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Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

I just spent the last 8 days with my adorable 2 year old niece. What a handful! Kids are pretty resilient and amazing at observing new things every day…just what I love about online marketing, I thought, something new every day!

Here are 5 lessons to take away from even the youngest members of society:

5. That Baseball will leave a mark!
Lesson: Be careful what you say or do online. It’s pretty permanent. Choose your words wisely and don’t go around bashing others. Not only does it help to advertise them but it also causes distrust in your work and reputation.

4. Curiosity did not kill this cat.
Lesson: It’s an amazing thing to be curious and have a constant yearning to learn more. As adults we some times lose or stray away from our un-abandoned sense of curiosity. My recommendation, always remain curious and keep a passion for something. And if you fall remember to get back up.

3. A 2-year-old’s voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
Lesson: No one likes a loud mouth bragger…unless you are bragging about the qualities of someone else. Think about it, when was the last time that you shared something great about someone else. The more you share without beating people over your head with your message the more people will come back to you for information because unlike the two year old, it’s not cute when you shout.

2. When you hear the toilet flush and the words “uh-oh” it is already too late.
Lesson: A good sense of humor will get you through most problems in life.

1. Learn something new every day.
Lesson: It’s pretty clear! Make it a personal goal to notice something new each day. Follow a new person on Twitter, join a new network group, read a new blog…whatever it takes…do it! It keeps you young

In the world of online marketing it’s all about getting found and having a presence. Good SEO (one means of getting found) has always been about making your site and its content more relevant for search engines (obviously) and also users. Social media (another way to get found) is all about online engagement and connecting with your audience. Combining the two makes for the perfect recipe. And thus (through simple math) Good Search Strategy = Engagement=Use of Social Media

The problem isn’t that social media is useless, but you have to think about what conversions are of value to you. Consider the following value metrics:

• drive people back to your site
• receive large amount inbound links
• appealing to early adopters
• build customer relationships
• learn what your clients want, need and think (help set and meet expectations)
• manage online reputation and brand
• increase traffic from various sources
• share/distribute content yourself, and via others, word of mouth
• chance to position yourself as the best
• have honest conversation and feedback (priceless), that’s why most (successful) industry giants are now involved
• rewarded emotionally
• it’s fun (can’t deny it)
• gives small business the opportunity to leverage themselves

In every one of these cases the feedback and the metrics are coming from real people that I can reply to, hear back from and with whom I can strike up a conversation. I can legitimately justify why updating my status and adding more people to my friend list, replying to feedback and building relationships are valuable to branding, marketing and bottom line metrics for the company. Understanding all of this, and gaining that insight helps promote more conversion driven focus on your site. It helps you interpret what brought your visitors to your site, how the user first became engaged, potentially why they care…it makes all the SEO work worth it and helps those engaged users become “active” through your site.

Other things to consider:

• Find a social medium that works for you, testing and tracking are extremely important.
• Some social media sources, especially Twitter is hard to track because traffic sources are often from other tools used to connect to the application and therefore don’t always register the same with Analytics.
• Good content naturally spreads.
• You have to track visitors, leads and customers.
• Set realistic expectations – Social media cost per conversion is obviously much lower and there tend to be fewer conversions overall. The social media conversion rate almost always is less than SEO because it’s just not the same.
• Outside of time, social media is low cost. Just track how much time you spend and the leads from sources.

Part of any process of converting a visitor to a lead is nurturing and engaging that individual. While Twitter or Facebook may not be the medium for everyone, there is plenty of opportunity to become engaged, and really the question should be, can you afford not to partake?

I am sure you have been among the many recipients of cold calls (or cold emails) from some search engine firm. And if you are like me you find it completely irritating when they send you a completely bogus email with absolute nonsense information…where do they get their information? The letter may sound lucrative. They get to the point and tug on the emotional strings of their prospect, and if you don’t know better you just may go for it…but that’s why I am here to lead you down the right path.

So, here is what the email said:

Hello,

Thank you for taking a few moments to view my introduction of our search engine and web services, it really is greatly appreciated.

To be brief, I’d like to invite you to take a look at how we could greatly improve www.domain.com in terms of achieving top, organic, search engine positions.

