May 19, 2012

Social Media Strategies from IBM

Social Media Insights from IBM

IBM keypunch stationEd Brill, who heads up Social Media at IBM was on the Noon Business Hour at WBBM Radio yesterday.  What he said bears repeating and is often the point that is hardest for most people to understand.  The benefit of social media is the ENGAGEMENT.  Don’t broadcast.  Engage your customers, partners and suppliers in conversations.  Social media is a vehicle to be in touch with customers in a transparent way.

Your reasons for using social media may vary.  Market research, sales, customer service, recruiting, fundraising or all of the above may be useful.  I know one major hotel brand is now beginning to emphasize social media primarily for reputation management.

In one of my presentations, I have a slide with a graphic on it that shows social media going back decades (actually centuries).  Every example is about communication.  And the social media we think of today involves using recent technology to make more conversations possible, with more people in more locations.

While we now have the ability to post written words, videos, pictures, audio and links, that just adds to the awesomeness of engagements or conversations, not unlike back in the old days – like the 1990′s.  Or 1970′s.  Or 1940s. IBM’s computers were awesome back then as they are today, with more capability, obviously.  And like Big Blue, things have evolved in social media over the past century.

Social Media Case Study

I set up the social media strategy for a client which included Twitter, Facebook and a blog.  I trained the sales staff to Tweet from conferences they attended, which brought more visibility to my client and opened up new in-person meetings – conversations – while they were at the actual meeting.  Valuable!  They began following conferences they attended by following the hashtags of those conferences, which build their brand awareness considerably!

They began following and engaging people using the hashtags of conferences they weren’t attending, which also resulted in more visibility, new contacts and learning from those who tweeted snippets of content.  All from the comfort of their cubicle…or living room.

They are now participating in chats on subjects of interest to their target segments.  Again, more awareness, engagement and continuing education.

One of the most important strategies of the blog is to feature short bios of each member of the sales team.  People Google people they become aware of or are going to meet.  Having them land on the blog post of the featured employee is great for two reasons:

  1. It allows you to serve up whatever information you deem most important to foster a professional engagement.  (I could do a whole post on that alone!)  It will help make the prospect desire to know more and meet.
  2. It gets your prospect in your neighborhood.  Once they’re on your blog, they can experience all kinds of content about you organization, staff, products or services.
#2 is a power tip most people never consider.  It really works well and allows you to provide information on your terms and move people more quickly through a sales funnel.
Ed Brill also spoke about the importance of sites like Yelp and Foursquare to measure consumer sentiment, but they also allow for different forms of engagement.  If you’re interested in hotel marketing online, Trip Advisor is a must for the same reasons.  Regardless of your niche, there are many choices available.  Select a few and see how they perform.  Toss what isn’t working in favor of something that does.

Get started. Revise later.

Ed also suggested that you set up Google Alerts to keep track of any mentions that appear online.  I will add that you should also add alerts for your products, key employees and competitors.  Whether you’re just starting out or primarily just concerned with reputation management, as cited above, listening to your market is often your best first step.  People are talking about you right NOW!  Do you know what they’re saying?  I wrote more about this in How to Set Up a Social Media Listening Station.  By the way that’s one of my most popular speaking topics.

Ed may be from IBM, but everything he said on WBBM’s Noon Business Hour applies to businesses of all sizes.  They key takeaway? Engage.
One other thing, social media as with anything worthwhile, takes some time and resources to do right, but can be amazingly inexpensive and return a significant Return On Investment (ROI).  Get started, take action, revise as needed, rinse and repeat.

 

How Often Should You Optimize Your Website for Search?

How often should I optimize my website for search engines?

I’ve come across this 3 times this week. Someone asked how often they should optimize a website for the keywords they want to be found for. Then my wife’s work was told by their web guy that their site only needed to be optimized twice a year. And now I hear a marketing acquaintance talk about a client who had some keyword research done for free and then asking her to update the meta tags on the website.  The free SEO guy says “Search Engine Optimization only needs to be done quarterly.”

Stupid is as stupid does.

