Before you say "Get my Business on Twitter"

Before you start saying "Get my business on Twitter, I want to be where all the buzz is happening now, sounds so exciting" to your marketing team; technology team or agency, here's some quick to do list:

Identifying where your customers are REALLY
Accessing where and how your customers (prospects, existing,brand loyal, passionate evangelists) are engaging with your business or brand through digging into your business intelligent data (CRM, Web analytics, other internal data, external data, channel data) and mapping it out.

• Are they on Twitter ?
• How are they communicating about your business or brand with others ?
  

Think two way communication and not one way
If you thought of using Twitter as the way you blast promotions and deals you did with TV, forget it, it doesn't work this way in Twitter. Want to understand how a business communicate with its customers ? Need a live example ? Here's Zappos, take a look on how they are engaging and communicating with customers and non customers alike.

Track > Learn > Understand > Repeat
Identifying which messages and post are generating response through url link trackers like bit.ly or the recent Twitter Data Tracking tool found in Omniture.

• Calculating your url link CTR (Click Through rate) = individual post clicks / number of followers (in identifying which post / message generates higher or lower response)
  
• Measuring the desired response after which (i.e. site visit recency, depth of visit, visitor loyalty, blogpost comments,newsletter signup, software download, etc)
• Finding out how often your business is mentioned on Twitter;
• Who are the individuals mentioning most about your business or brand and who are their audience ?
  

Is your business on Twitter ?
How are you Listening and Learning about your business and customers ?
Let's carry on the conversation on Twitter

Lead Generation Guide

How do you implement and execute a successful lead generation marketing campaign ? And how do you quantify a successful B2B lead generation campaign ?

How ?
Mac McIntosh has created a Step by Step guide, on how you could create a successful B2B lead generation marketing campaign:

Step 1 - Set Goals
Determine your company’s goals for sales revenue in the coming year

Step 2 - How much new business do you need ?
Determine the percentage of your company’s revenue that needs to come from new business

Step 3 - How much revenue needs to come from marketing’s leads ?
Determine the percentage of your company’s new business revenue that needs to come from marketing-generated leads

Step 4 - Define “qualified sales lead”
Determine the definition of a “qualified sales lead” with which marketing, sales and corporate management agree

Step 5 - Calculate how many qualified sales leads will you need
Determine how many qualified sales leads are needed to meet your sales revenue goals

Step 6 - How many inquiries needed ?
Determine how many new inquiries or responses are needed to generate enough qualified sales leads to meet your goals

Step 7 - Determine the specific business problems you solve
Determine the specific business problems your products/services address and the problems your company is qualified to solve

Step 8 - What are your competitive advantages ?
Determine your company’s competitive advantages and how best to articulate them

Step 9 - Who are your best prospects ?
Target the best companies and contacts with your lead-generation efforts

Step 10 - How will you reach the best prospects ?
Determine how to reach the best companies and contacts

Does the economic downturn affect your lead generation efforts ?
Why ? And Why not ?

And how could you reach new prospects effectively and efficiently and turning them into customers ?

You decide.

Strategies and key learnings from Obama's presidential campaign

In the following video, Larry Grisolano, senior communications specialist for President Obama's election campaign, discuss the strategies and key learnings from one of last year's most successful marketing campaigns.


AMA Mplanet 2009 - Interview with Larry Grisolano from AMA Mplanet 2009 on Vimeo.

What key learnings could you take away from this video ?

Location...Location....Location

Where are you now ?
Where exactly are you now ?
Where are your friends now ?
Where do your friends hang out ?

Slide out your smart phone and let Google Latitude show you...

In this video,Stephen Baker talks about the latest location-tracking software, Sense Networks and Google Latitude, and how companies may target advertisements to users of these programs



How could you tapped into this channel for your business ?
Is is feasible ? Yes ? No ?
Your decide.

Are you on Twitter ?

Are you on Twitter ?
If so, how are you tapping onto this channel for communication ? Be it for business, personal or ?

In this video from TED, Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams, reveals that many of the ideas driving that growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves.



How are you tapping onto Twitter as a communication channel ?
Your thoughts ?
Are you on Twitter ?
Ping me on Twitter.

Open Source Web Analytics

Here's Piwik, an alternative to Google Analytics in tracking your website visitors' onsite clicking behavior. What's really unique with this open source tool is its features are built inside plugins, which mean to say you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. And in addition, the user interface is fully customizable.

Try the Piwik online demo

How to get started ?

1. Download the Piwik 0.2.30 zip file
2. Upload onto your web server (Requirement of at least PHP 5.1 and a Mysql database)
3. Start tracking the onsite clicking behaviour !
4. Analyze the findings
5. Optimize
   
6. Repeat steps 4-6

Now your turn.
Any other open source web analytics we have missed out ?

