Archive for June, 2008
Social media marketing is the new frontier in marketing for many businesses, large or small. There has never been a better way to reach a mass audience, already engaged and ready to receive information.
The larger social media sites—MySpace or Facebook—are primarily populated by younger people with a bit more disposable income to spend on various products or services. However, in addition to these social media powerhouses, there are a number of smaller sites out there, catering to this same audience. Many businesses are taking advantage of the unfettered access to this audience by taking on a new form of advertising.
Social media marketing throws out the old rules of marketing in the forms of print advertising or billboards and instead, utilizes the Web to reach an audience. Think of it like this, for the more traditional forms of advertising, media outlets and cable channels displayed adverts that were not interactive during news programming or other shows similar to a news format. The major difference in social media marketing is that the user controls it. And it targets the people looking for your product or service and avoids those who are not.
Blogs have also become more popular in the social media marketing realm because they often develop a dedicate readership and you can often integrate advertising content into the general topic of the blog, getting your message out on a subconscious level. Blogs allow you to reach a segmented audience who is already interested in your topic; it’s simply up to you to tout your service or product to close the deal.
Social media marketing allows businesses to think outside the box when it comes to reaching their customers. Taking advantage of these online options can not only enhance your existing business, but also allow you an opportunity to reach a new audience you may not have otherwise had access to without the benefits of social media marketing.
Tags: social media marketing
Sometimes the best way to understand what to do in web design is by knowing what not to do. Here are a list of things you can be sure will anger your visitors; and remember angry visitors spend less than happy ones.
1. Pop-ups
There is not much need for explanation here. Pop-ups are just annoying; especially the ones that are impossible to close. Some claim that pop-ups are still an effective way of advertising, I have trouble understanding this considering most web browsers now come with pop-up blockers already enabled.
2. Slow loading pages
I have said this over and over again; most website visitors are not patient. If your page takes too long to load they will move on! It’s much better to have a page that is plain but loads than one that has too much on it and takes forever. A page should load in under 4 seconds.
3. Flash intros you can’t skip
Flash intros may seem cool but if there is no skip button you are really going to annoy returning visitors.
4. Sites that need extra software
Remember not everyone has the same software. You may think that you are safe making most of your site in Flash but remember not all people have Flash software on their computer. Make sure to have an alternative for the users who may not have the appropriate software.
5. No contact information
Don’t make contacting you harder then it has to be. Nothing is more frustrating then trying to get in touch with a company who has hidden their contact information.
6. Bad Navigation
Make sure getting around in your site is easy. It should be as easy to go to the next page as it to go back to the fist.
7. Clutter
Try to use heading and sub-heading to separate content. This will make information easier to read and will make it simple to find what you want.
8. Unreadable text
Make sure your text is readable. This means dark text on a light background. Just keep it simple it will make it look much more professional.
9. Out of date sites
Update your site often. If you don’t people will think you are out of touch and they won’t want to work with you.
10. Registration required
If at all possible don’t make registration required to see your site. I get that you want to get people’s information but you can find a more clever way of doing that. People are way more likely to give you their info once they have seen what you have to offer.
Search engine giant Google seems to be constantly coming up with ways to make surfing the Net a better experience for everyone. Consumers can find just about anything with the entry of a simple keyword and businesses, no matter what product or service they offer, can use the multitude of Google’s advertising and promotions-based programs to deliver more eyeballs to their Web site. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the company’s latest venture, Google Ad Planner, is anticipated to be a huge success.
This invitation-only media planning tool essentially helps advertisers connect with publishers of other Web sites. The gist of the program is that an advertiser can enter demographics and Web sites that are associated in some way with the audience they are trying to target and then the Google Ad Planner tool will give information on the Web sites that the target audience is most likely to visit. What’s even better is that you can then get even more detail on the demographics and search information for a specific site. Google Ad planner will even give you aggregate stats on the sites you choose to add to your media plan. I think the very best part is that Google will return sites in your search that are not even a part of the Google advertising base. So there is no bias in this program; it really does operate with the user’s need in mind. However, you can filter through the sites that carry Google AdSense, if that information is important to you for the sites you are trying to target.
It is important to note that the Google Ad planner program does not give advertisers an opportunity to get in touch with Web site operators or content owners directly; that is still something you have to do on your own. Additionally, there is not an opportunity at this time for Web site operators to get involved in a brokerage system of sorts through this program.
This program is definitely designed with media planners in mind and can definitely be useful for business-minded professionals for whom marketing is a top priority.
Tags: google
Increasing the number of inbound links to your website is a critical part of any SEO campaign. Since the search engines rate your website partially based on how popular it is (the number of backlinks you have), getting better and more backlinks to your website will help improve your rankings.
