Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

The annual ISA Marketing and Sales Summit is rapidly approaching (7 – 9 September in St Louis). Last year, I taught an intro to inbound marketing workshop that was very well received. This year, we wanted to “kick it up a notch” and so I’ll be focusing on advanced strategies and tactics for creating remarkable content.

Content is the fuel that powers inbound marketing (What is inbound marketing?). It needs to be compelling enough that your audience wants to share it with their peers. That’s the definition of “remarkable.” This workshop is going to present some strategies and tactics for planning, crafting and promoting remarkable content.

Here’s an overview of what we’ll be covering:

Introduction

The first session will provide an introduction/review of the five fundamental components of inbound marketing; content, search engine optimization, social media promotion, conversion and analytics.

Characteristics of Remarkable Content

The cornerstone of inbound marketing is remarkable content. This session will explain the three characteristics that determine whether or not content is truly remarkable.

Planning

It is more important to be consistent than prolific when it comes to content creation. “Planning Content” will cover strategies and tactics for developing ideas for content and establishing an effective publication schedule.

Crafting

The heart and soul of this workshop, “Creating Content” will break down the components of any content (title, lead, body and kicker) and explain the role and importance of each. Next, it will cover valuable techniques for creating appealing and engaging content.

Promoting

What good is remarkable content if nobody knows it exists? “Promoting Content” will explore some strategies and tactics for actively promoting your content via social media and passively promoting it via search engine optimization.

Wrap-Up

The wrap-up session will feature case studies, questions and demonstrations of some of the tools and techniques discussed.

About the Marketing & Sales Summit

Sponsored by the ISA Management Division, the ISA’s Annual Marketing & Sales Summit will help marketing and sales executives in the automation markets meet the strategic and tactical challenges of the 21st century. This unique event is designed exclusively for senior sales and marketing professionals in the automation markets.

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“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” This sage advice comes to us from the wise and prescient Ferris Bueller. In a world where strategic business planning is typically measured in years, the pace of change in the world of search is placing constant stress on internet marketing plans.

Google’s “Panda” update earlier this year is the latest example of search game-changers. What’s a company to do? This video from the search experts at SEOmoz explain the reason for and implications of this algorithm change. Before you watch this important video, here are a couple of important takeaways:

Search Engine Gaming Is Getting Harder

There were lots of automated, black-hat techniques that were effective at generating inbound links, boosting your page rank and improving organic search ranking. While inbound links are still important, other more social factors are getting involved in the algorithm that are harder to game. At the end of the day, the formula for success is still the same: Create remarkable content that people want to consume and share with others.

Ignore Social Media at Your Own Peril

The search algorithms are increasingly incorporating more and more data from social media APIs. This means that by not participating in social media, you are potentially hurting your organic search engine results. In other words, you may not generate lots of leads from social media activities like Twitter but alone that isn’t a reason for not participating.

Dump Metrics, Adopt Analytics

The Grand Pooh-bah of web analytics, Avinash Kaushik, warns against confusing metrics with analytics. “When people say, ‘web analytics,’ they really mean web metrics. Your boss rarely asks for analysis; she asks for ‘data’ (metrics) or ‘reports’ (KPIs)… If you remember nothing else, remember this: life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot.” Old metrics like page views and inbound links used to tell most of the story. But now that’s no longer the case. Search optimization requires diving much deeper and finding answers like, “Why is the bounce rate on this page so high?” or “How can we increase the conversion rate of this page?”

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Setting proper expectations for search optimization is critical. As the system becomes harder to game and increasingly requires social validation, the results will take longer and longer. The reason is that you need to build an audience, which takes time. There are exceptions, of course, when you can catch lightning in a bottle go viral but those are infrequent scenarios and unreliable. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

UPDATE: Less than two hours after publishing this article, Search Engine Land published an article about “The Bleak Future of Commoditized, Outsourced SEO.” It explains in detail why the shortcuts are disappearing.

How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

Without further delay, here is a great video from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series.

