Sales
Profits Leads Branding
Free Tools Whitepapers Case Studies Services
Press Room
Here’s a neat eBook of marketing quotes – for those days you need a little marketing pick-me-up.
http://ccmcmarketing.com/101marketingquotesjune2011.pdf
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Specialize in optimizing website designs to improve conversion rates, banner click through rates and internet direct marketing (AKA: Sales Funnel A/B Testing). I also focus on Search Engine Optimization tactics and affiliate marketing to achieve the best possible ROI. Including landing pages, jump pages, ppc landing pages and conversion rate optimization.
Sales funnel design, conversion rate optimization, web marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, direct response web design, user interface design, css, flash, html, xhtml, cold fusions, netsuite, crm, small business, erp, landing pages, landing page design, ppc, seo, sem, landing pages, jump pages, ppc landing pages, landing page designer, conversion rate improvement, lead gen, lead generation
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Acquire an FTE (Full Time Employee)
The question isn’t IF a good online marketing employee will help increase revenue. If they are good they will. But there is a question as to if the cost of this person will exceed the revenue they bring in. For example: $100,000/year salary and benefits for a good online marketer is a good deal. If this employee helps you bring in an incremental $200,000/year in revenue this is a no brainer. If the market will only let them bring you in $50,000/year there is probably a problem.
Acquire PTE (Part Time Employee)
A part time employee may also be considered and may cut the salary requirement in half. You may also reduce the quality of the person you are seeking. You are probably seeking (or at least hoping for) Organic Search, Paid Search, Display, E-mail, and Social Media marketing skills in one person. Your chances of finding all these skills in one person are slim in the first place. This effort is further hampered when you only have a part time position to offer. Two reason for this: 1) you screen out the best people and 2) you limit the time they have to devote to doing a complete job each month.
Hire an Agency
Acquiring a GOOD agency will address the problem of expertise. They will most likely have expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media. Unlike your perfect employee they will most likely be multiple individuals who focus on their core competencies. The problem with this scenario is you will probably go from $100,000/year salary and benefits for a full time employee to $200,000/year to engage a good agency. You may also find you will not have an employer/employee type relationship. As hard as they may try not to do so they will probably come across as a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls that will insist on doing everything their way with little input from you. This may be justified in some cases but will be unacceptable in many situations.
Hire a Virtual Agency
This is the best of both worlds and more. You have a) at your disposal expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media, b) part time “virtual” employees while maintaining the quality and coverage of a Full Time Employee, and c) a cost that is closer to the cost of the part time employee. The expertise gained by engaging this virtual agency is further enhanced with years of contacts, available online marketing tools and techniques at their disposal, and economies of scales that simply can’t be enjoyed by companies that don’t have online marketing as their primary business.
What You Should Expect From A Virtual Agency
Virtual Agencies are usually smaller than the traditional online agency and will restrict the number of clients that they service at one time. They purposely remain small to maintain control and that personal relationship with the owners. They limit the client load to ensure that the quality remains in each relationship.
Contact Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 or e-mail him at steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com if you would like additional information on the Virtual Agency program offered by siteEDGE Agency.
Technorati Tags: Online Marketing, Online Agency, Internet Marketing, Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Twitter Effectiveness
In a previous blog posting I discussed your effectiveness with Twitter as measured by your Retweet Rank. A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others. I argued that this rank can be used to determine how much self promoting you can get away with.
Beyond Measurement
This time I talk about how Twitter may be used to emulate, in my opinion, the most successful marketing tactic in the history of marketing. If you haven’t guessed it already I’m talking about search marketing. Most people are familiar with search marketing. You go to Google, or some other engine, and search for what you want. The results are displayed in either the organic (free) or sponsored (paid) listing results.
Search Marketing
I argue that search marketing is the most successful tactic because, from the marketer’s perspective, you can market directly to the people who are specifically looking for your product or service. And you can tailor your offers and call to action specifically to the prospect. What still amazes me is you can “automate” the process to track your success (conversions) and adjust your activity to improve results even more. Yes, I think this is the greatest invention since slice bread…but wait. The market is getting saturated. Click costs are going up. Too bad there isn’t another tool that could work beside it. Well maybe there is. Twitter!
Twitter has Context and is Free
Twitter has two attributes that could help accelerate the growth of advertising in the mobile market. Like Google, Tweeter has context and is a free service. With Twitter you can determine the hot topics (keywords). Additionally, since people tell Twitter about themselves through their account or through their tweets, Twitter can layer on demographic and behavioral targeting.
Twiter as a Search Tool
This is where it gets similar to Google AdWords. Advertisers could buy keywords or phrases that are tweeted. This could be based upon geographic location and a Twitter profile of previous Tweets. If you want to get real fancy, assuming that the GPS location is turned on, a retailer, say, in a mall could send offers to the mobile device of people walking in front of their store, or generally in the mall.
Beyond Just Search
I’m excited, but is it just me? There is nothing better for a retailer than the ability to know that John is looking for a new WII game and getting him an offer before he begins to shop. How about Sue with a broken windshield that would appreciate the convenience of getting a fair price and mobile service without having to ask.
Is it just me? I don’t think so.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Most of us know something about how Twitter works. We follow someone. Hopefully they will follow us back. We type in something interesting every once in a while. We read what others are typing in. But what does it all mean?
