By this I mean: how does blogging stack up against other online marketing methods available to business owners in terms of Return On Investment, Return On Time and Return On Effort?

There’s no one-size-fits all answer to this question, but let me share a few insights after working with many SME clients from multiple industries on their web marketing strategy, which has often included a blogging component.

Blogging for “offline” businesses

In this post, I’m mainly considering how a typical “offline” business selling products or services can use blogging to enhance the performance of their website.

There are two broad scenarios I’ll consider:

1. Scenario 1: “Necessity-based” businesses - when your prospects and clients don’t have a particular interest in what you do beyond the result or outcome you can produce for them. This would apply to many strong  “Yellow Pages” categories such as pest control, landscaping, rubbish removal etc.
2. Scenario 2: “Interest-based” businesses – when your prospects and clients can identify more strongly with the “subject matter” behind the products and services you provide, especially in “information-rich” industries  (e.g. model aeroplanes, financial services, Ultimate Fighting Championship subscriptions, coaching clubs etc).

In other words, some businesses and industries tend to easily spawn a wealth of information that your prospects and clients will eagerly lap up.  In others, prospects will have little personal interest in drilling deeper into what you offer (e.g. latest techniques in rubbish removal).

There may also be cases where different customer segments may fall into the first category (e.g. a home computer shopper searching for the lowest price desktop PC) and others the second category (e.g. an avid computer geek following the launch of the latest must-have graphics card).

What this means for your blogging strategy

Where your customers don’t care deeply for your subject matter and are simply looking for a result (Scenario 1 above), the main benefit blogging can offer your business is that of increased search engine visibility.

Briefly:

1. Search engines like “fresh” content.  Blogs offer a convenient way to add fresh content without interfering with key conversion pages.
2. Regular blog updates allow you to add posts which target long-tail search terms.  It is difficult to rank the same website for multiple competitive terms, especially when you have  a limited number of pages on your website.  Blogging effectively allows you to add more search-engine optimised pages, which target less competitive key phrases.  Good rankings for many specific long-tail or multi-word key phrases can add up quickly.
3. With this strategy, it’s important to quickly convert the search into a conversion.  Because users are not necessarily interested in your content, clear calls to action and/or seasonal offers are vital to ensure you do something with the traffic you generate.

Then there’s Scenario 2 - in which the user is potentially highly interested in what you have to say.

Here you have the option to use your blog to gain a position of Thought Leadership in your market.   You’re not as focused on the quick conversion as you are in building a reputation with prospects, clients and even colleagues and competitors in your market.

There may be the same SEO benefits as with Scenario 1, but the principal benefit of this strategy are the long term conversion and loyalty benefits.

Bottom line: this strategy takes longer to gain traction and requires a higher standard of content writing to demonstrate the Thought Leadership which fuels outsized results.

What will be the investment of time, money and effort?

With Scenario 1, the investment of time, money and effort can be fairly modest.

Design and setup of a blog may cost anywhere from $0 if you DIY to a few thousand dollars (sure, you can spend more if you go for a super-premium design which is overkill in 99.9% of cases).

Then there’s content production.  As the aim is not to demonstrate Thought Leadership with cutting edge content, it is easier in this scenario to outsource the content production function to a writer with very little effect on results.

Having one blog post a week written and published might cost you a couple of hundred dollars a month – a fairly modest investment.  (This is also one of the deliverables we often roll into our Gold Client Internet Marketing Program for SMEs).

Blog content usually gets picked up by search engines fairly quickly and it doesn’t take long to build up a base of posts to feed the search engines.  Within 3 to 6 months of regular posting, you can expect to get a comparatively large proportion of your organic search traffic via your blog.

However, you should recognise that this can be a bit of a “brute force” strategy – a large proportion of the traffic you generate via your blog will NOT convert – so it’s also important to ensure your offers and conversion strategy is sufficient to squeeze some conversions out of the traffic you do get.

