Twitter was playing a bigger part in conversations with clients, so I thought it was time to jump into the birdbath rather than watch from the side. [Cringing at my metaphor but not enough to remove it. ;-)] As with most things the practice is more enlightening than the theory…

Been following Twitter’s growth as part of my siysphean efforts to stay on top of the ever-evolving world of online marketing for years. But I hadn’t done much more than set up an account and follow a couple of copywriters I admire. Until last night…

Interesting!

Simply following a large group of SEO and online marketing “gurus” has generated a lot of followers for @southerncontent. Generated a lot of followers and got me a lot more energised about the potential value of Twitter for building community around a brand.

I remain a underwelmed about the insight into the minuate of people’s lives. It’s gonna require discipline to ignore all the help people’s tweets about useful resources though. And I can see how quickly a compelling message can spread in a way that countless articles and webinars on Twitter never really captured.

Still stand by my earlier view that Twitter doesn’t fit into everyone’s online marketing mix. But I can see a definite ROI on Twitter activity for those sites/businesses for whom it does fit.

Follow me www.twitter.com/southerncontent. I’ll try to share as many of the internet marketing goodies I find as possible.

Tweeting on Twitter just became mainstream or early mainstream. No idea what that means? You’ll learn.

Twitter is particularly big in the UK. Lily Allen just started tweeting. Stephen Fry is tweeting to the point that people following him think he may be addicted. Jonathan Ross is constantly referring to it on his resurrected BBC Radio2 show… Econsultancy.com is currently running an experiment with a Twitter feed on their homepage…

But it is a worldwide phenomenon with NZ a little behind the times.

From Early Adopters & Online Marketing “Gurus” to Early Evening Viewers

It’s the talk of online marketing circles, after being in the mix but not overly prominent for a couple of years. Many businesses are tweeting. And even crusty corporates have got in on it, presumably persuaded by their online marketing advisers.

But you know it has really gone mainstream when TV news catches on and profiles a site. So it was very interesting to see one of NZ’s two 7.00pm current affairs shows on the main networks allocating 6 or 7 minutes to Twitter tomorrow night.

Honeymooning on Mainstream Media

Facebook, the last social media phenomenon du jour, got the positive introduction a couple of years back. Now it’s more likely to get coverage related to privacy and copyright concerns.

Twitter, founded in March 2006,  is still in the “cool new thing”/”honeymoon” mainstream media phase despite the fact that it informed guesses put the number of users at 3.5-4.5 million users as long as last September.

Should you be Tweeting?

Short answer: not necessarily.

Not every business needs to be on Twitter. Offering regular insights into what is going on might not be a good fit for your business. And there is absolutely no point if your target market is likely to think a tweet is something that occurs in close proximity to the bird feeder hanging from the old oak at the bottom of the garden.

If your market is Web savvy, young, addicted/connected to their mobile phones… And if offering regular insight into what you do will build brand awareness/loyalty. If your brand is closely associated with a particular person… Consider it. It’s good enough for Richard Branson, Nasa, Jet Blue & Barack Obama; to name just a few celebs, politicians and brands tweeting…

Golden rule: as with all journal-type social media initiatives, do it regularly or not at all.

Update: after writing this yesterday I checked out RadioNZ… first topic on interview I listened to with US correspondent: Twitter and mundanities US senators were sharing via their Twitter accounts…

But, as I say, “early mainstream”: interviewer embarassed herself, while touting the fact that her show has a Twitter account, repeatedly saying Tweets were up to 140 words (rather than 140 characters) before her correspondent corrected her.

Living in a resort town where the local economy runs on a combination of tourism and construction you wouldn’t be surprised if all was doom and gloom here. But there is light amongst all the darkness. So I thought I’d do my little bit to turning the tide of sentiment…

You see the recession hitting elsewhere in the world — we’ve been feeling it for longer than most countries — has joined with other factors to force our dollar to a more reasonable level after historic highs. Good news for an export reliant economy. And good news for people, like my clients, in tourism.

It seems New Zealand is a good option for those who don’t want to give up on their travel plans but want to be a bit careful about the cost of their travel. So both clients have very good bookings for the coming winter’s ski season…

NZ is a good option for Australian skiers because it is often cheaper and better than their local ski holiday options. And it becomes an even better option when the regular visit to Japan or North America seemed inprudent… Businesses around town report things are looking good for the winter.

And NZ is always a popular option for UK travellers taking time out from study or career. An option with less opportunity cost when jobs are scarce and costing less with our exchange rate to the pound as it is…

So I have clients with growing traffic that converts… Not all doom and gloom for them.