And this guy can’t update the site himself?  There is something drastically wrong here!

Let me correct this flawed information and show you how to benefit from it. Obviously the people suggesting that SEO needs to be done only twice a year or once every 3 months have no real-world experience in Internet Marketing.  That people are listening to these Bozos (and paying them) is really troubling, but you’ll benefit by doing things the right way while your competitors sit around for 3-6 months waiting for results.  And when that doesn’t work, they’ll revise (or usually not) and wait another eternity for the Search Engine Gods to smile down on them.

Stupid is as stupid does. (Sorry, I already said that)

First, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is techniques, policies and tactics used to refine a website to attract visitors who search for information in Google, Yahoo, Bing and hundreds of other search engines.  What works best on one search engine doesn’t work as well on others, and that means for individual keywords!  You can have a top 10 listing on Google and be in position #70 on Bing for one keyword and have the exact opposite results for another keyword.

Second, there are at least 2 dozen places to optimize a webpage for Search.  In reality, only 5 or 6 are useful to address and it takes experience to integrate all of those together, not only SEO, but so that the content reads well.  So for the guy who did the free keyword research mentioned above and asked the marketing specialist to update the meta keywords, he is ignoring writing effective headlines, placing proper keywords in page content, cross-linking pages on the site, optimizing images for search…the list goes on.  It takes time to revise, wait for the Googlebot to visit, assess the results and revise again.

Stupid is as stupid does. (Sorry!)

Third, one of the most important elements of optimizing a website for search is to build incoming links to the website.  We could discuss this for days, but here are some major points:

  1. The number of inbound links can be important for increased rankings, but the quality of the sites the links come from is more important.  The best links come from “authority sites” that are related to the subject.  For example, a link from a news site, association or chamber of commerce site is much more valuable than a link from “Betty’s Blog” or something equally unrelated.  Sites with higher traffic levels are preferable to sites with little or no traffic.
  2. Building links to a website is a long, time consuming project, especially for websites in competitive niches.  It doesn’t happen overnight and for successful websites, it’s a marketing tactic that never really ends.
  3. And while there are services out there that will sell you inbound links for insanely low prices, most of them are known to Google and others, who devalue those links, if not ban your site altogether!
  4. Search engines spider different sites with different frequency, often based on how often the site content changes.  CNN and other news sites are crawled by search engines constantly and new articles begin showing up in search indexes almost immediately.  They crawl smaller sites less frequently so you want to update your site on a regular basis to encourage more visits from more search spiders.

So for the guy who told my wife’s work that SEO only needs to be done twice a year, he’s completely ignoring one of the most important elements to optimizing a website for search.

Stupid is as…oh nevermind!

One other point is that search engines rarely give you the highest ranking they think your site or page deserves because they want to see how it evolves, how people interact with it and how many other sites link to it over time.  Good SEOs refine their tactics, wait for the search engine spiders to visit, assess the results and revise accordingly. It’s not a one-shot deal.  And despite our best efforts, sometimes search rankings can be frustrating.  I had some success with an eye doctor client site.  We achieved most of our objectives in the first couple of months, but we just couldn’t get rankings for the term “optometrist” and their local GEO’s (location geographical references).  It took a couple of months of trial and error, but we finally got them page one rankings for all combinations of GEOs and “optometrist.”  That’s because we worked on it every month for several months!

I’m not saying that SEO is a slam-dunk.  It’s like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you’re going to get. But you can improve your odds! And you must optimize your site on an on-going basis!

I believe that clients of the two guys mentioned above have websites that are not optimized for all the keywords they should be, are not ranking well for many of the ones they’ve tried optimizing for and aren’t getting much in the way of website traffic, all because of their sporadic approach to website optimization.

I hope you understand what all this means.  If you do it will improve your results, save you money paying Bozo to optimize your website and give you a major advantage over your competition!

There is much more to this!  Please call or email if you’d like to know more.  Toll free: 877 Web-Asylum

Would you like a chocolate?

