your site that they populate - and then you get back links from about 5000 other sites using the same program instantly. It takes about 3 months for all of the backlinks to start appearing in a link popularity test. We found the results are really good in MSN, but Google seems to ignore the links altogether. The sites we used it on got good rankings in MSN but no movement in Google at all.

I am starting to think that it actually hurts the Google ranks because Google is smart enough to know that the majority of the sites are 'non-trustworthy' and therefore your links to them hurt you, and their links to you hurt you.

We are taking it off the sites that we are currently using it on and continuing with the more 'white hat' method of manually searching for and requesting good quality, relevant links. It is definitely a lot slower and more labour intensive, but if Google is what you want (which we do) I can't see any other way at the moment.

Automated Content - The Holy Grail?

2006-01-21T13:33:00.000-05:00

We've been experimenting with automated content for some time but have yet to find the perfect solution. Getting to the top of search engines is one thing - but having a site that is interesting and converts is most important when the visitors arrive - and these two goals seems to be frequently at odds with each other.

Recently we've tried articlebot for the task. It's a program that rewrites a page of content using a thesaurus and a common phrases database to rewrite the same content in different language. You can generate hundreds of versions of the same content that is more than 30% unique - so in theory, you can create tons of unique content - and some of it will rank highly.

The results? Well, in some circumstances it works - you never know which pages will rank, but some of them certainly do get good ranks. The problem is the content is generally crap. It reads like it was written by someone that is just learning English and is fumbling for words and uses incorrect phrases and grammar all of the time.

Hardly good content to create trust and keep people reading. We gave up on it after a few attempts.

Automated content has to pass the Touring Test - It has to sound like a real, intelligent human being wrote it.

It seems like we'll stick with caching RSS feeds for now but it is not as good at getting to the top.

Comments are welcome.

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

2006-01-21T00:47:00.000-05:00

The latest SEO contest has begun on January 15, 2006. The winner is the person that can have their site rank #1 in Google on May 15, 2006 for the nonsense phrase "v7ndotcom elursrebmem".

These contests are very interesting in the SEO community because a lot can be learned about the Google algorythym by analyzing the techniques, backlinks, etc. used by the winners and the losers of the competition. We'll keep you posted on the results.

The official thread to watch is:
http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22836

2006-01-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

I say Flash is a bad choice for web site.

I am often told,"but Google can index Flash now". Maybe so. A little bit. But there are more problems than you can imagine.

If you want to read more on this - go here:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=9600

SEO Mike's post says it perfectly:

The problems of indexing and ranking flash for the search engines.
1. Where to start, where is the main content? frame 10 on layer 2??? Your guess is as good as mine.
2. Whats to stop a person from importing text files, xml feeds or database driven content into frames,scenes and layers that are never called or used...
3. How do you write a program that understands heavily actionscripted files that have to be triggered to pull in content...4. Let say we get all the content from all the source files, xml, or database. How do we organize it and break it up like an html site would.and thats just a short list

This is not to mention an even bigger problem with Flash. Users have a general idea of how web pages should work and there are certain conventions of navigation, etc that web sites should follow. The temptation of most Flash designers is to create wacked-out interfaces that are definitely not conventional. Do you think this helps people navigate your site? Do you think people have the time or inclination to figure out your funky navigation?

If you have an art site - fine. If you want to make money with the Internet as a tool - forget it. Use flash in embedded elements. You can make great sites with HTML and Flash together - stick with that.

How crazy can SEO get?

2006-01-19T22:58:00.000-05:00

Black hat SEO techniques - not recommended or condoned:
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2005/11/02/unethical-seo/

What is Web 2.0

2006-01-19T21:28:00.000-05:00

I am frequently asked what is Web 2.0. Some people that seem to think there is a 'new' Internet coming out that is going to replace the old one. The funny thing is that there is already a new Internet that the current one has almost invisibly morphed into already.

Web 2.0 is not a new technology. It's not a new platform. It's more like a milestone - a turning point that we have crossed at some fuzzy point in the last few years. It's in the way the Internet is being used, the applications that are being developed, the new ways of thinking about what can be done, the new ways of co-laborating, the new connections and layers of connections. At least that's my humble stab at an explanation.

For the most fabulous explanation of what is actually going on - read it from the guy who coined the term, Tim O'Reilly:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Death of the Yellow Pages

2005-01-24T02:26:00.000-05:00

Last month I wanted to buy a “memory foam” bed topper and I wanted to do some comparison shopping. So I went online. I didn’t search for “memory foam” – I searched for “memory foam Toronto”. I looked through all of the results and I could not find a store in Toronto that carried them – but one place in Quebec kept popping up. After a few more fruitless searches I visited the Quebec site and learned that they offer free shipping and could deliver in two days. So I bought it.

Surely there are plenty of stores in Toronto that carry the product, but I could not find one. Had a Toronto company had invested in search engine marketing my search would have been worth $500 to them. I would have drove there and made the purchase that day.

So it should be no surprise that a recent study by MarketingSherpa.com found that 77% of online purchases originated from a search engine.

It used to be that many businesses could get a steady stream of customers simply by advertising in their local yellow pages. For some it may still be true, but I believe those days are numbered. My Yellow Pages directory went in the blue box the day it was delivered.

