Marketing is the same everywhere. Um, well, ok, I take that back. Marketing is different everywhere. Well, no, that’s not right either. Marketing means different things to different people–some companies are Direct Mail machines, others are strictly digital marketing companies, creating banner ads and performing Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for their clients. There’s about as many strategies out there as there are marketers, and even more marketing tactics employed by those marketers following the strategy they have decided on as a company. But no matter how many different ways marketers will try to skin a cat, there are definitely a few things that need to remain relatively consistent, no matter what product or service the marketer is trying to market.

One of the most important–if not the most important–thing a marketer must do is have a target market. A target market, loosely defined, is the set of folks plucked or ‘targeted’ out of the full set of people that could or would likely purchase a product or service. Dividing the larger group into these ’segments’ is called market segmentation, and it is a process that is based on demographics (age, gender, socio-economic groupings, geography, etc.).

Breaking down the larger population down into workable segments helps target marketing activities so that you get the best bang for your marketing buck. If you know who you’re going after, you know what their needs and wants are, and you’ll know how to cater your marketing messages towards meeting those needs.

 Here are some Target Marketing Resources:

1. AllBusiness
2. Target Market News (The Black Consumer Market Authority)
3. Net MBA
4. eSmall Office
5. Michel Fortin’s Blog

If you’re a marketer, you understand the importance of keeping abreast of marketing technologies that help the bottom line. While you can’t (because I know I certainly can’t) stay on top of every single little innovation in marketing technology that pops up out of the woodwork daily AND get your regular job done, you can definitely glance at a few blogs and news sites to at least get a glance at what’s sprouting in marketing technology, even if you don’t get a full, comprehensive examination of it under your belt.

Below are a few blogs that deal with marketing technology–some more insightful than others, some more technical than a lot of marketing folks are comfortable with. It’s your call–cut and paste the ones you like into your favorites.
http://www.douglaskarr.com/
http://www.technologymarketing.com/bw/index.jsp
http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/niallcook/
http://www.itsma.com/
http://www.threadwatch.org/
http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

While there are plenty more blogs and websites out there, the above should provide just a taste of some good marketing and technology sites for you to home your skills on the subject. Happy Marketing (using technology)!

http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/
http://www.chrisg.com/branding-blog-post-round-up/
http://ries.typepad.com/
http://www.smallbusinessbranding.com/
http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/
http://www.credibilitybranding.typepad.com/
http://www.brandingbrand.com/blog/
http://brandexperienced.blogspot.com/

The above are just a few of the blogs I enjoy reading through from time to time. If you have any that you think are must-reads, and deal primarily with Branding, please let me know.

I think the resounding answer, for the most part, is yes. Images on blogs not only help in terms of aesthetics for the user/reader of your blog, but they can also help optimize the blog through the labels/titles of the images. While I haven’t put any images on Level2wo’s blog, I really should. It helps, but right now I just simply don’t have the time.

See, writing for blogs takes a great deal of time, in particular coming up with new, relevant content that will be interesting to your readers. Finding pictures and images to post on your blog isn’t all that difficult, but if you want consistency, it does take time if you aren’t familiar with the different ways you can format the pictures/images to the correct size. If, for instance, you’re using Wordpress or Blogger, or a similar blogging tool, it’s relatively simple to get the pictures and images to the right size–but if you’re like me, who is more of a writer than someone like, say, a designer who is used to cropping, and shrinking, and sizing, and other ‘ing’s’, then you know how difficult and time consuming making a pretty blog can be. I leave that to others, unless i’m feeling lazy.

But there are plenty of sites to get inexpensive or even free stock photo to post on your blog. Images and pictures help get the message across, especially when you consider that there are plenty of people out there who are more visual than textual. My advice is try it. If you have a blog already and don’t post images, give it a go. Label the images appropriately, as they can help build traffic to your site. Not overnight, but keep at it for the long haul. Images, my friends, are added help. And we all know the value in that.

Anyone who has ever written a blog knows understand that traffic is what it’s all about–or, at least, the eyeballs behind that traffic. But it isn’t easy building the readership that provides that traffic. Getting people to post a comment is even more difficult, but there are a few standard things you should do (or at least research), if you want to start building up that blog community of yours. Below you’ll find a few ideas to get you started.

1. Blog daily. Even if it’s a few short paragraphs (or one quick paragraph). You want your site to be active every day, as your site will be pinged by the powers that be out there, meaning feeds such as MyYahoo.com and other sites so your blog gets spidered by the search engines.

2. Use sites such as Ping-O-Matic.com to ping blog directories–and do so every time you publish an entry.

3. Invite everyone you know to subscribe to your blog. The more the merrier when it comes to your blog being read, obviously.