 

 

Keys to Business Success & Why Companies Fail

I was invited to sit in on a presentation to entrepreneurs last night by a company that provides an interesting array of services to SMBs around the world. I thought I would share some of the highlights with you for consideration. Many of these subjects I’ve written about in the past and will continue to do so. But I think zeroing in on even a handful of these will significantly boost ROI.

Keys to Business Success: Personal Development, Systems and Accountability

I’m a big believer is personal development – that you must always be learning and improving your knowledge. You can do that by reading books, attending conferences and webinars, taking college course, etc. Consider including that to your MQA Plan. (Monthly/Quarterly/Annual plan that should be assessed and revised on an ongoing basis.

Develop the systems to make your operation effective, efficient and consistent. (I remember best-selling author Dan Kennedy saying the same thing and adding that you could also give your competitors a copy of your blueprint and it wouldn’t hurt you at all as most people would not follow thru implementing it. In some cases – maybe many – I don’t think competitors would understand it!)

Supporting the idea of systems, the presenter Art, stated: “9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 2 years.  9 out of 10 franchises succeed.” Why?  The franchises are provided systems, checklists and specific training.

Art talked about becoming an “Intuitive Performer” and used Michael Jordan as a classic example.  MJ never looked at the ball when he was dribbling.  He focused on other things that made him great. Successful people strive to become intuitive performers.

I think this was where Art began talking about determining your hourly rate – he likes to use $524/hr as a bogey, which is $1,000,000 per year at 40 hours per week.  His point was why do a job that you can pay someone else $8 bucks an hour to do?  Jack Canfield discusses this concept at length in his excellent book, “The Power of Focus” and you can read even more in “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber.

Accountability is another success key and you hear alot about it lately.  And why not?  A strategy that you fail to execute is really just a pipe dream.  If you can’t be accountable to yourself, you need another person at your level who you can confide in work with to ensure accountability.  Mastermind groups can be a great way to accomplish this.

Why Companies Fail

So, why do businesses fail?

  • No capital or under-capitalized
  • No success blueprint
  • No brand strategy
  • No marketing system
  • No accountability
  • No e-Loyalty
  • No corporate structure
  • No business coach
  • No list building system
  • No social media strategy
  • No newletter/eBook/blog
  • No mastermind plan
  • No residual or automatic income plan

I couldn’t agree more and will address more of these in posts to come.  But, what do you think?  What will you work on improving?  What do you need help with?

Are you an intuitive performer?

Start providing value, or lose to price.

Jeffrey Gitomer and Chris Brogan both addressed the importance providing and selling value, instead of selling on price today.  Both have message that will help improve website ROI.

First, Gitomer's YouTube video.


 

Here's Chris' post, Compete on Value

What do you say about providing value?  What can you share?

I often tell people that the websites we build at Web Asylum are not the cheapest, but we strive for them to be the best value.  The same goes for our Internet marketing services and social media training.  And I don't fret about business lost to the low-cost vendor.  I'm not sure we'd want them as customers anyhow.

"Value" and "Price" are components of Website ROI.

By the way, Chris Brogan and Jeffrey Gitomer are terriffic authors.  I recommend all of their books.

 

Do You Update Your Website Content Regularly? If not, it can kill you.

Content A new survey points to a very real problem that affects website ROI significantly.  The results are not surprising, but here's why not updating your website content can kill sales, bore customers and clobber your search engine rankings.

Streamline.net is a website hosting company in the U.K.  Their Small Business Bytes Survey found that 2 out of 3 website owners had had a business website for 2 years or more, but only 10% of them made updates on a daily basis and only 1 in 4 made an update every month!

Search engines, particularly Google, make great efforts to supply their customers (those searching for information) with the very latest information and as a result, how often a website is updated affects the overall ranking.  That's one reason why blogs and news sites tend to outperform other sites for certain keywords.

Google crawls some news sites continuously.  It's not uncommon for a new story or blog post to get indexed within seconds.  And how often their spiders visit your site depends on how often they find new content.  If they return in a week and see that nothing has changed, they might not return for 10 days the next time.  If they find nothing new then, it could be weeks before they return.

