When starting a website one can easily become overwhelmed with all the options available for it’s creation, promoting it and improving sales. Concentrating on (or obsessing about) just one aspect of the website or website promotion can lead to you losing sight of the big picture of how all the pieces fit together.

As you start researching what is required for successful marketing on the Internet you are confronted with all kinds of ideas of what to do. Search engine optimization, web design elements, marketing sales copy, getting listed quickly in the search engines, email marketing, there’s so many the list could go on forever. With all the excitement around each idea, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and lose sight of the big picture, to create a successful website using different techniques that work for your targeted audience.

The website is an investment both in time and money. To get a good return on investment (ROI) you need to carefully consider which ideas you come across will work for your target audience. It’s not just about having a ton of hits on the website, it’s about drawing in buying customers. Investing time and money wisely on ideas which truly give a better return on investment is the way to go. Sometimes, this does require stretching the budget for the right investment.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one area where there is all kinds advice available on the Net. Whether you do your own SEO or hire it out, analyzing the advice you find and calculating the true ROI (look beyond the hype of the advice) would be something to do.

Website design is another area where you can invest a lot of time (if you are a DIY website owner) or money (if you hire someone). Carefully considering what website theme and features suit your targeted website visitors is best. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a fancy website theme but in the end, it just won’t give you the ROI expected if it is not tailored to suit your website visitors needs and be optimized for the search engines.

The list could go on as to all the aspects of a website that are important and that’s the point, there’s so many ideas of how to build and promote your website, you loose sight of the big picture of how everything needs to work together.

Start with a plan (or go back to this step if you have an existing website that isn’t performing). Make a list of all the ideas you have collected. Check how the ideas work with what you are marketing and who you are marketing to. Discard the ones that won’t work for your targeted audience. Prioritize. Work on the items that will fit together the best, give the best ROI and ultimately will make the website successful. Get everything in order for your website visitors before spending any time or money on advertising. A website requires ongoing maintenance and updating, so it is never really finished, but get the major components done that your targeted visitors will be looking for before launching the website. If you have done your planning homework you will have part of your search engine optimization program started.

Some don’t give an idea a chance. You have worked on your website and search engine optimization but no immediate increase in sales. Things take time to work. Hopping from one website promotion idea to another without giving the previous one a chance it’s going to help. If you have given the promotion idea a fair chance, then maybe you need to review your website content and your search engine optimization. When a promotion idea has worked and then it doesn’t seem to be working, keep in mind your competition is keeping their eye on their site too. If you start beating them, they will tweak their site to try and get back above you in the search engine results. Search engine optimization is an endless task. You have to continually tweak, as your competition will do.

Sorting all those ideas you have for marketing your business with ROI in mind will help stop you from losing sight of the big picture, to have a successful online business. Seriously look at each idea, it’s pros and it’s cons, and only try those which work for your business. Don’t let quick and cheap solutions prevail. In the end, a well thought out plan, with a reasonable investment of time and/or money could be the right long term solution, even if it stretches the budget.

Article by V7N SEO Blog guest author S. Emerson of Accrete Web Solutions

One thing I’ve been preaching for a long time now is marketing drives sales. Probably more to the point, branding drives sales. Either way, it’s not the product itself that drives sales.

To illustrate, let’s talk about web hosting. iPowerWeb is one of the biggest virtual web hosting providers on the Internet. Their $7.95/MO plan offers:

• Hosting for a single domain
• 250 GB Transfer
• 10,000 MB Disc Space

Now compare that to DreamHost:

• $7.95 for unlimited domains
• 1 TB Transfer
• 20 GB Disc Space

It’s not the product that drives sales. It’s the presentation of the product.

Very interesting conversation going on about link bait, spamming, social network spamming, and such. Read the comments. Involves Andy Beal (the accused) and Jeremy Zawodny (the accuser).

Yet another example of how (perceived) cheap stunts can impact negatively on brand equity.

That is a (deliberately) rubbish headline!

“Link bait” is a catchier term.

