Return on Intention

Yesterday (Wednesday January 21st) I attended the first official meeting of Webuquerque, the web focused section of the New Mexico Adobe Users Group. I have been scheduled to speak to this group in November on Marketing, but this time around there was no presentation, just a chance to get together, see the group and meet the other presenters. It was a great night for several reasons:

1. I won a door prize (a book on Adobe Air for Javascript Developers)
2. I got to see some people haven’t seen in a while and meet a few news ones
3. I had some really good conversations with other web folks about web stuff

I usually attend other get togethers, like the Albuquerque Web Geeks Meet-ups, but often people go there to get away from their work, not talk more about it. There seemed to be many people at the Webuquerque group that we’re waiting for a group that not only accepted, but encouraged shop-talk. I am one of them, and I think this group will work out very nicely. 

If you are interested and around town when the events occur (every 1st Wednesday) stop by and say hi. I promise I will get more sleep before the next meeting.

There seems to be a lot of confusion between can’t and don’t when it comes to strategy or execution. There is a tendency to shoot the messenger, as it were, when something goes wrong. If you launch an initiative and it doesn’t product the results you want, it’s pretty important to know why.

There’s a pretty big buzz over the internet and social media (and has been for years). Some people started blogs and were successful. Others started blogs and we’re not. Does that mean blogs don’t work? If you start a hamburger joint and it fails, does that mean that hamburger stands don’t work? No. McDonalds is all the proof you need to say otherwise. 

So many companies who jumped on the bandwagon of getting a “website” or “trying social media” without first considering how it fits into their business feel like they got burned. Most often the channel is blamed. “The internet doesn’t work for my business.” Maybe. Or maybe your strategy was off. Maybe the implementation was off. Most often, in my experience, its because the initiative was called off too soon, or all the factors we’re not considered. Sometimes it was dues to bad or incomplete advise from a “professional” (Read: I know this guy who can build websites / knows facebook and can do it for you cheap on the weekends).

The real work of any initiative starts at the launch. The idea that the work is over at the launch is what causes most executions to fail. Be prepared for the after launch in planning, manpower and budgeting. 

If it can work for a toilet manufacturer, I’m sure it can work for your industry.

Its official, Obama has won the American Presidency. As I was watching the coverage of the election on MSNBC.com, at least twice it was mentioned that the Obama campaign will go down in history as one of the best run and innovative in many many years. The primary means of his win, according to the MSNBC broadcast, was the internet. Is there any doubt left that the internet is changing the world?

With the American economy ( and much of the worlds ) slowing down, advertisers are most likely going to look for alternative and hopefully cheaper ways of attracting customers. One possible method for doing so is through Pay-Per-Click search marketing.

In general, Pay-Per-Click advertising has been considered a cheaper, or at least more measurable means of advertising compared to traditional media. In many respects this is true; however, a fully integrated campaign utilizing multiple media channels always produces the best results. Given the slowing of the market, I expect that we will see companies move to more measurable means of advertising as a way to try and get the most bang for their buck. 

As more companies move into the Pay-Per-Click model and more keywords are receiving bids, it should be safe to say that the cost for bids will go up to get the same results that current advertisers do. This could have some big impacts on smaller fixed budget adervertisers, but there are some ways to combat the rising prices.

1. Make sure your site is coded to help your page score. Having good markup and well written copy will increase your page score with the large search engines. Page rankings play into the cost of your adwords showing up. If two companies bid approximately the same amount for a keyword, the one with the highest page rank will get the higher position.

2. Geo-Target your ads. By reducing the size of the market you could reduce the size of your competition. Geo target your campaigns so you can lower some of the areas bid prices and save some money.

3. Bid on more specific phrases and words. If you are bidding on keywords for computer repair, it might make more sense to split your campaign into “MAC computer repair” and “PC computer repair”. The more specific your words and phrases, the less competition you will have for those words and phrases so you can bid lower.

Remember to keep and eye on your analytics, and if you don’t have any analytics installed on your site, whether you are advertising online or not, contact me immediately.  Watch closely how your ads are performing and pull what ever isn’t working and throw the money into what is. 

When it comes to writing headlines, take your time and do it right. The headline is one of the most important parts of your blog posting because thats what people most often see in a search result to decide whether to click through and read your post or skip it and go on to a different one. 

I have been reminded of this fact again recently when I was checking the analytics on this blog to see what people are reading. My second most read post is this one – Would you sell your subscribers email address?

This post is not reaching the right people, as the number way people are finding it are by searching for “How to sell email addresses.” This group is obviously not the group that I’m trying to reach with this post, and this post is probably not what this group is looking for. The bounce rate for this post is in the high 80% range. Perhaps I should have titled it “How to piss off your customers”, or “The fastest way to lose your customers trust”… but alas, there it is. Think about your headlines and make sure they are sending the message you want your audience to receive. 

To make good on the promise on this headline, go check out this post from CopyBlogger entitled 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work- they got it right on.

Thanks for pointing this out Mitch.

I received and email yesterday from a reporter at the Albuquerque Journal asking about marketing in Second Life. We set up a time to talk today (8/15) so I decided to log into SL and see what was going on. No sooner did I log in when my computer froze. SL didn’t crash, my whole system did. This happened about 3 times before I gave up. I tried again this morning and the same thing happened. I checked the SL blog just to find that some system maintanance was taking place. So I figured, Oh Well, I’ll just get twitter going again (its been a while since I’ve used it). So I download twitterific and low and behold, Twitter is having problems as well. It amazes me how far we can come, and how fast we can drop the ball. It becomes hard to let clients know about these great new media tools when they don’t work half the time. I wonder if its just me, or is this common with everyone else, and is isolated to just a few tools, or are they all having problems?

I know that the fast growth of these tools are very taxing on the technology. One day your running your small “Web 2.0″ service with your closest 200 friends, and then all of a sudden, 800,000 people decide you have a cool new toy to play with and BAM!!! You server dies!!! I guess its not that uncommon, many small businesses face the same issues with rapid growth. I have no doubt that these services will make it through the scaling phase, but I sure wish they would hurry.