That's one good reason to update your content regularly.

Sites that aren't updated frequently are also a sign the owner/manager is not paying attention to feedback he or she is getting from visitors and customers.  Successful websites constantly evolve based on factors such as split-testing of pages or individual page components, shopping cart abandonment, keyword research, customer feedback and about 6 dozen other things.

Sites that aren't updated often are boring!

Googleanalytics-keywords The Small Business Bytes Survey also showed that 34% do not know how many visitors their site attracts or any of the other metrics that come with a decent analytics package.  That's like a shop-keeper not keeping track of foot traffic.

Most website hosts include website analytics for free and there are free services like Google Analytics that can easily be added to a site.  The information can be invaluable for decision making and you can read more about website metrics and analytics here.

Yes, it takes time and resources to update your website on any regular basis.  Yes, it may take paying a consultant or coach to devise strategy and monitor the execution, design and develop your site, program functionality and/or execute marketing plans. And all that is part of calculating your website ROI.

But the ROI of a static website is usually zero, to say nothing of the potential not achieved.

Get an advantage over your competitors! Begin updating your site on a regular basis!

Click here for my post on website content ideas.

+++++

Do you manage or own a website?  How often do you update it?  What obstacles do you face while maintaining your site? 

How do you market your website?  Do you know how many people visit your website, where they came from and what keywords might have been used to find you?  Do you know which pages are most popular on your site?  Do you know which pages, other than your Home page that people land on first?  Do you know which page they visit last before they move on to another site?  Have you ever considered that there might be a reason why they exit your site from certain pages?

I'd love to hear from you! Kurt @ WebAsylum.com or (630) 482-9323

Facebook.com/WebsiteROIGuy

Twitter.com/KurtScholle

Market Research: How to Tell What Your Prospects Want

KSonRichesMagazine If you're operating a website, its likely there to solve someone's problem, right?  You want site visitors to buy your goods and services.

If your message appeals to your visitor, you have a better than average chance of engaging them than if you just sling up content without giving it much thought.

And many times, we see messaging that appeals to the site's owner, instead of his/her prospects and customers.  Look for sites that promote features, rather than benefits. (This is one of the most important things for website owners and managers to understand)

FEATURES may be of some interest to prospects and customers, but its the BENEFITS that convey value to your customer. "Features tell, benefits sell."

So, how do you find out what your prospective customers want?  How do you find the terms they use?

By visiting blogs that cover the niche.  By participating in forums and other Web 2.0 communities related to your industry.  By reading the publications they're reading.  By subscribing to online newsletters, both paid and free.

Go to magazines.com and you'll find a publication for just about anything!

Google "blog directories" to find sites that will help you find the most popular blogs by subject. Do the same with "forum directories" and "newsletter directories."

An added benefit of cruising blogs, forums and other communities is that you can leave comments and answer questions, which builds your reputation as an expert and increases your brand awareness.

Don't forget to put a link in your sig file or profile, so that when you answer questions and comment, the readers will know where to find you AND you get an incoming link to your website, which helps with the search engines.

Talk about an ROI!  I would try and spend time doing this every day, even if it's 10-15 minutes.

Sometimes it's helpful to look from the top down.  What are the biggest magazines people are reading, for instance?  Here's an article about magazines that are kicking it in 2010 in terms of increasing ad sales.  Maybe it will give you some ideas! 

But a simple trip to a well-stocked news stand or magazine section in a bookstore can be very incisive too!

Where do all the good ideas come from?

My friend Liz Strauss likes to say, "The people who will get rich on the
Internet are those who solve a problem the Internet didn't cause."  I think you could succeed with that
mindset OR of solving problems created BY the Internet!  But Liz says,
"There are way more problems the Internet didn't cause … that still
need solving. :) "  Point taken.

Almost everyone with a blog or website wants to achieve website success and that often involves providing a solution to someone's problem or creating a memorable experience that supercharges your marketing and therefore your traffic. 

So where do the great ideas come from?  There are many components to a successful website, including design, writing, products and services, pricing. You might want (or need) good ideas for all pieces of your site.

