Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

Viral marketing is an awesome, cheap way to get your product or service spread across the Internet, right?

Wrong.

The very idea that viral marketing can be applied to your business is a myth that has been perpetuated mostly by folks who are unwilling to believe that you need to work hard and do the groundwork in order to succeed.

Not to say that nobody ever succeeds in “going viral” but the bottom line is that almost without exception, most efforts that succeeded owed their viral success to either:

1. Giving away something for free that formerly cost money - i.e. Hotmail for email, Napster for music, Skype for long distance.
2. Creating a meaningful community - i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Flickr. OR
3. Both of the above - i.e. YouTube offering free video hosting and creating an online video community, Wikipedia offering a free encyclopedia and a community of contributors.

Other than that, there are a few successful examples (Mentos and Coke video, Axe viral commercials) but the bottom line is that the chance of orchestrating a viral campaign that succeeds in propelling your business to new heights overnight is about as likely as winning the lottery.

So, all that said, what CAN you do to leverage the Internet to spread word of your product or service online?

1. Identify a group of users who love what you offer. For instance, if your product is a time tracking software tool, your most happy users might be independent graphic designers.
2. Find out where this type of user congregates online and join in where possible and appropriate. There are numerous sites that provide resources, articles and forums for customers in just about any industry you could imagine..
3. Engage in these sites and communities in a meaningful manner. For example, in the case of a graphic design business forum, start to read forum posts daily and reply where you can add insight to business topics.

   Resist the urge to “pitch” your service, but rather focus on becoming a valued part of the community (be sure, however, to always include an online “signature” in your posts that explains who you are and what you do). In the case of news and article sites, figure out some topics that would be of interest and find out how to submit articles to the respective sites.

The most important advice, which may seem at first to be counterintuitive, is to avoid “selling” in your interactions. Focus instead on building trust, relationships and credibility (although never hesitate to tell folk what you actually do when it’s appropriate).

Also, once you’ve established your credibility in the group, it’s usually reasonable to do things like ask the group for opinions for product improvement, post short surveys to learn more, and recruit beta testers or focus group members.

If you take a long-term approach to this strategy and spend a bit of time on it weekly, you will eventually achieve widespread awareness of your product within the group, positive word of mouth, and a position as a leading supplier (in your field) to the industry.

Best of all, you’ll get to know your best users even better, resulting in product improvements that will make your product even better for them. In doing this you create an ongoing feedback loop that will give you the insights you need to become insurmountable in your chosen industry.

Hard work? It definitely takes a bit of time and patience, but the good news is that it will work for anyone who sincerely wants to improve their competitive position within a chosen industry. Plus, it beats waiting around to win the lottery.

Note: Obviously, if you want to embrace this approach there are lots of other things you can do in terms of Online PR, Word of Mouth Marketing, Article Marketing, etc. We’ll be tackling these in future newsletters and blog posts. In the meantime, check out the 5 Secrets To Success In Article Marketing if you’re interested in learning more about article marketing…

Money’s tight right now. With this in mind, do you have the background information on your own company that will allow you to make smart marketing decisions?

If you’re serious about marketing in a responsible and cost effective manner then you should definitely read through these questions and make sure you have answers for each one.

Even many large companies don’t have this information all together, so don’t feel bad if you don’t have all the answers (although I guarantee your marketing program is not doing all it can be if you don’t).

Products:

• What is your flagship/most popular product or service?
• What is your guarantee/return policy?
• Best features – what makes this a great product or service?
• Competitive Products - what would your prospective customers buy if they didn’t buy this product?
• Why is this product better than competitive products (Answer this question in terms your customers would use)?
• What are the answers to the above questions for your other top products?

Target Groups

• What specific and definable groups (i.e. engineers, skiers, dentists, crane operators, homeowners) benefit greatly from your products and are currently using them?
• Which groups are using which products and why it is they are using them?
• What groups are currently NOT using your products but would benefit greatly from them? Please match the groups to the products and mention why it is they would benefit from them.
• Is there anything that would prevent these groups from buying your product (i.e. technical hurdles, no purchasing authority, not enough confidence in your brand, lack of awareness, etc)? Be specific according to each group.
• If these are corporate groups, are they in industries where they are likely to share information on great products with others in their industry, or are they likely to keep it a secret?
• What channels do these groups use to communicate with others in their industry (web groups, communities, trade associations, industry publications, etc, etc)? What are the top 3 for each group?

