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Our Favorite Internet Marketing Tools and Resources
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
On our web development blog, Joel recently compiled a great list of our favorite development tools and resources that we've created over the past year. I wanted to take this opportunity on our Internet Marketing Blog to do the same.
Search Engine Optimization
Organically ranking high in search engines is a key component to driving quality traffic to your site. These resources cover a variety of tools to better optimize your site and some basic strategy behind why SEO is important.
New Google Tool Suggests Competitive Keywords Based on Site ContentGoogle now allows Adwords users to run a report on their site that suggests keywords to target. This new tool is very valuable to many different marketers, ranging from people running their first Adwords campaign looking for good terms to experienced advertisers trying to devise new keywords to target.
Three Basics of Search Engine Optimization
SEO vs. PPC: Analyzing the Value of Each with Heat Charts
The Importance of Geotargeting Your SEO Campaign
Blogging
One of the most effective and efficient ways to market your business online is by having a company blog. The following articles explain the concept of Inbound Marketing and feature our series on blogging for business.
Preparing to Start a Business BlogThis is the start of a three part series that covers the basics of Blogging for Business, from the initial build to making sure you're getting the most out of your blog through social media promotion.
Strategy for Writing Business Blog Posts
How to Promote Your Blog Posts
Gathering Data
One of the most important goals of a site is gathering data and leveraging it in the future. From landing pages to registration splash pages to iterative data collection, the posts below provide good strategies to successfully build out your own list.
Example of a Great Landing Page Design: Netflix.comA landing page is an important component of your online marketing campaign strategy. The number one goal of a landing page is to convert a prospect by having them register information with your site. That information could be for a free whitepaper, an online newsletter, free demo, or another call to action.
Make It Easy for Visitors to Register Their Data: A Close Look at USAirways.Com
Political Splash Pages: Are They a Good Idea?
Social Media
As the web has become more and more social, we've wrote several articles exploring what exactly are social media and how to best leverage them.
4 Innovative Uses of Twitter for Social GoodOne of Twitter's strengths is content sharing both in the form of links and retweets (RTs). As the popularity of retweeting has grown and Twitter has improved its search capabilities, many people have come up with some creative and powerful ways to take advantage of the Twitmosphere to help fight for a cause.
Selling a Date: A Case Study in Facebook Advertising (very funny)
Online Advertising
A good, and sometimes essential, compliment to your online presence and marketing effort are paid ads, especially Google Adwords.
Google Adwords Tips: Improve your results in 3 stepsGoogle does a great job of providing a venue for you to reach millions of people from your computer at home. Running an effective Adwords campaign takes dedication and attention to the many details that Google provides you. I like to think of it in 3 connected but distinct phases: Create, Track, Adjust.
Optimizing Adwords Campaigns: Different Strategies for Search vs. Content Ads
Selling a Date: A Case Study in Facebook Advertising (very funny)
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Successful Blog Posts Target Seekers not Browsers
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
Writing good blog content that drives traffic requires a different style than writing content for traditional mediums. This is because of how your readers find the content. The difference is between "browsing" and "seeking".
Browsing
When a person reads a newspaper or general news website, they are typically "browsing." They are skimming headlines and looking for something that they find interesting. The headlines may vary widely in topic. Once they choose to read an article it is expected that they will receive some background information on the subject since it may be unfamiliar to them.
Think of the best content from the New York Times. It is typically longer and you come away much more knowledgable about an entire subject. So in order to present an issue, a traditional article makes sure to at least summarize the subject before addressing the new issue or development. This structure of a news article has been in place for decades and is driven by the "browsing" behavior that readers use with traditional media.
Seeking
The reader behavior that a blog targets is much different. The most successful blogs focus on a niche. Their content is found by a visitor either typing specific search terms into Google or by finding the article on a focused area of a social news site. In either case, the reader already knows what they are looking for and is ususally very familiar with the general topic.
This makes general pieces and background information much less useful. Many successful blog posts are specific and stick directly to the post's core point. A specific post is more useful to an already-educated reader. The novel information density can be much higher which results in good inbound links and more enticing headlines.