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This article originally appeared as a guest post on The Fundable Entrepreneur. Angel investor, entrepreneur and business mentor Ken Steinberg has created a site that is dedicated to providing early stage entrepreneurs with assistance because “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Moustrap game photo courtesy of Glogger via Creative Commons

The best product or service doesn’t always win. Sorry, but the road to success it littered waist-high with better mousetraps that never sold and in the vast majority of those cases, they failed at marketing. A superior product with inferior marketing is a Betamax. An inferior product with superior marketing is a Shamwow. A superior product with superior marketing is an iPod.

If you want to be fundable, you need to be findable. This article will let you in on five tactics you can use in order to implement an inbound marketing strategy that will level the marketing playing field between you and your competitors, regardless of budget.

You Lucky Dog!

We live in the greatest times in the history of business startups. If you are in the early stages of getting a business off of the ground, you may not exactly feel like it right now but you are lucky to have access to a truly amazing array of resources and opportunities. But if you won’t take my word on that, maybe you’ll take Guy Kawasaki’s.

If you’re an entrepreneur and unfamiliar with Guy Kawasaki I strongly suggest you become familiar with him ASAP. Guy earned his wings as the original “Technology Evangelist” for Apple Computer in the early days of the Macintosh. His job was to convince software developers to write programs to run on Apple computers. His success at Apple allowed him go on to form a venture capital investment firm, Garage Capital, and to also found several successful startups himself. Guy wrote a blog article called, “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09,” in which he described how quickly and cheaply he was able to launch one of his online ventures, Truemors. He concludes, “1) There’s really no such thing as bad PR. 2) $12,000 goes a very long way these days. 3) You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away. 4) Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.”

While there are countless examples of free and low cost web technologies that can help get your company off the ground, in my opinion the most important, least understood, and most poorly implemented is inbound marketing. If you learn what it is and how to do it properly, it can be your secret weapon to leapfrog competitors and put distance between yourself and them.

The Problem with Outbound

Before explaining inbound marketing, it’s useful to explain its polar opposite; outbound marketing. This is the “traditional” approach to marketing in which companies try interrupt people from doing what they wanted to do in order to watch, hear or read a message they wouldn’t otherwise care about. These interruptions include television and radio commercials, print advertisements, web banner ads and popups, cold calls, unsolicited emails’ etc…

While these techniques can certainly be effective they have three major flaws:

• First, people are getting much better at ignoring and/or blocking these interruptions. DVRs allow us to skip commercials, satellite radio does away with commercials, and spam filters help keep our inboxes clean.
• Second, traditional outbound marketing is linear: In order to reach more eyeballs, you have to pay more. A small advertisement in the local newspaper is affordable to most but a 30 second Superbowl commercial isn’t.
• Finally, it’s rude. As a new business trying to establish relationships with new customers wouldn’t you love to start by some means other than trying to shove an unsolicited message in their face?

Inbound to the Rescue

Implementing inbound marketing means pulling people into your site by creating remarkable content and then converting visitors to leads and leads to customers. This approach counteracts the three problems I just listed with outbound marketing. You’re not trying to interrupt people so you don’t need to worry about all of those roadblocks. Inbound marketing is nonlinear because it relies on people sharing your content with others; one person tells two friends, they tell two friends, and so on… Finally, it starts off your relationship with potential customers with an act of generosity, not interruption.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to having the positive attribute of not being outbound marketing, it has the added benefit of being much less expensive.

Do I have your attention yet?

Five for Finding

OK, hopefully you’ve bought into the idea that to be successful, you need to be findable and that the best strategy for getting there is inbound marketing. So let’s meet the rubber with the road and list those five tactics of inbound marketing:

1. Create Remarkable Content – The key word here is “remarkable,” which means something worth remarking about. While there are lots of tips, tricks, and techniques involved in creating remarkable content there is one golden rule that will help get you started. Make sure the content you create qualifies as being a “gift.” In other words, does your content provide something valuable to the reader? Does it improve her day? Give him something that makes his job easier? Provide advice for solving a problem or making more money? This should clue you into the fact that the most common form of content companies shower upon us – the press release – is not a gift. In fact, if you think of it in that light the whole concept of a press release starts to feel a little silly and a lot antiquated.
2. Optimize for Search – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated process that is very poorly understood. But the reality is that about 85% of how well your site will rank for given keywords breaks down to just three factors; inbound links (65%), URL structure (10%), and page titles (10%). Obviously, the most important factor, by a long shot, is inbound links. This is why creating remarkable content is the cornerstone of an inbound marketing strategy. On the Internet, people remark about your content with links. If you create great content with keywords in the URL and page title, you’re 85% of the way there.
3. Promote Online – Once you’ve created your content and made it search engine friendly, you want to get out there and spread the word. This primarily means using social media to get people sharing and talking about your content.
4. Convert – This step could also be labeled “paydirt.” There is a reasonably famous clip of former New York Giants football coach Bill Parcels motivating his players on the sidelines during a Superbowl in which he yells, “This why you lift all them weights!” If you’re going to go to all the trouble of diving traffic to your website and not go to the effort of converting visitors to leads and leads to customers, then why bother in the first place? So how do you convert? With landing pages. A landing page is contains two key elements; a strong call to action and a low-friction conversion form.
5. Analyze. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Having a good analytics package installed on your website is a good first step, but it only provides metrics, not analytics. The difference is that metrics are relative indicators of behavior whereas analytics are absolute measurements of desired outcomes. For example, unique visitors and depth of visit are important and meaningful metrics, but they only indicate traffic volume and patterns which may or may not correlate to actually improving your business. However, conversion rates on landing pages, for example, give you a measurement of a very specific desired outcome; new leads.

Simple, Yes. Easy, No.

These steps sound simple enough, and they are. However, simple does not always equate to easy. In fact, simplicity is pretty hard to pull off. Each of the five inbound marketing tactics mentioned here involve hundreds of sub-tactics and techniques in order to be successful. Some are common sense, some are counterintuitive, but all of them are free or low cost.

That’s why inbound marketing levels the playing field: it’s more about the width of your mind than the depth of your wallet, according to Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot and co-author of “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs“. If you want to learn more about inbound marketing, I recommend you get started by picking up a copy of his book.

Now go forth and be remarkable!

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"I'll take Vincent for the win (FTW)!" (image courtesy of Greenery on Flickr)

The most popular post on this blog, “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress ,” was written two years ago. One of the commenters recently asked:

Jon, it’s been nearly two years since you posted this article and the economy and job markets have changed significantly. How do you feel your Resume-as-a-Wordpress-site has performed in comparison to the traditional brochure, or single page, resumes people have been publishing?

I’m really glad somebody asked me this question, as it has given me the prod I needed to provide a much needed update on the results. The bottom line is that the results have been terrific. I’d boil them down to the following three categories:

• Convenience
• Data
• Results

Convenience

I’ve relied heavily on my web site when communicating my background and skills to a variety of people. Sometimes, I’ve used the site to respond to job opportunities by including links to my professional bio, a sampling of my public speaking engagements, or links to all of my social media accounts. While it’s very convenient to have these links at my disposal, the best part is really the flexibility. I can embed presentations, documents, images, and even video. You can’t do that on a paper resume.

Data

Analytics is the fifth pillar of Inbound Marketing and it has been very valuable to have the insight into traffic sources, engagement measures, and keyword analysis. If you’re using WordPress to host your online resume, there are lots of great plugins that make it a snap to integrate Google Analytics. Consider the following:

Click on image for full size

This screen shot shows that more than 40% of the traffic to my online resume comes from this blog. That exemplifies how important content is to driving web traffic. Using analytic tools gives you an understanding of how people are finding you online. Also, it gives you an understanding of what interests visitors to your resume:

Click on the image for a full size

Results

OK, what’s the bottom line? Has my online resume produced results? Answer: oh yeah!

Some of the results are hard to quantify. I’ve earned consulting business and speaking engagements and the degree to which my online presence helped can’t really be measured. It’s probably time to start thinking about ways to start collecting some data (even anecdotal) along those lines.