How Gary Vaynerchuk turn negative into positive through social media

In this video,Gary Vaynerchuk clearly demonstrates how an organization could quickly turn around a negative crisis into positive, through social media. One of his network sites,Corkd,was hacked and here's how he personally addressed the situation:



Now your turn.
How would you respond to a negative crisis ?
What actions would you initiate ? Why and Why not?

PPC Landing Page: Are they aligned ?

Let's start off the year with a quick look at a PPC campaign which is running LIVE on Google as of this writing and how we could learn and apply from here. If this is your first time here, do take a look at my last post on what's in for your website visitors and do share your thoughts with us in this post.

Let's do a Google on "storage for paintings" and imagine ourself in need of more space for storing our lovely painting collection.

And here's the first position ad:




Seems like they are essentially squeezing all their product offerings onto this ppc ad, wishing the potential customer / searchers will click onto it just because they have everything listed on the ad. Does the ad seems only understandable to the company offering this ? Or should it be the other way round ? No Call to Action found. What's in for the potential customer ? What are they really looking for ? What's the benefit other than as low as $50 ?

Now moving onto the landing page:



Once landed onto the landing page, searchers are left to figure out why they are here in the first place. What's next for the searchers ? What's the desirable action ? What's in for them ? The story doesn't ends here by just throwing them onto a generic landing page. Is it really worthy to spend the money driving interested searchers onto your landing page and after which having them to bounce out in a few seconds just because they can't find what they were promised or looking for.

Even having a highly motivated searcher with the intent to seek the solution themselves through clicking onto the Contact Us button; additional voluntary steps will have to be initiated by them in either dialing the number or email listed on the section. How many searchers would be willing to go the extra mile for you ?



Now Your Turn.
What other learnings could we add on ?

What's In for your website visitors ?

Doesn't matter if you have the best structured ppc campaigns, high click through rates or great ad copies for all your ppc campaigns.














Before you get really excited about it, do you know what happens next after your visitors lands onto your website ? The "What's in for me" objective starts to kicks in for visitors whom came onto your website because of what they were told earlier on in your ppc ads, so does your landing page offer what they were looking for ?

If Yes...good job...however the journey does not ends here....did they eventually completed the goal or objective which you hope they would do so (Be it signing up for your newsletter, filling up a form,etc...) once they landed onto your landing page ? Did they take action ?

If No....Why ? And Why not ?

Today in this post, I will be sharing some tips which you should give it a try and let the data speaks for itself:

• What's the goal / objective once your ppc visitors lands onto your particular landing page ?
• Instead of landing your ppc visitors onto your generic homepage, try sending them to a customized page which is relevant to what they were looking for when they were clicking onto your ppc ads earlier on.
• Test which ppc ad copies work best for the individual landing pages (product/info /etc)
• Split testing your ppc ad copies constantly.
• Start small and learn from your testings before scaling up.
• Once you're confident enough, try Google Website Optimizer in testing different elements of your landing page; finding out which elements work together best in achieving higher conversions for your landing page goals / objectives.

If you're really serious about getting better ROI for your ppc campaigns, try the above mentioned tips,not only will you get higher conversions but also getting to understand more about your website visitors' behavior and in turn creating more targeted and relevant content for them.

To end this post with a mantra: Learn, Analyze, Test, Repeat*
Agree or Disagree ?
Your Turn Now !

2008 PPC Learnings

2008.
With 2008 coming to a close,have you reflect back regarding your search campaigns in 2008 ? What can you learn and leverage for 2009 ?

Here's some learnings to share for 2008:

Daily Budget:
How better to blow your budget overnight ?
- Setting a newly revised daily budget and going for a holiday, going for a few day retreat, ignoring the budget over the weekend. Get ready to burn off your budget when you try the above mention.

Keywords
- Bidding on high click through keywords which has zero or very low conversion rates.
- Over bidding on keywords without having taken into consideration of your revenue / profit per conversion.
- Paying for negative keywords without knowing (Failure to run the reports in identifying the negative keywords which are costing you money but zero / low conversions)
- Lumping all your keywords all onto a single ad group when you should be segmenting them individually onto respective relevant ad groups.

ZERO testing:
- Simply just running your only ad copy without any alternative copy in testing which has a better conversion rate. No split / AB testing conducted.
- Which elements of the landing page are better enticing the prospects in converting ? (Call to action button, colours, hero image, form fields, copy content)

Generic Landing Page:
- Simply send all your potential customers to a generic page without a goal in mind; paying for all the clicks but zero conversions. When you should be sending them to respective product / promotions / information page.

