Drive It - Convert It! #12 (podcast): Getting Started with Local Search
October 5th, 2006 by jboulter

Local search tactics offer a huge opportunity whether you are local or not.

Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, search engine optimization, internet marketing, web marketing, local search, web promotion

Show summary:

Local search defined.
The numbers are all pointing to more and more local searches being done online by Internet users.

A 10 step plan to get started with driving more traffic to your web site through optimizing for local search.

Download and Subscription Links:
Download the Podcast
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It!
Join our Email list to be informed about future podcasts 

Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:

• comScore’s Local Search press release
• Google – add your local listing
• Yahoo – add your local listing
• MSN – add your local listing
• infoUSA – add/verify your information
• Yellowpages.com advertising
• Verizon’s Superpages.com advertising
• Local.com – vertical search engine
• TrueLocal.com – vertical search engine

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Drive It - Convert It! #11 (podcast): Internet Marketing Diversity
August 29th, 2006 by jboulter

Don’t put all your eggs in one web marketing strategy. The key to short and long term success is diversity.

Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, web site conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility, web promotion

Show summary: SES San Jose - A little about the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose

Diversification - Be careful about jumping too soon AND jumping too late. Longevity is one more reason to diversify now, though. Think your safe with SEO or Pay Per Click - think again.

Upcoming podcasts - Switching back to the Drive side of Drive It - Convert It! Look for the new Getting Started series to help get you started with new Internet Marketing vehicles and for those that want some extra tips on doing it effectively.

Download the Podcast here
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here

Read a full transcript here …

Hi and welcome to Drive It - Convert It!, for August 29th, 2006. This is episode #11: Internet Marketing Diversity

Drive It - Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

Drive it, convert it.

Well it’s been over a month sine the last Drive It - Convert It! podcast. Thanks for sticking with me. It’s been a busy summer. I went on vacation. They tried to catch up. Then I went to a conference. Then tried to catch up. I little more vacationing, and I’m still trying to catch up. But the podcast gods were calling my name and promising retribution if I didn’t get things going again.

Actually, I have been dying to get podcasting again. There’s a ton going on. I’m fresh from the latest Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose and clients are keeping us on our toes here at Bastion Internet. We’re pushing some limits and exploring into new territory.

If you want the details of my vacation - send me an email. From here on in, this podcast is all about driving traffic to your website and converting it once it’s there.

We’ll start by reviewing the summer Search Engine Strategies conference. That’s going to lead me into what’s hot, what are the trends in Internet Marketing. From there, the main event - I want to talk about the importance of diversity within your online marketing plan and how we’re going to get you starting down that path. Finally, with diversity in mind, I’ll give you a forecast of the upcoming podcast series.

Search Engine Strategies: I attended the summer Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. For those of you that are familiar with Search Engine Strategies you know how much information gets thrown at you over a 4 day period. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these conferences - I’ll give you the rundown.

Search Engine Strategies, also know as SES is put on by Incisive Media. It’s chaired by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch fame. It runs over a four day period and follows a pretty typical trade show slash conference type of format. There’s 5 hour to hour and a half sessions running at any given time and that’s done 4 times a day. So over the course of the conference there’s well over 70 different sessions. The sessions break down into different focuses - you’ve got ones more targeted toward beginners, ones targeted at advanced users. You’ve got a SEO track, an Advertising track, vertical tracks like shopping search and local search, you’ve got a B to B focus. It’s really got something for everybody.

The sessions are a little bit teaching, a little bit opinion, lots of Q and A. Most sessions have 3 or 4 panelists that are subject matter experts, and a moderator. Each panelist gives a 10-15 minute presentation offering their slant on the subject and then it gets opened up for questions.

Based on how people put up their hands when the moderators ask, it seems like about 60% of the attendees are in-house employees at various companies outside of the Search industry and about 40% are from Internet marketing firms of one description or another. My numbers could be way off, though, I’ve never seen anything published on that.

There’s also a exhibition floor where there’s a good100 or so exhibitors ranging from SEO companies to dot.coms to analytics software firms.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this a commercial. Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com for more info if you’d like.

One of the things I look for when I go to these conferences is trends.
Where things seem to be heading. In marketing if you’re always following other companies’ leads, you’ll likely always be following others – stands to reason – huh. So if you can get out in front of the trends, you stand a better chance of success.

