Outdated marketing methods – the dinosaurs still walk among us

It’s my birthday today. I am exhausted as usual. I’ve been in the office for 40 minutes and already my blood pressure is up. The decisions that are made here are based solely on speculation and outdated ideas. One bad decision after the other and a completely reactive environment. Every suggestion I make is shot down, it almost seems deliberate, like no matter what, go against the employee. More wasted money, more sub-par results.

Without going into too much detail, we are working on a project that is potentially really cool, however my enthusiasm has already been squashed because the way we are going about things is wrong, and I am tired of being ignored. The only reason I would make any suggestions now is to have the “I told you so” opportunity at the end.

I could write a novel on the wrong way to go about things. Whether you are marketing your own business or marketing someone elses, the steps that are necessary to succeed are the same.

1. Know your audience

2. Know your content

3. Know what works and what doesn’t

4. Know when to pull the trigger and when to pull the plug

Today I watch a fairly nice budget slowly get chipped away,  you could do a hell of a lot with $60,000. Let me give you an example. If you are promoting an event that is recurring, say it’s an annual event.  You should set up your marketing methods so that it builds on what you did last year. If you pay attention at all,  you should know that 85% of search marketing is reputation. A site reputation is no different than a persons reputation. To make it simple, reputation is based on age, history, and what people are saying about you. Simple enough right?

So, using those 3 pieces of reputation, which would you ithink would be the best idea?

a. Create a solid website that can be modified to fit the event each year. Build links to it, get reputation through social networking, let the site age, use it to showcase the event AFTER it happened so that the site generates traffic through out the year untl the date of the next event year? Oh yeah, and HOST THE SITE???

or would you think it was a good idea to:

b. Build the main (money site) as a profile page on a social networking site, then promote that website with paid search, viral marketing etc.  I guess you wouldn’t care that since you don’t own the site, you cannot control the uptime, you cannot harvest the email addresses or contact information directly to your database or email list. The paid search you are doing is actually promoting the network that is hosting the page, not the website, so any links that are built are actually pointed at the social network site that is hosting the page, thereby increasing the reputation of that social network (which is already the top 5 website on the internet). I don’t really need to continue here right? It’s obvious why this is an incredibly stupid idea, right? Apparently not.

There is a reason that Carl Icahn says that all CEO’s are morons.  Personally, I am totally OK admitting when I don’t know something, and if I don’t know something, I will defer to someone who does. Never assume you are the smartest guy in the room and there is no room for hunches in marketing. The beauty of marketing is that there is no shortage of stats, plans, metrics and methods that show exactly what you need to do.

Regardless of whether or not you want to be involved in the marketing of your business, you owe it to yourself to at least know what questions to ask.

1. What are you going to do to make people want to come to my site?
2. What are you going to do to get people to stay?
3. What are you doing to make them want to come back?
4. Is there a call to action on every page of the site?
5. What methods are you using to capture visitor information? Just because they aren’t interested now doesn’t mean they wont be in the future.
6. Are you taking advantage of social marketing methods? Do you understand them?
7. Are you paying attention to usability?
8. Are you leaving room to explore new avenues as they become available? Do you keep up with changing technology and trends?

Obviously, there are more but this gives you some idea. Internet marketing is interesting and fun. The ability to be able to modify campaigns at any time, stop on a dime and change directions, tweak and fine tune. There is no reason to fail.

Writing this rant gave me the idea to write up a list of questions to ask a potential search marketing company. I can give you 10 questions that will immediately tell you if the person is full of it or out of touch. I will try to get that up in the next couple days or so.

Marketing your website. Social Networking and a couple analogies.

I was thinking yesterday about what I’m going to say in the tele-seminar today. The tele-seminar is essentially going to be for owners of bowling centers, how to market their business maintain a strong presence online. my part in this whole company is essentially search strategy and that includes social networking, and all of the new social network fads. I find it easier to explain with analogies that people can understand. Everybody has heard of MySpace.com, Facebook.com and of course now the big one, twitter. The DVD of the metamorphosis that is taking place in online marketing is that the Internet is really just becoming a series of networks. They used to sort of explain to new, website owners that the Internet was sort of like a neighborhood. I never really liked that explanation, because it really wasn’t a neighborhood now. It seems to be moving closer to that original explanation.

The Internet really is now just a bunch of communities and portals and if you want to look at something like Google. I would almost say it’s like a map. Or rather, a guidebook. For the most part, the days of manipulating Google, and I use Google in place of search engine. They pretty much managed to become the name of all search engines. The best example they used to use for that in marketing class or xerox. At any rate, it is becoming harder and harder to manipulate Google, they have put so much of their resources into trying to get their search engine to act like a human being, to listen and pay attention to what’s going on outside. In these other communities. So, in order for you to have a successful presence online. You need to participate in as many communities as possible. You need to have a constant steady flow coming in and out of your space, you need to have people talking about, you, hopefully in a favorable way, and you need to make an effort to get out there at least once in a while. Show your face and interact with people. I hate saying that the days of iif you build it they will come are over, that analogy has been beaten to death. However there are still so many people and businesses that believe that if you just throw up a website that you are. Or rather, they are owed their place in line, and because they run a quality business that is somehow going to guarantee them a favorable spot in the search engines. And that’s just not the case.

