Training Marketer

Natural search is the best tactic for generating online leads and outperforms almost all other types of online marketing, according to a recent study out of the U.K. reported by eConsultancy. Meta-tag descriptions are a small piece of the SEO puzzle that can be easily overlooked, but can help search rankings even for non-text files.

“Meta-tag keywords and descriptions become more important when the search engines are not able to determine (or have a difficult time determining) the “aboutness” of a file, such as a video file. In this situation, a keyword-focused meta-tag description can make or break search engine visibility.”

While meta-tag descriptions have been devalued in the past, some major search engines still use metadata when displaying a page’s listing.

Meta tag descriptions should have three goals:

1. To encourage searchers to click through to your page
2. Reinforce the existing content on the page
3. Help achieve top search engine positioning in results that use meta tags to determine relevance

Meta-tag content alone will not make or break your search engine results, but is still an important factor to remember. Organic, natural search traffic requires a broad knowledge of SEO best practices including (but not limited to) how your site is set up, internal linking structure, page construction and quality content.

So, you have poured copious amounts of blood, sweat, and tears into promoting your business online. Ok, maybe not any blood, but certainly countless hours of hard work, effort, and your fair share of perspiration have gone into getting the word about your products or services out across the internet and other venues. Don’t you want to see how these efforts are working? Fortunately, there is a comprehensive solution available from one of the giants of the internet industry to help you see how your marketing efforts are paying off. Oh, and did we mention it is absolutely free?

Google Analytics provides you with a way to see how your website is performing. What are your most popular pages? How many visitors does your site get a day? Which sites are generating the most traffic for your website? These questions (and more) are all answered by Google Analytics. You can even check to see how many people visited your site from Timbuktu!

With all of this in depth statistical information available at the click of a mouse button, you might worry about becoming overwhelmed. However, Google has designed a sleek, user-friendly interface that lets you find the information that you need to maximize your marketing efforts with relative ease. For a step-by-step guide on how to get going with Google Analytics, check out this blog:

How to Use Google Analytics (For Beginners)

FYI, for all you training providers out there, Google Analytics is a great way to see how much traffic TrainingTime.com is bringing to your site. Oh, and one more time, just in case you missed it… ITS FREE! Enjoy.

The ability to tell a good joke is a skill that few posses and many aspire to have. Some people believe they can tell a funny joke, when in fact, they fail miserably every time they try.

Developing and delivering great marketing works in the same way you would deliver a joke. Unlike a joke, your branding and marketing messages may not be funny, but they must be effective.

Thanks to the authors of the Ubereye Marketing Blog, who were creative enough to make the connection and generous enough to share their tips with the rest of us. Breaking down the steps to telling a good joke can help us deliver an effective marketing message.

Before you start talking, know the joke from memory. Consumers know when a company is not fully connected to the message they’re sending. Know your brand and marketing message before trying to sell it.

Know your audience. Some jokes may be inappropriate in certain settings. Not every consumer out there will like your brand or buy your widget. It’s your job to find the target audience most inclined to listen to your message.

Don’t tell your audience how funny your joke is before telling it, because they’ll start off skeptical. It’s like saying you have the best, most innovative and effective product on the market. Any savvy consumer will have their doubts about your egotistical claims. If what your selling is the best, people should know already by word of mouth.

Jokes should follow a direct, simple and sequential story line. Keep your brand message simple enough for someone to understand in the first few seconds they land on your site. Your marketing message must also tie into the overall message of your brand.

Commit to your joke and follow through to the end. More than knowing it by memory, your company must commit to your brand and marketing message completely.

How effective your joke or marketing message is (or isn’t), will be left up to your audience to decide. Everyone has the ability to tell a good joke or deliver a powerful marketing message if you just remember a few simple tips, test your message and keep trying.

Twitpitch - your company’s story in 140 characters (roughly 20 words) or less.

The term was created earlier this year, when social media pioneer Stowe Boyd, decided to only accept his Web 2.0 Expo appointments via Twitter. Companies were forced to fit their company’s story into a short “Twitpitch.”

In order to make things simple for me, I am hereby posting a schedule of the times that I will make available for meetings with companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, and I am not going to accept email-based proposals to meet, only Twitpitches.

Note also, in a twitterized style of business, I am only allotting 30 or 40 minutes for meetings. Let’s get down to it people. Cut to the chase. If I fall in love with it, I will be the first to ask for a follow up.

Small companies everywhere can learn a lesson from this interesting social media experiment - get to the point. In this age of information overload, less is more. People don’t have the time to sit and wait for your main point to come around, they want you to tell them now, and it better be quick, or they’re outta here.

