Category: Blogging
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Internet Marketing New Year's Resolutions
Jan 5, 2009 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, New Media Campaigns, Web Marketing | Comments (0)We all have resolutions for the new year, whether it's to save money or shed some extra pounds, the goal of a resolution is to always better ourselves in some way. Companies also tend to make resolutions and goals for a new year with the same end result in sight of improving upon the previous year.
At NMC, we sat down a couple of weeks ago to etch out our resolutions and goals for the new year and many of them focused on how we market ourselves online. I figured that I would share our Internet Marketing resolutions with everyone, thinking that they may also serve as a good model for your organization in the coming year as you move your marketing dollars move online in the tough economy.
- Blog, Blog, Blog - We really began posting with frequency around September of 2008. In that time, we've been averaging around 4 posts per week. That's a great starting number, as it makes sure we have fresh content nearly every day of the business week. However, we'd really like to crank up the content generation in the coming year and multiply that by threefold to bring our total to 12 a week. We plan on accomplishing this by having more of our team contribute and branching our blog into different mini-blogs relevant to specific audiences such as developers, political clients, small businesses, etc. This is a bold goal, but we think we can accomplish it by working together and the benefits will be great for our SEO, content resources, and Blog subscriber count.
- Search Engine Optimization - In the past year, we've improved in many SEO rankings and our page rank has increased from a 4 to a 6 in just four months. However, we want to continue optimizing for the terms for which we don't yet rank as high as we'd like. One of our main focuses will be ranking highly for Raleigh web design and other geographic qualifiers that will help local businesses find us. We plan on accomplishing this goal by continuing to build links within our blog posts, creating great content, winning mentions from outside sites, and submitting directories. The fact that resolution #1 contributes directly to #2 is no accident and demonstrates the importance of a business blog.
- Rework Homepage Design - We're very keen on our website design, but would like to make some changes to the homepage to make it more functional. Currently, we're dedicating a lot of valuable real estate to the image rotation and not saying so much about our firm, services, and philosophy. We'd like to add some function to the homepage by adding more copy about who we are and what we do and also giving visitors the opportunity to quickly jump to the content that's most relevant to them. Whether it's our Content Management System for designers or our political website portfolio, we want targeted niches to have quick access to the content that they want to see.
These are our top 3 Internet Marketing resolutions for the New Year. They're all quite achievable and will greatly benefit our business. As you can see, these are all very cost-efficient methods to grow our business and require nothing else but some good elbow grease from our team.
Did you set online marketing resolutions for your organization? How are you going to achieve them? Good luck to everyone with their resolutions and I encourage you to check back here frequently to hold us to ours!
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Consumers Trust Search Engines More Than Traditional Media
Dec 15, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, Online Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing | Comments (0)A recent Forrester Research study shows the breakdown of how much consumers trust different information sources. Search engines come in third place only behind email from friends and consumer reviews.
This data is somewhat surprising since search engine results can be manipulated through Search Engine Optimization efforts, which sometimes go as far as Google Bombs. However, this research is also a great validation to the importance of internet marketing efforts and well designed websites. With people placing so much trust in search engines, it reaffirms the importance of Search Engine Optimization and being in front of potential clients.
Knowing the importance of search engine results also demonstrates the importance of making sure your site looks like a trustworthy source. People looking for reliable information or vendors on a search engine will quickly discredit you if your web presence is lackluster and untrustworthy. It's important that the quality of your website compliments the quality of your online marketing strategy.
Another interesting tidbit from the report is that corporate blogs are the least trustworthy information source to consumers. This is a disappointing trend as blogs should be the most honest outlet for corporations to disseminate information and voice opinions. However,very public errors, such as the Wal-Mart blog fiasco, have caused consumers to be more hesitant when using company blogs as an information source. The report is very clear that this should not serve as evidence against blogging, but rather as encouragement to do it in an honest and engaging fashion.
Another interesting aspect of the report is that consumers are more likely to trust email from a company rather than direct mail, supporting the value of email marketing vs. direct mail.
Overall, new media fared very well in the report often times beating out its traditional media counterpart. It will be interesting to see how this trend adjusts over the next year as people become more savvy online and the space also becomes more crowded.
