Perception is Worth 1,001 Words

by Stoney deGeyter

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer's perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you're going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you'd think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can't take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site's of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don't follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn't always fall on the marketer's shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO's job doesn't include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO's area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We'll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn't great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can't change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It's not just website design, it's also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you're perceived to be. That's true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/perception-is-worth-1001-words.php

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Using LinkedIn to Get More Business Customers

From Jennifer Gregory:

Many restaurant owners are adding LinkedIn to their social media strategy. Going beyond the familiar Facebook marketing possibilities, restaurants find LinkedIn offers a great way to get the word out and build customer loyalty. The primary...

Source: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-linkedin-to-get-more-business-customers

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SEM Rush Review & Free Trial SEMRush Coupons

SEM Rush has long been one of my favorite SEO tools. We wrote a review of SEM Rush years ago. They were best of breed back then & they have only added more features since, including competitive research data for many local versions of Google outside of the core US results: UK, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil.

Recently they let me know that they started offering a free 2-week trial to new users.

Set up a free account on their website & enter the promotional code "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M"

For full disclosure, SEM Rush has been an SEO Book partner for years, as we have licensed their API to use in our competitive research tool. They also have an affiliate program & we are paid if you become a paying customer, however we do not get paid for recommending their free trial & their free trial doesn't even require giving them a credit card, so it literally is a no-risk free trial.

What is SEM Rush?

SEM Rush is a competitive research tool which helps you spy on how competing sites are performing in search. The big value add that SEM Rush has over a tool like Compete.com is that SEM Rush offers CPC estimates (from Google's Traffic Estimator tool) & estimated traffic volumes (from the Google AdWords keyword tool) near each keyword. Thus, rather than showing the traffic distribution to each site, this tool can list keyword value distribution for the sites (keyword value * estimated traffic).

As Google has started blocking showing some referral data the value of using these 3rd party tools has increased.

Normalizing Data

Using these estimates generally does not provide overall traffic totals that are as accurate as Compete.com's data licensing strategy, but if you own a site and know what it earns, you can set up a ratio to normalize the differences (at least to some extent, within the same vertical, for sites of similar size, using a similar business model).

One of our sites that earns about $5,000 a month shows a Google traffic value of close to $20,000 a month.
5,000/20,000 = 1/4 = 0.25

A similar site in the same vertical shows $10,000
$10,000 * 0.25 = $2,500

A couple big advantages over Compete.com and services like QuantCast for SEM Rush are that:

• they focus exclusively on estimating search traffic
• you get click volume estimates and click value estimates right next to each other
• they help you spot valuable up-and-coming keywords where you might not yet get much traffic because you rank on page 2 or 3

Disclaimers With Normalizing Data

It is hard to monetize traffic as well as Google does, so in virtually every competitive market your profit per visitor (after expenses) will generally be less than Google. Some reason why..

1. In some markets people are losing money to buy marketshare, while in other markets people may overbid just to block out competition.
2. Some merchants simply have fatter profit margins and can afford to outbid affiliates.
3. It is hard to integrate advertising in your site anywhere near as aggressively as Google does while still creating a site that will be able to gather enough links (and other signals of quality) to take a #1 organic ranking in competitive markets...so by default there will typically be some amount of slippage.
4. A site that offers editorial content wrapped in light ads will not convert eyeballs into cash anywhere near as well as a lead generation oriented affiliate site would.

SEM Rush Features

Keyword Values & Volumes

As mentioned above, this data is scraped from the Google Traffic Estimator and the Google Keyword Tool. More recently Google combined their search-based keyword tool features into their regular keyword tool & this data has become much harder to scrape (unless you are already sitting on a lot of it like SEM Rush is).

Top Search Traffic Domains

A list of the top 100 domain names that are estimated to be the highest value downstream traffic sources from Google.

You could get a similar list from Compete.com's Referral Analytics by running a downstream report on Google.com, although I think that might also include traffic from some of Google's non-search properties like Reader. Since SEM Rush looks at both traffic volume and traffic value it gives you a better idea of the potential profits in any market than looking at raw traffic stats alone would.

