Never has there been a better time to ramp up on Internet strategy and marketing, especially for small businesses. Entrepreneurial business have some distinct advantages in this economy: the ability to rapidly adapt to the new reality, identify problems and solve them–both problems that are internal and external, as well. How about this problem: finding new customers? There’s also a rapid shift in the way consumers think about advertising and being marketed to.  Yesterday in the mail, I received the new Yellow Pages book, a Shopper’s Guide, two local newspaper rags, a fashion magazine that I didn’t subscribe to, and several direct mailers. All of this unsolicited paper went straight into the recycling bin; and I suspect that this reaction was repeated several times around my neighborhood in suburban Washington D.C. Advertising is apparently not dead but but with the high cost of advertising in print and its dwindling results; its days are certainly numbered. The new B to B and B to C relationship is built on trust and the notion that when I, as the consumer, need you, I’ll find you.

TRUST

The Internet offers businesses an unparalleled platform for building consumer confidence. The first and most important edict for campaigning for consumer confidence online is to “deliver your promise.” Also, be sure to have a plan to properly handle the inevitable problems that will occur in your business. Proactive customer relationship building will go a long way towards cultivating customers who would rather help you than hurt you.  It’s never been more important for businesses to deliver on their promises and coddle their customers because the Internet can put a big black mark on you and your company in a hurry. Fifteen years ago, I found a piece of glass in my food at a restaurant. My only recompense was a surprised reaction from the manager and a lame “sorry.” I told a few friends and family about the incident and the word may have spread a couple of degrees beyond. Now, however, someone could post such an experience on Yelp where the story will live forever and will influence the buying decisions of hundreds if not thousands of consumers.

Public relations is about having a relationship with the public and relationships are about trust. The best way you can build trust with the public right now is by being an expert voice in your industry and the Internet hands us the perfect platform for doing it. I’ve personally found that this takes a lot of commitment and when you’re a small business operator and have a life on the side it’s difficult to commit to doing more. But, this is where we are at; you have to get a blog, post industry relevant content on it often, and try really hard to make it interesting. I strongly suggest having your blog integrated into your website, as this is excellent optimization strategy. WordPress is a hosted blog platform on WordPress.com and is also best-of-breed software that can be downloaded from wordPress.org,  is easy to install to a hosting account that supports PHP/MySQL (most), skin the design and work with. With the installed version there are also tons of neat plugins to serve all sort of functions that you can install in a couple of clicks and greatly extend the functionality of your blog platform.  (Get in touch with me if you need help. Our hosting platform [and many others] automate the installation of WordPress in a few clicks.) Your blog, as a section of your own website, will optimize your site by getting it indexed by the search engines more often, building its richness in relevant keywords, and as your blog builds in popularity inevitably links back to your blog and hence your website will grow organically, which WILL cause your search engine presence to grow, as well. If you follow my prescription, you will also immediately enter the social networking sphere and begin building links back to your blog. Another powerful platform to be strongly considered is Internet video and it’s never been easier to launch your own Internet TV channel. Read this post for more about Internet TV. Internet video will continue to grow and become a dominant online activity amongst all types of Internet users.

With a blog in place (and hopefully some video content)  it’s time to segway into the realm of social networking, which is another powerful trust building activity. Being social is all about inviting the public into your world and sharing your story, knowledge and experience. Social networking is NOT about building a network to listen to your sales pitch. Your blog and/or video presence is or will be the center of your social networking strategy–it’s what you share with your network. The first step is easy: go to all of the well known social networking platforms and establish profiles. (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and other industry specific platforms.) I’ve seen many social networking strategies not make it past this first step. My suggestion is to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Use Facebook as your personal platform, Linkedin as your professional platform, and Twitter to tie your profiles, blogs, events, and personal thoughts all together. Also, check out Squidoo it’s not so much a social network but is a great way to aggregate your content by building something they call a lens which focuses on a specific subject. Once you are on Linkedin, join groups that are relevant to your business and start posting discussions and work in the links back to your blog. Just remember to be relevant and not get pitchy or you will violate the trust and may be banned. On Linkedin your will also want to solicit recommendations from your clients and partners and if you want to get recommendations you are probably going to have to give them out, as well. Go searching for discussions on Linkedin, Yahoo groups, Google groups and others for relevant discussions where you can share insights that you’ve written about in your blog and you will also find the next topic that you will want to blog about. If you are feeling really committed, start up your own group.

