June 27th, 2009
The current state of the economy has driven internet media marketers to sort through the data stream and produce results that can be measured.
While conventional marketing budgets are being drastically reduced, internet media budgets are being reinforced if not increased.
Dollar for dollar, measured and quantifiable internet media marketing delivers a more targeted reach with a bigger ROI.
Now is the time for internet media marketers to move from the edges and more edgy aspects of business marketing to being the core marketing activity.
May 14th, 2009
I’m working on a visual to describe to clients how SMM works - how the interconnectivity works.
I’ve posted a PDF of my first attempt. I would love your feedback.
SMM Cloud Visual PDF
I used a radio interview as my example to show how you put your content into as many different venues as possible to get maximum reach.
Thanks very much - feel free to post comments and critiques - all are welcome!
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April 23rd, 2009
So many people ask me why they should incorporate social media into their marketing strategy.
The common argument is that very few of their clients or customers are into social media. Most of their clients aren’t on Twitter or blogs, and only have a simple LinkedIn profile.
The answer? The people who are tweeting, posting, blogging, podcasting and chatting on Facebook, the early adopters of social media, are the most important people in your marketing mix - they are “influencers”.
They are setting the tone for your clients or customers and if you don’t know what they think or you’re not persuading them about the benefits of your product or service, your competitor is.
If you can have a dialogue with the influencers in your industry or market you are essentially having a conversation with thousands of additional customers through the “influencer”.
Start the conversation, increase awareness of your brand with the influencers in your community and they will carry your message and become advocates for your brand.
Questions about social media or internet marketing?
Give me a call! John 206-335-6162
Email: John[at]marketoneweb.com
Twitter: Twitter.com/JohnX
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marketoneweb
April 16th, 2009
(This approach is the opposite of Open Networking – although nothing wrong with that – just a different way of accomplishing the same thing.)
It’s easy to find just the right people you want in your network - a good Google seach and a bit of digging and you can have 5 to 500 names in about 10 minutes.
But none of them are in your network! Now what!
Let’s say I’m a new lawyer recently graduated from UCLA and working in international law and I’m looking for possible referrals for business people looking to trade with China
LinkedIn is perfect.
Here’s what I do.
Google has several “query strings” that are actually the basis for the advanced search - for me it’s just quicker to type these query strings directly into the search box- and I can also refine the search past “advanced search”.
Step 1:
1. I start by telling Google that I want to search a specific site “Linkedin.com”
site:linkedin.com/in
Adding the /in after the .com will limit the search to people and exclude companies, directories etc.
2. Then I add the keywords associated with the job description or job title of the person I’m looking to connect with. Put these words in “quotes” and Google will only return listings that have that exact word combination.
site:linkedin.com/in “international trade”
3. Then I restrict it to a geographical area.
site:linkedin.com/in “international trade” “Los Angeles”
4. I add “China”
site:linkedin.com/in “international trade” “Los Angeles” China
Results:
This search brought up 208 excellent people who might become clients or possible refer clients to me.
Results 1 - 10 of about 208 from linkedin.com/in for “international trade” “Los Angeles” China
A few too many to sort through so I’ll add “University of California, Los Angeles” my example’s alma mater. School affiliations are great starting points with people you don’t know.
I added the exact language from LinkedIn so I wouldn’t get only UCLA grads.
Results 1 - 10 of 10 from linkedin.com/in for “international trade” “Los Angeles” China “University of California, Los Angeles”.
You figure out how to mix and match to get the best search combination.
Now I have a number I can quickly run though pick a couple of possible connections and go to step 2.
Step 2:
1. I find the people that I have the most in common with that might be potential clients or who might be able to refer someone to me. Remember I also have to be of some value to them.
2. I go their website and find their email address
3. I email them with this in the subject line “I would like to connect with your on LinkedIn but don’t want the dreaded IDK”.
You can fashion your own subject line with your own style and substance, maybe something you both have in common (UCLA). Just be natural and honest.
4. The body of the email is very brief, just asking to connect and listing my LinkedIn address. I do say why we both might get value from the connection, but I also say that if you’d prefer not to connect it’s no problem.
Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the people will connect with me because I have taken the time to find out a little bit about them and show them the value I might bring.
But if not, you’ve lost nothing and you didn’t get the dreaded “IDK”!
PS: There are a lot of specific queries that Google uses. Email if you have a very specific person you are trying to connect with and I’ll put together a query string for you. Just let me know how it works!