The specificity is also very helpful when trying to win keywords. While it would be next to impossible for our blog to rank well for something as general as "jQuery Development" as a whole, we do very well for specific keyworkds like jQuery Portfolio. This strategy is often referred to as inbound marketing.
Keep this in mind as you write your blog content. Specific content is easier to publicize and is more helpful to a niche than general content.
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Why We Decided To Split Our Blog In Two
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
As readers of our blog have likely noticed, we have greatly increased our blog posting frequency over the past couple months. We hoped that this renewed dedication to blogging would help our inbound marketing efforts with better organic search rankings, increased inbound links from other blogs, more exposure across social networks, greater mind share, and a larger number of subscribers.
Thus far, our efforts have been extremely successful in almost all of those facets. We've seen our organic search traffic more than triple, reached tens of thousands of new people, had our posts linked to from dozens of other poplar blogs and publications, experienced an increase in traffic from Twitter and other social networks, achieved some recognition as a leader in jQuery techniques, and more. However, our subscriber count has stayed rather stagnant, with only a slight increase of about 15%.
At first, we wondered if perhaps our increased frequency was causing people to unsubscribe? Quickly, we recognized that many of our favorite blogs also post daily, so we doubted that frequency was a deterrent. Also, upon looking at the Feedburner statistics, we saw that the main issue was a lack of new subscribers rather than an increase in unsubscribers (at least that meant our current subscribers were enjoying what we write!).
We then took a look at our actual blog content to see if we could gleam any insights from our actual writing. It quickly became apparent that our posts varied, almost exactly 50/50, between Internet marketing topics and in depth web development techniques.
As a non-developer, I can attest to the fact that no matter how interesting I found a marketing post, if it was sandwiched between posts about smarty image resizing and jQuery calendars, that I likely would not subscribe to that overall blog and would rather just hope to stumble upon it again sometime in the future.
By not focusing our blog on a specific niche, we were losing out on building our subscriber count for people interested in only that specific topic. However, while we certainly wanted to increase that subscriber number, we couldn't sacrifice one of our niches, as both are important to our company and its continued growth.
Half of our business is with folks who look to us for programming expertise and use our CMS for designers and ad agencies. While the other half is with end-clients who come to us for our Internet Marketing and web design knowledge to build and leverage their own web presences.
That is when we came up with the solution to divide our blog into two separate blogs: an Internet Marketing Blog and a Web Development Blog. That way, all of our new organic and inbound traffic would land on the blog that most interests them, be able to browse that niche's content, and have the ability to subscribe to just that blog. Also, understanding that there are some renaissance men out there, like Joel, who are equally interested in development and marketing, we'll allow people to continue to be able to read and subscribe to the "Full Blog."
We're interested to see how this experiment evolves and it if it affects our subscriber count and perhaps even our inbound links, as people read more links when presented with a full blog of related content to digest.
Now, what you've all been waiting for: if you want to specialize your feed from us, feel free to choose from below. Thanks for your continued support! Let us know your thoughts on this strategy in the comments and if this change is likely to affect whether or not you subscribe.
Internet Marketing Blog Subscription
Web Development Blog SubscriptionFor more information on business blogging, check out our series on blogging for business.
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JS-Kit introduces Echo
Josh Lockhart
Josh Lockhart is a project manager, designer, and front-end developer at New Media Campaigns. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, Josh encourages web standards, semantic markup, and simple design. Josh writes about web development and creates RapidWeaver themes on his personal website. Follow Josh on Twitter.
What is Echo?
JS-Kit recently announced Echo, an exciting new tool that unifies fragmented discussions among disparate online networks into a single real-time conversation. Echo is an alternative to traditional comment tools such as Intense Debate and Disqus. For example, a blogger can paste a snippet of Javascript after a blog post to embed Echo, as demonstrated at http://www.js-kit.com/echo/. Readers may then experience a consolidated and real-time stream of comments, re-tweets, Diggs, mentions, and more from around the World Wide Web.
Bring your identity
Echo allows readers to identify themselves with existing identity providers (ie. Google, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID). Readers do not need to create a new identity for every website they visit; instead, readers retain their existing identity and social capital with their current identity provider. Once identified, readers contribute to the conversation and simultaneously distribute their input to their own social networks.
