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

…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

siteEDGE News, Pay Per Click, Usability, Tracking, Marketing Tools, Strategy, Blogs, Local Search | No Comments »

John Jantsch has a great post about the best metrics that small businesses don’t measure. It’s a list that, when we put together a paid search campaign we try very hard to get our clients to use (or at least figure out).

1) Leads - where do they come from, how many, and what generated them - if you don’t know this, it’s likely you are wasting lots of money on things that are not generating leads, or potentially worse, not sticking with a great tactic.
2)Average $ - What’s average amount of business you do with a client - your existing clients want to do more business with you. It’s easy to create an average dollar number and give your attention to creating more opportunities and more profitable clients - this way you can weed out clients that fall below the number eternally.
3)Conversions - How many of those leads turn into clients - the biggest time killer of all for the small business is chasing leads that are not qualified, not educated (by you, not in life), not ready to appreciate your value. When you measure this, you have to fix it, it’s too painful otherwise.

These are especially important if you’re purchasing leads - no matter what your business, it is vital to know as precisely as possible where your customers are coming from, how much they cost to acquire, and the potential profit from them.

Technorati Tags: Small Business Marketing, Lead Generation, Paid Search, Marketing Metrics

Tracking, Analytics, Strategy | No Comments »

I was reading a post at David Lorenzo’s Sales Intensity about Sales Strategies for Entrepreneurs. The main gist of the post is that sales people looking for the ‘magic bullet’ to get new clients usually fail. I couldn’t help thinking that this relates well to a number of our online clients as well.

While search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) is an amazing tool that CAN deliver high ROI and help build a business, relying solely upon that can be dangerous. David’s post tells you to think of 100 ways to get one client, instead of 1 way to get 100 clients - and that is a smart strategy for online as well.

The key to a successful online marketing campaign is to not only build up search, but also other online channels that can deliver you customers. That way, if you find it’s prohibitively expensive to get customers via PPC, then you have a tool kit of other tactics that can deliver you that customer.

If you want to know more about integrated online marketing campaigns, and how they can help you grow your business cost-effectively - contact us now for a free consultation!

Technorati Tags: PPC, SEO, Online Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategies

Strategy | No Comments »

On today’s web - a static ‘brochure’ site doesn’t cut it anymore.  If you provide a service, sell a product, or want to generate traffic, you have to produce fresh content that engages your readers on a regular basis.  One of the best ways to do this? - Blogging.

What is a blog?  You can read the Wikipedia Entry for that.  What I want to do is give you 7 steps to making a blog work for your business.

What are the potential benefits to blogging about your business?  They are numerous: search engine traffic, blog search traffic, positioning yourself as an expert in your field, engaging your customers, creating a community, positive PR, RSS subscribers, easy content creation and archiving, and, most importantly - gaining new customers.

Just see what it did for one lawyer here. (requires a free signup - sorry!)

Step 1 - Do some research and planning.
Look at your business.  What sets you apart?  What are you an expert in?  What subjects do you feel comfortable writing about?  Go to Google and type in some keywords related to your business.  Are people blogging on the same subjects?  What are they talking about?  Can you add value to the conversation?  Answer all of the above questions, and find your niche.

Step 2 - Choose your platform.
There are a number of services out there, from free blog sites to very expensive systems.  Each has drawbacks and positives, so you have to decide what’s most important for you.  Ideally, you want a blog system that is easy to use, customize, and will allow you to have your own domain name pointed to it. If you can find one that offers web stats, even better!

Step 3 - Get started.
An empty blog can be intimidating, and the best way to get through it is to just get started.  As you post more, you can discover your voice, and it will get easier as you go along.  Remember, you don’t have to impress Harvard scholars here (unless they are your target audience) - blogs are supposed to sound like you wrote them.

Step 4 - Keep going.
Once you start, set out a schedule of posts that you try to keep to.  1-2 per day is best, but make sure to try to post at least a few times per week.  If you keep the content fresh, people will find you, and come back.

Step 5 - Interact.
The magic of blogging is that they create communities based around them.  Read other people’s blogs, and comment on their posts.  Allow readers to comment on yours.  Respond to those comments.  Provide links to others (and they will reciprocate).

Step 6 - Rinse, and Repeat.
Once you get rolling, keep the momentum going.  With a few months of effort, you can create a very valuable web property.

Step 7 - Get help.
As a business owner, you’re busy - and we get that.  Sometimes, it makes sense to get some help executing these steps.  If you hire a professional consultant, you can use their expertise in this area to kick-start the success of your blog, get ideas for content, change the look and feel of your blog, stay up to date with new plugins and technology, and have expert help in promoting your blog.

And, you’ll find that many consultants are reasonably priced.  Contact siteEDGE for more information on how we can help you build a successful blog to get you new customers.

Strategy, Blogs, Social Media | 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 »

At siteEDGE, we’re in the business of helping your business online. That includes letting you know what NOT to do. Thankfully, Guy Kawasaki did some of that work for us today. Check it out.

Here is the full list of his points, with my thoughts added. You should head over to his place to read the original thoughts.

1.Enforced immediate registration.
If you keep you content behind a wall, it’s going to stay there. Instead of forcing your customers to register, give them a reason to WANT to. They (and you) will be much happier that way.

2.The long URL.
This is bad from the standpoint of sharing sites with friends. It’s also bad from an SEO standpoint. In short - it’s easy to rewrite URL’s, so do it.

3.Windows that don’t generate URLs.
If the content is unique, make sure it has a home. If I want to send a friend to some cool content I found, I should be able to post a link, because I won’t be bothered to explain how to navigate back to it.

4.The unsearchable web site.
Don’t expect your users/customers to work too hard to find what they’re looking for. Make it easy for them.

5.Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks.
Make it easy for users to distribute your great content. Please.

6.Limiting contact to email.
If you’re selling something, you should greatly prefer that they call you as opposed to email you.

7.Lack of feeds and email lists.
If people want to listen, why not make it easy for them?

8.Requirement to re-type email addresses.
Again - lower the level of effort required and you’ll increase conversion.

9.User names cannot contain the “@” character.
People like to user their email address. Let them.

10.Case sensitive user names and passwords.
It may sacrifice a bit of security, but it can also sacrifice your customer experience.

11.Friction-full commenting.
If you want to stimulate conversation, you have to let it happen. Get some spam plugins and let the people talk!

12.Unreadable confirmation codes.
Frustrating your customer has never been a good idea.

13.Emails without signatures.
This is as much common courtesy as anything - let people know how to get hold of you.

14.Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer.
IE’s market share is shrinking…why limit yourself?

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Online Business, How to Hurt your Business

Strategy | 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 »