Morettini on Management

General Management and Marketing Advice for Software and Tech Companies

Category: Promotion

More SEO Tools

From time to time, I let you know about some of the more useful (out of the abundant crop available on the Internet!) online tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that I have come across. So here’s the latest batch of valuable, and free, widgets that I’ve found:

The first is a site that checks on all of your back links, with a twist: it actually details not only the back link itself, but the anchor text associated with the link. For those of you sophisticated about SEO for your website, you’ll know that this is very important information. There are a couple of reasons why this is important. First of all, the search engines use anchor text to associate your site with keywords that might be searched on in that engine, and uses this information in it’s search rankings. So it’s very important to have your most important keywords show up as anchor text on as many back links as you can manage. Secondly, if the search engines find that the anchor text on your back links is too repetitive, the engines will penalize you from a ranking perspective. The reason is that if the anchor text on all of your back links reads the same, Google and the other engines assume that the links are “manufactured” by the owner of the site–rather than generated naturally as a result of your site being interesting to others. So I highly recommend that you check out and use this tool:

Backlink Anchor Text Checker

A similar tool is the “C Class Back Link Analyzer”. Once again, this is a tool for those sophisticated about SEO. The “C” Class Back Link Analyzer investigates the links pointing to a website, and then groups them according to the IP addresses they result from. If one back link comes from 54.37.14.5 and another comes from 54.37.14.6, the tool would group together. Links which come from the same C-Class IP are likely to be hosted by the same company, often lowering the site’s search engine ranking.

“C” Class Back Link Analyzer

One last esoteric tool for the true SEO fanatics out there. It’s called Deep Link Ratio Calculator. This tool measure the number of links to pages on your site other than the Index/Home Page, divided by the total number linked to your site. This is important because the Search Engines consider these “Deep Links” to be more “natural”, more likely the result of someone creating a link to some great content in your site (as opposed to you listing your own site in a directory, for example). So this neat tool can give you another view of how “natural” the Search Engines are viewing the links to your site.

Deep Link Ratio Calculator

Finally, I present “yet another” Keyword Suggestion tool. I know, there are lots of them out there, but I find that when you’re looking to generate keywords for SEO on a site, or when starting a PPC campaign, there are never enough good tools. This Suggestion tool claims to accumulate and report Keyword variations from the six most major search engines. Give it a shot and report back how it goes.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

I hope that you find these online SEO tools useful–post a comment and let me know!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on September 28, 2007
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media
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The Mechanics of Email Marketing

There are many different possibilities for technology and software companies, when it comes to formulating a marketing mix. I’ve written before about some of my favorites. One method that can be a big winner, if done well, can also be a big loser if done poorly. I’m referring to email marketing. If you want to be successful, you need to do it very well, as a result of SPAM and the general bursting of everyone’s email inbox these days.

Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing can be so productive for a company, because unlike more passive forms of online marketing (ex: PPC advertising, Banner Ads), you can usually target you audience very effectively. This is especially true if you are using an in house list; by definition, these are prospects that have some reason to have an interest in your products. In B2B marketing, there is an abundance of excellent niche lists available for rental, to use in a targeted campaign. In B2C they aren’t quite as good overall, but there may be very good lists available for a particular category.

Like all other forms of online marketing, another primary benefit to this method is the ability to measure results with great accuracy, granularity and speed. Lastly, you can make a very big impact quite quickly, unlike other online methods which may fit more into the “steady as you go” category.

The Elements of a Successful Email Campaign
So if “doing it right” is so important, just what are the important things to concentrate on, to achieve success in email marketing? Let’s take a look at some of the most important elements:

Relevancy
First and foremost, your email must be relevant to the people who are receiving it. This is the great problem with the email marketing universe today, especially when considering the Spammers. Scattershot emails to every name that you can get your hands on not only won’t raise your sales; it will ruin your online reputation, and prevent you from effectively marketing online in the future. It’s been said by others that the difference between SPAM and legitimate commercial email is RELEVANCY. I firmly believe this. If your offer resonates with the list that you send it to, you will receive very few complaints.