Your Turn.
PPC search campaign learnings to share ?

Optimize your PPC campaigns

2008.
The year is coming to an end.
How much are you spending on search marketing ?
Are your marketing dollars well spent ?
Or are you throwing your $ out of your window ?

So how do you better optimize your ppc campaigns ?
Enough said, here's some quick tips to implement now.

PPC elements optimization:

Negative keywords
* Removal of non-performing keywords which are not converting but costing $

Split testing
* Any split test conducted on a on-going basis ?
* Which ad group is converting better ? In individual countries ? In seasonal period ?
* How long is the test conducted ? Too long ? Too Short period ?

Historical keyword performance
* What's the historical keyword performance of individual ad groups / campaigns ?


Other on-page elements to test:

Call to Action Button
* Colour - which colour on the cta button converts better ? In different countries ? In different seasonal period ?
* Copy on cta - which copy on cta converts better ? In different countries ? In different seasonal period ?
* Shape - Which shape coverts better ? In different countries ?

Web Form
* Which part of your web form field is actually necessary ? Or which part of web form fields are hindering conversion rates ?
* Shorter web form field, have you tried testing the conversion after alteration ?

Landing Page Load Time
* How fast is your landing page loading ?
* What is the landing page individual document size ?
* What is the average Internet connection speed of your visitors ?

Landing Page Copy Font
* Is your landing page fonts visible ? (Even though visitors / potential customers scan web pages)
* Which Font size / colour converts better ? In different countries ?

Landing Page Friction Elements
* Which element of your landing page is actually hindering conversion rate ? (Don't make the visitors / potential customers think !)
* Are there any substantial claims or testimonials to support your copy content in reducing friction,thereby increasing trust factor ?

Implement this:
> Try using Google Website Optimizer, let the consumers test / decide for you, which on page elements work best at which country, for which seasonal period, for which promotional campaign, etc.

Test, Test, Test
Learn.
Optimize.
Re-Test, Re-Test

Are you testing ?

SEO / SEM: Online Tools Collection

Alright, here we go....
A collection of free online SEO / SEM tools
ready to be BOOKMARK !!

SEO Tools:

Search Engine Analytics
Simply just enter any Url into the search query and voila you get a trend report from link popularity, PageRank™, Alexa Rank, keywords.

Head Checker
This tool will check any web page's header tags.

Search Combination Tool
This tool will generate all possible combinations of two separate lists of search phrases.

Keyword Density Analysis Tool
Enter a page URL and this tool will tell you the keyword density of all the phrases on the page.

Spider Viewer
Wonder how your page is viewed by a search engine spider / bot ?

Index Rank
Check and benchmark your website indexation against your competition

SeoDigger
Find out for which keywords your site ranks high enough to be in Google Top 20. Registering for a free account at SeoDigger gives you information per entire domain as well as per separate pages.

Site Comparison Analysis
A useful tool in benchmarking your website against a competitor via a radar diagram.

Stomper Ranker
A firefox plugin in finding out how well your site fare against the competition in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live.

SEO Site Audit Tool
A quick audit on your website or competitor on how well your website is faring on search engines, social bookmarking, etc

SEO Audit Report
Free SEO audit which provides score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors on how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Backlink Analysis
Find out all the important information about your competitor's links. This free tool reporting includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information , etc.

Website Analysis
Another tool in digging out everything regarding a website


SEM Tools:

Keyword Tool
The free keyword tool from Google
Find out how competitive your particular keyword is / are; Crawl your own website to determine which keyword / s are getting higher traffic

Traffic Estimator
The free Traffic Estimator tool from Google
Get quick traffic estimates for keywords for your sem campaigns

Keyword Competition Tool
Find out how competitive the particular keyword /s is for your sem campaigns.

Search Radar
Search for topics relevant to your search query


Landing Page Optimization Tools:

Loading Speed of your website
How long does your website load in various web browsers ?

Website Speed Test
Another tool in testing your web site loading speed

Page Size Calculator
Useful in calculating the size of your web page and the estimated time it would take to download on a 56k Modem.

Heatmap Analysis
Identify how people view your website, photo or ad and which areas are getting most of the attention.

If you know of any SEO / SEM tools that were not mentioned here or missed any goodies, drop a note and I will update the post.

Bookmark.
Share.

Test Your Call to Action Button

Before we begin for today,
lets do a little test below should we ?







Yes, which call to action button would entice you to click onto it if you were a student signing up for your degree program ?

Have your answers ready ?

As a business owner / marketer, which copy would you put onto your call to action button ?

• Would a generic copy on the button entice more clicks from your users / visitors ?