One of the most highly attended sessions was on Social Search. I think it was highly popular because it’s pretty new. We’re all trying to figure out how we want to play. How many resources do you put into something without having a good idea of the payoff.

Now it’s always a little dangerous because new stuff is alluring. If you’re like me, you work so much with standard SEO and Search Engine Advertising that it can start to seem a little mundane at times. So when something new comes along, you want to jump all over it. And then you step back and look at the statistics and see what an overwhelming amount of traffic is still generated by those two 500 pound gorillas – Optimization and Pay Per click

So it can be dangerous to go after the new, alluring marketing vehicles – I call them market vehicles one, because they drive traffic, two, because they are often self contained. Anyway, back to the danger of pursuing the new, mysterious strategies. But, it can be more dangerous not to pursue them. If you don’t diversify, and that even includes doing things that are new to you and not necessarily new to everyone else, you will absolutely suffer from that decision.

Let’s run through some scenarios. You think SEO is the place to be. Well it can be until you get banned or shoved down in the rankings by an algorithm change or a spurt of competition. Have you noticed that Froogle and Google’s local results have started showing up high in the rankings of search engine results pages. How’s you’re Froogle ranking. Are those Froogle results knocking you down in the rankings an inch or two.

If you rely on leads just from the natural search results, what happens when those results suddenly dry up. A lot of companies have been thrown into a panic for just that reason. Now a lot of times you can go way down in rankings and it’s just a temporary thing. You bounce back up after a week or two. But if that’s where all you’re business is coming from and it’s now gone, you’re under a ton of pressure to do something. You can’t just sit there and do nothing – which is often the right thing to do. So you’re sort of forced to take action just so it looks like you’re trying to do something. If you had some other traffic driving vehicles in place, the pressure’s off a little. You can wait it out a bit to see what’s real and what’s not in a rankings bump or shuffle.

So you think you’re safe by driving leads through search engine advertising – pay per clicks. Hey, you pay, your ads show up, people click, you get customers. Well along comes Google and their quality score. Now it’s just not a matter of price bids. Click through rates and the relevance of landing pages are affecting the rank of your sponsored ad. Plus with all the Tivo’ing going on, just how much more competition is flowing in from companies looking for better places to spend their advertising dollar then television. How does that affect the cost per click.

Here’s something to think about. Do you know what two of the highest downloaded Firefox extensions are – a script blocker and an ad blocker. Do you think that might have an affect on your Google and Yahoo pay per click business. History has definitively shown us that people like to block ads. Don’t think Google and Yahoo’s ads are immune to that. Getting a little sick of seeing AdSense on sites – yeah, me too. Where’s that Firefox extension. Maybe once I’ve turned it on it’ll block the ads on the Search Engine Results Pages, too.

I think you’re getting my point.

So if you haven’t already started getting systems in place to diversify efficiently, you need to.

Another trend – longevity. Longevity goes hand in hand with trust. If you’ve been around awhile people tend to trust you a little more. Heard of the Google sandbox. There are pretty good indicators that length of time you’ve been doing something means something in this web site marketing world of ours. It’s pretty hard to go out a get a new link that’s 2 years old. You would have had to have done that two years ago.

So the key to longevity is to get started now. It a few years you’ll have it. Meanwhile, why not drive some traffic and have some fun while were at it.

I believe it was John Lennon said that 90% of success was just showing up. I’m not sure that I totally agree with the exact percentage, but the principle does apply. You’ve got to get in the game if you want to score and if you want to win. Most people sit on the couch and are content to watch.

So, how do we all get into the game.
Well, Drive It – Convert It! is shifting back to the “drive it” side. Over the next several podcasts I’m going to talk about getting into different games - we’ll call it the Getting Started series.

What do I want you to get started with – to diversify into. Lots of things.

We are going to talk social search and social networking. We are going to talk about podcasting. Blogging – yeah it’s been out awhile but you’re still not doing it, are you.We’ll revisit Vertical search engines like shopping search and local search. Pushed out any press releases lately, how about Ezines or newsletters.

I’m calling it the Getting Started series but don’t let that fool you. I’ll be lacing it with something for everyone whether you’re a beginner or an old hand at it.

