Now, for the first time since 2009, I am taking on new clients. I love agency work for the collaborative effect and the diversity of clientele, but it makes more sense to either go independent or start my own agency.

If you’ve contacted me in the past twelve months and are still interested in receiving Reputation Management and Monitoring, please reach out again and let me know. I’ll only be taking on two clients to start, so contact me sooner rather than later.

I look forward to hearing from you. May 2012 bring you increased success, both personally and professionally.

- Daniel Dessinger

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Here’s a sample 12 Month Plan for improving your small business digital marketing efforts in 2012.

January: What Do You Want to Rank for?

This is PurposeWeb, after all, so let’s start by knowing what we’re about in 2012. Ask yourself some questions before you make your plans.

Q: What Do You Want to Rank For?

You know your website needs SEO and Linkbuilding to be competitive. But “doing SEO” isn’t good enough. You need an objective. What are your goals? Which terms, when a customer searches Google, should they find one of your pages? (Action: Strategic Thinking + Keyword Research)

Q: Do You Have Individual, Unique Pages Written for Those Phrases?

Once you know what phrases SHOULD help people find your product or service, ask yourself whether your existing pages A) target those phrases. (Action: Content Strategy + Information Architecture)

February: Is Your Content Ho Hum or Awe-sum?

Once you’ve pinpointed the weak points in your website copy / content structure, it’s time to write or rewrite.

Q: Does Your Content Speak to Target Users in a Compelling Way?

Small business owners often find it difficult to answer this question objectively. Find someone you know who qualifies as your target audience. Ask them to imagine having landed on Page X of your website after searching one of your target keyword phrases. Does that page speak to their interest? Does it answer their questions? But most importantly, is it compelling enough to keep them engaged and move them a step closer toward becoming a customer.

You need brutal honesty. In order to succeed in SEO, there’s no room for ego. Either you’re converting traffic or you’re disappointing traffic. And the quality of your page content determines the result. (Action: Review Pages and Rewrite Content That Isn’t Extraordinary.)

March: Is Your Website Worth Visiting Twice?

If you threw up a static website that never changes, never updates, and always offers the same 6-10 pages, there’s no reason for anyone to ever share your information. In the digital age, links = love. You want links from everywhere, but especially websites related to your industry, products, city, and specialty.

Q: What Makes Your Website Worth Visiting Twice?

You may not yet care whether someone visits your website twice. If you’re a B2B or a service provider, you may only care that people find your site, grab your contact info, and make the call.

But other competing websites ARE more interesting. They provide insights, tips, humor, photos, news, and they showcase expertise. You can capture the user’s attention and respect by showcasing your own expertise, and you do this most effectively by blogging. (Action: Plan 52 Weekly Blog Posts to Intrigue, Interest, and Assist Your Customer Base.)

April: Is It Easy to Purchase or Contact?

If I do find your website through Google, how easy is it for me to make a purchase or fill out a form from the point of entry? Do I have to wade through half a dozen pages to find the precise product I’m looking for? Do I have to fill out six thousand fields in order to get you to contact me?

The purpose of having a website is to turn visitors into customers. If your website makes the conversion process difficult, technology is working against you rather than for you. (Action: Upgrade Contact Forms or Ecommerce Usability)

May: Have You Settled for One Kind of Search Traffic?

The greatest misconception in SEO / PPC is the idea that you only need to be visible in one place or the other. The problem with that line of thinking is that most people don’t look at both ads and organic results in the same search. Their purpose defines where they look.

Studies show that a person in the research phase is more likely to look at and click organic listings, while a person ready to make a purchase or looking for the best deal is more likely to click a paid search ad. So you target the full target audience by being visible at the top of both left and righthand columns in search results. (Action: Target the Missing Piece to Drive Fresh New Traffic)

June: Are You Capturing Newsletter Subscribers?

The lesson bloggers and business owners alike seem to learn 3-4 years in is that newsletters are like gold. You can double or triple sales by building a quality email list from people visiting your site. This is the #1 relationship driven / sales building technique you absolutely MUST employ in 2012. 

If your current web visitors make a purchase today, it saves you more money to retain their business on an ongoing basis than it costs to replace that lost customer with a new one. Customer retention is key. And any major chain will tell you that implementing upselling strategies is how CEOs make their millions. (Action: Upgrade/Create Newsletter Call-to-Action)

This was one of my priorities for 2012, as you can see by visiting my home page or the top of my sidebar.