• Or would a copy which inform your users / visitors on the next step or what's IN for them once they click onto the the call to action button ?
  

Why not implement a simple A/B testing and let your users or visitors decide for you. Let them decide which copy; which colour of the call to action button; which size entice them better to click onto the call to action button.

This is only part of the equation, make sure you test your landing page elements in an integrated approach, taking into consideration the following elements as well:

• Body copy
• Hero shot images
• Sign up form fields
• Landing page load time
  

Are you testing your landing page ?
Or are you sitting in the cubic room guessing ?
Are you optimizing your landing page ?
You decide.

Insight in Creating a Profitable Startup Company

Startups.
Have you thought of starting your own business ?
Or have you already started your own business ?

You have a great idea.
You have a great team to start with (Best case scenario)
You are ready to gear up and kick start your startup.
So you have everything in place....
What else is required ?

Idea + team + ? = Profit

In the following video,David Heinemeier Hansson,
creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals
will be sharing his insights in creating a profitable startup company.

Your Turn.
What's your view ?

Tim Ash Interview: Landing Page Optimization

An interview conducted by Sage with Tim Ash on his book: Landing Page Optimization



Highly Recommended book written by Tim Ash:
> Landing Page Optimization

How crawable is your website ?

How does a search engine spider crawl your website you say ?

Here's an analogy of how a spider might crawl your website: Imagine yourself visiting a newly constructed mall down by your town, what might you do when you first find yourself inside the mall ?

• Navigating around ? For something of interest to you ?

• Looking around ? For something of interest to you ?

• Which varieties of stores are available ? Which is / are relevant to your needs ?
  

• Where are the restaurants / fast food outlets / restrooms ?

You decided to locate the restroom but to your surprise.....the door to the restroom was locked when you reached it.

One week later, you came back to the mall and when you went to the same restroom...the door was locked once again.....

Another week later.....history repeats itself.....
Will you still try using the same restroom the next time round ?
Yes ? No ?

Similarly the search engine bot faces the same issue when their navigation is blocked either by your password protected content areas; your graphical images which displays nothing when being blocked by ad block programs, missing images....etc...

So what could you do to prevent such mishaps ?

• Adding appropriate ALT attribute descriptions to your graphical image; Making sure the surrounding copy / text around your image clearly sets the context.
  

• Having password protected content area only for those content that would require registration such as pay-per view content / subscription based premium contents.
  

Your turn.
What could you ensure the crawl-ability of your website ?

Ads on PDF ?

Ads on Adobe PDF ?
A recent partnership between Adobe and Yahoo allows PDF
publishers to embed Yahoo ads in it and earn revenues
based on the ads click through.

To get started, Publishers simply just upload their
PDF files to Adobe for ad registration. After which ,the PDF is
than analyzed and relevant ads will be placed.

Users
So how will this have an impact on the current users ?
Will they be enticed to click onto the relevant ads while reading
through the PDF file ? Or will they find it an intrusion ?
Only time will tell whether this model work or fail.

Advertisers
So how will this have an impact for advertisers ?
How could you tapped into this new ad placement channel ?
How can you better optimized your ad copy and content for PDF ?

Your turn now.
Your thoughts.

A day in Twitter

Ever wonder how Twitter's office is like ?
Here's the video from Technology Review providing us with the peek into Twitter's offices days before they prepared for a move to a more grown-up space.

Search Engine Optimization Daily Digest - Issue 2

• Domain Strategies for Search Engine Optimization
> Are you choosing the right domain strategy?


• 5 Reasons to Not Use Black Hat Tactics
  > Are you practicing Black Hat tactics ?

• Improved Flash indexing
  > Finally Google learns to crawl Flash
  

• Flash May Now Bring More Search Traffic, Does it Matter?
  > How does it relate back to your bottom line ?

• Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy
> Being Cool or being useful to searchers ?

Related Posts:
. Search Engine Optimization Daily Digest - Issue 1

Analyse Your Top Ranking Keywords

What are your website's top ranking keywords ?
Which keyword phrases do you rank well for ?
Which keywords are your competition ranking well for ?
How could you better optimize your website and content ?

Try SeoDigger, a free keyword utility tool which helps you in identifying the keywords your site ranks well to be in Google Top 20. In addition, data showing you the search popularity of the phrase are also determined from Wordtracker and Overture results .

However, this free unregistered version only analyze a single page of your website.Sign up for the free registered version, in identifying the rankings of all the pages on your website.

Take action now: Type in your website URL and let SeoDigger show you which phrases that website ranks for with-in the top 20 results.

Analyze.Test.Optimize.

Related Posts:
. Keyword Analysis
. Competitive Analysis Tool - Part 1
. Competitive Analysis Tool - Part 2