The three ways our team stays smarter than our competitors is 1) testing online marketing tactics on multiple websites and coming to our own conclusions, sharing our knowledge internally with one another, and reading blogs from the best and the brightest. One of the better blogs I read on a regular basis is The Future Buzz. Adam Singer wrote a great blog the other day on 77 Insights from More than a Decade on the Web, Daily.

While most of the 77 ideas are based on the world of blogging , the ideas I found most relevant to the online marketing business were:

7) People hate flash – especially influencers
14) Telling stories that are unique, novel or in some way remarkable can always cut through the clutter
22) Content trumps design
23) A vast majority of web designers still can’t create Google-friendly sites
24) Knowing traditional graphic design doesn’t make you qualified to do web design
25) Search advertising is exceedingly effective if you know how to use it right and have a good product
31) People love lists
35) The most passionate professionals in every industry blog
39) People with mobile devices are far more efficient at spreading news than traditional media
45) E-commerce requires patience and good leadership/strategy
52) There are still newcomers, but eventually such a thing won’t exist
56) You don’t need to spend insane amounts of money to develop a popular site, product or web destination, but you do have to have a strong strategy, purpose and goal
70) People will always take the path of least resistance
71) With design, less is more
76) Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come

Other ideas I would add to the list are:

78) Every site should have clear calls to action, such as buy online, complete a form online, register for a blog or newsletter, or download a PDF
79) All webmasters should install Google Analytics (even if you use another tool also) and use is to track what channels drive visitors to execute your site’s calls to action
80) Most large companies waste for too much money on paid search
81) If your website has a Google PageRank of 6 or higher, then you should focus a large majority of your marketing budget on good content and search engine optimization – it will pay huge dividends
82) If your site is B2B, you have to measure online leads from the web and track them through closing offline with a CRM tool

To see a list of some of the blogs I read on a daily basis, visit Blogs for Small Business CEOs.

When we started teaching people about search engine marketing back in 1997, Google wasn’t even invented yet and the only paid search engine worth paying for was called GoTo.com (which became Overture and then Yahoo!). Instead of 3 or 4 search engines to worry about (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask), there were 30 or so search engines we had to monitor.

When our sales people called people to pitch search engine marketing, prospects would almost always say “What’s that?”

Fortunately, today almost everyone knows what search engines are and most people understand how search engine marketing can grow their business. The question we get these days is “What can we do, in addition to search marketing?”

Here is my top 10 list of things to do outside of search engine marketing:

1) Link Build – Find sites that are topically relevant to your business and ask them to link to you. Reverse engineer where your competitors get their links from and get links from those sites too (try link:www.domain.com in Yahoo).

2) Create Content or Tools Worth Linking To – in the online marketing world, they call this link bait. If you are a mortgage broker, create a mortgage calculator. If you are an online marketer, create a free website ranking tool. Just create something cool that other sites will want to link to.

3) Start an In-House Email List – next to search, an opt-in, in-house email list is rated as one of the best ways to drive sales. We have some e-commerce clients that generate 20% of their business from sending out email blasts once a month.

4) Write Ariticles – if you want business prospects to find you online, write expert articles about your industry. Submit them to the top article distribution websites and get your name out there.

5) Use Online PR – find something interesting to tell the world about your business and submit it to the most popular online PR sites – PRWeb and BusinessWire. Make an announcement about your latest big deal or the Fortune 500 client you landed. Just have something to say.

6) Start a Blog – there are over 70 million blogs on the Web. Why? Because it’s easy to start a blog. If you have something valuable to put out into the business world, start a blog. It will help you add valuable content to your website, it will help you position your business uniquely above the competition, and it may even make you famous.

7) Market Your Blog – there are over 70 million blogs on the Web. If you want anyone to read your blog, you better spend some time marketing it. Register your blog with the top blog search engines – Technorati.

8 ) Work on Social Bookmarking – social networking sites like Digg, Furl� and Del.icio.us are the latest rage. People use these sites to vote for great content they find on the Web. Vote for your own stuff and get your friends to also.

9) Update Your Website – getting traffic to your site is only half the battle. Getting visitors to take your desired call to action (make a purchase, complete a form, sign up for a newsletter) is the other half. If your website conversion rate is 1%, you can double your sales by making your website better and increasing your conversion rate to just 2%.

10) Network – Get Out There – for most businesses, customers still come from relationships. Get out there and press the flesh!

Today I had a very yummy luncheon at the Four Seasons with a hospitality and tourism networking group here in Atlanta. I met some new people, stuffed my face with as much free salad and pasta as I could, then listened to a speaker from a Trade Show marketing company.

His topic? Simple, “The Basics of Successful Marketing.”

I think there are times when we try, not only in marketing but many industries, to dig almost too deep to be the best and the first. Sometimes we forget the basic ideals originally motivating us to pursue our current careers.

I love SEO because it’s such a dynamic industry, things are always changing and moving forward. But with that fast paced progress, I think it’s important to occasionally step away and go back to the basics.
Continue reading “Why simple never goes out of style” »

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.
Continue reading “X Marks the spot: Creating an Effective Landing Page” »

I am not a big fan of podcasts.  I don’t like podcasts because I like to surf the Web and browse information before reading it in-depth.  If you listen to a podcast, you have to sit and listen to someone’s entire opinion – no skipping to the good stuff.

BUT, if you want to create podcasts for your own website, here is a short list of all the equipment you will ever need: