Strategic E-Marketing kibble for the brain…

Ok we know its been a while since my last post - (c’mon I have a company to run ;O) ) so we wont dwell on it. Let’s move on…

As we all know, Bing.com is the new (or relatively new) search engine. They’re making big pushes marketing wise and have ads popping up a little bit everywhere.

So Googled SEO’ed sites on Bing’s SERPs are producing very different results that the other primary search engines.

Do we know what Search Engine indexing methods / alogo’s they are using?

Will this now be considered another Primary?

Upon looking into the situation a little more closely - There seems to be an individual Tim Grice over at SEOWIZZ who has looked into the Bing/Google conundrum. (thanks Tim)http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/bing-seo-how-does-it-differ-to-google.html

Link posted here to Google and Bing SEO -

If what he is saying is in fact true (yet to be tested by me if that warrants merit), then we’re going to have some interesting results. Although there seem to be many of the comments in relation to his post who are in fact stating equivalency between both engines…

Coincidence? Opinions please…

Could it be that Bing, is more sensitive to certain aspects Google SEO factors and methodologies. I suppose the ol’ adage holds true.

The best SEO is just to make a proper site.

Thoughts?

If you’re not already aware - Twitter was hacked. And has eluded to Paid Tweets. The horror. You think? I’m thinking wow - Strategic E-Marketing at play here - ok not the hack - I’m referring to the paid tweets.

As per E-Consultancy “Twitter has a really bad weekend”, they’ll outline the full series of events.

Y’know - There shouldn’t really be any surprise that -

1. Companies, promoters, or general e-marketer will take advantage of a platform growing in popularity.

Everyone is outraged! Paid Tweets will remove the authenticity of the tweets. Boo hoo. Is pay per tweet right? Well with the current popularity, and our ability to properly use metrics to assess the *clicks* - it’s a viable method of getting out there… especially with all the RSS being fed by Tweets. Damn powerful - so right - well it’s not not right - but there should be for example a method of distinguishing between paid and unpaid tweets. This would at least give the readers a chance.

2. Of course people are going to try and hack Twitter. Just like they do any social media growing in popularity. It is somewhat of a nuissance, but ultimately hacks expose weaknesses and force the companies to be better, smarter and stronger… I’m not pro-hack but good does come from these situations… after the dust settles. Imagine Windows without hacks. ;O)

Will Twitter be a thing of the past… nah… it just took a dent in the door - they’ll be fine. They’ll get things together and make things better.

Hell - we’re still talking about ‘em and will be for a long time I feel.

Your thoughts?

I’ve decided to go back to basics and describe E-Marketing for the masses. I’ve been shocked and appalled by the number of people who have come to associate spam and E-Marketing.

It’s happened in quite a few instances now that when asked what LinguaCounsel is and how it can help them… if I use a definition including the term “E-Marketing”, they automatically say – “Oh, but we don’t spam our prospects.” and go on to give me the stink eye.

The definition of E-Marketing is vast, yet simple. So for the masses…

E-Marketing is the use of the Internet as a vehicle to deliver strategic marketing initiatives.

Often this involves a website conceived a certain way, the way in which you communicate your corporate message online, methods used to rank higher in search engines so a site is easier for you to find, Pay Per Click (yes those annoying banners used to be part of it)… etc… And yes, dare I say it… e-mail can be considered part of E-Marketing.

However, there are laws governing what “SPAM” really is. And yes - SPAM, all SPAM should be reported.

I’ll start with the SPAM portion of the article, otherwise I feel I’ll lose half of you to scanning the article looking for the term “SPAM”.

So we probably figured out by now, I’m not referring to canned meat. So “SPAM” by my definition is the sending of unsolicited mail without the sender providing real contact information and the choice or ability of opting out of receiving future communications from the sender.

So on to how to successfully use E-Marketing. Believe it or not E-Marketing is highly strategic as it must connect a multi-faceted marketing approach to support your sales staff.  Each facet must propel and benefit off the other.

Here’s a step-by-step to setting up your own successful Strategic E-Marketing Campaign.

1.    Decide/Define your  target market

2.    Research your competitors and their actions

3.    Gear your website to emphasize your offering while creating must-click calls to action

4.    Create traffic generators targeted at your target audience (SEO, PPC, Blog)

5.    Enable RSS and Social Media plug-ins and email campaigns (NOT SPAM)

6.    Publish Articles/White papers/Reviews/Reports on to an e-wire

7.    Create properly crafted landing pages with strategic call to actions to support SEO,PPC, Blog and Articles, etc…

8.    Become involved in target related Blogs and Forums

9.    Measure results through specialized software

10.  Continue initiatives by repeating steps 2-9

Here’s a list of tools that can help you accomplish your e-marketing initiatives.