The strength of weak ties
Echo is a brilliant attempt to unify and strengthen online conversation by leveraging the power of weak ties. Echo encourages the conversation to bridge social graphs by enabling readers to distribute their thoughts to their own networks while simultaneously contributing to a unified conversation. This scenario is best described by Mark Granovetter's ground-breaking sociological work The Strength of Weak Ties. Echo benefits both content authors and content consumers; Echo exposes content authors to a larger, more diverse online audience than ever before; Echo also encourages consumer participation by maintaining and improving consumers' existing social capital.
For example, I love reading ABC Widgets' blog, and I want to comment on one of ABC Widgets' latest blog posts. Fortunately, ABC Widgets just installed Echo for all of its blog posts. First, I choose my identity: do I identify myself using my Google account or my Facebook account? I choose my Facebook account and authenticate myself with my Facebook login credentials. Next, I choose to where I would like to send my comment. I would like to send my comment to my Twitter followers and my Facebook friends. After providing my Twitter credentials, I submit my comment. Now, my comment is added to ABC Widgets' blog post, it is sent into my Twitter stream, and it is posted to my Facebook profile for my friends to read. Any further re-tweets in my Twitter stream or comments from my Facebook friends will be aggregated and collected into the conversation's echo and displayed on the original ABC Widgets' blog post page.
How good is too good?
However, some pundits fear Echo may work too well. Echo publishes all facets of the conversation from all nodes of the affected social graph. This includes negative feedback, spam, flames, and more. Due to the real-time nature of Echo, it may be difficult for content authors to adequately moderate the conversation; is it possible for one author to monitor a real-time conversation all hours of the day? Power of opinion may transfer from content authors to content consumers. Echo does include moderation features, but specific details are forthcoming.
Coming Soon
Echo is currently in Private Beta. You can learn more at http://www.js-kit.com/echo/.
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Blogging for Business Part 3: How to Promote Your Blog Posts
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Part 1 of the Series: Preparing to Start a Business Blog
Part 2 of the Series: Writing Your Business Blog Posts
In the first two parts of this series, we've covered how to set up a business blog and the strategy behind actually writing your posts. However, one of the main purposes of your blog is to drive valuable traffic to your site; you're certainly not just writing it for your health.
While an increase in organic rankings for your blog posts will drive new traffic, there are also more proactive and immediate methods to send traffic to your blog posts. These actions can be accomplished pretty quickly and are well worth it, in order to draw attention to something that you invested serious time into.Post to Social News Sites
One of the leading sources of traffic to our site are social news sites around the web. These sites allow you to submit your recent blog posts and then the site members vote them up or down. As your post gets more "up votes," it rises through the rankings and hopefully to the front page of the site, making it visible to everyone who visits the site.
There are dozens of popular social news sites, and many of them specialize in a particular niche. It's important to make sure that the content you're posting is relevant to that audience. If you post something deemed spammy or outside of the site's target, you not only won't get any up votes or traffic to your site, but you also risk being permanently ostracized by the other members of the group.
Here's a list of some popular social news sites and the audiences to which they cater:- Reddit - One of the most popular social news sites, Reddit has dozens of subreddits (e.g., Web Design Reddit, Programming Reddit, etc.) that cater to every imaginable interest. Find the Reddit that is most applicable to your post and submit to it. We've found that it's almost guaranteed that a submission will garner at least a few dozen unique visits from subscribers to that group. If you reach the front page of a popular subreddit, you're in for a couple thousand uniques.
- Digg - (In)famously the most difficult of the social news sites to gain real traction on, Digg also has the largest audience. Unlike Reddit, where you can create your own sub-category if one doesn't already exist, Digg limits you to a preselected list of rather specific categories. Reaching the front page of Digg will get you tens of thousands of unique, but it also takes the most work and likely some coordination with other strategies - it's extremely hard for a post to organically reach the front page.
- Hacker News - This news site still has a very niche focused on programmers and entrepreneurs. It's the network with which we've had the most success getting on the front page, but all of those posts have been very technical in nature. This community is very selective, and you will be spurned for posting links unrelated to the community's core target. A front page post here will get you a solid 600-2,000 unique visitors.