The List
After relevancy, the next most important thing is the list. Absolutely do send your message to a list of folks that you have good reason to believe will be interested in what you have to offer. This is called target marketing; it is good practice across ALL marketing media. In email marketing–IT’S ESSENTIAL.

The Offer
Next comes the offer; often this is the most critical thing that you have a lot of control over. You need to remember that in email marketing, you are “going to the people”. They aren’t coming to you–actively looking for your product or service. As a result, your offer needs to be very aggressive to get their interest, and to compel them to act in the manner you desire. I always say that in direct marketing you want to make your very best offer. In email direct marketing, make them an offer that is so aggressive, it actually makes you wince a bit!

Creative
The above categories are the most critical to success. If you don’t get them right, nothing else will matter. However, it’s still very important to properly execute your relevant offer to the proper list. Even if you’ve got these elements formulate properly, poor creative execution can still lead to failure. My advice here is to make the email look like an email–not a web page. People’s expectations in an email message are very different from visiting a website (and attention spans are short enough in web-viewing!). I recommend that you keep your message simple, direct and relatively short. Feel free to include some attractive, eye-catching graphics. But remember, this is direct marketing–not an art project. The most recent research suggests that email graphics has no effect whatsoever on response rates. It’s all about the copywriting. Make your copy compelling, and get to the point very quickly–there isn’t much time before the “delete key” get punched.

Legal
The legal aspects of marketing via email are important, and quite a bit more restrictive, relative to any other form of direct marketing. So make sure you are aware of the laws which apply to your message–they vary from country to country. In the US, for example, the CAN-SPAM act requires an honest subject line, “remove requests” instruction, and a listing of the sender’s physical address–among other things. In some cases there are also state laws that apply. In Europe and other countries, the requirements can be far more restrictive, sometimes going so far as to require “opt-in” permission before any message can be sent. So be sure to research the local laws and comply with them at all times. To do otherwise risks ruining your online reputation–or worse.

Deliverability
This is one of the most difficult aspects to this particular direct marketing method. The advent of SPAM has created many barriers to delivering even the most welcomed messages to email inboxes. This was necessary, of course, for the preservation of the ability to use email at all. But deliverability is a very challenging, every changing scenario that has morphed into a marketing specialty of its own. There are many good places on the Web to assist you in getting your email delivered to your prospects. Return Path and Habeas are two of the more well known new companies that specialize in this area. I have used a free tool called SpamCheck to great effect over the last year, in screening my messages for deliverability problems. Contactology also has a great free Spam checking tool, as well as a turnkey service which enables you to easily create highly-deliverable email messages. EmailReach is another company that has some deliverability great tools. They aren’t free, but they do offer a 24 hour free trial for their service.

Continuous Measurement & Testing
The last thing I want to mention, which should be part and parcel to any successful email program, is measurement and testing. Since email is an online medium, it’s easy and cheap (or free) to measure your results. Frankly, doing any form of direct marketing without measurement is dumb. Online direct marketing with measurement is criminally dumb. There is just no excuse for it, other than laziness. Direct email marketing works best when it isn’t considered a “single-shot” campaign. Each drop should be part of an overall campaign aimed at continuous improvement. Multiple elements of your message should be tested and measured with each drop. If you do this, you WILL improve your results as you go–and likely will end up with a highly successful, and repeatable, marketing method to help drive your company’s growth.

Wrap Up
That’s my review of the nuts and bolts of good email marketing. Let’s hear from some of the other experts out there, on your best email practices. Post a comment so we can discuss this important marketing method in depth.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on April 7, 2007
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Pricing, Promotion, sales
tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Pay Per Click (PPC) Online Advertising

It’s known by several names: PPC or Pay Per Click advertising, CPC or Cost Per Click advertising, or sometimes by the best known PPC advertising engine, Google Adwords.

Pay Per Click advertising is no longer new; as a result, much of the “easy” money has already been made. But I’m struck by how many companies I run across that are still NOT using this method to attract prospects or make sales on the web. While it is now a competitive channel unlike in the early days of this medium, it can still be very effective and cost-effective in many markets.