Communications

• Which online groups or communities do people within your company currently participate in (i.e. industry chat groups, bulletin boards, Google Groups, Linkedin, industry web sites, etc, etc.)? Are these groups also groups that prospective customers participate in?
• What groups might it be valuable to start participating in?
• Does anyone in your company blog? What is the goal of the blog and what do they blog about?
• Do you have a newsletter? What is its goal, who’s it about, who does it go to, and how do you get new subscribers?

Credibility

• Is there anyone within your company that is widely known as an expert within your field or your target industries?
• If not, is there anyone in your company that has an expert level of knowledge in your field who is not widely known in your field or your target industries?

Content

• What content is currently produced on a regular basis within your organization (white papers, support threads, articles, help documentation, newsletters, blog posts, community postings, etc)?
• Is this content being leveraged to optimize your site’s SEO? Is it being proactively distributed to those who would benefit from it?

Marketing, Market and ROI

• Do you currently have a marketing plan that describes the activities you want to undertake in the next 6-12 months and ties your various activities together in order to maximize their contribution value?
• What tracking do you currently have in place to measure the ROI of your various marketing activities.
• Do you know what the total value of your market is within regions that are accessible to you (i.e. How much does your total accessible market spend per year on products that offer the same features as your current products)?
• What is the typical sales cycle for buyers of your products (i.e. immediate impulse buy vs. careful analysis over a period of weeks or months)?
• Do your buyers typically approve the purchase of your product themselves or do they need to defer to higher-ups within their organizations? Do their higher ups have a technical understanding of products of your type?
• Is there an event that typically necessitates the purchase of your software (i.e. year end, launch of new website, holiday, etc)?
• Do you know what your “customer lifetime value” is (the amount one customer will spend over the period of time they are likely to be a customer)?
• How much do you estimate that you spend on marketing to gain a new customer? Is ROI-positive?
• If marketing were as simple as “buying” new customers, how much would you be comfortable paying for one?
• Which is currently more important: engaging in short term marketing efforts that will drive short term revenues or building longer term marketing programs that will take longer to result in revenues but which will ultimately be more profitable?

Of course, the real question is what to do with these answers. Sadly, I’ve got nothing for you in this post!

Watch for upcoming newsletter articles and blog posts that will help you identify the most strategic marketing opportunities for your company…

Are you concerned about Marketing ROI in these tough times? Read on for a variety of things you can implement virtually without cost if you have the available resources.

Co-Registration & Co-Marketing
Are there companies in your industry that have related but non-competitive offerings? What better time to work with them and figure out some strategic co-marketing. These efforts might include:

• Ad swaps. Get them to run a small ad on their site or in their newsletter in exchange for running one on theirs.
• Co-registration. Get them to offer an opt-in “check box” for your newsletter in their newsletter sign up process and do the same for them.
• Shared editorial. Write a relevant newsletter article or blog post for them and get them to do the same. Be sure to get a link back to your site to maximize SEO.
• Contests. Launch a contest to encourage purchases or sign ups and get a partner to give you the prizes. Be sure to give them enough exposure so that it’s well worth their while to do so.

Social Media
Have you figured out how to leverage Social Media for your business yet? If not, it’s a great time to start some experiments in this “free” medium. Bear in mind the word “social” in social media and make sure you only launch relevant initiatives or you’ll risk alienating your audience.

One great strategy is to develop some valuable content and offer it for free. You can then promote the content through social media (which, unlike promoting your business directly, is okay). As an example, if your business offers Executive Coaching you might want to write a great guide on “Effective Leadership in Tough Times” then find opportunities to get the word out to relevant sites, networks and forums.

Just remember, you do NOT want to be spamming sites and forums with commercial stuff. Just stick to getting word out about the helpful guide (or whatever content you develop) and ensure that the guide itself and the pages it’s presented on are well branded and have an appropriate call to action. If you take the high road and do a great job executing on this you can achieve dramatic success with such an approach.

Email List Optimization
Regardless of the size of your organization you can improve your results dramatically by cleaning and optimizing your list. The lowest hanging fruit in these regards is simply to determine who has been in your list for the last 6 months or more and has not opened an email. Break this group into a separate list, send them a test mailing to determine they are indeed “dead” and then cut them from the list.