- Sphinn - Dedicated to online marketing, blogging, and SEO, Sphinn has a dedicated following of online marketers. To be honest, we've used this site in the past with little success. Unless something reaches the front page, it doesn't seem to earn much traffic at all. The most popular articles here are aimed directly at online marketers and tend to be anecdotal or lists.
- Undrln - A relatively new social news site aimed at designers, CSS coders, and entrepreneurs. The site's growth appears to have slowed some, but the content here is usually high quality. A submission that makes it to the front page has a very long lifespan, however, due to it being new, don't expect more than 100-150 uniques from a successful post here.
- Dzone - This site's subtitle says it all "fresh links for developers." The content here is heavy on the technical and is a great option if you target programmers. We've had good success reaching the front page (and top spot) here, which generally translates to 200-300 uniques.
- InboundMarketing.com - This is a brand new site, but I could see it having success in the future. Go figure, but the most popular posts here are aimed at inbound marketing and online marketing. Currently, front page posts have a pretty short lifespan as they get bumped down by others, and it seems like almost no one gets more than two or three up votes. Again, the site is very new, so don't expect more than 50 visits, but given its potential, I think its worth getting acclimated to posting related content here.
- DesignFloat - The most design-oriented of all these sites, your submissions here should focus heavily on design or CSS tricks. The site has a pretty avid following and you will see good traffic for reaching the front page, however, voters are pretty picky and it's not easy to get too far in the process.
This list is just a few of the popular/up and coming social news sites. I tried to spread it out pretty evenly between design, programming, and entrepreneurship. There are dozens more out there for every imaginable niche.
No matter where you're posting, it's important to remember to only post content relevant to that specific niche. Also, avoid posting spammy content that is only meant to give you Page Rank points, as it will likely be deleted by the moderator and you risk being banned from the site. It's also in good taste to make sure that your title submitted on the site matches almost identically the actual title of your blog post.
These sites will not only generate direct traffic, but they also expand your content's reach to other bloggers who will hopefully reference your content on their blog or elsewhere.Leverage Your Social Network
Depending on the size of your digital footprint, you may be active in a number of social networks. While social news sites are akin to giving a presentation to strangers and hoping that they enjoy it, your social network is similar to sending information over to friends and counting on them to check it out/pass it along.
Post your link as your status feed in Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These are people that have "opted in" to your stream of thoughts and recommendations. They're very likely to check out links that you recommend to them, and also chances are high that they'll pass it along to other friends (i.e., retweet, post on their blog, etc.) and your content's message will gain a life of its own.
Some quick guidelines when posting status updates about your content:- On Twitter, make sure to cap your promotion at 100-120 characters, allowing ample room for people to add a RT@_______ in front of your message to pass it along. If you force followers to copy-edit and shorten it on their own, they're less likely to quickly retweet it for you.
- Make sure, in all of your social networks, you have a good amount of actual content and interactions mixed in with the self-promotional links. If the only things you ever post as status are your own links, people are likely to screen you out as "noise," and someone who doesn't actually understand the space.
- Be sure to respond to comments and @'s regarding your status or link within the medium. If people have been kind enough to take the time to read your full article and then interact with you, it is essential that you respond to them and let them know you value their time.
- When tweeting about your article, add relevant hash tags (i.e., #). Many people have continuous filters set up to pull content that interests them into their Twitter application. By tagging your content, interested readers will easily find it. For example, we attach a #jquery to all of our blog post tutorials on jquery.
In our experience Facebook has been the most solid referrer of traffic, but we are much more active in promoting on Twitter. We save Facebook for big news, whereas we post all of our content on Twitter.
Whatever social network is ideal for you, just be sure to be genuine in interacting with others and to thank them for their commitment to reposting your content or commenting.Build a Relationship with Readers
The first two methods are very action-oriented and place the initial responsibility of promotion on you. However, by equipping your site with an RSS subscription or email registration, you have the ability to instantly push content to that audience without any extra effort on your end.
By placing a prominent RSS option on your site, readers that enjoy your content will subscribe and have it automatically pushed to their RSS reader of choice. This is the most passive promotion possible, as you're doing nothing other than publishing your post, but also instantly engaging a larger audience.
