Inbound Marketing Blog

Clients always ask me, “What’s the next Facebook?” Given the turbulent ride of MySpace, and the slow mainstream growth of Twitter, I understand why clients would ask this question. They want to know if Facebook will be around - and popular - in a few years and worth the utilization efforts and investment. They also wonder what platform is going to explode next year so they can jump on now and be ahead of the curve. When I’m asked this I often laugh. I feel like they are asking me what will the stock market do next year. I have no idea - and neither does anyone else. It’s impossible to predict the future, so we have to rely on educated guesses and make assumptions and predictions based on historical data.more

Take a look at the following commercial. Take detailed notes of any thought in your mind during your viewing. Pop some popcorn and enjoy.more

Keeping in theme with my last post, Transforming in the Digital Age, I think it’s interesting and entertaining to look back at early uses of the Internet and Web technologies and the changes over time - it provides comic relief and demonstrates how Web technology has evolved from user demands and feedback. Today the Internet is about content and providing a valuable user experience, but it wasn’t always that way - remember silly “splash” homepages and animated flash sites with elevator music? Back in the day website functionality was not only trendy, it was an adventure. I thought it would be fun to compile a list of these hilarious out-of-date features. From the early days of the Web to Web 2.0, a list of the silliest and most obnoxious website features from the past:more

It’s no question that things change quickly, faster now than ever before. We’re both blessed and cursed with the pace of change, the impact of technology on our ability to do more with less - and do it faster, often finding distractions and efficiencies in the same tools. My three year anniversary at MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry is coming up, so I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned.....more

Over the past few weeks I have been blessed with a plethora of Web analytic data to mine and analyze. Although some of you may want to stop reading here, I promise this is not about data mining, but more about a typically missed listening channel. While scanning through endless analytic accounts, I started to notice a trend of a piece of data missing in each site’s analytic data. This is where the data analysis guys/gals typically start to throw up their arms and walk out the door. So instead of doing that, I decided to sit down and write this article with the hopes of helping you gain lost insights and a better perspective of what your visitors are telling you.more

Many students and educators are blessed by the opportunities available to engage with our agencies, Hanon McKendry and MINDSCAPE, and the people who make us who we are. We open our doors often to the curious minds that seek to know more about the advertising and Web industries we serve. While we give them an opportunity to learn, we also receive…in the enthusiasm, the freshness, the vulnerability of these curiosity seekers. We now also receive in another way.more

Link tagging is one ninja-like feature built into Google Analytics is surprisingly powerful and rarely used outside of AdWords campaigns. Link tagging allows you to tag nearly any link with some special values to gain some interesting insights into your traffic sources. To Tag or Not To Tag So, why on earth would someone want to use link tagging? Well, link tagging allows us to see visitors from a particular email campaign. It would help us to identify visitors from a specific tweet or Facebook post. It’s really a very simple thing to do, it’s easy to get started and it can provide a lot of insight into your traffic sources. The first thing to understand about link tagging is that you don’t need to tag everything and you can’t tag some stuff. Organic traffic is impossible to tag. No matter how much of an analytics ninja you are, you just can’t tag organic traffic. If you use Google AdWords, you don’t need to tag those because Google already does that for you. If, however, you are using a different paid advertising campaign or any email campaigns, you will definitely want to tag those.more

As I was organizing some papers, I came across an old marketing piece from the late nineties. Done by the Gardner Group in 1998, it illustrates how businesses can embrace the Internet (back then called e-business) and ultimately transform to efficient and powerful enterprises.more

We are very fortunate to work with over 1,000 clients these days, from multi-billion dollar international companies to local mom-and-pop shops. This wide range of clientele allows us to gain a vast array of experience. Something I experienced this past week was working with one of our larger clients and setting goals for 2012. Before working with us, their 2011 goals were centered around getting to the top of the search engines. Their goal wasn't to just be on the front page, they wanted to be no lower than number 3 in Google. And it worked! As great of a goal as that sounds, I was able to quickly point out several cases where they dominated the search engines for the key phrases they were targeting. But in the end, the traffic driven to the site was minimal at best.more

If you’re a reader of this blog, chances are at some point in your career or life you will be a part of a team that builds and launches a new (or improved) website. For those of you who have launched a website, how were the first couple of days? Websites are a lot of work. They take weeks or months to plan, design, develop, create content and get to the point of going live. Website beta testing is done internally by your staff, your Web team and those you know. Given all this hard work, going live is a HUGE milestone, right?! It makes sense to want to tell people the day it goes live.more

Google, Bing, Yahoo – oh my! Over the past several months, search engines have been toughening up on quality keyword optimized content. With the Panda update, effective February, 2011, search engines are cracking down on inserting meaningful keywords, so that those inserted haphazardly cannot prevent your Web content from reaching search results. When writing copy for a website, press release, blog or other published venue, writers must not take the importance of keyword placement lightly. If there aren’t keywords in your content for search engines to locate, they will not place you highly in search results. It’s that simple. Of course, everyone wants to place as highly as possible in search engines, but how is it done? It can be tricky – but once you know the steps to take, it will be a breeze.more