July: Are Your Profiles a Ghost Town?

Back in 2008, there was a mad dash to register all of a brand’s potential profiles in every social media site under the sun. You can still do this using a service like KnowEm. But in the paranoia driven race to register, most brands failed to answer the question:

Q: What Are You Going to Do With All Those Social Profiles?

The defacto answer is typically NOTHING. At best, a brand will use each possible profile to push an RSS feed of their latest blog posts or tweets.

Tip: If your profile is a Ghost Town, your first impression is that your brand doesn’t have its sh$! together. Better to not have a profile than to look irrelevant. (Action: Establish a Purpose for Each Social Network or Kill It.)

August: Are You Answering Questions Online?

Every day, people are volleying questions out into the virtual void, hoping someone will come back with an intelligent answer. You could be that someone.

Be the intentional, active voice in your industry, helping individuals and building rapport long before your services are even needed. Build trust = build your brand. (Action: Answer Questions on Twitter, Quora, and Forums)

September: Are You Gaining New Links?

You’re not just competing with your digitally challenged direct competitors for top billing in Google search results. You’re competing with every college, forum, blog, directory, and article that references the same keywords you do business with. Someone you’re competing with is building links, whether actual competitor or search competitor. To remain static with the same number of links of an extended period of time is to lose the battle. (Action: Develop a Link Building Plan)

October: Are Your Blog Posts Compelling?

Posts that almost never go viral have nonsensical three word phrases that are so general nobody knows what they’d get if they actually clicked to read. Get specific. Be adventurous. (Action: Read 3 “How to Write Titles” Posts and Practice with Your 52 Plan)

November: Do Your Commenters Feel Appreciated?

Approve comments within an hour. You can’t build steam on a blog post if everyone’s comments fall into a black hole that you only get to when you feel like it. Approve comments. Respond to each one. And once a month, thank your commenters for taking the time. (Action: Create an Email Template to Thank Commenters Individually)

December: Do Your Landing Pages Convert PPC Traffic?

The biggest mistake people make with PPC is to send their newly acquired visitors to regular internal pages of the website. These pages are often formatted to be informational in a “Get to Know Us” format, whereas paid ad clickers are looking for actionable material. It’s time to test landing pages specifically designed to target paid search visitors. (Action: Test 2-3 Landing Page Versions Monthly)

Bonus: How Do Visitors Remember You?

One visit may not be enough. But if your visitors are still thinking it over, or looking at alternatives, stay top of mind by remarketing to them every chance you get. When they visit ESPN or Better Homes and Gardens, be the ad they see that reminds them of the great opportunity still waiting for them. (Action: Create a Remarketing Initiative with Creative Banners)

So that’s where you start. You have 13 months worth of initiatives here to help you plan your small business marketing initiatives for 2012.

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After falling painfully behind Google in Pay Per Click tool innovation, Microsoft has done one thing right. Recognizing that most people start with AdWords accounts and then move extra budget to the adCenter side, MSN finally built a quick and easy method for importing existing campaigns from AdWords to adCenter. Assuming you use a PC and you’ve downloaded Microsoft adCenter’s Desktop Editor,

you can now use a special import feature on MS adCenter to import directly from your AdWords account. This means no inbetween csv or excel spreadsheets. Simply select which campaigns and ad groups and click “Import”.

I’ve tested the functionality and it works great, so long as you import entire campaigns. But there are two caveats worth calling attention to.

Updating Partial Campaigns Not So Much

The one snag I noticed came when I tried to import a campaign, but I opted to not update existing information on two ad groups that already existed on the Bing/Yahoo side. adCenter generated an error message which sent me back to the drawing board.

My quick response was to import the entire campaign and ignore the option to leave existing ad groups as is. The import worked flawlessly. It is the easiest and fastest way to keep both tools current.

You’ll Have to ALWAYS Update AdWords First

Since AdWords doesn’t have similar functionality at this point, your best bet is to make all campaign changes on the Google side and then quick-import them over to the adCenter side.

Exact Match or Nothing

This presents an obvious problem. Assuming your ad groups yield different results on Bing vs Google, you may want certain ad groups to remain unedited in order to maintain their superior results on MSN. That would require you to only update the ad groups you don’t wish to change within a campaign.

Granted, this is supposed to be a basic functionality and option, but this functionality didn’t work for me out of the box. I’ll try it again in the weeks ahead. Just keep in mind, user behavior is different on each search engine, and you don’t necessarily want identical campaigns on both ends after the initial setup.