Web designers sometimes look at other designs for inspiration on sites they're working on.  Some get ideas using design directories. Sometimes, you can get ideas from the portfolios of other web designers.

Web strategists and entrepreneurs can find ideas by studying what has worked on other websites.  Even something like "10 Totally Stupid Ideas That Made Someone Rich

Writers get inspiration from studying the works of others without plagiarizing. "If you take it from one source it's plagiarizing. If you take it from multiple sources, it's RESEARCH." (Some famous writer said that – can't remember who)

Bloggers are taught to read the blogs of others in their niche, and I think anyone (bloggers, affiliate marketers, corporate webmasters, et al) can get great information on what people are looking for and the solutions you can provide by reading those blogs and forums in the same niche.

So, whether you're a writer, marketer, entrepreneur or anyone hoping for Website ROI, it pays to listen to what your prospects, customers and even competitors are saying.  What are their needs?  What words do they use to describe their needs? (They may use those terms to find you in search engines)

Here are some simple search tips that may help you out:

To find websites or blogs with a keyword in the URL, type "inurl:" and follow it with the keyword in a Google search bar.  Let's use gardening as an example.  If you type "inurl:gardening", Google supplies you with a list of 20 million+ websites with "gardening" in the URL.

Good luck wading through all of those.

The keyword you specify might be found in the domain name, such as Gardening.com or it might be in the path of the URL, such as www.marthastewart.com/gardening.

Check out a few sites and refine your search, such as "inurl:tomato gardening," which results in 228,000 web pages.

Notice that some of the results use "garden" and not "gardening," so it's not 100% accurate.  But compare these results with just entering "tomato gardening" into a search engine.

To search for terms in the title of a blog post, use "intitle:KEYWORD"  As an example, try "intitle:gardening" or "intitle:tomato gardening"

Want to find a forum that discusses your niche?  Search "KEYWORD + forum"  Example: "tomato gardening + forum"

That's all the time we have today boys and girls.  I'm going to continue this series this week.  Comments?  Questions?

Done is better than perfect!

My buddy, Al Lautenslager, who is a best selling author and in-demand public speaker, is fond of saying that.  And lately, I've heard alot of people saying something similar.

Jeff Herring often says, "Go Use This Stuff!" (GUTS) 

Somebody from Ed Dale's seminar just tweeted, "RT @BrentHodgson: RT @EugeneWare From @Leslie_rhode: "Wrong now beats perfect later." #30dchome {Amen! Just get it out!}"

Implement! That is one of the primary messages in Ted Ciuba's book, "How to Get Rich on the Internet." (Watch for my review soon)

It was one of the dominant messages at the Niche Affiliate Marketing System conference recently.

Regardless of the exact wording or how it's conveyed, it mean this: DO IT NOW!

Yet, we come up with every reason in the world not to do it. I heard it from a guy who approached the Web Asylum booth at a seminar for realtors today. "Oh, I'm not going to build a website for another year or so; I'm just starting out." How long have you been a realtor, I asked?  "About a year and a half."

He won't ever build a website.

And he'll be a former realtor in a year and a half.

I have offered to build a mini-website for free for a friend of mine who really needs one. That project is going nowhere because my friend can't decide on a domain name! In all fairness, he's only been thinking about it for 5 months. <grin>

We built a website for a customer last year and when we presented the prototype to them for approval in August, they realized they hadn't supplied pictures for 2 pages of their new website.  A couple of months later, they delivered one of the 2 pictures.  So we used stock photography on the other page for a generic piece of equipment they use.  "If we launch the site with that stock photography, I know it will never get changed," my customer told me yesterday.

I just hope they stay in business long enough to pay us for the balance of the project!

Author Dan Kennedy likes to talk about, "Ready, Fire, Aim!"  He knows. Without action, there is no gain.

And we're not advocating dramatically lowering your standards and turning out crap.

I'm saying, what I've heard many successful people say, "Good is good enough!"

At least you're doing something.

And you can always fix it later.

