5 Free Internet Marketing Tools

Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Market Research, Search Engine Optimization by Fran on December 29, 2009 | No Comments

In a previous post “Effective Online Market Research – But Are You Listening?” we dealt with the need for effective market research in order to execute internet marketing online.  The challenge, we maintain, is not in doing the research but in implementing the marketing strategy after the demographic is understood.

Many small companies or fledgling businesses will balk at spending their resources on tailoring their marketing strategies, assuming that they know the mind set of their customers. Fortunately, there are some very good free internet marketing tools out there.  Some of these tools are very popular – and yet underutilized.

The following are 5 internet marketing tools that most websites can benefit from.  Even if you are already familiar with these tools, we recommend taking a deeper look and becoming proficient with some of the lesser known functionality in order to help you achieve your marketing and strategic goals – without paying a fortune.

The last tool in our list (it should be introduced with “last but not least”) should get your special attention, especially in light of our premise that most online businesses think they know what their users want.  By using online surveys and polls, even budget-conscious companies can now get to the pulse of the people without spending a bundle on a market research firm.

Perhaps, the money saved can be better used for PPC – to be addressed in a future post.

5 Free Internet Marketing Tools

1. Web traffic metric sites like Alexa http://www.alexa.com/ provide “free web traffic metrics, top site lists, site demographics, hot urls and more”. Simply type in the URL of your biggest competitors to learn about who their visitors are and get insight into their online behavior.
2. Google Insights For Search allows you to “compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties” http://www.google.com/insights/search/ .  Here too, add the URL of your biggest competitors to get a cartload of relevant information.
3. Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends “provides insights into broad search patterns” and shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Popularity is broken down by region, city and language and time period.
4. Google Adword Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal allows you to find out the hottest key words and phrases in your industry and later will be the most effective tool  to construct a website marketing campaign.
5. Create free online surveys and polls.  Here are two easy and free applications: http://polldaddy.com/ and http://www.surveymonkey.com/ to find out first-hand what your users are thinking.  Include your polls on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and get quick results.

Effective Online Market Research – But Are You Listening?

Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Market Research by Fran on December 22, 2009 | No Comments

I’m fairly stunned when otherwise savvy business individuals who want to improve their online marketing, turn to me for advice about their latest internet marketing tools and branding strategies, yet let me know unabashedly upon inquiry that they’ve done zero market research.  Rather, the vital process of choosing their marketing strategy and design elements is based on what they themselves like.

One experience in particular still leaves me laughing.  A few years ago a client was tackling the college market (18-24 year olds) and invited me to lead his online marketing efforts.  Even before I stepped into his office I began formulating his online campaign. As college students are the single most connected demographic group, I recognized the need for a strong online presence with a very aggressive social media marketing campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social media sites.

During our very first round of meetings, in order to connect to our young consumer base, the question of “what’s considered cool” by this demographic became the hot topic at our round table discussion. As half-a-dozen forty year olds and a couple of thirty year olds sat around the boardroom laughing and brainstorming about all the crazy but cool things they did in college using terms like “nerd”, “dweeb” and “rockin”, I knew we had better kick-start our marketing strategy –  and fast – because as much as we thought that we were still “with it”, we were truly estranged by at least a decade to Generation Y and  even more so to Generation Z and did not understand what motivated them. Even worse than not understanding our target demographic, was the fact that if we had proceeded with what we thought was our cool, hip and with-it lingo, we would have created a clearly erroneous marketing strategy.

Many small companies hesitate to invest in market research due to financial limitations – a simple market report can cost several hundreds dollars and still not provide strategic market research information.  I’m always happy to allay concerns as there are several ways to gain the necessary information to make intelligent decisions about your online marketing campaign that don’t require a big expenditure.

The first step in the process is asking the questions.  Even though the actual market analysis questions themselves are obvious, you would be surprised at how often companies need to be reminded to go through the process of asking the questions – and more importantly, listening to the answers!  The marketing strategies that are implemented must be attuned to your market demographics and their habits – not what you think are their habits.

The first step in the process is to define your demographic.

10 Essential Market Research Questions:

• Age?
• Gender?
• What is their level of education?
• What are their annual earnings?
• Where do they live?
• Do they have children?
• Where is their browsing location? What time of day are they most frequently online?
• What sites do they visit (competitive sites/social media sites/news sites)?
• What’s important to them?
• How much money are they spending online? What are they buying?

Only after knowing who your target market is, and having them clearly defined, can you now begin the next step of creatively marketing to them – based on their terms.  In the next post, “5 Free Internet Marketing Tools” we will explore some internet marketing tools to help you do this.

How often does Google crawl?

Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Search Engine Optimization by Sol on November 12, 2009 | No Comments

Internet marketing success is almost completely based on the ability to maximize search engine optimization.  You can do everything right in terms of website promotion, follow all the best and up to date SEO optimization strategies and provide users with original material and added value content.  But there are millions of websites out there.  Unless your site is a rare concept, it is probably one of many competing for the attention of search engines.  I have always struggled with whether to look at search engine placement techniques as art, or science.  (This would make an interesting discussion for a future blog post.  Any input would be welcome).

After all your SEO groundwork is done, there is one last thing that needs to happen.  The site has to wait to be crawled by search engines.  The big question is how often does Google (and the other search engines) crawl?  Is there a way to make it happen sooner or more frequently?

