Creative marketing ideas, tips, strategies for Website Marketing and Web Analytics, including pay per click management, search engine optimization, blog development, content creation and distribution, web marketing strategy, web consulting, new website launches.
* You can create a Twitter account and release special coupons, discounts and exclusive products to your followers. Don't regularly schedule a weekly or daily update -- use the power of suprise to keep them guessing.
* Set up a Facebook page for your brand and use it to promote the personalities of your people. Link to their personal profiles and watch the viral power of Facebook generate more exposure for your brand/website.
* List all of your upcoming tradeshow appearances, product release dates, company anniversary, and other important dates on Google Calendar, and then share away.
* Set up your job postings and career listings over to LinkedIn and use the power of recommendations to qualify your applicants.
* Promote your product demonstrations, personalities, and your differentiators on YouTube. Let your customer service people tell the customer success stories.
There is no doubt that Google AdWords is a great delivery mechanism for targeted traffic and leads - it definitely works. If you're not careful, tho, you can find your budget soaring and your PPC charges continually increasing -- without a similar increasing conversion rate.
You may wake up one day and also find your organic traffic from Google has dipped. You check your links and see that Google now only considers half of them valid.
Now you've got steadily increasing PPC charges, reduced conversion rates, and a drop in organic traffic from the one search engine which seems to matter.
What do you do? Well, hopefully, you've done some things outside of the Googleverse which could help sustain you in such a dire situation.
Some simple things any size business can do to diversify yourself from complete Google dependence:
* Establish a presence for your business on LinkedIn and Facebook. Don't just dabble. Build a great page on these social networks. Use widgets to add content to your pages and try to initiate interaction with other members as you build your network. There are many other social networks but start with the most popular.
* Write decent PR and distribute it everywhere. Link from your social network pages.
* Create your own industry-related search engine using a source other than Google (Eurekster for example, though they were closing in on the dead pool last I read on TechCrunch) and include a link on your site, in your blog, and social network pages.
* Add some listings in Craigslist. Make sure they are legitimate ads and not just spammy linking -- it's a great place to recruit local talent. Facebook now offers the Oodle service, a competitor to Craigslist.
* Start creating a database of prospects. Do a regular postcard mailing, inviting them to visit your website, try out your services, or attend a webinar. Don't ever count out traditional marketing means. You can use GoTo Meeting or Webex for your webinars.
My must-have apps include Google Reader, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Google Bookmarks, and Picasa. Very heavy on the Google front -- and Gmail is nearly taking over for my 10+ years on Yahoo! Mail. In 2009 I will be searching for the perfect social network aggregator/updating tool.
Other applications I would use:
* I've mentioned before that it would be nice to have a Google Reader Radio, where you could listen to your headlines in the car, and then using some speech-rec technology, tell it to "read" out loud or "ignore". That would be cool.
* An app perfect for new year's: it would track goals for each of these different focuses: health, financial, creative, social, spiritual and career. Perhaps a radar graph would be the best visual. Each focus would be linked to a website/service which specailizes in the topic. For example, financial could be tied to your mint.com service, and social might be tied to your facebook profile. Career could be linked to LinkedIn. Spiritual wouldn't have to be faith-related, it might be yoga training, meditation, or book-reading.
Three web resolutions to hope for...
* Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask need to get together and form something which can compete with Google. Throw in MySpace as well. Google will probably get Facebook and Twitter. We may see a very different landscape toward the end of 2009, after the current economic crisis shakes out. What will this mean for SEO? More of the same: keep fine tuning your content and keep experimenting socially.
* Google needs to add a tagging mechanism to its' toolbar. This way, people can tag websites and Google can use the data to help define sites contextually. Taggers can build reputations and their tags can carry more weight.
* Blogger needs to build in a simple way to bring the blogger WYSIWYG into your own domain. One step publishing to a specific path on a website. Add a script to your website to pull in the blog and everyone's happy.
Paranormal State meets "The Office"
Now that "The Office" finale is over, I think it's time to turn to next season. I'd like to propose to both NBC and A&E television that they do a cross-over episode where A&E's "Paranormal State" investigators are called in to check out supernatural happenings at NBC's "The Office".
It's a natural fit, as "Paranormal State" takes place at Penn State university, and "The Office" resides in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They could even bring back Joss Whedon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") to direct the episode -- he did the one where Jim convinces Dwight he is a vampire and Dwight captures a bat by placing a bag over Meredith's head.
The episode could find the Paranormal team investigating either the Office itself, or perhaps more logically, Schrute Farms. The possibilities are endless, and the humor potential is amazing.
A different kind of marketing...for your baby Image via WikipediaMy wife and I have been so thrilled since learning we were going to have our first child. I wanted to try and spend quality time with the baby, even while he is still in the womb (yes, it's a boy!). I read all of the parenting and fatherhood books, and two things I came across stuck with me: if you talk to your baby, they will familiarize themselves with your voice, and if you play music, they will respond.
