Thinking Marketing for Business Visionaries

the HUB magazine

Charlotte Internet is Coming

Charlotte Internet Blog

Charlotte Internet is coming...back! What started as the first Internet community in Charlotte, North Carolina, headed by Dave Beckwith back in 1995, will now become Charlotte's low-cost, high-value internet provider...thanks to the help of the legend himself, Scott Huffman -- longtime captain of Webkorner Internet Services. Webkorner will continue to offer internet services, but will focus more on broadband and business applications.

But Charlotte Internet does not stop at the internet's edge. There are many facets to the net, and many different professionals and artists who make it run well and beautifully. If we can't do it for you ourselves, we can direct you to those who can...as part of our new referral service.

If you are in the Charlotte area, and would like to try out our new service, or get involved in our referral program, drop us a line, and we'll set up an appointment.

In addition to Internet and referral services, we also offer blogging and marketing services. You can have your business, product or service featured on one of our network of blogs such as this one (Trade Street Journal) or one of our other fine blogs...including Carolina Art Blog, Wanderblogger, The Charlotte News, Idea Consultants, Carolina Blog Consultants, Planet Bizblog, and others.

Other exciting developments include VoIP (Internet Phone), IPTV, Podcasting, and much more still coming down the pike.

Why Search Engine Optimization Matters to Small Business

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a large area that we won’t try to cover all of in this article. SEM is the implementation of a variety of search engine processes and services to help market your business via a search engine. Today, however, we are focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Optimizing your web site to perform well on search engines can be a critical part of your online success. Search engines play a large role in how people navigate the Internet, so if someone is looking for your services or products online, sooner or later they will use a search engine. Your relevance to these search results can significantly impact the ability of search engines to deliver a user to your site. Studies have shown that those sites that show up on the first page of search results for a keyword receive six times more traffic than they did prior to their appearance.

The first thing I ask a client when we begin discussing SEO is “where does your web site get its traffic?” Most successful small business web sites glean only a small percentage of their overall traffic from search engines, if any at all. They have gotten their traffic from either their current client base or their promotions on their vehicles or other traditional advertising methods. My objective at this point is to see if an SEO plan would be good for them.

The next step is to review actual Internet search usage. The tool we use most frequently for this is the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo! Search Marketing. Using this tool, we can look at past activity on the Yahoo search engine. A rule of thumb is that Yahoo represents about 25% of all search engine traffic, so when you see the number of searches associated with a term, multiply by 4 to get a general idea of Internet search demand.

Oftentimes, a keyword is typed in and the telling response of “No suggestions for this keyword” is returned. You would not believe the keywords that some business owners believe are used to find them on the web. This exercise teaches us very quickly how to jump into the seat of the search engine user. Afterwards, we fairly quickly begin to identify keywords that do apply to the business that are also experiencing at least some demand based on the Keyword Selector Tool.

Now we have some direction.

The next step is to take this list of 20 or so keywords and determine with which the best opportunities exist to optimize your site. We do this several ways. One, we simply do a search on those terms and visually see how relevant the results are and what the pay-per-click activity against that keyword is. I typically just use Google and Yahoo for such research. This method is fairly ambiguous and depends a lot on experience.

Secondly, we run what is called a KEI analysis. This fancy acronym stands for a formula that looks at the demand for a particular keyword and then the supply of pages out on the Internet that are relevant to that keyword. In my opinion, opportunity exists for my client with any keyword with a KEI of 10 or higher.

Finally, we evaluate how best to deploy those keywords over your site. Should we optimize just the first page? Or should we look at creating sub-pages as well?

Once we have narrowed the list and decided on which pages to optimize, we go through the process of making your site relevant for the keyword selected. In my company, we use an optimization tool that considers the current search algorithms from Yahoo and Google (as best as they can be determined through observation) and lets us know what changes we need to make to the particular page in order for it to achieve the ideal level of relevance. Once these changes are completed, we then move on to the next page and perform the same operation until your site is relevant to the keyword selections from the previous process.