Of course, in order to earn RSS subscribers, it's essential that you publish good content and push interested readers to the site by using the methods above.
In order to set up an RSS feed on your site, I recommend using Feedburner, which is a free service that makes it extremely easy to set up a feed and allow people to subscribe.
Similar to an RSS feed is a newsletter subscription. Allow people to register for your monthly newsletter on your blog and simply push out the top posts to them at the end of every month. Again, this strategy allows you to engage readers that have prescreened themselves as interested in your content.
I recommend that in addition to republishing blog content in the newsletter, you also have some newsletter specific content, as many of the recipients will also be RSS subscribers.Conclusion
At a fraction of the time it took to write your post, you can publicize it to an audience that is potentially in the thousands. It's important that you do this for every post, as sometimes it's the most unlikely content that takes off and garners a lot of attention and traffic.
Are there other methods with which you've had success? What strategy has consistently driven the most traffic to your site?
To show that we eat our own dogfood, this post has been posted on Twitter, submitted to Reddit, scooped on undrln, and added to inboundmarketing.com. -
Blogging for Business Part 2: Writing Your Business Blog Posts
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Part 1 of the Series: Preparing to Start a Business Blog
In part 1 of this series, we examined why a business blog is important and how to build one. After living in the space, deciding on a topic, and building your blog on your domain, it's now time to actually start writing posts and publishing them for everyone to read.How Often and How Much Should You Post?
One of the first concerns that many of our clients have about posting a blog is the "time factor." They're scared that blogging will be too much of a time commitment and they don't have sufficient resources to posting thoughtful content. This is a valid concern and I always appreciate people not wanting to get in over their heads, but blogging isn't really as much of a time commitment as many people fear.
Our general rule of thumb is that you should write at least one post every seven days. This guideline can differ based on what you're truly trying to accomplish with your blog (for example, we post daily, as this blog is one of our main marketing efforts), but we think once a week is a good baseline to start with.
A post every seven days ensures that your site is frequently updated with fresh content, and you also acclimate prospects to the idea that you're dedicated to your business and generating quality content on a regular basis.
Furthermore, your posts don't have to be the quality or length of Moby Dick - we generally recommend making sure each post is between 300 and 700 words. It's fine to occasionally have a shorter summary post or a longer thought-leading post, but people are generally coming to your blog to be informed quickly, so 300-700 words ensures you generate good content while not alienating readers with your verbosity.What Should You Post?
One way to help ease the time burden associated with the weekly posts it to repurpose content you've previously written and turn it into posts. Some good sources of content are:
- Emails to clients and colleagues. Did a client or colleague write you an intriguing email that prompted you to write a thorough and thoughtful response? Does it seem that this question comes up pretty often? Make some changes to the email to make it more generic and post it to your blog. It will then serve as a permanent reference for the question in the future, and the poser of the question will likely be flattered that you deemed their question worthy of an entire blog post.
- Previous Articles Written for Other Publications. Have you been a guest columnist or blogger for another publication? There's no reason that this content or similar content shouldn't also live on your site, especially if the original article only appeared in print form. Make some changes to the column and post it to your blog, so people can always get access to the useful information from your site.
- Summarize Important Industry News. Was their big news relevant to your industry or your clients' in the past week? Post a summary of the article (be sure to link back to the source!) and how it affects you and your clients on your blog. Clients will appreciate that you've provided them with valuable information and were perhaps helpful in decoding a confusing news event and how it affects them.
By repurposing previous content, you can be sure that you didn't write that long email in vain or write a column for a rarely read publication, and you also cut down on the weekly time necessary to maintain your business's blog.
So, while a blog is certainly an undertaking that you shouldn't take lightly, I think the overall committment is not nearly as intimidating as many people think. By posting 300-700 words every week, you have the ability to infinitely expand your footprint on the web, increase inbound traffic, and gain thought leadership with your target.
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Blogging for Business Part 1: Preparing to Start a Business Blog
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Business blogs are becoming a necessary element of online marketing and inbound marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes. Our clients frequently have many questions about how to best build, write, publicize, and maximize their own blogs. So, this three part series will cover the basics of Blogging for Business, from the initial build to making sure you're getting the most out of your blog.
This first part covers what to do after you've decided that a blog would be helpful for your business. Be sure to stay tuned for the next three parts of the series.Why Blog in the First Place?
There are many reasons to start a blog for your business. The most beneficial for marketing purposes is the help that it will provide in organic search engine rankings. Each blog post is a new page on your site, meaning a new piece of content for Google to index. The more pages indexed by Google, the likelier it is that your site shows up for a variety of keywords, helping you benefit from the longtail of search results from various posts that you publish.
On top of the SEO benefits, there are many other benefits that your blog will provide to your site. First, its a dynamic element that will be frequently update and lead visitors to be more engaged and frequently return to your site. Furthermore, the blog will help establish you as a thought leader in your space and increase your firm's mindshare. Also, by blogging about your company and industry, you will be providing a free and helpful resource to your clients, of which they'll likely be very appreciative.
How Do You Know A Blog is Right for Your Business?
While a blog isn't right for everyone, it's quickly becoming a pretty standard component of online marketing campaigns. Here are some basic questions that should help you in deciding if a blog is right for your business:
- Do you have industry-specific knowledge that you're happy to share with others?
- Can you find the time to write at least one post (at least 300 words) every 10 days?
- Do most of your target customers spend significant time on the Internet, especially researching vendors?
If you answered yes to all three questions above, then a blog is likely a good investment of your time. A business blog is a free opportunity to (very) publicly broadcast your expertise, engage site visitors, raise your site's dynamism, and improve your organic search engine rankings.
Live in the Space Before Publishing to It
Now that you've decided that a blog is a good move for your business, you need to start taking the appropriate steps to bringing it online. A first step that I always stress to clients is that before you write a single word of your own, take 2-3 weeks to read other popular blogs and industry blogs.
By taking time to live in the space, you will gain a greater understanding for good standards on how to write a post, interact with commenters, and what type of content sells well on a blog. During this exploratory period, also be sure to take the time to participate in the blogosphere by commenting on posts, reaching out to other bloggers, setting up an RSS reader, and sharing good posts with friends.
This time spent researching the medium will help you become a better blogger, quicker, and it will also help you cement relationships with other bloggers in the space that will then become more likely to link out to you.How to Build Your Business Blog
After living in the space, you're now ready to actually begin the process of getting a blog set up on your site. One of the most important pieces of advice that I can offer for this stage is to make sure your blog resides on your site's domain, meaning the URL of your blog should be something like blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog/.
This point cannot be overstated in importance - one of the key marketing benefits of your blog is the Search Engine benefits by the newly indexed pages and also the Page Rank juice generated by inbound links. If your blog is hosted on a third party domain, such as myblog.wordpress.com or myblog.blogspot.com, even though you may link to it from your main site, your actual domain will not reap any of the SEO benefits associated with the blog.
There are many ways to launch a blog on your domain. First, check out if your current Content Management System offers a blogging module, which it should (shameless self promotion: ours does). If your site isn't currently on a CMS or it doesn't have blog publishing capabilities, then I recommend checking out WordPress. They have an easy five minute installation to get a WordPress blog enabled on your domain, allowing you to easily publish your new blog to your current site domain.Update:
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Marketing an Online Political Campaign
Alex Pomer
Alex Pomer is a project manager and online media buyer at New Media Campaigns. He received a degree in Advertising from The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC Chapel Hill. He has successfully launched sites for statewide political campaigns, national organizations and non-profits. Follow him on Twitter.
Political websites are one of New Media Campaigns' specialties. And oftentimes, we give suggestions for how to best market the websites we build. We've done several on-line ad campaigns for political clients in the last few weeks so I thought I'd share a couple guidelines, both with regard to ads and also to political marketing in general.
