April, 2008

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Stay Up with Trends in Your Industry

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Here’s a couple quick ways to keep up with the latest trends in your industry.

Set up a custom news feed with Google

Go over to http://news.google.com and type in your phrase. This will bring up all the latest news that mentions that subject. If you need a specific phrase, make sure you put it in quotes.

Then click on the RSS button in the lower left corner and sign up for this custom news feed. Now every day you’ll have the latest news about your industry right there in your RSS reader.

Over time, you’ll see mentions of related items that you don’t want to read about. I suggest you go back to the Google News page and rewrite your query, using delimiters such as the plus and minus.

Get Google Alerts

While the Google news thing is cool, it’ll only give you updates on actual news items that have been submitted. Since many people are publishing items in formats besides press releases, we want to be able to capture these additions to the web, too.

To do so, we’ll set up a Google alert with our same phrase(s).

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and you’ll see this page:

In the “Search Items” box, put in your same search criteria that you used on the news site. You can use quotes and other delimiters just as you did above.

Depending upon how often you want these alerts, choose the correct option in the “How Often” area. If you’re running a news site, you’ll want to put the “How Often” to “As it happens”. That way you can get that info onto your website as soon as possible. If you are just trying to keep up with trends, leave it at “once a day”.

Now plop in your email address. Now every time Google indexes a new page on the Internet that includes your specific phrase, you’ll get an email.

You can use these same methods to keep an eye on your competition as well, your own business name, or even mentions of specific products that you carry. Watch for bloggers that are mentioning your business and drop a comment on their site. They’ll be blown away that you visited their blog and you’ll have an even stronger chance of getting future referrals from them.

By the way, this should not be confused with Google Trends, an online way of watching search trends over time. That’s a nice tool too, but not what I was going for here.

Posted in Google Alerts, Google updates, trending | No Responses »

SEO Costs and “Free” Traffic

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Just how much is an SEO campaign for a small business? And if you do it, will you get free traffic?

Andrew Shotland discusses the true cost of SEO

Search Engine Land talks about free traffic

Posted in free stuff, small business, traffic | 2 Responses »

SEO is a Lot Like Fitness Training

Friday, April 18th, 2008

SEO is like fitness training. From start to finish, it’s like the training for a major event. It doesn’t happen over night, and it won’t improve if you don’t ‘feed’ it constantly.

The Decision
Fitness Goal: To move a train 50 feet in less than n minutes.
Fitness: The entire fitness process starts with a simple decision. That decision is to start treating your body the way it should be treated. No more neglect. Feed it well, give it specific nutrients, cut off the bad stuff and start working out.

SEO Goal: To rank number one for your industry related terms.
SEO: The entire SEO process starts with a simple decision. That decision is to start treating your website the way it should be treated. No more neglect. Feed it well (content), give it specific nutrients (keyword targeting), cut off the paid and reciprocal links, duplicate content and Flash, and start fixing those title tags and meta descriptions.

The Workout / Training
Fitness: Working out daily is essential to getting fit. Each day you need to do a little bit of cardio, then follow up by working on your upper body one day, and your lower body the next. This switchoff will keep your muscles growing and allow your body to grow and repair consistently.

SEO: Changing your site (often) is essential to getting the rankings you want. Each day you need to read and be aware of the latest trends in your industry, then follow up by working on building your content one day, and your link building the next. This switchoff will keep your website growing and allow your rankings to grow consistently.

The Event / Goal
Fitness: Finally, you’ve been working out for months and you’re ready for your challenge. You wrap the rope around your waist and begin to pull. The train doesn’t budge, and you pull with all your strength. Suddenly the mammoth machine begins to nudge forward, just millimeters at a time. You continue to pull, and soon the train is moving inches instead of millimeters. Pull some more and its moving feet. Soon you attain your 50ft goal – and something happens. The train continues to roll. It rolls another 150 feet before coming to a rest. You’ve attained your record – but you could have done more.

SEO: Finally, you’ve been building content and targeting keyphrases for months, and you’re ready for your challenge. You grab the keyboard and start to adjust code. Your sites don’t rank, and you continue to modify pages and tweak settings. Suddenly you rank on page 10 for a few of your terms. You continue to put up fresh content, and soon your site is moving up the SERPs. Build some more quality links and soon your website is moving towards the top. A little more work and you hit page one. Soon you attain your top rank goal – and something happens.

What Can Happen
Once the site is ‘rolling’, there are a few choices to make:

Option One: Stop Pulling
Quite often this is where a small business cuts off the SEO funding, and the ‘train’ rolls to a stop. Ouch. For a while there, the site was doing great. Traffic was high, orders were coming in. But slowly they slowed, and now there’s only a trickle of orders. You no longer rank on page one. Sure, you’re still only on page four, but who looks that far down?

The worst thing a small business owner could do is to tell their SEO to stop pulling. You may live fat off the rankings for a while, but eventually it’ll stop. And then you’ll have to start pulling again. Start from zero again? Sounds expensive.

Option Two: Keep Pulling
There’s plenty more for the SEO to do, and the best part is, once the train is rolling, keeping it going isn’t as hard as getting the process started. The SEO can still continue to create content, creating more and more fodder for long tail results. The SEO can continue to build links, building up the trust and authority of the site. Pulling at this point produces more inertia with less effort, thus extending the SEO aftershock further and further into the future. Overall, it’s less expensive because your SEO can fine-tune the machine to run efficiently and smoothly. He can add new components (bolt ons like a blog, customer reviews or an interactive forum) with ease. These things just help the train move even faster.

Summary
SEO is a lot like fitness training for a major event. It’s tough and costly to start, but once its rolling, its a hard mama jama to stop.

Posted in Marketing, SEO, small business | No Responses »

The Formula for Success

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

“Would you like the formula for success?” Thomas Watson (IBM) asked. “Double your rate of failure.”

Posted in Marketing | No Responses »

Recent Book List

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

I’m reading and/or have ordered the following books:

I’ve actually read the Millionaire Mind one twice now.  It’s a great book, highly recommended.

Posted in books | No Responses »
Tags: , ,

Customers Suck – Who Needs Them Anyways?

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

With your business doing great, and the revenues up, who has time for customers? I mean, all they do is complain and ask you to show them things – and you’ve got better things to do, right?

Truth is, you’d better make time for customers. Beyond the obvious ‘They’re the ones paying the bills‘ there are many other reasons to pay attention to them.

Take Seth Godin’s post today about answering the phone. True, the most important job in a business just could be answering the phone. I’m the first to admit that I don’t always do this right, but I’m getting better. The phone answerer for some small businesses is also the owner, so what Seth says about the lowly being the ones doing the groundwork isn’t always true. Nonetheless you get the idea.

Customers come to you for a reason. Perhaps they liked your storefront. Perhaps they thought your sign or a recent flyer was pretty. Maybe they were referred by a friend who told them to ‘just go up there’. Maybe they stumbled across your website and liked what they saw (and by that I mean physically liked it, the layout, the colors, the ease of navigation).  The reasons may be fickle, but as soon as they walk in, your opportunity is huge.

No matter the reason, they came – and they want (in most cases) to give you money. And in many cases, this may be their first time to your store. You’ve been coming there for years, day after day.  You’ve noticed (but ignored) the cobwebs on your AC unit. You’ve seen the dirty and scuffed floors from all the product you’ve been moving in and out. (Those darn boots!) You’ve noticed (but ignored) that odor that the furnace puts out every winter.

But the customers notice. They aren’t just there to purchase something, they are there for the experience. The shopping experience (particularly for higher value items) is an adventure. Spending any amount of money needs to be pleasant and fun. It’s exhilarating to spend, and you should cater to that.

Mr. and Mrs. Small Business Owner, take a minute to step back today. Check out the place from a customer’s point of view. Start in the parking lot, examine the front door, and enter with your eyes darting around. Try to see what they see. Visit your business as an experience, not as your job. Ask customers to fill out a survey, not just about the satisfaction of their product, but of the entire experience.

And speaking of satisfaction, if you really want to be proactive, ask them for suggestions.

The board members at Starbucks, the uber cool coffee company, noticed a downward trend in their customer satisfaction (probably judged primarily by their declining sales). So instead of selling off their stock, or going to some marketing company that can pull together a whiz-bang campaign, they went to their own customers for ideas. They launched MyStarbucksIdea.com, a site where their customers can visit and submit new ideas to the coffee giant.  The website is doing great, and the ideas are pouring in.

Starbucks is listening to their customer.  And you know why?  Because as you’ve said a hundred times before, they pay the bills.

Posted in customer service, small business | 1 Response »

Buying a House: Most Realtors Missing Big Opportunities

Friday, April 4th, 2008

My wife and I are in the process of purchasing a new home. This will be our first ever, and we are very excited. We’ve settled on a beautiful two-story – one we would not be able to buy had it not been for Internet marketing (but that’s another post for another day).

For several years now I’ve been teaching free Internet Marketing classes at our local library. Up until this past year, there were two other guys teaching there as well. One was a local PC-fix-it guy, teaching classes on memory upgrades, anti-virus software, etc. The other guy was a local realtor. Oddly enough, he was teaching Excel classes. Nonetheless, we all became friends with a common thread, helping out the community.

So when it came time for my wife and I to get a house, we already had someone that we wanted to use. But had we not, most likely we would have gone online to find someone. I’d probably type in something like ‘real estate agents in arnold mo’

real estate agents in arnold mo - Google Search

Besides Google’s ‘Local 10′ listings, this page really only shows me one ‘actual’ real estate agent – Gwen Reynolds (result #5). Looking through Gwen’s website, its obvious that the page is not at all search-optimized, but rather she was just lucky enough to have a title tag that worked for her. This is very typical.

As local search continues to grow, realtors that haven’t optimized their websites are missing one of the biggest opportunities to get new clients. At an average 3% commission per house sold, they are passing by a huge amount of money every day that their website goes on unoptimized.

I think it’s fair to say that 90% or more of local real estate agents use some sort of proprietary website that their company gives them. Every page on their site is just like every page on their co-worker’s website, minus the very few personal things they’ve changed. These pages are usually cheap (or free from their company) and the real estate agents use them as just another way to show their houses. There is little or no personalization, no mention of local events or pictures of local landmarks.

Interestingly, a search for ‘arnold mo realtor’ produces similar results. There’s Gwen at the top (once again, I’m betting this is because of her title tag and not because the page is optimized). Why aren’t any realtors optimizing their websites for local terms?

arnold mo realtor - Google Search

LocalOnliner recently mentioned the real estate agent v search conundrum as well. The most interesting thing to me there is that the process of selling a house with use of online tools isn’t all that great either. My wife and I used our real estate agent’s MLS program, but ironically enough the house that we found wasn’t even listed in his system.

A while back my real estate buddy mentioned to me that he was considering purchasing domain names for each of his listings – ie 456MainStreet.com. I thought this was a phenomenal idea. Some agents are doing this, because I remember seeing signs with URLs at the bottom of them in some yards. This isn’t a very widespread idea yet, but could be a great way for agents to rank for tons of local terms including small towns, community nicknames and even street names. Load up a nice virtual tour and some unique content and your chances of selling (and ranking) go up dramatically. Take some pointers from sites like Trulia and you’ve got a home run.

Online search for homes is only going to grow. Newspaper ads, untargeted direct mailing and real estate magazines are going to dwindle as Gen-X house buyers grow. Throw in mobile search and real estate agents have a very untapped market at their hands.

Note: Interestingly enough, shortly after posting this, I found a great conference for real estate agents: Kelsey’s Drilling Down on Local ’08. Looks to be a great conference, particularly for REA’s.

Posted in local marketing, Marketing, SEO | 2 Responses »
Tags: , ,

Orbitz 21 Contest – Missed Opportunities

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Orbitz is a pretty well known little website, so I’m really surprised at the amount of mistakes I came across today when signing up for their 21 Prizes in 21 Days promotion.  I orignially heard about the contest on the radio.  “Orbitz.com slash twenty-one”, the commercial announced.  Easy to remember, at least.

The Lead-in Page
The first thing Orbitz does is ask me for my email address – unmistakably the most important piece of info for the contest (for Orbitz). Get the users email and you have a lukewarm lead. But then they screw up and don’t ask for permission to market their wares to you in the future. Big mistake.


 (click to see larger version on flickr)

The Contest Signup Page
Lots of mistakes here – mistakes that I wouldn’t expect a reputable company like Orbitz to make.


(click to see larger version on flickr)

Next, the ‘more information’ links on the left. As I said, I would have put them on the first page where it asked for my email. Put them under the email box and have them already checked. Personally, I think this is the biggest mistake Orbitz made. They asked for the email address, then on the next page didn’t give themselves permission to use it. Why not let the user uncheck the boxes instead of checking them? This is a hugely missed opportunity.

Since that was IMO their biggest mistake, the rest are minor but noteworthy. Look how long the pages are. There are so many distractions and escape routes that it’s not even funny. If they are there to collect information about users which they can use in the future to market to, why are they giving them so many opportunities to not submit their info? Classic landing page mistake. Don’t give the user any ‘outs’.

Finishing Up
Upon completion of their entry, they provided the user an opportunity to play a little ‘card counting’ game.  Personally I didn’t get it and closed the window, but some other geniuses might find it mildly entertaining. The game really has no purpose beyond entertainment, and they probably should have just dumped the contest entrant to their $50 off Vegas sale instead.

Show Some Love
Now Orbitz did do a few things right on here.  On the first page (email page), the links to the various hotels and the LV Visitors Convention do open in new windows.  Good move, don’t lose the user altogether.  I still think they could have provided most of this info after they got the users information, but that’s me.

The ‘click here to learn more about the prize’ is a javascript that opens a new, small window.  Good move, assuming most of your users have JS turned on.

Internet Marketing is a Learning Process
I’m no marketing genius, but this little contest could have been a bit more thought out.  The marketing team at Orbitz missed a big opportunity on the first page, and then continued their errors on the next few pages.

Take these errors into thought for your own site.  If you’re running a contest, or just selling a product, get the email address (and permission!) at the very beginning.  All the rest is just a bonus.  You’re there to get leads.

Posted in beginner sem, Marketing | No Responses »