Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

“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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Everything was so simple then… When search engines ruled the Internet, all we had to do was optimize our web sites to get some love and we’d turn up at the top of the results page. The most effective way to rank highly was to have high quality links pointing to our web pages. These inbound links were the coins that were deposited into our SEO piggy banks. They were the currency of Internet marketing.

Why is this conversation in the past tense?

Because of so-called “walled gardens” like Facebook and iTunes, that’s why.

Earlier this week, I wrote “Search Engine Marketing: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” in response to Wired magazine’s article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Their point was the Internet is simply a collection of pipes that form a content delivery system. The “Web” is essentially HTML sites that do not block search engines. iTunes is an application, not a web site. Facebook is (mostly) private and can’t be crawled by search engines. They are walled gardens.

This means that search engines aren’t as omniscient as they used to be.
…Which means they aren’t as influential in Internet marketing as they used to be.
……Which means that links aren’t as valuable as they used to be.

During JitterJam‘s weekly Creative Coffee session this morning, we were talking about how to identify influencers in social media. As we kicked around various ideas and returned from tangents, one of the ideas that crystallized was that in our brave new world of social media, the coin of the realm is changing from links to people.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” he examines the phenomenon of messages going viral. One of the main ingredients to an epidemic, he suggests, is a set of people with specific gifts:

• Mavens are “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
• Connectors “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” People tend to think of the Internet as a single, enormous, amorphous glob of people when, in fact, it is a series of groups. Connectors act as the information conduits between these groups.
• Salesmen are the charismatic persuaders.

As we try to establish our own influence online and spread our ideas, we still need to be doing SEO and collecting links. But we need to leave room in our piggy back for the new coins of the realm also; mavens, connectors, and salesmen. They are the ones with the keys to the walled gardens in which search engines are persona non grata.

P.S. If you’re in NH, I encourage you to stop by JitterJam on Friday mornings (8:30 – 9:30) for Creative Coffee. It’s a great forum for idea exchange. Today’s session included Ric Pratte, Marty Watts, Michael Conway, Joe Merrow, and Karen Grimmett.

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"For all your real estate needs" courtesy of SeanMcTx on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Everybody has heard the familiar axiom that “The three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location.”  The same is true for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), where your “location” is your domain name.  It’s one of the most important aspects of optimization and there are four common mistakes that hurt your website’s ranking.

Let’s use the real estate metaphor to describe them…

1) You’re a Squatter

In the real estate sense, squatting refers to setting up residence in a home you don’t own.  The Internet equivalent is setting up your website as a subdomain that belongs to someone else.  For example, jondipietro.wordpress.com.  There are a couple of reasons this is a bad idea.  First, you never build any search authority because it all belongs to the domain (wordpress.com) and not the subdomain.  In other words, there is very little difference between “jondipietro.wordpress.com” and “elmerjfudd.wordpress.com”.  Another reason this can be dangerous is that you could (theoretically) be evicted at any time.  While the risk may be low for a site like “wordpress.com”, just ask Ning users how that worked out for them.

Solution:  Find and buy a domain (but see below first).  You can purchase .com domains for about $11 per year and most hosting services (WordPress included) support using your own domain name on their platform.

2) You’re Subdividing

While this is usually a positive thing in real estate, it’s terrible for SEO.  This means having separate domains for your company and other related sites, which could include things like blogs, events, or products.  For example, let’s say I planned on launching a whole separate web site for “Inbound Marketing Workshops.”  I could host the site at “inboundmarketingworkshops.com” or use a subdomain like “workshops.domesticatingit.com”.  There are advantages to the first method – it is keyword rich, for one thing.  But there is a big problem too.  When I launch the site, it will have zero juice.  I would have to build it all from scratch because it is a brand new domain with no inbound links and no authority.  However, by making it a subdomain, I gain the benefits of two years of SEO from “domesticatingit.com”.  The converse is true as well: as the new site builds traffic and links, it will benefit the overall optimization of the domain.

Solution: Generally, though not exclusively, it’s a better idea to create a subdomain and point it at your new web site so that you can leverage any existing search quality and authority.

3) Your Sign Stinks

Let’s face it – registering a short, memorable, descriptive, keyword-rich domain name is difficult, if not impossible these days.  There are so many domains in existence, registering yours always involves trade-offs. So what constitutes a stinky sign?  Well, it could be confusing by including words that aren’t part of your optimization strategy.  For example, if you include the word “Boston” because that’s where your office is then you’re essentially telling search engines that you’re a local business; which may or may not be the case.  Another factor is getting the words in the best order.  Google gives less weight to every word in a URL or page title, so the further you go in a domain name, the less valuable the word is.

Solution: Leave out words that don’t target the search keywords for your business, and try to keep the most important words as close to the left as possible.

4) You’re Slumming

This last one’s a little controversial as the consensus is somewhat split in the SEO community.  The idea here is that if you set up shop in a run down part of town, people will tend to think less of your business.  The Internet equivalent here is having a “low rent” TLD (Top Level Domain) like .info.  At issue here is the fact that these TLDs are so cheap that they are frequently used by spammers, but it’s not entirely clear whether or how much that hurts SEO.

Solution: In my humble opinion, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

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Don't be a social media lemming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Get 300 followers per day on Twitter!”

We all have, and I’ve heard this and other similar enticements in just the last couple of days.  This topic has been covered ad nauseum by every social media and marketing blogger out there, but apparently the message isn’t getting out.

So here is one more shot…

Metric vs. Strategy

Measuring is a good thing – provided, of course, you’re measuring the right metrics.  The number fans on your Facebook fan page, or followers on Twitter, or subscribers to your blog are all important metrics that (indirectly) measure the reach of your message.  But they are not a strategy!

Getting additional followers on the social media channels is relatively easy, but what is the point?  Many businesses hold the mistaken assumption that more followers will somehow equal more business.  All it equals is more opportunity for business, but you need to have a plan to turn those opportunities into customers.  The real question is how many of those fans/friends/followers will convert?  What reason are you giving them to convert?  How are you tracking your conversion rate?  That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

Inbound Marketing

If you combine a large number of followers/friends/fans with an effective inbound marketing infrastructure, then you’re in business.  But building a large following without it is putting the cart before the horse.  Here is a basic outline of what inbound marketing entails:

1. Create compelling content. Which is easier said than done for many people.  Creating remarkable content in the digital age requires some competency in four skills: webapprentice, designer, storyteller, and marketer.
2. Optimize it for search. Inbound links are by far the most important factor for search engine optimization, which is why #1 is extremely important.  But it is also important to understand the basics of on-page optimization in order to maximize the visibility of your content to search engines.
3. Share it with others. This is where your large following can start to pay off.  Once you’re creating compelling content, share it through your social media channels in order to drive traffic back to your web site.
4. Create calls to action. Once the traffic is flowing into your web site, it’s important to have clear, prominent calls to action.  Make the visitor some sort of offer that gives them value in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads. Ideally, your leads would be entered into some form of database or customer relationship management system so that you can follow up appropriately and move them through the buying cycle.  Cull them when necessary.
6. Convert your leads. That’s what it’s all about – convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers.
7. Measure. You need to be measuring all of this activity every step of the way.  Understand where your traffic sources are and which ones are the most/least effective.  Compare those against your conversion rates and use the data to optimize your efficiency and scrap ineffective strategies.

Having 100 extremely engaged followers is far more valuable than 1,000 who are not paying attention.  And even if those 1,000 are paying attention, without an effective strategy for converting that asset into business you’re just wasting your time.

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