If you have any experiences with the new import feature you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.

And for the record, I’m going to once again voice my displeasure that Microsoft hasn’t provided a Desktop Editor for Mac.

Related Posts:

• 12 Steps To Improve Your Marketing Efforts in 2012
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Here’s the breakdown of visits to each of the top ten search results in Google:

Why is this significant? Google offers a keyword research tool popularly called the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool. This tool will estimate how many searches are performed for each phrase you may optimize a page for on your site.

For Example

In other words, if you sold racing bikes, you would perform a search that looks something like this. I entered in two phrases: racing bikes, and racing bicycles. Google offers an estimate of global monthly and national searches for those and related keywords.

Now it’s time to do the math. Keeping in mind that Google’s only offering estimates, we can at least get a picture of what kind of traffic we could expect should we achieve Page 1 rankings for these terms.

Take a Deeper Look

If 12,100 people around the world are monthly searching for road racing bicycles, then I know approximately how many visitors I would get if my website ranks #1 for that term. 18.2% of 12,100 is 2,202. So if a page of my site ranks #1 on Google for that term, I will expect somewhere in the ballpark of 2,202 visits per month.

If I am doing my due diligence, I can now go through all the many keyword phrases and subsets of phrases to see what kind of traffic each will drive. This gives me a preliminary summary model of my marketing efforts. If I get 2,202 monthly Google-referred visitors and 3% convert into paying customers, then I have approximately 66 monthly sales for my efforts. Depending on how much it cost me to arrive at the #1 position on Google, I may or may not have just made a ton of money.

The conversion rate on-site will of course vary for each website and fluctuate based on successful A/B testing. The smallest design or content changes can dramatically improve your conversion rate, but you’ll never know until you experiment.

Putting It All Together

Now that you have that information, you can at least make an informed judgment call on which terms to target and how much to spend.

Obviously, all of the numbers gathered through research are estimates and could be wildly off. But if you’re hesitant to spend money on SEO because you’re not sure why it’s so important, this should give you some insight into the possibilities.

Approaching SEO

The importance of SEO is to have established goals. Did I mention reasonable goals? While we don’t have time to go into it today, you can’t get #1 rankings for a few hundred dollars (or maybe even a few thousand dollars) per month. Your competition may have hundreds or thousands more links than you. It will take hard work and considerable resources to accomplish your goals.

A seasoned SEO Specialist should be able to tell you when your expectations are completely unreasonable. There’s no hard and fast rule on how much it will take to reach the #1 spot. There are a thousand modified approaches to improving your rankings, and each one will have differing levels of success at different rates of time.

The Moral of the Story

If nothing else, the purpose of this post is to make it clear that there is SOLID traffic and potential business out there that you’re letting someone else have when you don’t pursue SEO with gusto.

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That means the website is built in HTML or utilizing some sort of CMS (content management system) that may or may not have an effective blog module.

Which means you’ve got to get creative.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is to create their blog on a different domain because they can’t figure out how to merge the website and the blog together.

You ALWAYS lose traction when you do this. Yes, it can take more time and money to merge the two. Yes, you may have to commit to a site rebuild just to make it work. But if you make money online (or even hope to), it’s worth the extra resources.

By creating separate entities…

1. You Dilute the SEO Value

A static website will never get super competitive in organic rankings by itself. It takes links. No one links to static content unless it’s super informational. A blog by nature is frequently updated, which means pinging Google with new and unique keyword phrases week after week.

The funnel of entering your domain grows larger and larger with each post.

But when the blog is on a separate domain or, God forbid, a subdomain on blogspot, the links and fresh content build SEO value for your blog only. And most with static websites and separate blogs don’t make money through their blog.

2. You Dilute Your Brand

Don’t take this personally. If you can’t figure out how to add a blog to your current website, it’s safe to assume that you also won’t design the separate blog website to match or closely follow the branding of the original website.

People feel tricked when they click a link in the main navigation of a website and it leads them to a totally different looking website.

And even when they don’t feel tricked, they feel disappointed. A standard or even slightly modified blogspot theme guarantees you a very poor 1st impression.

Why spend time and money at all on creating something that will negatively affect your audience’s perception of you?

3. You Confuse Your Customers

Visitors to your static website click “Blog” in the navigation only to find themselves on another website entirely. It looks different. It feels VERY different.

And there’s no quick and easy way to get back to the other site. Of course there’s the Back button, but no one will tell you to depend on it for usability.

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