Top Competitors

Here is a list of sites that rank for many of the same keywords that SEO Book ranks for

Most competitors are quite obvious, however sometimes they will highlight competitors that you didn't realize, and in some cases those competitors are also working in other fertile keyword themes that you may have missed.

Overlapping Keywords

Here is a list of a few words where Seo Book and SEOmoz compete in the rankings

These sorts of charts are great for trying to show clients how site x performs against site y in order to help allocate more resources.

Compare AdWords to Organic Search

These are sites that rank for keywords that SEO Book is buying through AdWords

And these are sites that buy AdWords ads for keywords that this site ranks for

Before SEM Rush came out there were not many (or perhaps any?) tools that made it easy to compare AdWords against organic search.

Start Your Free Trial Today

SEM Rush Pro costs $79 per month (or $69 if you sign up recurring), so this free trial is worth about $35 to $40.

Take advantage of SEMRush's free 2-week trial today.

Set up a free account on their website & enter the promotional code "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M"

If you have any questions about getting the most out of SEM Rush feel free to ask in the comments below. We have used their service for years & can answer just about any question you may have & offer a wide variety of tips to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.

Categories: 

seo tools

Source: http://www.seobook.com/sem-rush-coupons

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How to Use Lead Intel to Accelerate Sales

Marketers expend time and energy developing personas to explain their target customer, understand what motivates them, and paint a picture in the company's mind that depicts to whom they are speaking and selling every day. These personas are a crucial component to a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy, but doesn't it sometimes feel a little...general? I mean, we have an idea of our prospects' wants and needs, but doesn't it seem like in this day and age, we could back that up with something more concrete?

Marketers who incorporate lead intelligence into their marketing and sales processes have happily found that personas are just the beginning, and the online behaviors that marketing automation software can track and deliver to their sales organization takes a lead from a persona to a living, breathing person.

Gathering and making use of lead intelligence based on on- and off-site behaviors can help you increase conversions, enhance user experience, shorten your sales cycle, and gauge the effectiveness of your content and site design. So what exactly should you track, and once you have the information, how do you use it? This guide will help you understand the kinds of lead information that will help your sales organization be more effective, and how they can use it to make their sales cycle shorter and yield more revenue.

8 Online Behaviors to Track and How to Use Them

1.) Lead Nurturing and Email Marketing Campaign Details - Lead nurturing through personalized email marketing is a crucial step in reducing the length of a prospect's sales cycle. In fact, Lonely Brand found out that 64% of companies that use email marketing to nurture leads close their business in 3 months or less, while only 43% of companies can boast a 3 month or less sales cycle that don't use email marketing.

But it's crucial to make sure your email marketing efforts don't interfere with lead nurturing campaigns that your marketing automation software has already put in place. Take a look at what email campaigns your leads have clicked through, and see what the subject matter of those emails were. This will give you insight into what content they find helpful, and what offers are enticing to them. You should also check to see if they are currently a part of a lead nurturing campaign to ensure any emails you send don't overlap with what they're already receiving (or due to receive) from the automated campaign.

2.) First and Subsequent Conversion Events - Consider what on your website interested a lead enough to fill out a form and what on your site keeps them converting. Monitoring the conversion events tells you the topics that interest that particular lead so you can tailor your conversation to their needs. Take a look at this lead, for instance:

A salesperson who sees this lead history would notice that this person has downloaded multiple offers about social media for business and SEO and may be considering outsourcing their SEO services. A good topic of conversation during the salesperson's first interaction with this lead would be around how they're currently using LinkedIn and Twitter for their business, and learning more about what they're doing for SEO and why they might consider outsourcing it. Knowing that these topics interest this lead, the salesperson could also conduct a brief audit of their organic presence, evaluate how well optimized their website is for search, and note how they're performing on social media before their conversation takes place so they're prepared with tips for improvement.

3.) Lead Source - How did the lead find your website? Are they coming from a paid ad? One of your social media accounts? A competitor's site? An organic search query? If you know how your lead arrived at your site, you can evaluate how useful that lead is based on past purchase history from other leads that arrive at your site in the same manner. Not only does this give marketing insight into which sources are driving the most qualified leads, but it also lets your sales organization prioritize their time working with the leads with the highest close rate and shortest sales cycle.