I can’t wait for the podcast on Social Search and Social Networking. I am excited about it and dreading it all at the same time. I’m 42 years old, do I really need a My Space account. Do I really need to Digg stuff. Is it a goldmine or a big waste of time.

We usually avoid what we fear or what we don’t understand. I know a lot of SEOs that hate getting links because they don’t want to have to actually communicate with another person. A lot of us have a fear of speaking – not looking forward to that first podcast – are you? Don’t understand all the tech stuff surrounding Shopping Search - don’t worry it’s probably just a fad anyway.

Let’s face down some of those fears, that apprehension together. Let’s go back and revisit some of those online marketing vehicles that we took a look at a few years ago and turned our noses up at – darn shopping engines. Let’s get diversified. A little secret – it’s mostly just about repurposing content.

So if you haven’t yet subscribed, you won’t want to miss out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. I’m John Boulter, for Bastion Internet’s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at podcast@bastioninternet.com. I’ll get back to you. See you then.

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Drive It - Convert It! #10 (podcast): Converting Web Traffic: Part 4: Building Trust - 50 Tips in 20 Minutes
July 21st, 2006 by jboulter

 
Continuation of episode #9 - Techniques to build trust and credibility on your web site.

 
Trust and credibility translates into website conversions. Here are 50 tips to help you build your web site’s credibility rating.

 
Suggested Tags: web design, website design, web site conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility

 
The 50 tips are separated into 9 categories

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here … Read the rest of this entry

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Drive It - Convert It! #9 (podcast): Converting Web Traffic: Part 3: Higher Credibility, Higher Conversions – Trust Me!
July 14th, 2006 by jboulter

Techniques to build trust and credibility on your site.

 
The more credible your website, the more trustworthy and capable you will be perceived to be. The more trustworthy and capable you are perceived to be the higher your website conversions.

 
Web site design and refinement plays a key role in building a site’s trust level and credibility, all which translate into a higher conversion rate.

 
Suggested Tags: web design, website design, web conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility

 
Topics include:

 
1) Web smarts – today’s street smarts
2) How web visitors judge us
3) Improving credibility and trust
4) Introduction to 50 tips in 20 minutes

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here … Read the rest of this entry

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Drive It - Convert It! #8 (podcast): Converting Web Traffic - Part 2 – Seven Steps to Effective Landing Pages
June 29th, 2006 by jboulter

 
Discussion on the importance of improving web conversion rates through more effective landing page strategies and design.

 
Suggested Tags: landing page design ppc email campaign conversion online sales ecommerce internet web marketing advertising website web design webdesign

 
Show Summary - Seven Steps to Effective Landing Pages:

 
1) Recognize the true value of a better landing page
2) Know your product
3) Know your target
4) Build based on your lead-in
5) Set you landing page objective
6) Design a superior landing page
7) Measure and test

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here … Read the rest of this entry

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Drive It - Convert It! - #7 (podcast): Converting Web Traffic - Part 1 – Ten Tips to Higher Website Conversions
June 9th, 2006 by jboulter

 
Website promotion is great - turning visitors into customers - even better. An overview of web conversion strategies and tactics.

 
Suggested Tags: conversion web ecommerce internet online web marketing promotion seo search engine optimization advertising website design webdesign

 
Show Summary:

 
Ten tips to improve website conversions.

 
1) Define your target
2) Define your objective
3) Define the offer and call to action
4) Define a conversion
5) Match ads to offers to landing pages
6) Vary your approach
7) Test, test, test
Audit your conversion process
9) Have a good overall design
10) Build a tracking methodology

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It - Convert It! here:

 
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Drive It - Convert It! - #6 (podcast): Search Engine Optimization - Part 4 – All About Linking
May 25th, 2006 by jboulter

In Search Engine Optimization part 4 we discuss the ins and outs of getting links to your site to help you drive more traffic to your site – in other words - link building.

 
Show Summary:

 
Take-aways from this episode are:

 
1) What’s a link, what’s a backlink.
2) Why are links important (there’s a number of reasons)
3) How you can get links (and COULD doesn’t always mean SHOULD)
4) The future of linking

 
Shameless linking plug (add a bastioninternet.com/podcast/ link to your site - thank you very much!). Here’s the code to cut and paste:

 
To listen to a great <a href="http://www.bastioninternet.com/podcast/">Internet marketing podcast</a>, check out BastionInternet.com

 
Quick links:
 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here … Read the rest of this entry

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Drive It - Convert It! - #5 (podcast): Search Engine Optimization - Part 3 – Keyword Targeting
May 11th, 2006 by jboulter

In Search Engine Optimization part 3 we discuss how to determine the best keyword and keyword phrase targets. This will focus your site on the best terms to increase your rankings in the search engines.

