March 2008 Archives

With the ‘R’ word hovering, the volatile internet marketing industry is bound to suffer right? Not so fast. One odds-defying industry offers inspiration to those of us in the ever-fragile web biz. Read on for survival tips culled from their mysteriously hardy shelves...

Start With an Untapped Community

If you cater to a targeted community, especially one that had no other place to go before you came along, you will be able to withstand the impact of more generic giants. Such is the case with Barbara Bailey, who started Bailey/Coy books in Seattle in 1986. The first bookstore to target gay/lesbian literature, she’s sort of like the Perez Hilton of the printed word. Bailey knew she needed an edge to get her indie bookstore off the ground, and by paying attention to her community, the pride-filled mecca of Capitol Hill, she has preserved a following of people who remember when Bailey/Coy was the only place to shop for such GLTB books. Lesson: target a unique audience. Mistresses, Taxodermists, Hare Krishnas all need web love too.

Add a Practical Angle That Doesn’t Clash with Your Principles

It is possible to capitalize on a lofty dream in a lucrative way.The key is to look at what you are really trying to accomplish. For Pat and Ed Rutledge of the charming A Book of All Seasons in the snow town of Leavenworth, the goal was promoting literacy, but also providing a cozy place full of personality. By opening up a bed and breakfast upstairs, they were able to support their bookstore dream even when the sales weren’t there. As a result, they’ve been able to stay in business since 1992. Try and apply the same ingenious thinking to your website. When websites with personality pay off, everyone wins.

Have A Special of the Day

It’s not just for soup anymore! Weekly, monthly and daily features are a great way to capture and build an internet audience. From A List Apart’s Fresh every Friday post to Manolo for the Bride’s Friday Caption Contest, savvy websites know readers love knowing when to tune in for their favorite web fare.This is exactly what Chris O’Hara capitalized on at her Spokane bookstore “Auntie’s Bookstore” where she hosts a daily activity from reading, knitting, and live music since 1985.

Target a Certain Niche

This is similar to targeting a unique community, with a slightly different lens. What it means is that rather than focusing on a unique demographic, you target a unique subject matter that might actually draw a fairly diverse group of people. For example, our blog Bridezilla.com is about having a thinking-woman’s wedding, so it appeals to people interested in feminism, fashion, wedding planning and blogs in general. The same can be seen from Peter Miller Architecture and Design Books, an independent bookstore that carries only architectural, design and graphic titles. Though it’s a specific focus, these books would appeal to anyone from architects, art lovers, interior designers, graphic designers or people who just simply want to support indie bookstores.

Remember It’s Still a Business

You may not want to be cutthroat and corporate, but maintaining your professional polish is still the make-or-break factor for independent businesses. There’s a fine line between independent and the wedding singer lady who paid Adam Sandler for singing lessons in meatballs. Don’t let your “indie” attitude overtake your need for good customer service. I once walked into a Twice Sold Tales and asked for a title. The surly store clerk said to me “This isn’t Burger King.” Needless to say, that bookstore is still struggling and Burger King, is well, King. This is not the way it should be, and the ability for independent businesses to still maintain their professional standards is what’s going to change it. Peter Miller, a Harvard Alum makes this point brilliantly when he says “We try not to be floppy, we try not to be sloppy, and we try to be extraordinarily up to speed.” Staying up to date on your industry, presenting yourself in a sharp and genuine way, and not making careless mistakes is crucial advice for both indie bookstores and website start-ups.

Make Passion Your Profit

The truth is, a lot of these bookstores aren’t in the black every year. But every single one of them has stayed in business for ten plus years. The same can be said for many internet marketing companies. That rocks! The world needs more quaint, quirky creative spaces, from bookstores to crafty blogs, and I think it’s amazing when this big-picture principle sustains people through financial rough patches. So choose Etsy.com over Overstock, choose Abebooks over Amazon, and choose my quirky, creative internet marketing firm Portent Interactive (it’s not a plug unless it’s shameless) over big name internet marketing firms who specialize in one-flash-intro-fits-all. When independent businesses flourish, everyone benefits-and the world becomes more interesting.