And not all doom and gloom for me with a Tourism NZ conference stressing the need for businesses to have effective websites.

Anyway. Just wanted to put some of the bright side out there because I, like many people, have tired of the dark side as the media’s vulture-like surveillance of the economy dominates the news.

It may be old-fashioned but it’s low cost and it works: email marketing should be an important part of your online marketing mix.

Okay, “old-fashioned” may be overstating things — is online marketing old enough for any tactic to be old-fashioned? But reading as much on online marketing as I do, it’s easy to forget about email, when all the buzz is about blogging and social media.

Bottom line: not everybody online is tweeting, blogging or social networking and RSS feeds, spam free though they may be, aren’t yet a well-subscribed channel. Everyone online uses email from my 73 year old stepfather to my 8 year old second cousin.

Some Email Marketings Stats That Matter:

Why is email marketing front of my mind? Well my RSS feeds [hat tip to irony here] and inbox have been full of good numbers around email marketing in the last day or two.

• According to eMarketer retailers think email is recession ready:
  • Smith Harmon’s “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008″ (January 6, 2009) report shows 90% of the top 100 retailers (the ones with the resources to know and implement best practice) sent more email in the Holidays, 15% doubled or more email frequency in December over other months… They didn’t do it for fun they did it because it pays.
  • The U.S. Direct Marketing Association released a study in October showing commercial email returning $43.52 per dollar spent versus $11.74 for direct marketing in general.
• And a little more from eMarketer on“The Powerful Potential of Permission-based E-mail”:
  • An Epsilon and ROI Research October study found 40% of consumers were more likely to purchase more from companies that emailed them after a purchase.
  • And the same report found 49-72% of people willing to “read email from companies they know after days or weeks” or save email for later reference when purchasing.

Attitudes to Email Marketing in 2008 Versus 2005

Be Careful Though: There Are Risks With E-mail

There is a risk in the increasing how frequently you email customers, as the chart shows.

Seven in ten people don’t want more email from your company. And they might just unsubscribe if you flood their inbox with stuff they don’t value.

That’s why I urge clients to make sure they have something worthwhile to offer in any email they send. So it’s important to:

• plan to email people regularly but not at a frequency that leaves you struggling to find something of value to recipients to communicate.
• demonstrate that value early in the email so it is hard to miss in email client preview windows or on a blackberry or phone.

Remember: people will save your email to read later but it needs to pass the initial scan for “what’s in it for me” test first.

If you are finding it hard to prioritise marketing strategies in current hard times, keep the email going out with good strong offers.

And, speaking of current economic woes, how many times have I read that existing customers are your best/first option for improving sales in “get your business through the recession” articles lately. How do you contact them? Well, email isn’t a bad bet…

Bonus link:

Are you a small business owner wondered whether all this corporate email data applies to your business?  “10 Email Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners”, just published by MarketingProfs, offers a useful guide to how email marketing can help your business.

Copywriting, Internet marketing, usability, conversion, etc…. You can easily spend many thousands of dollars on courses, conferences and coaching promising to let you in on the secrets of “six figure” per annum or better wealth. The question is whether it is money well spent.

Often, but not always, the marketers of these courses, etc. know what they are doing. They definitely have knowledge to share.

And they use that knowledge to do a great job of convincing prospective students of the value of the courses. You know the technique — long copy pages with recognisable sales letter elements: red headings, lots of testimonials from other course/conference/coaching purveyors, lots of “free” extras, and a certain reticence about price.

If I’d had a bit more money to play with over the years I could have spent thousands….

But.

• Being skeptical by nature
• Being careful with my money by nature and need
• Being a voracious reader of everything the people behind these courses put out
• Being the owner of some of their books — sometimes republishing of ideas I have read in email newsletters
• Being the recipient of many pricy ebooks as reward for signing up to said newsletters
• Being high in the outside corner of the analytical* quadrant of the personality types graph…

I haven’t succumbed to the well practiced sales pitches very often.

(*Hey. I once spent so much time assessing industry and customer reviews and comparing prices on a pair of skis I wanted that they had sold out in Australia, where I was living at the time, by the time I went to buy them… Positive spin [for the context of what I do for a living]: as a reluctant purchaser I know how to cater to reticent prospects/customers.)

When I have I haven’t been hugely impressed with the results. A webinar series from a guy who has some great perspectives on selling and web success padded out just one of those ideas. An online/virtual conference that didn’t go beyond ideas that speakers had covered elsewhere — other participants seemed to think the event was great value but they hadn’t been reading the speakers’ newsletters for as long as I had… maybe.