Optimizing for keyword relevancy, however, is just one battle in the effort of search engine marketing. In my next article, we will take a look at the importance of link popularity and the role it plays in placing your site above the crowd when you are all equally relevant.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Power of Affiliate Sales

On the Internet, the classic referral system has morphed into a highly automated and accountable affiliate sales program. Utilizing an affiliate program allows you to empower other people to sell or market for you in exchange for payment per lead and payment per sale, as either a flat rate or percentage of the sale. An affiliate program offers an extremely measurable return on your investment because you only pay when a sale or lead is generated.

There are two ways to approach an affiliate program. The first is to purchase your own affiliate software and establish your own distribution network through the people and web site owners with whom you have relationships. This is the very least expensive route as well, with software typically priced at $100 or more. You determine the price per lead or per sale and there are no additional fees.

The second route, which we tend to endorse more frequently, is the inclusion of your promotions in an established affiliate system. These systems typically cost a bit more to set up, but give your web site exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential affiliates and their clients. After setup, you determine the price per lead or per sale and the affiliate system provider typically charges a percentage of that price as their fee. Typically the fees associated with the system are in direct proportion to the number and quality of affiliates that can be brought to bear upon your campaign.

Once you are an established merchant within an affiliate system, you must then gain affiliates. Affiliate web site can range from link farms – sites with hundreds of links back to merchants and their products – to well-established and high volume specialty sites. My opinion is that no link is a bad link. I tend to apply very few filters, if any, to those willing to send traffic and potential sales my way.

After commission rates, the next item that attracts affiliates are the creative graphics and promotions that your company offers. Empowering your affiliates goes beyond just establishing yourself as a merchant. Once embarking on an affiliate program, time each month should be budgeted for evaluating the performance of your ads, creation and delivery of new ad campaigns, gauging hits versus sales (conversions) and interacting with your affiliate base. The more you do to help your affiliates succeed, the more successful you will be.

A final note is that affiliate programs are not overnight success systems. You are building a network of affiliates that requires time and maintenance to be successful. This network, over time, could be enormous and truly make the difference in the success or failure of an ecommerce site, but time must be allowed for that monitored growth.

The company we recommend most for affiliate sales is ShareASale.com. Based out of Chicago, ShareASale.com has a very reasonable entry price, provides an array of tools for tracking and interacting with your affiliates and, most importantly, has over 100,000 affiliates available. Check them out at www.shareasale.com

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Local Internet Marketing Made Easy

Coming soon to your neighborhood, CityAdNet is opening its doors in October 2005. Specializing in local Internet marketing, their services bring together web sites and advertisers to create win-win relationships. Sometimes, less is more. Go to the site and check out the details. Launching soon!

Utilizing Online Press Releases

The value of doing a press release is the exposure of your newsworthy items to a large crowd that would otherwise not know about your efforts. The phones are not going to ring off the hook, but as our analysis below show, there are benefits.

The secondary value is the improvement you gain in composing your thoughts about your company. Writing about your company is important. Blogging is one thing, but when you issue a press release, you are literally saying "PUBLISH THIS" and it has caused me to be more aware of my message.

The Trial Balloon

Using my release Trends, Taste & Travel Goes Podcasting as an example, let's explore the experience of these two different services and the overall advantage of doing a press release.

PRWeb - www.prweb.com - tracks the performance of your release via "views". I submitted my release on 9/14/05. I spoke with someone at PRWeb and the term "view" was defined as the combination of page views from the web site, views from the various RSS feeds, and views from their network of emails. They also track the "Printer Friendly Version" and "Email this story to a colleague" buttons on the release. PRWeb offers an upgrade for a minimum contribution of $10 and on up. I was pleased with the $30 level because my release showed up in Yahoo! News and Google News within a few hours of the release time.

PR.com - www.pr.com - free business registration and submission of press releases. I submitted my release on 9/17/05. However, I found their site to be a bit cumbersome and have a long laundry list of items they wanted completed. The benefit is that apparently they have many subscribers. I was able to find my release through them coming up in search engines with a few days - and not just on their site.

The Results

As of this writing, 9/24/05, I am seeing decent results in the search engines. When I type in the phrase "Travel Goes Podcasting" in quotes (necessary because of the ampersand special character), I received 583 results in Google, 6 results in Yahoo, 133 results in MSN, and 12 results in Altavista.

