LYNX Interactive Marketing

WordCamp finally coming to Minneapolis!

Scott DeToffol — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:00:53 +0000

WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul has officially been announced! WordCamp is a community organized and hosted conference focused on discussing the open source WordPress blogging platform. The first WordCamp event was held in San Francisco in 2006. Since then, the event has spread around the world. Previously, the closest WordCamp to the Twin Cities was in Chicago.

WordCamp MSP will be on Saturday November 13, 2010 at the Eagan Community Center. Registration starts on March 1st, and the limited spots typically fill fast. Minneapolis is a very active online marketing community, and WordPress is a favorite tool in this crowd, so I predict a full house.

The organizers are looking for program ideas, speakers, volunteers and sponsors. For anyone looking to market to a highly targeted and enthusiastic online marketing and technology audience, this will be a great opportunity. Find out more at the WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul website.

Follow @wordcampmsp on twitter
Become a fan on Facebook

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Facebook > Google?

Scott DeToffol — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:48:23 +0000

In more ways than one, Facebook is becoming just as important as Google to online marketers. Today’s wake up call is news from Compete.com that Facebook is the leading referrer (source of traffic) to big portal and news sites like MSN and Yahoo!, sending significantly MORE traffic than Google. Social media, and Facebook in particular, is not a fad, or limited to Internet experts. Social media is becoming just as important as search to users, and in turn, should be a high priority to those planning and approving marketing campaigns.

Many businesses are taking a wait and see approach to social media. Decision makers want to see case studies and ROI, which is fine and good. There are plenty of examples of social media success, but truthfully many are relatively shallow this early in the game. Getting in the game and figuring out what works for your customer, for your audience and for your business is a process of trial and error. Laggards will have an uphill fight because lessons learned will not be easily applicable across businesses. And earning an audience is a long-term process, so getting started now will only help you when you do have formulas that are effective.

What is clear at this point is that social media is here, its a big online movement, and any serious online marketing campaign should be incorporating social elements.

Shopping with search engines on the rise

Scott DeToffol — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:36:20 +0000

E-commerce companies have seen a recent surge in traffic from Google and Bing, as the two dominating search companies up the ante with rich search results for shopping. Google has released a number of important feature enhancements including showing product images in regular search engine results pages (SERP), offering Product Listing Ads in Product Search (formerly Froogle), and Ad SiteLinks, which allows retailers to display up to four links for each PPC ad.

Google allows e-commerce companies to upload their product databases for free using Google Merchant Services. Google serves up these products in their organic listings, including product descriptions, images, prices, shipping rates and local store results. To get products listed in Bing, merchants need to participate in Microsoft’s Bing Cashback program, which gives shoppers rebates that merchant’s fund through PPC ads. Yahoo! recently announced that they are partnering with PriceGrabber.com to power their popular Yahoo! Shopping site. This seems strange since Bing will soon power regular search for most of Yahoo! content properties.

Marketers are happy to see Bing’s emergence with rich features pushing Google to increase the pace of innovation. Having two strong companies dueling for marketer’s and shopper’s attention can only help those of us who focus energy on attracting business through search. The remaining shopping comparison sites, most of which require PPC funds to get products listed, have suffered as a result of consumers moving more and more of their product and local searches to the big guys.

Shopping sites losing share to search engines

(number of unique visitors in thousands)

	December 2008	December 2009	% change
Total U.S. Internet audience	190,650	205,709	8%
Google Product Search	13,864	20,483	48%
Bing Shopping	NA	14,071	NA
Yahoo! Shopping	29,722	28,389	-4%
Shopzilla.com sites	29,410	21,436	-27%
Shopping.com sites	16,362	15,880	-3%
Pronto sites	NA	14,251	NA
TheFind.com	NA	12,010	NA
NexTag.com sites	9,657	9,990	3%
ValueClick sites	12,390	9,841	-21%
ShopLocal.com	10,419	9,068	-13%
PriceGrabber.com	6,653	6,464	-3%
AOL Shopping	10,163	4,929	-51%
PayPal-Shopping.com	NA	4,299	NA
Best-Price.com	1,345	3,283	144%
Source: comScore Inc.

