- Fruits de Mare from Downtown Atlantic Restaurant & Bakery - 4 stars (a light and delicious seafood mix of shrimp, lobster, and calamari)
- BBQ chicken and Mac and Cheese from Soul Sister Quisine - 4 stars (sooo authentic, sooo good)
- Guacamole from Maria’s Bistro Mexicano - 4.5 stars (this guacamole was some of the best I’ve ever had, and the chef made it right in front of us from ripe avocados)
- Red velvet cupcakes from Abu’s Homestyle Bakery - 4 stars (moist and flavorful with flawless buttermilk frosting)
- Malva Pudding with Amarula Custard from Madiba Restaurant - 4.5 stars (The only thing that I couldn’t resist going back for seconds…and thirds)

As we left the event we swore we would never eat again, but just thinking about all the delicious gourmet food makes my mouth water all over again. There are over 1,000 more restaurants in Brooklyn to try, but this event really highlighted some of the best in the borough. Incredible cultural events like this make us proud of our community and are just one more reason The JAR Group is proud to be a Brooklynite!

Following is a checklist that all websites should go through before spending the time and resources developing and marketing the site. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours of your time, and it can have a significant impact on what you thought you knew about your market. With that said, it is also highly recommended for established sites to run through a list like this at least once every 6-12 months. At The JAR Group we offer a robust market research offering that often heavily influences even established sites’ plans. This is a scaled down version of the research that can at least get you up and running and give you an edge. All of these tools are either free or offer a basic free version of their service, which is good enough for our initial research.

The Competition
Almost every time someone says they have an amazing and totally unique website idea that can’t lose, there are already about 50 sites just like it already up and running. That is definitely not to say the idea is not worth developing, it just means that you have to at least identify 1) who the competition is, 2) how effectively each site is reaching their customers, and 3) how you can stand out from them

1)  First head to Google. That’s right, this is ideally the way a lot of people will be finding your site in the future, so it’s a good idea to understand the landscape your target audience is currently seeing there. Pretend for a second your site already exists, think about what keywords you would use to it in the search engines. Now Google those terms. You may not find sites that do exactly what you’re doing, but you’ll find ones that come close. Start writing all of these down and take notes on their site usability, their feature set, their apparent audience targeting (look at the meta keywords in their homepage’s source code for ideas), their value proposition, and anything else that stands out. Don’t get discouraged right away if you find a site that “took” your idea - there’s a whole lot they could be doing wrong that could prevent their online success and you can use to your advantage.

2)  Take that list of sites from step 1 and enter the competitor url’s into compete.com. Right off the bat you can see how the competition stacks up - who is getting the most traffic, which sites are new, where they are getting their traffic, and more. A lot of times the data can be surprising - the seemingly “best” site in your list isn’t necessarily getting much traffic, many of the sites get the majority of their traffic from Youtube referrals, etc. Maybe there’s a site that’s doing a great job of what you’re trying to do, they seem to be marketing themselves well, they’ve been around for a while, and they still are getting very little traffic - that’s a bad sign for you and is worth researching further. Also, you may notice a site had low traffic all along, up until a certain month where it spiked to high levels. You should definitely do your research on the cause of that. You may find some great marketing ideas you would have never thought of until you do a little snooping.

3)  Time permitting, you can also dig deeper into the competition using quantcast.com. They provide great data on competitor visitor demographics - age, education, income, geographic location, etc. This can give you a better idea of who your target may be and how to speak to them. As with many of these tools though, they are based on a sample audience so when you are analyzing smaller sites the data may seem fairly skewed in some instances.

4)  Now research those same sites in SEMrush.com. This will tell you the kinds of keywords they are bidding on in Pay Per Click campaigns, as well as estimates on their ad spend. This information will give you a picture of who they are targeting and how much the customers’ visits are worth to them. If they are bidding $10/click for your ideal keyword, would you be able to generate an average of at least that amount from each visitor? You won’t last too long in the competitionif your competitors have a better plan of monetizing their site. SEMrush also gives you competitors’ PPC ad copies so you can get an idea of their value proposition to their customers.

Part II: The Demand
In Part II of this series we will review the other side of the coin - the potential demand for your site. Just knowing that you can outdo the existing competition does not ensure site traffic, money, or fame. There has to be actual demand for it - either in the search engines (via keyword searches), the social media sites, or wherever else your target audience resides online.

I believe this list will give you a well informed, high-level perspective on your online landscape. What are your methods of competitive research online? Which tools and techniques have helped you the most?