Some Information Taken From: Washington CEO April 2008 Edition

Monday marks the end of the first quarter for 2008 here at Portent Interactive. So far it's been a busy year. That's okay. I say, "Bring it on!"

But with the end of the quarter I thought it would be fun take a short breather and look back at some of the appearances Ian has made this year. Since presenting at Search Marketing Expo - SMX Stockholm, Sweden Ian has received several invitations. I hope you enjoy these highlights:

Search Engine Strategies New York

Most recently Ian returned from Search Engine Strategies New York where he spoke about Multi Variate Testing with Sage Lewis of Web Marketing Watch and Gregg Makuch of Wide Mile.

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During SES Ian aso made a return appearance on Webmaster Radio: Webmaster Radio's SES Showcase

SEMpdx

In March, Portland's search marketing association SEMpdx asked Ian to teach them all about Search Marketing Analytics. Here are his slides.

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Search Marketing Expo West, Santa Clara

Ian spoke about using Personas to focus your online marketing efforts. Here are his slides.

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Jim Hedger from Webmaster Radio also interviewed Ian for his radio show..

If your business to business web site is like most companies’ its focused is on:

Too bad. Compacting your Internet marketing strategy and your online content are huge errors. The desire is understandable. Time is precious. People are busy. No one enjoys adding to their work load or increasing the company’s overhead.

Have you considered this?

• Most people find most web sites by using search engines.  Search engines, like Google, have huge appetites for original content. Every page of original text adds to your web site’s ranking strength and increases that likelihood that your web site will be found.
• The best practices for attracting B2B leads online are the same the same as they are offline. You have to gain their attention and trust first and often before they need your product or services.

Instead of asking how you can get more message into less space on your B2B web site, ask how you can expand your content to make it worthwhile to more people and earn greater respect from the search engines at the same time.

Here are some ideas:

• To sell your products and services online
  How many different ways can you break this down?
• By product or service
• By each industry you serve
• Do you include video or other types of demos?
• To publicize trade shows, conference appearances and events
• To build your company’s brand and reputation
• To position your company as an industry and peer leader?
• White papers
• Webcasts
• Educational content
• Industry news, patents and regulatory information
• As a client support center.
• Manuals
• FAQs
• Forums
• As launching pad for new marketing ideas or new products and services
• To ask for client, industry and target market feedback
• As an information center for stakeholders who are not leads or clients
• Your B2B customers’ customers
• Your Suppliers
• Your Investors
• The media and press

How does your company use its web site?

Watch me do my best Bob Ross impression while teaching you how to create a preloader in Actionscript 3. No happy trees included.

Download the example files here. Video after the jump!

We all know that the biggest part of attracting a potential customer to clicking on your ad is the headline. They see that bold text, what they searched for and are drawn in like a moth to a flame. But in the continual quest that is a PPC Analyst’s career, we have to think of innovative or employ new tactics to entice those visitors. So let me ask you this: have you tried using your display URL, rather the address of your website as a headline?

Face it, a lot of people actually type the destination URL in the search field and hit “search” rather than type it directly into the browser. If your website address includes your most popular or type of product/service you can not only increase branding, but the visitor will see that URL and think “Yes! That’s what I was looking for!” This works particularly well if you have a client with an established presence as a brand and you receive lots of searches each month just on their name.

Examples:

Client sells blue stationery. Website URL is www.bluestationery.com. Nice and easy because the URL is short enough to include a space between “blue” and “stationery”. Client sells striped stationery. Website URL is www.stripedstationery.com. Just long enough as the entire URL, too long if you add any spaces. Client sells polka dot stationery. Website URL is: www.polkadotstationery.com but the URL is too long for a headline, so drop the “www”.

Pretty simple, yet highly overlooked.

Give it a try!

Everyone who has worked in internet marketing for more than 5 minutes has encountered the following situation: Someone, somewhere says something like, “I notice that the first chart on page 7 shows our bounce rate on the Press page jumped by 10% in February.”

It sounds like a reasonable enough question. Why is your bounce rate increasing, anyway? There is a great urge in this situation to dive deep into the stats and let no one within six degrees of Kevin Bacon rest until the question is answered.

