As search engines continue to change and evolve the way they rank websites, content marketing is what is making companies and people stand out. It’s about the content, really! To create great content you need to:more
In a recent strategy development session with all the creative folks here, I had asked a couple of the team members to take notes for me since my whiteboarding abilities are… well, not very structured. After our session, I asked a new team member to start putting together the findings in our standard format. He struggled a bit to pull everything together and it was at this point I realized we did not have a good way of thinking through strategies and documenting them in a way that could be easily understood.more
The other day I got a postcard from a local B2B firm inviting me to a product show. To attend, just register online. So I entered the website listed on the card and there I was on their home page. So…now I need to search the site to find where to fill out my form to RSVP? What a pain. It would have been great if they’d created a landing page on their website specifically for the show instead of forcing me to click all over looking for the form.more
Brands Get a Facebook Face-Lift! You've likely noticed a few changes in your Facebook brand page lately. In case you haven’t, you will soon. Facebook announced that the Timeline feature is now available for brand pages. The new pages will mimic user profiles, allowing brands to display their history and provide a rich experience for the user. With the recent upgrades, it's important to make sure that your Facebook page conveys the right message! The new interface changes a variety of commonly used features currently available to page admins. Here is an overview of the most important changes that page admins need to be aware of:more
I just received two emails from Internet marketer Trey Smith. The first email's subject line read: "Update" I didn't read it. But then about 90 minutes later, I received another email with the subject line: "SERVER CRASH! (Woooo hooo!)" I immediately opened it to learn what happened. It's curiosity. The email read:more
It’s 2012. Is this the year your website will work as hard as you do? A well-planned, thoughtfully designed website that positions your business to grow like crazy using the power of the Web isn’t cheap. For a business owner or manager, it can be difficult to know just when to approve the investment in a new website. Below are some thought starters on when to pony-up.more
It happens so often. A business gets excited about the idea of blogging on their website. Post after post goes up, the bosses gush and everyone is excited. But the charm fizzles after a while, and a blog ends up totally inactive or as a catchall for sporadic self-promotional messages. Readers flee and the whole thing becomes, “Yeah, we tried it but it didn’t really work for us.” As with any business initiative, successful blogging requires a plan. If executed properly, having a blog on your website offers many benefits to enhance your online presence. First, blogs provide current and relevant content to your site visitors. Trends in technology, new government or regulatory policies, discoveries for a new use of a product, etc. – anything that affects your industry is useful information to your readers.more
Online Reviews: Why Should I Care? Taking a vacation these days is precious. With demands on our time from work, home, and community, we want (and need!) the best trip possible. When my husband and I went to Mexico a few years ago, I spent hours on TripAdvisor reading reviews posted by average people. Those reviews helped steer us to book at the resort we chose, which wasn’t cheap. When we got home, I couldn’t wait to write my own review! TripAdvisor’s site says they have over 50 million reviews on 85,000 establishments, with 23 reviews per minute being posted. Readers of the reviews are potential customers of every hotel or restaurant they investigate. A positive or negative review can literally change a buyer’s mind without any further research or information.more
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
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
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
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
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
If you’ve been through the Mindscape Internet Marketing Academy, you know that it’s important to do your keyword research, filter the list based upon your research, and then start changing your on-page content elements to work in those keywords. However, after doing that, how do you know if you’re really gaining any traction? If you know the keywords you’re targeting, measuring the impact of your efforts is actually quite easy using Google Analytics!more
Contrary to popular belief, the “thrill” of social media has not gone away; if anything, it’s in full swing! I know this because of the increasing amount of questions that we receive from prospects and clients about social media. One of the most common questions I receive from people is how to get more fans/followers. I’ll be honest with you- it’s a question I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ve researched ways to build your fan base, talked to numerous social media folks, and observed what other brands have done trying to get an idea of what the best tactics/strategies are to build a fan base. There are a lot of ideas out there on how to do this, but I still find it difficult to determine exactly what you can really do to build your fan base.more
Google is once again trying to improve search with the release of their latest feature named Google Instant Preview. Basically you'll be able to roll over a magnifying glass icon and get a screenshot view of the website you'd be visiting if you click. This isn't a new concept, but new from Google. There are browser add-ons you can get such as CoolPreviews that give you this same functionality.more
Facebook and Microsoft's search engine Bing came to a new partnership agreement. The following was reported by Bloomberg on October 13, 2010: "Facebook Inc. expanded its partnership with Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, letting people automatically see what their Facebook friends think about the topics they’re seeking information on. Bing’s new search screen also will let users become a person’s friend on Facebook or send a message to the social- networking service, Microsoft and Facebook said today at a media event in Mountain View, California. Searches for restaurants or movies will spotlight the ones that a user’s friends like." Whoa. Re-read that last sentence. "Searches for restaurants or movies will spotlight the ones that a user’s friends like."more
Ok, if you've spent any time inviting friends on Facebook to become a fan of something, you know it can take forever. Here's some quick instructions on how to invite all your friends instantly.more
It's interesting to look at the process people go through when starting a new website ... Once they decide they need a site they begin to plan what content they'd like to have on the site. The majority of the companies decide they need a page that talks about them so they add an "About Us" page to their site. Secondly they would like to talk about their products or services so they add a "Products" or "Services" page to their site. The most important part to the new website is giving it's visitors the ability to contact them to do business or ask questions which is where the infamous "Contact Us" page comes from. I could go on and on but I am guessing you've seen these types of pages on almost every website you've ever been to, so I won't bore you. I am sure when you decided to get your first website online you had the intention of increasing your business and tapping into the "gold mine" the Internet makes available to us all. Heck, this was my initial motivation as well and I'm sure this is no earth shattering revelation. Well the problem with this process of developing a website is unfortunately absolutely wrong. No, I'm not saying you won't make any sales or receive any phone calls by structuring your website this way. I am just saying you are limiting the potential revenue by doing it and you could do MUCH better.more