4.) Pages Visited On Your Site - The more pages a lead is viewing on your site, the more interested they are in your company. After all, if you had the choice between talking to someone who visited 4 pages on your site and someone who visited 50, who would you choose?

But you should also consider which pages a lead visits on your site, as there are certain pieces of content and areas of your site that indicate a lead is closer to sales readiness. For example, a lead who visits your product and pricing pages may be more prepared to buy than someone visiting your 'About Us' page.

5.) Site Return Notifications - In sales, quick response time is crucial. In fact, Harvard Business Review released a study that shows companies that contact prospects in an hour or less are 7 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker than those who wait longer. Give your sales organization the capability to know when leads are coming back to the site so they can prioritize their day and escalate leads in their queue. When you combine this information with knowledge of which pages they are visiting on your site -- like pricing pages, for example -- you know you should hop on the phone stat to help them, answer any questions, and close the deal.

6.) Stage in the Buying Cycle - What can you learn about their stage in the buying cycle based on the offers they are downloading? Are they in the beginning stages during which they are simply researching possible solutions, somewhere in the middle during which they are downloading case studies and getting more information on your solution, or signing up for free trials, making them more likely to purchase? Knowing a lead's stage in the buying cycle can help you prioritize your time better, nurturing leads that are in the middle of the buying cycle and closing those that are near the end.

7.) Social Media Profile Information - Populate pictures of your leads for a more personalized sales experience, and get their Twitter handles and LinkedIn profile information so you can find out more about your lead. For example, by doing a little social media snooping, you could figure out their company and industry, investigate common connections, learn about their role in their company, determine their level of education on what you're selling, and even find out some of their hobbies and interests to make your conversation more personal.

8.) Social Mentions - Select important keywords -- like your brand name, competitors, or product specific words -- and track when your leads (or future leads!) mention them on social media networks. Remember, response time is key, and if you can catch someone asking for, say, an opinion on your product, you can get in touch with them and offer them some testimonials and case studies. Alternately, if you find someone ranting about a competitor of yours, you can jump in and turn them into a new customer!

Are you collecting any or all of this information about your leads? If so, what pieces of lead intelligence are helping you improve your sales process?

Image credit: hospi-table

Connect with HubSpot:

 

 

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/ODS8UwKgZD0/How-to-Use-Lead-Intel-to-Accelerate-Sales.aspx

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Women in Startups: Is There Room for Us & Our Mad Baby Fever?

Penelope Trunk, true to her ?Brazen Careerist? brand, wrote an assertive ? and annoying ? guest post this week on TechCrunch called ?Stop Telling Women to Do Startups.? It starts with a sentence that isn?t even grammatically correct:

We need to get more guys who are running tech startups instead decide to be stay-at-home dads.

She goes on to say that of course this statement sounds ?stupid? ? just as stupid as the reverse, or saying that more women should do startups instead of being stay-at-home moms. There are plenty of opportunities for women in startups, she claims ? but women don?t want them, because women want babies.

As far as I can tell, her only evidence for the claim that women don?t want to do startups is that not many women do startups. Trunk is assuming that women can do whatever they want ? but it?s not at all clear that that?s the case. Last time I checked, there?s still a wage gap ? women in America are paid only 80% of what men are paid. I don?t take this to mean that women want to be paid less.

Laura Klein of the blog ?Users Know? responded to Trunk?s article by saying ?STFU about what women want?:

I?m not going to argue that most women don?t want to stay home with their children. Frankly, I don?t care what most women want to do.

I know what I want to do, and what I want to do is to work at startups. I don?t want to have children. I?ve never wanted children. I never will want children, and I certainly wouldn?t want to give up working at startups for them.

So, when a publication like TechCrunch spews some nonsense about what women want, it means that the next time I go into an interview with a male founder (and they are overwhelmingly male for some reason that I?m not going to address here, but that Penelope assures us has nothing to do with bias) who has read that nonsense, he may be thinking, consciously or subconsciously, ?she doesn?t really want to work at this startup because she wants to have a baby.?

