The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Watch Your Capital Letters

2010-02-05T08:59:00.004-06:00

Here is something most people reading this probably don't know because it doesn't make a lick of sense: Google treats duplicate keywords as separate if they have different capitalization. For example:

PPC

ppc

These two words would be considered different keywords even if they were both in the same ad group. So you might say…what's the big deal? Here's the problem. It has been our experience that there are times when Google seems to greatly favor keywords that are all lower case. It would not be unusual for the first keyword above to have a quality score of 5 while the lower case version had a quality score of 10.

Given that you don't really know which keyword will trigger your ad, it is best to always use the version which might give you an advantage in ad positioning. So even if you decide to experiment to see what happens with capitalized versions, always test the lower case version as well.

Another problem with having keywords in your ad groups that are the same except for capitalization is that it aids in making your account more unwieldy and difficult to manage. Accounts that are fine-tuned to the best (and smallest) set of keywords are much easier to manage, so we suggest only using lower case keywords, but have each in your account as both exact and broad match.

This is just one example of how something that seems very insignificant can have an impact on your overall paid search account performance. It is important to pay attention to the details.

Got questions about search engine marketing? Feel free to contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Using Amazon.com for Topic Research

2010-01-26T08:36:00.004-06:00

If you've read much of our blog (or our articles, books, etc.), then you know that we are HUGE advocates of using content distribution as a primary search engine marketing strategy. It has many benefits: it establishes your credibility as an expert, it gets your name in front of a lot of people, it generates many keyword links to your web site, and it drives direct traffic. However, coming from the perspective of someone who has to write many articles on all different subjects on behalf of our clients, I can honestly say that it can be a grind. Sometimes it is hard to find the research material you need to write an article, especially with all the garbage that you find in a typical Google search. However, we've discovered that Amazon.com can be an excellent research tool to help you write your content.

The way this works is by using Amazon's Look Inside feature. This feature allows you to view and read passages from books for sale on Amazon that contain specific keywords. Amazon, shrewd business people that they are, only allows you to use this feature if you are a registered user on the site and have actually ordered something. So sign up for an account and buy yourself a good book to read. Then you'll be good to go.

To use this as a research tool, you will search books by whatever keyword you are researching. Then, scroll through the list of returned results and find a book that has the "Click to LOOK INSIDE" logo on top of the book cover image. Click on that book cover.

On the next screen, you will see a search box labeled "Search Inside This Book." This is the search box that allows you to specifically search in the book, so type your keyword in that box and perform another search. You will now be returned a list of links to passages in the book that contain the keyword. If you are a registered user with an order history, then clicking on the link will show you that passage. Otherwise, Amazon will tell you Sorry, you gotta order something first.

Searching through a book like this will provide you with all kinds of information about a keyword from a real book written by a real expert. This can be a richer mine of information than other types of online searches, such as searching article directories.

Anyone can be a successful writer of online content for distribution if he takes the time to do his research. This process can be tedious, but using the best sources of information will make the process a whole lot easier.

New Book Almost Done

2010-01-22T12:25:00.002-06:00

Well, yes, I am still writing 30 minutes every day per my New Year's challenge to myself. Then where the heck all our your blog updates then (you might ask)? Lately I've been devoting all my time to finishing up our next book, titled something like:

Be the Magnet
(How to Use Social Media and Content Distribution to Attract Customers and Business Opportunities)

The book is about using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Squidoo.com, in conjunction with a content distribution campaign (articles, blogs, etc.) to spread your brand, generate visibility, and drive traffic to your web site. The book is being finished up, I'm working on artwork, and am about ready to set up the review copy that we will order from our publisher.

So we're excited and believe it will be something a lot of people will want to check out. So that's why no blog updates lately...just too busy finishing up something bigger!

AdWords Ads: To Optimize or Not to Optimize?

2010-01-12T12:26:00.002-06:00

When you set up your Google AdWords campaigns, you should create multiple ads for each ad group, in order to try and find the ad copy that is most effective. You have two options for how to rotate your ads.

Google AdWords has a feature called ad optimization, which Google defines as follows:

Optimize (default): The system will favor ads that have a combination of a high click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score. These ads will enter the ad auction more often.

The alternative to optimization is a standard rotation in which all ads for an ad group will be displayed roughly the same number of times.

Of the two, intuitively it seems that you would always want to use ad optimization. It just makes sense to let Google automatically display the ads with the highest click-through rate ("CTR").

But here's the problem. If you are trying to fine tune your campaign ad groups for maximum performance, YOU yourself should judge which ads are most effective, based on an analysis of historical data. Google's ad optimization kicks in quick. Ads that have a higher initial CTR will garner massively more impressions. So ads that could actually turn out to be the best performing over the long-run might be squeezed out of the picture early on.

Do your own optimization. Run all ads an even number of times. Give each ad a fair number of impressions. How many impressions will be different from situation to situation. If your are competing in a hot market with high click rates, then you might be able to tell after only a couple hundred impressions. But in most cases, you will need to give it more than that. Maybe a thousand impressions, maybe even more than that if click rates in your industry are low across the board.

If you do not have time to actively manage your search engine marketing campaigns, then you might still be better off using the optimization feature. It is better to use early optimization than to let poor performing ads run too long, dragging down your ad group performance.

But if you have time…do it right and take care of it yourself.

Or better yet…let us do it for you! Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net to find out how we can make your life a whole lot easier.

The Thirty Minute Writing Challenge

2010-01-07T15:04:00.002-06:00

Write thirty minutes every day. That is one of the challenges to myself at the start of 2010. Day three (not counting the 1st, which was a football watching, beer drinking, chilling out kind of day; the 2nd, which was a Saturday devoted to catching up on chores; and Sunday the 3rd, which was a church and family day), this is day three of my New Year's writing challenge. Assuming I end up typing for in the neighborhood of thirty minutes, I can check off three consecutive days.

So what's the point?

When I am finished with this piece, I will have three new blog posts or articles, all dealing with my industry, and all containing keywords and keyword links to my main web sites.

If you do that…if you create a new piece of content every single day that gets posted on a blog, or posted to one or a hundred article directories, or to any one of dozens of high quality social media sites…all with keyword links back to your web site…you will accomplish several things:

You will get your name in front of a lot of people.

You will establish your credibility as an expert in your industry.

You will improve your web site's search engine rankings.

You will drive traffic to your web site.

That is an impressive list of benefits. In the general scheme of things, thirty minutes doesn't seem like much, but I can attest (and I'm sure many of you will agree) there are many days when you just can't find a half hour to do nothing but write. So maybe you do it early in the morning. Or maybe you do it at night (it's 10:34PM Central at the time of this writing). Or maybe you just pay somebody else to do it. It's worth the effort.

Normally I write something a bit more technical or specific to some aspect of search engine marketing (see the way I linked the keyword "search engine marketing" to my company's main web site?). My brain is fried from debugging .NET code all day (.NET programming definitely does not fall under the domain of search engine marketing; however, one of the things that Work Media takes pride in is being able to do WHATEVER our clients need us to do to keep selling), so this is what you get.

I'm at 37 minutes…with a couple of lapses to watch a few minutes of reruns of the Office…so I can call this one done.

A Lesson in Keywords: How Many Keywords Do You Need?

2010-01-05T12:17:00.003-06:00

There is a client we have worked with for a long time who has a Google AdWords campaign that has not performed as well for parts of this year as it has in the past. In general, 2009 was somewhat of a difficult year due to increased competition for paid search traffic and poor economic conditions. In other words, there have been more advertisers chasing fewer customers. And this particular client definitely experienced the effects of that.

After trying many different strategies (account keyword expansion, keyword contraction, higher ad positioning, ad split-testing, etc.) we've finally stripped the account down to the barebones.

We're now only bidding on four keywords. I'm really not a big fan of bidding on so few keywords. It's the whole "eggs in one basket" thing. But in this case, looking backward, I can see that if we had concentrated our client's budget on that very small set of keywords, our performance over the last year would have been substantially better. We bid on many, many more than just four keywords. Throughout the year, we bid on fewer and fewer. And finally, this month, we're down to the final four contestants.

Should we go down to a single keyword? In theory, if you place all of your budget on the number one performing keyword, then all else equal, you will maximize the performance of your paid search account, up to the point where you run out of traffic. So there's one problem with this strategy. It is best employed in a limited budget situation.

If you have $10 thousand to spend, but bidding on a single or very few keywords only soaks up $1 thousand of your budget, there are likely many more opportunities you could be exploiting by spreading your budget around. But if you only have $1 thousand to start with, then spending the entire $1 thousand on a single keyword makes sense if it provides the best return on your investment.

Another problem is that keyword performance does tend to fluctuate. If you're all in on a single keyword, then if conditions change and that keyword's performance declines, your overall account performance will decline right along with it. So in our case, I don't see us dropping to a single keyword. We will stick with the four keyword basket, but you better believe if we start to see a trend of declining performance, we will open up some other keywords.

I guess the core lesson here is the importance of allocating your budget so that more of your budget is consumed by keywords that provide the best return for your advertising dollars. The only way to do that is by carefully examining your historical keyword performance. One caveat is that keyword performance can be affected by where your ads are positioned, so your analysis will be most accurate if your ad positioning is relatively steady across keywords.

Paid search management sometimes requires some imagination, and it definitely requires a watchful eye. Work Media have a lot of experience doing this stuff, and we're pretty dang good at it. We would welcome the opportunity to work with you on your search engine marketing. Contact us at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

A New Beginning

2009-12-30T15:53:00.002-06:00

2010 is upon us, and we at Work Media are very excited for the future of our company and the search engine marketing industry. This has been an up and down year as we sort-of rode the same economic waves that rocked the rest of our country, but the last couple of months have been very good and momentum is high going into the new year. We've got the gist of our business plan for the new year written up on a whiteboard so everyone in the office will see it, and we had set very specific goals for the new year. I hope you have done the same.

Have a great New Year's!

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-23T15:17:00.001-06:00

Hope everyone has a fantastic holiday weekend. Work Media is shutting down for a couple of days, but never fear! We will be back in business come Monday morning, ready to get to work.

Whiteboard Planning

2009-12-16T09:23:00.003-06:00

We're trying something different at Work Media. It seems like every December we create a marketing plan for the coming year, only to have the plan sit around and collect dust as we get back to business as usual. For big corporations with many specialized employees, maybe the thick paper marketing plan works because there are people who actually have time to look at it and tell other people what to do to stick to the plan. But I'm not sure how well it works a lot of times for small companies like us.

So we're trying something new. We're whiteboarding it. I will probably still end up creating a paper plan to flesh out details (SEO, advertising, direct mail), but for the big picture, I've written what we want to accomplish in 2010 on a whiteboard so everyone in my office can see it. Now obviously, there is a limit to how much detail I can go into. But details are meaningless unless everyone in the office knows what the "big" goals are, what what we're trying to get done.

So what is my on our whiteboard? At the top of the board is our revenue goal for the year. Now, your business may be different. There may be a different metric that is most important to you. But for us, being in a business with low capital requirements, I know that if we hit our revenue goal, everything else will fall into place.

Beneath our revenue goal, I've sketched out in very broad terms how we will hit the number: how much we have to generate in product sales, how many clients we need, etc. I've also created a picture of what our company structure should look like with arrows going this way and that. I like visual diagrams when trying to demonstrate something that can be complex in as simple a way as possible.

The whiteboard approach may not be effective for you. If you have a large office, with lots of employees disbursed in different places, then a whiteboard might not work because not everyone would even see it. But my point is, you should try to come up with something to keep your company's goals for the year in front of your people's eyes. Maybe some kind of weekly report would work for you.

Do you have your goals set for 2010? If not, that is obviously the first place to start. Set your goals, decide how you are going to accomplish them, and then make everyone in your company know what the plan is.

If you're small enough, you might even want to whiteboard it.

Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?

2009-12-02T14:01:00.003-06:00

Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.

First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site's worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.

For another thing, we don't think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That's not to say Google doesn't do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn't I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors' web sites?

Google says this: "...it's useless to think of harming your competitor's ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won't affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines."

Ah, there's the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:

1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.

The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.

Here's another thing: don't rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.

Here's another thing that we find odd: one of Google's suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.

So what should you do? Don't worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-24T16:02:00.002-06:00

Work Media will be taking a couple of days off this week for Thanksgiving, as I imagine most of you are doing. This is the time of year when things start slowing down a bit, and business people such as ourselves reflect on the year behind and start planning for the year ahead. So just for fun, I thought I would list some things we are thankful for:

We're still in business! We have seen so many businesses shut down this year, including our former partners who were a one-time successful Nashville ad agency. Unemployment nationwide is sky high, and people are having a hard time all over. If you have a job, or work for yourself, you are doing pretty good right now.
Bing. Google needs some competition...bad. We are unhappy about some of the changes Google has made over the last few years, many of which it seems (to us, at least) were done just because they can. When you have no competition, you can get away with things like that.
Dickson, Tennessee. Until a couple of months ago, we were operating out of a very nice office in downtown Nashville. For a while, it was really cool being downtown in the city. But that coolness quickly wore off and was replaced by feelings of inconvenience. Now that we have relocated to downtown Dickson, a little town a ways outside of Nashville, we can get to work much quicker and get more work done in the same number of hours.
Big companies in the legal marketing industry who rip off their clients. It's not that we really like seeing anyone get ripped off, but word is getting out about the practices of some of the big companies in this industry, and that is only going to serve to drive more business to smaller companies like Work Media that operate in a much more ethical manner.
Print on demand. Over the last year, we have made great use of this publishing technology. We released two books, both of which went up for sale on Amazon.com things to print on demand. It has been very helpful for spreading our company's name and establishing our credibility.
Our health. Everybody at Work Media and our families is relatively healthy right now, which is the greatest wealth of all.

What are you thankful for?

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Is There Power in Twitter Lists?

2009-11-06T09:34:00.002-06:00

Twitter has released its "list" feature and I think it has some potential to be a very useful tool in the context of a Twitter marketing campaign. It lets you create lists of other Twitter users. A separate Twitter sub-page is then created where people can view the updates from those on the list. If you follow lots and lots of people, this is a good way to really keep track of the ones you are interested in.

Another handy feature is that other users can follow your lists. So if you spend some time creating good lists, that is a good way to feed those users into other accounts. Why would this be useful? For one thing, you are providing a service to others by helping sort through users that are actually worth following. Secondly, if you have multiple Twitter accounts of your own, you can include them in your lists, which could definitely help expand the number of followers for those lists.

Creating a list is quite easy. Click on the Create a New List button. On the next screen, you give your list a name and add users to it. You can search for users using the search text box, but you are probably going to want to add existing users you follow to the list. To do that, you just have to visit those users' Twitter pages, then click the Lists button at the top. Your newly created list will appear as an option. Click on the list name to add that particular user to the list.

The new list feature is definitely a Twitter feature you should explore. If you just like to read what others are having to say, you can use it for that. But I also think there are more strategic uses if you put some work into it. We will explore this feature more in later blog posts.

So That's How They Make Those Cool Flash Ads!

2009-10-28T12:41:00.003-06:00

I'll admit. I've seen those cool Flash ads that have things you can click or that provide some kind of interaction with the user and always thought they seemed really cool and something that we could take advantage of for our clients...if we had time to do such a thing. But I always thought those things were created in Flash. I've dabbled in Flash but just don't have time to get good enough with it to do those kinds of things.

And then I met Flex.

Adobe Flex is a platform for creating interactive Flash widgets. A flex file is an XML file that is compiled into a Flash movie. The Flex framework is free, and using it all you need to create Flex files is a text editor. But Adobe makes a product that allows for visual, drag-and-drop style development, at least from the user interface perspective (there is still a lot of manual coding involved).

We were recently hired by Prototype Advertising to create a promotional widget for Regal Cinemas. While investigating different ways to pull this off, I discovered Flex. Here is a preview of what we have created:

http://workmedia.net/regal

I have a fair amount of time invested in this, but it would have been much more difficult if I had had to create it directly in Flash. Another very cool feature of Flex is that it allows you to convert your online widgets into desktop applications using Adobe Air. Awesome.

So now you know...all those cool Flash ads and widgets you see? It's all Flex, man!

Don't Be Lazy with Your Social Media Marketing

2009-10-21T09:10:00.004-06:00

Jerry Work here. I have returned to the business of finishing our next book, on the subject of social media marketing. It has been 90% written for a couple of months; I just haven't had the enthusiasm for the project to finish. But I've rededicated myself to getting it done and out to the public.

It's funny...as I read through what I've written, I keep saying to myself "man, that's a good idea...I should do that..." You see, I've spent a ton of time this year studying social media, experimenting with Twitter and whatnot, but then when things get too busy around the office, I tend to drop it so that I can concentrate on getting the work done.

But it can't be that way.

You have GOT to be systematic if you are going to use social media as a marketing strategy. If you post on Twitter once a week, that is going to do absolutely nothing. If you update Facebook once a month, you might as well be invisible. These things have got to be done every day.

I have blogged quite a bit here and in my Twitter marketing blog about automating certain tasks so that your accounts stay updated even when you don't manually update them yourself. But I've discovered something else about myself that I think is probably applicable to most people: once you stop doing something, it is difficult to start back up. So for the last few weeks, my Twitter account has pretty well been on auto-pilot. Sure, it is good because I have kept it going, but social networking is MUCH more effective when you involve yourself...when you read what others around you are saying...when you are part of the community.

So be better than I have been lately. Get your systems in place to automate your accounts, but make sure you set aside a little bit of time each day to log into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever you're into, and update your account. Respond to what some other users are saying. Look for new friends.

Just do it!

Loving Flex

2009-10-15T15:20:00.003-06:00

We have been heavily involved in a Flex widget development project this week. I have to say...Flex is a very, very cool technology. I plead ignorance...when I used to see dynamic Flash banner ads on search engine or content pages, I just assumed they were developed by Flash developers. Now I know the truth...

They are using Flex. Flex is a development platform that combines XML and ActionScript to create Flash files. The difference between using Flex and Flash is that Flex is specifically designed for building dynamic widgets and Web components. So...if you want to create a Flash ad that has a dropdown list or that displays data from an RSS file or that has any other kind of interactivity, Flex makes it easy.

Well...it makes it easy from a user interface standpoint. You still have to know how to do some programming. I've been doing so much programming lately that those concepts have been freshened up in my mind. ActionScript is very, very similar to JavaScript, so it's really not that difficult to deal with. You just have to learn what the objects are that you need and what the properties, methods and events are for those objects.

The Flex framework is free and you can actually build Flex applications using nothing more than a simple text editor. However, your development time will be greatly sped up if you use Adobe's integrated development environment for Flex, called Flex Builder.

If you have the time or resources, I highly recommend you check out Flex and see what you can do with it.

Mid-October Update

2009-10-09T08:24:00.002-06:00

Guys, I'm sorry. I just can't keep these blogs updated lately. Things have gotten very busy around the office. We're in a bit of a growth spurt and things are quite busy around the office. I really hope to find more time in the coming weeks to start updating our blogs more often and teaching some things. Teaching...let's see...okay, here's a lesson:

When advertising on the Yahoo Search Marketing platform, it is absolutely critical that you separate search and content campaigns. The reason is that your quality score for the entire campaign will be based on the combined performance of search and content. This is usually not a good thing because content is going to perform much worse, which is going to drag down your entire campaign...causing you to have to pay more for your search engine clicks. So keep the two separated and you should get better performance from your Yahoo search engine ads.

We have signed on a couple of new clients. Please welcome to the Work Media family New Jersey-based law firm Clark & Clark. We will also doing some widget development for Prototype Advertising, a Virginia-based advertising firm. We also recently completed a Zen Cart ecommerce installation for our client World Floors Direct.

We are working with our client C. Emory Cross on a new workers comp blog. If you're into talking about insurance and workers comp...check it out.

Tiny URLs in Email Messages

2009-09-23T15:07:00.003-06:00

One thing I've noticed in various junk marketing emails I've received lately is that email marketers have started using tiny URLs in their email messages. A tiny URL is basically a URL that is routed through another service that knows what the actual URL is supposed to be and directs the visitor to the right page. The reason for the service is that it can take a URL that is very long and complex and transform it into something MUCH shorter in terms of total characters.

Now, tiny URLs have value when doing something like micro-blogging, where the total number of characters you have to convey your message is very limited. For instance, if you are using Twitter, where you are limited to 140 characters, it is not practical to place a long link in your message because it will take up so much room. So you can use a tiny URL and leave yourself with many more characters.

The downside of tiny URLs is that they mask where the links actually go. In today's dangerous Internet world, where criminal robots, spyware and viruses abound, you just can't go around clicking on strange links when you don't know where you might end up. So why, when character limitation is not an issue, would you HIDE where you are linking to? In my opinion, this is very suspicious. Personally, I will NEVER click on a link in an email if I can't see where the link goes, unless it is from a very trustworthy source who I know personally. Otherwise...forget about it.

I'm probably not the only person who feels this way. So...if you are doing email marketing, my advice is to make your links transparent. Otherwise, it seems like you are trying to hide something. and I would just bet that your email marketing performance will suffer.

Google Shakeup: Just Stick to the Basics

2009-09-02T08:17:00.004-06:00

Google has been doing some things lately with its index that have caused quite a bit of shuffling of rankings. However, what we are finding is that, in general, in a few days things get restored to something like what they were before. So if you have high rankings that have suddenly disappeared, chances are pretty good you will get them back in a few days. The main thing is: stay calm!

We have been checking a lot of our clients' rankings in the beta version of the new Google algorithm which is to be released in the near future. We are actually seeing improvements for many of our rankings with the new release. This validates our theory that, if you stick to the basics and work it, you will be fine.

So...what does that mean exactly?

First off, make sure the copy of your web site (including page titles and headers) is optimized for specific keywords, and not all on the same page. Spread your keywords out!

Make sure you have a keyword-rich internal linking structure. For example, if you are a law firm and your number one keyword is "Huntsville injury lawyer," then you should have lots of links throughout your site pointing back to your home page that incorporate that keyword.

Next, make sure you systematically build up a heavy catalog of external links to your site. And spread it out. If you do reciprocal linking, that is fine, but that should not be your only linking strategy. Submit articles to article directories. Add your site to general directories. Look for lots of places for your links, and add new links regularly.

Also, we have seen some evidence that Google may now be giving preference to sites that have been updated recently. So if you don't do a blog, set one up! Stream or publish it to your blog and update it regularly. Pepper your blog with keywords, links to your own content, as well as useful content from other web sites.

In other words...if you want to maintain or improve your search engine rankings, stick to the basics! It would also be an excellent idea to mix in some social media marketing, but that is another discussion.

Knee Deep in Code

2009-08-26T14:37:00.003-06:00

Jerry here. Man, I have been knee-deep in code for weeks now. Sometimes I curse having a background in programming. But the fact is, my having that experience is invaluable. One thing Work Media prides itself on is our flexibility in being able to help someone with their problems, no matter what they are.

Need a new web site? We'll build it.

Ecommerce not working? We'll fix it.

Need a custom program? We'll create it.

None of which is really our core business, which is marketing! But we can't do much in the way of marketing a bad or broken web site, so the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty important.

We have been customizing the hell out of a Zen Cart installation for one of our clients. We are WAY beyond the default features and functionality. But when the new site is live, I fully expect it to greatly improve our client's conversion rates. And the great thing is...we'll even know it if he does since we'll actually be able to track that stuff now. His old site, which was...well...not very good...could not be properly plugged into our analytics package. So we had a CLUE as to what was working, but not as much detailed information as we would have liked. The new site fixes all that.

It's also wearing me out. I worked 'til past 5:00 in the morning the night before last. But it's what I have to do to get the dang thing done.

I have also begun development of our own proprietary Twitter management tool, which we will make available to the public once it is live and stable. Speaking of Twitter, if you haven't already, I invite you to check out our Twitter marketing blog, www.TheTwitterMarketingBlog.com. I do a MUCH better job updating it than I do this one.

Updating Twitter with TweetLater and TwitterFeed

2009-08-19T14:39:00.003-06:00

The deeper we dig into the Twitter world, the more different ways we are finding to take advantage of it. I (this is Jerry) have to admit that I am much more intrigued by Twitter than I am with Facebook. I have yet to really realize the benefit of Facebook, although admittedly part of it is that I just haven't put that much effort into it. Part of it is time. I do all of our social media work, and after taking care of our clients, I have fairly limited time for self-promotion. But it is also that I just don't "get" Facebook like I get Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly simple concept, yet remarkably powerful in the things you can do with it.

I think the best way for a business to manage a Twitter account is with a combination of automation and manual posting. For automation, my number one tool hands down is Tweet Later. I really can't do Twitter without it now (the pro version, not the free version which is much more limited in what it can do). However, one issue with using Tweet Later to automate your account is that you pre-program your messages, so the tweets that originate from Tweet Later are not really tied to events actually happening.

That's why I have started combining Tweet Later automation with automatic posts from TwitterFeed. The purpose of TwitterFeed is to let you stream your own blog to your Twitter account. That is a nice feature, but what I have started doing is creating an RSS feed based on Google alerts, and then feeding that into TwitterFeed to in turn update my Twitter account with news items. So now, my account is automatically updated with a combination of pre-programmed messages about my industry, along with Google news results. And of course I do a fair amount of manual posting as well.

If you are active with Twitter, it can keep your name in front of a lot of people. And if some of those people like what you have to say and start retweeting your messages, then there is a powerful viral effect.

I have devoted many hours the last few weeks to a study of Twitter. If you would like to learn along with me, I invite you to check out my blog devoted to the subject, The Twitter Marketing Blog, at www.thetwittermarketingblog.com.

Don't Be Fooled by this Old SEO Trick

2009-08-13T11:29:00.003-06:00

Here is a trick of the SEO trade:

To demonstrate your skill in SEO by achieving a very high search engine ranking for a very low competition keyword.

Look, if your site ranks well for a keyword that noone ever uses, have you really accomplished anything? No! My partner relays an interesting story from his days at CJ Marketing about an SEO "expert" coming in and demonstrating how she could take a particular keyword and very quickly get it ranked number one on Google. Fantastic! Only...the web page she optimized was the ONLY result brought back by Google for that keyword. In other words, there was not a single other web page competing against her page for that keyword.

It is easy to be number one when you have ZERO competition!

So don't be fooled by this trick. SEO is not easy. It's not quick. And it's not cheap. If you want your web site to rank for keywords with no competition and no traffic, you don't need an SEO firm. You can easily make that happen yourself. But if you want to rank highly for competitive keywords that may actually drive targeted traffic to your web site, then you need to be prepared for war.

Social Media: Walking Down a Hallway with Lots of Doors

2009-08-05T07:26:00.004-06:00

There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business. That is fine, however, because it means that you are recognizing opportunities that you would not have seen if you had not taken action.

The concept of using social media to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with these sites, the better your chance of using them as a tool for opportunity creation.

However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your friend/follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry for geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis. When one of those people needs help with a bankruptcy issue, they will know who to contact.

It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many friends or followers as you can but you never read what those people have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. If the number of people you follow is small, then you might be fine just using the default twitter interface. However, as your accounts grow, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with what is going on. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your social media accounts.

There are several on the market, and I have spent time finding a solution that works well for me. It would be a good idea for you to do the same. The one I like the best is TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com), which automates many functions of managing a Twitter campaign, such as posting tweets, sending direct messages, and searching for new relevant users to follow. A good application for just keeping up with what people are saying is TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), which lets you view your Facebook friend updates and Twitter follower updates in the same interface.

New Direction for Work Media

2009-07-28T09:11:00.002-06:00

Work media is enjoying our new office located in downtown Dickson. Our productivity is up and our travel time is way down. We can all get to the office in 15 minutes or less, which uses more time to spend researching Internet Marketing strategies and applying them to our clients accounts. If any of you ever find yourself in Dickson (about 1/2 hour drive west of Nashville), we invite you to stop by for a visit. We are in the old Ragan arcade on main street.

We've been getting really heavy into social media and video. We have begun recording a lot of video footage, including short 12 second video four 12 seconds/twitter. Of loading videos to 12 seconds has a definite SEO advantage, in that it can result in the creation of a lot of web pages with a keyword links pointing to your main site. This is somewhat of an advanced strategy that could have a powerful long-term impact on a search engine optimization campaign.

Combining video, social media, and content distribution is definitely the state of the art in search engine marketing. We invite you to contact us today to talk about creating and implementing this type of marketing campaign for your business.

By the way, if you're into Twitter, you should check out our Twitter blog, http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.

By the way one more time, I invite you to check out our 12seconds page, http://12seconds.tv/channel/lawfirmseo. As the name implies, this particular channel is intended to discuss law firm marketing, but it pretty much all applies to any type of business.

Using Groups to Organize Your Twitter Account with TweetDeck

2009-07-22T08:17:00.003-06:00

Once your Twitter account gets up to a couple thousand followers, it can be difficult to manage. Unless you're rich and don't have anything better to do, you can't really sit around all day and do nothing but read tweets. However, checking out what the people you follow are saying is sort-of the whole point of Twitter's existence.

A program for organizing your account so you can keep up with those you find interesting or useful is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a client side program that presents your Twitter information in an efficient, organized way using columns. By default, the tweets from all of your friends are listed in a column on the left-hand side of the screen (although columns can be moved around however you want). The next column lists tweets that mention your user name. The third column lists direct messages. The last column, by default, shows TweetDeck recommendations, which I found to be a waste of space. I use that column to build out groups.

If you take the steps to build up a large list of people you follow (and who follow you), there are going to be many people that you're really not that interested in reading. Likewise, there are going to be some people who you really want to keep up with. The way to account for this is to place those you really want to read into groups.

I have several groups set up in my account - one for those who post about legal marketing, one for those who post about affiliate marketing, etc. This lets me track posts on specific subjects from specific users, rather than having to dig through thousands of tweets that I really don't care about.

You may choose to use groups differently, instead just grouping anyone you find interesting regardless of their line of work or the nature of their tweets. That is fine. The main thing is just to find SOME way to keep up with your most followees, rather than just having a big unorganized mess.

How to Use Your Blog and Twitter Account to Keep Facebook Updated Automatically

2009-07-13T15:05:00.000-06:00

Using a tool like Ping.fm, you can integrate your blog, your Twitter account, and your Facebook account. We're talking about dynamically combining content from multiple sources into content for a third or more web page.

Here is a hypothetical example.

Let's say I run an Internet marketing company in Nashville...wait a minute, that's not so hypothetical is it? Anyway, I update my company's blog every Tuesday and Friday. A couple of times per day, I also update our Twitter account. Assuming it takes me one hour per blog post and five minutes per tweet, that would represent a total time investment of just under three hours.

At the moment, I am only updating my blog and my Twitter account for those three hours. With a little ingenuity, I can also keep a major social networking site such as Facebook updated with very little additional time.

With an application like Ping.fm, I can have my Facebook status updated every time I post a new tweet. Taking it a step further, I can use the Facebook Notes application to update my Facebook account every time I update my blog. So now, for those same three hours, I am not only updating my blog and Twitter, I am also updating my Facebook page.

One problem is that just having a Facebook account doesn't do us any good if we don't have any friends in the account. So I may need some additional time to periodically log into Facebook and search for new friends. I could even automate that part using a tool like Facebook Blaster. But I would still want to periodically log into my Facebook account to check things out. You never really want to automate something and then just forget about it.

Since I'm using Ping.fm, I could also choose to set up some more social media pages and have them update every time I update my blog. In this case, it will be important to separate blogs from update sites using groups. Otherwise, I will end up with a bunch of extremely short blog posts with no titles. I have made that mistake before and it looks really bad.

So, the whole point of this exercise: whereas before I put in the time and only managed to update my firm's blog and Twitter account, I can now update the blog, Twitter account, AND a Facebook account.