One critical element that is often overlooked in developing an inbound linking strategy is the importance of obtaining deep links to your website. A deep link is pretty much any link that goes to your website that does NOT point at the homepage. With deep linking, you want to build links to the important internal pages of your website. This will help improve the PageRank of these internal pages and the pages that they link to.
Focus on deep linking when:
* Your homepage has a high PageRank but important internal pages have little or none (this may also be a symptom of a bad internal linking strategy)
* A good number of pages on your website aren’t getting indexed by the search engines
* You’ve optimized internal pages on your website for highly competitive search terms
As you would do with homepage link requests, you’ll want to seek keyword-rich links from relevant websites for the internal pages on your website. Since most free website directories won’t give you links to internal pages on your website, you may want to consider paying for links or exchanging links for these pages. Of course, the better and more useful the content is on your internal pages, the easier it will be to get good links.
Tags: internal linking
There are probably a million web design rules out there and it can be really overwhelming when you are just trying to focus on what is important. So I explain the “Four critical web design rules” as stated by Nicolas LaPolla.
1. Make sure your page is easy to read
Most people do not actually go through and read everything on a page. They scan the page to find the information they are looking for. If a person cannot find what they are looking for in the first couple second they are on the site they will most likely move on to a different site. To make it easier for the reader try to break up your content. Use headers and sub-headers to make it simple to stop what you are looking for. Keywords can also help make it trouble-free to find information.
Font and background colors are important too. Make sure there is a large contrast between the text and the background and keep your back ground plain.
2. Simplify Navigation
From the beginning (design stage) you should think about how your readers are going to get from one page of your site to the next. The general rule is that a visitor should be able to get to the page they want with no more than three clicks of a mouse. To simplify this have a clear navigation bar and repeat it at the bottom of the page. A menu on the side of the page can also be helpful. Use links that lead to other pages in your sites. If you do it well this can really help your SEO (search engine optimization).
3. Consistent Design
In my opinion this might be the most important rule. Keep your pages similar. It is generally a good idea to use the same layout (2 can be acceptable). You want your design to flow from one page to the next. This does not mean that ever page has to look exactly alike, but you want your readers to feel like they are on the same site as they click through your pages. Keep your navigation bars in the same place and keep the same color scheme and fonts.
4. Lower Page Weight is Better
You want to keep the weight of your page low because the page will load faster. If a page takes too long to load you will loose your visitor’s interest and they may decide to just visit a different page. This means avoid all large images or too many images. You should never have a page above 64K but try to keep it even lighter then that at about 35K.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- from ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka
What you’ll need:
(1) Credit Card
(1) Mailing Address
(1) Week
(0) Insecurities
Like Samsa, it became me. Just pure, unbridled word-nerdery.
My first stop—Unicomp Keyboards.
I kicked it back to the elementary school typing class days and purchased an IBM Model-M keyboard. The thing is a tank and features that classic buckling-spring clack-clack-clack sound and feel when you depress the keys.
What could be interpreted as just another laughable case of cultural irony, was, at least for me, a comforting blanket of nostalgia.
My next point of unnecessary spending brought me to Turn Nocturnal for what was quite possibly the epitome of guilty-pleasure purchases over the course of the transformation—a tshirt of San Serifs.
“Not too bad,” I thought to myself. But who was I fooling. It was quintessential word-nerd.
When the keyboard finally arrived, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon this little gem. Type Racer.
Remember those speed typing tests cleverly masked as games to make typing class a little less lame than it already was? Well, they’re back. This time in the form of VW Beetles and excerpts from famous books and screenplays. Nothing about it makes sense, but once you experience that initial crushing victory, you’ll understand.
I’ve yet to achieve the final stage, but I hear it’s exploding all over the Internet and accumulating a large base of non-typographers. FontStruct. It’s free, too easy to use, and available as what I’m assuming to be a plugin as an on-site tool.
Tags: how to
Do you find that people are coming to your site but not doing anything while they are there? It can often be difficult to understand why your conversion rate is low. People are obviously interested in what you are offering because they have clicked on your ad, so why aren’t they going through with a purchase? Below I will discuss 9 tips that Michael Mattis at the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog claims will improve your conversion rates.
1. “Connect the search experience to the landing page experience”
This means you should use the same keywords on your ad as on your landing page. If your ad says that you are offering web design service then make sure your landing page isn’t selling graphic design services. The person that clicks on your ad is going to want to see that thing when he arrives on your landing page.