Your deliverability % will go up, your complaint rate will go down and your costs will be reduced if you use an external vendor. This is a tactic we love to bring in when we’re doing email consulting with larger companies as it’s usually possible to save the company more money in deployment costs than what the engagement costs them (we’re 3 for 3 in these regards in the last year or so with companies who have lists over 500,000 in size).

This post originally ran in our Online Marketing Insights Newsletter. Watch for the next issue as we look at Article Marketing, Blogging and Effective Site Optimization.

Article Marketing is getting a lot of press these days as a great way of marketing yourself or your company online. That said, you have to approach it in a certain manner if you want to succeed. With that in mind, let’s look at some secrets to success in this area.

Admittedly, these “secrets” should be fairly obvious, but based on what I’m seeing out there, this is definitely not the case.

1) Adopt Article Marketing as a philosophy, not as a tactic. If you simply see Article Marketing as a means to an end, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed. Instead, stop to consider whether you’re ready to fully embrace the idea of spending the time to deliver quality education to your market or your user base.

If the answer is “yes” then you are likely to succeed. If the answer is “no” then you probably shouldn’t bother as it’s almost certain you’ll quit your efforts long before the many benefits start to roll in.

Also, if you’re not truly committed to the educational element of this strategy, your articles will likely end up being too “salesy” to ring true and build credibility for yourself and your offering. Successful article marketing is almost 100% reliant on the trust and credibility you build, so never consider compromising your articles in hopes of making some quick sales.

2) Think from an SEO perspective. Submit quality articles to as many different sites as possible in order to maximize the benefit of inbound linking. As well, you never want to write for the search engines, but you should be aware of the critical keywords that you want to target so you can use them where appropriate.

Also, make sure the topics you choose to write about are related closely enough to your site and offering that there is a logical connection for your readers and good relevance for the search engines.

3) Commit to a minimum of 6 months to your program before you expect to see results. The results may happen faster but consider that it will definitely take time to identify good sites to write for, hit your stride with your writing, develop a following, build trust, drive traffic to your site and convert some of your traffic to new business.

Also, consider that a vast majority of your competitors will lose patience and quit or compromise their efforts well before this 6 month benchmark. Just remember, you want to be one of the very small group of smart marketers who see this through long enough to reap the rewards.

4) Keep your articles short and sweet. You are waaaay better off to write a larger number of short articles than a smaller number of longer articles. If you can communicate one clear idea per article you’ll keep your readers coming back for more. Also, by spending less time per article on more articles, you’ll be well positioned to write articles for a number of different sites or publications.

5) Think about conversion. In your articles it’s all about education, but once you get folks clicking through to your site from your articles, it’s all about conversion. Make sure the page you’re linking to is highly relevant, compelling, and contains a clear call to action.

Given the nature of your relationship with these readers you may want to consider a very strong call to action to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter (if you don’t have one then definitely consider starting one).

That’s it! If you have a good knowledge about the topics you’re writing on and follow the above “secrets” then you’re virtually guaranteed success as long as you stick at it long enough.

Want to learn more about Article Marketing? Sign up for our Online Marketing Insights newsletter as we’ll be providing an introduction to Article Marketing in November’s issue.

I’ve been helping launch a new blog for LicenseStream, a fantastic product that makes it extremely easy for photographers (and other creative pros) to sell their work using Rights Managed, Royalty Free, and “Rights Simple” licensing models.

If you’re a photographer, check it out to learn a bit more about the product. If you’re considering a corporate blog, have a look to see a great example of a blog that helps educate customers, drive SEO and establish credibility within a vertical.

Note: this was originally posted earlier this year. In the interim the laws in the U.S. have changed so that it’s actually illegal to put your unsubscribe functionality behind a log-in requiring a password! Any companies still doing this (I can think of a couple) would be best advised to get on track with this as soon as possible.

Ever tried to unsubscribe from a newsletter, only to find out you need to enter an account password in order to access the unsubscribe function? Ouch.

Message to marketers - don’t ever, ever, ever require this. First off, if the unsubscribe function is being accessed from a newsletter, the technology required to automatically pre-populate your readers’ email in your unsubscribe form is so simple that even I could do it!