PPC should be a staple of the promotion budget of nearly every company (although not a major portion of the overall budget, in most cases). It should also be one of the first promotional methods utilized on behalf of a new product, service or company. Here’s why:

Complex to Optimize–But Simple to Start
PPC advertising campaigns can be very complex and extensive, and will be once you get them optimized. Many companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars/month on PPC. At that point they should be making a lot of money for you–so it’s worth the investment and the trouble!

But getting started is quite easy–anyone can do it. You simply open an account with one of the major advertising engines, which will take you all of five minutes or so. You can put together a basic test campaign in less than an hour’s time. I always recommend starting with Google Adwords first. Once you are successful and understand what you are doing on Adwords, it is pretty easy to move your functioning campaigns to the other major system (Microsoft Adcenter) and the tertiary players. There are differences, but they are fundamentally the same.

Adwords is the most powerful and has by far the greatest reach, yet it is still very easy to set up your initial trial campaigns. There is an excellent set of online Help and tutorials to walk you through the basics. When you set up your initial campaigns, you WILL make mistakes. But don’t worry. Just set your budget limits to a low number that you can easily afford, and you will quickly climb the learning curve. Once you’ve learned the basics of what you are doing, you can then seek assistance to do the final optimizations to your campaigns, which will lead to the greatest success. You may decide to “do it yourself”; if so, there are a lot of different experts out there with modestly priced guides and services to bring you to the top of your PPC game. Or at this point, you may wish to outsource your PPC advertising activity. I always recommend opening an account on your own first, even if you plan to outsource. The knowledge that you gain will help you in hiring a third party who will best optimize your PPC activity, if you decide a third party PPC firm is the way to go for you.

Easy on the Budget
If you are a thinly capitalized startup company, or have a tight budget for a new product or market segment, you can start a PPC campaign that brings you results that you can continually improve, for just a few dollars/month. As usually is the case, the more money available the better. The more money you have to spend, the faster you can receive statistically significant results–which can then be used to tweak your campaigns for improvement, over and over again. But if you can only spare $50, $100 or $500 per month at first–don’t let that deter you. In most cases you can get started and move your campaign forward, at even these low budget levels. The beauty of PPC is that you really don’t need to commit to a large budget until you’re sure that you’ve got a profitable campaign. At that point, you’ll want to pour as much money into your campaign that you can muster. Once a campaign is proven profitable, pouring more money into it is like turning up a profit meter!

Precise Measurements
One of the major advantages of PPC advertising, compared to traditional offline adverting and other promotional methods, is the ability to precisely measure nearly every important aspect of your campaign. The ability to precisely track your results is much greater than any other form of promotion I’ve utilized in my career. This measurement precision turns PPC advertising into the most scientific form of marketing available. After some initial hypotheses with respect to Ad copy, keyword selection and landing page design, it is possible to systematically improve your results by tweaking these elements of your campaign  almost forever–increasing your profitability as you go.

Fast Results
The other important aspect of PPC advertising, in conjunction with measurement precision which makes this medium so systematic and scientific, is the ability to get this precise feedback in near real time. As an example, in traditional, offline advertising campaign, you need to invest tens of thousands of dollars upfront. After this large investment, you won’t even know if your campaign was successful for months. With PPC advertising, you quickly get feedback in the form of precise, quantifiable results, sometimes only minutes after you started it. As a result, you can have a fully optimized, profitable PPC campaign working, before you would even get your initial measurements with other methods.

The Ideal Platform to Test Messaging, Campaigns and Offers
The expediency and precision of PPC advertising make it a great platform to kick off any new product, market segment or company. It is very efficient way of testing messages, offers and websites. Once you’ve discovered and proven the things that work best, you can transfer this knowledge to your rollout of other promotional vehicles. This greatly reduces the risk inherent in starting up new marketing campaigns of any type, and should increase your profitability across platforms and promotional vehicles from day one.

Summary
As you can tell, I am a big proponent of PPC advertising as a staple of every marketing budget. Unless your market is so small that it consists of only a few hundred prospects, I recommend it to nearly every software and high tech company on the planet. Consumer, Enterprise or SMB–it’s very effective across many markets. In fact, the more of a niche your market is, the more cost-effective PPC becomes, due to reduced competition and lower resulting bid prices. There are a few highly competitive markets these days which are so competitive, that it’s hard to run a profitable PPC campaign. But these are still the minority. So if you aren’t active in PPC advertising today–get started! Give it a try, and let me know your questions or comments.

Follow Phil Morettini and Morettini on Management via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, or the PJM Consulting Quarterly Newsletter. Contact Phil directly at info@pjmconsult.com

1 Comment by admin on February 26, 2007
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, sales
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Through Online Bookmarking

I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about Search Engine Optimization in the past. The reason is that in the new century, this is as fundamental to marketing success as print advertising in the last fifty years, and maybe billboard advertising in the fifty years previous to the last fifty. The details and tactics of marketing change, but goals don’t really–getting your products and business in front of prospective customers. It would be really hard to find a business of any size these days that doesn’t have a website. If they don’t, they are probably on the same path as the carriage builders of the early 1900’s–becoming extinct.

That’s why I spend so much time exploring SEO: it is nearly universally critical to the market presence of every company, especially high tech and software companies. So here is one more new technique that you can use to build your company’s Internet presence, including the always present goal of improving your ranking in Search Engine Results for the keywords important to your business.

ONLINE SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Online bookmarking, also known as “tagging” is a way of making available to others online, your recommendations on interesting content to visit on the Internet. Think of it as making your browser “bookmarks” or “Favorites” available publicly. In fact, most social bookmarking services allow you to upload your bookmarks/favorites into their system to streamline the process. You often have the choice of making your bookmarks available to just people you are acquainted with, or broadly to the public.

While this is a neat thing to do for a consumer from a Web 2.0 perspective, this activity also can have application to online marketers, if used correctly. You simply bookmark or tag the articles that you’ve written and posted online, press releases, news stories, etc.–any important and interesting content related to your company. In doing this, you get the opportunity to include your name, company name and a link to your company’s website in the tag detail. This will create some organic traffic to your site, but will also be of assistance in improving the SEO rankings of your site.

Some people consider this to be spamming, but it really isn’t. You are simply tagging interesting things for people in your industry to find easily. I recommend that you also include your other interesting bookmarks along with your company-specific content, to minimize any concerns.

Now this is a bit of work, even for one social networking service. For maximum effect, you want to cover as many social networking services as possible.

I’ve come across another great, free website that’s assists you in doing just that, greatly limiting the labor involved. It’s called ONLYWIRE. You can use this site to place a tag across multiple social bookmark sites(currently 16 different sites). Using OnlyWire you only have to place the tag once, instead of 16 different times if you tried to do this manually. It requires you to visit the 16 sites and open an account first (which you’d have to do anyway), which is a bit of work–but OnlyWire then increases your productivity tremendously from there on. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and found it to work great. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on February 1, 2007
filed in Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, Startup/Early Stage
tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Publishing White Papers on the Web

Let’s talk about another great way of promoting your High Tech product or business on the Internet. One of the best ways to bring QUALIFIED prospects to your site is by publishing whitepapers.

In a previous column, I wrote about WhitePaperSource.com. This is still a great place to start if you are thinking about writing a new White Paper, or even starting a long term white paper campaign. I consider it the authoritative source of information on white papers as a form of promotion. There are forums there where experts reside to answer whatever questions that you may have about this important form of promotion.

The reason that white papers are so important, relative to other forms of promotion, is because they are credible. In fact, if you write a truly great white paper it won’t be viewed by the reader as a form of promotion at all–but as a key information source in the search they are on to solve a particular business problem. So don’t waste your time writing a thinly veiled product advertisement. Write a really useful white paper that will build your company or product’s image as a leader in your business category–and one whose products and services should be checked out FIRST.