I know, I know. Things get in the way. The phone rings. Kids get sick. Someone doesn't show up for work. The dog ate your homework.

I'm guilty as charged too.

For me it's more the distractions than excuses.  I'm too busy working IN my company, rather than ON my company. So I've tried to set priorities and work on 2-3 primary tasks daily before I allow distractions from email or Twitter or the phone. And it's working!

I have also developed MindMaps of my overall vision for my companies and key initiatives within those companies.

We must be doing something right. We are celebrating our 15th year of service this year.  2009 was our most successful year.

Ready! Fire! Aim!

The Benefits, ROI & Fun of Continuing Education

KurtWSJ I'm a life-long learner.  Started reading the Wall Street Journal at 8 months.  (Yeah, right)

I am a big believer in continuing education, whether you take classes at a local college, attend conferences/lectures/trade shows, read books and blogs or subscribe to newsletters and magazines. You need to learn to earn.

As a consultant, I'm paid for what I know (and sometimes for who I know.)  It's amazing to me how often I will learn something at a conference or on a teleseminar and be using that information with a clients days later. Sometimes I implement something I've read in a book for my own businesses or suggest it to clients.

I would not be in a position to benefit from that information without making the investment in time and resources.  I personally attend a minimum of 4 trade shows or conferences each year.  I participate in at least 2-3 virtual trade shows or training programs every year.  I subscribe to at least a half dozen newsletters, each of which cost as much as $80 per month.

Why?  Because of the ROI (Return on Investment)

When I share recent information with a client, it benefits them and builds brand loyalty.  It may also result in more billable hours.

That information often finds its way to this blog, which attracts and benefits subscribers, who sometimes hire my company, Web Asylum, or me to develop strategy, design a website, add functionality or execute search engine marketing.

DeniseKurt One benefit of attending a conference in person is the ability to network with experts, vendors, potential partners and others in similar businesses.  Sometimes what happens outside a conference room is more valuable than what you learn in the conference room.

Pictured at right, Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad, who I've had the pleasure of meeting twice, and yours truly.

Denise has graciously agreed to do a 1-hour teleseminar for us in March that will be open to all.  The point is, we may never have had that opportunity if I hadn't met Denise.

I recently went to the Niche Affiliate Marketing System event in Atlanta because so many people I follow and tweet with were going to be there.  I have an interest in affiliate marketing, but I was more interested in learning from some of the people I consider to be outstanding marketers.  I was able to record some interviews that I will post here in the near future and I'm also looking forward to a discussion with Jeff Herring on article marketing, which can position you or your company as a leader in your space, but also can seriously help your search engine rankings.

Lotsa fun at NAMS, SOBcon, Search Engine Strategies and other events!

I went to Justin Brooke's Protege conference in Tampa Bay last year to learn how he adds value to the websites he buys, improves and then sells.  Justin is known as an expert at flipping websites.  (I could do that)  But it was important to learn how he makes them more valuable. I like and respect Justin and his wife Chaunna.  I learned alot from them and got a return on my investment, not only from what they taught, but also from being able to add them to my rolodex!

So, find an affordable conference, books or magazines to buy.  Invest some time in free or low-cost teleseminars and webinars.  Read blogs or find forums to participate in.  But do so with the outcome clearly defined.  I guarantee it will result in a great return on your investment and you may have a little fun at the same time!

Google Reader Allows You to Follow Changes on Websites Without Feeds

Googlereader For many of us, having the ability to track new blogs posts without having to actually visit the weblog increases efficiency (your Time ROI) and productivity.  With a blog reader you can quickly scan recent posts for any number of blogs and even group feeds based on a specific interest.

Google has added a new feature to the Google Reader which allows you to track changes to pages on a website without an RSS feed!

You can now create your own custom feeds and subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.  You can stop the feed at any time.

The benefits are enormous:

  • Start following blogs that don't have RSS feeds.
  • Keep track of pricing changes on a website.
  • Be alerted to changes to competitor websites.
  • Follow changing news stories.
  • Track changes on portals.