By making sure to project yourself in a trustworthy manner online, through well designed sites and honest content, you have the opportunity to continue effectively influencing consumers in a cost effective manner through SEO and online marketing. -
The Beauty of Blog Controversy
One of my biggest pet peeves on the web is when companies use their blogs as a press release repository or just a listing of local news. They provide no insight, state little opinion, and spark zero conversation. In short, they don't take any chances. That's always a huge disappointment to me.
A blog is a great way to educate and engage visitors, clients, and prospects. Take some chances, state an opinion, tell me something personal. Don't just take the easy way out and repost your press releases or the releases of other companies.
We use our blog as a way to discuss industry trends, talk about processes at the company, brag about recognition, and voice our opinions. The last one is what this post is dedicated to. Joel recently posted on how he thought Gmail's new themes are a backwards step for usability. The post instantly sparked controversy, gathering over 20 comments, the vast majority of which were lambasting Joel for his opinion and reasoning.
Now, if you are a practitioner of the boring method of blogging described earlier, you would shudder at this response, thinking that it reflected poorly on your company and getting your ego bruised. However, a true blog should do just the opposite and embrace the controversy. We were thrilled to see people from across the country calling Joel an idiot and criticizing his post. We'd voiced an earnest opinion and sparked a conversation - how awesome! There are several reasons why sparking a mini controversy with a blog is a good thing.
First, we generated an honest discussion around a recent news event. Isn't that one of the main purposes of a blog - to interact with others and start a conversation. Whether people agreed or disagreed with Joel, they appreciated the post enough to take time out of their day and write a response.
Second, we gained a ton of traffic from the post. People would much rather spend time reading a piece that takes a stand and states an opinion rather than just a press release or boring post on a trivial event. In just 24 hours after posting the article on our blog, Hacker News, and Reddit, we'd gained over 3,000 unique visitors. In addition to the traffic, we also had many new people subscribe to our blog feed. The post was unique enough that people decided they'd like to know more of our opinions, helping our blog gain wider readership and a better chance of our posts being passed around to even more people.
Third, we have experienced a great longtail of Search Engine traffic related to the post. Since the post was provocative, people posted it on different networks and blogs, giving us some great SEO juice. Now, for dozens of permutations of the search phrase "gmail new themes" we rank organically on the first page, generating dozens of visitors everyday.
We've written before about the benefits of corporate blogs, but it's important to remember you will only truly realize gains from your blog if you take chances and post interesting content. Does anyone else have interesting stories about sparking a mini controversy with their blog?
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Six Hours In: Launching a Niche Microsite
Oct 29, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, New Media Campaigns, Politics, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (4)Earlier this evening, we launched a microsite at www.votethesite.com to allow people to vote for their favorite political websites. In just six hours, the site has already recorded 3,000 votes, received dozens of comments, and been viewed by hundreds of visitors from across the world. This site wasn't just launched with an "if you build it, they will come" strategy, but is the result of a multi-stage, concerted effort by our team to publicize and market it.
We launched the site hoping to gain as many votes as possible, and hoping to get picked up by outside political blogs and circulated around the designer community. We knew that we had to crawl before we could walk, so first we needed to get traction with low hanging fruit, such as friends and family. So far, we've followed a pretty regimented roll out; here are the steps we're taking to market our microsite.- Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others. This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly. This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.
- Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1. We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more. This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.
- Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site. We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out. This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!). In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.
These are the stages we considered part of the initial rollout. The goal here was to gather a decent amount of votes on the site, so each race had multiple votes and to start a little buzz around certain circles that we had launched this site. Considering we launched the site at 5pm, we had modest expectations for the results of these phases, and have exceeded all our expectations so far.
Below is a brief overview of the next steps we're taking to get the site in front of more voters. I'll offer more details on these steps later this week, after we have tangible results on whether they worked or not.- Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage. By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.
- Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level. We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others. If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.
- Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites. Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site. This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility. This would be the ultimate win.
Well, there's still 6 days before the election, so we think people have plenty of reason to check out votethesite.com and vote on their favorite political sites. Per #4, we'll be keeping the blog updated as we keep publicizing the site and we'll let you know if we reach our goals and how the traffic is doing. Wish us luck and be sure to go vote - both in our fake election and in the real one!