PRWeb.com reports the press release was viewed 115,539 times. 550 of those views were by what they estimate as "Pickups" which tracks media outlet views. I would guess they do this by email address or known IP addresses. The release had 7 prints and 1 forwarded email (which was me).

I could not find statistical data on PR.com.

My business site typically gets about 25 hits a day (average over the last few months). This went up to mid-40s right away and did go into the 50s per day (I put out another release on this past Monday). Both sites (www.cyemerus.com and www.parkerwebdevelopers.com) both experienced a temporary surge in link popularity as the release went out. As of this writing, the link popularity has returned to previous levels on Cy's site. Also, my hit count on my business site has returned to the mid-20s.

We did see a 10% gain in podcasting views and subscriptions, which at the end of the day is a payoff. Neither of us got a call from a potential customer or a writer, but we were both able to use the press release in three different sales calls (1 for Cy, 2 for me). I see this as another payoff. Finally, I was encouraged enough with the perceived value of the release to my sales team, that I issued another. The feedback I am getting is that it is good to have these to refer to as almost historical data. There is also some level of legitimacy perceived by potential clients when your article is showing up on Yahoo! News and such outlets.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

How to Select and Manage a Business Domain Name

Selecting and managing a domain name properly can save you a lot of frustration in the future. Here is some guidance I offer my friends and clients when they ask me about this most important task:

1. Does the domain end in .com? The .com top level domain (TLD) is by far the most popular and most recognized TLD. The most successful and most memorable web domain names will end in .com.


2. Does the domain reflect your business correctly? The company name is the best route here. When either that is not available or if you are trying to promote a particular campaign, keep in mind that someone should be able to look at or hear your domain name and understand what it is that you do.


3. How long is the domain name? Not that size always matters, but the shorter the better in this situation. My domain, www.parkerwebdevelopers.com, is a bit to bite off, but I selected because it is my company name and there is no question as to what I do.


4. Is your domain easily misspelled? Some examples are fortimes.com (could be fourtimes.com or 4times.com) or an uncommon name or word that may be hard to spell. Other examples are intentional misspellings of words so that you are able to find a .com address that is available (i.e. smallbiz.com or webkorner.com). If you are concerned about this, tell a few people the domain name and have them write it out for you. This will give you a quick idea of the effectiveness of the domain.


5. Multiple domains for a single company are not a bad idea IF you are planning only on using them to track your traditional advertising efforts. However, I do NOT recommend using multiple domains for your online promotion effort. An important factor in your Internet presence is link popularity and this effort should not be diluted by more than one domain to promote. If you go the multiple domain route, select the primary domain that will be used online with search engines and other promotions and stick with it.


6. Buying a domain. Purchasing domains is a fairly straightforward process. I recommend www.godaddy.com for price and ease of use and ongoing management. For less than $10 a year, you can have your own domain name reserved. By managing this process yourself, you can save a lot time in the future (especially if you have multiple domains).


7. It is also my recommendation that you set up your domain to automatically renew. There is nothing like being successful a year later and all of a sudden your domain expires and your site drops. I’ve seen it happen, it isn’t pretty and, more times than not, it seems to happen just when the site is needed most.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Have word-of-keyboard? Worker Bees puts the Buzz in your Marketing

Worker Bees: Buzz Marketing & more

Also see their excellent blog!

E-marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

E-marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Online Marketing

Blog Books, Buying, and Marketing

Blog Business Summit

Over the holiday weekend, the NY Times covered blog books, buying, and marketing.

On publishing, Scoble, Debbie Weil, and Jeremy Wright are also writing books and using blogs to help the process. We’ll launch a companion blog to our New Riders book soon and are not planning on blogging every chapter, like Naked Conversations, but will blog it more like the Longtail, which is “a source for anything related to the topic.” MORE

Corporate Blogs List

Wiki with a list of Corporate Blogs...

