maine web development, web design, internet marketing

Whenever I am about to try something scary (like, really scary) I use the analogy with my teacher, coach, employer… “It’s like pole vaulting to me.”

I do NOT understand the margin of error in pole vaulting. You are either gracefully over the pole on a safe mat, or your face is ground into the dirt and your pride is 8 feet behind you. I said this when I wrote my first blog, when I did my first webinar, when I spoke at my first conference. It’s my shtick I guess. The good news is – I for the most part have always landed on the mat.

Want to know the secret? It’s not as difficult as you think.  Having done it myself, here are the biggest three social media tumbles I see businesses make:

Knock, knock – Anyone home?

Working with clients on their social media strategy, I find that the biggest hindrance is the fear of not knowing what to write, blog, post or share. You can strategize all you want but the end result isn’t a carefully crafted plan – it’s content. Actual content that people are looking for to learn from, share and use to potentially make their next purchasing decision. Stop the crickets chirping and just get out there and write some interesting content!

Me, me, me

Once you are set up and you know what communities you are going to participate in the easiest thing to write about is YOU. Unfortunately not many people care about you, they care about themselves, their needs, their question, their problem. Is your product or service something that is going to help any of these people with their problems? Talk about that. Talk about what your customers need, in the language they use and in the community they participate in. The content you produce isn’t about what you are ready to talk about – it is about what your customers are ready to hear from you.

Have to beat my competitor

We are competitive by nature – I know. I see a lot of wasted energy with people consumed with what their competitor is doing with their social media space. The most unique opportunity with creating a social media space for you and your company is the ability to be yourself.  The ability to show corporate transparency. What makes your company its own entity. Try not to stress with what your competitor is doing. Stress about how you are going to make the most accurate reflection of you and your products and services. Stress about the best tools to use to offer as much as you can to your potential clients.

From my small knowledge of pole vaulting one thing is for sure – if you don’t fully commit to you getting your butt over that pole you are probably going to crash onto the floor. Let’s apply that to social media marketing as well. Your level of commitment is probably going to effect your success. So are you going to make it over the pole? Or will you just sit on the mat and not even try?

Photo credit: carl_blake

Want to Know More Now

Read: Business Owners Need to be More Involved with their Marketing Strategy

Read: 5 Tips to Take Charge of Your Social Media Strategy

Read: The Marketing Power Shift – Are You On Board Or Will You Be Left Behind?

Read: Measuring the ROI of Social Media

What is Social Media And Why Should I Care? Wondering what del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and Squidoo can do your for business? Get the dirt on Web 2.0 and beyond in this introduction to the major social media networks with tips on how to create and maintain a profile for your business for best success. » View Webinar

A deal between the 2nd and 3rd place search engines has finally been confirmed and is reported to close in early 2010. Microsoft and Yahoo!, who have been in talks since early 2009 after Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo! last year, are teaming up to try and chip away at Google’s market share.

What Does this Mean?

Basically, the long and the short of it is that Yahoo! will use Bing’s search engine to supply organic search results. Pay-Per-Click ads that appear on Yahoo’s search engine results pages are going to be powered by Microsoft’s paid search platform, AdCenter. In return, Yahoo! will use their data and technology in other areas of the search business, including enhancing its display advertising technology. Both companies will maintain their own separate advertising and sales teams.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Google scored 65% of the total US searches in June. Yahoo! came in just under 20% and Bing’s slice of the search pie was 8.4%. Together, the two underdogs don’t account for even half of Google’s share, but it’s still a step closer in rivaling the giant. “They should be worried,” Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, said of Google. “It’s going to give Microsoft in one fell swoop a much bigger share of the search market.”

Will There Be Much of a Change?

At this point so early in the game, it’s unclear whether or not Yahoo! and Microsoft will be able to greatly increase their current combined market share. There still needs to be some sort of driving force to steer people away from using Google. In my opinion, I’m not sure it can be done. I used Google to find more information about their search deal, which speaks volumes about the fact that people’s habits are hard to break. Will my preferred search engine change? Not very likely.

Stay tuned for more updates as the details unfold…

OK, so it’s technically the World Wide Web, but with so much emphasis on keywords as part of a website’s SEO strategy, I tend to think of the web as a world of words. And it can be overwhelming.You know that keywords are the foundation of performing well in the search engines and driving the right kind of traffic to your site, but where do you start?

Unfortunately, we cannot just hit the “Easy” button and have a magical list of the perfect keywords appear; it takes a good deal of hard work. So turn off that old-school rerun of 90210 (is it just me that gets sucked into them?) and get crackin’. Let’s get into the right frame of mind:

“If you’re not dreaming of keywords at night, you’re not optimizing enough.”

I have to agree with Brad Hill, the author of Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, on this one. This may seem extreme but the truth of the matter is that there is a lot of thought that needs to go into the keyword research of your website.

The Who

Just like any marketing effort your company puts forth, you need to know who your target market is.

Geographic: what area do you service?
Demographic: who is buying your product?

You should already have a clear idea of what areas you want to target, whether your customers are male or female, young or old, business or consumer, etc. There’s no mystery here. Know who needs your product or service and where these people are. (This should be the easy part, by the way!)