I wanted to provide you with some great additional online resources for your white paper campaigns:

PLACES TO LIST YOUR WHITE PAPERS

IT AND TECHNOLOGY TOPICS

http://www.keyitsolutions.com/

http://www.itpapers.com/

http://www.tecwhitepapers.com/

SOFTWARE

http://www.softwareceo.com/white_papers.php

NETWORK SECURITY

http://www.securitydocs.com/

GENERAL BUSINESS AND VERTICAL MARKETS

http://www.bnet.com/whitepapers.html‘

So there you go, some additional resources for you Technology and Software white paper campaigns. Check them out and let me know what you think. Since this is my last column of 2006–Happy New Year–let’s have a chat in 2007!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on December 29, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media
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Link Building for Free

As most everyone who isn’t a newbie to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knows, building links is one of the most important activities to excel at, if you want to eventually rank high on the Search Engine results pages. But how do you accomplish this? When you are first getting started, it seems to be a daunting task.

Frankly, without using black hat techniques that will ultimately cause you more harm than good, it is a lot of work–there’s no way around it. My suggestion is that you look at link-building as a marathon, not a sprint. If you don’t, the task can appear so overwhelming that you might not ever start–which would be very unfortunate. It’s just too important to establishing a strong online presence.

Like just about everything else in SEO, this is a constantly changing area, which you need to stay on top of. This is mostly because the Search Engines are continuously trying to improve their results. The way they believe that this improvement will come about is by ensuring that the results are “natural”. In other words, they are always attempting to overcome any and all SEO techniques which might “artificially” raise one web page over another in their results. What represents good marketing to website owners is seen as obstacles to overcome by the Googles and Yahoos of the world, in a great many instances.

For example, it wasn’t too long ago that joining a link exchange network was a smart and attractive way to build links. But a recent change to the major search engine algorithms has “penalized” reciprocal links, to the extent that most inbound and outbound links “cancel each other out”. It no longer makes sense, in most circumstances, to invest time in reciprocal link-building activities. The exception is if you can exchange a link on your low PageRank (PR) page, for a link on a partner’s high PR page. But to do this successfully in any volume, you will need to find some pretty clueless partners!

So what’s the best way of going about gaining high quality inbound links? Well, there are several that I recommend for just about anyone. A regular Press Release campaign, utilizing an online Press Release distribution service, is a great way to build links. Make sure that you are sending out real news, and not just fluff. You’ll also want this to be useful for your offline marketing, as well. Make sure after you’re written the release “organically”, that you go back and optimize it for your important search keywords. Don’t be so maniacal about this that you mess up the readability, but I find if you go back after your first draft, you can usually make the release more keyword-rich, without negatively impacting the content or readability.

I also recommend that you write articles relevant to your industry or specialty. Post them on your site to build your own content, but as they age, you can also release them via an Internet Article distribution service. If you do this right, you will end up will thousands of additional inbound links over time.

The final method I’d like to talk about is the one just about everyone should start with–Directory Listing. This is a bit of work, but it’s completely free, with the exception of you time commitment. And many of these directories will be of real benefit to your SEO efforts due to their high PageRanks. Anyone can do this, so it’s something you can assign to a junior member of your company. Start with the free directories, and then look at the ones that charge for inclusion, but are inexpensive. In some cases they may make sense as well. A good starting point for this effort is the directory list at http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php.

That’s my tip for today on free and cheap ways to enhance your web presence. I hope it helps! Let me know about your own tricks.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on October 30, 2006
filed in Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media

Overture and its Bid Tool

I wanted to tell you quickly about another very useful tool for Search Engine Marketing. It’s the Overture Bid Tool, which you can access from several different places. I’ve linked a site above that is accessible to anyone; if you are currently doing business with Overture, you can of course access it from within the Overture site.

For those of you who don’t know, Overture is the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) division of Yahoo. Overture was the pioneer in the PPC business, and was later purchased by Yahoo. It is now officially known as Yahoo Search Marketing, but many people still know it as Overture, so the brand has stuck around. It’s a direct competitor to Google Adwords; although it was the pioneer, Overture’s technology has fallen behind Google. Yahoo has a big new upgrade of the service which will be available soon (it was supposed to be released by now, but was delayed). It is supposed to help Yahoo get back in the game and catch up with Google in the PPC business–we shall see. Google surged ahead of it with superior technology that it released at a far faster rate. There may be quite number of you who have utilized Google Adwords but have never tried Yahoo/Overture, since the general perception is that is “where the action is”. These days with the extreme competition for good keywords on the Adwords platform that may be a dubious strategy, but that’s a discussion for another time.