 
Show Summary:

 
1) Why Keyword Phrases are important.

 
The search engines and searchers are all focused on them – at least for now.

 
2) How to determine what phrases you want to target

 
Look at the nouns and adjectives that describe your company. Modify and qualify with industry niches, geographic locations, and alternate phrasing.

 
3) Technical processes to determine which phrases and terms to target

 
A few methods to see which terms are going to give you the biggest bang with the least competition.

 
4) Ensuring your website is being developed and maintained to take advantage of keywords in search.

 
Make sure your site is heading in the right direction

 
Some quick links I refer to:

 
- Yahoo Search Marketing tools

 
My Odeo Channel (odeo/1bf9f36afb79290e)

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read the full transcript here …
 

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Drive It - Convert It! - #4 (podcast): Search Engine Optimization - Part 2 - On-Page Coding
April 28th, 2006 by jboulter

In Search Engine Optimization – Part 2 we discuss On-page Coding. What steps should we take in coding our website to gain in search engine rankings.

 
Click the “more” link below for a full transcript of the show.

 
Here is a summary:

 
(Note: In this podcast, on occasion I refer to the “Content” meta tag. That should be the “Description” meta tag. I guess my “Content is King” theme from Show #3 stayed with me a little too strongly. Sorry for any confusion.)

 
The code you use on your web pages was designed to tell users more about that page. Thus, it also tells search engines more about your page.  Over the past 5 years the importance of that code has diminished somewhat, but it is still a valuable tool for both the viewers of your page and for the search engine crawlers.

 
First it’s important to have an understanding of the web itself and how it works. I briefly discuss and explain the following:

 
1) What is the Internet
2) Web Page Technology
3) How crawlers crawl
4) HTML – the language of the web
5) Specific on-page coding

 
Within Item 5 – Specific on-page coding, I take a look at 7 items that can help you to higher rankings:

 
1) Title Tag
2) Alt Attributes
3) Headings tags (like an H1 tag)
4) Meta tag – Description
5) Meta tag – Keywords
6) Internal linking structure
7) Clean code

 
(see examples here)

 
This is not a tutorial but is meant to give you an understanding of the relative importance of on-page coding, it’s likely importance in the future, and some of the top areas to examine if you want to pursue your on-page coding in more detail.

 
If you’d like to get more into the details, there is one excellent resource at www.seomoz.org. I also recommend frequenting www.searchenginewatch.com and www.webmasterworld.com.

 
Download the Podcast here:

 
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here:

 
Read a full transcript here …

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Drive It - Convert It! - #3 (podcast): Search Engine Optimization - Part 1
April 14th, 2006 by jboulter

In Search Engine Optimization – Part 1, we discuss Content Is King. How important is your content in search engine rankings and how do you adapt your content to get the best results.

 
Click below for a full transcript of the show.

 
Here is a summary:

 
Writing content is one of the most challenging aspects of producing a website. However, it’s extremely important from both a Web visitor perspective and from a search engine optimization perspective.

 
To effectively produce your content you need to plan, write the overview, focus, and refine.

 
Plan by architecting your website into logical categories and subcategories. Write in a similar style to that of a newspaper with the most important points first and then breaking down into further and further levels of detail. Focus each page on a central idea and incorporate targeted keywords and phrases.

 
Make further search engine specific refinements such as accessibility, elimination of pronouns, high use of adjectives, variation of keywords and strong use of relevant headings.

 
Download the Podcast here

 
Subscribe to the Podcast here

 
Read a full transcript here …
 
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Drive It - Convert It! - #2 (podcast): Target Markets
April 7th, 2006 by jboulter

 
Establishing the proper target market before you role out traffic-driving and conversion strategies such as Search Engine Optimization, Advertising, and landing page designs.

 
This podcast explores some examples of how your online target market may differ from your regular brick and mortar target. It also covers the effect of demographics, psychographics, and technographics on site design, search engine strategies and other web marketing vehicles.