Have a question? Please feel free to call me at 206-335-6162 (in Los Angeles) or email me at John@marketoneweb.com. Thanks!
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March 2nd, 2009
SEO: Catch Some Big Fish with Linkbait
Rule #1: Be Bold!
Make a controversial claim and back it up. Bigfoot lives! Click here for candid shots of Sasquach in Seattle at a Starbucks drivethru!
Of course, you have to have the pictures. But you get the idea. Take a controversial stand and back it up with some real numbers.
In my business, the boldest thing that I can say is that conventional SEO doesn’t work, because it doesn’t. How could it? Everyone is doing it and only 10 sites can be on page #1. The failure is built into the design!
Rule #2: Be Useful! Really Useful!
There’s a ton of junk on the internet claiming to be helpful. There are a million mortgage rate calculators but how many can link you to a local bank offering you the terms you just calculated – not many – and those who do are passed around from site to site.
Rule #3: Be Funny!
Funny’s hard. But successful funny will get more traffic than just about anything else. If you can’t pull off funny, make fun of yourself. Everyone relates to that.
Rule #4: Be Original!
The internet is thick with lists, widgets, prizes, questionnaires etc that you have to be really original to stand out.
In my business at great list would be “10 Ways to Spot Bad SEO” and #1 on that list would be cheap SEO. The most expensive SEO is inexpensive SEO because you might as well just give the SEO company your money and say thanks. You’ll waste your money but at least you haven’t wasted your time.
It’s like the joke about the oft-divorced man. He should just find a woman he doesn’t like a give her a house.
Rule #5: Fight the Man!
Start a campaign to rid the world of “Anti-Pogo Sticks in the Park” regulations and mean it. Get a viral campaign going about how great Pogo Sticks are, how healthy they are for children and how “The Man” just wants kids to buy junk food and watch TV. If it’s meaningful, people will get onboard and you’ll have a hit on your hands.
Pogo sticks to the people!
The Take-Away:
Linkbait is one of the best things you can do for your website if you can pull it off. Get people talking, offer something new, inspiring or entertaining.
Give it a shot! It’s well worth the time.
Have a question? Call John at 206-335-6162 or email marketone[at]gmail.com
SEO Expert Los Angeles
Keyword Saturation: 1.1%
Keyword Relevance: 10/10
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February 16th, 2009
“75% of users say they make judgments about the a company’s credibility based on their website’s design.”
How Visitors “See” Your Site
The example above shows how your visitors see your site. Your visitors eye will follow the pattern in red. Your design elements should also follow the “sight line”
While the average click-thru rate for most sites hovers around 2% this sample site has an average click-thru rate of between 12% and 16%.
The visitor to this sample site will track the page like this:
1. The name of the site first
2. Move down, then left to the AdSense ads
3. Move up through the AdSense ads
4. Move right, down to the middle to the affiliate ads
5. Move left, down to more AdSense ads
6. Move across the bottom over the AdSense ads
7. Move up the right through the AdSense ads and the Affiliate ads
The purpose of this site is exclusively to garner clicks for AdSense and affiliate ads.
All the elements of the site that would take the visitor’s eyes away from the ads are “below the fold” so the eye will not be drawn away from the ads.
Here are some design rules to increase ROI on your website utilizing eye tracking.
1. Text will usually grab the “active” attention of your visitor before a graphic will. This seems counter-intuitive - but “active” attention is what your looking for. Something for your visitor to do.
Graphics are very important. No one will stay long on a site of text only, but to impart information you need text. Graphics are merely anchors for text.
2. The sight line begins with the upper left. Organize your elements so the beginning of the sight line has your most important information.
Keep headlines, sub-heads, bullet points, “H” tags and highlighted text along this sight line.
It has become common practice to put the navigation area in the top left and visitors are accustomed to looking there for navigation. It’s not unreasonable to change the navigation area, but it’s something to keep in mind if it works with your design.
3. If it looks like an ad – it probably is. Text ads work better because they don’t look like ads. Your visitor will leap right over banner ads and obvious text ads. Design your ads to blend in with the format of your site. If you have to, re-design your site a bit to make the ads look like elements of the site.
Ugly does sell – but not to repeat visitors. If you’re looking for one click per visitor than garish might be the way to go.
4. Font size – bigger is not better. Larger fonts are scanned, smaller fonts are read. Pick the size of your font to match your purpose. Lots of body copy in large type is going to be ignored. Long, small headlines will not be read.