One of the features where Overture has maintained some functionality not available on Adwords is the Overture Bid Tool. This tool is of great use for Search Engine Marketing, in general. It’s very easy to use: you simply type in any search term that you are interested in, and the Overture Bid tool will return a list of advertisers for that the keyword or phrase, with the exact amount that they are bidding.

This can be very valuable in a number of instances. You might for example, use it to scope out a new market, to see if PPC advertising will make economic sense. You can use it to get an in depth view of the marketing strategy of your closest competitors. In a more global view, it can give you an quick overall picture of the competitiveness of a market segment. In many markets, PPC spending can be an excellent proxy for how competitive a particular market space is. So if there is brutal bidding on Overture, you can expect the SEO competition will be almost as bad, and even traditional marketing channels have a good chance of being pretty clogged up as well. And since Overture doesn’t have the volume of Adwords, the bids tend to be lower–so you can expect the competition on the Adwords platform is even worse.

Give the Overture Bid Tool a try–use it for whatever purpose that you like. It’s free, and easy to use. Let me know what use you found for it.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

No Comments by admin on August 30, 2006
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion

Behavioral Marketing – What’s all the Fuss About?

There’s a “new” form of online marketing that’s all the rage, and is getting a lot of press these days. Different people call it different things, including “Behavioral Targeting”, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll call it “Behavioral Marketing”. The most interesting thing about this technique is that it real isn’t new at all.

Let’s talk about what Behavioral Marketing is, and isn’t. It’s not any great new marketing theory or technique. It’s really just another form of database or segmentation marketing. Marketers have been attempting to categorize and segment potential customers since the beginning of the free enterprise system. What’s really new and exciting about it is that it has couple age-old marketing techniques with web technology that enables the marketing segmentation to be applied more efficiently and accurately. As I stated in the headline, it’s all the rage, being used by brick and mortar companies like Best Buy in store design, and pure web companies like Yahoo, who utilizes their vast portfolio of free services to get a handle of what Internet surfers are really up to.

My personal focus is on Technology and Software Management and Marketing Techniques. Behavioral Marketing isn’t a technique specific only to the market served by PJM Consulting, since it is broadly applicable to any company marketing products or services online. But my client base of software and technology companies should have a special interest in this topic, since they tend to be early adopters of leading edge technologies, such as utilized in this technique.

BEHAVIOR, NOT APPEARANCES OR LOCATION

In the context of online activity, behavioral marketing is the technique of targeting consumers based on their behavior online, rather than by simply the content of pages they visit, or the demographic characteristics of the prospect. For example, the prospect’s surfing habits might cause them to be grouped into a category of active car shoppers, or a different category of engaged women planning a wedding in the very near future–or both. These categories are constructed using information compiled from both clickstream data and IP information. Behavioral marketing networks with thousands of participating websites are being developed, which allow marketers to build databases that characterize online surfing behaviors across a wide spectrum of websites, in near real time. Marketers using behavioral techniques can then target these consumers by serving ads tailored to the predefined segments or categories. This is an example of a classic marketing technique that is made much more practical by Internet technology. The Internet isn’t essential to the practice of behavioral marketing, but it can greatly add to its effectiveness.

HOW IT WORKS

So how does it work? Generally, you’re being tracked as you surf the net using Adware, or tracking cookies on your computers. Adware is a dirty word to a lot of people, and is often lumped in with Spyware. What’s the difference? As I’m defining it here, Adware has no “mal intent” like some Spyware, and is fully disclosed and consented to. It is used strictly to track behavior and activities online, for the purpose of categorizing the surfer into a preset category, then serving an Ad targeted to that group. Not to steal your identity, or empty your bank account (at least not without your knowledge!).

IS IT A GOOD OR A BAD THING?