Are you an open-minded and innovative person who is passionate about achieving online results for your clients? Do you have a proven track record of project management success in the online marketing space?

We want you you to think beyond set deliverables and bring ideas to the table that will provide added value to both clients and to the agency. If you enjoy interfacing with clients, but still want the freedom to create, build and expand your project management knowledge then tell us how you will make this your next role.

To be considered, interested candidates must send a cover letter and resume to jobs_pmw@thejargroup.com.

Summary:

The Project Manager must successfully manage client projects from kick-off to completion. Consequently, he/she will primarily be responsible for planning, managing, and controlling the budget, schedule, and scope of a project. Additionally, the Project Manager will mentor, support, and advise on project management skills and lead teams through successful project delivery to clients.

Key responsibilities:

· Execute full lifecycle project management on Internet projects including, but not limited to, analysis of client requirements, scope, schedule, budget, and strategy activities

· Develop and then assess impacts of the time, scope, and budget relationship to maintain successful delivery

· Define and manage team expectations regarding scope of work and responsibilities

· Manage client expectations and communications flow for production and the project team

· Represent the team’s consensus in all client communications clearly

Qualifications:

· Undergraduate degree required with minimum 3-4 years experience in project management, web development, or IT consulting

· Agency experience managing diverse teams and multiple concurrent online marketing projects (campaign development, PPC, media planning, email marketing, social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing) is critical

· Strong analytical and problem-solving skills as well as verbal and written communication skills

· Comfortable working in a casual, open office environment

· At this time we are only considering local candidates in the NYC metro area

Compensation commensurate with experience

Recently, while reading Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, I was inspired to collect a list of books for our office library. This criteria for this list is fairly broad and the recommendations have come from numerous channels–mostly I rely on authors of blogs and books who produce great content themselves. The list includes anything that is relevant to doing business in the online space. I’ve focused on books by current thought leaders in Internet marketing, but I’ve also included a handful of “classics” on writing, communication, information presentation and general business intelligence.

So, what are the must-reads for a company that cares about communication, service excellence and delivering marketing wins for their clients?

Books by current thought leaders (in no particular order):

1. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marking, and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly, by Seth Godin
2. I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad, by Jeanne Bliss (recommended by Chris Brogan - he “loves the hell out of this book”–see #5)
3. Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, by Tom Peters!
4. Meatball Sundae, by Seth Godin
5. Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith (kind of a How to Win Friends and Influence People 2.0 - see #16)
6. Free Agent Nation, by Daniel Pink
7. e-Riches 2.0, by Scott Fox
8. Gravitational Marketing, by Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller
9. What Would Google Do, by Jeff Jarvis (via @thomashardy1805)
10. Radically Transparent, by Andy Beal
11. Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin
12. Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Levinson
13. The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media, by Paul Chaney
14. Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, by 37signals et al (via @rob11n)
15. Web analytics 2.0, by Avinash Kaushik (via @dylanspencer)

“Classics”:

16. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
17. Language in Thought and Action, by S. I. Hayakawa
18. 19. 20. Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations (three separate books), by Edward Tufte
21. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

I’d love some input on this list, so if you have any additional resources to recommend, please drop me a line on Twitter @micooler, or add them in the comments below.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals

Why are you marketing on Facebook? What do you hope to achieve? Managing a Facebook Page can require serious time and effort, so make sure you have your objectives aligned at the outset.

Your goals should be specific. Your goals should revolve around engagement and interaction with your existing and potential customers. Your goals on Facebook should be to enhance your customer service or sales process, not just serve as a branding tool.

Step 2: Create Your Facebook Page

The basic component to marketing on Facebook is your Page. Your Page is essentially your brand’s profile on Facebook. Over 10 million users become fans of Pages every day. A Page can be anything. There are Pages for brands, celebrities and even random things like “Laughing When Someone Falls.” Yes, that’s an actual Facebook Page and it has over 2,000,000 fans.

Facebook Pages are easy to set up and even if you don’t plan on doing any serious marketing on Facebook, you should set up a Page for your brand to ensure that no one else does. However, if this is all you do, don’t expect much.

Facebook Pages are tied to the the events stream, which means that when users become a fan of your Page, their friends will see this in their news feed. With your Page, you can also organize events for fans, send messages and updates, add photos, videos, hold contests, conduct surveys, utilize applications and depending on your settings, users can post content to your Page.