So, in short: I am skeptical about much of the information being marketing by information marketers.

Interesting then to read a post script on a recent Bob Bly newsletter offering advice to information marketers/copywriters on what to sell in straightened times:

“In this market, e-books can far outsell all other information products. Reason: in a recession, customers who can’t afford your $1,000 coaching or $249 CD set can still come up with twenty, thirty, or even forty bucks to pay you for the same content in e-book format” [My emphasis]

“…the same content…” Two very different prices. Hmmm… I’m sure he doesn’t mean the exact same content.

Think before you buy even the ebook that will turn you into a master of copy. Think hard before you pay thousands of dollars for that online course. What is the cost of the packaged information? Is it less than the cost of your time to do a search on your favourite search engine and trawl through its’ authors’ back catalogue of freely available internet marketing know-how? It could be.

Then again: today’s $39 interview transcript is tomorrow’s free giveaway you get when you sign up for a newsletter.

There is always useful discussion about website content, optimisation and online marketing going on somewhere. So from now on I’ll be choosing a thread to highlight here every week… This week a thread from Sitepoint.com’s Content Writing forum caught my eye because it points to a regrettable attitude toward creating content.

The thread starts with a question about the uniqueness of rewritten content. Little context is given but I’m guessing the scenario goes something like:

“I need content for my site. Hmmm… Writing’s hard. Wonder if there is a shortcut? Maybe I could just rework some other people’s content in my own words…”

I might be wrong and I’m not suggesting an attempt to deceive. The issue here is more about naivete.

Naivete that is all over sites like Guru.com and Elance.com. It’s based on two key misconceptions:

1. Search engines like content and as long as it is keyword rich the quality doesn’t matter too much.
2. Good content can be aquired cheaply — about $3 to $4 per 500 word article will do it — or copied, if you are clever.

Wrong! Search engines are well beyond keyword richness in terms of assessing content’s value. You can’t get a chunk of good content for $3. And rewriting others’ content is not ok as long as you change a lot of the words.

Rewriting others’ content and presenting it as your own is categorically wrong. It’s theft if you don’t acknowledge the source of your ideas or insight or, indeed, words.

But wouldn’t there be reasons you might rewrite content?

Well, yes. Freelance writing gurus/teachers/courses often talk about getting maximum value out of an idea or experience by offering different angles on that idea or experience for different markets/contexts. But the key thing is that they are your experiences/ideas and the pieces of writing are completely different.

All too often I see people after someone to rewrite some articles for their website for a few dollars a pop. Cheap content! No thought. Just reword and publish. Easy….

Argh! It is not a question of changing the words enough to pass some copyright infringement software test. Rewriting others’ ideas is not unique and presenting them as your own is reprehensible.

I remain depressed by the number of people that fail to understand the value of good — compelling, unique to your site, written by/for your site, showcasing your expertise and an interesting point of view — content.

Labeling images and offering text alternatives is not only good for search traffic generation it’s also best practice for accessibility… It offers people using screen readers an insight into images on your pages because the reader can read the text.

Years ago when there was more weight attached to alt text (i.e. text to display when images are turned off coded as alt=”relevant keywords”) for images we used to suggest using image descriptions to improve keyword density without making your content read like keyword spam.

This technique was abused by people who loaded image alt text tags with unrelated keywords. And, as with meta descriptions and meta keywords content, search engines stopped attached any ranking weight to it.

But adding appropriately keyword-rich text/labels still has value in the image search context and also in context of universal or blended search (where search engines show web page, video and image search results together). As Deb says, making it easier for search engines to understand what your images represent will pay search visiblity dividends.

Best practice:

• do a quick check for popular keywords related to your image (Google Adwords free external keyword tool is perfect for this)
• name the image file using popular keywords separating individual word with a hyphen — popular-keywords.jpg or popular-keyword.gif. (Search engines will identify keywords in merged names and when you use underscores, which they don’t recognise as breaks, but creating a space between individual words with hyphens is worth the effort — as it is in URLs*.)
• give images alt text (alt=”popular keywords”)and title tag (title=”popular keywords”) that include — you guessed it — popular keywords.

Note: most content management systems and blogging platforms offer fields to enter this data as you upload an image file; use them.

Attention to this little detail — even if you skip the keyword research step when keyword choices are obvious — can amke quite a big difference to your blog/site’s chances of getting search traffic.

