Our approach to business is that your web site should be treated as an employee.
Employees either contribute toward your bottom line or you fire them and hire an new employee.
Either way, we can help you get your web site to be a profitable employee.
We help our clients to get more out of their internet employee by using web sites, email, RSS feeds and other current technology.
We all know that following up on a lead is important, but read this:
Many things with lead generation seem easier than they are. Take sales lead follow-up for example, research shows that sales people do not fully pursue around 70% of leads generated by marketing. That amounts to literally billions of wasted marketing dollars. The speed of lead follow-up is a major contributor to this problem.B2B Lead Generation Blog: Velocity of Lead Follow-Up Is Critical To Winning the Complex Sale
70%! Hmmm…. I’m thinking this is an area that I can improve. You?
It was Kryptonite with their bike lock that had trouble responding to a crisis, now it’s Kensington, makes of laptop locks.
The Kensington saga (AKA, this years Kryptonite lock story) continues. Read more over at Marketing Begins At Home » Unlocked
Tagged with: Kensington, Kryptonite, lock, crisis.
It can be frustrating when your site doesn’t appear in natural search results. Take heart. It happens to others as well.
Time was the solution.As I always recommend to those website owners, who are experiencing the Sandbox or new site dampening filter, keep building the site. Forget the Sandbox, and disregard the search engine rankings.
If you follow that course of action, when the Sandbox filter is lifted, the site will have powerful Google search engine placement.
That is why my client is dancing on her desk in celebration.
Blog Business World – Marketing, Public Relations, Search Engine Optimization
Mark Bernstein has a worthwhile read on his site on how we can actively protect the Blogosphere.
Tagged with: Protect, blogosphere.
Just spotted this over at Talking Story on writing good email copy.
For example, Friday before last I got one from Constant Contact, the folks that I use as my own email editor, called Break Through the Clutter, 3 Tips on Writing Email Copy. I just read it yesterday, but I did read it, and it was very well done.The author started with a good story, (storytelling works!) then he shared these 3 tips:
- Pick one idea. We tend to go from searching for content to complete overload.
- Boil it down. Edit, simplify, and get to the heart of the matter.
- Speak like a human being. Biz-Speak is unnatural and Marketing-Speak is annoying.
The italics are mine :-)
Good advice
Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching: What was she trying to say?
This is a great tutorial on using bloglines to keep track of news, current events and blogs. Even shows how to use feedster to keep track of issues that are relevant to you.
Most blogs and increasingly news sites, search engines and other web services are publishing these RSS feeds. People also started building tools called aggregators (also known as Feedreaders and Newsreaders). Aggregators can collect RSS feeds from many sites and present the fresh content from these sites on single page in a format that we can read.One of most popular aggregator today is Bloglines. Bloglines is web based, you don’t need to download any software to your computer. Just create an account on their website and subscribe to your favourite blogs. You can then follow your blogs from a Mac at home, a Windows PC at office or a PDA at some airport.
This tutorial will show you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with Bloglines. We will also show you some other interesting things you can do with Bloglines.
This is good. I wish I’d written it.
Jeffrey Phillips looks at and links to two studies. While not web marketing specific, they are about how important IT is in business. I found them interesting reading. Read on…
There are several interesting items that are common across both studies:
- IT today is still much too operationally focused and is not embedded in strategic thinking in most organizations.
- Most businesses report that getting better customer understanding, loyalty and insight are important, but IT has not succeeded at doing those things
- Most IT focus and spending is on tactical, day to day operations and very little on new systems and especially innovative uses of IT
I’m going to analyze these two reports more in a subsequent post. I think they are very valuable to understand where information technology is succeeding in helping businesses compete, and where it is missing the mark.
Tagged with: JeffreyPhillips, Bain, ATKearney, Business, IT, Innovation, Investment.
So your writing on your web site, your commenting on others sites, but are you being heard?
I’m going to talk about just one tool here.
It is a search engine specifically for Blogs. It is Technorati.
To use Technorati it first helps to understand what it is and how it does what it does.
If you wanted to find out what’s popular at the moment, visit technorati.com/tag/ and you’ll be presented with a list of tags used in current conversations on the internet.
Tags are words that the author of an article has tagged the article with. As a way of categorising it. The technical term is folksonomy. Rather than be constrained by a hierarchical structure of categories, many people choose to tag their writings with whatever words they think are relevant.
This allows us to find what other people are writing, and it allows us a way to let others find what we are writing.
Now to use this to our benefit, we tag our writings with relevant tags. If what we are saying is of interest to others, they will not only visit your web site and read what you have to say (and leave comments) but they will also link to your site.
By entering our site url (i.e. example.com) into the technorati search box, we can see who is talking about us.
In summary, use technorati to find out:
This is a simple, quick and free way to see if we are being heard.
Tagged with: Technorati Tags, Folksonomy, HOWTO.
It sounds rather obvious doesn’t it. If your not making any sounds, then how can anyone hear you.
On the internet, unless your out there, talking and commenting, nobody is going to hear you.
So that then raises the question, how do I ‘talk’ and ‘comment’ on the internet?
1. Get a web site, start writing about your subject matter.
2. Make a list of other web sites that relate to your subject. Visit them regularly, comment on their sites, and link back to your web site.
3. Find out where your site visitors are coming from. Use this knowledge to improve your conversation.
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3.
When anyone comes to us for a new web site, we run through the 4 D’s of development with them.
Unfortunately, this is where most people fall down. They get a web site built, it looks good, then they do nothing with it.
If you work your site, it will become a profitable employee for you.
Tagged with: 4D, Development, Decide, Determine, Design, Do, WallisHamilton.