Step 3: Advertise Your Page on Facebook

Once you have a Page, you’ll want to promote your page and attract new fans. Within Facebook, this can be done on their advertising platform. Facebook advertising has had some mixed reviews. From personal experience, I can tell you that advertising on Facebook is very different from other forms of online advertising. Normally, when advertising via paid search, you bid on keywords that indicate intent. The person who searches for “digital cameras”, for example, is most likely in the mindset to research or purchase a digital camera. This isn’t the case on Facebook. On Facebook, you advertise to users that are not in the mindset to be advertised to. People are on Facebook to see what their friends are doing, update their status or stalk people they went to high school with. They aren’t there to become a fan of your Page or brand.

To make advertising work, you need to do a significant amount of testing. Click-through-rate (CTR) is typically VERY low. Impressions are usually very high, however, and cost per million clicks (CPM) is very low, depending on the number of people you are targeting. Recently, Facebook has allowed advertisers to include a “Become a Fan” option with your ad, allowing users to become a fan of your Page without actually visiting your page. This could potentially address the low click-through-rate issue. Keep in mind that Facebook users are definitely not interested in leaving Facebook. If you’re intention is to get users to click on your ad, don’t expect them to click on an ad that will take them AWAY from Facebook. The goal of the ad should be either branding or to encourage users to become a fan of your brand. And I can’t emphasize this enough–test, test, test! Run multiple ads and variations of ads targeting different demographics. Also, ads grow stale very quickly so change them regularly.

A big advantage to Facebook advertising is that it offers some ridiculous hyper-targeting. You can target people by location, age, sex, education level, etc. You can even target users who already Fans and those that aren’t. This can give you some very useful insights about your target market. It is also incredibly useful for local marketing.

Step 4: Create Unique and Compelling Content

There are over 600,000 Pages on Facebook. Why should people become a fan of your page? Users are beginning to suffer from brand fatigue, so you really need to offer them a compelling reason to become a fan. Your Page has to be unique and you should offer fans something exclusive that they can only get on Facebook. One pretty common method of offering fans something exclusive and also promoting your Page is a Facebook contest for fans only. However, after this contest you should continue to offer Fans regular and compelling content to keep them engaged. Don’t just use Facebook as a platform to update your fans with information they can already find on your website.

Facebook offers some great marketing and branding opportunities. It’s very easy to get started on Facebook but it’s difficult to succeed. Make sure you take the time to plan and do it right!

Community Links
The Community method requires participation on your part. This can include commenting on others’ blogs and connecting via networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. This can also include participating in forums and interacting with others. Community links should be approached as more of a branding effort. While some links may not pass link popularity, it’s the perfect opportunity to display your brand and interact with potential customers.

Social Links
Social links are similar to community links but with an emphasis on bookmarking sites such as Digg, Furl, Reddit and Stumbleupon. Again this does require some type of interaction but it allows you to get your content on quality websites. This method works well if you have something viral or employ linkbait.

Content Links
Article marketing is a very effective method of obtaining links. There has been a huge rise in the popularity of sites such as Ezinearticles and ArticleAlley. Press releases are also included in this category. A service such as PRNewswire or PRWeb can be used to syndicate your press release to numerous news networks.

Paid & Trade
Paid links can include banner ads, paid text links, sponsored listings, etc. This method can be effective, but the higher the quality of the site, the more expensive it can be to purchase links. Traded, or reciprocal links are an option, but it is more effective to obtain non-traded links. Directory submissions are also included in this group. There are a few good paid directories you can use, such as Business.com, BOTW.org and Yahoo Directory.

Competitor Links
This method can be effective but time consuming. You’ll have to gather link data from your main competitors, sort by relevancy and popularity and review each to see if it’s worth soliciting links from them. You then have to email each website individually to request the links.

I hope you’ve been able to gain some good information from these posts and were able to spark thought and creativeness into your linking.

Do you have some other methods you’d like to share? Post a comment!

This is half of a giant step forward in attribution reporting. The downside of this new reporting feature is that, to my knowledge, if a customer views but does not click the display ad but later does a search for the brand and converts from a search ad no view-through conversion will be attributed - only the search ad that was clicked will be. It would be ideal to see all of the touch points that occurred prior to leading to a conversion.

Most research on the value of impressions concludes that the average converter has 15 to 20 interactions with a brand, depending upon vertical, prior to converting. Often times the lag between first impression and conversion can be 30-90 days down the road. This same research indicates that added impressions, from media such as display advertising, increases conversion rates on sponsored search ads by as much as 22% on average.