But the best example just occurred several months ago. I received the following email from a project manager of a local software company:

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This is a perfect example of how an online resume can leverage the Long Tail of the Internet to create opportunities. In my how-to article, one of the features I cover is using blog categories to group together your experience and qualifications. This email came about because I categorized some of my work with the web content management system “DotNetNuke,” which is how and why I was found in this particular instance.

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However, the best news here is that after meeting with this company and discussing my Inbound Marketing services, I was able to secure a long term consulting contract instead of a day or two of work to modify some web pages. During an interview with one of the owners of the company, I was evangelizing the benefits of inbound marketing when he asked, “OK, then how did we find you?” When his employee answered, “Inbound marketing,” the job was mine.

Inbound marketing FTW!

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Google is moving the goal posts again. This is not a complaint, but an observation. This post isn’t about the ins and outs of their new  Instant Search feature going live. There are lots of bloggers taking the opportunity to opine about the irrelevance of SEO or the death of the long tail search. I recommend reading at least a dozen or so posts to get a wide view of the potential impact. There is one thing everyone seems to agree with; we won’t really know the impact for a while.

So what is this post about? It’s a life lesson for search engine marketers, articulated in memorable fashion by Ferris Bueller on his day off. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Are You Insane?

Albert Einstein is credited with the quote, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  If you haven’t thrown out your search marketing playbook this year but are expecting the same results, you may very well be insane.   There have been so many game-changing events in the last twelve months that it’s critical to a) understand their implications and b) modify your strategies and tactics accordingly.

Search Engine Marketing Is Changing

Google Instant is going to change the way organic search and pay per click campaigns behave as well as how they’re measured.  Right away, the very definition of the word “impressions” has become a lot more complicated.  This will have a trickle-down effect on all of the click stream metrics you’re watching.  In engineering terms, we call this event a discontinuity.  I’m fond of using the phrase, “I do not think it means what you think it means” for many of my blog posts, and that concept can be applied here also.  You simply cannot compare (some of) your historic metrics to those being collected as of yesterday.  They are apples and oranges.

We’ll also need to start thinking about the impact of what I’ll call “attention deficit searching.”  Early observations suggest that instant search is going to favor established brands and trending topics/searches.  This means that if you have optimized for a given long tail keyword search, a person who may have intended to type in that entire search phrase could get distracted by a recent news event and never make it to your website.  Let’s use a fictitious example…  Assume for a moment that your website is optimized for the long tail search, “bubble bath pillows.”  Then one day, the Internet goes nuts with stories about “bubble bath pics of Angelina Jolie.”  Many of your searches could experience “searchus interruptus.”

Search Engine Marketing Is Personalized

This aspect isn’t new, but Google Instant will up the ante even more.  Google has told us that, “Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search.”  These predictions are going to be personalized for the person conducting the search, which means that no two people will (theoretically) see the same results.  Further complicating this is the fact that this is going to occur dynamically as the person types, which is likely to change their behavior.  At the end of the day, it’s possible that this will end up improving the quality of click-throughs to your site since they are going to have to survive this new vetting process.  However, it means that intelligent web analytics are an absolute must now!  Since there is no such thing as a generic search anymore, the results and outcomes will have to speak for themselves.

Search Engine Marketing Is Dead

Okay, that’s a blatant and transparent sensationalized headline.  SEM is no more dead than the web, despite Wired Magazine’s own sensational headline that “The Web Is Dead, Long Live the Internet.”  In “Search Engine Marketing: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means,” I wrote that…

Your entire Internet marketing strategy may be based on a mirage. Many companies are focused on search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. This is all well and good as long as Google remains the gatekeeper of the Internet. But here’s the thing; there’s a new sheriff in town and the entire 18 year old ecosystem of the world wide web is in danger.

The reality is that “walled gardens” like Facebook and iTunes are increasingly closed off to search engines and their influence is even stronger than Google’s.  The volume still favors search engines right now, but Internet marketers need to be aware of this approaching tsunami.

Search Engine Marketing’s Bottom Line

Things are changing really, really quickly.  Like many situations, this favors the agile, forward-thinking organizations.  Keep your eyes open and your powder dry, but most of all…

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