Last week, MarketingSherpa published a great “how-to” for all of those companies out there who are lacking in time or money and want to improve search results. They talked with an expert who revealed seven free SEO tools and one paid option to help save you time and money.

Will Reynolds, SEER Interactive Founder, gave the Sherpas a guide on how to sift through the numerous search tools out there to “distinguish the helpful and free ones from the useless and costly ones.” He shares the eight tools he uses on a daily basis, and only one costs money to use.

He warns to not rely solely on any one method and advises to use the tools like a team. Reynolds also tells people to know your business well enough to know when data from the search tools is flawed. He personally ignores up to 20% of the data returned by the free SEO tools.

Here are the seven free tools Reynolds depends on:
(Read the full MarketingSherpa How-To for complete information)

Google Advanced Search - Allows you to limit a search to: anywhere in the page, title of the page, text of the page, URL of the page, and links to the page. Reynolds thinks the most important one is “links to the page.” He uses the tool to target link campaigns and keep track of the competition.

Google Trends - Gives you a picture of keywords’ historic search volume on Google dating back years and illustrated with graphs. The tool is best used to decide on a keyword (ex. singular or plural?).

Microsoft adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 - This tool is only free to adCenter account holders with Excel 2007 and is still a beta version. It can be used to measure MSN traffic directly from an Excel spreadsheet.

Rank Checker - A Firefox plug-in that takes keywords and reports your rankings on top search engines, including Google in other countries. The tool automates the process of manually going into each search engine and checking your rankings.

SeoQuake - Another Firefox plug-in best used for researching your competition. It can also help you determine why the competition is outranking you and give you reason to adjust your SEO strategy.

Today’s Hot Trends - A part of Google Trends that shows the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on Google. The tool can help you seize an opportunity or create a blogging strategy.

Yahoo! Search Assist - As you type in a term in the Yahoo! search box, Search Assist gives suggestion for related keywords, loosely based on word content and search volume.

And, one paid tool:

VoiceStar - For a cost of about $500 a month it can help you connect telephone conversations with online searches. The tool delivers traceable phone numbers in search ads. Reynolds uses this tool primarily for his business to business efforts, especially when large purchases are involved. Many people would rather pick up the phone and talk to someone when placing a $10,000 order.

Space colonies? Rocket-powered shoes? Robots doing the laundry?

Predicting the future is tough. Most of the time our ideas don’t pan out exactly how we expected, but luckily we have experts out there who can help us see into the future.

If you’ve ever wondered what the future of social media looks like, experts out there have already started their predictions. Those at Mashable, the social networking news blog, had a recent guest post sharing expert predictions into our social media future.

Jackie Peters, CVO and founding partner of Heavybag Media, recently attended the Executing Social Media conference where Peter Shankman, social media guru, gave a very energetic keynote on the future of social networking and how the social web is changing the way we do business and make money.

Some of Shankman’s social media predictions:

Information overload. Think you’re overloaded now? Just wait, soon there will be too many channels, tools and platforms for anyone to keep track of. The solution will be in the form of one tool that streamlines all of the information in order to successfully manage the information, automating the process for you. FriendFeed and Socialthing are two emerging tools on the market now.

Automated life tracking, life sharing and network building. Peters tells us to imagine a world where a business traveler can walk into an airport, their Bluetooth device signals their arrival and a ticket is printed and ready at the check-in desk.

The fall of reviewers and critics. With personal information so easy to access, people will be using recommendations and ideas from your trusted network rather than traditional reviewers or critics.

Citizen journalists rise. “One customer can do better than a million dollar spend on the Super Bowl.” Customer reviews hold more merit than anything a professional critic could write. We want to know what our friends think about a product or service before we give it a shot.

In the end, “the evolution of the web is more about how it is becoming integrated into our lives and less about the technology.”

Peters’ important side note - according to the movie Back to the Future 2, in 2010 it was predicted we would all have a fax machine in every room. Basically, don’t hold the predictions against us in the next few years if it turns out we weren’t so right.

MarketingSherpa released their weekly chart, this week focusing on ecommerce marketer survey responses. The Sherpa’s learned a lesson they feel all marketers should be aware of – “Analytics tools can help you really put your customers first, but most don’t get their full value.”

A breakdown of the chart:

Preference centers: a place where customers can choose the content and frequency of emails. This tool will help segment customers and target your message. Preference centers also show respect for customers by not clogging their inboxes with unwanted or too frequent emails.

Personas: customer profiles that represent each major buyer group. Develop a customer profile for your typical customer, and look at your website from their angle. Persona-based design uses the customer buying experience as a base to develop the entire website around.

