Friday, February 19, 2010

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results," or, Winston Churchill & Search Engine Marketing IV: Conversion Analysis


If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
Today, #4:

We know a guy who works in the restaurant business whose entire strategy comes down to one phrase: "Inspect, don't expect." There's an SEM equivalent: Check Your Results.

Traffic comes from many sources. Don't you want to know from where, and which of your efforts are paying off (the question was rhetorical; of course you do!)? Think for a moment about the many ways site promotion happens. Here's a quick list:

  • Websites
  • SEO
  • Off-page factors (linking strategies)
  • More comprehensive SEM activities (Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Newsletters and direct email
  • Other offline marketing
We have techniques to measure ALL of these—yes, there are even tricks to measure your web traffic from offline marketing!



Beyond measuring where your website traffic originates, you'll want to keep track of a few important things:



Conversion: What's conversion? Conversion is when a visitor is CONVERTED into something more. It could be a direct sale, a viable lead, a client, an appointment, or even something as simple as an entry on your mailing list.


Aggregation: A fancy word that in SEM terms means traffic origination measurement combined with and compared against conversions to figure out what return you get from each source of traffic.


Fine Tuning: The complexity of what we do at CDLLC starts to creep in here, but here's one simple concept —SEM takes time, both because it's a cumulative process and because you need to resist the temptation to cut corners by altering many variables simultaneously. Change one variable at a time and wait for results. Changing too many things at once as you pursue SEM Nirvana removes your ability to identify the changes that lead to positive results.

And you thought this was easy. It is: Just contact us, and we'll do the rest . . .

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give," or, Winston Chrchill & Search Engine Marketing III


Enjoyed our riffing on Confucius? You'll love this: Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
Today, #3:

At CDLLC we've been building web sites for a long time- since the WWW was just a little baby. And we're proud of our work. Some of our clients have sites designed with very simple purposes in mind, while others are quite complex, and broad in their scope. But one thing they all have in common is that they look good . . . to the person or company they represent.

Hopefully, of course, they also look go to the people who stumble upon them.  And people that we drive there with SEM efforts. But since others' reactions are tricky to gauge, the way a web site looks really does have to reflect the personality of the party displaying their corporate personality before anything else.

The problem with this is the potential for your web site to become a vanity project.

How do you create a web site without it becoming just an advertisement?  How do you create a website that attracts people rather than talking at them?

The answer is simple.  Be honest.  Share information.  Just like life, you gotta give to get.

So whether it's a newsletter, website, or blog, share, share, SHARE knowledge and information.  Similar to this new world community and global economy we are living in, the days of business information protectionism are limited.

Offer something to your prospective target.  In doing so, you get to prove your expertise while increasing the likelihood of winning business... and loyalty.


To echo what we said in our previous post. Publish, publish, publish. Tell people what you know about the things they're interested in, and keep your target audience in mind, rather than writing to existing customers and vendors already in your industry.

People will notice.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Monday, February 15, 2010

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential," — Winston Churchill's SEM Part II


If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
Today, #2:

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say:

You say important things repeatedly.

Do you remember how many time you were told "look both ways before you cross the street!" as a young child? The message sunk in. We all know way more about Coca-Cola and McDonald's than matters, but we sure do remember who they are. And like these examples of repetitive message delivery, your job in SEM is to drive points home over and over again.

Whatever you feel about that message, the point is clear, isn't it? Tell a story. Tell it again. Then look for new ways to tell the story and new places to tell it in. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Which, naturally, brings us to budget.

We've seen businesses "do search engine marketing" once, and then stop. And it works! But just like with Yellow Pages advertising, the SEM work you do has a limited shelf life. Buy a Yellow Pages advertisement just once and it will become less useful when next year's version of the book comes out and progressively less useful over time as people replace the book that has your listing in it with a newer copy that has no such listing. And when was the last time you looked in a Yellow Pages, anyway?

The Internet has all but replaced that way of looking for people to do work for you, and a new version of the Internet "comes out" every single day. Churchill was right about that continuous effort thing, don't you think?

Lacking continuous effort, you'll ride an SEM campaign up the search engine rankings, sink soon thereafter, and then then sink even further until you start your SEM efforts again. And each time you allow a sink cycle you make it a little harder to climb back up.

Budget for Adwords, Pay Per Click, Sponsored Links, Off-Page Optimization, Blogging, and On-Page Optimization, implement them all, and stay on top of them.

Or . . . you guessed it . . . let us take care of the whole thing for you.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services