Recently added:
Outsell (online media consulting) - http://now.outsellinc.com/
Cheskin - http://weblog.cheskin.net/
Red Hat:
Red Hat Executives Blog - http://blogs.redhat.com/executive
Red Hat People Blog - http://blogs.redhat.com/people
Red Hat Intern Blog - http://blogs.redhat.com/intern/
Red Hat Magazine Editor's Blog - http://blogs.redhat.com/magazine/
EDS (Electronic Data Systems Corp.): EDS' Next Big Thing Blog - http://www.eds.com/sites/cs/blogs/eds_next_big_thing_blog/default.aspx
Edelman - Christopher Hannegan, SVP, U.S. Director of Employee Engagement: Employee Engagement - http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/empeng/
The Security Awareness Company (Interpact, Inc.) - Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless
Associates Consulting Group (investment banking) - http://associatesconsultinggroup.blogspot.com/
Reprise Media (Search Engine Marketing) - http://searchviews.com/

For the full, and evolving, list...click here.

Other resources:
How Many Fortune 500's Blogging? - Jeremy Wright, Ensight
European Corporate Blogs, a list maintained by Fredrik Wackå
Business Blog Consulting - examples of business blogs
A List of Business Blogs maintained by Darren Rowse
Biz Blogs (sans Consultants), maintained by students from Auburn University
SEE ALSO:
The Product Blogs List
The CEO Blogs List
BizBlogConsultants

Next Level Biz Tips: Magnetic Marketing: Getting Clients to Come to You!

Denise Wakeman discusses Magnetic Marketing, Adam Urbanski of The Marketing Mentors and ConversationsWithExperts.com.

Caro Consulting

Teresa Caro launches her blog, Caro

Lot's of good stuff.

(Thanks to Diva Marketing for the link)

excerpt:
Yesterday, the people from Jupiter and Search Engine Watch came to Atlanta for a half day presentation and round table event—Search Engine Watch Forums LIVE!

Key take aways were...

- Dave Williams from 360i. "Watch the trends. There is tremendous growth in the vertical search market – Orbitz, Shopping.com, Froogle, and Shopzilla. Out of search new ad models have emerged – click to call, local search, day parting, demographic search, contextual search etc. Your competitors are becoming savvier with A/B testing & multi-variable optimization. More and more studies show search is a valuable component of a branding campaign."

- Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement. "To overcome search marketing challenges, use all the tools available to you... Optimized blogs & press releases and well placed, high quality links to your site. Make sure your PR team is regularly monitoring the web and is working with the marketing team to address any negative PR that crops up. Take a look at local search – 25% of today's searches."

Business blogging “brings the most marketing and sales returns”

Tom Raftery's I.T. Views

excerpt:
Business blogging more than pays for itself according to a study carried out by Backbone Media - a Boston based company specialising in integrated search engine marketing and website design strategies for Business to Business companies. The survey includes case studies of blogs run by IBM, Microsoft, Maytag, iUpload, and Macromedia.

The study, available online in html format and pdf format, discovered that corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. Corporate blogs are giving established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting in ways that are tangible to the sales and marketing side of the business.

Ping your favorite services when updating your blog.

from Fred on Something

Ping 14 places at once.

Thanks to Toby at Diva Marketing)

15 Blog Marketing Tips

IBMW on Chris Taylor's 15 excellent suggestions.

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005

- Executive Summary

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With all of the buzz around corporate blogging, we wanted to understand the real value of it for companies. Why would a company want to start blogging, who should blog, what makes a blog successful, and how can a company use this type of website to make a positive impact on business?

To answers to these questions, we asked bloggers at hundreds of companies to participate in an online survey and conducted in-depth interviews with leading individuals from six corporate blogs that were selected as representative of the diverse spectrum of the corporate blogging world. What we discovered was that for the majority of our survey sample, (which includes some of today's biggest corporations and scrappiest underdogs), corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. We discovered that corporate blogs are giving established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting in ways that are tangible to the sales and marketing side of the business.

Just like in other aspects of life, success breeds success. What we see with successful blogs is a chain reaction that starts with a sincere interest on the part of the bloggers to provide their audience with great value in terms of useful and engaging content in the form of information, help, discussion and ideas. If a company can harness their customers' knowledge and ideas, a company will find better ways to satisfy their customers needs and wants. Listening to customers and acting on their suggestions is one of the best ways to build a group of customers who are committed to expressing their goodwill to their community. It is a common practice in blogging to provide a link back to a thought originator, which is valuable because backlinks are a way that search engines distinguish the order of the editorial rankings. When customers start commenting, posting or tracking back to their blogging community it can have a viral effect - spreading the word through other blogs. We discovered that it is a company's blogging strategy that will produce the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill brings the most marketing and sales returns.