4. Link your websites (if you have any) to your blog.

5. Submit your blog to all of the relevant blog directories. See a blog you like that similar to yours in a directory? That’s where you should submit your blog.

6. Submit your blog to the search engines.

7. When you’re visiting other blogs, comment on another person’s blog entry. Make the entry a thoughtful one, because you don’t want to be seen as a rabid url poster. It’s the same as spamming someone if you aren’t really contributing.

8. Publish a newsletter as part of your marketing–and include the blog url within the content, or as a signature.

9. Make sure you have an RSS feed url that visitors can subscribe to.

10. Write articles on your particular subject matter, and post them around the web, making sure you include the URL to your blog.

11. Make lists (like this one).

12. Try to write articles that are relevant today, but that will also be relevant a couple of years from now. I know, I know, technology changes all the time, but there are truths that last.

13. Make your posts stick out somehow–it’s a blog, and you want to show your personality–just don’t get too crazy.

14. Try to use images wherever you can–people like images around the content that interests them, and it’s a great way to liven up the blog for your readers.

15. Include polls every so often, to get your readers involved.

Blogs can be a great way to generate traffic, as well as create yourself and/or your company as a thought leader in your industry. If you become a good source of information for readers out in cyberspace, you’ll continue to grow a following and, in the end, drive business–whatever business that may be, to your site and, eventually, your bottom line.

There are plenty of things to do to optimize your website, and if you’re serious about driving traffic to your site, I’m sure you’ve been hacking away at it daily. A few things you can do to get traffic to your website kickstarted include:

1. Do A/B testing. A/B testing is a great way to improve what works over what doesn’t work. Making sure you continually try new things (read, improving the things you do well already, and nixing the things that aren’t working), will help drive traffic to your site. Maybe not overnight, but you’ll get there if you have some consistency to what you’re doing.

2. Do your homework. Before you begin testing of any kind, make sure you’re doing your homework in terms of what it is you will be A/B testing. Don’t start throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks; optimizing your site means reading up on a good many website tactics and techniques will shorten the path to success.

3. Use Google Website Optimizer or any other testing platform to test your landing pages. Here’s what Google Optimizer will do for you, in Google’s words: “Small changes to your website content can sometimes yield big results. Discover what your visitors really want to see with Website Optimizer, Google’s free site content testing tool. Start experimenting today to optimize your web pages and improve your site’s conversion rates.”

4. Keep your testing to one change at a time. Altering various items on each page will dilute the accuracy of what you’re measuring. If you change 5 things on a landing page, how are you supposed to know which change is the one brining success? Or failure?

5. Get traffic. This may mean buying it through Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, but it’s how to best get that sample population in so that your testing is based on a decent size sample.

While these are just a few ways to optimize your site, or get you started on the right path to optimizing your site and your landing pages, they should help. Giddyup.

 Level2wo can help you optimize your landing pages and website in general.

Marketing and technology go hand in hand for a number of reasons, and for marketers, technology has allowed for a great many expediencies, as well as scalability, reach, and a good deal improvement in terms of measuring ROI. Below are some general, not-so-random thoughts on using technology for your marketing activities, including tactics to use for your overall marketing strategy.

In certain places I will simply list a tactic and why you may benefit from it, but I won’t go into the ‘technical’ aspect as much as simply state the benefits. Feel free to pop an email if you want specific questions answered. So what are some ways to use technology to market your product or service (or even yourself)?

Website
Seems basic, but a lot of companies do not have websites because they either don’t understand the value, think they already have enough business delivered through their current channels, or because they ‘haven’t gotten around to it’. All three of these reasons may hold some truth, but these days technology and marketing go hand in hand. A website is crucial to at least having a presence online, where most research is done these days. You want to break down all of the hurdles that prevent your customers and prospects from finding you, and chances are that they will do a little research online about your company before initiating any contact.

Websites tend to be of two types–the business card online, and then the interactive type, which includes websites where consumers and business can make purchases, gather information, participate in web communities and social media sites, or do a host of things that add value to a user’s life in some form or fashion.

Websites are a great marketing tool because they allow prospects and customers to approach your business at their own speed, research and browse your offering(s), and take the steps necessary to initiate contact–all pull marketing activities that require little work on your end (at least after the site is already up and running).

Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns are a great way to market to a great many people quickly and at a very reasonable cost. The beauty of email marketing (besides reach and cost) is that measuring the ROI is much easier than it would be if you had sent out DM (direct mail) pieces and waited for the phone to ring as a result. Email marketing campaigns allow you to reach broader audiences sooner, and they allow you to make edits and changes in almost real time (try doing that after your DM piece has been printed).

Blogs
Blogs are a great way to communicate on a more frequent basis with your prospects and customers. Blogging allows you to provide resources and valuable information to your prospects and customers directly over the internet, and with the great many blogging tools currently in existence, it’s also a relatively painless process on your end. You just have to make the time to write, and have the ability to offer your audience something worth reading.