And frankly, that sucks for me and all the other women like me. Oh, did I mention that there are lots of other women like me? There are.

To me, Klein?s point is that telling women not to do startups is much more dangerous than telling them to do them. If women can do what they want (as Trunk claims), then career-oriented encouragement won?t harm them ? they?ll just ignore it. But given, well, the history of the world, it seems much more likely that at least some women do need encouragement in this arena.

They may have been told, straight out, by a parent or teacher that they don?t belong in math or the sciences or the tech industry, because those are male-dominated fields for a reason. Or they may simply assume they don?t belong in those fields, because they don?t know any women who work in them. They may have been subtly guided away from those fields their entire lives, starting with the kinds of toys and games they were given as children ? a doll, not a toolset or Lincoln Logs. They may actually need to be told or reminded ? hey, if you?re a woman and you?re interested in tech and you?re ambitious, you?re not crazy or wrong or weird. But people may think you?re crazy or wrong or weird, so you may just have to work a little harder.

Klein points out that her father?s law school class in 1963 had three women in it, and probably ?there were all sorts of blowhards opining that women didn?t go to law school because they were too busy having babies.? Now more than 50% of law school graduates are women. We could see the same thing happen in startups in the next 40 years ? if we create opportunities for women. If we don?t ram it down their throats that what they?re supposed to want is babies, not a company.

For another great response to Trunk?s article, check out ?Stop Telling Cats to Do Startups.?

Speaking of Women in Startups ?

Check out Lisa Barone?s great TED talk about what stuttering taught her about running a business, and why you should embrace your weird.

More Web Marketing Highlights

I personally love case studies. Over at the KISSmetrics blog, Kristi Hines shares eight tips for creating a great case study, including using real numbers/data.

I also love when people share their all-time favorites of any type. At Distilled, Paddy Moogan lists the 12 must-read blog posts and that he always refers back to, including posts on keyword research, creating linkbait, completing a site migration and more.

PPC Hero has put together a great guide to understanding and using Google?s Multi-Channel Funnels, which help you learn how different marketing channels work together to drive conversions.

Matt McGee takes note of how easy it is to rank in Google?s universal search results ? for example with videos that aren?t even videos from illegal file sharing sites.

Have a problem you need to solve? Ian Lurie has created a handy problem-solving cheat sheet to help you think through the issue and you can solve it with losing your sh*t.

AJ Kohn notices that Google?s ?synonym? results are sometimes not real synonyms but simply related queries.

Is Facebook driving the Greek debt crisis? Business Week illustrates how you can prove anything with two line graphs and a leading question.

And for something completely unrelated: Here are 25 super-clever household tricks and storage tips, such as using bread tags to label your cords and hanging spray bottles from a tension rod under your sink.

Have a great weekend.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/12/16/women-in-startups

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Using the PPC Mindset For Link Building

I've touched on the subject of how to use PPC for link building a few times before but after Panda, I've been forced to think about it even more. While I hate paying for just about anything, I'd be remiss not to understand how important paid advertising is to an online marketing campaign. Whether or not you actually participate in PPC isn't of concern with this, either...you just need to at the very least be aware of how to use PPC tools and data in order to finetune what you want to do elsewhere. For our purposes, I'll be explaining how to use PPC for three main areas of link marketing:

1. Keyword data for anchor text
2. Boost traffic when there's a dip
3. Use with social media promotion to help build links

Keyword Data

(Since Wordstream are kind enough to let me guest post here, I do suggest that you check out their suite of keyword tools.)

Did I mention that I like free? A Wordstream effort, the Free Keyword Tool is quite intuitive and here's an example of how I'd use their data:

Let's put in a nice long-tailed keyword here since the database contains over a trillion keywords. For the free tool, you have 10 sets of searches that you can run (then just one per day moving forward), with or without the adult filter on, and you can "nichefy" results. That sounds so German but I'm not going to check the box because I'm stubborn. I'll keep the adult filter on since your children may be reading this blog and I don't want any angry emails about how I've ruined them forever. Since I can't seem to grow up, let's go with a search for "punk rock clothes" as I'll pretend that I'm cool enough to make and sell such items.