I decided to study this question in an old fashioned, yet scientific manner.  Rather than just relying on checking my web stats, I decided to search for my site on Google using keyword terms I knew would be successful and checking the cached date presented (see the word “cached” under each result).  I found the date and time of the last snapshot Google took of my site.  I also repeated this for 10 other sites.  I chose some of the largest, most popular sites on the web, with ever-changing content, some very small  newer sites and a few medium sized sites.

I then repeated this survey every day at the same time of day.  After a few days, I found out what I had suspected, and in fact, what we are told by Google, openly in their webmaster guidelines:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

The criteria by which Google crawls a site….. depends.   I could not find the hard and fast rules, but page rank, the frequency of updating and refreshing content, the relevancy of content and other factors do play a decidedly crucial role.  Some of the newer sites with static content seemed to get cached about every 12 or 13 days whereas some other sites seemed to be cached daily.

However, the real shocking revelation is something else I learned.

On the fourth day in a row of accessing this openly available information, after checking 8 sites, I was suddenly denied access to the last cache date result.  Upon clicking on the “Cache” link, I received the message:  “We’re sorry, but the computer or network you are using may be sending automated queries.  To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

Checking Google crawl information too frequently? I received this Google Message.

I had to contact Google and explain that I was searching for this information for 11 sites only, without any use of software or any mechanism that would breach their terms of service.

Google was able to pick up on my pattern of searching for cache date information, and assumed that my searching was tantamount to automated queries.  My first reaction was to take this a compliment to my efficient and quick searching skills.  However, that feeling quickly disappeared when it dawned on me that I was being blocked from further accessing cache date information, based on an automated monitoring mechanism.

This experience was in fact a bigger lesson to me.  It showed me the extent to which Google, and presumably other search engines, guard their criteria and procedures for their search engine spiders.  Though on the one hand we know much information about search engine optimization, on the other hand we don’t even have some basic understanding of the topic.  For example, does a high page rank tell the search engines to spider more often, or is a page that is spidered more often (due to other criteria) result in a higher page rank?

These uncertainties and the lack of full disclosure of search engine crawling or spidering is part of the genius of Google and others.  It makes us, internet marketing professionals and aficionados, have to work harder, smarter and constantly.  It ensures that the system is not manipulated.  Providing a good user experience to a searcher is their business, and ultimately this is good for all of us.

It just means that we have to continue to use our genius to get great search engine placement in the name of ongoing website promotion.

Fran’s 10 Best WordPress Plugins

Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Wordpress by Fran on October 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Welcome to Buzz Words.

Got a blog? Plan on building one? Well, with Technorati tracking over 112.8 million blogs (not to mention the 72.82 million Chinese blogs counted by The China Internet Network Information Center) there’s a lot of competition in the blogosphere.  One essential tactic that will ensure you have at least a fighting chance to get users to visit your blog is to use robust, open source blog software. This is a no brainer – go directly to WordPress and sign up now. No need to thank me .

I fully admit to being a WordPress addict. WordPress makes life a pleasure. It’s flexible and simple to use and if you don’t know the first thing about coding – no problems – WordPress plugins will save the day. Plugins are cool mini computer programs that interact with a host application (in this case WordPress) to provide a very specific function. In other words, you can add incredible features to your blog without the need for a programmer. G-d bless WordPress – many of these plugins are absolutely free. I’ve created a list of the 10 Best WordPress Plugins – some of my favorites – I know you’ll come to love them too.

Without further ado here’s an essential list of the 10 Best WordPress Plugins

All-In-One-SEO-Pack: A must have, this cool, out-of-the-box plugin babysits even the newest newbie through many key search engine optimization (SEO) requirements including automatically generating Meta Tags and optimizing Title Tags. Advanced users can modify features for greater SEO juice.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: This social media tool lets users share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, including the biggies like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 other social bookmarking and sharing sites.

Akismet: This anti-spam plug-in is usually built right into your WordPress template’s plug-in menu. All you have to do is activate it. I’m always awed at this plugin’s ability to siphon the good from the spam. According to Akismet’s WordPress description it differentiates itself from the competition because “it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.” Bottom line – it’s highly effective at ridding my blogs of spam.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT: Breadcrumb trails are often found near the top of web pages and show users where they are currently located within the site hierarchy. An example of a breadcrumb may look like this: “Women > Skirts > Pencil Skirts”. Breadcrumb trails aren’t just a nice feature for users but are a great way to boost SEO and rankings. This simple plug-in takes care of the work for you.

Sociable: Aptly named, this awesome social tool automatically adds links to the top 99 social bookmarking sites from your posts and in your RSS feed.

Google Integration Toolkit: It may lack the glamour of some of the other plug-ins but this no-nonsense tool allows you to check how your site is indexed in some of Google’s most important tools including Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Adsense.

Google XML Sitemaps: One of the fundamentals in kick-starting SEO is ensuring that you have an xml sitemap in place. This handy plug-in automatically generate a compliant google xml sitemap. It updates the sitemap – and get this – it notifies ask.com, google, MSN Search and Yahoo after every new post!

Simple Tags: In every Internet Marketer’s back pocket, there are a couple of good tricks. Here’s one. This groovy little tool gives you more opportunities to tag your blog. It automatically extracts relevant tags from Yahoo, Tag The Net and Local Tags and more giving you an extra SEO boost.

Redirection: There’s nothing more frustrating than encountering a broken link. Users get frustrated and search spiders hit a dead end. Redirection is an excellent tool to manage 301 redirections and 404 errors.

WP Page Numbers: Make it easy for users to navigate your blog. Get rid of “next” and “previous” links, your readers can find what they want quickly. It’s also another great “back pocket” SEO trick because it helps to build a strong inner site structure.