Secondly, chances are that a majority of the readers who want to unsubscribe probably don’t remember what password they originally used for your service or publication. By requiring they log in to unsubscribe, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that these folks will flag you as spam instead of trying to figure out their password. So, if you’re wondering why your emails are going to the spam folder on Gmail or AOL, this might just be the reason.

I have a confession to make: I’m always a little nervous when I book airline tickets online. I’ve done it many, many times, but for some reason I always feel like I’m going to screw up my reservation and get stuck with the wrong tickets.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that I’m not the only person who feels this way.

With this in mind, let’s look at a huge conversion mistake I just experienced while buying tickets online from United…

I got through the flight selection process no problem (double checking my flights/times at each step), entered my credit card info, hit “okay” to purchase the tickets when the following (click to see full size version) came up:

So, this screen comes up and the first thing I see is the big, bold 932.51 when I had just clicked “okay” to a $584 total. My first thought was that there’s a mistake - given the prominence and the positioning of this price, it definitely looks like the price I’m about to get charged. Feeling a bit flustered, I started to read through the text and still was not immediately sure what the deal was.

Also, upon reading it and figuring it out, I began to doubt whether I should click on the “Purchase original itinerary” button. Taken literally, I was worried that it might truly be my original itinerary (I changed it a couple times while looking up the flights). Combined with the fact that the text above refers to the “current” itinerary and the text below refers to the “original itinerary” I definitely was not feeling too good about hitting that button.

Next, I found myself wondering whether I needed to “check” the “offer and conditions” checkbox. It kind of looks like you don’t need to, but on any other site I buy from you usually need to check such a box.

Plus, the page refers to you having to “Decline” the offer if you don’t want it. I didn’t see a “Decline” button anywhere, leading to further discomfort.

It also says it will expire in 5 minutes. Does this mean I’ll have to “rebook” if I don’t make the decision right away.

Furthermore, it’s a horrible offer! They want to charge over 50% more to upgrade ONE WAY on my 2 hour flight!

So, basically, United has taken someone intent on finishing a transaction, thrown in an unexpected/overpriced/confusing offer, and tried to add a sense of urgency to the whole thing.

Yikes.

At this point, I slowed down, determined that I was probably being paranoid and… saved a screen shot of this page so I’d have something in my defense if the wrong purchase went through.

What’s the takeaway from this? In the words of a manager I once had, “Once you make the sale, shut up! You only create opportunities for the buyer to change their mind.” This is great advice in this case. I absolutely guarantee that United loses sales with their confusing upsell tactic.

The lost sales may be balanced by the fact that United occasionally upsells the odd passenger to this ugly offer, but there’s another way to approach this. Why not make this offer AFTER they have made the original booking? If they offered this immediately after confirmation of the transaction they would remove all the risk of someone abandoning and there’s no reason why they couldn’t get the same amount of upsells (they could even keep the cheesy “expires in 5 minutes” part if they so desired).

The bottom line is to not try to accomplish an upsell before you’ve made the original sale, unless you can do it without risking the sale. United fails in this regard and damages their brand in the process.

Launching an SEO strategy is much like launching a new business. In order to succeed it’s important to research your competition and get a sense of where the best opportunities are.

The obvious first step is to search on all the most desirable terms you want to target through your SEO efforts. Have a look at the sites that come up high in the rankings:

• Do they have a lot of relevant content?
• Do they update their content (blogs, articles) on a regular basis?
• Do they have a high PageRank?
• Do they have a lot of relevant inbound links?
• Is their site structured and their content organized in a manner that is friendly to search?
  (note: we’ll discuss how to determine the above points in another post)

Once you’ve determined the answers to the above, you’ll be able to see trends and areas of opportunity. In most cases, you need to try to be “as good” in most of the areas noted and then excel at one or two areas in order to get decent rankings.

The exact areas you pick to excel at depends, of course, on where the best opportunities exist. For instance, if the sites you’re competing with have a lot of content but are poorly structured for SEO, put your biggest focus on structure (rather then trying to win on volume).