 

Notice all of the greyed out information, which is available to you on the paid tools, but since we're talking about free ones right now, let's just focus on the Relative Frequency. It seems that there are lots of searches for baby punk rock clothes (and naturally I sell those.) What this says to me, as a parent, is that there are other like-minded posers who want to slap a Ramones onesie on their offspring. This will naturally become a sought-after anchor as I'll make sure my content is well-optimized for this, I'll make sure there are some great sections of the website that are devoted to this, and I'll pursue links with this in mind. It also tells me more though; people looking to buy a bib emblazoned with Joe Strummer are possibly people who'd like to purchase a Clash tshirt for themselves, for example. These people are probably on Twitter and Facebook, possibly using Spotify or Grooveshark, and might like to interact with my site on those other platforms too. They might want an email reminder in 1 year that there's a new 12 month-sized punk hoodie available after they've bought one in a newborn size. They might want the chance to follow me on Twitter and get access to sales, and they might want to like me on Facebook and be entered to win $500 worth of free clothes. This isn't just a good idea for a successful anchor text strategy, it's a start to a full-blown sales brainstorm.

Getting More Traffic

Everyone wants more traffic but there are times when bad things happen (algorithm change that kicks your butt, server downtime, idiot developer screwing up your robots.txt file, etc.) and you need to keep things rolling. PPC is brilliant for this. If you already run a PPC campaign, you can always just increase what you're doing, but if you aren't doing anything currently and a loss of traffic could sink you, you might want to start one, even if it's quite small. You can't simply buy your way to the top of course, as there are things like that pesky Quality Score to consider, but just as a new site doesn't immediately perform brilliantly, a new PPC campaign probably won't either, so in the interest of seasoning things, you could allocate a bit of your budget and get one running for when you really need it.

Let's turn to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and, again, see what's going on for punk rock clothing, with the idea of figuring out what a small PPC campaign might cost us.

I really like this tool because you can define the language you want, the geolocation, and the devices you will be targeting.

Now, if I am going after a small account to get started, I probably am going to be cheap and spend as little as possible. Thus, I'd sort the list of keywords by Competition to get the low ones, then look at the keywords with loads of searches. There aren't a lot of great ones but I did find a few worth going after:

• gothic style (I'll take it, as I'm not proud.)
• punk rock style
• alternative fashion

Their Traffic Estimator is also awesome...let's just throw in these three keywords to see what sort of budget we'd need:

As you can see, for a little over a dollar a day, I can have a very basic account running for these three phrases. It's not much but it might be easier to build on this when I need it than it would be to start from scratch. If you've ever been upset and tried to set up an Adwords account, you know what I mean.

PPC Meets Social Media

Both of the aforementioned keyword tools could easily be used to gauge popularity of certain terms so that you could slap in a mention of them when you're tweeting or posting on Facebook. First though, let's find some people to follow for an example, using our terms we gleaned from the earlier work: For this I love, love, love Followerwonk.

This search gave me 299 Twitter users who have some form of the "alternative fashion" keyphrase in their Twitter bio. You can follow these people on the spot, sort the results, or visit their associated websites. If you're a paying member you can also download the info but since I'm keeping it cheap, we won't get into that right now. These are people who view alternative fashion as being important enough to mention it in their bios, so it's probably safe to say that they're the people you want to connect with. That's when the hard part starts of course, as properly engaging with people on social media is not quite as simple as many people think. If you aren't viewed as an authority, no matter how much you tweet or promote yourself, you probably won't build many links through social media.

None of these methods/tools should replace actual tools and methods that are strictly designed for link building of course, as many of those are totally irreplaceable. However, I do definitely think that it's important to learn how to market outside of your specialty, and learning more about how PPC works opens you up to different ways of interpreting data that you can get from paid ad sources AND proper link building tools. And who knows...with the way things work in Google today, you might need to know how to run a great paid ad campaign sooner than you think.

About the author: Julie Joyce is the cofounder and Director of Operations for Link Fish Media, a link building agency solely focused on creating custom link solutions for clients all over the world.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/12/28/ppc-for-link-building

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