Fred

photo credit: Menlo School

Ahhh, back to school. Time for the kids to get packing with new backpacks, fresh notebooks, the latest fashions and, oh yes, sharp pencils (okay, maybe that’s a little old school, but bear with the metaphor for a moment).

We all spent an inordinate amount of time each year preparing for the school year, but what do we really get out of all that effort?

Do sharp pencils and clean notebooks really make a difference? Couldn’t we do fine with the last 100 pages of last year’s notebooks and the chewed-up leftovers from last spring?

But of course, as every student — and parent — knows, it’s not the sharpness of the pencil, per sey, that makes the good student. We could, if we really wanted to, get away with dull pencils. But it’s not about the pencils, it’s about the attitude.

I am here, I am ready to learn, I am serious.

That’s what sharpness says.

So, how about your website?

Does it say, “My business is sharp and can serve your needs splendidly?”

Or does it say, “Hey… I put this up and I know it’s not good, and I kept meaning to update it, but never really got around to it?”

And, based on what your website says, what impression do you think your customers will have?

You put the time into showing up sharp to your office every day, and your website should be no exception. Even if no one ever shakes your website’s hand, you can be assured that they can and do make a lasting impression of your capability based on what they see.

So, wanna get sharp? You can learn the basics at our webinar this afternoon, “Creating a Website That Works.”

photo credit: Napalm filled tires

High gas prices got you down?

They shouldn’t. At least, not if you’ve got a website for your business and the gumption to take some lemons and make lemonade out of them.

Start with your business model. How is the web currently helping you to travel less, or causing your customers to travel less? If you’re an online retailer, the benefits are obvious. Less obvious is how this is can help your sales people in the B2B market. Are you pushing whitepapers, online demos, and webcasts to your prospects, rather than sending out print materials, or visiting them for on-site demonstrations?

The web allows you to massively pre-qualify prospects before they ever ring you up. Through search engines, they qualify themselves by looking for a particular keyword. They find your site, read your relevant offerings, and then, if they’re the right fit (and you’ve got the right user conversion methodology set up!) they give you a buzz.

If you’re website isn’t working for you, well, that’s a different discussion (not to mention something we’ll be covering in on webinar topic, “Turning Traffic Into Dollars: User Conversion Explained” later today).

Pre-qualification obviously saves you time, too, but in terms of your bottom line, think about how often you’re not sending salespeople out in the field to talk to people who are just kicking tires!

About how about those webcasts? By creating webinars that you market online, and fulfill online, you are able to reach a theoretically infinite number of prospects anywhere in the world, all without leaving your office.

Sure, airfare may be up, and your employees can barely afford to commute, but there’s a silver lining in all this, and that is that your customers are going to be more likely to search the web than ever before, and if you’ve positioned yourself properly, you’re all set up to enjoy the rewards.

Note: This topic was sparked by an interesting article in the New York Times about businesses moving to more virtual meetings to offset rising travel costs.

photo credit: mattyturner

As I’ve made no effort to hide, I’m a fan of Seth Godin and in particular his philosophy on marketing as storytelling. This morning he wrote a nice post on “Creating stories that resonate” that leads to the inevitable question: does your website resonate?

This question is kind of an extension of an earlier question we asked — Is your website brochureware?, where we asked if your site is something that’s up there because you felt obligated to put it up, or if it’s a strategic, core piece of your company’s identity and marketing.

Having a website that resonates is not one thing. It’s not great design, it’s not great SEO, it’s not a great testimonial or whitepaper. In fact, many websites resonate while missing some of these components, and many fail to resonate with them.

What makes a resonating site different from their bland competitors is that they demonstrate an understanding of their intended audience and meet their needs.

What made MySpace or YouTube succeed where dozens of clones failed?

What makes craigslist such minimalist perfection and Copyblogger a site you can’t help subscribing to?

It’s not one element on the site. It’s the owners’ understanding of what their audience wants and a million minor things tweaked to meet those needs.

Once you’ve aligned your web site’s strategy to meet the needs of your customers, those million little things will start to work for you, too. The choices of keyword targeting become clear. The kinds of offers that work are evident. The design becomes a byproduct of function, not a me-centric portfolio piece. And of course, you start generating the stats that help you do better, and better, and better.

Just like there is no “quick fix” to turning around a site that’s not doing well in organic search, you won’t create a site that resonates from a bland one in a day. But you can start thinking about and connecting with, the hopes, fears, and desires of your customers and use that as your most important strategic advantage.

It never fails to surprise me how often I’ll click on a pay per click ad only to end up on a page that’s resemblance to my search query is worse than a Canal St knock-off. I experience this both as a consumer and a professional as I compulsively click on ads in an effort to understand the state of pay per click marketing and the often neglected connection to the customer.

Let’s take the search term “solar panels,” a nice, simple, fairly straightforward term, right? After all, what else could someone who types in solar panels be looking for other than, well, information on solar panels?

Well, the answer to that question varies –quite a lot — depending on whether you look at the organic search results or the paid listings.

In the organic column you see a mix of commercial sites with varying degrees of information, the token Wikipedia entry and a nice integration of Google Universal listings including some eCommerce retailers, a YouTube video, and blog entries. While getting dumped onto some of these eCommerce sites may be a little thin on the practical details you might be looking for, what would you expect when typing in such a generic search? (Try something like “learn about solar panels” if what you really want is information…)

What’s really fascinating, though, is how poorly the pay per click ads match the actual query. The answer to the question on most of the pay per click advertisers, instead, seems to be… what do we want people who like solar panels to think about?

This me-centric thinking leads to a variety of oddball ads — one promoting an energy audit (no info on solar there), another promoting the Democratic National Convention (powered by a lot of things, the sun not being one of them), one info-packed if ugly site for a solar panel retailer, and a half-dozen knock off sites by the same advertiser promoting a single product (which, by the way, isn’t a solar panel).

And we wonder why users are sometimes hesitant to click on paid ads?

On the flip side, paid search ads that are properly targeted are incredibly effective. After all, isn’t it pretty cool that I can throw “war and peace book” into Google and then see an ad to Amazon.com that shows me… the actual book? And hey, there’s the “Buy it Now” button…

Relevancy and specificity are critical to an effective pay per click campaign, as we’ll be discussing in our webinar this Tuesday afternoon — Pay Per What? (2:00PM EDT).