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

Are Businesses Doom?
If you believe what you hear in the news your business is doomed because “the economy is worse than it has been since the great depression.”  My advice is not to follow this defeatist philosophy.

The Crux of the Problem
If you are not getting as many customers as you were before the economic downturn you may need to do something different.  If you sell cars, for example, there may only be ten people in your area purchasing automobiles this month when there were a hundred this month last year.  This is a problem but the answer is simple.  Instead of giving up you should go after the ten people who are buying.

Reasonable Expectations
Of course the effort and cost of getting these ten customers must yield you a reasonable profit.  This means you must first determine how much a customer is worth, and should know within a reasonable doubt that your effort will at least cost less than this.  Contact me and I will show you how to do this.  For the purpose of this article we will assume we are reasonably certain that the effort is worthwhile.

The Four Steps Revealed
Just about everyone uses the web.  We all know about search engines and e-mail marketing, and many more are familiar with terms such as social media and viral marketing.  Many, however, do not fully understand how powerful this internet tool can be.  As powerful as television, radio, newspapers, yellow pages, and the US mail is, they lack interactivity. 

The one major difference between old and new media is interactivity.  Television, for example, is not yet able to allow consumers to search for what they need; nor does it support an environment where businesses can tailor a response to the consumers.  This follow-up makes the difference in how much control you have in delivering the sale.  This is the essence of what the internet offers and is revealed in the following four steps:

1. Paid Search—at this point some of you are probably saying “is this all? I have been doing this for years.”  To this I have two responses, speed and precise targeting.  There is no better method to quickly and precisely a) target who you want, b) immediately get them to study your offer, and c) begin a back and forth dialog where the goal is to sell your product or service. Unlike other online marketing options, with paid search you can get quantifiable results in hours instead of months.

2. Search Engine Optimization—Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most inexpensive methods for maintaining a constant flow of online customers and prospects.  One mistake that is made by many search engine marketers is to target the wrong search terms.  Notice in my solution hierarchy that I included paid search first.  This is because you used what was learned from the paid search to determine how you should plan and execute your search engine marketing strategy.  Where a paid search campaign can be producing results in hours an SEO effort may take month.

3. Search Retargeting—many may not be as familiar with search retargeting as they are with paid search and search engine optimization.  Paid search and search engine optimization is the first step to a search retargeting effort.  Once prospects show interest in the product or service offered, as indicated by their click through to the site, the site visitor is profiled and the marketing message is evolved.  They are then re-engaged with the improved marketing message until they become customers.  The actual re-engagement occurs on targeted network sites that the prospect visits over the next 30 days.  The re-engagement is an effective method of keeping your offer in front of people who have previously shown an interest.

4. Opt-in E-mail Marketing—Opt-ed in e-mail marketing should not be confused with spam.  Where spam is unsolicited e-mails, opt-ed in e-mails are ones that the recipients has specifically said they want to receive.  As with search retargeting, the prospect has previously indicated interest.  This occurred as a result of their contact through paid search or search engine optimization. Based upon their interest, buying habits, demographics, and a multitude of other attributes, periodic e-mails are sent with the goal of increasing sales.  Once the list is in place the cost of a long-term e-mail marketing campaign is extremely economical.

At each step in the process customers are acquired but it is not the goal for one method to stand on its own.  If a prospect does not become a customer right away they are re-engaged a second, third, or forth time.  The long term goal is to minimize the cost associated with the acquisition of a customer. Moving from an aggressive paid search campaign to a low cost search engine optimization strategy is a means to this end.  Once the SEO effort has met the established goals, the paid search campaign is turned down but is still used to fill the gap for the SEO search terms that are not performing as well.  Finally, e-mail marketing is also used for re-engagement.  The prospect has given you their permission to send them e-mails. You leverage this by presenting them with the right combination of price and offer to turn them into customers.   E-mail is also used on existing customers to increase repeat sales.

Get Started Now!
No matter what the economic outlook, if you have a viable product or service, you can go to the head of the line for the acquisition of customers.  There may be a drop in the number of people buying your product or service.  You simple have to get to the people who are still buying.

As previously mentioned, the first step is to determine if an effort like this will yield you a reasonable profit.   All the tools are available and waiting for you.   It’s up to you to take the first step to make sure they are leveraged on your behalf.  

Contact Steve at 816-587-8880 x102 or at steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .

Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking,  google content network, google site targeting

siteEDGE News, Pay Per Click, SEO, E-Mail Marketing | No Comments »

If you’ve been keeping your eye on the online world, you may have heard about a pending lawsuit against retail giant Target. This suit is being brought about because Target failed to provide ALT tags on its website - which the plantiff states constitutes discrimination against visually impaired users.