Online Advertising
Everyone has heard of google and Yahoo! (search engine marketing) and many of the other search marketing tools you can use to drum up business using keywords and search, but online advertising is much more than throwing some money on a google adwords campaign. Banner ads are a great way to build your brand as well as generate leads. Of course, you have to make sure your banner ad is a ‘good’ banner ad, and you have to make sure you’re advertising on the ‘right’ sites where your target market hangs out, but banner ads allow you the opportunity to compete with the big boys in your industry that have budgets much larger than yours.

Webinars
Webinars are another great way to draw attention as well as educate your audience while building yourself as a thought leader in your industry. These days it’s pretty simple to create a webinar, and vendors in the webinar business make it pretty easy to execute.

Hope the above has given you some things to think about. If you have any specific questions about how any of the above may be able to help kickstart your marketing program, give Level2wo a call, or shoot us an email. We’re glad to help.

To continue on yesterday’s entry, I’d like to run through some quick guidelines for writing copy that you want to be SEO-friendly. I’m not going to touch too much on the more technical aspects of SEO–such as tweaking the meta tags, title tags, description tags, or having Google Sitemaps or anything like that. What I am going to do is run through a list of things you should do as normal practice when writing copy for your website, blog, or someone else’s website or blog. They’re pretty simple, but require getting used to if you want to write effective SEO copy.

I’m going to separate topics in a loose fashion here, so bear with me if I start rambling a little–I’m trying to let the creative spirit come out so you understand how I go about writing copy that I want to rank in search engines. Remember, there are technical things that also go with the content, but I’m going to focus primarily on the actual written words as opposed to ‘what’ you do with those words by making them hyperlinks, etc.

Keywords and Keyword Strings

Let’s face it–unless you’ve been doing this for a number of years, it’s pretty hard to rank for single words or your more common search terms. An entire industry has blown up around SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and it’s no longer a secret. That means it’s harder for you to rank faster for certain keywords. Part of writing copy that will get crawled and ranked means incorporating the keywords you want to rank for (or show up in SERPs, or search engine results pages). But you want to make sure you’re going to be able to compete for those keywords, and eventually rank for them. How? Well, by doing your research. There are a few sites out there that you can use, some of which have free trial offers, but that aren’t all that expensive anyway.

Sites to do Keyword Research
1. wordtracker.com
2. keyworddiscovery.com
3. Google’s keyword tool
4. addme.com/keywordsuggest.htm
5. gorank.com/seotools/ontology/

You can use the above keyword resources to also search for keyword strings (meaning phrases that you would like to rank for), which will likely prove more fruitful in the short term than trying to rank for single words.

Readability

Now that you have your keywords and keyword strings, it’s time to write the actual copy around those keywords. One of the most important things that you want to remember is that the days of tricking the search engines is pretty much over, if it isn’t over already. If you’re trying to rank for the term “website design“, for instance, then you want to write clean copy that is easy to read and that provides a good deal of relevant, new and informative information for the reader, incorporating the term “website design” as appropriate. What you don’t want to do is repeat the term “website design” a thousand times, the idea being that it’s a numbers game to beat the competition. Search engines are smart–probably a lot smarter than the smartest one of us. They know when you’re trying to trick them, and while keyword density is important, the magic number of keywords within content is not known to you or I, so don’t drown your content with your keywords. Make the copy ‘readable.’

Consistency

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, and have written the copy so that normal people can read it without wondering why every other word is the same, make sure you’ve done so with consistency. You want to have no more than two or three keywords per webpage that you’re trying to rank for. If you have another keyword you want to rank for, go on to the next page that deals with that keyword or keyword phrase. Don’t try to jam everything onto the same page. If you simply have to include a keyword on a page that already has a few keywords, then just hyperlink it to the page where you go into more detail on that keyword or keyword phrase (which, by the way, obviously helps with the internal link structure of your SEO).

Headings

Use keywords and keyword phrases in headings
Search engines like Google and Yahoo and the rest are similar to human beings in that they look at headers to know what’s in the rest of the content. Including your keywords and keyword strings within the headings will help the search engines better understand what they will find within the copy, which will make their lives easier and your pages more relevant and better ranked.

I know, seems basic enough. But the reality is that making sure the copy is written for the search engines is crucial to actually showing up in the SERPs. Again, I have not touched in this article on the need to use other technical tactics to ensure your pages are ranked; I have only touched on the copy. There’s much more to maximizing your optimization efforts…so stop on by for future updates on search engine optimization.

