Whenever we work with start-ups as online marketing clients, they often want to know one thing: how soon will this start working?

It’s completely understandable. They’ve just invested considerable time and money in creating their new product or business. They want to know how quickly they can start earning a return on that investment.

But just as a new brick-and-mortar shop needs to take steps to build its customer base, an online business also needs to put in some up-front effort in its online marketing to create interest and drive traffic, and ultimately sales.

Although some of these steps yield more immediate response, others—search engine optimization (SEO) in particular—simply don’t happen overnight. A more realistic timeframe is 30 to 90 days.

So here’s our recipe, and a sample timeline, for generating success in 90 days or less.

Continue reading "How to Be An Overnight Success Online (In 30 to 90 Days)" »

As Heidi mentioned, I spent the last two weeks in Kombolcha, Ethiopia with Habitat for Humanity. My pictures are available on Flickr if you'd like to see what I was up to while I was away. Otherwise, here's what we've been reading this week:

What are you selling?

Sales people sell features, but customers buy benefits. Why we shouldn't discount emotional benefits from Branding Strategy.

Global Brands

What is a global brand? from Branding Strategy. This was recently interesting question to me since I was in an extremely rural part of Ethiopia for the past 2 weeks but Coca Cola was still pervasive.

Metrics

One of the most common questions we get is about measuring - either site metrics or social media metrics. Here are some tips on getting started from the Online Marketing Blog

60 Million Professionals Can't Be Wrong

When deciding on a social media activity mix, many companies forget about LinkedIn. The Online Marketing Blog offers some great suggestions about how to incorporate LinkedIn into your marketing mix.

Privacy Concerns

And finally, from the Onion - Google's "unsettlingly specific apology" about privacy concerns.

Metrics are the holy grail of social media - how can you tell what's working? In their new ebook Radian6 explores some easy and practical ways to measure your social media efforts.  

There were a few points in particular that stood out:

First, decide your business goals and then choose metrics that illustrate progress toward those goals.

And second, start with an hypothesis like, "Increased activity on Twitter will decrease call center volume and costs." Then measure that over time to see if it holds up. Just keep in mind that factors like annual sales are affected by so many factors that one activity can't generally claim credit (unless you're advertising during the Super Bowl), so that's usually not a good hypothesis to start with.

And the book included a hint that requires a little bit of extra effort up front, but will be well worth it for tracking purposes. When sharing links through a URL shortener, first create a unique URL using Google URL generator (or your analytics tool) including the parameters for the content and the social network where you plan to share it. Then use bit.ly or another shortening service to shorten the unique URL. That way you will be able to track referrals and conversion rates for each unique URL. Of course, that won't help you when others create shortened URLs for your content, but that will tell you something as well.

Have you successfully tested any hypotheses with metrics? What did you find?

WordStream recently wrote a great case study detailing a link bait campaign they created and launched that used a hot news topic as a peg to drive interest--and ultimately an inbound link from the New York Times.

While we can't claim attention from the New York Times, we were also recently able to capitalize on a buzzworthy topic--DC's recent back-to-back Snowmaggeddon storms--to drive interest and sales.

Here's how it happened, and what worked.

Continue reading "Case Study: Snowmageddon + Social Media = Sales" »

My colleague Lisa King is currently halfway around the world, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity in Ethiopia. So I'm filling in with this week's list of links, some for work and some for pleasure.

How Search Is Changing

In this edition of SEOMoz's video series Whiteboard Fridays, "How Search Is Changing," Rand Fishkin explains how recent moves by Google indicate that the social graph will become as important as the link graph in determining search ranking. What does this mean for businesses? That social media may become as important as search marketing.

Also in search news, John Battelle considers the implications of Google's recent purchase of human-powered search site Aardvark.

10 Goals to Measure on Your Landing Pages

Whether for pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns or organic search, you should be using landing pages to guide your users toward a conversion goal. But what can you measure as a goal besides sales? Megan Leap of Search Engine Journal has written a list of "10 Types of Landing Page Goals."

Complicators vs. Simplifiers

The always entertaining Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman, starts a 4-part series on Complicators vs. Simplifiers in advertising--and why the Complicators are winning.

Outsourcing Company Blog Posts

In our recent series on starting a company blog, one of the aspects we covered was the content for the blog itself--and how to generate it. One option is to recruit outside resources for writing posts. Marketing Sherpa offers 6 tips for outsourcing your blog.

Online Wedding Planning, Google Docs Style

Did you get engaged on Valentine's Day? Here's how to plan your wedding with Google Docs.

[Photo credit: Matti Mattila, Flickr Creative Commons]

In a perfect world, we’d all have unlimited budgets to lavish on our websites & related online efforts. (Also in a perfect world I’d look like Angelina Jolie and have an unlimited designer shoe budget—but that’s another post.) Alas, those of us living in the real world need to deal with pesky things like cost and time constraints.  