Has Target missed the mark legally? I won’t comment on that, but what I CAN comment on is that Target’s web developers have missed the mark on a basic (and very easy to execute) best practice. From the W3C Website:

The alt attribute is defined in a set of tags (namely, img, area and optionally for input and applet) to allow you to provide a text equivalent for the object.A text equivalent brings the following benefits to your web site and its visitors in the following common situations:

• nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images
• some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page
• search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won’t miss important sections of your pages.

Besides allowing for accessibility and standards compliance, ALT tags also offer some benefit from an SEO perspective, providing context for spiders as to what your images represent. The exact SEO value of this is up for debate, and we ARE NOT suggesting stuffing every ALT tag with keywords - however, since it can’t hurt, will likely help, and opens up your site to visually impaired visitors, and is very easy to execute - you have no excuse not to do it!

If your site isn’t standards compliant, and you need some help getting there, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you out!

SEO, Usability, Site Design | No Comments »

It’s the Holy Grail of SEO’s.  They are also great channels to drive relevant traffic to your site outside of search.  What are they?  Authoritative Links!

The “Authority” of a site is calculated by the value of the sites linking in to it, as well as the quality of the content on those sites.  Many “A-List” blogs can carry amazing link value, along with huge readerships (so they drive traffic directly to your site as well).  How do you get a link from a top blog?  Content.

Writing great, relevant content is the best method to get links, get search rankings, and create and keep a dedicated readership.  It also helps to know how to network with bloggers, and how to create relationships with them.

Other top sources for great links are .edu and .gov sites.  These links can be hard to come by, but are worth the effort.  The SearchEngineWatch Blog has a great post on how to get authoritative links:

1. Focus on links from authoritative sites that are relevant.
2. Be prepared for the fact that success in a campaign to get a link from an authoritative site might take many months.
3. Be prepared for your strategies to fail more often than they succeed. If you do a really good job, perhaps 1 in 4 of your campaigns will work.
4. Be prepared to invest in building a relationship. Your first communications with the authoritative site may not include a request for a link.
5. It’s a campaign. You need a strategy, and it may have multiple steps. Be prepared to invest in the strategy to make it work
6. Know that they won’t link to you because they want to help you make money
7. Know that they will link to your site because your content is valuable to their users (and because they actually care about their users).
8. Meet their needs.
9. Study their needs. Figure out what they need, and then figure out which of their needs you can meet. One way to do this is to review things written in the past by key contacts at the site. They may have expressed a need, such as “I wish I knew how to …”, “The web needs a resource that …”, etc.
10. Be opportunistic. Your target site may identify a need that you can address. Jump on it as quickly as you can, and then fill the need completely.
11. Invest more in your first 2 or 3 killer links than you will in the ones that follow it. Your first authoritative link will simplify obtaining the ones that will come later, as that endorsement makes all the difference in the world.

Thanks to Eric for providing that guide!

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, Blogs

SEO, Link Building | No Comments »

SEOmoz has a great list of 24 Checkups for Clueless Developers/Marketers. As it turns out, this is essentially a how-to guide to get started in the SEO process for your business site.

Each of these points are very pertinent - and I wanted to list my favorites, and add a little extra to each of those:

5. Double check your code to make sure you’ve got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

This is one tactic you don’t see nearly enough of. As a general rule, I like to use H1/H2 tags wherever possible. It really helps in telling the search engines what the gist of the content below it is, and also organizes the content for your users. Hot Tip - Make your first H1 Tag match up with your Title tag if possible.

7. Make sure contextual links are widely spread and commonly used all across the website content to emphasize key pages.

Despite the fact you already have great site-wide navigation (making it easy for your users to get around), breadcrumbs (making it even easier) - you cannot forget to link to key pages on your site from within the content itself! This give you the opportunity to use specific anchor text (and different versions of anchor text) within your site. This will also help in the overall crawlability of the site.

13. Ensure that your 404 page contains links to your main categories and maybe a search box.

Whenever I suggest setting up a default 404 page with content on it, instead of the usual error message, clients never fail to smack their foreheads with a big “Why didn’t I think of that?” It’s easy to do, so there’s really no excuse. It can help users who go astray, as well as help alleviate the pain of broken links in the SERPS and from inbound links. If nothing else, default the error page to your sitemap.

You do have a sitemap, right?

Technorati Tags: SEO, SEOmoz, Website Development, Search Engine Optimization

SEO | No Comments »

That’s a Good Question

I just left a consultation meeting with a client where I raised the question “where are your site visits originating from today?” The first response was “That’s a good question. We don’t really know.” After some thought he remembered that they acquired a competitor’s domain that was already organically ranked and forwarded it to their site. This now accounts for a vast amount of their daily visits.

