Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Google Allows You To Sort Your Search Results

If you’re logged in while searching on google you can now resort your results, remove entries, and add your own.

This next move by Google has been in the works for quite some time now. Having used it myself I’m not quite sure what the real benefit is to me as a user. What I mean is I use Google to find things I don’t already know about. If I know about it - I’ve likely bookmarked it or remember the URL. I don’t need to use Google SERPS to have precisely the results I want. That being said - I am convinced millions of people are going to play around with this and Google will eventually put this good data to use in some way for the rest of us performing regular searches.

Have you seen this new feature? Have you tried it. Let me know what you think about it and how you feel Google will put this information to use.

Facebook adds third ad on pages?!?

As many of you probably know, facebook did a complete site re-design - much to the dislike of some of its users.  Regardless of your opinion on the change, this did allow Facebook to post their ads on the right hand side of the screen, rather than the left as was the case in Facebooks initial design.

Along with the new design came the arrival of two Facebook PPC ads being posted to profile pages, group pages, photo albums and the like.  Perhaps its just me, but did anyone happen to notice the arrival of a THIRD ad to their profile pages?

As an advertiser, I don’t remember seeing any notification or press release about this… did you?

It will be interesting to see how this affects conversion rates from Facebook campaign…

Developing a Marketing Strategy

Last time I was shared the importance of having an internet marketing strategy.  Today I would like to share a little about developing the internet marketing strategy.

One of the keys to an effective strategy is to establish the goal of your website.  Is the website an online brochure which is compared to something like a line card in print.  Or, is your website looking to accomplish the task of generating traffic to it with the intention of generating leads or selling your products online.  If your website is meant to be a brochure than the fact you have one is almost good enough, and as long as it is updated (meaning it doesn’t have mid 90’s graphics that your child did for one of their high school projects) than you should be in good standing.

However, if you are in fact looking to attract unique visitors each month and you are trying to generate leads or sell product, than you will need a different approach.  First look at your current website.  When was the last time you updated it?  What does it look like?  Have a look around the web, either at competitors or just in general, the big name companies and just look from a creative perspective and compare with your current site.  Does your site have the same feel, look, and ability to attract attention.  If it doesn’t, than you will need to start there.  Look at updating your website.

Once you have your new website, you will be able to begin driving traffic to it.  In order to drive traffic to it, during construction of your site you will want to ensure you have done your homework and prepared a list of keywords for your organic search engine optimization.  In order to find out what your keywords to target you can get them on tools like www.adwords.com and plug in some basic top level keywords and it will provide you with many additional keyword combinations. Another great kewyord research tool is www.wordze.com, www.spyfu.com or www.keywordspy.com. Oh, don’t forget about Google.com. Do a search on a generic keyword to see who else ranks for it. Look at their website and see what keywords are in their text.   Once you have your keyword list you will want to start working them into your site, so the search engines can find them. You can validate your keyword list by asking yourself - “if I were looking for my products and services how would I use google to find them?”.  In may not just be keywords either, it could be a lot of phrases, so you will want to get creative and think of every possible way a word can be said to find your product.

Start with these tips and I will be back to explain the importance of which Search Engine Tools to use and at what time to use them.

Best of luck with all of your campaigns.

Kyle

Take A Break From Work And Look At Your Business!

As a business ower you need to remember to take a break from doing work and have a good look at your business!

As owners we’re laser focused on developing our business. Many things in the business compete for our attention and we try to work on them all. Developing new business, working on existing clients, hiring, marketing, collecting money, and more. After a while though you may realize that you’ve not worked on your business in a while. That’s why I’ve learned to do this one particular task atleast once a month.What is it?

Take a break from working and actually look at your business to see what’s going on. What’s working, what’s not. Are clients generally happy with the results their getting? How is your staff doing? Are they busy and motivated or bored and not challenged?  All of these things are signals to you about how your business is doing. I happen to be more on the technical side of the business so here are the things that I like to do a reality check on at least once a month:

• Current Customers. Are your teams delivering for the customer you’ve already got? What challenges are they faced with and how can you help them?
• New Customers. Are your teams starting new business on time or are they too busy to get new projects going? Maybe you need to do some hiring.
• Your staff. How are your staff doing? Is anyone standing out as being stressed, overworked or bored? Pay attention to the signals and address issues head on. Be fair and blut but get to the point fast and help them out.
• Sales and Marketing. Is the sales team firing on all cylinders? Do they need more technical training or technical assistance in sales calls? Find out how they are doing and see what you ca do to help.
• Accounting. How is the accounting team doing? Are they accounting for all of the extra work you do that should be billed for? Find out and make sure they have what they need. Perhaps you have to change some internal processes?

Every business is different so you’ll likely have different areas you need to look into. I promise - if you take the time to look at your business you’ll be on a more direct path to growing a successful business sooner. By paying attention to what’s happening in your business you have the opportunityto proactivey drive it i the right direction instead of reacting to situations when they bubble over.