That means we sometimes (okay, usually) need to scale back our lofty ambitions for top-to-bottom redesigns, custom application development, whiz-bang widgets, etc, etc, etc. But the good news is, you can do a heck of a lot to improve your web strategy on a modest budget and an aggressive schedule. The key is to focus on what will give you the most bang for your buck; that is, what makes the most sense for your business goals.

Here are five ways you can quickly improve your web efforts:

Continue reading "“So You Can’t Afford a Redesign.” The Top 5 Things You Can Do Improve Your Website Right Now" »

I'll be traveling for the next 2 weeks so here are some extra links to keep you occupied while I'm gone.

What's the Buzz

When we're not talking about snowpocalyse vs. snowmageddon vs. snowfecta here in Washington DC, everyone's trying to figure out Google Buzz. At the moment it seems to be more like Wave with more people talking about having it and trying to figure out what to do with it.

And of course, we're watching all the tweets from TED and wishing we were in California. You can watch the videos of the sessions as they are posted. My favorite so far is J.K. Rowling on the fringe benefits of failure.

I might have titled this When I ask for your opinion, I actually want it, but Seth Godin reminds us that when you're asked, it's not about being right.

Year in Review

comScore releases The Digital Year in Review. Download the white paper to see which consumer trends dominated the digital media scene in 2009.

What's your story?

Google reminds us that the story is everything during their Super Bowl ad

Resources

SEOMoz offers 30 SEO Bookmarklets to save you time of some of the most commonly used SEO datapoints.

Google has launched a new Adwords Online Classroom with hands-on line training in Adwords topics including optimization and using Analytics to improve your ROI.

A friend and former colleague recently lamented on her blog that no one had commented on her new re-design. From the responses she received, the reason was soon obvious - no one had seen it. All of her readers were using RSS. Great for ensuring your readers see every post, but not so much for commenting on the design.

But that discussion highlighted another struggle we have - internally and with our clients. How do you measure blog interaction and engagement now? It's no longer as easy as the number of comments made on the post.

The way people interact with blogs has changed. Readers can now share the post with a comment in their RSS reader, tweet or re-tweet a comment and a link (with or without visiting the site), share the link or comment on a shared Facebook link. This means the conversation can be fractured and needs to be addressed in multiple places.

Some sites are currently debating the usefulness of comments - Engadget recently turned off their comments temporarily and Web Worker Daily is asking Are Blog Comments Worth It?

As you're thinking about interaction with your readers, remember the conversation happens where they are, not just where you are. And what they're saying there could be much more interesting than the comments they leave on your site. You may find it helpful to use a social media monitoring tool like Social Scan or a paid service like Radian6 to monitor and follow up on these multiple conversation threads.

Do more with mobile

Google is updating the features on mobile ads again - this time introducing click-to-call phone numbers in mobile ads. I can see this as a definitely helpful feature instead of trying to remember a number and dial.

Like Post-its for Analytics

Google Analytics has now made their annotations feature available to everyone. If you run a special promotion or your site is featured somewhere, you can create an annotation to note the event and help track traffic, conversions, etc. or just remember that it happened six months later when someone asks about the spike in traffic.

Social Sharing

Delicious changes the way you can view links which gives it a more StumbleUpon feel. You can see Google's take called Fast Flip in the Google Labs.

Checking in

The Frugal Traveler gives us an interesting approach to the benefits of Foursquare. Being mayor can be more than ceremonial when it leads to discounts or inside info on a venue. I finally broke down and installed Foursquare on my phone.

A tale of two social media sites

The New York Times reviews The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Sounds like a soap opera.

Iron Chef - Bing vs. Google edition

I haven't found much that Bing is better for - or maybe Google is just a habit. But this feature could be seriously helpful. Bing has added a recipe search that might help you decide what's for dinner.

Assigning authority to the Twitterati

In indexing Tweets, are re-tweets more important? Does it depend on who said it initially? Or who passed it on? Apparently so, according to Technology Review. Google is working to identify "reputed followers" which will presumably work like inbound links and PageRank to give higher authority to certain information on Twitter.

No RSS feed? No problem!

You can now use Google Reader to keep up with changes on any webpage. So if there's a product you've been keeping an eye on and want to know if the price or description has changes, Google Reader can now create a feed for that page and let you know when content on the page has updated. I tried it out and it's incredibly easy to use.

Content is King

The Online Marketing Blog offers 10 Tips for Content Marketing Success, and they have some thought provoking statistics. 900,000 blog posts are published every 24 hours and 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, so creating compelling content is essential.

Facebook Privacy Changes

We've written extensively about Facebook privacy settings in the past, but some new changes were made recently and it's important that you understand the changes and why you shouldn't automatically accept the Facebook defaults. Here are 3 Facebook Settings you should check now, from the New York Times. (More to come on this topic.)