Nick Wilson wrote a good, if partly defensive, post about link baiting in 2007, a term he coined (?) in 2005. In the post, Nick makes the point that “you need to put thoughts of manipulating the system to one side and focus entirely on providing value to your clients users and making that value easy to link to”.

A good point. However, the aim is to manipulate the system, and I doubt the manipulation will ever be too far from the link baiters mind. Manipulating the system to ones advantage is what marketers and seos do. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The most powerful marketing provides value for both the seller and the buyer, which is Nicks main point.

Link baiting also encapsulates a fundamental truth – in any crowded market, popularity counts. There is a nonsense often perpetrated by some SEOs – “producing quality content will attract links”. It doesn’t. Not by itself, anyway. Quality content needs to be placed somewhere where people will see it, and shaped in such a way as to encourage viral take-up. Quality content published on an unknown site is likely to be read by no one. Garbage content will often be read and parroted by thousands, so long as it is published on a popular site. SEO gurus who believe otherwise can conduct a simple test – publish articles on a new site, under a different pen name, and see if the quality content is enough to attract readers, links and attention.

The web is a popularity contest, thus the demand for marketers and marketing strategy.

However, I think there are more risks to link bait strategy than Nick makes out in that article. I’ll give you a an example. In a recent hacking event, many people didn’t believe that some top SEO blogs had been hacked because they suspected an elaborate link bait stunt. In other words, the past history of advocating and publishing link bait had come back to bite some of the bloggers involved. Readers did not trust what they were seeing, so wary were they of being misled, and who could blame them. Ironically, a reputation for link baiting can result in less links over time as readers become increasingly suspicious.

I find the term link bait to be pejorative. It screams manipulation of the reader, and as my example above illustrates, it can backfire. That is where the bad reputation is coming from, because no one likes to feel like they are being manipulated, and it will no doubt get worse as more people start using the strategy in inappropriate contexts. What’s the first rule of Fight Club?

In some ways, the growing bad reputation is a shame. Link bait is really an old, proven marketing idea concerning popularity and appeals to self-interest. It is the art and craft of getting attention in a crowded space. Compared to some of the alternatives – begging for links – link baiting is a far more useful and productive strategy. In the hands of master marketers, it can be pure gold. But used blatantly, it can have unwanted side effects.

And like SEO, the strategy won’t fit all customers. Do Ferrari need to do SEO or link bait in order to sell more cars? No (although they could use a usability consultant). Their brand is more than enough to carry them. Attention getting stunts will most likely devalue premier brands. Too overt, and it can be perceived as being base and desperate, the very things Ferrari are not. Careful application of any marketing strategy is critical.

I look forward to reading Nicks upcoming ideas on attention getting

SearchEngineLand has a good post on how to get more traffic to your blog: 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines.

I want to expand on one point which deserves more attention: Have Descriptive Titles.

While describing the content is certainly a great start, you can achieve a lot more clicks simply by applying direct marketing theory to your headlines.

Direct marketers found that headlines were important – often the most important part of their campaigns. How do you write a headline that makes people feel compelled to click?

Here’s a test. Which headline do you think was more successful?

• Are you afraid of making mistakes in English?
• Do you make these mistakes in English?

The second headline produced far more inquiries and orders.

Why?

The second headline arouses a readers curiosity and self-interest.

Now let’s take a look at Digg. Often, the most successful stories appeal to self interest, arose curiosity, and provide news. Digg may be new, but these old theories hold true, as the top stories are often using traditional attention getting methods, whether the writers realize it or not.

Here are a few examples from the top Digg stories today:

• Why Steve Jobs didn’t mention Leopard & the Mac (Reader reaction: “Why! I want to know why!”)
• Who is planning the next war (Reader reaction: “Who! I want to know who!”)
• Paypal Doesn’t Want Slain Soldiers’ Families To Receive Aid (That headline is both news, and arouses curiosity as to “why”?)
• Public can purchase $100 laptop (Reader reaction “tell me how I get a cheap laptop?”)