HOW SEARCH CHANGED THE WORLD

Quite coming into my house. I know you are out there; and when I need you, I’ll find you. When I find you, I’ll buy from you because I trust you.

The quest of the marketer is to find the right customer, at the right time–a truly qualified buyer. Usually we do this by throwing a handful of darts up into the air and hope that one of them hits a buyer. All of the other darts are, for the most part, wasted. Search delivers truly qualified buyers a million times a day and is why Google became a multi-billion dollar company in so few years. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a search engine presence, but it’s incredibly important. The upside of all of the activities and suggestions discussed so far is that everything here will contribute to your search engine presence.

How your website is built is extremely important and is the basis of search engine optimization (SEO). Your website also must be ready to deliver the result of optimization and networking efforts and deliver the browser of your site meaningful information about your product with a clear call to action that is easily executed. An in depth discussion of SEO is beyond the scope of this article, but here some thoughts.

1. Search engines crawl the Internet to find your site and crawl your site to index your textual content. If you have important content that is locked up in images and Flash animations; this content will not be part of the index.
2. Crawlers should be able to crawl your entire site from any page of entry. I’ve seen a lot of neat JavaScript-based drop down menus on websites but crawlers do not execute JavaScript and such links will never be followed. Likewise, if your menu is driven using Flash, crawlers will not find your links. Use CSS-based drop-down menus, put text links at the footer of your site, and build a site-map, which is an index of your site and link it from every page.
3. Each page in your website needs a unique title tag. When you look at a page within your site, the title is shown at the top left of your browser window. It should be the short concise subject of your page content. In the search engines this is what will display as the title of the search result, which is what searchers will skim to decide which result to click on.
4. Clean simple CSS layouts work best. Complicated, heavy code (table based layouts with a lot of tiled images) on a page pushes the text of your site down and can also make it difficult for the crawlers to decipher, which could result in a page being completely skipped. In a table-based layout, a left column will appear at the top of the page inside the code and usually the important text for the crawler is in the middle or right column. The text snippet that shows in search results is usually the first sentence or two of the text on the page. Hopefully, you can understand how this can get lost in a sea of muddled code. CSS is a method of constructing a page using container and object tags. A separate “style sheet” is then created which dictates how the page will be rendered visually in the browser. This “style sheet” is ignored by crawlers. I will be creating a video tutorial on the SEO power of CSS shortly so please be sure to join the Ecropolis Report list so you will know when it’s posted.
5. Semantic design places text content into the right code objects on a page and creates a hierarchically structured page. The idea here is that a search engine will place more keyword weight on a word that is within heading tags.
6. Keywords are key. Compose your text content repeating keywords often and thinking of the variations and combinations of words that may help search engines index your page. If you overdo it here, it could actually hurt your rankings as crawler algorithms have gotten sophisticated enough to recognize over redundancy and throw the page out. Push it too far and it is possible to get blacklisted from a search engine all together.
7. Build links within your site’s text to internal and relevant external pages (external links tell search engines that your site is a resource on a topic) and understand the text that is linked carries a lot of weight in the search engines and it should properly describe the link. Typing ‘click here’ and linking it is terrible in good SEO practice.
8. Each page should have a unique and meaningful meta-description tagged into it. Meta tags are not rendered visible in the browser and are for the sole benefit of crawlers.  There are other meta tags, such as meta-keywords, which you can use but for the most part are pointless. Meta-description, however may be shown in search results if the crawler doesn’t find other seemingly relevant text.

PPC: THE REAL REASON WHY GOOGLE IS A BILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS

Pay-per-click is a system of auctioning off keywords and phrases based on a business’s willingness to pay cash for a click. The highest bidders get the highest rank in the “paid” portion of the search results (top highlighted ads and the right column). Google also has built a huge network of websites that have agreed to show Google ads along side content in exchange for a share of the click profits. Ads are served in context with the content on the page, hence the program’s name, Adsense. Adsense advertising is less costly and generally delivers more traffic but of far lessor quality than a visitor coming from the search result ad. Remember, the right person at the right time; the fact that they searched and found your site, even in paid search, highly qualifies them and then it becomes the job of your site to call them to action, just good old fashioned sales strategy. PPC is offered by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing search engine.

