Category Archives: Internet Sales

Get Found in the Blogosphere

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As we discussed earlier, it’s important you create lots of remarkable content.

A great way to create lots of remarkable content is by starting a blog. Blogging makes sense for many types of businesses for many reasons.

First, a blog will establish your company as a thought leader in your market.

Second, due to its dynamic nature and the fact you’re creating new content on a regular basis, a blog will change your web site from an online brochure to a living, breathing hub for your marketplace.

Third, a blog gives your potential customers away to engage with you versus being hit with a premature sales pitch; by conversing with your potential customers via your blog, you build trust over time, so that when you actually talk to them about your product and service offerings, they’re prepared for your offering.

Fourth, a blog will dramatically improve your search engine rankings; a blog is great way to create more pages on your site (each article is a page), and the more pages Google has, the more your site shows up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for dozens of keywords. And, because search engines like to see sites linking to one another, a blog helps your search engine results because other bloggers are far more likely to link to a remarkable blog article about your industry than to the products page on your web site.

The more inbound links pointing to your site, the more traffic comes your way and the more Google views your site as an “authorities hub” and thus the higher your site goes in the SERPs.

Creating a Remarkable Strategy

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One night as I was listening to one of the audio books, I heard this passage: “Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them.”

Within your marketplace, unwritten rules form that you and all your competitors implicitly agree to and fight along. These rules are typically set by the current market leader who educates the customers—who then force the rules upon new entrants like you.

There are two ways to create a winning strategy in an era where remarkable ideas spread virally and you face more competitors than ever.

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Is Your Web Site a Marketing Hub?

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The history of the company web site began with the paper brochure that was handed out at trade shows and stuffed into envelopes for mailing to unsuspecting prospects.

When the Internet came into play, this same brochure was handed to a Web designer who turned it into a beautiful web site. This made sense at the time: brochures were static, the Web was new and mostly static, and companies had spent lots of money to have these brochures designed. However, having a “brochureware” web site is where the trouble starts for many businesses today.

If your web site is like many of the web sites we see, it is a one-to-many broadcast tool—think megaphone. We find that people visit these types of sites once, click around, and never return. Why? Because nothing on these sites—which arefilledwithsales-orientedmessages—compelthemto stay.

The Web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s and while it took a couple of decades to get there, the Web is now truly collaborative. Instead of broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, the top-ranked sites today have created communities where like-minded people can connect with each other. In order to take full advantage of this collaborative power, you must rethink your web site. Instead of “megaphone,” think, “hub.”

What we want you to do is to change the mode of your web site from a one-way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub for your marketplace.

Who Moved My Customers?

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People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction. People now use the Internet to shop and gather information, but where on the Internet do they go—and how do they use the Internet for these activities? We can break the Internet down into three main areas.

People primarily shop and gather information through search engines, such as Google. The average information seeker conducts dozens of searches per day—and, rather than listen to a sales rep, read a spam message, watch a TV ad, or fly to a trade show, most people find it easier to sit at their desks and find the information online through Google.

In order to take advantage of this new reality, marketers need to change the way they think about marketing—from the ground up.

Another place people use to gather information is the blogosphere and its over 100 million blogs (as of this writing). Virtually every industry and consumer niche you can think of has a cadre of online pontificators, many of whom are quite good. Your target audience is no longer reading the trade publication, and instead is searching Google and subscribing to blogs written by the folks who used to write for the trade rag.

The third place people learn/shop is in the social mediasphere—the name for the collection of social “media” sites such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and others. These sites started as niche techie sites, but are becoming mainstream.

To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products. And you do that by generating leads through inbound marketing.

Five Social Media Models

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It’s a good idea to know how others are using social media so you can incorporate those models into your own campaigns.

Here are five common social media models that are being used by most people (some of whom are our own clients):

Branding. Some companies use social media strictly as a branding tool. Typically, this means running a YouTube campaign that (hopefully) gets a lot of buzz around the water cooler. In our opinion, using social media simply as a branding tool is a twentieth century mindset. If you really want to supercharge your social media campaigns, you’ll incorporate one or all of the next four highly measurable approaches.

eCommerce. If you can sell your product or service online, then you’ll want to drive people to a landing page on your website where they can buy your goods. How can you accomplish this? Just do what Dell does—they Tweet about special promotions available only to the people who follow them on Twitter. The promotional links are easily tracked so they can see how many people went to the landing page and how many converted from a prospect to a customer. They generate millions of dollars in revenue each quarter by using this method.

Research. Many companies are using social media as a tool to do research. Sometimes, this involves building a website to track the results. Starbucks has done this famously with their MyStarbucksIdea.com website. Other times, using social media as a research tool can be as simple as doing a poll on LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, or via email.

Customer Retention. A good rule of thumb is that it costs three to five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Given that, wouldn’t it be smart to use social media as a tool to keep customers loyal and engaged? That’s what Comcast and Southwest Airlines do—they communicate via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to help solve customer service issues.

Lead Generation. What do you do if you can’t sell your product or service online? Then you’ll want to do what many B2B companies do—that is, to use social media to drive prospects to a website where they can download a whitepaper, listen to a Podcast, or watch a video. Once you’ve captured the prospect’s contact information, you can re-market to them via email, direct mail, or any number of other methods.

Repost: Google Cooks Up a New Recipe for Local Search

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The engineers at Google have recently been throwing a lot of new ingredients into local search, working to improve both user experience and merchant visibility. This week’s announcement of a new local recommendation engine called Hotpot is the latest culmination of those efforts.