Keyword research and tracking tools for SEO

Scott DeToffol — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:09:53 +0000

Keywords are the core of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for any site. Actually, keywords should be a major part of any online marketing program including social media campaigns, e-mail campaigns and online advertising. There are many tools available to research which keywords and keyword phrases are going to work for you, and to track your rankings over time.

Free Keyword Tools

All the major search engines make suggestions as you type in their search boxes. Start typing in your main keywords to see what other related keywords the engines are suggesting. This is a good place to start.

Clusty is an niche engine that provides a nice cluster of related keyword. Soolve aggregates the suggest features of numerous engines, so it is a one-stop shop. And Quintura shows a fun tag-cloud type result.

Both KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker have long been important keyword tools. They have free versions, but the paid versions are the real thing. WordStream recently released a free tool as well.

Google Insight for Search is a newer tool where you can compare keyword search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. and Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast does much the same.

You don’t need an Adwords account to use the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool or the Google Traffic Estimator to find great suggestions and data on keyword performance.

And don’t forget to leverage your analytics package to understand past keyword performance.

Paid For Keyword Tools

While not directly a keyword tool, running Google Adwords PPC campaigns may be the best long term tool for understanding which keywords are going to work for you. Adwords can be used for amazing market research with relatively little investment.

Rank Tracker has some nice rank tracking features and reporting.
Market Samurai includes a number of SEO tools. I really like the SEO Competition and Keyword Research modules.
Web CEO has a lot of features, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is well regarded if a bit complex. Its link building tools are very good.

Subscription SEO Websites

The subscription websites offer tools, guides, forums, videos and other helpful materials

Rand Fishkin’s SEOMoz includes a suite of tools, some of which are free. Pro memberships start at $80 per month.
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is well known for a great forum and training and lots of tools, many of which are free. Membership is $300 per month.
Raven SEO has a sweet of hosted tools, including a Social Media Monitor, starting at $80 per month.

This is not an exhaustive list of tools or providers. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment.

Video killed the SEO star?

Artificial Intelligence and Social Networking

Scott DeToffol — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:53:21 +0000

Damon Horowitz of Aardvark, a social search engine, who is both a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence and a professor of philosophy, makes the case that AI shouldn’t be about simulating human intelligence, but should be facilitating human interactions.

What’s the big deal about social media?

Guest post at MN American Marketing Association blog

Scott DeToffol — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:54:58 +0000

I contributed a guest blog post at the Minnesota chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA) website. My topic is a high-level approach to building content and links for search engine optimization (SEO). Here is an excerpt:

I was throwing around tips and tricks with some SEO pros the other day when the conversation lulled. One of the old hands, a self described reformed black-hat search engine optimizer, remarked wistfully, “When it comes down to it the only thing that matters over the long haul is content and links.” After some smiles and nods from his audience he continued, “You can try all the tricks and schemes, but Google eventually catches on and changes the game and then you’re back to what works anyway.”

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Video killed the SEO star?

Scott DeToffol — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:22 +0000

Will online video kill the SEO industry that relies on text to drive search engine indexing?

Not likely, thanks to Google. Very soon, online video is going to be an even bigger tool for marketing your company, brand, product or service.

Online video has been great if someone stumbles upon your site or YouTube posting. If you went viral, you could make a lot of noise. However, search engine marketing (SEM) is where the real power of online marketing is right now, and video is largely on the sidelines because no one can search for the content in videos. You can put tags on the videos, but the keyword richness of a video is lost in today’s search indexing.

Google is working hard to change this. First they bought YouTube, a fantastic move that will pay off massively considering the next move. Google is going to transcribe and index the words spoken in online videos.

Now you can publish your video ads, customer testimonials, product demos, ect. on YouTube (or anywhere) and Google will index the content, whether its spoken or displayed as text. Consider how many keywords are in a two minute overview of your product. This is SEM gold.

The biggest challenge to SEM is producing fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index. Once you get over the technical and production hurdles, video may become the easiest method to produce tons of relevant content.

UPDATE

Here is a nice technique that works today. Transcribe your own videos and upload them using YouTube’s Captioning capability (aka subtitles). The text of the speaker’s words will appear over the video. The best part? This text is indexed by Google.

BIG UPDATE November 2009

Google has formally announced that they will be auto-captioning YouTube videos! This is big news that will make videos an essential tool for all online marketers. Video after the break.

Content is King. Hire a Journalist.

Scott DeToffol — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:04:32 +0000

Online marketing relies upon frequent publishing of relevant content. A great challenge for many companies (and consultants!) is producing original content that matters. Too many business managers assume they don’t have interesting things to say, or that there isn’t anyone who cares to listen. Even if that were the case, Google is listening so you should be talking!

The truth is most companies already have great content in their business; it’s just buried where a typical marketing or public relations person can’t access it. These stories are in sales people’s heads, in manager’s notes, in product manager’s meetings, in customer service rep’s trouble tickets. The challenge is in finding, editing and publishing the content in a way that is usable, especially online.

Here’s an idea: hire an internal journalist. A trained journalist knows how to dig for the good stories. They know how to interview people and how to ask probing questions. Put them on a deadline and get them publishing on a schedule. An good internal journalist that is focused on your company, its products and services, its people, customers and industry will find and produce more content than you could ever use.

This recession has been hard for marketers, but even worse for journalists. There are plenty of experienced writers willing to work. Bringing a trained journalist into your organization is a great way to get high-quality, publishable content for newsletters, e-mail campaigns, blogs, social media, case studies, white papers and more. And this content is great for public relations as well. The media is always pining for good stories, and what better way to feed the beast than to have your own journalist pumping out fully-formed story ideas.

Content is king for online and search marketing. “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” who can write.

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Google SideWiki needs to be opt-in

Scott DeToffol — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:18:25 +0000

Google recently released SideWiki, a commenting system that is available for every site on the Internet, without the approval or participation of the site owners. I fear that SideWiki may be a royal pain for webmasters, marketers and people concerned with online reputation management.

Your website is the one place on the Internet that you have control. People can do and say crazy things out there, but on your site what you say goes. You pay for it, you put effort into, and you get to decide what visitors see and read, right? Wrong. Google’s SideWiki provides visitors a mechanism to contribute content and comments to your site that are completely out of your control.

As a recent blog post points out, Seth Godin purposely does not allow comments on his blog. Now Google has forced comments on him. Other famous bloggers like Jason Kottke and Andrew Sullivan purposely and by design do not allow commenting on their posts as well. Now they all have comments and its out of their hands.

There are some SideWiki defeats techniques already available, but I really don’t want to bother with a work-around. Google should make SideWiki opt-in for site owners. It should only work on sites that give an explicit approval.

Now, please comment using MY commenting system below.

Time for WordPress theme standards?

Scott DeToffol — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:27:56 +0000

The success of WordPress as the de facto self-hosted blog platform is partially due to the great abundance of free and paid-for themes and plug-ins that are available. As evidence that our cups runneth over, see this insane list of more than 300 resources for WordPress users.

Great huh? Well, there are some downside to using a themes. Many of them, as described by Brian Williams in his post 10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes, your site may suffer after installing an under-developed or poorly written theme. A decent WordPress developer can overcome most of these themes with customization. But the vast majority of WordPress theme users are non-developers, so what should they do?

Maybe the WordPress community can help. It would be extremely helpful is there was a list of standard features that theme developers would self identify that they include. For example, if a theme includes the basic features of widget enabled, certain page types included, and W3C validation, it could claim a bronze standard stamp, or some sort of certification. A theme that included bronze standards plus complete header/footer templates earns silver. And so on. (These are just examples, please leave a comment on how it should be setup!)

Theme standards would obviously benefit the theme user and buyer. But would theme developers go along? If a few of the big theme developers and framework makers adopted this idea I think it could take off. The serious developers would use theme standards as a differentiator. Users would eventually rely upon the standards to ensure they are getting a certain level of features and quality. WordPress would certainly benefit with a more mature marketplace for themes.

Discuss!

A new look for LYNX-Marketing.com