Researching competitors

·         KeyCompete (www.keycompete.com)

·         Quantcast (www.quantcast.com)

·         SEMRush  (www.semrush.com)

Research Keywords

·         WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com)

·         SKTool ( www.google.com/sktool )

·         Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)

Blogs

·     Click here to view  a comparison of Blogging platforms (Thank you techsoup )http://www.techsoup.org/binaries/images/comparison-chart.gif

Social Media

·         Twitter (www.twitter.com)

·         Facebook (www.facebook.com)

·         LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)

·         Technorati  (www.technorati.com) and ShareThis (www.sharethis.com)

E-Wires (News)

·         PRWEB (www.prweb.com)

·         Vocus (www.vocus.com)

Obviously there are endless resources out there – so please feel free to contribute by commenting.

This is a general overview and I am open for comments or questions… it obviously does not go into depth about the research involved or the best way to implement it, however I am here for questions.

So the idea is relatively simple. Develop a short concise statement consisting of 1 to 2 sentences that describe clearly what you or your company does. It should be able to be said in the time it takes an elevator to go between floors, hence the term “elevator pitch”.

Ok, I know that elevators now zoom up from G to the 45^th in the time it take to say – “Hey there, how are y…” DING. However, this is all the more reason why we should have a quick statement delivery that yields impact and peaks curiosity or immediately enables the recipient to understand and want more.

An ideal response to a properly crafted and delivered elevator pitch should be a “Really - that sounds interesting, we should discuss it further.”

But an elevator pitch is more practical than just a sales intro… it truly enables professionals to convey their companies expertise and how you and your organization can help people. Imagine the cocktail party or networking event scenario or even just being introduced to people through a friend. How often do you get “So… what do you do?”. A great elevator pitch is truly invaluable.

As an example, LinguaCounsel’s current elevator pitch is the following:

LinguaCounsel enables organizations to drive lead generation and revenue through strategic online initiatives targeting prospects while ensuring further opportunity with existing clientele is unleashed. - www.linguacounsel.com

Note that above, I said current elevator pitch. We should always be striving to develop better more efficient, more impact yielding statements. And you’ll notice with time, you’ll develop some really awesome ones.

So how does this relate to strategic e-marketing? Well, as we can understand, with strategic e-marketing initiatives we’re looking to clearly convey what an organization does and how it can help other companies, all while trying to express what differentiates you from some Company Competitor X.

A potentially scary fact that e-marketers are aware of and is very interesting to sales folk and management is that the killer text you wrote for your home page of the company website… is only going to have about 20-28% of it read. In our fast paced world, people (including the visitors to your website) scan text and links – to arrive at their point of interest.

This means that if you have 1 or 2 sentences that illustrate everything someone needs to know to want to contact you, download your brochure, request a demonstration, or buy your product - you’re in the green.

And now with the flexibility in design and websites dynamically loading content based on IPs or geographical location, etc…, imagine the possibilities. You can strategically run a targeted A/B split tests on elevator pitches on your site.

Take advantage of the web! If you want it to be done – it probably can.

Contact me with comments and questions…

I had to take a few moments to comment about this article about how Microsoft.com is included in a list of names that sport a website that is not compatible to Internet Explorer 8.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/2056228&from=rss

Despite the fact that Microsoft.com doesn’t do well with its own browser, I commend the team that developed the new IE8. It appears they wanted to achieve something good and wholesome and something very unlike traditional MS… they wanted to conform to standards.  

So this is good right?

Well unfortunately, not really. The reason is because so many people designed their sites to work with IE5, IE6, and IE7, IE8 may actually hurt a lot of sites when it’s launched. Currently the list is at a 2400 websites and growing…

Thank the lord for QA folks!

Recommendation

Don’t Panic! When MS launches IE8 officially, many users will update… but many still will remain with IE6 and IE7. Check out these statistics of browser usage…

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Don’t sweat it… Just be aware when developing new website designs…

The best thing to do is to verify your site across a range of browsers (various IE’s, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, Opera…) and use your analytic information to see what your visitor base is primarily using.

Concerned? Send me a mail or leave a comment, let’s discuss.

With e-marketers trying more and more ways to reinforce their online marketing efforts, I’ve stumbled across many who don’t understand the method in which to gain real value from their “organic” search engine optimization and their PPC efforts.

I often see e-marketers failing to connect the proverbial dots of their multi-faceted SEM campaigns which cause a slew of repercussions to their overall SEM strategy and negatively affect the faith factor of their clients.

I’ve noticed the reasons behind most e-marketers who fail to successfully connect the proverbial dots of their multi-faceted SEM campaign are:

1. Their ability or lack thereof, to effectively understand the steps in which to apply a properly result-driven campaign.
2. Clients who do not enable the e-marketer to carry out their strategy.

Now, although we may all tend to opt for reason 2, I’d prefer to discuss reason 1.

Let’s assume the research has been properly performed for effective keywords, competitors, rank position etc… Because that should in the very least be a given.

When it comes to implementing the developed strategy, I often see e-marketers going to PPC methods prior to ensuring their sites/pages are effectively indexed and optimized for organic searches. From what I’ve gathered, this is due to the fact they’re being pressed for immediate results by the client. And PPC will deliver that, but potentially short-lived.

