Category: Internet Marketing

Website Maintenance: Make an Index

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Many times we get too close to our own websites.  We know right where everything is because we put it there.  The problem is that what makes sense to us, often doesn’t make sense to visitors.  An easy way to ensure that items of a similar type are easily found is to make an index page.  When a site has an index page for a single topic then it serves to be a single point of contact that visitors can use to find the individual thing they are looking for.

Recently I was reviewing a client’s website.  We were in the process of updating it to support marketing efforts.  My client was heavily involved in doing events designed to give a sampling of how they help companies which converts some of the attendees to customers.  In fact, this was such a large part of their marketing matrix that they ran an event every two weeks.

So we outlined which events were coming up and made a list of 6 events for the quarter.  I jumped on my client’s site to see how each event was promoted.  I found 2 of the events that were featured on the homepage.  However the other 4 were MIA.

So I called my client and asked whether the events had pages on the site.  He assured me the events were there and walked me through the navigation.  Two of the events were available through banner ads but the ads cycled so they were only available 25% of the time.  It turned out one event never had a link set to it.  The sixth one was available through a buried link on a calendar document.

I was a dedicated visitor and I needed a guide to find the events I knew were there.  How many unmotivated visitors that don’t know about the events do you think made it to the event pages?  As you’d expect, very few.

The solution, make an events index page.  We placed an events link on the primary navigation so that it was easy to find what was on the calendar regardless of where a visitor went in the site.  The index page provided a handy list to site visitors as well as my client so that there was a simple reference of upcoming events.  Furthermore, promotions could point to the index or the individual event page depending on what’s most appropriate.

It’s a simple thing but one that can be lost as a site grows.  Make sure that any important category of your site has an index page so that visitors can easily get to the information you want them to see.

Internet Marketing, Web Maintenance , , , , ,

Online Marketing: Don’t Mistake New for Better.

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I was recently informed by a client that they needed to step up their social media presence because “email is on the way out”.  That was a shock to me as most of my clients (this one included) see a nice return on their email marketing investment.  In fact, industry wide email marketing boasts a leading ROI among online marketing efforts with $42.08 generated from every dollar spent.  In short, my client was mistaken.  He’d made the error of thinking “new” was “better”.

Social media seems to be the new “new”.  It’s one of the first things out of people’s mouths when internet marketing comes up.  And I don’t mean to pick on social media, it’s a valuable tool.  It just shouldn’t be put on a pedestal above older communication channels that still outperform it.

An older example is when CSS layouts were first appearing.  Many companies rushed to update their pages for the new “standard”.  The problem was that many of the web browsers weren’t quite up to speed in rendering these sites so web developers had to create multiple versions for individual browsers.  That made developing the site significantly more expensive.  The difference between jumping on CSS layouts when it was new and when browser support increased was potentially tens of thousands of dollars.  At the end of the day there was no difference between a tabled layout and a CSS layout to most users but the early adopters could revel in the “newness” for a short period of time.

Neglecting other marketing channels to do what’s “new” can be very problematic when resources are shifted to a new media that does not perform as well as an older one.  It’s like trading a dollar for a quarter, it might be shinier but there’s no financial upside.

Of course I’m not suggesting that you let your online marketing stagnate into a tried and true rut.  Innovation and new technology will come up and many times it should be adopted.  But focus on effectiveness not newness.  When you keep track of what’s performing best it keeps the allure of “new” out of your decision making.  Online marketing is about increasing awareness of a company, driving opportunities, and ultimately having a positive impact on the bottom line.  Newness is hard pressed to affect any of those things on its own.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media , , , , , , , , , ,

Online Marketing Success Takes Work and Diligence

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The myth of getting rich quick through the internet still seems to have a pulse. Many people looking to start an internet based venture still have delusions of a “set it and forget it” situation. If only it were so easy to promote your business and generate revenue online. Online marketing is a process, not a task. Overall the process does not have a completion date, rather it’s a system of maintenance and gradual improvement.

The set and forget mindset typically sounds like this, “I’ll build a website with a great tool, product, or service. Then I’ll do some initial promotions, SEO, ads, emails, social media etc. Then I’ll rake in the money.” There’s a lot wrong with this idea.

The first might be that your tool, product, or service is great. It’s extremely hard to offer something online that doesn’t exist in some form. Check your assumptions and make sure that you are filling a need by focusing on a certain niche, geography, or competency.

The second false assumption is that initial work is the completion of your online marketing. It’s almost always just the beginning. SEO’s a good example, if you set your sites parameters and then leave it alone, you won’t rank well for long, if at all. SEO only works well when it is actively managed and content is added or updated.