And this is wrong. Questions like this fall into a category of activities I call Bad Monkeys. Let me explain…

Portent recently won an award for something I initially thought sounded very counter-intuitive, maybe even a little shady. But it turned out to be one of our most successful email opt-in campaigns to date. Below are the marketing insights I believe made all the difference.

The idea was to add an email subscription page between the free printables offer and the actual free printables download on a client’s site. My fear was, once people got in the free printables mindset, they would not appreciate being derailed by a page popping up and asking for their email address to receive a newsletter. But as it turned out, people actually did like it. A lot.

By adding this new sign-up page, Portent was able to increase this client’s subscriber list by 6,626 subscribers, an average of 828 per month since the campaign started last May.

Obviously adding just any page isn’t going to guarantee this sort of success, and including unnecessary steps or diversions can often result in high bail-out rates. That said, there are a few ways to make the bait-and-sweetly suggest marketing technique work for you:

1. Meets the same overall marketing objective. People may be clicking through the site to download the free printable, but that is not their overall goal. Their goal is to learn more about the product with minimal commitment. While the newsletter and the download printable differ in content, they both move the customer towards this overall goal. For this reason, offering a newsletter sign-up before the free download page isn’t spammy. It’s helpful! Case in point: The email subscription page is the equivalent of the waitress giving you the specials of the day at a restaurant. While it does momentarily deter you from your initial goal of opening the menu and ordering, it can propel you to your real goal (eating) in an appealing way you might not have thought of. So, when deciding whether to bait-and-sweetly-suggest, figure out your customer’s overall goal and make sure whatever ad or offer you include caters to that goal.
2. Makes eyes happy. When creating this page, we added one of our prettiest, nicest email newsletters to the page to reassure viewers that they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of some red-bulleted, free free free, frightening missive once they signed on the subscriber line. An attractive visual example comes across as genuine and enticing. Most importantly, it negates any suspicion that accompanies being diverted from one’s initial online objective.
3. Make it a choice, not a condition. A page like this is about providing an option, not holding a customer hostage until you have all their personal details. Forcing people to register and receive your emails for life in exchange for a one-time printable is definitely below-the-belt,and will ensure many customers bail from your site-especially if the initial ad they clicked through makes no mention of this registration. By making it totally clear that they can click right past this option and go to the printables, customers view this email page sign-up as a thoughtful offer, not a nose-wrinkling prerequisite.

What is your B2B Internet marketing strategy?

For most companies the answer is a website with:

• Descriptions of products or services, contact forms and perhaps a shopping cart
• Additional sales information in the form of case studies, industry lists or another organizational breakdown.
• A description of the company, press releases and job announcements.

This strategy dates to the early days on the Web, back when the first companies were establishing an online presence. And while people have become more knowledgeable and sophisticated in how they use the Internet to make purchasing decisions, most Internet B2B marketing strategies have not evolved beyond trying to create a better landing page.

Once upon a time, the Content Network seemed eternally damned to represent hundreds of thousands of impressions, a few too many hundred clicks, no sales or leads and no idea where in the universe your ads were showing up. I used to just opt out the content network every time since it just seemed to suck up dollars into the black depths of the intranet, never to be seen again.

Then Google AdWords came through and provided transparency into the content network. (Since I don’t advertise ring tones, My Space bling or temporary tattoos, I never thought that I would use the content network again.) Yet here I sit today with profitable content network campaigns and no tattoos! Effectively blocking impression generating and budget eating black holes, seeing exactly what sites are bringing sales, budgeting appropriately and enjoying some very low cpcs.

Today is pi Day, in case you didn’t know. Geeks like us assigned 3/14 as ‘pi day’ because, well, it’s 3.14 and that’s funny. Chuckle chuckle snort.

pi Day is Great. But Why Not e Day?

But I have to stick up for a less known but just as important constant: e.

E is 2.71828 (with lots more numbers after that).

It’s crucial for financial calculations around compound interest, probability, asymptotics and a whole range of other mathematical mind-benders that give me a headache.

Google stated their intent to raise $2,718,281,828 when they filed for their IPO. How geeky is that? Matt, did you have anything to do with the choice of target amount?

We also use e in a lot of Portent’s own tools: Our keyword research tools as well as our keyword quality measurement calculator, to name two.