5. Headings attract the visitor’s eye. Keep your headlines short and interesting. Something that will draw the visitor into the site.
6. Subheads should be the end of the sentence for your header. Both the header <h1> and the sub-head <h2> should contain the keywords for your site or this particular page. Google puts great weight on “H” tags at the beginning of the copy.
Example: A site about green high top sneakers.
Header: Will Iridescent Green High Top Sneakers Improve My IQ?
Subhead: Just buying Iridescent Green High Tops shows you’re a genius! No improvement possible!
7. Your visitor will scan the bottom of the visible page. Bullet lists, polls, widgets go well there – something for the visitors eye to catch on and compell them to some “call to action”.
8. Keep it short and sweet. Only 2 or 3 sentences in each paragraph. If you need more just break the paragraph at a logical point and keep writing. Visitors will read the top few words and the bottom few words of a paragraph and move on unless they are truly interested.
9. Single columns of body copy are easier to read, less distracting than multiple columns. Keep your body copy in the middle of your page with a maximum width of 5 inches.
Visitors read in “hops” and your eye can hop a couple of times before getting lost. A hop is about the width of newspaper column – about 2 ½ inches.
10. Get rid of the clutter. Keep it simple. You can have a lot of copy but you need to keep the font, font size and style, widths etc to around 6 different ones.
11. If you have an ad driven site, put the ads on the sight line and put the copy next to the ads. In our sample site above there is no copy, just affiliate ads that look like copy. Any of the photos could be replaced with copy because they are near the ads and on the sight line.
12. Your eye can only focus on one thing at a time. When selecting your images have one that dominates all the images. If it’s a great image the visitors eye will rest on it and whatever is in its proximity will be read.
13. Images of real people are the best, particularly when they have eye contact and are smiling. You don’t have to crop photos like they are boxes. Mix up the cropping. Close in implies intimacy. You can rotate the image a bit so that it’s somewhat off balance – this give the reader a feeling of action.
14. Visitors will look at menus and buttons. Do not over-design them. Keep them clean and uncluttered. Your visitors eye should be attracted by them but not confused.
15. People will avoid reading so lists are a great way to impart your information to fast moving visitors. Either numbers or bullet points work depending on your subject.
16. Again, people want your information, but they don’t want to read and you shouldn’t make them work to get it. Break up long paragraphs into bullet lists, headlines and sub-heads and highlighted areas along with small paragraphs.
17. Text formatting is very important to your reader and very, very important for the search engines. Bold text and “H” tags near the top draw your reader in and let the search engines know what your site is all about.
I would not recommend too much color, highlighting or italics – use very sparingly – too much is hard to read and cause the eye to turn away.
18. White space is your friend. Like a uncluttered house, you can find what you’re looking for quickly. White space is the accent for your images and text. It’s equally as important as your text or copy.
19. It has become customary for navigation to be at the top and the left. This doesn’t work for every design and can be boring and stilted in many cases. Start here if you can, but don’t build a boring site. Be flexible.
20. Most visitors have learned to ignore anything that blinks or moves, particularly banners. Banners can be good if they are designed to be a part of the site – almost a graphical representation of some aspect of the site.
Test, test, test - Amen.
Keyword Saturation: 3%
Keyword Value: 10/10
Questions? Call me at 206-335-6162 or email me at marketone[at]gmail.com - John
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February 11th, 2009
When you ask your visitors to provide sensitive information on your website, it’s important to send them to secure web pages. This is generally credit information, passwords, access to private forums, membership sites etc.
To do this you need to keep your secure pages on a different server, a secure server that requires an SSL Certificate to validate its status.
Most web pages are on non-secure servers with “http://” in the URL. Secure pages begin with this URL - “https://” - the additional “s” means secure.
As an added precaution, add the “nofollow” and “noindex” tags to your secure pages so theses pages won’t be indexed. If you have any security holes won’t be published around the internet.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
You can buy SSL Certificates from your host provider.
Your secure pages will be hosted on a different secure server so your link architecture will need to have absolute URL’s for your secure pages.
EX: If you are using short URL’s “../pages/mycoolproductpage.html
The URL for the buy page should be
https://mywebsite.com/buypages/buymycoolproduct.html
This will take your buyer back to the secure server.
Keyword Saturation: 2%
Keyword Value: 4/10
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February 11th, 2009
Viral marketing is getting your visitors to do your marketing for you. Give them something of value and they’ll pass it along. It’s as simple as that.