Hotpot is an extension of Google Places, the local search database of more than 50 million locations in which merchants can claim their businesses, provide their addresses and other information, and engage with customers. Hotpot adds two important new features into the mix: user ratings and recommendations from friends.

The ratings are done on a five-star system, and a user can share a business’ ratings to get further recommendations from friends. One example of this would be if a user is visiting a town for the first time and has an online friend that has also visited that town or is a local resident. That friend’s recommendations for restaurants and hotels will provide an added, trusted element to the ratings the user discovered during the original search.

Google’s new feature is not exactly new in that it essentially provides the same service as Yelp and other local-recommendations services, but it confirms Google’s growing interest in local search – not to mention some poorly named new features lately. The mere fact that Google Places provides Hotpot with a database of 50 million businesses out of the gates means that it may very well catch on – and local businesses that aren’t already in that database should change that right away.

Source: Website Magazine Blog

iReport boot camp: Get your stories seen

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Lets talk about SEO!

I am sure some of you are asking, “What the heck is SEO?” It stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the simplest terms, it is organizing a website and its content to help it rank higher in a search engine such as Google.

At CNN, I work with the editors and writers to help them take the great stuff they produce and make it as search-friendly as possible so more people can find it and read it. I also work with the design and development teams to make sure the Web pages are as SEO-friendly as possible.

topher kohan

We do all this work and training so that search engines hopefully list our stories higher on the correct results pages.

Here are some things that can make your iReport submission, and anything else you publish on the Web, more search-friendly.

1. Headline:

The headline is one of the best ways for a search engine to find out what your story is about. So your story is more likely to turn up in a search if your headline includes the terms people are searching for.

Here’s an example of a search-friendly iReport headline: “Nonlethal projectiles fired into crowd in Los Angeles”

It works because it tells the user exactly what the story is about and includes the terms we think people would be searching for to find info on this event.

Here’s an example of a headline for a story about Colorado wildfires that’s not friendly:
“11 a.m. Sept. 6”

This headline doesn’t work well with search engines because it doesn’t say what the story is about.

It makes sense after you see the story, but search engines and the people doing the searching don’t have that context. Therefore it won’t show up as high in the Google search results pages.

2. Description:

The description should tell both readers and the search engines what the iReport is about. You want to use words that you think people will be searching for, but you still want it to sound normal.

Jamming too many search terms into a description is called “stuffing.” Search engines look for that sort of thing, so it can hurt how your iReport shows up in Google.

Here’s an example of a good iReport description:

“Scenes from Boulder, CO fire. Accidentally happened upon the epicenter of the fire shortly after it started this morning. Such a moving human experience.”

It works because it is simple and to the point. It tells you what the story is about, what you will see in the iReport and also give good information to the search engines.

Here’s one that wasn’t as helpful:

“People queuing to board a bus near the Marylebone and Edgware Road stations in London, UK”

This one did not work because there wasn’t any context in the description. Why are people queuing? Is this a unusual happening? Content without context is not content to the search engines.

3. File name:

The search engines cannot watch a video or see a image, so what you name them can help the engines know what they are about. It’s a lot easier for a search engine to find “denverfire.jpg” than “IMG_0358.jpg.”

One last thought: All these things will help, but remember that you do not want to mislead readers or the search engines by saying the iReport is about one thing when it is really about something else.

Source: CNN

The right way to use Videoblogging

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The most blatant use of a videoblog — and the least successful — is to post an advertisement for your product or service to your videoblog. This particular method of videoblogging isn’t known for its effectiveness, because when people download your videos, they want something valuable in exchange for their time; they see a blatant self-promotion as a waste of their time and
bandwidth..

Since advertising is something that you as a business normally pay other people to show, asking people to download it of their own free will is counter-intuitive.

However, there are two types of ads that do seem to work. First, if your ads are really clever and fresh, people will download them because they’re interested in them. When I say clever, I mean the kind of fresh and surprising ads that you can expect during the Super Bowl (which many Americans watch only for the advertising, even if they don’t say so).

The other kind of ad that works is a trailer for a movie (or, to a lesser degree, for a TV show). People love downloading and watching movie trailers online.

If the online trailer contains content — scenes for example — that aren’t in the theatrical trailer, all the better!

I should mention that there’s a special kind of trailer — better called a teaser— used to advertise adult media and Web sites. Videoblogs for these teasers work for their audiences, and if you have such a site with teaser videos or the capability to make them, then you will have no trouble turning your teaser
videoblog into a very successful moneymaker.

Choosing the right size of keywords (Long Tail vs. Short Tail)

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There is some practical stuff that you can do to help your website gain a better ranking in search engine. For example, choosing the right size of your keywords whether it is going to be short or long can make a huge difference. Other people recognized it as choosing between broad or narrow keywords.

The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson and is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than hugely competitive broad keywords. A long tail keywords is something like “Website Design Company in Seattle” while a short tail keyword is something like “Website Design.”

When you compare the two keywords, “Website Design” has about 30-40 times as many competitors as “Website Design Company in Seattle” but “Website Design” also gets far more searches each month.

A small number of broad terms such as “Website Design” account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as “Website Design Company in Seattle.” This search distribution can be understood through the following graph.

Which one to choose? There is less competition with “long tail” keyword so you can rank on the first page of Google far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Moreover, visitors or clients searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it “Web Design Company in Seattle” , “Web Consultant in Seattle” or “Half Price Armani Suits.”

Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords or not, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you.

If you have a website selling “Armani Suits” but can’t pull any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword “Armani” or “Armani Suits” try targeting more specific keywords such as “Armani Mens Suits”.

Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales.