Blog Friday
An associate here who regularly blogs on another website we have commented that today was “Blog Friday,” and it hit me that that is a great concept. Blogging needs to be a consistent part of your Internet marketing; something that you do every week, maybe even on the same days, regularly. It should be a habit. Now, I can’t say that I have done very well with this habit…for a couple of years now. But I’m back, baby! One of my goals for this year is to blog three times per week. So let’s explore this idea.
Why would you want to blog regularly? There are some very good reasons:
- You cause your website to grow with content. Google loves websites with lots of content. The more you have, the better.
- You can re-purpose your blogs. We’ve published a couple of books which have been very useful in spreading our brand and attracting clients. Most of the content in those books started as blog posts. You could do the same thing, turning your blog content into articles, reports, books, or anything you can think of.
- It helps establish credibility. Chances are pretty good that if you blog about a particular subject regularly, those who read the blog will think you know what you’re taking about.
- It can cause people to return to your blog to read your updates. This is a very favorable thing. You WANT people to want to come to your website to read what you have to say.
- It can cause you to think critically about what you do. If you’re constantly having to come up with something to say related to your business, it may force you to have to learn some new things about your industry and keep up with what’s going on. This is a very good thing.
So there you have it. Five very good reasons to have your own Blog Friday…or Blog Monday…or whatever day(s) work for you.
An Introduction to Local SEO
If your business operates at a local level, or has a geographically-defined market area, then it is important that you engage in local SEO. This process should probably start with Google Places.
Google Places is Google’s online business directory, similar to Yellow Pages listings, with the listings appearing on pinned onto a local map. So if I am in Savannah, and I search Google for “carpet cleaner,” Google will likely show me a few local carpet cleaning businesses. Or I may have to click on Maps to view those listings. Then Google will show me a list of businesses, along with little pins showing where they are on a map of Savannah. Obviously, you would like your carpet cleaning business to appear high up on this list.
Go to www.google.com/lbc and provide very complete information about your business. Don’t play games here. It can be a real pain to “fix” your local business listing in Google, so give your exact business address and don’t try to trick Google into thinking your office location is somewhere it isn’t. Give a detailed description of your business and include your major keywords. You have 200 characters, so make every character count. Include any other relevant information such as your hours of operation, if you have parking available, awards you have won, etc. This is not time to be modest.
Also add some multimedia. Add images and videos. In fact, add as many images and videos as Google will allow. If you don’t have videos, create some! This is the 21st century! Go get a cheap video camera and have someone record you sitting at your desk explaining how you have helped your customers. Or create an informational video explaining how you do what you do. This ain’t Hollywood. Just think of something to talk about, comb your hair, and press record.
Here are few tips:
- Use your exact business name for the titles.
- Use your search keywords in the description.
- Use your proper street address (a P.O. box defeats the whole point).
- Use your local phone number.
- If you have more than one location, fill out a profile for each location.
For local businesses, local search optimization is extremely important for generating search engine traffic to your website, so follow the above steps and you will greatly increase your odds of making this happen.
SEO Ain’t What It Used to Be
Search engine optimization ain’t what it used to be. Back in the good old days (pre-Google) all you had to do was use your keywords in your meta-tags, title and copy. You had a very good chance of ranking in search engines for the keywords. Then Google came along the with the idea that the number and quality of links pointing to your website, as well as the text content of those links, was a good indicator of your websites relevance. And thus was born the linking campaign. Now, it’s a lot more difficult than that.
Google remains the leader in the search engine race, still owning a large percentage of all search engine traffic. So it makes the most sense to optimize for Google, and work down from there. So what is Google looking at these days? Increasingly, Google is taking social media into consideration. In a way, they are sort-of forcing your hand into using Google Plus. Although other social media platforms certainly come into play as well.
Google is now looking for links to websites or social media profiles contained in social media accounts. Want to have your website appear highly ranked to your prospects? Then become social media friends with them. This will increase the likelihood that those individual see your website prominently in Google.
And ultimately, aren’t you most concerned with your website being found by those most likely to purchase your products or service?
And putting aside the idea of improving your visibility to your social media friends, it is very likely that this process will improve your rankings to anyone. If Google sees that lots of people promote your website in their social media accounts, then that will likely have a similar effect to having lots of external links from other websites.
So now you need to think of SEO in a couple of areas. Certainly, you still need to continue the process of optimizing your website in the traditional way. In other words, make sure that your web pages use your keywords in the correct way. And make sure that you have a catalog of high quality external links pointing to your website, especially links that contain your primary keywords.
A much newer area of optimization is concerned with the visibility of your website in the local portion of Google search results. This is called local SEO. I’m not going to go into the details, but there are a number of things you need to do to improve the chances of your website appearing prominently to those searching for your business in your market area.
And of course the newest area involves using social media to influence search results. Regardless of your opinion on the effectiveness of social media as a lead or sales generation tool, it cannot be denied because of its effect on your search rankings.
So regardless of your comfort level being social online, it now must be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy
Need some help? Work media would be glad to assist with this process. It is time consuming and not necessarily all that intuitive. Call us today at 615-375-8793. Or e-mail us at info@workmedia.net.
How the Little Guy Can Take on Expedia
Work Media has been doing some business with a company in the destination lodging industry and they have, like everyone else in the industry, an interesting and difficult problem that I think is probably going to be more prevalent across other industries over time – the problem is well-funded, much larger competitors crowding them out – crowding them out of search rankings and obtaining traffic that should be their’s. In this case, it’s companies like Expedia and Travelocity that are both crowding the search results and becoming such dominant players that companies like our client have no choice but to get leads from them.
Interestingly, in this case, most people don’t realize they get the same deal just by working directly with the company in the first place.
We’re finding that there are two strategies which the local companies need to utilize in order to fight back. These strategies are being local and being social. Local optimization and social media marketing. Expedia is not a travel agency located in Miami, Florida. It is not a hotel located in Nashville Tennessee. That Nashville, Tennessee hotel has an advantage from a local search perspective because it has a local address which can appear on Google maps and thus can have a strong presence in Google Places. Similarly, that Nashville hotel can build a following and an audience for itself on Facebook, Twitter and other social media properties. It can have a personality specific to its market. It can have a conversation. It can be of much greater use and value to those looking for a Nashville hotel than Travelocity or the other large travel aggregators.
So the key to competing against these types of much larger, better funded organizations is to combine aggressive SEO with strong local optimization and very systematic social media marketing. If you want to take it even farther than that, you mix in paid search and e-mail marketing – the two other components that can add even greater leverage to the overall package of strategies.
In this particular post we’re not going to go into the details of local search optimization or Facebook marketing. But needless to say, just do it. Go set up a Google places account. Set up a Facebook account. Set up a Twitter account. Start updating these accounts daily. Even if initially you don’t have any friends or fans, you got it started.
Filling the Pipeline
I am speaking now from a personal standpoint. My advice to you today is this:
Always Keep Filling the Pipeline
Consistency is one of the hardest things to master in the world of business. Once you manage to establish your business and bring in a fair number of customers/clients, it is easy then to set marketing aside to concentrate on servicing your existing business.
Big mistake. You must devote some portion of your time every day toward bringing in new business. My favorite marketing guru, Dan Kennedy, talks about one of his core strategies being that he does at least one thing every day to fill his pipeline with new business. This is a guy who is quite rich and would be just fine without a single new client. But he keeps promoting, bringing in new business.
It’s really basic economics: supply-and-demand. The higher the demand for your services (the more people who want to hire you or buy your product), the more you can charge. Having a pipeline filled with potential new business is a core key to maximizing the amount of money you can extract from your business.
I have personally failed in this concept over the last few months. I think what I am experiencing is a stair step pattern that a lot of businesses go through. Do some marketing, get more business, stop marketing until some time frees up, then do some more marketing, etc. The problem with this approach is that you generate plateaus. You don’t want plateaus. You want a nice upward slope.
So take my advice: promote every day. Fill the pipeline.
Four AdWords Strategies You May Not Be Using
Despite what you hear these days about Facebook domination, search engine marketing is alive and well. Since I’ve got AdWords on my mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to pass along some strategies that might help you be more successful using Google to promote your business.
1. Bid high in the beginning. I’ll admit that I hate to make this recommendation. Higher bids just make Google that much richer. But a big part of your Quality Score (a metric Google uses to rank competing ads) is your historical click-through ratio (“CTR”). How do you generate a high CTR? Assuming you’ve done everything else right (with a strong congruency between the keyword, ad and landing page), a higher CTR will get your ad positioned higher at a lower bid. So the idea is that you bid high at the start to accrue a high CTR and then back off of your bid over time. I should point out, however, that if your keywords and ads are not well-chosen, this strategy will only cost you money.
2. Use alerts. Alerts are emails that Google will send to you when some aspect of your account meets some particular criteria. For example, if an ad group’s click-through ratio declines by X%, Google will alert you via an email so that you can make whatever adjustments are necessary. These devices help you stay on top of your account.
3. Track your conversions. Conversion tracking is critical. Before you even think about starting up a pay-per-click account, you need to decide exactly what action it is you want the visitors to your website to take, and how you are going to measure that action. If you are selling products directly from your website, this should be a no-brainer. If you are not selling products directly, then you may have to be inventive. Create something that people want to view or download, which will create a conversion event that can be tracked back to a specific click for a specific keyword and ad.
4. Make use of dynamic keyword insertion. This is a very easy way to make your ads more effective, and something I don’t see many amateurs doing. Having the exact search term that triggered your ad appear in the ad copy causes Google to highlight the keyword in your ad. People also like to click on ads that contain their exact search term. So it is often a good strategy to insert the search term into the ad headline or body. However, if the search term is too long to fit in the allotted space (such as the 25 characters you are allowed for the headline), then the ad will not show unless you supply an alternate keyword to use in its place. The Google syntax for inserting a dynamic keyword makes this quite easy: {KeyWord:Default keyword}
For example, let’s say you own a hotel in Orlando, Florida. You might use something like this as your headline: {KeyWord:Orlando Florida Hotel}. So if someone searches for “Orlando hotel,” then the headline in your ad would be “Orland hotel.” But if the person searches for “The best four star Orlando Florida hotel,” then the headline will be “Orlando Florida Hotel” because the search term contains too many characters.
Google has made so many changes to the AdWords interface in the last couple of years that we have barely scratched the surface of features and strategies that can help make your account more successful. But these are four tips that could make a profound impact on your AdWords performance.
Time to Build Your Own Marketing System
You should spend serious time thinking about how you market your business. You need to design and IMPLEMENT a system for delivering leads to your business. I am a student of guys like Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy – guys who have helped millions of business owners like me build successful businesses. But there is an advantage that you have – and that I have – over those marketing geniuses. The advantage is this:
You know your business.
So it’s not a matter of having to learn how a business or an industry works. You already know how it works. You have a product or service that your market needs – you just need a way to bring them to you. Again…you need a system.
And I’m sure you have lots of time to sit around doodling marketing ideas on napkins and daydreaming about your vision for your business. Hey, I know where you’re coming from. I’m struggling with it myself right now. I finally managed to hack out a marketing plan but I’m already struggling staying on schedule because there’s just so much work to do. Not that I’m complaining. I wouldn’t want it to be the other way around. But you and I have got to have the discipline to carve out the time to build marketing systems for our businesses.
Your marketing is a funnel. At the top of the funnel are a whole bunch of prospective customers. But where do those prospects come from to start with? From whatever devices you use to promote your business – sales letters, advertisements, referrals – and of course search engine marketing. As these devices drive people to your website or cause them to pick up the phone, that’s where you hopefully move them further down the funnel. If you get them on your mailing list, that moves them along. If you can get them to request a free book or download, that moves them along. Anything that causes them to interact with your company helps move them along.
So what do you do with those prospects who request more information, download something, or perform whatever the required action is?
You want to do whatever you have to do to get them to trust you. This generally involves giving away a lot of free information, dripped to them indefinitely. In other words, once they have held their hand up and said “we are interested in what you have to say,” then you need to nurture that relationship until they finally buy something from you. Then you continue to nurture that relationship even more until they buy more goods or services.
In other words…you need a system for delivering prospects to your company and converting those prospects into paying customers. This is not something that should be taken lightly. In fact, it is probably more important than the actual product or service you are selling. There may be lots of companies selling the same thing. You have to figure out how to capture as much of your market as you can. As the owner or marketer for your business, that is job number one. Sell, sell, sell.
The Power of Try
“Try” is a powerful word. It represents the difference between success and failure.
Between glory and mediocrity.
Between pride and despair.
Work Media is doing well. I think the company has a very bright future, and I am proud of where we have come. But it has not, by any means, been easy.
I always wanted to be one of those guys who got really rich in business at a young age – one of the ones who made it look effortless. It just wasn’t that way for me. I made my first attempt at starting my own business when I was 23.
I crashed and burned.
Then for the next several years I had a number of jobs in the fields of website design, programming, and Internet marketing. After finishing one particular contract job, for which I admit with no pride that I gave little effort (there were extenuating circumstances, but I still mailed it in), I had much difficulty finding my next gig. So I made my second attempt at starting my own business.
I crashed and burned.
So came a couple more jobs. I eventually landed at Shop at Home TV, where after working with a good guy named Fred Bergman doing Endeca programming (a sophisticated shopping cart search platform), I eventually became their Manager of Search. That was a cool job.
Then the company got sold, and I was on the street again, small severance check in hand.
So what did I do? Well, of course, I started my own business. This time around, I did not crash and burn. Not that it was easy. There actually came a time when my business partner (and brother), Chris Work, and I decided to shut down. This was about three years ago. Only thing was…there weren’t any jobs to be had anyway! So we carried on.
And then things turned around. Work Media is now well-established. I don’t worry about going out of business. It took three times, and even then it was often like pulling teeth, but we pulled it off.
What is the underlying theme throughout all this?
We kept trying.
No matter what happens in your life, if you have a goal…a dream…a vision for what you want your life to be, it can happen as long as you keep trying.
One thing that is interesting is that you will find yourself stumbling into opportunities and good situations which were not at all part of your original plan, but these things often end up sending you in even better directions, and providing opportunities you never imagined.
But it never happens if you don’t try.
The Marketing Lesson Behind Those Sweet, Sweet Colas
Colas are nothing but addictive, obesity-causing poisons…
Sweet, sweet addictive poisons…
I love colas. Dr. Pepper is my favorite. I can drink that stuff like it’s going out of style. Periodically I give them up. I go through phases of being really healthy, eating right, and laying off the sugar. But so far in my 37 year old life I have eventually returned to them every time. But I know…and it is not uncommon knowledge…colas are loaded with sugar and cause you to get fat. Over time, if you drink enough of them they can cause diabetes.
In some ways, they are much like cigarettes. Highly pleasing. Highly dangerous to your health. And just like a chain smoker…despite the risks, I continue to consume.
So what the heck does this have to do with marketing?
Even though I know that colas are bad for me, I continue to purchase and consume them. Why? Because I am dependent on them.
In business, you want to breed dependence while practicing independence.
I didn’t create this concept, but I forget where I read it. Whoever first said this, I apologize for the lack of recognition, but I applaud your brilliance.
So…what can you do to cause your customers/clients to be dependent on you? You need to think of ways to offer everything your customers need. To cause them to be so plugged into your business that it is extremely inconvenient and/or expensive to leave. If you provide a service, you need to have your customers so dependent on your advice and wisdom, that it would cause them great pain to leave.
This could be as simple as being a friend. If a highly profitable client just likes to call and talk non-business on occasion, it may be worth it to be the guy’s friend and let him have some of your time. However, never forget that time is the most precious resource there is, so it should not be given away lightly.
If you operate a house painting company, maybe you also do roof/gutter work. Make yourself indispensible. What complimentary yet necessary products or services can you offer in addition to your core business?
From a marketing standpoint, you need to be careful not to dilute your message or try to be too many things to too many people. I think this is a strategy that works best with existing customers. Now that they are already doing business with you, what other things that they buy can you sell to them? Finding ways to sell more stuff to your existing customers can have a profound impact on your business.
We’ve focused on the breeding dependence part of the above formula here. We’ll hit on the practicing independence part another time.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go crack open a Dr. Pepper.
Price Elasticity
This is an interesting marketing concept that you probably haven’t put nearly enough thought into. “Price elasticity” just refers to the sensitivity of sales of a product or service to a change in its price. Most business owners have an artificial idea in their heads about how much they can charge for what it is they are selling. In reality, the cap may be much higher.
If you can charge more, shouldn’t you?
This may require a lot of will power and faith to overcome some strong psychological programming. I am guilty myself (many, many times in fact) of being weak when it came to quoting a price or asking for money. You cannot be timid when marketing your business or your products. And you owe it to yourself to test the market at different price points.
Perhaps what you sell can be wrapped up in some kind of bundle. Or perhaps you can just offer more of whatever it is. Or maybe you can offer exclusivity. There will always be a buyer at the very highest point of the price scale…just because. Even if you sell a commodity that is subject to intense price competition, you should try to find a way to charge more by packaging it or presenting it in a different way.
A good every day example of premium pricing for commodity products can be found in your local grocery stores. Certain types of foods can be sold at a premium by being labeled “organic” or something similar. And customers who prefer that variety of the product pay two to three times more for it.
Technology makes it easy to test different price points and offers. You can create an infinite number of offers and prices and test them by creating website landing pages and using paid search marketing to drive targeted traffic to them (surely you knew I would work a search engine marketing angle into this article)?
You could even create a completely separate company to test a much higher price point with a different marketing message. These day you can create a new company, including opening a bank account, for under a grand. This is actually a good idea if you have identified several distinct markets you want to target. The closer and more specifically your name, message and presentation match your target market, the higher the perceived level of trust.
The main thing is just not to let preconceived notions or what you see everybody else in your industry doing dictate what you do. It is worth finding out how much you can really charge. Differentiate yourself. You owe it to yourself to maximize your profits, and selling the product or service you provide at the right price is one component of making that happen.
I would love to talk to you about the Internet component of your marketing campaign. Call or email Work Media today.