With all the buzz about blogs, you’d think that people with really popular blogs would make tons of money. There are people in the blogosphere claiming to get $100,000 checks each month from Google for their AdWords campaigns. And maybe they do, but how many of those bloggers are out there and should we all aspire to this lofty goal?
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Archive for June 28, 2007
The Truth About Blogs
Five ways to legally spy on the competition
Having a website entitles you to no privacy, leaving every company on the Internet equally vulnerable to their enemies. Now, this sounds like a bad thing, but there is an advantage to this openness and I have already said it. EVERY company is equally open to scrutiny, meaning you have the same chance as everyone else to spy on the competition.
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X Marks the spot: Creating an Effective Landing Page
Search for any term in a search engine and you will get a list of results. From that list of results you can click on any link directing you to a website.
Type a URL in the address bar and a website will pop up.
Follow a link from one site to another and land on a website.
How to get to a website is the easy part. What to do when you get there is the hard part, this is where landing pages come in handy.
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The Nine Rules of Website Stickiness
“Try a little tenderness”
These words from the great voice of Otis Redding describe perfectly what a relationship should be between a website and its owner. Websites should be coddled, loved and spoiled. Remember that websites work for you 24/7, they represent you and everything your company stands for 100% of the time, so they need to be maintained.
But without any site traffic, the love you give your site won’t be apparent to anyone but yourself. Maybe you get some traffic on occasion, but it trickles off. So what can you do to your site to keep visitors interested and give others a reason to view it as well?
Get out the fly paper because we’re going to make your site sticky.
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Tools for Small Business
Abraham Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” In the business of online marketing, the best way to sharpen the tool is to find a better tool. As online marketers, we are always on the lookout for better tools for our clients.
Here is a list of 100 Web Applications for Small Business.
Some of our favorite tools are:
Keyword spy was brought to our attention by Rob a 262 blog reader. Thanks for the addition Rob!
State of the Blogosphere and Social Media
David Sifry is the CEO of Technorati, and he had written a great post on The State of the Blogosphere and Social Media. It provides great information on blogs and other social media trends. Great information!
Here is a quick summary:
- 70 million weblogs
- About 120,000 new weblogs each day
- 1.5 million posts per day
- Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
- 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
- Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
- English second at 33%
- Chinese third at 8%
- Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
- 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
An E-commerce Tool You Cant Live Without
There are a couple of great e-commerce tools we recommend to all of our e-commerce website clients. These tools let customers participate in live chat.
Each of these tools is a little different, but they’re all relatively inexpensive. Live chat tools help online visitors send quick instant messages to you so they can find what they need quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, they may get frustrated and leave your site because what they want to find is buried somewhere.
Some of these tools will allow you to track visitor activity on your website in real time, monitor PPC campaigns, view web analytics reports, and get real time page error alerts.
Live Chat Tools
Having an avenue to communicate with clients is really important for e-commerce sites. These live chat tools allow you to do that without breaking the bank.
The Truth About Website Analytics
Webstie analytics tools, like Omniture (the tool we use) and Google Analytics (a free tool), are meant to help companies look at their website traffic and analyze the data in order to make good business decisions about marketing and website usability / design.
Website analytics software can tell you things like:
- How many visitors you get (unique visitors, repeat visitors)
- Who your visitors are (what country, what state)
- Where your visitors come from (search engines, other websites, email)
- What they do when they get to your site (pages they click, where they exit)
- If they perform the desired ‘call to action’ (buy, fill out a form, sign up)
I recently worked with two very large Fortune 500 clients (we still love small business customers too) who had over $5 million each invested in website analytics technology that did not work. Their IT guy made excuses and blamed it on his predecessors. The software vendor blamed it on the hardware configuration and the old IT guy. My thought was “Hey, who gives a damn. Someone give me the $5 million back right now.”
If I paid someone $5 million, I assure you the damn thing better work, or I would be getting my money back. By the way, if you want to give me $5 million and get nothing in return, I could write this blog from the beach instead of my office! Sometimes big companies amaze me!
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Top Blog List
With over 70 million blogs on the Web, searching for the best blogs can be an overwhelming process. The good news is, there are a lot of “Top Blog” lists out there. Everyone likes a Top 10 list – especially in the blogosphere where we like to scan.
The most well known top blog list is from Technorati. This a list of the Top 100 Most Popular Blogs on the Web. This list is based on the number unique links acquired in the last six months.
Another great list that focuses on marketing blogs is The Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs by Todd And. Todd’s rating system is based on:
- Google PageRank
- Bloglines Subscribers
- Technorati Ranking
- Subjective Ranking by the List Author
There is also a list of over 300 Search Engine Marketing Blogs. Of course, our favorite search engine marketing blog is right here.
These top blog lists serve two purposes. First, these lists help us all find the best of the best. Second, they serve as link bait for these sites. People all over the Web link to these lists of top blogs and check them regularly for updates.
Once you have found a few blogs you like, you should check out NetVibes. They have a great tool that enables you to browse the lastest headlines from your favorite blogs all in one place. And you can setup different tabs for the different types of blogs you like to read.
I read over 100 blogs using this great tool on topics ranging from search engine marketing to leadership to blogging. I think that knowledge is the only thing that separates our Atlanta search engine marketing firm from the competition, so I read all the time. My favorite blog is Be Excellent from Six Disciplines.
If you need help setting up or marketing your blog, give us a call at 404-541-9780. Happy reading.
How to Leverage Social Networking Sites
There are a couple of ways to take advantage of social networking sites to grow your business:
- Blog: Blog about the blogs and the websites that you want to get noticed by. Most bloggers are obsessed with checking their stats and keeping track of who’s linking to them. If you link to a website in a blog post, you can bet they will find your post and read it.
- Comment: Read blogs about your industry and comment on them regularly with honest, quality responses. Other bloggers that read your comments are likely to click back and check out your website.
- Sign Up: Create profiles on business social networking sites like LinkedIn where you can interact with other people in your business or industry.
The golden rule of social networking is to be honest and genuine. Remember that at the end of the day, people like to meet other great people. Making connnections with others is the purpose of social networking sites and it’s also the best way to build a business – online or offline.
To show you that we practice what we preach, here are a couple of links to two client’s that have also become great friends. Lets see if they mention these links I added from our blog to their site / blog: Golf Franchise / Kids Furniture. Just passing the “link love” around.