 
Download it now - Drive It - Convert It! Podcast #2
 
Here is a more complete transcript … Read the rest of this entry

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Drive It - Convert It! - #1 (podcast): The First Step to Great Online Marketing - Setting Your Site Objective
March 31st, 2006 by jboulter

The inagural podcast of Drive It - Convert It!
This podcast talks about a vital part of your online success - nailing down your site objective.
Here’s a summary:
Many companies never nail down the main objective of their website. They then go on to spend money on search engine advertising and search engine optimization without having the best vehicle for it - a site with a clear objective.
Once your objective is clear, it becomes orders of magnitude easier to ensure you have an appropriate and effective site design, focused web advertising, and the right level and quantity of functions and content. It also gives designers, search engine marketers, and programmers the focus they need to stay on target with your site development and site marketing.
Thus, you have a better designed site and you won’t have overspent.
Here’s the podcast Drive It - Convert It! Podcast #1

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How “Accessible” Should You Be
March 23rd, 2006 by jboulter

The Point:
Economic specifics trump economic generalizations.

The Background:
A client’s site had some design issues that made it somewhat less accessible to certain web visitors. If a User had changed the “text size” setting in their browser (e.g. Internet Explorer), to “largest”, some of the text menu’s would blow out of their space and became unreadable. Many far-sighted people do exactly this.

I talked to some technical resources to see what options there were to modify the site to limit a browser’s ability to enlarge the text within certain menu areas. This has traditionally been done using images (i.e. pictures of text), as opposed to using text characters themselves. However, there are certain design techniques (e.g. CSS), as well as Search Engine Optimization traits that make using text preferable to using an image. Well this started a whole discussion on the aging population and how a user should be able to view a site in whatever manner was best for them. It also led to a further discussion on moral and social responsibilities not to discriminate.

Now, I’m getting older, too, but it didn’t quite sit right with me that a site should need to cater to me, if indeed I wasn’t their typical audience. The answer all boiled down to target marketing.

If your target market includes people who are likely to have their “text size” set to large - then make sure your site is designed accordingly. However, you may very well be targeting a younger audience where this is secondary to other design considerations.

For all I know, the younger generation may soon be demanding non-resizable text sites as a way of rebelling against the older generation.

“So Dad, you want to monitor my MySpace account, bring a magnifying glass with you - ha ha ha.”

The bottom line is that when we try to cater to large trends we can lose sight of the immediate opportunities. Have a good understanding of who your target audience is. Design your site, design your ads, and design your ad landing pages all to appeal to that audience. If you’re in business to do business, your first priority must be economic specifics.

Examine generalizations; just because the macro market of the U.S. population is aging, doesn’t mean that you should be catering to it at this point. However, if you are targeting that market, then proper use of technology could definitely leverage your marketing strategy and your ability to convert these users.

Finally, a good piece of news is that true accessibility (i.e. for the handicapped), usually has excellent benefits. For example, if your site is developed so that a visually impaired person could easily understand and navigate it with a screen reader, then it is perfectly designed for Google and Yahoo’s crawler robots, too. For a crawler, like love, is blind.

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Why do techies do it?
March 16th, 2006 by jboulter

The Point:
Do what you should, not what you can.

The Background:
A business associate/friend and I were talking. I was lamenting the fact that often when I came up with a strong marketing answer to a client’s business challenge, I was often at odds with my technical staff. They preferred to do things the “right way”. Additionally, they often came up with fantastic ways to deploy new technologies without any idea of the marketing purpose.

So I asked my friend - “why?” His answer - “Because they can.”

Now, to some I am a tech geek, to others a neophyte. It usually depends where on the spectrum you are coming from. I have both a strong marketing and strong technical background. However, I’m no match for those creating, using, and deploying technology on a daily basis. Still, I have felt the thrill of overcoming a technical challenge, of creating something that should be exciting to all - but isn’t.

Web Marketing is a marriage of marketing and technology. It is a constant battle for balance. If done right - you, the business client win. You leverage technology to drive more high quality traffic to your website. If done wrong - either you get a cool look that nobody sees, or a well trafficked, poorly converting page.

Seek out specialists that also see the big picture.

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Newsletter - March-April 2006
February 7th, 2006 by jboulter

Watch for the Inaugural Newsletter - Coming March-April 2006

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