Make a List, Check it Twice

Your next step toward keyword success is making a list of all the terms your customers will use to find you. Get yourself in their shoes and think about what they will type into their search engine box when they are looking for what you’ve got. I should also mention here that this should be a collaborative process, as you may not be thinking of all the possibilities.

You may be thinking of terms that your target would never even think about using as a search query (therefore being useless to optimize your website for). It’s quite possible that you, personally, are not even part of the target market of your company. Quiz the people that are: other people you know, your colleagues, even your current happy customers. Incorporate everyone’s ideas as part of your list.

Narrow it Down

Many of the terms on your list will most likely need to be further qualified. If you’re a gourmet candy company, and one of your specialties is peanut brittle, optimizing your site (or pages within your site) just for “peanut brittle” is something I would advise against. Why? It’s just too generic.

When someone searches for “peanut brittle”, the chances may be pretty slim that they are actually in the market to buy it. They could be looking for recipes on how to make it, they may want to know the history of peanut brittle, or any other 100 reasons for searching on it. So if you try to optimize for just that broad term, you’ll end up with a very low conversion rate. You want people to buy it from you, right?

Try “peanut brittle Berkeley california” or “order peanut brittle online”. Get specific with it. This expansion of the core keywords into phrases of three or more words is also called long tail keywords.

Do the Dirty Work, But You Can Also Get a Little Help from Your Friends

This step is labor-intensive, but it’s also kinda fun. Type each keyword/phrase into each of the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) and make a note of how many results are returned for your search. Look at the top 30 website results. Have they optimized for that keyword? Can you do better?

I realize that this is a lot of work, but it’s great if you’re a little green in the keyword research department because it will help you really understand the results and what you’re working with. But there are also keyword research tools that you can use to help guide you. These tools are your friends, as they will help you further the brainstorming process by giving you additional words based on what other people have searched for and they will also tell you how many searches have been performed using your keywords.

My personal favorite is the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, but you can also give Keyword Discovery or WordTracker a whirl and use whichever you prefer. Google’s Wonder Wheel is also a cool way to visually see related keywords of search queries in Google.

Narrow it Down (Again!)

Remember when I mentioned that it’s not a good idea to optimize for a generic term like “peanut brittle”? Well, that goes the same for the other end of the spectrum.

Perhaps the candy company sells some whacky types of peanut brittle, like “Grandma’s Purple Moose-Shaped Five Nut Peanut Brittle”. Show of hands, how many people think it’s a good idea to optimize a web page for that phrase? (I hope none of you raised your hand)

It’s WAY too specific. Unless you’ve had a long-term worldwide advertising campaign of McDonald’s magnitude promoting this “special” peanut brittle, hardly anyone would type this phrase into a search engine. You might want to try something like “specialty peanut brittle Berkeley california” instead.

I recommend eliminating any words from your list that generate less than 20 searches per day and taking a good look at the more popular keywords that specifically relate to your business. Hopefully you’re catching on that keyword research is a bit of an art. You’ve got to find that delicate balance between “too generic” and “too specific”.

Put it to the Test

Like I said, keyword research takes time and effort. Once you’ve optimized your site with your final list of keywords, both in your website copy and META data, you’ll need to measure the analytics of who is visiting your site, which pages are most and least popular, and the keywords that are driving people there (along with a myriad of other stats).

You’ll also want to check the position of your keywords in the Big 3 search engines and see how they’re ranking. Some terms may be doing very well, and others may be showing a less than stellar performance. It’s an ongoing process of tweaks and changes in order to try to achieve the best possible results.

Your keywords need constant love and attention. Are some of them not returning the favor? Ditch ‘em and do some more discovery of terms that might work better. I cannot emphasize enough that keyword research is not just a one-time task. In fact, you’ll probably end up seeing them in your dreams tonight!

Still confused and wishing for that “Easy” button? Sign up for one of our upcoming Webinars to learn more.

The measuring geek is at it again. Social media this and social media that… everyone is talking about it and wants to join and get as many fans or followers as they can. I am proposing instead of measuring how many people – we focus on which people and what they do with your content. Are you participating in social media to be popular or do you find social media as a useful, powerful tool that can help your personal and professional brand grow?

In my webinar this week we talked about Measuring Your Social Media Efforts. Many people don’t like to measure their time and results, because then it isn’t fun anymore. There are lots of ways you can measure your energy spent and return.

I’m soooo popular

If you think just by measuring your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, blog subscribers, LinkedIn network, MySpace friends etc.  you have a true testament of your success in social media I would have to politely disagree. Being popular is great but are all of these people engaged in your content?

I had the nightmare pleasure of attending my high school reunion and have you checked in on how all the popular kids in high school are doing these day? Now the geeks – they are the ones running the world. Popularity wears off. Someone will always have a shinier, prettier new object to distract them unless they are invested in you and your products and services. If that investment and interest is there, they will stick with you.

A better way

• Try to measure your engagement levels. Those things that make people stop their busy day and comment, re-post, link to your content.
• Weigh more heavily your Google Analytics results. Things like your content pages viewed most, traffic sources, unique visitors etc.
• Create landing pages and target them to specific social networks audiences
• Count conversions on those landing pages – whitepaper downloads, enewsletter signups, free downloads, forms filled out, purchases etc.

Those are just a few suggestions. Being popular is fun but with social media you are building relationships not just numbers. It’s not the number of eyeballs you get it is whose eyeballs that really matter.