Big changes still to come

2004-11-28T16:25:00.000-05:00

When I started in the advertising business only 15 years ago we still did things by hand. The tools of the trade were very different then. Tech pens, T-squares, french curves, compasses - we carried around these instruments in a toolbox as if we were master mechanics.

Then came the first big change to revolutionize our industry. It seemed kind of gradual at the time, as small incremental change always does. Looking back, though., it changed everything.The first to go was only the entire typesetting industry. Companies with a hundred employees, in business for decades, closed down overnight.Then the death of the colour separation business. Their huge investment in lab equipment could not protect them. Their ‘assets’ became liabilities - they were no longer needed.

Many large graphic design and production houses are gone, too, mostly because they could not change fast enough. All of this fallout from a pretty innoculous looking, inexpensive ‘toy’ called the Macintosh. Thousands of multi-million dollar businesses were toppled, and tens of thousands lost their jobs.

Is this a unique event in our society today? Surprisingly, no. Business has changed forever. The Internet may not have everyone in the world shopping from home yet, but it has certainly changed many businesses forever. Is the book selling business the same now that we have Amazon? Will the music industry ever return to normal in the post Napster world? Even the ‘new’ business of retailing computers seems to be short lived because of the Dell phenomenon.

Computers, and then the computer network, have changed many businesses and industries forever. Yet, it is not over. The temptation is to believe that as long as we have not been adversely affected, or have already adapted to deal with the changes that have already come, then we have nothing to worry about.

Living with incremental change makes it really difficult to see the larger changes taking place over slightly longer periods of time.OK, so computers were a super big change and it changed everything, but what about businesses that have nothing to do with computers? How about the department store, for example? How has Wal-Mart changed the business of retailing? The statistics of small store owners that have closed shop because of Wal-Mart moving to town are scary.

It’s not the advent of computers and the network that are driving the changes, but the advent of the information age that is changing everything. Companies like Wal-Mart are dominating not because of their huge size and their valuable assets, but because of their new processes. It is the efficiency and timeliness that they transfer information from one area of the business to another that gives them the edge. They have become more efficient than any organization in history because of what is made possible with the computer network.

It is not slowing down
Is it over? Are the changes slowing down? Not a chance. The Internet has been asleep for a few years as far as investors are concerned, but in the ‘real’ virtual world, things have never been more interesting. The technology is better, the usage is way up and the thinking has evolved. What new ideas or new processes are going to change what industries next?In sales and marketing the changes are enormous.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has not delivered on the big promises of reduced costs and improved profits for every organization, but it has been a huge improvement in information flow that just hasn’t stopped evolving yet.

Sales Force Automation (SFA) is in now runaway growth mode. Salespeople can have access to their entire company’s database online from anywhere in world, even wirelessly. The efficiency and productiveness of a fully wired salesperson has gone way up.

The death of advertising
Advertising prices are being killed by increased media choice and segmentation. Marketers are demanding measurable return on investment and the smart marketing companies are delivering it. The use of the Internet for consumer research is affecting every business, whether they know it or not. Yellow pages use are down every where, and Internet searches are rising every month.

Recent research suggests that 86% of Internet users perform searches to find what they are looking for. Direct marketing via the post is dieing a slow death, and e-mail marketing (while often misunderstood and criticized wrongly) is hailed as the ‘killer app’ of modern marketing.

Smart marketing costs are dropping and measurability is rising, while the old methods of marketing and advertising are struggling with their old business models. Will they survive? Any un-measurable medium will have a hard time competing with one that offers a measurable return on investment (ROI).

ROI Marketing
There is a whole new industry evolving called Internet Marketing. It is about understanding, innovating and leveraging the strengths of the Internet to find and retain new customers. Even more accurately, it is about being more connected then your competitor, so when your prospects are looking for your product or service, they find you. This is a powerful change in the way people look for information, the way people shop, and the way marketers think about finding new customers. Doubtless, there will be more changes in the coming years that may have far reaching effects on your business and your industry, but the shift to ROI marketing affects us all.

Life of an Internet Marketer

2004-08-08T16:21:00.000-04:00

This is my blog for Internet Marketing.

Maybe you are saying - What is that? It wouldn't be the first time I have heard it.

Let me try to explain. It's about getting noise for what you do... driving traffic to your web site, capturing that traffic in the form of permission, following up with that automatically - educating, informing, developing preference, closing the sale, and then maintaining loyalty and awareness with respect to the relationship you have developed. All online.

That is what I hope to get across here. I have been in the web development business since '95 and in marketing and design since '89 and I have seen a lot happen in this field. Becoming a professionally trained salesperson in the last 5 years has taught me that most web sites suck at sales.

Going from a design background to marketing has taught me that most designers suck at marketing. And being a designer, I know that most programmers suck at design.

So perhaps I should call this blog - how to NOT to create a web site and marketing program that gets the wrong message (or no message) across and does nothing for your bottom line.

So, the convergence of marketing, design, sales and the Internet is what I will be discussing. Mainly I hope I can share and give a few ideas to any readers about what I have learned, and mostly just be able to log all of this learning and be able to look back at one day in the future and say "Wow, I really didn't know much about the web way back in 2004" But then, nobody did. What is yet to come I am sure will surprise me as much as everyone else. This IS still just the beginning.

Let's go!