I’ve performed a complimentary link analysis for you by utilising 2 different link checks for your website – with a reference at Google.com followed up with a more comprehensive one at Alltheweb.com. Here are your results:

• According to Google.com you have 5 incoming links
• According to Alltheweb.com you have 164 incoming links

(It’s very common for a difference to show between these two numbers, I’ll be happy to explain why if you wish to hear more)

The better your inbound link profile, the higher your website is likely to rank on Google and the more visitors (and ROI) it will bring you.  So, to improve your link profile and have your website rank highly on the search engines for your keywords, we are able to offer you a search engine promotion service that includes ethical, ongoing sourcing of links throughout the Internet with a view to building your link authority – this is achieved through a mix of links from websites, intelligent forum participation, blogs and more.

Additionally, and of equal importance, we will examine the architecture of your website and provide advice to ensure it is correctly set-up for current search engine algorithms.

We aim to achieve Top 10 rankings for your website on the major search engines, whilst protecting your ROI with our unique Performance Agreement that refunds your monthly payments should this target not be reached. Specifically:

1. We will work to achieve first page results for your website across the three most important search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).
2. The search terms we use will be chosen by you and designed to bring you the maximum level of purchase-motivated traffic possible.
3. If we can’t achieve first page rankings for your site we will refund your money.
4. If we can’t keep your website in the Top 10 we will refund your money.

No-one can promise Top 10 rankings with absolute certainty. What we can do is protect your investment.

We are confident our methods work; they’re tested on our own R&D websites and are currently achieving first page results for many of our existing clients with search terms as tough and massively important as, ‘Graduate’, ‘sales jobs’, ‘Bling’ and ‘dresses’.

As our client, you will be kept fully updated on your campaign progress, with regular ranking reports that show you exactly how your search terms are doing on each of the search engines, and of course, regular contact with your personal technical consultant to answer your questions whenever they arise.

I’d like say thanks once more for your consideration, and you can take a closer look at what we have to offer by visiting a ‘business-card’ website we’ve compiled to provide more information for you…

When you do choose to call or drop me a line, you’ll find our approach refreshingly different, there’s no obligation, and our virtual coffee is the best!

I hope to hear from you soon, very best wishes,

Eva

Hilarious right. So I will dissect this in parts:

1. Professional firms don’t reach out cold to anyone. They work through referrals or are found in organic search or via advertisment. We use the tools that we talk about 24/7 to gain our leads.
2. Using Google for link analysis tells you nothing. When you search link:www.domain.com all that it gives you is a random sample of inbound links. It does not give you a complete list of links (ever)…I wonder if they include that as part of their explanations (doubt it).
3. Your inbound links effect your Google PR (PageRank) which is different from Page Rank (or positioning). Don’t let them fool you. PR is not nearly as influential as it once was. That said, inbound link are important, and you want to gain them naturally and having top search results listings is not the reason you gain inbound links. Sure having top page listings may gain you more traffic, and maybe those visitors will read through your site, and maybe they will share and/or link to information, but it’s not guaranteed. Nor is it guaranteed that having more inbound links will gain you top page rank. It is only one part of a hugely complex formula that helps you achieve that over time.
4. They aim to achieve top 10 rankings…cleverly phrases though still misleading. The parts that they choose to emphasize clearly lead the reader to believe that their site can end up on page 1, which should NEVER be a promise that any SEO makes. SEO should not be about selling ranking. Sure it’s seems like a good sell, that is how it worked years ago, and maybe that’s all you know how to explain.
5. Why would you let a client choose their keywords. I completely agree that keywords should be used that will help motivate leads, however this requires more than just a client telling you what keywords they want. You MUST do research, and research competitors, trends, history, search results etc.
6. As a client I would want to see more than my site’s ranking. Ranking alone does not bring in traffic. You will want to see all organic traffic sources, content viewed, time on site, entrance and exit pages, bounce rate and most importantly the number of leads through your site and specifically the source and what they did while on your site.
7. Sounds to me like a lot of their clients will be getting refunds.

PS: it helps to spell check a letter before sending it out.

What do you think? Would you go for it? Have you gotten any mail like this? What would your response be?

I recently reported on the launch of bing.com and how it claims to bring an end to search overload by over-promising their esp capabilities and under-delivering, well, on everything.

You may recall or have heard about about an event that occurred a few years back (2004 election cycle to be exact) when the phrase “miserable failure” returned the bio page of George W. Bush in Google search results (funny right). A group of bloggers had taken it upon themselves to add a whole-lot-a inbound links to the Whitehouse.gov site with the anchor text – miserable failure.