Now let’s look at Scenario 2.  Setup costs will be similar to Scenario 1, but the content generation task tends to be much more labour and time intensive for the Thought Leader (who is often the business owner).

For example, if you’re an expert in cutting-edge loan structuring approaches for property investors, it’s hard to employ a low-cost writer to produce content that does your strategies justice and engages your audience.

My friend and blogging expert Yaro Starak talks about building a successful blog in 2 hours a day.  The problem for business owners is that most don’t have that amount of time to devote to a strategy that may take 6 to 12 months to gain sufficient traction to generate a payoff.

Many business owners under-estimate the ongoing work required to keep a Thought Leadership blog going. It’s common to see business owners write a few good articles before getting distracted by other things and it doesn’t take long for a blog to get “stale” and lose traction.

There are ways for business owners to leverage their time with a Thought Leadership blog (e.g. dictating post ideas to a good writer and proofreading the draft before posting), but there is still a substantial investment of time involved to ensure both post quality and frequency.

How long will it take to see results?

As mentioned above, in Scenario 1 you may see search engine benefits in 3 to 6 months sufficient to justify the ongoing investment.

In Scenario 2, the payoff tends to be slower (although it can be large if you manage to achieve a position of true Thought Leadership).

I’ve been writing this blog for 6 years now and although the payoff is sufficient to keep writing, by no means has blogging been one of my highest-return marketing activities.  However, I do see blogging as one component of the pre-eminence building process.

How does blogging stack up against alternative promotional approaches?

I am no doubt revealing my bias toward targeteded traffic+ conversion here, but I see blogging primarily as a supplementary promotional strategy for “offline” businesses rather than a primary one.

My advice is always to get your conversion funnel right first so that you know you can convert a visitor into a client.  You should test and tweak your funnel to ensure maximum throughput and maximum velocity from first-time visitor to loyal client.

Only once your conversion funnel is in place would I recommend looking at blogging as the “cream” on top of your strong foundations.

The final verdict

Blogging can be a very useful traffic generation and pre-eminence building strategy for SMEs – but you need to go in with your eyes open and be clear on your objectives, what the resourcing requirements will be and whether or not you’re prepared to pay the price.

It may also be prudent to think about what support is available to leverage your time and efforts to ensure you get the highest net return.

For example: www.xyzpl.com.au or www.wxyz.com

Unless you’re IBM, this can be a very costly strategy for a few reasons:

1. Abbreviations are meaningless, especially to people who don’t know you. Does BBS.com stand for Brisbane Baking Supplies or Boat Building Services?
2. Because abbreviations lack meaning, they tend to be harder to remember… for your prospects and clients.
3. Keyword-rich domain names assist your organic SEO results, both directly (domain names are a ranking factor for search engines) and indirectly (keyword-rich domain names lend themselves to keyword-rich inbound links)
4. Relevant domain names dramatically increase your Google AdWords (and other PPC) Click Through Rates and conversion results. In some cases we have seen different domain names outperform others by up to 400% when tested in AdWords ads (like in this online marketing case study, for example).

So what do you do if you’re already using an abbreviation as a domain name? My advice is to seriously consider changing, or at a bare minimum investigate other domain names to “park” over your existing domain name.

That will allow you to at least test new ideas in Google AdWords and gauge response – then if the results justify it, consider a complete change.

My preference is to duplicate campaigns and target them toward specific countries or country groups — this accounts for the different market dynamics within different regions and allows you to optimise independently.

My typical market groups are:

• USA
• Canada
• UK (plus Ireland)
• Australia (sometimes with NZ, sometimes separate)
• Middle East (UAE, Qatar, Israel, Kuwait work best for English language)
• South Africa
• Northern Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc)

Beyond that you have the option of targeting other country groups, but it’s important to track ROI for each group.

In my experience, most other country groups don’t have the purchasing power to buy USD-denominated info products, but you really do need to test on a per product basis.

Got a product or service and need high-end Google AdWords management? See how we can help.

Although this blog is “dofollow” (i.e. if you make a comment it will pass some “link juice” to your site), there are still standards.  The rule is, “if it doesn’t add value, it doesn’t get published”.

(Thank you to legitimate commenters though…your guys rock!)

It may be replaced shortly, so I’ve reproduced a (static) version below (click to enlarge).

This is pretty cool from a design perspective — I wonder how hand-drawn forms compare with the plain ole popup?

We can get 15%+ conversion on a popup form from “cold” traffic.  I’d be interested to see if going the extra mile with design can boost this number.   Anyone have any data on that?

Half the battle is fixing stuff that annoys, confuses and frustrates your visitors.

When you’ve fixed all the roadblocks and chokepoints, only then is it time to think about positive motivators to act.

“Domain name class” is another word for “Top Level Domain”, or the extension on the end of your domain name (e.g. .com, .net, .com.au). In particular, you should know the implications that country code top level domains (or ccTLD for short) can have on your search engine marketing efforts.

ccTLDs and Organic Search Engine Optimisation

Should your “main” website URL be a .com.au if you’re primarily targeting Australia?

Yes.

A site with a country-specific top level domain will rank better in that country than elsewhere, although you do see other websites with other countries’ ccTLDs ranking in google.co.uk, google.co.nz and so on.

If you’re primarily interested in targeting Australia, you should definitely go with a .com.au domain.

If you’re interested in targeting multiple places, the tactics get a little more involved, but for one nation, this is fine.

Another option is to go with a .com (or .net, .org, etc) but geo-target the domain to the correct country within the domain’s Google Webmaster Tools account.

This presumably works just as well, but a .com.au is really a sure thing in terms of telling Google where your intended audience is.

ccTLDs and Pay Per Click (e.g. Google AdWords) Performance

How about ccTLDs and Google AdWords performance?

The domain name you display in your ads or “Display URL” can certainly influence the click through rates and performance of your ads, and a country-specific domain name (YourSite.com.au) will nearly always perform better than the .com (YourSite.com) for users in the target country.

In some cases, the effect can be large (50% or more), which helps to increase your click through rates and decrease your average cost per click.

If you operate in multiple markets, then ideally you should test multiple ccTLDs in each market — and as a general rule you should avoid serving ads with the “wrong” ccTLD in foreign markets.

If you’re targeting multiple countries and you can’t get hold of a ccTLD for certain countries for whatever reason, then a trusty old .com works best. Bear in mind that in our tests, .com domains normally perform better than .net, .biz or other extensions — but your mileage may vary.

You have to test.

Phase 4: Total Integration

After you’ve evolved from internal orientation to objective measurement through to user involvement, you’re ready to enter the phase that can potentially unlock the most rewards: total integration.

This is where the first three phases feed into each other in a never-ending improvement process:

• developing and prioritising strategies internally
• measuring your results objectively
• capuring insights from users to acceleratete the process

These aren’t “steps” so much as never-ending improvement loop.

So the ideal website development and optimisation process goes something like this:

1. Conduct research of your market, competitors and opportunities.
2. Develop your site based on your “best guess” (plus smarts and experience) as to what is most likely to work
3. Measure everything so you can track what’s working and what’s not
4. Try different approaches and if they work, keep them.  If they don’t, revert back to the control.
5. Glean insights from users to add new ideas to the mix.  Selectively test, measure and optimise.
6. Rinse and repeat!

With most optimisation processes, it is normal to reach a stage of diminishing returns, once the most obvious improvements have been made.

But in the case of online sales funnel optimisation, the field is developing so quickly that there are always new opportunities to test new tools and strategies.

Even if your online sales process is relatively “mature”, it’s still possible to generate ongoing improvements of 10 or 20 percent per month using this process.

About Marketing Results:

As Australia’s leading internet lead generation experts, Marketing Results specialises in helping fast-growth companies generate more enquiries and sales online while eliminating marketing waste.  Find out more about our internet consulting services here.

Phase 3: User involvement

User involvement (also called “qualitative analysis”) simply means getting users’ input into the optimisation process — what they do and don’t like, why they would or wouldn’t buy from you and the “WHY” behind what they do on your site.

There are many ways to get this information, but until recently, the cost or effort was prohibitive, especially for smaller organisations.

Two of the most useful tools for getting this qualitative input are the 4Q iPerceptions exit survey tool and user testing videos provided by UserTesting.com.

I’ve written a previous review of 4Q iPerceptions, but the “Cliff’s Notes” version is that 4Q allows you to understand why users came to your site and whether or not they were able to achieve their main goal for their visit. If not, why not. If so, what they liked best.

Input from 4Q can easily by fed back into your website improvement initiatives (for example: copy ideas to test, pages to emphasise, pages or elements to de-emphasise etc.). And the cost? $0.

Then there’s UserTesting.com — I’m very excited about this because it makes it fast, easy and cheap to get informed end-user feedback on your site.

Here’s how it works: for (only!) $29 per user, a trained user tester will review your site and deliver output in two formats:

1. A Flash video that records the entire session, showing you every mouse movement, click and keystroke, along with spoken comments.
2. A written report detailing what they liked, what they didn’t like and what would have caused them to leave your site.

There are a few reasons why this is a very significant development:

1. Traditional user testing costs around US$250 per user at a fancy usability lab. Now, for around 1/10th of that price, you can get pretty much the same thing, from anywhere in the world, without leaving your computer.
2. You don’t need to test a lot of users – 1 to 3 users can be enough to give you a good idea of general patterns and trends that you can ACT on.
3. Crucially, this input is coming from outside your business or sphere of influence. This is nothing like the traditional business owner practice of “emailing a few friends to see what they think of the new site”. Such “insider” feedback is almost always tainted by filters that don’t impact on results.
4. It’s a good way to introduce fresh ideas into your improvement process which otherwise may not have been considered

I’ve introduced a number of colleagues and clients to UserTesting.com and they are universally impressed with insights and value it provides.  I invite you to check it out!

So now you know about internal orientation, objective measurement and user involvement. What’s the next step? Tomorrow we’ll look at Phase 4 – Total integration.

Phase 2: Objective measurement

Yesterday we looked at some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on internal knowledge and resources to develop your online strategy. Today we’ll look at the next phase – objective measurement.

Objective measurement tools tell you WHAT users are doing on your site and whether or not tweaks or changes are working.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere on these “quantitative” strategies, so I won’t expand further here, except to provide some examples of typical objective measurement tools and what you can use them for:

• Google Analytics – broad-based analytics package, great for showing a range of key visitor (’How many visitors did we get last month?”) and conversion (”What percentage of visitors from search engines are downloading our White Paper?”) metrics.
• CrazyEgg – shows you WHERE on your webpage visitors clicked and presents the information as an easy-to-understand “heat map”
• Google Website Optimiser – multivariate testing tool. Use GWO to test different page elements (e.g. headlines, copy, offers or designs) and establish which elements convert best.

According to a survey we conducted last year of 324 Australian small and medium business owners, approximately 4 in 5 Australian companies have NOT yet evolved to this level. If you’re already using some or all of these quantitative tools, you should give yourself a pat on the back!

The great advantage of these tools is that they tell you what’s actually happening on your site — what’s working, and what’s not.

That allows you to test new things and if they work, keep them; if they don’t work, scrap them. This step-by-step process of is the basis of our online sales funnel optimisation service that we implement for SME clients.

The disadvantage of a purely quantitative approach is that you don’t have any insight into WHY users are doing what they’re doing. You have to make a “best guess”.  While you can certainly produce dramatic results from a quantitative approach, these types of tools are relatively inefficient for answering the following types of questions:

• What do prospects and clients really think of our website?
• Which specific elements of my website or sales copy are unwittingly turning new customers away?
• What new ideas should I test to improve user experience and conversion further?

To answer these types of “WHY?” questions, you need to evolve to Phase 3: User involvement.  That’s what we’ll look at tomorrow…