So, what to do when ALL areas are competitive? This is an interesting question that comes up regularly in industries like software and financial services. In these cases, the answer is to get more granular:

• Pick a limited number of search terms and focus on them one at a time. A LOT of strategic content around a single search term is going to yield exponentially better search results than a little bit of content on a lot of different topics. In this case, get some traction with your first chosen term(s) before moving on to focusing on the next ones. This strategy is particularly effective when executed through blogs and article archives (just make sure they are structured properly).
• Move to niche, local and/or “long-tail” terms. Typically, the more specific you can get, the less competition you’ll find. Also, focusing on a local or regional market (i.e. targeting searchers on “Seattle Web Design” rather then “Web Design”) will diminish your direct competition by a huge amount. “Long tail” is something you can build effectively over time as well - it refers to the large number of search terms that get fewer individual searches each, but cumulatively add up to a vast number of overall searches.

As I write this post I’m realizing that I could spend my entire morning and still not cover all the details I’d like to. With that scary thought in mind, I’m outta here!

Questions? Suggestions for a follow-up post? Just email me at robertecooper(at)gmail.com

Do you still think in terms of how to “position” your company? In the past, companies had the luxury of making a decision as to the “face” that they would put forward to the public and they carefully managed this facade in hopes that they would be able to control public perception of their company.

This does not work anymore.

Repeat, this does not work anymore.

With the transparency of the web, the rise of ratings systems, and the brutal honesty of the blogosphere, superficial attempts at “positioning” simply do not resonate and become a liability to your brand.

So what to do? Start by understanding that the ONLY long term route to success is to replace the idea of positioning with the idea of “communicating the essence of your company.” What is your company all about – what does it do better than anyone and what are its values?

To “position” your company in any way except the answer to the above questions will simply cause unmet customer expectations, which the world will hear about in very short order.

Stop trying to make lofty statements that don’t resonate and start portraying your company exactly as it is and you’ll do a great job of attracting and satisfying the type of customers that will make your business thrive.

Note: Can you tell this post is the product of a debate I recently had with someone about positioning?

Something happened in December that should have gotten headlines in every small business paper, magazine and website in the world. Interestingly, instead, unless you‘ve read the Google blog or done a search on “local targeting” you’re probably unaware of what happened.

What happened is that Google added Google Maps functionality to its Adwords program.

Got a decent website for your electrical supply company in Seattle and don’t want to waste money paying for clicks from outside of Washington State? Simply select the Locations feature in the Target Audience options in your Adword campaign settings, select Washington state on the map and you’re done.

Ooops, discovered you need to add Portland because you’re getting lots of sales from there? Just go back in, select Portland and add it to your target.

Your own targeting criteria will be as unique as your business, but the results are the same: less overall cost for your Adwords program, much more qualified traffic to your site, and much higher ROI.

With only a tiny percentage of businesses taking advantage of these opportunities there is no good reason for you not to dive right in.

Worried that it’s too complicated? Well, it is a bit intimidating at first, but with an investment of a couple hours of keyword/competitive research and hour to set up your Google Adwords account you’ll be rocking.

In recent weeks we’ve been gearing up to relaunch our website for the next “iteration” of our business. This involves doing things like registering domains for “client-branded” A/B testing, getting professional help to redesign our site, and implementing the tools we need to optimize our site.

Much like the “shoemaker’s children,” we’ve been going without a number of the things I tell clients they absolutely must have in place for effective website optimization. Well, we’re finally changing that, but as a young company we’ve still got to consider our budget (or lack thereof) for this effort.

This is where Google comes in. There are a couple of free Google tools that are mind-blowingly powerful if you leverage them well. Without further ado:

Google Analytics
While lacking the “Enterprise” power of major analytics providers (Omniture, WebSideStory, etc.), Google Analytics is incredibly robust for a free tool. Plus, it’s easy to install.

Even non-techy folk (like myself) can manage to implement it by themselves across their site and blog if they take the time to read through the instructions. I had it up and running correctly on our 50 page site and blog within 30 minutes.

Our implementation even included setting up specific conversion goals that we wanted to measure.

Interestingly, for some companies, Google Analytics is a better choice than some of the more robust offerings. The reason for this is that you’ll never get past the surface of what the Enterprise solutions offer unless you spend a LOT of time at it (trust me on this, I’ve spent days sifting through data in Omniture and WebSide Story).