Many companies want to know what the impact of social media is on sales. Unfortunately, there is not a magic formula that will say “for every fan we get on social media, we’ll get XX in sales”. But, using some super cool tricks in Google Analytics will help make some reasonable assumptions about social media’s impact on sales. For example, let’s say that you are selling widgets, and these widgets are only available for purchase by contacting your company. You write a blog about how cool your widgets are, listing out the features and benefits. You then provide a series of postings on social media, driving people to your blog about widgets (using tagged links, of course!). You also use some traditional methods like paid advertisements, etc. Over the next six months, your company sells 500 widgets. But how many of those came from social media?more

While shopping the LEGO website the other day, I ran across a free application they provide called LEGO Digital Designer. With it, you can assemble bricks from the included palette, then package and upload your creation back to the site. This looked pretty fun so I gave the software a whirl. Now, I am not a professional 3D modeler, but I do have experience in a few tools, such as Blender, and expect a few necessities in a 3D modeling application. LEGO Digital Designer does not have them. But that’s OK, I thought. I’ll just play around with it. For an experiment, I decided to model the building I work in, 25 Ottawa SW, Grand Rapids, MI, the home of MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry. My goal was to capture the feel of the building (being that it is LEGO and not a precise, 3D replica) without getting into too much detail. Well, that’s hard for me to do, and before too long, I found myself agonizing over placing bricks exactly where they should be to accurately reflect the building’s layout. Then I would take a step back, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m just capturing the building’s essence. Then it would get fun again.more

More changes to Facebook! YAY! I’m sure you've noticed that Facebook has, once again, made some changes. Given the amount of time it’s been since we’ve seen any major updates, it’s about time they rolled out something new and different, right? Here’s a breakdown of the major updates and, of course, my thoughts on them.more

At Mindscape, I've really been jumping head first into mobile web development for the last year. I find it interesting to create something that works across the board on several different devices. We're at a point where we're starting to offer this to clients, and surely the question of "Why do I need a mobile site?" is going to come up a lot more frequently. So I thought I'd address some of the key benefits to creating a mobile-friendly website in this article. Keep in mind that developing a mobile site doesn't necessarily mean creating a separate site for mobile devices. It has more to do with creating a site elastic enough to display nicely on whatever device your end user is viewing it on.more

I was talking to my brother the other night and somehow we got on the conversation of online advertising and not wasting money. Somewhere in the midst of this discussion I gave an example of making sure you are not paying for visits when a searcher is putting your business name in their search phrase. This is a waste of your money, because the intended user already knows they want to go to your site. Why not let them click the free organic link? In a very quick response he came back with a great analogy: “That is like giving every customer that walks in your door a dollar for showing up when they intended to anyways.”more

Much like measuring the results of traditional marketing (TV ads, billboards, ect), it’s difficult to analyze exactly what your social media efforts are doing to help promote your brand. In it’s purest form, “social media” is essentially the digital representation of social interaction. How do you truly measure the ROI of attending a network event? Or talking with someone about your business? You don’t- because you can’t but you do these things because you know that it’s piece of a bigger puzzle and can eventually lead to future sales. The same is true about social media: the impacts of engaging are not entirely known. But, if you are willing to spend a bit of time and put your thinking cap on, you can analyze some data and provide some tangible results.more

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “We have two ears and one mouth, and therefore we should listen more than we speak.” I’ve heard it so many times that it’s permanently ingrained into my brain. How about you? As I explore the social web it seems as though companies completely forget this saying and utilize social media like traditional “interruption marketing.” You know the companies I’m talking about. They’re easy to identify when you are viewing your Facebook or Twitter news feed. You constantly see their updates letting you know about the “great deal” they are offering, or messages encouraging you to “buy now.” They post so frequently that the content you’d like to see gets lost in all the noise. It’s as though the marketing people within these companies completely forgot about delivering VALUE to their “fans” and “followers.” If you happen to be one of these “marketers,” and you’ve somehow forgotten what brings the most value to your clients, I’ve got a tip for you. Become an active “listener” so you can get back to the basics of delivering as much VALUE as possible.more

Content is everything. Content informs, educates, fulfills, inspires and helps your audience gain trust in your brand. It’s the act of giving them what they want, not telling them what you think they should know. In essence, it’s hitting them “right there.” Content keeps your audience on the edge of their chair, or makes them fall out of it when it’s really, really good. It’s not simply words on a page. It’s a page, or video, or post or workshop full of information that really means something to the audience. There are tons of types of content, but here are my personal favorites.more

A month ago, I wrote about the Google Page service. The Page Service caches your static content and serves it up from their servers for faster page views. It sounds great in theory, and perhaps it will perform well in practice. Currently, it’s still in a beta period and available to only a small set of webmasters. While I was researching that article, I stumbled upon a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare already does what the Google Page service does, but also protects your sites from known threats like spambots, can auto-minify your site’s CSS and Javascript files, hides your email address from any spambot that may get through, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Basically, they level the playing field for small websites. A small website no longer has to pay large sums of money to get the security and reach that giant, corporate websites get. And Cloudflare manages to do it all for free.more