Now, I like to drive targeted traffic as much as the next guy, but folks, this is 101. Ensure your site is properly optimized and designed or has ready landing pages with a specific purpose, ready to receive traffic before throwing yourself into PPC.

Imagine a solid organic SEO campaign, which is helping your site rank higher, it typically means you’ll have already spent some time (and money) evaluating your website’s objectives and made it a solid foundation. If you then reinforce the solid foundation by driving traffic to it via PPC, you achieve far more effective results. Guaranteed.

In the other direction, using PPC to drive traffic to your site before your site is properly visitor-ready, people will click on your ad, cost you X and then click away upon landing on your page.   

 Additionally, if you are already ranking high in organic searches and you have a highly positioned PPC, people will be more likely to click on your link than if you had simply 1 or the other individually.

If you manage to do things in the right order, justification of ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) will be tangible in a short time and the client will have only wonderful things to say.

My $0.02. 

Recently, I spoke to someone who has a successful (publicity) business and seems to be doing everything right. They know the right people; they get the nice contracts so I inquired about their views in regards to SEO and general E-Marketing strategies.

“We don’t get our business through the web…”. I simply stared in awe and complete confusion.

As an E-Marketer I just don’t understand the notion of not driving business opportunity with the most diverse, cost-effective and amazing business development and marketing vehicle in the world.

It’s been said that prospects will visit your website at least 1 during a sales cycle and that it will be a factor that plays into their final decision if only because it demonstrates your commitment and ability to deliver and present quality information.

Now if every prospect visits your site at least once, then I believe it should be considered an item of importance when developing your overall image and be included as one of your methods for business development.

If one understood their prospective clientele, then an effective e-marketing strategy could be created ad applied to reinforce and strengthen a company’s offline efforts. The secret of course, is understanding exactly how to go about creating that plan and effectively implementing it.

If you are someone that doesn’t believe that you currently obtain or can obtain some sort of business benefit from using the internet. Then you’re potentially missing the boat.

Discuss your possibilities with your e-marketing specialist or drop me a line…

Black Hat refers to the nasty methods in which people use to manipulate systems, application or people. Now Google has set a series of guidelines to ensure people do not try and stray into Black Hat methods of SEO.

Naturally we seem to assume that if Google can be manipulated, there must be many who get away with it. Well Google tends to be the all Seeing Eye when it comes to these types of things. More importantly Google is a relatively strict all Seeing Eye.

 What’s the worst that can happen? Well your site can be banned from being indexed. What does this mean for you and your site?

It means you’re alone on an island… and the rescue ship knows you’re there but would much rather ignore you and convince others to ignore you as well.

Bottom line – stick to proper practices as outlined in Google’s Guidelines for SEO…

About this post

I was pleased to see how many people replied to my discussion on LinkedIn about this topic. It seems that people are always trying to figure out whether an SEO action is acceptable or not. Things that seem too good… usually are and with SEO, it’s no exception.

All this comes down to how many people unknowingly put their sites at risk by attempting something they heard in passing. SEO is serious. If you’re not sure what you’re doing. In the very least, ask a Pro.

Remember the registrar… where you bought and registered your domain. Mental note… keep it up to date or your site may meet a very annoying fate.

Recently, I apparently failed to react to a “Renew your domain now” email as it ended up in my SPAM box. Oops. The result was an expired domain. This domain… ( you can see the gap in postings )

The SEO fans out there will chuckle as I mention that we all know that 301 redirects are truly important when creating new versions of pages with different URLs… but let’s think about this…

What do you do… if your site is simply not there… No access to your domain on your hosted server… It’s down… dead… gone… but you know it’s only temporary…

What would be YOUR plan of action?

Let us know… and I’ll be discussing this in an upcoming post.

This is a great topic for discussion and everyone seems to have a different perspective on the subject. I’ve seen so many people simply miss the point about why they should care about rendering their press releases, websites, applications and sales / marketing strategies multilingual.

What it comes down to is effectively and efficiently using the global market place to increase revenue. So to answer the question; business owners, sales departments, marketing departments and communication departments should really grasp the reigns a start producing multilingual content.

The reason behind it is simple in concept. When you start to produce multilingual content, your prospective audience, that is to say, your global audience immediately increases and will continue to do so exponentially with every language added. You therefore broaden the scope to which you are actively selling.

Already traditional / unilingual SEO yields amazing results when done properly, Multilingual SEO simply enables it to be better and better with every language added.

This will produce a series of actions;

1. You or your brand will be known/seen by more people

2. You will increase your sales funnel / pipeline

3. Your content will come out in search engines more frequently

4. You will increase your web traffic

5. You will create a new following for your service or product offering

6. You will open up yourself or your company to other (potential more lucrative) markets

All these actions result in providing you with a greater opportunity to increase revenue. So, for the cost of translating your website and published material properly by human translators or language service providers - the opportunity that is created far outweighs any investment of translation. More so - if you are currently sitting on a solid e-strategy or marketing model, then replicating what is a proven process in another language, should yeild amazing results.