Enough numbers. This data proves that we need better attribution reporting. Advertisers don’t want to just see an instance where a single impression happened to lead to a conversion. Advertisers need to see all touch points leading up to a conversion, a snapshot of the full conversion cycle!

Google, let’s take that full step!

Update:

I just found this old post on the Google Blog that mentions View-through conversion reporting way back in August of 2008. View-throughs are tracked via a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the content network.

There is also hopes for better attribution reporting with improvements in technology being made by companies such as Clearsaleing.

The secondary analytics data they provide is pulled directly from Google Analytics. This tracks page views, visitors, time spent on the site, bounce rate and Twitter followers. These metrics are then mapped against each other to present a comprehensive picture of your social media efforts

The primary benefits for using PostRank’s analytics tool are 1) you have the data in one place and 2) you are able to easily see metrics around individual posts. This kind of information is already available through various other methods, but PostRank provides a more convenient way to track efforts across many services. It also eliminates the need to manually pull data from these different sources. There is a one-month free trial; after that it is $9/ month for each blog or site.

In my opinion, this product is interesting but not mind blowing. It’s most appropriate to a more mature blogger, an organization that has content posted across many different social media channels, or for companies where brand buzz and monitoring is a top priority. The aggregation PostRank provides would make it easy and convenient for them to gain insight into viral spread & popularity.

Overall, I like the direction PostRank is taking in bringing social media engagement closer to the metrics that ultimately matter. What I’d really love is to see them add the ability to track which posts lead to the most conversions and generate the best ROI.

Contents

• Introduction
• Deny Thyself; Increase Conversions
• Free Labor—No Sweatshop: The Art of the Forum
• Going Viral Corporate Style

A majority of consumers are more likely to buy a product that’s associated with a cause they care about even if the product costs more. Increasingly, consumers are listing corporate responsibility alongside price and quality as a key factor in their purchasing decisions.

Socially-Responsible Purchases:
Throughout the month of October, consumers are urged to “Think Pink” and to purchase Pink Ribbon products in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Since its introduction in the early 90s, the Brand Awareness of the Pink Ribbon has skyrocketed. (Brand awarenesss is measured as the proportion of target customers who have prior knowledge of a brand, and the measurement is based on both brand recognition- also referred to as aided awareness- and brand recall- also referred to as unaided awareness.)

The Affiliate Marketing industry recognizes the importance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in seasonal promotions. By publishing special offer guides, affiliate networks such as Linkshare make it easy for affiliates (publishers) to find Pink Ribbon products from merchants (advertisers).  DollarDays.com, a JAR Group client, has a wide-variety of breast-cancer awareness products for consumers as well as business owners. These products help a good cause and generate revenue.

Cause Marketing and Consumer Loyalty:
According to the Cone Benchmark Study, 79% of Americans would be likely to switch from one brand to another brand if the other brand is associated with a good cause.  Amongst Millennials ages 18-24, the percentage jumps to 88%, making cause marketing one of the most effective ways of reaching this group.

Innovative affiliate sites such as iGive.com, OneCause.com, GoodSearch.com, We-Care.com, Escrip.com, and BoxTops4Education.com enable consumers to donate a percentage of their purchases to the charity of their choice. These sites make giving easy since consumers can support their favorite causes through everyday purchases, and they are among the fastest growing affiliate segments.

When discussing recruitment strategy with your affiliate manager, you may hear them refer to these sites as “loyalty” sites rather than cause marketing or charitable sites. Upromise.com, Ebates.com, and FatWallet.com are among the most prominent loyalty sites. These sites give consumers cash-back on purchases, and a prominent placement on the site or mention in an email to their loyal members can dramatically increase sales. Similarly, people who shop through iGive or OneCause.com feel a strong affinity for these sites, and obtaining placement on these sites should be a key part of any recruitment plan.

Employee Retention:
Just as consumers show a preference for brands and online sites which give back, supporting charitable efforts can increase employee retention, build skills and even improve physical and mental health.

Staffing conference booths can be tedious—especially when it requires working through the weekend. But The JAR Group’s CEO motivated employees by pledging a dollar for every zombie killed by booth visitors. The xBox 360 and staff enthusiasm generated a steady stream of booth visitors. The result: a lot of new leads and a $1500 donation to the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer!

The JAR Group partners with non-profit organizations to increase online donations through pay-per-click search engine marketing campaigns. We manage pay-per-click accounts for non-profits without upfront management fees utilizing a free budget provided through Google Grants to non-profit organizations. Working for a good cause such as Epilepsy research is great motivator and an opportunity for employees to build new skills.