How to get the most out of your ads
- Placement is key. The efficiency of banner ads in general isn't stellar (less than 1%) and if you don't place your ads in front of the right audience then you don't have a chance. Look into local newspapers' websites. Advertise in the politics section obviously, but don't forget to advertise in areas that reflect the issues that are important to your campaign. Google's adwords and Facebook ads are both very inexpensive and should be at least a part of your online marketing campaign. Google allows you to target users who are searching for keywords that directly relate to your campaign. Facebook does the same except with people's interests instead of their searches
- Your ad should be a call to action. With banner ads, you have one or two sentences at most so you need to make every character count. Readers are probably only going to glance at your ad so unless it stands out and inspires the reader to take action, you don't have a shot at getting them to check out your website (which is the whole point, right?).
- Use more than one ad. You never know what ad will bring the masses to your website so when you're placing ads online, create two or three and rotate them. Then monitor them throughout your campaign and if one ad is producing significantly fewer clicks than the other, take it down. It doesn't make sense to place all your eggs in one ad-basket. Create a few and let real data decide which ads you're going to stick with.
- Use CPC as opposed to CPM when possible. The goal of banner ads is to redirect web users to your website. So don't pay for just impressions when you don't have to. Pay for clicks on your ad since that's what you want anyways. Both Google and Facebook allow this option but they're not the only ones. Look into the sites you're advertising on and if they allow a 'cost per click' option, take it.
How to get the most out of blogs
- Research blogs that are relevant to your platforms. Look into both political and non-political blogs that align with the issues that are important to your campaign. People choose to read blogs that interest them. If your campaign is pertinent to the blogs you've researched then it's likely that your issues are pertinent to the readers of those blogs and they'll be more likely to take to heart the information you present.
- Send bloggers a personal email. Your research should include not just the blog but also the person writing the blog. Send that person a personal email detailing who you are, what your issues are and most importantly, why they are relevant to the blogger and the blog she writes (note: changing the name at the top of a templated email does not qualify as personal). Bloggers are always looking for something new and interesting to write about especially if it appeals to their readers. If your campaign will appeal to the blogger's readers, try getting her to write a post about you. You'll reach a large group of readers/potential supporters without the trust barrier that comes along with traditional advertising.
- Don't send bloggers mass emails. I touched on this earlier but bloggers can be your enemy just as easily as they can be your friend. They have the ability to reach people who want to read about topics relating to the issues surrounding your campaign. Don't irritate these bloggers by spamming them with mass emails. You want them on your side not writing about how annoying it is to get email after email from you. Which brings me to my last point...
- Email, but don't email too much. Not so much about blogs but, if someone has indicated that they want to receive updates about your campaign, don't violate that trust by emailing them several times a week. You want the people who get your emails to read what they say and the more often you email, the more likely it is that they will just delete the email or unsubscribe from your mailing list.
What are you doing to market your political campaign? Have you employed any of these strategies to success? To failure? Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments below
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Reflecting on Three Years of Business
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Just last week on May 5, to little fanfare around the world (except for a few tweets), our firm celebrated its third year in existence. It has been an exhilarating and rewarding few years, which has seen us grow from a bootstrap funded startup to a successful full service web design and development firm that has launched over 200 websites for clients ranging from public corporations to national non-profits.
Over time we have grown in number, have had a couple of different offices, have adjusted our business model, have won awards, and have made plenty of mistakes. However, we have also always stayed true to our core business philosophies:- Empower our clients with powerful technology that meets their needs to solve specific problems.
- Create beautiful websites that set our clients apart from their competitors.
- Provide unparalleled personal service, always making ourselves available to our clients and going the extra mile for them.
- Have a lot of fun in the office and make NMC a truly enjoyable place to work.
- Do all of the above at an extremely affordable price for our clients, allowing them to successfully leverage the web at a fraction of the cost of our competitors.
Challenges and Decisions Along the Way
When we first launched, we envisioned ourselves as only a political web design firm, solely focusing on that niche. As it stands today, a little over one third of our total business is political, and the rest is non-profits and corporations. This is due to the fact that within weeks after launching, our political clients brought us non-political business; rather than reject these clients, we embraced the new niches and expanded into new regions. This decision ended up being a major revenue driver and likely kept our company alive through off-election years.
Similarly, when we first launched the company, we didn't foresee acting as a web development partner for ad agencies, and that is now our most explosive area of growth. The idea makes total sense. Ad agencies are amazing at strategy and creative; we have special talents with technology and understand the web. Why not marry the two knowledge bases to provide clients with the best of both worlds and no added overhead?! It seems so straightforward now, but it was a space we looked over in the frenzy of our initial launch.