2. “Integrate your landing page into your site”
As always all the pages on your site should be consistent and this includes your landing page. If your landing page is different from the rest of your site it could appear unprofessional and this could worry people and prevent them from buying your products.
3. “Gain their trust”
Of course many people are still skeptical about buying online due to a fear of fraud. This anxiety may be keeping people from purchasing on your site. A way to overcome this is to use third party security providers and make sure that their icons are displayed where they are easy to see.
4. “Offer tips and suggestions”
A good way to get consumers to buy your product is to give them examples of what they can do with it. This can be anything from providing food recipes to or explaining 30 ways to use VoIP. The object is to let the customer envision what they can do with your product. This is also a good opportunity to introduce another one of your products. You can put more than one of your products in a recipe or explain how your shampoo works even better with the conditioner that goes with it; but be very careful not to push it.
5. “Stay on target”
This one is similar to number 1. If your ad is for great red wine make sure your landing page is not full of different types of reds, whites, roses and champagnes. People clicked on your ad because it said red wine, so this must be what they like. Of course nothing prevents you from having links to other pages but don’t try to sell everything at once.
6. “Cut the clutter”
This is pretty similar to the tip above. Keep it simple. A page that is too cluttered or generic seems unprofessional. Additionally you are allowing people to get lost and that is the last thing you want. You want to keep their attention focused. If they stop thinking about what they want they will just go back to what they were doing.
7. “Ban your bling”
Somehow people have been lead to believe that if they had a lot of sound and animation on their page people would pay more attention. Today these things are synonymous with low quality and low reliability. Plus animation and sound are just plain distracting; remember you are trying to keep people focused. Make sure your page is simple and professional. People will judge your webpage by its design.
8. “Give them something to do”
It is a good idea to be a little interactive. This is especially important when you are selling big ticket purchases. Examples of this are 360-degree tours and photo-galleries. Extra information will help your consumers feel more reassured and reduce cognitive dissonance.
9. “Write right”
The language you use is important. Try to be concise and get straight to the point. And try to include some persuasive messages.
Tags: conversion rates
Tangible and the intangible—something you can feel, smell and taste versus a concept or an idea—it’s the crux of some tired and drawn out debates. One I can name off the top of my head—religion—has probably claimed a few more lives than social media; but the question still remains, is it more engaging than the traditional mediums?
Well, yes and no…
What Bob Hoffman misunderstands in ‘A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing‘ is that the Internet was never really intended to retire traditional medias but, instead, act as another weapon to the marketing arsenal as a whole.
Where Television and Radio and Print advertisements drop the baton, Social Media Marketing picks it back up and delivers, regardless of location or socioeconomic status.
“[television]. You interact with the medium all the time. You change the channel. You turn the volume up and down. You lighten and darken the picture. But you don’t think of it as an interactive medium because you can’t interact with the content,” says Hoffman.
Fair enough, but local stations aside, a cable subscription costs money and is certainly not portable. Internet access may come with a price, but public libraries, and the wildfire that is free WiFi have made it nearly impossible not to use and experience the Internet whether at work, school, or home.
“So the best hope for the web as a truly interactive marketing medium is the conversation, i.e. social marketing. I am sure there are wonderful examples of marketers building valuable and profitable social networks… For every success you post, I can post a hundred failures. Let’s make that a thousand.”
A thousand, in case that startled some, is a just a random number the ill-formed toss around for dramatic effect. If I had to assume, “success” in this case is defined strictly as conversion, a sale, and only the sale. Social Media Marketing, on the other hand, is a different animal. Where television ads are given 30 to 60 seconds to sell you on a product or an idea, the Internet has no such time-restriction, and social media serves as its salesman, fleshing out and closing the sale.
Social Media Marketing accomplishes 2 goals—other than working towards a ROI—that other mediums do not.
•It can reach a broad to extremely defined demographic regardless of location.
•In comparison to traditional marketing platforms, it has a less demanding initial investment.
While my heart will always be with traditional media—print advertising in particular—my mind presides in social media marketing; it’s still relatively new and consistently expanding, and offers new and highly-interactive outlets to reach an audience.
At the end of the day, I believe Mr. Hoffman and both factions-traditional and new media—are invaluable and have a lot to teach one another.
Tags: social media marketing
A disadvantage of SEO is the time lag that occurs before you see results from your efforts. First, you need to build an SEO-friendly website, research keywords, write copy, build links, etc… Despite all your hard work, you won’t likely see results for a few months. This makes testing new things and measuring results difficult. The advantage, of course, is the free traffic you get to your website.