So let’s give pi a rest. Next year, 2/7 is e Constant Day!

Do you know it all, and just want someone else to take care of it? Or do you need help figuring out what to do? Save yourself a passel of hassle and know what kind of client you are before you call anybody for help.

Matched with a company who understands where you are in the Portent Client Matrix will reduce confusion and frustration and encourage achievement of your goals.

There are several ways to embed Flash on a web page - some are better than others. Here’s the one we’ve found to work best:

First, you’ll need to go to the SWFObject home page to download the javascript. You can also read up on SWFObject here. The example html included inside the zip file should be enough for you to figure it out, but in case you have a short attention-span (like me); I’m going to walk you through it, step by step.

Internet marketing is a blend of technology and creative. When putting together a landing page campaign or whole new site, you have designers who create the art and the developers who make it do magic.

Some companies make the mistake of having their developer also be the designer. Not good. You’ll end up with a really, really large title text in font size 32 mismatched with really small paragraph text in font size 10. Colors will probably consist of black, white, blue or red and no shades in between. Your background will have some sort of funky rainbow gradient. Not to mention the mega indignation from the developer explaining, “Yeah, it doesn’t look great but it works.”

I spoke about search marketing and analytics yesterday, at SEMPDX Searchfest 2008. It was a great conference and a great group!

If you need my slides, here they are:

Just a quick post to let Technorati know that we are indeed who we say we are.

Technorati Profile

Google has introduced a nifty new benchmarking report:

With it, you can see how you measure up against others in your industry. This kind of data is pure gold.

There’s one catch: You have to agree to share your data with Google, so that they can establish the benchmarks.

I strongly, strongly suggest that you do so. Here’s why:

1. The tradeoff: Google gets some basic analytics data that they could have anyway. You get to compare yourself to the rest of your industry. It’s a no-brainer.
2. The data: While you’re giving Google data like pageviews and visits, and they could potentially share this data with your competitors, guess what? Competitors can already get this kind of information through Compete.com (for free) or Hitwise (for a lot of money).
3. It’s anonymous: Your competitors won’t be able to look up “page views for Portent Interactive”. They’ll only see aggregate data for the entire industry. So, for example, I’ll be able to see how Portent Interactive compares to similar internet marketing agencies.

While the jury’s still out on how effective this new benchmarking tool will be, the potential upside is huge: Accurate, free, anonymous information showing how you’re doing compared to the rest of your industry.

Share your data. Everyone will gain for it.

If you want to learn more about Google Analytics Benchmarking and data sharing, visit the FAQ Google’s posted: Click here.

To read Google’s announcement about the new feature, click here.

Last week I attended SMX West. It was a great event, but one session in particular stood out for me: ‘Search Engine Q & A’.

Lead engineers from Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo! and Ask all answered audience questions about search engine policies, what’s OK and what’s not, and the future of search.

One attendee asked, "Do you consider search engine optimization a good thing?"

I braced myself for an answer like, "No, we think you’re the scum of the earth".

But, first Google’s Matt Cutts, then every other engineer on stage, all answered that they considered ethical search engine optimization a good thing. No hemming and hawing, no hesitation.

Search Engines Want SEO?!

Yes. Ethical, smart search engine optimization works to:

• Create well-structured, easily-categorized web sites.
• Write great content.
• Make that content accessible to search engines.
• Make sure the search engines find the stuff.

The Market Rules

Great search engine optimization only makes the search engines better. They reciprocate by giving you a higher ranking. It’s a market of sorts, where the content creators have every incentive to deliver the best-quality information on the best-quality sites, and the search engines have every incentive to show that content.

Support the Market, and You’ll Benefit

Hire ethical, smart SEO agencies that will help you make long-term, sustainable improvements to your rankings. Don’t hire so-called miracle workers who promise fast, easy results. If it sounds to good to be true, it is.

The Pitch

Yes, it’s the Portent Interactive blog, so there’s a Portent Interactive pitch.

We’ve been practicing the kind of ‘white hat’ search engine optimization the search engines love for 10 years. You can learn more about our services by clicking any of the links below:

Search Engine Optimization Services
Portent’s $999 SEO Checkup
SEO Packages
Portent’s SEO Code of Ethics