….and so on. Pretty simple, eh.

When crafting a headline, try and fit it into one of the following categories:

1. Self-interest. Offer something the reader wants.
2. News
3. Curiosity

If you can combine those three elements, your headlines will be even more compelling, and readers are more likely to click. When evaluating your headline, ask yourself – do I give news? Do I arouse curiosity? Do I offer something people want?

If you don’t do at least one of those things, the posts are less likely to be clicked.

If you want to read more on direct marketing theory, I suggest you grab a copy of “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples. My good friend Sophie recommended this to me a few years back. While it is getting a bit dated in places, a lot of the theory still holds true, and I find it works very well on PPC landing pages.

Yahoo notices the spend on advertising is dipping:

“Yahoo Inc. – said on Tuesday it expects third-quarter revenue to be at the bottom half of its forecast range due to weakness from two of its biggest advertising segments, sending its shares down as much as 13 percent…Yahoo has seen “a little bit of weakness in the last few weeks” in auto and financial services advertising,“.

New trend or blip? If it’s limited to the finance and auto industries, then that probably doesn’t say a whole lot. Also, this appears to be banner advertising, as opposed to keyword advertising. If so, Google probably wouldn’t be much affected as their search marketing business revolves around smaller advertisers over a wide range of sectors.

In a related note, SEM clients apparently not as plentiful as they once were:

“there is apparently a considerably smaller growth (or even a decline) in the number of clients hiring SEM firms: …year-over-year growth in terms of total client accounts for 104 surveyed firms is slowing considerably. The number of clients who are willing to pay for top-of-the-line services is still increasing, but smaller clients are not increasing“.

Maybe, but then you’ve got to wonder about the sample size of these reports.

Doesn’t Seth just mean plain old usability and online marketing?

I guess that doesn’t sound as catchy.

Exploitation or opportunity?

“Frito-Lay is tapping a new “agency” to create the ad spot for their $2 million Super Bowl ad spot — consumers. So finalists get a free trip to the Super Bowl, and the winner gets the deep personal satisfaction of seeing their ad on the Super Bowl — which could of course lead to a financial return from actual paid creative work. But you have to wonder whether the winner of the Frito-Lay ad contest would prefer receiving the millions of dollars in creative agency fees that Frito-Lay otherwise would have paid“

This happens on the internet – the search engines don’t pay for content, but offer exposure. This happens on tv – contestants in Idol/game shows aren’t paid, but are “given” exposure.

The result is, of course, a lot of content that isn’t worth watching or reading.

Seth has a list of interesting statistics that serves as a useful reminder: us ‘net-heads are not your “typical” user, if there is such a thing:

31.4% of Americans don’t have internet access.

90% of the people in France have not created a blog.

88% of all users have never heard of RSS.

59% of American households have zero iPods in them.

30% of internet users in the US use a modem.

Detroit (one million people) has six Starbucks.

1% of internet users use Digg on an average day.

Marley and Me outsells Small is the New Big 200:1. On a good day.

.37% of the US population reads the paper version of the New York Times daily.

Brazil consumes 11% of the world’s coffee.

20% of the world speaks English.

98.2% of the households in the US have a TV, and virtually all of those TVs have cable.

On a related note, here’s a few statistics relating to online shopping patterns:

• Thirty-five percent of consumers said added costs, such as shipping and handling, or lengthy delivery times resulted in their abandoning an online purchase
• The top reason online consumers prefer to shop on the web is to avoid crowds, a reason cited by 38%
• Internet-influenced offline spending is 50 percent greater than online spending, meaning that for every $1 spent online, the Internet influences $1.50 in brick-and-mortar sales.

More interesting internet shopping statistics here.

Buzz marketing has been an obsession of mine these last few months. When I get interested in something I tend to focus on that one thing exclusively until I understand it fully, or at least to my own satisfaction. The reason I only recently became interested in buzz marketing is because I tend to prefer brand building over short term strategies such as SEO, publicity stunts, etc.
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