If you are a local business, be sure to target your ads locally by adjusting ad settings, otherwise you will be wasting money by bringing visitors to your site who will never buy from you. Local businesses can also place the neighborhood or city name along side their golden keywords. For example, a dentist in Phoenix should use ‘Phoenix dentist, Phoenix cosmetic dentist, Scottsdale dentist, etc.’ Use keyword harvesting tools and get lots of relevant keywords for your campaign (Google has excellent keyword tools built into the Adwords interface). You will find some good combinations that are lower in cost because they’ve been discovered by fewer competitors. Others won’t generate much traffic; but in aggregate, will generate decent traffic at lower cost. The more general the keyword, the more costly. I’ve seen keywords/phrases going for as high as $40 per click, so it’s important to watch your budget and monitor effectiveness carefully.  Keep in mind that with PPC you pay for nothing if no one clicks, which makes it great tool for inexpensive branding opportunities; especially if you create some graphical banner ads, which can also be served through Google now (and are not shown in search results, but rather only on the Adsense network).

ANALYTICS

Analytics is the key to tying the search engine strategy together. It’s like the saying, “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” One common mistake is to look solely at the hit count or the visitor count; while this is important, it doesn’t really tell you much and certainly doesn’t provide the kind of resource needed to make continual improvements to your strategy, which is an important part of the strategy. Take the time to make an in-depth analysis of where traffic is coming from, when it’s coming, what search keywords are used when it’s coming from a search engine, how long visitors are staying on the site, what pages get the most traffic, what pages get the least, check stats on specific important pages. It is also important to track conversions both to leads and to sales.  Make it a goal to sit for 15-30 minutes every week on the same day and study your website traffic reports. Most of this data is logged by your web-server and most web-hosting companies have a reporting engine that gives you access to this straight forward information and there are plenty of resources to help you better understand and demystify the terminology that is common amongst reporting engines.  I would suggest looking at Google Analytics (built on technology acquired from Urchin several years ago, which is still sold as an independent software product) as a web-based, third-party, and therefore independent resource for reliable, in depth analytical reports. It’s free to create an account, but does require some work on your website because each page that is to be tracked will need a small snippet of Javascript code embedded in the page. Once the code is in place, each time that page is loaded, the script makes a call to Google’s logging system and sends all of the appropriate information to be logged. (Microsoft acquired DeepMetrix and is releasing a similar web-based service, code-named “Gatineua“. Yahoo acquired IndexTools and rebranded it as Yahoo! Web Analytics, which has apparently surpassed Google Analytics in enterprise usage.) Omniture is a similar enterprise-level, independent service, which has various levels of cost and can be custom tailored more so than other services; their offering has been very successful attracting several Fortune 500 companies. If you need a powerful enterprise-level reporting engine, that is not maintained on a third-party platform, I suggest taking a look at Webtrends software. Software such as this would be essential for tracking multiple, intertwined websites and multi-media that may be hosted on other servers and with third-parties including,  such as advertising campaigns, email campaigns, and video servers.

Analytics, in and of itself can be a very intricate. But, one other point that I would like to make that isn’t often made is that in the tracking of conversions to leads and to sales, you may need to find a way to integrate your sales metrics with inbound phone calls. In other words: are your leads being counted as telephone leads when they should be website leads?

THE RECAP

When you think Internet strategy, in a nutshell, that should mean five things.

1. Have a website that’s built using proper SEO practices and is rich with content about your business, products, and industry. Your website may very well be your potential customer’s first impression and should reflect your desired image in a professional manner and strengthen your brand.
2. Make a plan to update that website often, making it dynamic. Read: install a blog and update it often.
3. Find your social networking strategy, which means promoting your blog and/or other content on various platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace, Linkedin, Plaxo, YouTube and any popular platforms that might dominate your industry. Social networking has no direct cost but takes commitment and time to work it.
4. Pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns aren’t optimal but are effective at driving relevant traffic and branding your business online.
5. Analytics are essential to understanding everything about your traffic and give you the key to refining your strategy over time by amplifying the methods that are delivering results.

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