SEO is everywhere, but as it’s still a growing industry (yes, it’s still growing–plenty of people outside of the tech industry have no idea what SEO or Search Engine Optimization is), I wanted to touch on SEO and the Search Engine Optimizers who are behind the search engine optimization work being done. Search engine optimizers perform a great many tasks for website owners, all geared around improving a website’s ranking in natural search results pages, or SERPs. I’m going to use Google as the example throughout this article, simply because it’s the largest and best known Search Engine. Some of the typical tactical elements employed by SEOs include:

• Researching keywords and suggesting keywords you could/should rank for in the SERPs
• Writing the search engine-friendly copy
• Improving your site architecture
• Getting you listed into the major (and perhaps niche) directories
• Adding tags to source code

When thinking about employing an SEO company to improve your website’s natural search engine rankings, there’s a few questions you should ask yourself before writing that check.

1. Do your homework. If you’re receiving an email from an SEO company offering their services, there’ s probably something odd about it–because SEOs, if they’re doing their work, should already be getting plenty of business through their own website. Why would they need to send you an email if everyone is already finding them?

2. Understand the fact that there is not guarantee for getting a #1 ranking on Google SERPs. There is no such thing as a ‘priority submit,’ and no way to get a high ranking except by doing the work. Anyone that guarantees a quick jump is probably doing Black Hat SEO, and you don’t want any part of that.

3. Know what you’re signing up for. Ask the SEO company you’re considering hiring a few questions, including what, exactly, they’re going to be doing. You don’t want to have Google remove your website from its index because of Black Hat techniques. SEO is a long-term thing, not a short-term shot to the top.

4. Don’t link to SEOs. And don’t link to anyone and everyone–because it’s not going to help with your SEO strategy, and could actually hurt your rankings. Linking is fine, but links should be relevant to your content, and ideally be of a higher rank than your site. Check out Alexa.

5. Get references. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO for references, or contact the companies that are listed on the SEO’s site. You want to make sure you’re going to be working with the right company, especially when you’re throwing down your hard-earned money AND risking the credibility of your site. A little work up front will save you a big headache later on.

Some SEO Warning Signs

If you’re already working with an SEO, you still may want to do your due diligence to make sure that you’re not working with a Black Hat SEO company or freelancer. Some things that may tip you off to the fact that you’re dealing with a less than kosher SEO:

• The SEO company is not listed in Google
• They use doorway pages, and have links to other clients
• They guarantee that your website will be ranked highly based on their work, or ranked for long, drawn out phrases
• They own shadow domains

Some great blogs to check out
Below are some great blogs on SEO that you may want to read through if you’re deciding you need some SEO work done. Always do your homework, and never be afraid to ask questions. Happy SEO’ing!

1. http://www.seomoz.org/blog
2. http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/
3. http://blog.seoptimise.com/
4. http://www.phoenixrealm.com/
5. http://www.seobook.com/

If you’re a startup or small business on a shoe-string budget, there’s some tactical things you can do to maximize your marketing efforts that won’t cost you all that much to do. Below you’ll find a list of ten things you can do without breaking the bank. Remember, it’s about sticking out in the crowd, and attracting attention. You want to get the conversation going, which will hopefully lead to your selling your product or service. That’s what’s important, because that’s the ultimate metric of success.

1. Donate to charity, and promote the fact that you’re doing so.

2. Give your prospects and customers/clients the opportunity to win something. The game is what will bring them in, but it gives you the opportunity to build the relationship.

3. In all the correspondence you have with prospects or customers, include something sweet or interesting beyond the marketing piece or invoice. Candy works–and it’s relatively inexpensive. If clients and prospects know your envelope has something fun in it, chances are they’ll remember you.

4. Blog. Blogging is a great–and cheap–way to get your message out there.

5. Be exceedingly nice to whoever you’re talking to where you’re looking for business. Sending thank you emails and notes make people feel good about you–and any advantage you have over your competition is invaluable.

6. Create a MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, or whatever account for your product or service. Sure, your product or service isn’t actually doing all of the writing or edits, but it definitely brings your product or service before the eyes of some consumers.

7. Leave your business card everywhere. You never know who’ll come across your card. If they’re looking for your product or service, there’s a good chance they’ll look you up.

8. Comment on blogs that your prospects and customers read. A lot of blogs let you have a link to your website, which is not only a way to have readers go directly to your site–it’s also a cool and quick SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactic.

9. Network. Send emails to your friends, family, associates, and whoever else might need your product or service.

10. Be creative, not only in your marketing and web design, but in general. Think outside of the box. I know, it’s a cliche, but truth be told, the more creative you are, the more likelihood of someone finding your product or service that normally would not find it.

Good luck!

If you have any low-budget marketing tactics you’d like to share, let me know if your comments. Also, check out some of Level2wo’s previous entries, including this one on Search Engine Marketing.