* There is continuing debate about the value of keywords in URLs but many CMSs now offer control of the URL so why not attend to this little detail too?

I am not a big fan of the traditional link request way of building links. The Web is all about links but they should occur organically… How do you get links then? You offer link bait and you engage with relevant websites. And, ideally, you do so in a way that builds your brand…

Do an interview with a journalist running a site offering podcasts about making money online? Of course.

Perfect: demonstrate my expertise to the site’s audience and build a link.

Lesson learnt: remember your tendency to “um” and “ah” when forming your thoughts; ask for questions first and get those thoughts half way formed before the interview. Listen and see what I mean.

Boring as it is to repeat the tired phrase, content is king in the link building realm too. Good content on your site will attract links. Good content you provide on other sites will drive traffic (assuming you think about it enough for it to be “brand enhancing”).

Mike Moran and commenters covered the request vs build links issues succinctly in a Search Engine Guide piece and resulting discussion

As I tell clients, building links is very similar to offline networking where you seek out relevant people and build a relationship. Online links represent that relationship. People will link with you if you offer them something of value to their business or site.

And the value should go beyond the value of a link — “Hi I wondered whether you would like to link to our site because we [insert tenuous association]? We’ll link to you too!” just doesn’t cut it. As Brian Clarke of Copyblogger suggested recently in an excellent post offering five value-based link building strategies:

“The days of flat out link begging are fading…”

Requesting links will work in some cases. But as Mike Moran suggested in a Search Engine Guide piece and commenters, generally, agreed an earned link is preferrable to a requested one.

Building links should be all about offering value on your site and on other people’s sites and demonstrating your expertise as you do it. But do it in a considered way and know your weaknesses… No more interviews for podcasts without some prior knowledge of questions for me!

I have support for my practice of neglecting the letter of punctuation and grammar law. Respected copywriter, John Forde of The Copywriter’s Roundable, recommended “Five Punctuation ‘Mistakes’ You Should Make” recently…

An “Aha!” moment for me… Not just because I am guilty of all these mistakes. But also because all help “scannability” and help give content the feel of speech — useful qualities for website content to have.

Maybe I’ve picked up these mistakes because Mr Forde’s excellent newsletter is one of my longest lasting email subscriptions — maybe seven years and as many primary email addresses. I have always admired the way he writes. Perhaps the “mistakes” have slipped into my content and copy work by some process of osmosis.

But hang on. Didn’t a friend wonder what was going on with all my elipses back in ‘97… And didn’t a professor of mine make a comment about my penchant for the emdash back in ‘89… No matter. I’ve definitely picked up a lot reading Forde’s regular advice on copywriting and noting the way he puts that advice together.

The point?

Forde’s advice has particular relevance to writing for the Web.

January 18th’s issue of The Roundtable (a must read for anyone wanting to write compellingly) recommended the mistakes in the context of writing “powerful sales copy”. But all five also help make your writing more readable by breaking up the flow of conventional sentences (commas ending in full stops or periods, if you prefer).

So, what are these five “mistakes”? All are acceptable in moderation but likely to raise the hackles of “proper” punctuation’s defenders when used frequently. Forde advocates extensive use of:

1. Emdashs
2. Parentheses
3. Quotation Marks
4. Ellipses (”…”)
5. Apostrophes

The emdash and the ellipsis are particularly useful in the online context. Why? Because they serve to make content more readable.

Next time you’re looking at a page of content online note how the long dashes and three little dots break things up and grab the attention of your scanning eye.

You scan a page before you read it (unless you “read” the Web differently from most people) so best practice demands multiple sub-headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points… Creative and “illegal” use of punctuation complements these best practices by making your short paragraphs more scannable.

And all five “mistakes” have another important online value. They help give content a feel of people speaking: a rhythm of speech rather than the more even flow of more formal writing. A rhythm that is particularly useful in giving voice to the people behind a website.

Ideally, website content should serve to engage and inform. To do that it has to:

1. grab attention by offering visitors easy access to key points
2. and convey key messages in a compelling way.

You’ll find punctuation your english professor might have frowned on a useful tool in achieving these duel goals.

I urge you to read “Five Punctuation ‘Mistakes’ You Should Make”. Forde describes why they can help to make content more engaging and your message more effective. (He does it much more eloquently than I could.) And then think about those “mistakes” when you are next creating content for your website. Use them to make your content more engaging and readable.

[Aside: reviewing what I have written here, I am not sure whether I would have used the "mistakes" less if they hadn't been the subject of the post... I wonder. ]