You are welcome to quote from the paper, we request you cite the authors and include a reference to Backbone Media, Inc with a link http://www.backbonemedia.com.

Lip-Sticking: Smart Woman Online: Average Jane

"...this week's Smart Woman Online, Average Jane (also known as Celeste) will open your eyes to some secrets about marketing to women online, though she did not set out to do so when we interviewed her. "

Why Blog?

VisionPace asks the primary question.
Let us examine Doug Bliss' answers...

"Why Blog? From a business perspective blogs are no different from marketing channels like video, print, audio or presentations. They all deliver results of varying kind. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with target groups important to you. Below are a few blogging advantages we hope to benefit from."

Customer Relationships
"In a forum where your main objective is not to directly sell, you'll have a more personal relationship between you and your customers. Blogs are a fast way to engage customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback."

Some of your readers will be come customers. But not just ordinary customers. Knowledgable and friendly customers. Customers who may actually behave like a sales or marketing department, as they may alert their network of associates, weak and strong ties, all of whom may, at least, speak of you positively, but some of whom will become veritable salespeople who, themselves, are strong and loyal customers.

Media Relations
"It's every PR-consultants dream to create a channel where media regularly check what you have to say, instead of media just being passive - sometimes indifferent - recipients of press releases."

Indeed. Especially since the blog arena is where so much of the best news is to be found. You needen't even lick a stamp. Just point you browser to be right spots, and go!

Recruiting
"If you establish your company as a thought leader, people in your business will pay attention. They'll read and discuss what you have to say. Chances are good they will see you as an attractive employer."

One's blog becomes one's portfolio that one pieces together one blogpost at a time, and over time. Not rifled together in a frantic afternoon.

Testing Ideas or Concepts
"A blog is informal. It's part of a conversation where people (often) can comment, and the blog can provide you with a measure of value. Publish an idea and see if it generates interest. Does anyone link to you? What do they say?"

Some people say that blog comments, themselves, are blogs. And I tend to agree. I have have seen blog comments that were far better than the blogpost to which it referred. Indeed, some my very best writing has been written in comment windows.
One should always welcome, nay, inspire comments, and then be sure to attend to them. The benefits of a healthy comment world ripple in ways we have yet to discover. Hey! Who's at the door...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
"Google and other search engines reward sites that are updated often, that link to other sites and most importantly, that has many inbound links. Start a blog at your regular site and your ranking will receive a boost."

The higher your ranking, the higher you are on Google. You are high on Google, aren't you? Hmm. Not a bad ad:

I'm HIGH on Google!

Blog Entries
"Don't be as concerned with the length or style of your entry. Keep the focus on sharing your thoughts and opinions on a particular subject. That's what readers are most interested in."

Knowledge, facts and wisdom might be nice too. No didacticism though. And pleeeease don't be calumnious, petulant or insane. At least not at the same time.

(Thanks to BloggingBusiness for the link.)

Verslag Tweede Nederlandse Businessblogmeeting

Marco Derksen

Gisteren vond bij Publicis in Amstelveen de tweede Nederlandse Businessblog-meeting plaats.

Ruim 40 deelnemers (waarvan veruit de meerderheid aktief met weblogs), waren getuige van presentaties van Stephan Fellinger, Neville Hobson en Ton Zijlstra. Elk van de sprekers bekeek het fenomeen weblogs vanuit zijn eigen discipline. Stephan vanuit marketing, Neville vanuit communicatie en Ton vanuit kennisdeling.

Rough translation from Babelfish:

Yesterday the second Dutch businessblog meeting took place at Publicis in Amstelveen. More than 40 participants (of which by far the majority aktief with web-unwieldly), were getuige of presentations of Stephan Fellinger, Neville Hobson and barrel Zijlstra. Each of the participants examined the phenomenon web-unwieldly from its own discipline. Stephan from marketing, Neville from communication and barrel from division.

What I am curious about is this "web-unwieldy" they keep talking about. And who is this "barrel" who refuses to capitalize his own name? And what is a getuige? What must those people be smoking?