Put it this way: unless you have a huge site or a large multi-channel effort (i.e. involving email conversion tracking and CRM), you’re likely just fine or possibly better off with Google Analytics.

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer is a tool you’ll find within Adwords. It’s primary purpose is to quickly and efficiently conduct A/B testing on landing pages for clicks to your site from Adwords.

Put simply, you can create two dramatically different versions of the page that people land on when they click on an ad you have placed in Google Search or on a content site. Then, you track the results until you can determine a “winner” of the test.

For smaller companies, this saves an awful lot of hassle in setting up a script to randomly display the different pages in the test and having the web team manage the process. If you can edit your web page and put it online, you have all the skills you need to do it yourself if you’re willing to read the instructions.

Now, the beauty of this is that Google Website Optimizer works even if you’re not paying to run Adwords. The folks at Google are quite generous in these regards. All you need to do is sign up for an Adwords account (free) and you’ve got access to it.

Also, using the Website Optimizer is not limited to Adwords. For instance, assume you have two strong opinions on what headline should be on a product page. This usually involves an argument and possibly (50% likelihood) the wrong decision.

With Website Optimizer, you can quickly create a second version of the page (with the different headline). Simply drop a snippet of code on both pages, set your conversion goal in Analytics, and you’re off to the races. You can now run an A/B test on the page.

So, what are you waiting for?

For a while in my career I worked in a company where traffic was considered the main yardstick for success and growth. This became incredibly frustrating at times as, while there was always some more budget to grow traffic, getting budget for marketing optimization and conversion improvement was next to impossible.

While traffic is indeed a critical factor, it’s the wrong one to focus on if you haven’t invested in optimizing conversion on your web site.

Like George Kastanza figuring out a witty retort hours too late to use it, here I am some years later to present some pretty compelling math on why companies should focus first on conversion.

First, a couple assumptions:

• - The company in this example is selling a product (but the same principles work for ad revenues, B2B lead generation, etc.)
• - The company has not undergone extensive marketing optimization on their web site and/or promotions already.
• - There exists an opportunity to raise overall conversion rates by 5% or more (I have yet to work with a company where this is not possible).

In the first example below we have an example of a CPM banner ad where conversion is the only option as the ad is currently running at negative ROI (See previous post on Working the Math on Online Advertising).

As you can see, with the assumptions I put in, the ad campaign initial is returning only $.80 on each dollar spent on it. Despite the thought of “making it up in volume,” spending more on reach on this campaign will only drive it further and further into the red.

On the other hand, if the company takes the time to run some insightful a/b tests on the ad and the landing page, all of a sudden the campaign is making money (ads and landing pages present significant opportunities for conversion improvement). Best of all, the campaign is now scalable. In this case, the logical thing to do is to NOW increase the reach of the campaign until it hits a point of diminishing return.

In the second example, let’s have a look at web site conversion and the case for optimization versus spending on reach.

In this case we compare a 10% traffic improvement against a 5% conversion rate improvement (from 2% conversion to 2.1% conversion). “But Rob,” you might say, “we make more extra revenue by paying for traffic and we get 10% more people exposed to our brand.”

That argument would be true for the first month, but to truly understand the power of optimization, let’s look at the math over a year:

• - Buying 10% additional reach costs $50,000 per month, which equals $600,000 per year, for a 160% overall ROI in the example shown.
• - Paying a consultant or agency $10,000 a month for 4 months is a good guess for what it might take to get 5% better conversion on a site with these kind of revenues (hey, I never said this blog wouldn’t be self-serving sometimes). This assumes the site hasn’t already been optimized.In this case, let’s assume the 5% improvement kicks in 2 months into the process. What this math works out to is that a mere $40,000 spent on conversion will result in $400,000 in new revenues for a 10x or 1000% ROI.

That’s pretty compelling math, isn’t it? Better yet, you don’t have to choose one over the other. By doing the work of improving conversion FIRST, then adding the spend on reach, you now get an example that looks like this:
Wow. Keep in mind that no real life scenario is as simple as the case I’ve described. That said, these are incredibly powerful principles and I hope I’ve helped show you why it makes sense to focus on conversion before opening the wallet for reach.

BTW, despite my tongue in cheek reference to hiring a consultant or agency, conversion and marketing optimization is definitely an area where you should develop in-house skills if at all possible.

Once upon a time, SEO was simple: put a lot of good, relevant content on your site and you’d be rewarded with qualified traffic.

Then, as seems to happen with all online mediums (email, blogging, forums), trickery and “secret tactics” became the way to climb the search engine rankings. The big problem with this is that instead of being rewarded for adding value to the Internet, many SEO practitioners were being rewarded for polluting the Internet with spam sites, ugly gateway pages, keyword spam, etc.

That was about the time I stopped actively participating in SEO. I’m a “content guy” at heart and believe the long term path to success is to add value to the medium you are working in. I had no interest in learning how to “beat the algorithms” and I put my energies elsewhere (community development, word of mouth, email newsletters).

Well, what’s old is new again and there’s a bit of a renaissance going on right now in SEO. The algorithms have caught up to the SEO spammers and successful SEO now boils down to exactly 3 things:

1. Lots of good content, regularly updated (a great reason to blog about your business).
2. Inbound links to your content from high quality sites (which happen when you write great articles or posts and actively promote them to other sites).
3. Proper site structure, tagging, and coding (another reason to hate Flash-based sites).

That’s it. Do a good job on those 3 things and your rise in the search engines is pretty much guaranteed.

Did I mention I’m back on the SEO bandwagon in a BIG way?

Ever struggled to figure out whether it makes sense to make a specific online ad buy? There’s really only one way to figure it out, and that’s to run the math on it.

Expect your “best guesses” to be way out of whack the first time you try this excercise. That said, doing an estimate and then a report after the campaign is the only way to get the insight and learning required to make better and better ad buying decisions.

More importantly, if you have ad buys that you do on a recurring basis, you MUST do this kind of analysis to figure out if they are making you money or not.

So, in a nutshell, here are the rows you will put in your excel spreadsheet:

1. CPM (the amount you pay per thousand for your banner ads).
2. Cost per impression (1/1000 of the above - somewhat redundant but it helps with our formulas and to illustrate a couple of points).
3. Click % (the percentage of people who click on the ad - this ranges from almost nothing to a couple percent for a highly targeted vertical ad).
4. Cost per click (cost per impression divided by click %) *Note: for Google Adwords, where you are paying based on cost per click, this is where your spreadsheet starts.
5. Landing page conversion % (this is the percentage of people who arrive at the landing page from the ad and take your desired action).
6. Cost per conversion (Cost per click divided by landing page conversion %).
7. Value of conversion (this is your net profit if you are selling something or an assigned value if you are undertaking lead generation or other activities).
8. ROI (Value per conversion divided by cost of conversion)

Once you arrive at ROI, there are a few factors to consider. For instance, if there is branding and/or residual value in your campaign, you will want to factor this in. Don’t expect to achieve positive ROI in all your campaigns, but be prepared to aggressively test and optimize the ones that are close to positive ROI.

Once you successfully found an activity that generates clear ROI, you have uncovered a beautiful opportunity and need to explore how you can duplicate and/or scale up your efforts. This is the key customer acquisition strategy of most of the biggest companies on the Internet: Find a few ROI-positive acquisition methods and scale them up like crazy.

There are a million variable factors in this model, but keep it simple to start and then expand on it as you get comfortable. For instance, you may want to assign the “value” of the action as your average LCV (lifetime customer value) instead of the value of a one time sale.

The beauty of using the model is that as time passes and you get real results to enter in the spreadsheet, you’ll get more and more accurate in your projections. Some of my clients keep a tracking document that stores both their original projections as well as the post-campaign actual results for each campaign they run. While this requires that you put your ego in check (a lot of the projections will be very, very wrong), it eventually becomes possibly the most important and accurate decision making tool in your business.

So, while it will take you a few minutes to set up the first time, this exercise is very straightforward and becomes incredibly valuable if you do it for each campaign you run. Also, as you can see, it is an excellent tool for and “apples to apples” comparison of different types of advertising (AdWords vs CPM for instance).

If you get really creative, you can even find ways of incorporating contests, trade shows and sponsorships into this model of ROI comparison (this gets tricky but is definitely valuable as you get comfortable with this kind of model).

BTW I actually thought this was going to be a quick and easy post before I started, but as I got further in it became clear that this is an area that will require some more digging.

More to come (including an example)…