So is this new Behavioral Marketing stuff a positive development? Like most things in Marketing, that’s in the eye or the beholder–and the hands of the user.

Extreme voices on the user side of the privacy discussion will object strenuously to anything that has even the slightest privacy implication, no matter how benign. It doesn’t matter whether the risk of abuse is slight or non-existent; they will toll the bell of alarm and protest vigorously. These folks are against just about any form of marketing that is proactive. There feeling is that marketers must wait for people to come to them. If their logic was followed, a great many innovative, productive technologies would never have found their way into common use. Thankfully, our free enterprise system isn’t that restrictive.

On the other side of this equation are the abusers of technology (I refuse to call them marketers), who will take any innovation and unscrupulously attempt to use it to their advantage–consequences be damned. Email Spammers are the most recent and dramatic example of this genre of fast-buck artists. One of the great innovations in communications in our time, email is perfectly suited to direct marketing, when used properly and responsibly. With proper targeting and a reasonable approach to permission, email marketing has strong benefits to both the marketer and the consumer. But the Spammers repetitively stuff our in-boxes with the same useless drivel, until this elegant technology becomes practically unusable for its intended purpose. By doing this, Spammers turn the flabbergasted public against even legitimate forms of email marketing, wasting a huge opportunity to conduct efficient commerce for us all.

WHAT’S THE VERDICT?

So what will it be with Online Behavioral Marketing? Will it be used just for good, or for evil as well? Since this form of marketing is really just getting started, it remains to be seen. But if history is a guide, there’s a good chance it may end up being both a blessing and a curse.

What’s your position on Behavioral Marketing? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

No Comments by admin on August 21, 2006
filed in B2C, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, market research

Maintaining and Editing your High Tech Blog

Blogs have become important marketing tools for many companies these days. Of course, being in the forefront of technology means that software and tech companies are early adopters of business Blogs. Whether it’s for marketing purposes as an online newsletter, to obtain feedback from the customer base, to have dialogue with potential clients, or to simply add interesting content to your website thereby increasing its “stickiness”, business Blogs are all the rage.

It’s challenging enough to come up with the content to include in your Blog. What you don’t need is difficulty in implementing that content, quickly and easily, into your Blog.

Unfortunately, some of the standard tools provided by the Blog software companies and services leave a bit to be desired. I use Blogger by Google as the infrastructure to my own Blog, Morettini on Management. I am generally happy with Blogger, as it has most of the features to meet my needs, and is generally stable.

But one area where Blogger is weak is in tools for creation and editing of Posts. The biggest problem is that the tools are browser-based. That’s a good thing in general, but when I’m trying to quickly write a serious document of any length, the lag time between typing and appearance on the page can be maddening. In addition, the editing tools aren’t exactly “feature-rich” with respect to formatting issues. For this reason, I prefer to use an offline editor, to create and publish my posts.

Luckily, there are some add-on tools out there to make your life easier. I use an MS Word add-in provided by Blogger itself, called Blogger for Word. It integrates in smoothly with Microsoft Word, and adds a few menu items to Word which enable “one-click” posting. Using this tool, I can create Posts like I do any other document in this venerable word processor, and simply post to my Blog with a single click. All the formatting that I use in Word is maintained when the document is posted to the Blog. It works great!

If you don’t use Blogger, there’s also a similar, but more general tool available: w.bloggar. This tool is an editor that can be used to post to a number of the well-know Weblog systems that are available. Currently, w.bloggar is compatible with all Weblog Systems that implements Blogger API, metaWeblog API, MovableType API and b2 API; all based on the XML-RPC definition. I haven’t used w.bloggar yet personally, but it looks pretty slick.

Both Blogger for Word and w.bloggar are available for free, although w.bloggar appreciates donations. Try them out and send me your own review.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on July 24, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, Startup/Early Stage

High Tech Article Marketing on the Internet

Many companies these days have a focus on Online Marketing, for pretty obvious reasons. The Internet has grabbed a hold of most markets, and is now the main source of information in most industries. In many it has also quickly becoming the actual center of revenue, via e-commerce activities on company websites and online retail sites.

But like most marketing methods, competition quickly clogs up the available channels of reaching customers. This is especially true for the fast moving software and high tech markets that PJM Consulting addresses. Time to market and to the customer’s wallet is at a premium, when every company is attempting to establish themselves as the leader of an embryonic market. As a result, it’s getting harder all the time to reach the top of the organic search engine listings, and the cost of an Ad in PPC engines such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture continues to climb. Downloadable white papers work in B2B markets, if they are well targeted and written, but there is plenty of competition these days in this area as well. And most of you are aware of the declining economics of direct email, with the issues of SPAM and blocking. So folks are constantly looking for a new channel to break through to their online prospect base.

One of the hot areas of Online Marketing currently is what’s being called “Article Marketing”. It’s a new twist on a very old marketing strategy: Write articles as an expert on your industry. So why should you consider an online article marketing campaign?

BUILD CREDIBILITY
As an expert, there are obvious benefits to building your own, or your company’s, credibility in the marketplace. If you are considered an industry expert, there is a definite halo effect for your company’s products or services. They will take on a “premium” feel to potential users in the industry. You and your company will become better known, more highly respected, and will be considered first, when potential customers are looking for the type of things that your company offers.

CONTENT FOR YOUR OWN WEBSITE
After credibility, this is the second most important reason to consider writing articles. The search engines love information. Articles discussing solutions to problems, or providing expert information is valued by the engines—and will be indexed quickly and ranked highly as a result. As a matter of fact, “commercial” sites appear to be losing appeal as the search engines seek out this expert content. As for publishing, the search engines love Blogs, which is just a structure to write and publish articles in. A Blog can be an excellent addition to your site, and will make your site much more attractive to the search engines as an information source. If you do use Blog software to publish your articles, make sure the Blog is hosted on your domain, to ensure that the full benefits of this expert content accrues to your site, driving its position higher in the search engine results.

TRAFFIC BUILDING FOR YOUR WEBSITE
In addition to creating content for your own site, it’s also a good idea to publish articles elsewhere on the web. Not everyone is using a search engine to find what they are looking for on the web, and even if they are, your own site will not rise to the top in every search (unfortunately!). So I highly recommend publishing your articles on other sites, with a link back to your own website included in your author bio at the end of the article. There is a whole cottage industry that has popped up of article submission websites, software and services to assist you in this effort. People clicking on these links will build additional traffic to your site.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION THROUGH BACKLINKS
My fourth reason for writing and publishing articles also revolves around the links established on other websites where your articles are published. We call these links “Back Links”, because they link back to your site. In addition to providing traffic back to your website directly by people who click on them, they provide another very important function. Search engine optimization for a website is very complex, and is constantly changing. But you can boil it down to two major areas—Content and Back Links. If you have great content on your site and lots of other sites are linking to yours, you will rank high in the search results, and get a ton of traffic as a result. All of the links to your website, that appear on third party websites as part of publishing your article broadly on the Internet, increase this “links score” that is so important to search engine ranking.

ARTICLE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
As you can see, Internet Article Marketing can be an excellent technique for building traffic to your high tech company’s website. There are many ways to proceed. Here is one step-by step approach:

  1. Create articles of interest in your company’s industry. Write them like you are submitting them to an industry journal—then review the article to ensure it is keyword rich.
  2. Publish the articles on your own website. Blog software, available freely on the Internet, is an easy publishing tool. TypePad and Blogger are two of the more popular, but there are many others.
  3. Feature the articles in your company newsletter.
  4. Leave newer articles solely on your company’s website for a period of time, as exclusive content.
  5. Submit older articles broadly on the Internet, using Article Submission software or a service. Ezine Articles, Submit your Article, and iSnare are services that all work pretty well. There are again many choices.
  6. Be patient—one article may not do much, unless you are very lucky. As your base of articles builds over time, you should see a definite positive effect on your website traffic.

That’s my primer on Article Marketing on the Internet—did you find it useful? Send me a note if you would like to discuss.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

1 Comment by admin on July 18, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, Startup/Early Stage
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