This sat well with me, as my wife and I are huge music fans. Often of different tastes, but we both agree that the best band in the world is U2. Also wanting to make my sessions educational for the baby, I decided to make it more of a radio show for him. I dubbed it "Daddy Radio" and scheduled it for every Saturday morning as we woke up (well, Mommy may have slept through some - I don't know how!).
"Daddy Radio" led to my eventually feeling the baby kick and move, probably earlier than normal. For real. The fatherhood book also said as you get closer to birth, music will help "lead" the baby toward correct positioning, head first to the birth canal.
Here's a recap of each week's theme for "Daddy Radio", as best I can remember (it's now week 31):
Week 1: The 60s - Elvis Presley Week 2: The Beatles Week 3: The Rolling Stones Week 4: The Who Week 5: Motown Week 6: The 70s - Led Zeppelin Week 7: Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young Week 8: Neil Young Week 9: Steve Miller Band Week 10: Southern Fried Rock (Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker) Week 11: Christmas Music Week 12: Bruce Springsteen Week 13: Bob Dylan Week 14: Fleetwood Mac Week 15: Eric Clapton Week 16: Rod Stewart Week 17: Creedence Clearwater Revival Week 18: Disco music Week 19: Van Halen Week 20: Styx Week 21: AC/DC Week 22: Def Leppard Week 23: Rap Music Week 24: Indigo Girls Week 25: R.E.M. Week 26: u2 Week 27: TV Theme Songs Week 27.5: Counting Crows Week 28: Pearl Jam Week 29: Red Hot Chili Peppers Week 30: History of music production - 78s to LPs to Tapes to CDs to MP3s Week 30.5: History of Microsoft vs. Apple Week 31: One hit wonders
Please comment below with artists I may have missed, or suggestions for weeks 32-40!
Cloud computing is reality - it's happening, as much as many of the old dinosaurs (Microsoft may be a dinosaur, but they are learning. They always come to the party late, but eventually they figure it out). The day when you can turn on your pc and go straight to the web (no Windows) is a day that is happening very soon.
Many of you use cloud computing and may not even know it. Webmail is cloud computing. Yes, if you've had a Yahoo! Mail account for twelve years like me, you've been in the cloud for twelve years. Google Docs are all created, saved, and shared in the cloud. Salesforce.com exists in the cloud.
This means all of the kids coming out of college, the ones who will be competing and winning jobs in the search marketing landscape, will already be using Google Apps and Google Docs and God, forbid, the kids in grammar school today may not even know what Windows is.
As a marketer, you'll be saving all of your content and keyword research and notes to the cloud, if you don't already. I do, because then I can get to them no matter where I am. Mobile phone? check. Hotel? check. Laptop in an airport? check. My Nintendo Wii? check.
Get used to it. It's not Skynet, but that's a whole different story.
Web marketing in 2010
What will the web marketing landscape look like in the year 2010? It's only two years away, so it's not as far off as you might initially think. Quite a bit can change in two years' time, though. In order to make these predictions, you first have to come up with the questions.
Will Google still be around? No doubt. They may be replaced in fifteen years, but they're definitely a force to be reckoned with for the short haul, even if Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo.
Will Google still be selling ad space directly? I think a new space will emerge with boutiques and shops reselling Google inventory, and other available inventory as well. Google may want to distance themselves from "selling" everything directly, especially as the Google product catalog grows more massive. What we'll see are specialists cropping up for each vertical. How about starting a small agency which combines best-in-class technology and best-in-class customer service for the biotech industry? Sounds like a winner to me.
Which social networks will emerge as the default one everyone has?MySpace and Facebook do nothing for me. LinkedIn seems to be much more productive -- however it is more specific to my current concerns. I've joined a ning group for a personal hobby, and it's fun and useful. Again, the more niche a group is, the better it's chances of sustaining a bright adaptable future. Not that MySpace or Facebook will be going away, but one of them will probably be swallowed by Orkut and the other by AOL-Bebo or the new Yahoo-MS social entry. Yahoo's never been able to successfully launch a social network, and they have the largest community of users: Yahoo Mail users.
Will we still be able to manipulate organic search rankings? This has become harder and harder. Same old rules apply: if your content is linked from sources relevant to your topic, search engines will pick up on this and reward you greatly. In 2010, content distribution may become more automated: write once, publish to blog, website, social nets, emails, IMs, twitter, and brand new communication tools we haven't seen yet. Don't forget to take those writing classes in college. Still valid.
How dependent will we be on Pay Per Click? Depending on how competitive you want to be, you'll want to track your Web Visibility Share - what percentage of potential exposure could your website link have to your exact audience? If you need a 70% share, minimum, to compete in your industry, you'll need to dominate the paid ad spaces. Will you need to buy ads from anyone other than Google is the more likely question. As of right now, you don't need to. In 2010? They hope you still won't need to pay anyone else.
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