Impressive

I have experienced cases where one site was forwarded to another to take advantage of its organic ranking. We have even done it ourselves in the case of a second domain we owned. We were taking this second site down, it was ranked, so why waste it? I was fairly impressed that these novices identified this opportunity and did what it took to milk the reward.

Temporary?

The question now is how long will they be able to take advantage of this free fruit. In this case both the acquired domain and the actual domain have similar content so it may retain the rankings for some time. My recommendation to anyone in a situation similar to this is not to bet your business on it. Start now doing what it takes to get the actual site ranked well organically or you may be caught by surprise.

Client Stories, SEO, Strategy | No Comments »

I just came out of a meeting where a client wanted to know how soon his site would show up on the search engines since he had now implemented some meta tags. It’s one of those situations that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Needless to say there are a lot of things that determine whether or not you’re in the number 1 slot on the first page of Google for a specific term or not visible at all. For those of us who are in this business of search engine optimization and search marketing, this is a topic of continued study and debate. For one thing, the engines themselves frequently change what factors they look at when determining where to place sites in the natural search listings. And to complicate things even more, each engine has a slightly different formula for search engine ranking factors. Right now, we’re all waiting with baited breath to see how things shake out on Yahoo! post Panama.

If you want a thorough, although a little bit dated, perspective on what’s important to the major search engines, check out Rand Fishkin’s article. It contains a large list of factors that can influence a site’s ranking on the engines as well as votes on the relative importance of each factor by some SEO gurus.

SEO | No Comments »

Here is a link to our whitepaper: SEO - What it is, What it isn’t, and Why you should care.

It covers the basics of SEO - a list of things you should know if you’re doing it yourself, or engaging an agency to help you.

SEO, Whitepapers | No Comments »

Would you put your entire retirement into one stock? Of course not - it’s crazy, right?!? You would consult an expert, or do a lot of pain-staking research yourself, and carefully craft a plan to optimize your returns on the money you saved, while insuring that if one company you’ve invested in fails, you won’t end up in the poor house.

If the above scenario makes perfect sense, why is it that so many very intelligent business owners are only concerned about one stream of traffic? That’s right folks - the big “G” (Google, for those of you who were wondering) is a great source of traffic and revenue. However, if you have positioned yourself to be solely reliant upon Google traffic to be successful - you’re poised on the brink of disaster.

Fortunately - it’s not too late. If you’re still planning out your Internet strategy for 2007, make diversifying your traffic portfolio one of your top priorities. If you’ve already got your ‘07 strategy done, change it to include this.

What exactly does diversifying your traffic portfolio mean?
It’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to find as many good sources of relevant traffic as possible. As a general rule, I shoot for no more than 30% of traffic coming from one particular source. That way, if one gets shut off, I still have at least 70% of traffic and sales coming in, while I figure out what to do about the other 30%.

Ok, so we know we need to do it, but how do we make it happen?
This may be easier than you think. First off, you want to make a plan - bring together your strategies for online advertising, PPC, SEO, email, PR, and traditional marketing, and look for ways they can work together to help drive traffic. Here are 5 example scenarios to get you started:

1)Our SEO is suggesting link building. Maybe we should INSIST that all the link building he does come from relevant sites that we think could provide us with a reasonable traffic stream.

2)We’re running a pretty extensive PPC campaign, so maybe we should look into adding a way for visitors to sign up for our newsletter if they don’t buy immediately. That way, we can bring them back.

3)Our communications depart sends out 3 press releases a month - we should send those out online as well, and maybe create a blog on our site to talk about them.

Those are just a few ideas to get you started. If your business is over-reliant on one traffic stream and you’d like to talk - just let us know.

Technorati Tags: Google, Diversifying Traffic, Website Strategy, SEO, PPC, Online PR, Email Marketing

SEO, Analytics, Strategy | No Comments »

The Center for Media Research reported Monday that 81% of survey respondents plan to increase 2007 spending on email marketing while 70% of respondents said they apply basic or no analysis to these campaigns.

As an Online Marketer I sometimes grumble at how offline media is not held up to the same standards as online for measurebility. I have even had a client, one of the top five US companies in telecommunications no less, say we shouldn’t hold traditional media up to the same standards as online. This was said while we were sitting down going over the details of their online campaign which reported how every dollar spent related to each conversion we achieved. The results of the online campaign weren’t bad but there was always this offline media superiority aura hovering over our heads. Since there was no way to measure the offline results it must be performing better than online.

Based upon experiences like this you would think I would be relieved to see survey responses like this. Wrong! We must go forward using the tools that are available no matter how uncomfortable they may sometimes make us. This should be done even at the cost of a decision to terminate a non performing online campaign and continuing a offline campaign where we just don’t know.

Pay Per Click, SEO, Tracking, Analytics, Offline Marketing, E-Mail Marketing | No Comments »