Generating money as a blogger (FYI this blog makes me exactly $0 in direct revenue) is a great example of people’s misconceptions. There’s a general belief that blogging is a no-sweat way to make money. The reality is it’s difficult to make significant direct revenue from a blog as generating an audience is challenging. The other misconception is how much work it takes to maintain a “career blog”. Professional bloggers work full time keeping their content updated, fresh, and audience appropriate.

Everyone likes the raking in cash part of the process. However, when starting, people need to be aware that internet marketing is not synonymous with turnkey business. You can make good money, but not without putting in the work. Most people that promote their business through the internet have to work at it to be successful. It’s rarely a situation where they take months off at a time and just check in to see how large their bank account has grown. If you’re going to be successful with your internet marketing, you need to understand that it’s going to take work and diligence.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Maintenance , , , ,

Define Success: Website

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Website metrics are often simplified to website metric, visitors. While the number of visitors is certainly important as we need traffic, many other metrics are a better measure of success on a website.

There are several web metrics that can be used to define success based on the company objective:

  • Bounce rate – This serves as a reverse goal, meaning a low rate is better.  Bounce rate designates how many people land on a page and then move away from the site.  It’s a great way to see if your content is delivering what visitors expect.
  • Time on Page – With a little analyzing you can see if people are using your webpages as you intend.  For example if it’s an article and they only stay a few seconds, then it’s unlikely that your content is engaging.  Conversely if it’s a directory and the time on page is low (and bounce rate isn’t high) it confirms that people understand the navigation easily and are finding the link to information they want.
  • Conversion – This takes some set up in the metric system but there should be clearly defined conversions for every site.  These are typically landing pages and a measure of how many people took advantage of a landing pages offer like newsletter sign ups, contact form, or event registration.

Truly valuable information comes from mixing these metric and analyzing the story it tells.  For instance viewing visitors to a conversion page and see how many people fulfilled the conversion is a powerful way of gauging offer and page layout effectiveness.

Don’t simplify website metrics into visitors only.  After all if people only visit the site and without taking any action, it’s unlikely that the website has fulfilled its real purpose.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance , , , , , , ,

Define Success for Your Online Marketing

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It’s common for people to use general metric standards as a guideline for success when analyzing online marketing data.  This can lead to real problems with their campaigns because it doesn’t take into account individualized goals.

Each webpage, email communication, or social media post needs to have a clearly defined metric for success rather than being analyzed on general metrics. General metrics like visitors, open/click rates, or post views can be misleading on the effectiveness of online marketing.  This data is informative but should not be the measuring stick for most online marketing initiatives.

In upcoming posts we’ll look at three separate areas of online marketing and general metrics that people use to measure success.  We’ll then outline how in many cases the general metrics are feeding false assumptions.  The three areas we will focus on are:

  • Email Marketing
  • Website
  • Social Media
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Is Your Call to Action Luring Visitors In?

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A good call to action is a Siren Song.  Your target audience shouldn’t be able to resist its lure.  However, many times websites calls to action are a dud.  They ask for a lot and provide little in return.  Make sure that your call to action is appealing to your website target so that conversions are consistently generated.

The first hurdle to making a good call to action is knowing your audience.  If you make “gut calls”, then you don’t know your audience.  Instead do some testing on calls to action.  Create landing pages for as many as three calls to action.  Make the layout and language as similar as possible.  Then send it to test audiences that fit your target profile.  That will illustrate what calls to action are appealing and which draw little interest.

The second step is to test and track layout and content.  Some changes will vastly change visitor’s perception of an offer.  For testing purposes it’s best to make small changes and see how that affects the metrics.  After the first test is complete, make another small change and see if that improves conversion.  This can be a tedious process but it ensures gradual improvement rather than guesses that may or may not help the call to action.  A layout and content that clearly communicates the call to action and the benefit to the visitor is the critical to ensure that visitors take advantage of an appealing offer.

Just remember that unlike a siren song we want to serve our visitors needs, not dupe them into dooming themselves.  Make sure that your call to action is sustainable for your business and you can deliver on the promise the call to action makes.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion , , , , , , ,

New Year’s Resolution – Evaluate Your Online Marketing Programs

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Once we get into a system for email and online marketing that works for us we can get lazy and blindly stick with it.  As 2011 begins it’s a good idea to challenge what you are doing.  If you don’t regularly review your web and email marketing performance, start now.  If you are regularly monitoring results, check your trends over a longer period of time, at least into the previous year.