It’s the execution that separates the pros from the joes.
Pre-internet was all about word-of-mouth. You could focus your marketing on that single element and build an effective campaign for print, television, direct mail and radio.
Now, for internet marketing, it’s email, text messages, videos, blogs, games, polls, forums, comments, images - all of which need to be incorporated into a viral marketing strategy.
And the strategy is a pyramid. You launch your “virus” – then you start talking about it everywhere – building up layers around your concept and getting others to add to the layers.
It spreads logarithmically – 1 – 2 – 4 – 8 – 16 – 32 – you get the idea. You might be level 1 – 2 – 4 but your customers provide the rest. By the time you get to level 32 you will have tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people seeing your concept.
Viral Marketing Works
Viral marketing on the internet works because the nature of the internet is spontaneous and immediate. Here, looked at, passed on and gone.
You can reach a very large but vertical market – kids who like sparking green high top tennis shoes – there might only be 10 in the world but with a good viral marketing campaign you’ll probably find them all.
People love to “pass it around” – particularly when it’s of great interest to them. And you’re getting the benefit of the trust factor.
Be sure to narrow the target to make it interesting but keep it broad enough to make to worthwhile. You could find those 10 kids who like sparking high tops but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.
The Basics in Practice: What “Pushes” Your Virus
1. The concept has to be interesting to your targeted market. This is the most difficult part. Test your concepts before going forward. I’m constantly surprised by what I think is great that doesn’t even get off the ground, where something else just takes off.
2. Consider carefully the first thing your visitors see in your campaign. If it’s a headline or subject line, make it provocative, interesting, mysterious – whatever it takes to get that click.
Remember – if you can’t say it in just a few words, you haven’t refined your concept enough.
If it’s a text headline, add a few dingbats before and/or after the text. This separates your headline from all the rest. It will bring the visitors eye quickly to your headline because of the white space the dingbat will create.
4. Time is not on your side – make it short and sweet. You can cut extraneous words from your copy – people will put those words back in in their heads.
Long: Did you know that sparkling green shoes will explode in water!
Cut down to:
Short: Sparkling green shoes explode in water!
5. Funny’s Fun: This never fails – unless it’s not funny. Funny’s hard to do. But do it right and it will fly around the world.
6. Getting the word out early. If you’re the first one out with some news of interest to your audience, they will pass it along.
7. Viral marketing works because you’re not selling – you’re telling. Always remember that. Inject any aspect of self awareness into your campaign and it won’t go anywhere. Your concept has to stand apart from any hard sell. Viral builds branding.
8. Keep it real. That’s what people are moving around - something that is “real life” – not polished. It’s harder than you think. You have to keep the concept clean. It’s had to fake real, but if you can do it, you have a winner.
9. The Buzz Factor: Start a mystery, get people guessing and interested. Be sure the payoff is worth while or you’ll do more harm than good.
Final word: Viral marketing in not a one time shot – no marketing efforts are. Be prepared to spend the time and money necessary to get the results you are looking for.
Plan and execute – but don’t get so stuck in the planning you don’t execute. The internet is very forgetful. Hit and move on until you find what works.
Keyword Saturation: 2%
Keyword Value: 8/10
Keyword: Viral Marketing, Internet Marketing, Buzz Factor,
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February 10th, 2009
Back in December 2005, one of Britian’s largest newspapers, the Guardian, just for fun (and to test the power of black hat) put up a spoof site just before Christmas for “Eco Friendly Flip Flops”.
To be fair to the Guardian, they did put a disclaimer on the site explaining that it was a goof.
Google brought up 11,500 results for “eco-friendly flip flops” at the start of the experiment. This was the challenge - to get on page one for this keyword phrase.
Two days after building the site Google dropped by and indexed the pages - not a big feat really - but no results in the SERPS yet.
To pump the results a bit they did a bit of keyword stuffing and adding content under “display:none”.
No bounce in the SERPS.
On to the big guns.
The Guardian built a second site, really a link laundering site, and starting pumping backlinks back to the first site.
Within hours the site was on page one, topping the 11,500 other sites.
This couldn’t happen today - Google’s been on to link laundering for quite some time.
The point is, besides it being a very interesting story, is that everyday, someone out there is spamming the heck out of your money making keyword phrases.
Smackdown!
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February 4th, 2009
RT Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don’t End URLs in .0 - http://is.gd/wtk
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