So, take a moment right now and schedule some time your calendar each month to take a break and do a reality check on your business.

Internet Marketing Links & Comments

Here is my latest round of interesting internet marketing content from the past week.

• Tracking Email with Google Analytics
  In this article Justin Cutroni provides a complete primer on how to setup Google Analytics to track email marketing visitors using Link Tagging. It’s an in depth resource that I found very insightful. If you’re doing any kind of email marketing I recommend you give this one a read.
• SEM Basics: How to Use a Proxy IP in Firefox
  Nick Wilsdon brings us this great primer on how to use a Proxy IP Address in Firefox. He starts off by explaining what it is, and then why of course you need to use one from time to time. We use them for testing rankings and ad text from different country specific search engines, but of course the usefullness of a proxy ip is limited only by your imagination!
• 2008 Canadian Blog Awards
  If you’re operating a popular Canadian blog you may want to submit it for the Canadian Blog Awards contest! Just have someone nominate your blog - and then wait and see!
• Visualizing Data In The Cloud
  Google Launches the Visualization API that lets developers build applications ontop of Google Spreadsheets. User can integrate gadgets from the Google Visualization Gadget Gallery into webpages anywhere on the interent and display data from their Google Spreadsheets. Have a look at the post to find out more.
• 50+ Must Read Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO Articles
  SEOptimise brings us a great set of resources around Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO. If you’re interested in honing your skills in this area give these resources a read.
• Announcing Applications on LinkedIn
  LinkedIn launches applications! “This initial roll out features productivity applications that range from gathering information that professionals around you are generating to enhancing your abilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively.” If you’re a linkedin user I recommend you give some of these apps a try!

I hope these resources come in useful to you! Come back next week for another round of links!

Internet Marketing Links & Comments

There were quite a few good news stories in the last couple of weeks and I thought I’d start sharing some of them here with you all in case you did not catch them elsewhere.

Here’s the list:

• The conversion sequence:  C = 4m + 3v = 2(i-f) – 2a An interesting post about the conversion sequence formula. If you’re interested in understanding some of the science behind the conversion process of a page you should give this one a read. It’s in fact the first of a series of posts on conversion.
• 30 Internet Marketing Blogs You Must Know to Succeed OnlineThis list of 30 internet marketing blogs is worth a review. If you’re trying to stay abreast of the industry this would certainly be a good starting point! For those SMB’s out there I recommend you have a look at these sites. The regular information they frequently release will help you in your question to leverage internet marketing even if you’re just looking to hire an outside agency to help you out.
• Google Diluting Quality To Remain Profitable Is the “chrome” coming off of Google? Well it appears that may be the case. Recently ShoeMoney and others have noticed some clear acts by Google of lowering the quality of their search results and AdSense services by for example sending AdSense traffic to syndication pages, or showing an AdSense search box instead of an Ad. Clearly this contravenes their own quality guidelines and the only reason for doing it would be to collect more revenue from clicks. Google - don’t go crazy because you’re still the search giant and have everything to lose and much less to gain. For more on this have a look at ShoeMoney’s story!
• Google Hit With Typosquatting Class Action Another story about Google getting tarnished is this one about Google making money off incorrectly typed domains by placing AdSense on the them. “As co-counsel in a class action suit, Edelman suggests Google could be making money from a million domains or more.” Checkout the full story on WebProNews.
• Looking for instant audiences? Try Google Hot Trends Google Trends provides great information for understanding which keywords are popular over time. Recently Google launched Google Hot Trends which attempts to show which terms are gaining in popularity right now. These trends are a great source of potential traffic for you website if you leverage the topics effectively. Jeff Woelker provides a short introduction to the concept in his post.
• EFF Echoes McCain’s Call For YouTube Fair Use Reviews I find this story actually quite hilarious. YouTube has been taking down debate clips as a result of DMCA take down notices from CBS. McCain as a result has been upset over the matter and the EFF is now backing the requests. It brings to light that the DMCA does not recognize fair use and that YouTube is just following the DMCA. So legislation that the US Government created is now interfering with the Elections! Maybe they will now create an amendment and fix the DMCA to recognize the concept of fair use. For more on the story read the WebProNews story.
• Google Launches Gmail 2.0 for Mobile While I’m a Gmail user it’s not my primary email address and I’ve got it forwarded to my primary email account. That being said, if Gmail is your main email account having it on your Windows Mobile Phone may in fact be important to you! For the full story visit the WebProNews site.
• Yahoo Offers Inquisitor Suggestion Tool for IE and Firefox Yahoo has made it’s Inquisitor plugin for Safari available on Internet Explorer and FireFox. The tool provides search suggestions on the fly. I’ve used it before and it’s quite convenient. If you want to give it a try I suggest you read this post before downloading it!
• Travel SEO – How to Target Searchers at the Right Stage of the Buying Cycle I bring along this story for the Travel Industry business out there. It’s a great read if you’re interested in understanding how to target travel industry searchers and some tips for converting them!
• Good Times With Inbound Links From the Google Webmaster Central Blog comes this simple overview of how links factor into the Google Ranking Algorithm. If you want to understand the role links play for your search engine optimization I suggest you start by reading this post.
• Alerting Webmasters To Webserver Vulnerabilities I’m not a big fan of Google policing the internet so I put this right up there with them alerting searchers to malware on sites. See the problem is that websites can get hacked and good webmasters are always battling this. In my opinion it hurts good webmasters before it hurts the bad guys. Any how, they are now alerting us webmaster to webserver vulnerabilities such as out of date software. I guess this is OK, but if it shows up in the SERPS I don’t like it all!