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Tough Times Squeezing Your Marketing Budget? Invest Online
Sep 30, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, Online Advertising, Tools, Web Marketing | Comments (4)It's no secret that the economy is currently going through a tough time. As your clients pockets grow shallower, your marketing budget tends to shrink. Tough times present the ultimate business conundrum: you need to build new leads but you have less money to spend on marketing. This is not the time to cut back on marketing. According to John A. Quelch in a recent HBS Newsletter:
"It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times."
Why marketing online is the solution.
The key to surviving tough times is improving your marketing efficiency. While it is not a black box you can throw money into and expect great results, the web is a proven marketing medium that can generate phenomenal returns. Successful online marketing campaigns take time, effort, and creativity; however, these efforts can certainly provide a substantial ROI when compared to pricey traditional campaigns.
Social media is completely assimilated into the mainstream market, making this is the best time ever to market online. Through services like Twitter (follow me!), Facebook, LinkedIn, and others, marketers have the opportunity to engage consumers in a dynamic conversation and keep them up to date on the company's latest news. Furthermore, all of these social media techniques are completely free to use and leverage. By combining these free methods with pay services such as website design, Pay Per Click advertising, banner ads, and more, you can form a formidable campaign that is far less expensive than many traditional campaigns.
Longevity and accurate tracking makes online marketing efficient.
One of the best features of putting your marketing dollars online is the amount of time you extend their life. Rather than spending money on a print campaign that dies after a month, your online presence can hold strong for multiple years and be the face of your organization. Furthermore by using a Content Management System, you can constantly refresh your campaign with new content to engage and inform your audience. Also, that new content will be informed by actual data gathered from the site rather than just "gut feelings" on how the campaign is going. Online campaigns make it easier to track results,scale a campaign over time, and engage your entire team by keeping them informed with their successes and failures.
The world is moving online (just ask the newspaper industry), there's no reason that your business should fall behind, especially when moving online is the more economical decision for your marketing dollars. In any marketing adventure, but especially one during a recession, there are pitfalls to avoid when spending marketing dollars online:
- Closely monitor your Google Adwords campaigns. Those monthly bills can rack up quickly and can have a low conversion rate, if not closely watched.
- Install a powerful statistics tool, such as Google Analytics. We install Google Analytics on every one of our sites, so our clients can track their site's success and make tweaks as necessary through the Content Management Software. This is the best way to ensure a strong marketing ROI.
- Do strong due diligence when searching for a web design firm. Too often we see organizations spend 2-3x what they would have spent with us, because they didn't really shop around and they just went with the first firm they came across. There are good deals for site development and online campaigns out there, be sure to get a good feel for each firm's value and values.
- Don't approach your site with an "if we build it, they will come" philosophy. You have to support it by placing your domain on all of your marketing collaterals, engaging in social networks, placing some ads, and more. The reverse of this is also true; if you're spending time and money to drive people to your site it's essential to remember the importance of a well designed website, so your money doesn't go to waste.
If there's one thing I could recommend to any company, big or small, during the economic downturn, it's to use this situation as an opportunity to efficiently spend your marketing dollars. Get in touch with some web firms and get a proposal for what they recommend you doing at a specific budget - I think you'll be blown away by how impactful an online marketing campaign can be, while still costing significantly less than other forms of advertising.
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The Benefits We Have Experienced From Our Company Blog
Sep 12, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, New Media Campaigns, Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)As you've noticed, we've been more diligent as of late inkeeping our blog up to date with company and industry news and commentary. We've been in the web design and marketingspace for over two years now, and in that time, we've seen the popularity of business blogsskyrocket. We've helped dozens of political,non-profit, and corporate clients build their own blogs and web strategy. However, our company never had its own large blog presence.
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5 Things Your Company Could Learn From Web Celebs
A recent Wired article details the rise of Julia Allison, one of a long list of people who have managed to become Web Celebs without really doing anything worthy of fame. Whether it's making a viral YouTube video about your new haircut or crying about Britney's VMA performance, there have now been dozens of people and companies that have become Web Celebs and built their own online brand.
Allison's claim to fame is blogging and tweeting just about everything she does...not to mention having a string of famous boyfriends. While it's easy for many organizations to write off her online success as annoying and pandering - there are still several things that organizations can learn from her to help build their brand online.- Be Innovative - The Web Celeb clique have each been innovative in their own way. Whether it was a new style of humor or being unprecedentedly open about personal secrets, most web celebs have done something innovative to call attention to themselves. Organizations don't necessarily need to do something as risky as these tactics, but they should still keep up with the technology curve, which will usually make them seem innovative compared to their peers. Whether it's linking to Twitter and Facebook, Embracing Flash Video, Blogging, or allowing consumers to discuss your product on the site (we did something like this for the Saranac Beer website), it's important to not let your site fall behind the times.
