Small-business Guide to Winning at Web Marketing [excerpt]

Posted in Sample text - 16 May 2010 - 1 comment

What, How, Who, and When

What: The electronic-marketing landscape

Today’s marketing is a lot like playing pinball. It’s not a straight shot; you have to bounce around a lot to really rack up the points and since some pins are worth more than others, you need a certain amount of skill and luck to be able to ping them more than once. In this book, I’ll teach you the basics, some game strategy, and a few tricks, but mastering pinball — web marketing — will depend entirely on how long you can keep the ball in play. (I’ll also try not to wear out the analogy.)

Download the PDF of Chapter 1 — What: The electronic-marketing landscape

This guide is not intended to teach you how to build a WordPress® site, how to read Google® Analytics, or even how to join Facebook®. Each of these applications have well-written and complete help files and documentation. Rather, my intent is to introduce you to self-promotion tools that are free (or very inexpensive) and readily available. In the pages that follow, you should gain an understanding of tools that will make you more successful in your entrepreneurial endeavors. You will learn to market, maintain, and grow your company for less than you can imagine – in most cases for less than $300 a month.

The importance of your web presence

It’s easy to underestimate the power of the web when it comes to your self-promotion but at a time when yellow-page directories are finding their way more quickly to recycle centers, in order to survive and grow your company you will need to recognize and embrace new tools.

As an entrepreneur, it’s not just your company’s presence on the web it’s also your personal presence.

This guide is a well-rounded presentation of web tools and processes. It also focuses on the value of optimizing your professional visibility so that whether you are starting a new company or starting a new marketing program for an established company, you will know how to use the tools to your advantage. Just as importantly, you will also learn to be careful about posting too much content.

Where are you now?

When you search using any of the popular search engines, the information returned is called the search-engine results or ser. When you, a business associate, or potential client, search for your name or your company’s name, are the ser favorable?

If you are an entrepreneur and have approached an important potential client is [s]he able to find you on the web and come away feeling confident that you are an industry leader? Would they believe that you are very capable at providing the services that you have asserted?

SER are often hit-or-miss propositions, but they don’t have to be completely arbitrary. There are thousands, maybe millions, of people and companies who specialize in manipulating search spiders to provide higher ranking for people, companies, products, or services. This process of manipulation is called search-engine optimization or SEO. To be effective at self-promotion, you must identify your current SER and affect that SER by populating the web with a great deal of positive content that is congruent with your goals. I_will show you the methods for doing that, but the real work will be up to you. Your success will depend upon how much time you dedicate to the self-promotion process.

Search engines

The concept of search-engine technology is not new, it was first defined in 1945 by MIT Professor Vannevar Bush. In 1987, Gerard Salton, a Cornell University professor, authored a book, A Theory of Indexing, which describes many of the tests on which today’s search engines are still based. With a foundation supported by such experts, one would think there would not be much deviation, but the fact is that there are many people who consider it an art to trick the search spider into favoring their products in ser.

There are three types of search-engine indexing:

spiders (also known as crawlers, robots, or just bots),
human indexed
hybrid of spider indexed and human indexed

If you follow good SEO practices, such as those outlined in this book, you will rank well without regard for the type of indexing performed. Search spiders are by far the most common of the three types and the type that we will discuss here.

Search spiders are only effective if they return relevant results to a search consumer, so think about this: if you use a search engine to find information about your teeth, but the ser lists sprockets (with removable teeth) as the most relevant, you might decide to use a different search engine – one with a more logical approach and that appropriately guesses that you are searching for information about the teeth in your mouth, not the teeth on a sprocket.

If you leave one search engine to try another, and the original search-engine provider loses you as a customer for future searches, this has a real impact on their revenue. While searching is free, having your company featured is not. Search engines retain and gain market share by providing you with relevant results so that you continue to visit their pages and continue to read the paid listings and ads.

In 1998, Jeffrey Brewer presented the idea of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Today you see this as the favored listings on a Google page. Companies listed in the yellow-shaded area at the top of the SER and along the right margin have paid Google to list them with this priority placement – to cut them from the herd, so to speak. This is called search-engine marketing, or SEM, though SEM can be achieved through both paid and organic methods.

While PPC is one method of gaining high rankings for a person or product within SER, it is only one part of a very big picture. Not only that, research has shown time and time again that people primarily focus on the organic listings directly below the paid searches, for a number of reasons. One important reason is that the search-engine user knows that the sponsor of the PPC listing has paid for that placement, so there is an element of distrust.

According to Nielsen® the top search-engine market share as of August 2009 is:

Google 66%
Yahoo 16%
MSN 11%
AOL 3%

Many companies rely solely on Google since they hold the majority share of the search-engine market, but not all search spiders are programmed in the same way. In fact, search spiders are an unpredictable lot and good SEO/SMO consultants change and adapt as they discover new ways of attaining exposure.

I first began working with SEO after 9/11 threatened my company and I needed to increase marketing exposure at a time when revenue was declining. I worked hard to gain an understanding of how the web could be used to keep my company profitable in such a challenging time. The changes that have occurred in the decade since are astounding, and what was a sure-fire method just two years ago will now get you penalized in the world of search-engine placement.

Search spiders are very sensitive to manipulation. If your SEO/SMO efforts seem unscrupulous, provide results contrary to the relevancy of the search term, or seem pre-programmed to interfere with natural results, you will be penalized and your product moved to the end of the list — or worse.

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