We have developed a plan, right now we’re calling it the $2 million plan, which I’m not going to go into. Actually, I will never go into a publicly. However, it is a plan that literally covers all the bases. I read an interesting article from someone at Google. I don’t remember who it was but I’m pretty sure it was not Matt Cutts. Actually it was not an article at all it was a phone call that I had with my Google representative. I was asking him if he could possibly give me any insight into the Google algorithm, and how to rank well, of course, everyone they talk to, tries to get them to admit something. And of course they don’t. But what he did tell me was that Google likes to see a steady flow of information. It does not like to see a stopping point. So there should be many paths into your website and there should be some paths out of your website and the pads out of your website should lead to other websites that have passed out of their websites, etc. etc. They said that the algorithm or the spider automatically get suspicious when it finds a website that is sitting by itself. Essentially, if there are some links going into the website, but the website is not saying anything about anyone else. Google does not like that. Now I don’t really see how this applies to websites like target.com. I don’t really see any links from their website to anyone else but a perfect example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always going to have the top spot for just about any search term that matters. Its just the way it is is the perfect website.

I don’t really know what going with all of this and I really should be spending my time doing other things, the clock is ticking, and I’m obviously procrastinating. So I’m going to cut it off here, but I am very interested to find out what the people on this tele-seminar tonight. No, and more importantly, what they want to know. Explaining search engine optimization has become easier and easier of the people that own a website are familiar with the terminology but trying to explain the importance of social networking, at least I have found, is incredibly difficult to get people to grasp. I know MySpace.com is for 16-year-old kid rock bands, and I know that Facebook is primarily for generation acts to look up friends from high school and see how fat they’ve gotten. But as far as the value of having some sort of a presence there, it’s absolutely necessary. Social networking, article writing, social bookmarking, twitter, you name it. The only way for your website to succeed today is that you have to take an interest in it or you have to pay someone to take an active interest in it. In either case, it’s expensive, it’s definitely more expensive than it used to be, because you are either making a constant investment in someone like me to create a constant buzz about your website or your spending hours out of your day learning about the different promotion methods, and the new technology in the new science. Its never-ending.

If you had asked me even a year ago I would have probably said that I thought that the Internet, or at least marketing on the Internet have for the most part, found its bottom or rather, where it was going to stay at least for the time being. I certainly didn’t anticipate something like twitter coming along then again. I constantly underestimate the narcissism that is so common in today’s society.

Online Marketing for your business – Ignore the one trick pony

I am #1 in Google for online marketing Milwaukee. I am #1 for a bunch of things, but this doesn’t get any traffic. It is going to take a while to get people used to the fact that internet marketing is going through another metamorphosis. A big one. Like it or not, most changes that we have to deal with as internet marketers have something to do with Google. Yes, I know, there are other things out there than Google , but for the time being (forever) Google is going to pretty much dictate the way people get their information online.

The reason I am bringing up this #1 listing for online marketing Milwaukee, I am also #1 in the 10 pack (the groups of local listings at the top of the page), is that SEO (Search engine optimization) is not really that important anymore. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a bit more relevant, but Online Marketing or Internet Marketing is really the best way to describe what has got to happen.

Online marketing encompasses everything that is important in getting your site noticed on the internet. This list is getting bigger by the day. It used to be that all an SEO person needed to do was hit some seminars and read some groups, make sure that the rules were followed on the site and get the meta information in order.  Then build links. Not to say that this is not important, of course it is, but for the small business owner, we can get the on-site SEO taken care of with two words.. Word Press. Well its actually one word because its a company name, WordPress. You really don’t need much more than this. Google love WordPress sites, they are easy to maintain, just get the plugins you need and get going. Now you need to build links, lots of them, lots and lots and lots of them. You need to be building links constantly.

Now lets add some more to the mix.  Social media. There is some debate as to who really started social media. User generated content. I don’t know the answer, I am sure some searching around in Google and I could find it, but it’s not important to me. Social media and using it to market really isn’t a big secret. What makes it cool is that it’s a bit more like real life. However, like real life, if you don’t have the time to be active socially – its a pain in the ass (excuse my French).  Social media is based on interacting with people – having conversations, recommending things, just like real life.

Tell a friend who tells three friends, who tells three friends, etc. etc. Like real life this can work in your favor or it can rock your world with a bad reputation or slander.  I need to say this again, if you feel that you do not have time to go out to bars, attend parties, go to networking meetings, then you probably don’t have the time to focus on social networking. That’s OK. We do.

I don’t want to drag this post out, I have work to do, and its a  fact that people don’t read long posts.  My point in all this is that if you are a business owner, stop looking around for SEO companies, or PPC companies. Start looking for someone that understands what is under the umbrella of online marketing. The internet is becoming more and more like the real world,  insert some clever analogy about not relying on someone who only specializes in one area. Talk amongst yourselves. Seriously, talk amongst yourselves, it will increase your ranking.