This ability to wholeheartedly embrace change within our company and shift on the fly ultimately helped us become a stronger company with a deeper body of work and a more steady revenue stream. To this day, we're constantly trying to think of ways to evolve our business into other disciplines that strengthen our overall offering to clients and also grow our company.Separating Ourselves from the Pack
We have progressively grown every year that we've been in business, in terms of volume of work done and company revenue. The number one thing attributing to that growth are referrals. We pride ourselves on being passionate about our clients and truly wanting them to succeed online, and they have rewarded us by sending new business our way.
In addition to our service, another reason our clients remain happy with us is our view on project-based billing vs. on-going hourly fees. We're not here to milk every billable hour out of each client, in fact we try to avoid hourly charges to clients all together. After we have priced out, built, and completed a project, over 90% of our clients never incur an hourly fee; however, just about all of our clients reach out to us for help or advice sometime in the future...we just don't bill them for those requests.
It's a pretty novel idea in the world of interactive agencies and most of our clients are initially skeptical, but it boils down to our core principles of empowering our clients with powerful technology at a good price. We want them to succeed, and we know that if we do that without unnecessary fees, the long tail of the relationship will be much more lucrative than billing for our time on a phone call. This approach has worked well for us and our clients, and I'm surprised that more agencies aren't moving in the same direction.Where We Are Now
These decisions and procedures have helped us stay viable and become the company we are today, all along without ever deviating from the core principles outlined above. As it currently stands, we're one of the top political web design firms in the country, have a renowned Content Management System, and have built a prestigious client list.
None of this would have been possible without facing the adversities listed above or without the dedication of our staff and partners. It's been a great ride over the past years and we have learned a lot; we're also focusing on continued expansion over the next year. 2009 has already been the strongest year in our company's history, and it's much thanks to the leg work we put in the past three years. At times, it was a slow growth curve to get here, but it has continued to be worth it, by allowing us to do quality work and have fun.
Happy Birthday to New Media Campaigns and congrats to our team for some great work, and a special thanks to all of the clients that have made this possible! -
New Website Launched for Recess PHP Framework
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
Kris Jordan, creator of the Recess PHP Framework has been a part of the NMC team since January of this year. While here, he has largely been focusing on enhancing the framework, working on our Content Management System, and building custom tools for our clients.
Recess has quickly been gaining steam in the PHP community; it now boasts hundreds of downloads by developers from across the world and has had dozens of ""commits" in Github":http://github.com/recess/recess/commits/. We've been really excited to see the progress of the framework and expect it to continue bounding ahead.
However, we were worried that the framework's old site was hindering Recess's progress by making information too hard to find and not conveying the core benefits of using Recess for PHPprojects. Kris and the rest of the team here began designing a face lift several weeks ago and we're proud to show off the new site.
Outside of the overall redesign, the most notable new feature is the nine different one minute demo videos on the homepage. One of the biggest benefits of Recess is its ease of use and simplicity, so Kris wanted to highlight these features through quick, easy to process videos on the homepage.
Too many companies, frameworks, and products bog their homepage down with five minute or longer videos; we know that no one wants to sit through those, so we tried to streamline the learning process with these short demos. It seems as if the strategy has paid off, as the ""Start a New App in Recess"":http://www.recessframework.org/page/starting-an-app-in-the-recess-php-framework video has been the third most trafficked page since the site launch.
Another unique feature is the developer spotlight in the top right. The nametag scrolls through the names and bios of developers using Recess for different projects. One of the largest barriers to adoption of a new framework is the fear that there's no community; we wanted to quickly assuage this concern by prominently featuring real, live, dedicated Recess developers and their projects. It is also a great way to give back to the community that has already given so much to Recess.
The homepage also features a comparison chart of Recess vs. other popular PHP frameworks, a feature breakdown, several quick download options, and more.
The new design has already been a great success, helping new visitors quickly learn about the framework and its benefits. If you haven't checked it out yet, you can download Recess here. I encourage you to check the site out and let us know your thoughts on the design and the framework.
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