As this is being written we are gathering responses in a Twitter poll from actual Twitterers. This poll attempts to gauge what users of Twitter expect from their time and energy. As of today the Twitter poll respondents believe Twitter should be used to:
1. Generally socialize and get connected 27%
2. Keep informed about a particular topic or interest 30%
3. Inform others about a particular topic or interest 19%
4. Promote a product or service I provide 24%
See poll results and add your two cents by clicking here.
From these responses we conclude that most people are not using Twitter to promote a product or service. If you are a business person, and since you are reading this you probably are, you may at first view this as bad news. But it is actually good news. Since less than a forth of the Twitterers are promoting a product or service, we conclude the market place is probably more open to a few doing just that.
Let’s illustrate this with an example of businesses at a trade show. If only the businesses at the trade show were the ones presenting, they would be focusing so much on promoting their own product or service that they may not be as interested in hearing about yours.
Of course you should Not come across as only being self promoting. You need to build relationships, offer value, entertain your followers, then every tenth tweet or so they may not mind a little self serving promotion.
This brings me to the point of this blog posting. How do you tell how effective you are on Twitter? Yes, you can create tracking url-s that tells you when you got a visit, lead, or sale from Twitter and that is the ultimate indicator. But how do you know how you rank with your followers as compared to other Twitterers? How effective are your tweets compared to the best on Twitter? A lack of knowledge here may make or break you.
One indicator of how you rank with your followers is your Retweet rank. A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others recently on twitter.
If you enter my Twitter ID of @steventhompson, I have a Retweet rank of 8,406 and a 94.2 percentile. This compares pretty good with Twitter ID @airductcleaner who has a retweet rank of 144,868 and a 0.0 percentile but not as well with Twitter ID @britneyspears who has a retweet rank of 1001 and a 99.31 percentile. As you can see the lower the rank number and the higher the percentile number the better.
If you rank low and have a higher percentile this is probably an indication that you may get away with a few more self promoting tweets. If you rank high with a lower percentile you may want to promote every 20 tweets or 30 tweets, of even more.
Go ahead and take the Twitter Poll. Then find out your Retweet Rank. You will then be positioned to do the optimal amount of self serving promotional Tweets.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
This was intially published in the Eyeing Marketing blog as written by Carrie Aker. You can go there for the full detail but I want to get your juices flowing with a high level mention of the tips.1) Let your customers determine the content.
Allow your audience to post photos, comments (rants and raves), articles, and stories to the site.
2. Build online communities
It’s very easy to assume that one general online community would be sufficient. However, that’s not the case. Remember, every person has different interest and it’s important that you tailor to each of those individuals in order for this to be more effective.
3) Offer something new everyday.
Give tips, new coupon offers, advice, or anything that might be of interest to your audience.
4) Contests
Be creative with your contest and try to come up with a unique concept.
5) Interactive Product Designs
Have your customers design their own product on your site.
6) Provide a useful tool
Sites that offer some form of calculator to calculate loans, currency exchange, BMI (Body Mass Index), etc. get bookmarked and referred to frequently. Look to see what sort of useful long-term tool you could provide your audience.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: website design, website development
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
I have to admit that I didn’t come up with this headline or topic. Erik Holladay, Global Marketing Director for Intertek blog positing of the same name talks about the importance of negative keywords. You can read his blog by clicking on the following link: http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/06/negative-is-positive-with-google.html
I agree with Eick on the importance of negative keywords but added my additional comment below:
Erik,
You could also stick to “Exact Match” search terms but that may be restrictive in some cases. What you didn’t mention was how to determine the negative keywords. With Google new “Search Query Performance” report it becomes convenient to view what search terms are actually being picked up in Broad and Phrase match. This is after the fact but may be worth periodically reviewing and making selective parts of these search queries negative keywords.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.
Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Google Negative Keywords
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
…or how you can generate more business than you can handle.
It’s as simple as following these steps:
1. Resolve to put your ad dollars into getting internet traffic
2. Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 6 to 8 ads
3. Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to identify the top producing ads
4. Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 2 to 4 offer pages
5. Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to ID the offer page that delivers the most prospects/customers
6. Use approved Campaign Tracking to tie every single customer generated back to the source
7. Continuously narrow the source of the internet traffic until you are only paying for the traffic that is producing customers.
You now have the Marketing System That Never Fails and all you have to do is repeat these steps until you have more business than you can handle. It typically takes 3 to 4 months to perfect the process.
You can do all this yourself but the “marketEDGE Technique” is the key to its success and it is proprietary to siteEDGE. Don’t worry it’s not that expensive. One of my customers paid the Yellow Pages 20 times what they paid me. References are available upon request.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.
Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking, google content network, google site targeting
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Search Retargeting has been around for a while. You may recall that this is when a visitor to a site page is tagged based upon the keyword they clicked on and is re-engaged on subsequent websites with pre-designed offers and messaging.
An Example of a Previous Implementation of Search Retargeting
Yahoo’s Implementation of Search Retargeting
While this technology has been available for several years, Yahoo has recently introduced its own version. Yahoo implementation is notable in several ways:
Yahoo has had its challenges over the past few months but, in my opinion, this is a step in the right direction for them. My experience with Search Retargeting, along with personal touches that Yahoo brings to the table, leads me to conclude that, if done correctly, this could be a gold mine for many companies.
Feel free to contact Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 if you would like to discuss how Search Retargeting might help you.
Spread the Word: del.icio.us Digg Reddit