Pay per click advertising, on the other hand, allows you to obtain instant results. If you decide today that you want to test a new landing page, ad copy and new keywords, you can have your ad in the #1 (paid) position in just a day or two. Testing and optimizing your paid campaigns can be done quickly and results are reported immediately.
Most businesses today realize that they need to actively pursue both organic and pay per click search advertising. What most businesses don’t realize is how to make these campaigns work together. Here’s one way.
Run a PPC Campaign Before Optimizing Your Website for Organic Search
When launching a new website or SEO campaign, sometimes the best tactic for developing your organic search strategy is to start by running a pay per click campaign. Do this to identify the keywords that will convert the best for you.
Start by developing a list of keyword phrases that you want to use to optimize your website for organic search. Next, run a pay per click using these keywords. You may want to broad-match your keywords so you can identify any variations of your original keyword list that may work well. You’ll also want to make sure that you do NOT advertise on the content network. The landing page for this campaign should be the same page that you plan to optimize.
Tracking Your Results
Over the course of a couple days or weeks, track your results considering the following:
* Conversion rate – Which keywords had the highest conversion rate?
* Impressions – How many impressions did each keyword get? This gives you an idea about which keywords are most frequently searched.
Keep testing until you find combinations of keywords and landing pages that will give you the traffic and conversions that you need. Once you’ve identified a set of proven keywords, get to work on optimizing your website.
Granted, the title of this post is a little strange. This is especially true because this post isn’t going to have much to do with Web SEO specialists in NYC. I actually think that a more appropriate title for this would be something like How to Find the ‘Low-hanging Fruit’ During Keyword Research. I’ll explain why I used this title in a bit. For now, I want to talk about the competition factor when considering keywords to optimize your website for.
Previously, Michelle wrote a great post outlining some important keyword research techniques. In her article, she mentioned the importance of taking keyword competition into account when selecting a main keyword phrase. Today, I’d like to go more in depth about this.
‘Low Hanging’ Keywords
Since one goal of SEO is to get more qualified traffic to your website, it makes sense to optimize your website for keywords phrases that are frequently searched. However, if you can’t get your website to the top of the rankings, you won’t likely see any traffic from your keyword phrases, no matter how often they are searched. Once you’ve identified keywords that people use to find your product or service, you need to consider the amount of competition you’ll have when trying to rank high for those keywords. By choosing keywords with less competition, you’ll have a much easier time getting and staying at the top of the search results.
There are many tools available on the web for researching keyword competition. One easy way to determine the amount of competition a keyword phrase has is to search for it in quotes. For example, if I wanted to determine the number of websites that I’d be competing with for the term red tennis shoes, I’d go to google.com and type “red tennis shoes”. Once the results came back, I can see that 63,700 other websites use that term.
Just the same, if I use the same method and this time search for “new red tennis shoes”, Google tells me that only 11 other websites use that phrase.
Since only 11 other websites are related to the term red tennis shoes, it will be much easier to obtain a high ranking for this term.
The ‘low-hanging’ keywords that I mentioned before are ones that not only have little competition, but also have a good search frequency. From our example, if people were searching for new red tennis shoes as often as they searched for red tennis shoes, I would definitely optimize for new red tennis shoes. Keep in mind I’ve only used these terms for demonstration purposes.
The title Web SEO Specialists in NYC is also an example of a keyword phrase that I would consider to be a ‘low-hanging’ keyword. I stumbled upon this keyword phrase the other day while doing research in WordTracker. I noticed that this phrase had only 220 websites competing for it (which is pretty low for just about any SEO-related term). Additionally, there is pretty high search volume for this term (a couple hundred per day). Since THAT Agency offers a variety SEO services, it seemed like a good idea to try to grab a good ranking for that keyword phrase. Hopefully this post will move toward the top of the rankings and generate some traffic for our website.
Making flowplayer.swf files play in IE where gzip is enabled
Ipad 2, get ready
THAT Agency launches hotel website for Iron Horse Hotel
2010 Social Media Statistics
THAT Agency designs and develops website for Club Safari
THAT Agency launches Scozia Insurance
NYJTL partners with THAT Agency for new website
THAT Agency launches WhyWeight
Online B2B Advertising with LinkedIn DirectAds
A Quick Way to Measure the SEO Value of Press Releases
Kat : Thanks so much. Great little s
cili : When having images and text, t
Jean Has Been Shopping : I figured it out. In style.cs
Jean Has Been Shopping : Love this theme, and all of th
egollas : How can I change the slide up
Liberty wrestling : You know, I wish there had bee
Lovers : This is good stuff...right her
hunter : I am so lazy sometimes, althou
Rick : You've not had success with us
Dorothy : Love the theme. But can't figu
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