- Keep Generating Good Content - Each of the aforementioned celebs constantly generates content. While it's not as important for a normal business or non-profit to post content on their site by the hour, they should refresh their news, blog, and other elements each week. One easy way to do this is to manage your website with a Content Management System - the system will make it easy and painless to frequently update your site's content.
- Start a Conversation - It's important to prompt your audience for feedback and give them the opportunity to get in contact with you. This includes writing open ended blog posts that prompt responses or just simply giving people an easy way to reach out to you. This conversation will make the experience at your site that much more relevant to the visitor, and when they hear back from you, it will encourage them to come back and visit again.
- Know Your Audience - Julia Allison knows that visitors to her website want to read about her dates and details about her social life - so, she gives people what they want and they continue to visit and refer other visitors. By tailoring your content to your specific audience, you'll build a better connection with visitors to your site and encourage them to return. This can be difficult at times - we recently completed building a new website for a national non-profit, and it was tough to balance addressing potential donors, applicants, and others, as each comes from a different demographic. However, after some work, we were able to find ways to make it very intuitive for stakeholders to quickly access the information that mattered most to them.
- Don't Give Up Easily - Many of the web celebs had blogged for years or posted dozens of videos before they found their celebrity. If you're site doesn't instantly receive the traffic you were hoping for, don't get discouraged. Keep generating good content and working to improve your site, and someone will take notice. Once you start to build a following, it will grow exponentially, so it's important to keep at it and don't get discouraged.
These tips will help turn your static site into a more heavily trafficked online brand. It doesn't happen over night, and for some, it may never happen. However, by following the examples of people who have successfully built their own online brands, you can greatly improve your site, traffic, and reputation.
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Get Rich Quick Schemes Never Work - Not Even for SEO
There's an eternal debate on the web and among companies about the most important SEO tactic. Everyone wants to find to find Midas' Touch and instantly turn their website into search engine gold - a top listing on Google. People are so eager to have a top Google ranking that they quite often forego the hard work necessary to earn a ranking, and they just opt for a "get rich quick scheme." We've all seen these ploys advertised in sketchy corners of the Internet: "Top Google Ranking, GUARANTEED," "Google Your Way to Millions," "Be On Google's First Page In a Week! GUARANTEED!" ... there are endless wordings of these ads, but only one result - wasted money.
When it comes to search engine optimization, just like in the real world, there's no sure fire "get rich quick" scheme. Believe it or not, the Google guys and their employees are pretty smart folks. Smart enough to know the shady little tricks that people will try to get a high ranking, and smart enough to not let those methods work. In fact, there's a good chance that if you try and sketch your way to the top that Google will penalize your site in the rankings.
In order to succeed in search engine optimization, you have to put some work into it. The most important work is writing good content. By writing content that accurately reflects your business and keeping it updated, Google will index you based on what your company does. Also, the better the content and the more frequently it's refreshed, the more likely it is that other companies and bloggers will link to your site - these links are a key part to your Google ranking. Business blogs are the raging fashion of today mainly because they challenge companies to write compelling content frequently, thus motivating visitors to link to the blog/company, which results in higher Google rankings for the terms that those companies care (and blog) about.
At New Media Campaigns, SEO is on the forefront of our minds when we work with designing our clients' websites. For example, our proprietary content management system (which is used by corporate, non-profit, and political websites around the country) ensures that all of the content on your site can be indexed by search engines. The system also allows for your site to host its very own blog, and reap the benefits that were mentioned in the previous paragraph. Additionally, when our clients want to strengthen their SEO tactics, we work with them every step of the way. From helping write content to directory submission, we work with our clients to ensure that they're getting the most out of their SEO. If you're interested in SEO, be sure to get in contact with us and learn about New Media Campaigns' SEO packages.
It's important to always remember that SEO is a long, hard fought battle, but if you put in the work, you'll begin to see results - however, never trust anyone that GUARANTEES quick results, because the process isn't that simple or predictable.
Clay Schossow
Lead Project Manager
cschossow@newmediacampaigns.com
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Call: (919) 485-4118
