Don’t React to Trends, Set Them

One trend I see on a regular basis, are companies following a dead trend or one on it’s way out. Typically once a marketing trend catches on, it’s already dead. Your competitors are hoping you follow their lead. Thats what makes them the leader and you the follower. They are already thinking 6 months ahead and you can barely keep up. It’s all about taking chances. If the risk you take is successful enough that will carry over and hopefully will snowball into more trend setting ideas. Yes there is trial and error involved, but it’s always the risk takers who reap the benefits.

One great and recent example is a friend of mine, Phil Kaplan just launched a new business called “blippy“. It’s controversial in the fact that it involves making credit card purchases publicly available online for all to see. It’s the next Twitter. Instead of telling your followers what your doing, you passively do so by making purchases. This creates a way of letting people know where you are, and what you’re doing and gives a clue on what you really purchase without even typing in an update.

Phil’s always been a progressive thinker, thats what makes him so successful.

Bottom line, take risks. If you don’t you’ll always be in second place.

Does Your Website Smell Like a Rat?

I can always tell when someone is being fake. So can you. It’s a gut feeling, a natural instinct that tells you that something isn’t the way it ought to be. Think about those expressions old movie cops used for when something just wasn’t right: this smells fishy, I smell a rat, etc. That’s because when something or someone is phony, it’s as tangible and obvious as a smell.

The same principle applies to your web copy, or anything you write about your business. If it’s fake, it’ll smell fake. That is, it will come off feeling forced or unnatural to your readers or potential customers.

Will your readers know why they don’t want to click the “go to checkout” button or even why they don’t want to navigate further in the site? Maybe, and maybe not. Some people are very good at understanding their gut feelings, while others just feel a sort of uneasiness that makes them want to go down to the next result on the Google page.

In either case, the reason will be the same: your writing doesn’t seem natural.

Natural writing sounds like it’s something you want to be saying in the way in which you normally say things in your everyday life. Of course there are matters of formality–slang isn’t appropriate for web copy because it doesn’t seem professional, and not everyone understands it. But the idea is simple: write the way you would naturally speak if you were discussing something you love with someone who would like to know more about it.

So for example, if you loved say, model trains and met a very attractive lady (or guy) at a Model Trains convention…how would you go about explaining to her the details of your thrilling new concept that will innovate model transportation as we know it today?

You would probably: explain your concepts well, make sure she understands everything you’re saying, and go into just enough detail to keep her interested in your concept without putting her to sleep.

The same principles should be in your writing whenever you’re updated the sales copy on your website or sending an email to a client. After all, you want to leave your reader feeling as clear as a spring day; not pinching their noses and clicking the close button.

Your own, Personal Google…A Search Engine to hear your prayers, a Search Engine that Cares

Wow, well aside from the long cool headline this is big news from Google. Basically Google will soon take your personal web habits and cater the results for you. This is good and bad depending on what side of the fence you stand. Google has always been about search relevancy. This is great is you search for similar things on a regular basis and want to omit the search results you never choose anyway. The ones who will suffer from this are the companies who will infomercial you via search results. You know who I mean, the ones who optimize their sites to rank for terms that sometimes have no relevance but are hoping to find customers blindly.

I think this can be great for legitimate businesses. Yes it may be harder for you to gain ranking but you know what, this means fair and equal balance among competition online. Build a strong brand the old fashioned way and you will be rewarded. If you’re a new business, then concentrate on word of mouth and standard marketing strategies first before shoveling a bunch of cash into a pay per click campaign.

Zip Codes and User Reviews Boost Localized Search Results

If you’re a small local business and you want to get on your local customers online radar, your first priority is getting your physical address all over your website. Zip codes and alternate names of the neighborhood your business is in will definitely increase your organic rankings in Google. When customers are searching for a local business, they usually enter a keyword followed by the zip code, or the name of the neighborhood with the keyword of the product they’re searching for. Then Google will show a hybrid local result using their map and normal search engine results link underneath it (see map image above).

Getting local organic results is the first challenge, next is getting quality customer reviews about your business. Setup a customer survey questionnaire, have customers fill them out and encourage them to post the results on google maps. Come up with an incentive for your customers to do this. This should be your top priority, think of it as word of mouth which essentially it is because the quality of referrals you get from word of mouth are usually high.

Bottom line is having an established connection between your physical business and online presence should be taken seriously. With little effort you can boost your customer reach significantly.

The Biggest SEO Secrets Aren’t Secret

It’ really boring and stale the same old SEO tips and trick articles you see online. I recently got an email from someone marketing an SEO tips webinar and how to dominate Google, and be listed in the top 5 results for your search terms. So I decided to attend it purely out of curiosity because I know how these things go already. To keep the story short, I left the webinar 10 minutes into it because it’s the same old boring crap everyone has heard before. It really surprises me on how long you can keep up this game of tricking people luring them in with big promises just to spew out garbage that you can find on Wikipedia.

So here’s my tip. Write about what you love. Keep your site going with steady content for about a year to gain traction. Most people looking for a quick buck don’t have patience, and are not in it for the long haul and it shows because they’re not doing something they love to do. Yes add in the typical standard SEO best practices, but just keep it going. Write everyday.

Remember, search engines change algorithms all the time, so you may be listening to information that really is harming your site and not helping it. Most articles I see is information thats a few years old already and thats a lifetime on the web.

So here’s the secret, pure intention always wins. And I think Google’s algorithm favors honesty more than keywords.

WiFi Web Marketing the Good and Bad

Google, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft have now all positioned themselves to offer free temporary Wi-Fi access in some public spaces and airports in the hopes of drumming up their advertising efforts. This can go a number of ways. It can be a great service to cut costs for the average person who looks to surf the net for free, or can be a pain to those who see this as a potentially intrusive move with big business bullying themselves to get in front of a mass audience.

Personally, I think it’s a win win. Free access but you have to use their search engine. Big deal, sounds great to me. The only objection I would have is how much access they will have in tracking what you do from your mobile device or laptop. This is where free wi-fi can eventually go wrong because of all of these companies being so data driven and hungry to stay ahead of each other that they lose site of customer experience.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you are blind to the overall goal of these companies and just want to casually surf the internet for free, then there is really no harm done.

Downsize or Just Optimize Everything?

With the major economic downturn, some online businesses find themselves going through another sink or swim moment similar to the dot com bust. One thing thats different and can positively affect your online business is that there are many more strategies you can implement if you’re smart enough. You need to be up to date and educated about the web if you’re running your own online business. You can’t just have a build it and they will come attitude anymore. You need to be cutting edge as much as the agencies out there in order to survive.

Optimization isn’t just a term used for search. You can optimize all facets of your business from yourself to your employee’s to software purchases and web hosting packages. You need to itemize the biggest expenses your company has which is probably advertising and narrow things down from there. I know several large companies with million dollar campaigns running with many inefficiencies where their money can be spent better in other areas.

Look for any and all inefficiencies of your online business. Always stay on top of new marketing techniques, make sure you read current industry blogs within your vertical market and ditch anything that doesn’t convert to sales. Pay close attention when analyzing your site for any holes in the sales conversion process. Getting feedback from customers from a quick multiple choice question form is a great way to find out areas your business may be lacking.

Without any major changes, little by little you can save money and potentially save your web business.

Link Building and Promoting Your Site Through News Articles

A great and free way of getting some link backs to your site as well as promoting certain products to a wider range of customers is using news article sites such as e-zine articles. Sites like these offer content for use to re-post on other websites. You write an article, and someone in need of web content related to your subject will post it on their site. The benefit to you, they need to include a link to your site to credit you for the content. Pending on how general your topic is, it could be re-used on dozens or hundreds of sites. That means dozens or hundreds of link backs to your site, which in turn can significantly boost your search ranking.

Another simple way of promoting your website is to create a press release. There are many sites online that will publish your news and send to the local news wires. The news should be something significant to warrant having a press release such as a launch of a local web business or new product. This will certainly get temporary traffic to your site. This is great to tie this into a product you may be promoting heavily on your site that you want customers to see.

How to Choose and Purchase a Domain Name

So you have a business or a business idea and you’re ready to buy a domain name to start your web business. There’s a few things to consider. It used to be necessary to have relevant keywords to your business in your domain name to achieve higher search results. Not so much anymore. The most important aspect to decide on is branding vs. name familiarity in your area of business. Is your idea a new concept? Or has your brand name been out there for a while? This is an important area of your business you need to understand when deciding on a name.

For branding, your overall strategy will be focused more on advertising than getting great search results because you’re presenting your product to people who may not know about it for the first time. This type of marketing strategy is to saturate the web with your name and associate it with your product. For an already known name or product familiarity, you’ll rely less on advertising but will focus more on search engine results. This is because people may be familiar with and know your product but they may not how to find it easily online or through search.

Shorter, easy to remember domain names are most desirable. But since the web is saturated with domain squatters* who have bought most of the great and easy to remember domain names. It’s harder to come by a unique easy to remember name so you’ll need to get creative. Domains with dashes are ok when in a pinch for a name you really want (my-domian-name.com) just try and keep it to about three words max. Purchasing multiple variations and common misspellings of your domain name is also normal procedure. This ensures if someone types in your name wrong, someone else won’t buy that domain and profit on it directing a user to a competitor site.

Domain names are typically $9.99 a year to register and usually has the option to extend for several years at a cheaper cost.

*someone who buys domain names in bulk in hope of someone wanted a name to pay a high price for it.

How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Why search engine optimization? Well, if your site doesn’t rank high in a search engine, then your business is as good as selling your product to yourself. Web users don’t normally choose to far form the top 5-10 results when doing a search to purchase a product or service. So you need to be front and center to be clicked and even then it’s not guaranteed the user will choose you.

That is one of the keys to a web sites success. The only way you will get great search engine rankings is to make sure your site has the following:

Unique content. Copycats beware. Search engines penalize you for copying content so don’t even go there. If you’re selling a product or service that others are selling also, creative bizarro content (opposite of theirs but related to the product). Original content with proper use of title tags, keywords, meta tags and description is what helps you climb to the top of the search engine results pages. Shoot to have about two or three keyword rich paragraphs per page. Write the content in the perspective of you searching for it online, with terms as how you would type a search request into a search engine, but in a way that blends it into the content and makes sense.

Keywords that are higher on the page top left are ideal. Web spiders (an automated program that search engines use to find your content) hit this area first usually and is common that they’ll rank the page higher.

Name and use alt tag images. The code used to visually display text if your browser doesn’t show the image. Make sure these are named in relation to your sites keyword strategy.

Naming conventions for web pages. The name of your page /my-page.html is important. Make sure it relates to the content on your page and references a keyword. Best way is to have a keyword in the page name and the same keyword in the H1 tag (Header 1).

Cross reference other related pages on your site. If one page has info that leads to the other page, link certain keywords to that page.