Are your initiatives performing as well as they had? 

If so, great, you might tweak some things here or there but at least you confirmed that you are doing well.

If not it’s a good time to reevaluate your initiatives and either revamp them or at least give them a facelift.

It’s a clichéd resolution but make sure that online marketing initiatives are in good shape.

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Know Where Your Online Marketing Spikes Are Coming From

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In analyzing online marketing  results people make two broad-sweeping common mistakes

  • Blaming poor performance on outside factors
  • Take credit for positive performance without verifying the conclusion.

If only these assumptions were true in reality, we’d have nothing to worry about.  We’d cause only good and any negative outcomes couldn’t be helped.  Of course, that’s not true  and in analyzing you online marketing campaigns honesty is critical.

The more prevalent of the two mistakes is taking credit for spikes without doing any research to verify that an online marketing campaign deserves the credit.  This can be a costly error because it’s confirming false data.  If we believe something created a positive reaction but in reality it did not, we waste time recreating that situation even though it doesn’t provide proven results.

Here is an example I ran into recently.  In checking site analytics for a fairly new client of mine I discovered the site experienced a 400% increase in month-to-month traffic.  I instantly assumed that the search engines had indexed new keywords which were driving exponential growth.  I started preparing an analysis of what keywords were performing best so we could further refine the site’s SEO.

As I looked through the search keyword data the numbers weren’t adding up.  The site had much more direct traffic than in previous months.  Upon further investigation I saw that the search engines had not registered the new keywords we had worked on.

I informed the client of the spike but had no clear explanation of why the direct traffic would have shot up.  Fortunately the client did.  They do a yearly event which took place during the month in questions and the attendees for this event were the likely cause of direct traffic as they visited the site after the event.

As much as I’d have liked to take credit for the spike, it would have set our efforts back.  Analyzing the data and seeing that the spike was not a result of the SEO, means that we can’t bask in our genius.  Rather we need to monitor what actually happens when the search engines index the site and see how that effects search traffic so we can see real SEO improvement.

Always investigate any website or email metric spike.  While it’s nice to believe that our efforts were the catalyst, that always needs to be proven by the data.

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Transition into Multi-Faceted Online Communication With Social Media

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For years there were essentially two forms of online communication.

  • Website –  A one-to-many media passive media
  • Email – A one-to many or one-to-one proactive media

The two have the potential to work seamlessly together.  Websites are always available and easily accessed by any interested party.  It casts a wide net.  Email could proactively promote specific initiatives or be targeted to ideal.  Furthermore email could drive traffic to the website for targeted conversions.

Of course there were subsets of online communication like ads and link sharing but technically those fall in the website category.

There is now a third major platform developing:

  • Social Media – A one-to-many, one-to-one, or many-to-many media

Social media is opening up a new kind of communication and it’s quickly becoming one that isn’t optional.  On the surface it appears to be a clone of email, a one-to-one or one-to-many scenario.  However, as it develops social media is becoming a many-to-many communication device.

Of course social media started out as a one person communication platform.  Basically it emulated email.  You could do blast communications or personal messages.  However, as “like it” and “retweet” features become more prevalent we find that groups of people are serving a role of spreading your message.

Websites and email is not going away any time soon but neither is social media.  If you are running online campaigns and have not ventured into social media, it’s time to start.  Not only are users expecting to have an option of receiving communications through popular social media systems, but the systems are opening up a new many-to-many media that can be leveraged for viral communication.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media , , , , , , , ,

The Long Tail Optimization to Nowhere

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Using long tail keywords has become a popular way of cutting out the competition and getting very specific keywords that bring in a targeted audience.  The guiding principle is the more specific the keywords, the less likely it is that other people are targeting the same group.

The SEO basics site has a nice overview of setting a long tail strategy but pay special attention to steps 1 and 2.

Long tail optimization is a great strategy but only when you do the research of steps 1 and 2.  Long Tail optimization without selective keyword filtering leads to 2 problems:

  1. No Audience – Blindly optimizing a site or PPC campaign for long tail keywords typically targets an abyss of phantom people site owners believe exist.  But they don’t.
  2. Too Much Information – Optimizing too long a tail can put such a restrictive criteria that it defeats the purpose of optimizing for it.  After all if it’s so restrictive that only a couple people would be included, optimizing likely is not the best means to engage them.

Don’t convince yourself you know what users want and skip the research.  Long tail optimization is popular because it allows very high rankings for specific keywords.  Just do your homework to make sure those keywords are worth the effort.

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