I hope you find this content as useful and informative as I did. I think I’ll make this a regular post each Monday going forward - a roundup of some of my favorite stories from the past week!

Debate Night in America… “Joetheplumber.com” Site Stats Sky Rocket!

Wow… who is this “Joe the Plumber”?  If you were watching the last American presidential debate tonight… you may have had the same question I did.

Here are a few predictions I expect to come true…

1. joetheplumber.com will have site traffic that will overwhelm his server
2. joelaratheplumber.com will take advantage of traffic looking for joetheplumber.com and take business away!
3. CNN, Fox News, CBS and NBC will all be tracking down this “joe the plumber” from Obama’s rally and feature him in tomorrows 6 o’clock national news.  First question - “Who won the debate in your opinion, Mr. Plumber?”
4. Joe the plumber will also be featured in McCain’s next TV ads.
5. Joe the plumber will get tired of the limelight… and go into hiding… like Steve Bartman.

What does this have to do with Internet Marketing?  errrrr… nothing… sorry.

Do You Have an Online Marketing Strategy?

“Do you have an Online Marketing Strategy? I ask this question every time I talk to potential customers or current customers who are asking about our new products.  Many times the answers I receive are centered around an attempt to appear there was some thought put towards this subject, but after a couple more questions, it is quite evident they clearly do not have one and eventually admit what I already know.  They do not have one and haven’t thought about it.  It is one thing to throw around buzz words like SEO, PPC and Social Media, but with no plan on how these great tools can be utilized companies will continue to foolishly exhaust resources on aimless campaigns.

Creating a strategy with set goals that are in-line with current demographics and target markets is very important to establishing credibility online.  As we all know the importance of bringing your business online is paramount as you establish a new customer base, or expand on a current one.  The advantage of online marketing vs. traditional methods, is that online can be fixed very quickly and as a result, the campaign can go in a different direction quickly and very economically.  However, without a plan in place from the beginning to accommodate the potential change in direction, and by the time you react, you may have lost that segment of the market that is primed for it.

Next week, I will talk about putting together an effective strategy. For now ask yourself what is your online marketing strategy, and if you don’t have one, when will you take your note pad out and start jotting some ideas down.  I think you will be surprised once you start thinking about a strategy how important it will be.  Good Luck!”

Major Security Vulnerability In TCP Stack

A major security vulnerability in TCP stacks is uncovered recently which can knock any website off line with very little effort or bandwidth.

Steve Gibson on Security Now Episode 164 recently discussed this vulnerability referred to as “sockstress”. It’s absolutely scary given the fact that unlike tradition Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDOS) this flaw only requires a single computer with a broadband connection to take down even the mightiest of websites. The flaw also affects routers, and loadbalancers. This as unbelievable as it sounds means that even script kiddies could take down sites like www.google.com if they wanted to.

So while real hackers have developed enormous bot nets to run DDOS attacks they would only need to pointa few of these atonomous machines at a site to bring it down.

This flaw was recently announced by a security company in Europe without first announcing it to major software and hardware manufacturers - a serious mistake in my opinion.

Our concern is that we could start to see this attack in the wild and the most likely targets would be major institutions such as Google, Amazon, Ebay etc. Let’s just hope that the software and hardware manufacturers work quickly to patch their TCP stacks and prevent this situation from turning into a major disaster.

Fingers crossed.

‘Spark’ the Election – Get Your Digital Lawn Sign For Facebook, Twitter, Personal Home Page, Blog and More

‘Spark’ the Election and get your digital lawn sign for your Facebook, Twitter, Personal Home Page, Blog, and More.

Hey everyone – this is just a heads up that we’ve unofficially launched our Digital Lawn Sign campaign in an effort to get more Canadians out to the polls on October 14th.

You can get them on our website here after answering a really short survey about the election. Our goal is to get as many people using the digital lawn signs in support of their favorite party so that we can get more people out to the polls this time. It’s the only way we can elect a good government this time around!

We encourage you to spread the word too – the more people you can reach out to the better! If you have questions about the digital lawn signs – post them here, OK!

To get your lawn sign click the big “Take The Poll & Get Your Sign” button on this post, or visit the Digital Lawn Signs (Tiny URL For Sharing: http://www.tinyurl.com/digital-lawn-sign) page. Below is a sample of what the signs look like.