Usability tests: how easy (or difficult) is your website to use. Organizations benefit from usability tests by putting stakeholders in the position of the customer. Stakeholders experience the confusion and frustration that may go along with the customer buying process.

Tying web analytics with search: organizations use this, but marketers know they can do better. High turnover rates of valuable analytics staff one of Sherpa’s main reason why organizations typically fail in this area.

Segmenting website content: creating pages and content, then using navigation to guide customers to them. The best segmenting uses cookie data to deliver relevant content matched to the user.

It’s an interesting chart that shows us all what we could be doing better, something we already know. Thanks to the Sherpa’s for reminding us that an emarketer’s work is never done.

Marketers learned how to sell to Generation Y and the Millenials from the time they picked up their first Nintendo controller. The same generation has now moved behind desks in the corporate world and has given them a paycheck, giving them more buying power than ever.

The marketing once used to sell to your grandfather will not work with these youngsters. There are large differences between Gen Y and past generations in how they were brought up and what they expect out of life.

How they’re different from older generations:

They are digital natives. They have grown up with computers, cell phones, the Internet, Nintendo and mp3 players attached to their hands at all times. And, they can usually use all of them at the same time.

They watch less TV. Rather than watching TV, you would most likely find Gen Y in front of their computer, watching videos online or playing a video game.

They think advertising is full of lies. They would rather know what their friends think. This generation has grown up with marketing being thrown in their face wherever they go, almost becoming immune to it. They also don’t have brand loyalty and will move on to whatever the next big thing is.

They’re environmentally friendly. They care about what’s happening around the world and want to do their part to help. News is read not on paper, but on a computer screen complete with interactive polls and video.

How marketing will change:

Because of how skeptic Gen Y is about marketing and advertising, marketers must work to build a level of trust between the two. Those marketers who succeed will have an open dialogue with customers, admit when they have done wrong and become more transparent.

Web sites targeting Gen Y will adopt more Web 2.0 practices. Social networking and blogging will be the main way Gen Y learns about products and the main way companies will reach customers.

You may think you’re ahead of the game now by using Twitter to update customers, but that could change tomorrow. Gen Y will choose what will be the next big thing to hit the Web marketing world.

Web sites will also have to cater to short attention spans. Long, boring and big paragraphs of text will not be read. They shift topics quickly and multi-task like pros.

This generation is anxiously biting their nails, waiting for the next version of the iPhone to hit store shelves. Web sites must adapt to a culture that is increasingly comfortable with mobile Web.

The future of the Web is whatever Gen Y wants it to be. While they continue to land jobs in the real world, business to business marketing will be changing along with it. Before long, these young employees will be running the show and Web marketing must follow suit.

Stop worrying about Google search rankings and forget the even exist. Excuse me, what?

It’s actually the exact advice from a Copyblogger post I came across today. The headline “Here’s How to Stop Worrying About Google Once and for All” was very effective in catching my attention, and the following article had some great advice.

Brian Clark shares how his initial strategy with Copyblogger was to ignore search engines. Why? Because he believes you shouldn’t depend on them for traffic.

Clark’s advice is to pretend like search engines are not a traffic option and focus your efforts on repeat traffic and referral sources.

His three “S” strategy includes:

Subscribers - “Getting someone to voluntarily pay attention to you over time is the greatest gift you can get as an online publisher.”

Social Media - Get other people talking about you. Chatter on other Web 2.0 sites creates quality links and encourages people to visit your site.

Selling - Build trust in your audience through social media referrals and loyal subscribers. Once you have the trust, then you can start selling.

Like we’ve said before, online reputation management is a must. Just one bad review can leave scarring wounds on your reputation, making it important to keep your online reputation clean.

With the rise of internet marketers, an industry of online reputation management service providers have followed. These services can help you bring attention to positive reviews and search results, and will work to bury the negative far down in search results.

When your online reputation has grown to be more than you can handle, these services may come in handy, but are they completely necessary?

Paying for a service that may not use ethical web practices can work against you and could actually hurt your reputation even more.

“Google, for its part, says there is nothing inherently wrong with reputation services, but ‘if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it,’” according to a recent BusinessWeek article.

Small business owners should approach online reputation management with caution. Small “tinkering” with search results is ok, but not enough to salvage an entire reputation.

“You have to take partial ownership in fixing your online reputation. It’s not something that you can simply just provide a credit card number to a company and they can take care of it. While outside firms can help businesses influence results on Google, only the company itself can repair real damage to its reputation.”

Ask yourself - are you really muffling angry voices instead of fixing the real problem? Take a look at all of the negative reviews about your company or website. Are they legitimate complaints? Is there something you can do to fix the issue for future clients? Instead of trying to find the mute button, take a step back to look at the real problem and try to find a way to fix it.