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There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ‘3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you’re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn’t normally have access to. If you aren’t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you’re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.
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There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

To the non-corporate user (IE, most of us) the most noticeable changes will come in the form of the visuals. Both the Facebook “homepage” and corporate pages are changing to become more personable. Now those pages that you are a fan of will look less corporate and more like your buddy. Also good news for you super friendly types, no more cap on 5000 friends.

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As I have pointed out before, one of the best things about marketing on the internet is the ability to watch the results of ads and to see what is working and what isn’t. However, as Andy Atherton at Advertising Age has pointed out, that’s really not the big selling point anymore. It’s not very surprising that the biggest selling point to market on the web is that it reaches the most customers. Yet companies still spend 95% of branding money in offline channels. It seems really odd that companies fail to act on web advertising with more capital. Now, there are those that notice it. Certainly, if you noticed CNN or the NY Times homepage this Monday were covered with a banner ad at the top half for Apple, and we have discussed how Porsche capitalized on mobile advertising.

As Atherton notes, the internet advertising industry has grown faster than any other medium before it. It still has ways to go. Is it the uncharted territory of high dollar web campaigns that have companies sticking to traditional but declining mediums like radio and print? Possibly, but I believe that is also that the people with the know how and chutzpah aren’t out there yet. In a medium that is just barley 15 years old it means that at most, online marketers have probably a decade of experience under their belts. Which might seem like a lot but, given how fast the industry and medium has developed it really isn’t.

Online marketers are continually struggling to find out what works because they have so many options. We now know pop-up ads are a quick way to irritate the customer, but how long did it take to find out something thats so obvious? It isn’t like TV had been, your option was a commercial or sponsor a show, the end. Banner ads, text ads, flash ads, viral video, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The list can go on, and just because it works for company A, doesn’t mean it will work for Company B.

Online marketers are now faced with the largest demographic of any medium, and they don’t know how to handle it. You are now starting to see colleges offering degrees in eMarketing and eCommerce and even still these degrees can change frequently. You will start to see companies advertise online more but not because they are figureing it out, but because print and radio and to a lesser extent TV aren’t working as well as they should.

Advertising Age: Digital Marketing: Is it time to forget Measurement?

The following is an excerpt from coursework I did analyzing and explain Search Engine Marketing and Web Metrics. The report analyzes and makes suggestions about one of eBay’s competitors, Amazon.com, based on observations, and should be taken at face value. It is meant to be an example of possibilities.

Amazon, one of eBay’s global competitors has been in business just a little bit longer than eBay. Started in 1995 by Jeff Bezos and two other friends in his garage, Amazon has become an incredibly large company, reaching sales of almost $150 million by 1997 (Rivlin, 2005). Originally concentrating on books, Amazon has managed to branch out into many other products and even launched its own product, the Kindle, a reader for electronic books. (Stone, 2008),

Amazon’s history has been a mixed one, while having incredibly large sales figures and grown at an enormous rate, they didn’t turn a profit until 2003 (Rivlin, 2005). It wasn’t in Jeff Bezo’s plan to have a profit on the first year of operations though, the founders expected not to turn a profit for 4-5 years. (Stone, 2008), It managed however, to turn a profit and remain in business in a time when the dot com bubble was bursting and companies were going under.

Amazon has moved from selling books, to selling all kinds of items, and to enabling users to make sales for themselves. Amazon has also purchased other companies like IMDb (Bloom, 2008), or the Internet Movie Database. It would seem though that its core product has been books. Though the Internet age has been changing the printed media industry, Amazon isn’t resting on solid sales of these items to last forever. The forward looking company has its e-Reader the Kindle. According to Amazon’s web page on the Kindle, the e-Reader can wirelessly download and purchase books with many titles being available for $9.99.
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Facebook changed its Terms of Service (ToS) last week. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg says Facebook has rights to your data. Guess who gave them those rights? You. Zuckerberg’s logic is that in order for you to control who sees your Facebook data, you have to give rights to Facebook, who controls the privacy management to other profiles. In order for them to manage this, you have to give them rights (IE, sign up and input data). This really isn’t any thing to get upset about, in fact it’s pretty standard fair. If you read every ToS for every service you signed up for, you wouldn’t been on the internet, have credit cards, or quite a few other things. It sounds far worse than it actually is.

Here’s an excerpt from Mark Zuckerburgs Blog explaining the low down:

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

But if you’re still angry, Robert Scoble thinks you should chill out.
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Nobody thinks Porsche’s are cheap. By and large to most people in this economy, they aren’t. What Porsche has been fighting is the notion that they are unimaginably so expensive. A notion that might be over emphasized by the fact that most of the 911 models come in over $90,000.

But what Porsche did was target mobile phone users, typically young and tech savvy users with ads on Weather.com and various Yahoo sites. The result? 22% of Porsches ad generated traffic was from mobile ads.

At least in terms of metrics it was a success.Where the metrics show is in the click-through rate. It averaged 6 times higher than Porsche’s non-mobile efforts. Personally, generating significant click through rates for ANY mobile campaign is grounds for celebration.

What do the mobile results mean though?
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When you’re starting a site and trying to get noticed there are a few tips you can use to get yourself noticed other than just buying a domain and getting started.

First things first, content is king. Especially if you are a blog. Write often, write smart, and stick to your niche. I’m going to try to stay relevant to eMarketing on this blog, but like many of use there are other things I like. Depending on your blog you might be able to switch topics every once and awhile, but try not to loose focus. You should be concerned with posting a bit, even though it seems like a daunting task. For personal blogs, at least a post a day, but if it’s just you, shoot for 3-5. Considering blogs like Autoblog, Engadget and others probably have somewhere between 20-30 posts per day, you have stiff competition. If you’re worried about keeping up don’t forget not everything you write has to be specifically for your blog, reuse school papers or work research if it is relevant.

Social Networking:
If you blog the first thing you should get going is Twitter, because it’s the easiest. If you have already established a Twitter account and have many followers this is great. It’s a built in readership. Not everyone will read, but some will. If you use WordPress like I do, there is a plug in called TwitterTools that automatically plugs in the title and shrinks the url to a tinyurl and posts it to my twitter feed. If you aren’t using Wordpress there is TwitterFeed which allows you to use your RSS feed to accomplish the same thing. Post a link to your twitter account and wait for people to follow you. Voila! It’s that easy.

If you are doing this for professional reasons don’t forget to update your resume, LinkedIn Profile, or any other pages where you want to market yourself with the web address. Other options include putting it in your email signature and business cards. If you use Facebook, MySpace or any other social networking sites, don’t forget about those either. Your friends might pass along your site too!

There’s something that I have purposefully left out so far, and that is search engines. It’s pretty important to get listed on but it’s a much bigger topic than this. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry unto itself. Thus, it is a topic for itself and to be discussed another day.

There are some other things you can try to get the ball rolling too. Consider creating a “fan” page for your blog or product on Facebook. It’s free and it allows you to reach out to more people without doing too much work. It also gives you the ability to proactively interact with your fans. You can also @ your Twitter fans occasionally just to show them you’re alive and not a blogging robot.

These are just the basics, but good foundations for getting started. As you get into the habit of blogging, and trying to generate page hits you will notice what does and doesn’t work.