Back then it pulled enough weight in Google’s algorithm so that an anchor text from a large number of inbound links, from various sources could push a listing up in rank… but that has since changed. Now when you search the phrase in Google you will find among other things Wikipedia pages referencing the incident.

Interestingly enough, now when you perform the same search, “miserable failure” in bing…or as they would say if you “bing” the phrase “miserable failure”, then you will see that hmmmm George W. Bush still shows up. But tied to the Whitehouse.gov page? Oddly enough, alongside of good ole W. you see Barack Obama in the organic results and then as “related search options” Martin Luther Kind and Waffles? Yes, of course I get it…um no I don’t. I may have skipped the class in school where Waffles, MLK and W. had something in common.

So what’s your take? Besides that the Whitehouse obviously needs to update their bio pages. Is bing really the one failing misrably? What has your experience been with this new and supposedly improved search engine?

Today’s guest post is presented by Rachel Levy (@bostonmarketer), whose daily writings on marketing and social networking can be followed on her savvy blog www.rachel-levy.com.

Auto-follow
For every person who follows you, rather than going through and making an individual decision whether to follow back or not, you set up your account to automatically follow everyone who follows you. Socialtoo and TweetLater are two applications that I know of that do this.

Stepping back, first, I think it’s important to understand why you are using Twitter. Personally, I use Twitter to connect with people who have similar interests. I want to engage with people I find interesting, and who have something useful to say. It’s like going to a party… I want to talk to people I find interesting. (If you are on Twitter for a different reason, you will probably have a different thought on this.)

So, will you find every person who follows you interesting? Do you want to talk to everyone at a party who wants to talk to you? Many times the interest is mutual, but many times, it’s not. Therefore, why would you want to follow everyone back who follows you? Some people even go as far as un-following people who don’t follow them back. Again, my same thought applies. If you think they are interesting, it doesn’t mean they find you interesting. Why should their lack of interest in me, affect my interest in them (unless we’re talking about dating, of course!).

In general, I don’t understand the concept of why auto-following makes sense for people, but there are a few situations I see that it would be useful:

• People with tons of new followers every day – Personally, I am starting to see how difficult it can be to keep up with new followers, and I’m sure that people who add hundreds each day, can’t spend their life deciding who to follow. They have to auto-follow, in order to manage the flow. While I don’t know for sure, it appears that @GuyKawasaki and @Pistachio auto-follow, probably for this reason.
• Companies – If a person is interested in a company, then typically a company is interested in them. An example of this is @BostonTweetUp, an account I co-manage. We are interested in anyone who is interested in us. And, we want people to have the ability to DM us about events.
• Broadcast accounts – If you are an account that primarily broadcasts information, but you want to give people the opportunity to DM you, you might want to auto-follow. An example of this is @Twitter_Tips.

If you do decide to auto-follow, you will most likely need to set up a good system in Tweetdeck or another application to separate out those who you are actually interested in.

Auto-DM
For every person who follows you, you automatically sent them a DM (direct message). These vary in content, but are normally suggesting you visit their website or purchase their product. TweetLater is one application that I know of that allows you to set this up.

Using a networking event as an analogy, think of how you approach a party. You walk in, say hello, introduce yourself, and start chatting and getting to know each other. After a while of talking, you may start making a sales pitch or telling them what you can do to help them. But, you DON’T walk in and immediately say “Hi, would you like to buy my product?” That’s what an auto-DM feels like to me. It feels like spam, and that’s what the vast majority of people on Twitter feel. Do a search on auto-DM, and you’ll see it’s 95% complaints.

Some people even go as far to say “Auto-DM = un-follow”… if you auto-DM them, they will un-follow you. Socialtoo even dropped the ability to auto-DM from their service, and instead gave you a way to block auto-DM’s (a bold, but smart move on their part)

Until yesterday, there were no acceptable exceptions in my mind to my no auto-DM rule. Then I saw John Haydon’s take on auto-DM’s in his blog post… focus on OTHER people, rather than yourself. His auto-DM recommends people he thinks are good to follow, and he rotates the people for each auto-DM. I really like that idea, as it’s not salesy, and is helpful to most people.

(Photo credit: Cartoon, Networking)

What do you think? Are auto-follows or auto-DM’s OK? If so many people dislike auto-DM’s, why do so many people still use them?