(SEO) Seeking Robust & Relevant Content

Effective web site content should be relevant and robust and pages should have supporting themes to provide value to both site visitors and search engines.  Both want substance. 

Content is one of the most significant success factors to any web site.  In general, the more focused and robust your content is – the better off you are.  Target your writing to one primary topic (or a subset of a topic).  Your web pages should contain enough text content on each page to support the messaging and overall theme.  Shoot for a minimum of 300 words.  Less ‘can’ work, but it’s highly unlikely. 

With that, you should also create a theme amongst a group of pages within your web site to give each page legitimacy and relevance.  A search engine ranks ‘each’ page within your site and a big deciding factor is whether the pages share relevance to and support one another. Planning for 6 pages of supporting content is a good minimum for creating a theme.

Summary:  Create enough relevant, engaging content and you will have a web site your visitors will enjoy reading and to which search engines will assign high rankings.

Build Your Brand With “Caricature”

A caricature falsely highlights various anomalies while diminishing the boring parts,” writes Seth Godin, well-known marketing author. Examples would be – Jay Leno gets a ridiculous chin (or Pamela Anderson’s female features are even more exaggerated). 

The concept also relates to business, says Godin. “The BEST brands are caricatures of their true selves,” he continues. “Yes, they must have exceptional features (a step that’s easy to skip, but without would lead to failure) but then, over time, those select features SHOULD become highly intensified much like a caricature.” Key examples Godin sites include: 

FEDEX: Many years ago FedEx ads depicted fanatical drivers doing whatever it took—even renting helicopters—to deliver a package on time. A wild exaggeration, of course, but it made the point.

STARBUCKS: The standard joke as it relates to Starbucks — is the spectacularly complex order (i.e. “no fat, no sugar, half-caf, extra hot, tall latte, with soy, extra foam, in a double cup – yes, with a sleeve.”) Yes, everyone likes to make a joke out of it, yet they know when they go to Starbucks they’ll get exactly what they want.  

Think about a few ways you could intensify your brand’s unique traits by creating a caricature, which in turn could actually make your company’s most outstanding features more memorable.

Summary:  Playing it safe and being ubiquitous to please a large percentage of customers, means you’ll likely be B-O-R-I-N-G.  It’s a lot faster, cheaper, easier and much more interesting to have a couple of pronounced features. 

Source: Seth Godin’s Blog. You can read the entire post here.

Criteria for Blog Selection

In a post at The Lonely Marketer, Patrick Schaber, talks about his criteria for choosing the blogs he reads. With so much engaging content available, he’s frequently tempted to expand his reading list. To help him stay focused and decide what to read, Schaber developed a list of blog must-haves.  Here’s some of his advice:

• Provide unique, actionable content. “To be honest,” writes Schaber, “I don’t care if you’ve been blogging for five years or five minutes, if I feel I’m going to leave a site having learned something new, count me in.” He gives extra points for highlighting recent content in a sidebar.
• Post frequently. This doesn’t mean that you have to blog every day—a few each week will do the trick—but if multiple weeks pass between each post, readers will stop checking in.
• Maintain focus. Nothing says you have to restrict yourself to a single topic, but you’ll confuse readers if you hop randomly from subject to subject without explaining why.
• Add visual interest. You’ll notice that many bloggers include an image with each post. Follow their lead. “So much of social media is visual perception!” says Schaber.

Summary: Good content is good content. Even the busiest people make time for their favorite blogs.

Source: The Lonely Marketer. Read the entire post here.

                    

Clarify: Landing Page, Jump Page, Microsites…

Landing pages are often confused with splash pages, bridge pages, jump pages and microsites. 

• Splash pages are graphic introductions – often full screen – to web content, mostly upon entry to a web site.  Usually, splash pages are made in flash and allow the user to skip them, which almost all visitors will.  In general, splash pages are an extremely bad idea.  Visitors usually dislike them and your site traffic will generally plummet as a result of having placed this barrier in front of it.

• Bridge pages (a.k.a. doorway, portal, and gateway pages) are designed to be particularly enticing for search engines, not visitors.

• Jump pages attract attention to a particular offer or event.  They must be navigated through to get to the desired content.

• Microsites are a cross between a landing page and a regular web site.  They often have their own domain names, and even brands separate from the organization’s brand.  They are used when a marketer wants to offer a user an extended experience for branding or educational purposes.  Many times a visitor might even return to a specified microsite as a destination.

• Although landing pages can have several linked pages, they generally don’t allow many navigational options.  You can move forward through the conversion process, or you can leave.  On the other hand, microsites invite you to explore and look around within the experience.

Digg This. (Blog Talk)

So common amongst bloggers, the word “Digg” comes up again and again.  What does Digg mean in the world of blogging?

As noted in Wikipedia.org (a free online encyclopedia managed by everyday users like you) – Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.  Learn more about the term Digg >>

Digg, Inc. | Social content website | Created by Kevin Rose | Launched December 5th 2004 | URL http://www.digg.com/ | Registration Free

Blog? What’s that?

Do you know what a Blog is?  If not, here’s an excellent 3 minute video tutorial that gives you a quick lesson on blogging -provided by CommonCraft.com.  Turn up your volume and check it out >> 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

Calculating Marketing ROI

Return on Investment, most commonly referred to as ROI, is a term that is used frequently in today’s marketing/business arenas -as well it should be.  Below is a basic breakdown of what all the “terminology” means and the underlying formulas for calculating marketing success.

 

Generally, the more expensive your product / service, the more you must spend to acquire a new customer.  The cost of lead acquisition equals your marketing cost divided by the number of customer leads that the activity generates.

          

Cost of Lead Acquisition = Marketing Cost /# of Leads

          

If you spend $100 for PPC ads on Google to get 20 people to your site, your cost is $100 divided by 20, or $5 per lead.  If only two of those 20 people buy, your cost of customer acquisition is actually $50.  That’s fine if they each spend $250 on our site, but what if they spend only $25?  You can compute acquisition cost for any single marketing campaign or technique for an entire year’s worth of marketing expenditures. 

Break Even Point

The break-even point is the number of sales at which revenues equal total costs.  After you reach breakeven, sales sy76tart to contribute to profits.  To calculate the break-even point for your web site, subtract your cost of goods (or cost of delivering services) from your revenues, which yields the gross margin: 

Revenues – cost of goods = gross margin

Now total the fixed costs (charges that are the same each month regardless of how much business you do) for your web site, such as monthly developer’s fees, hosting, charges for your ISP, overhead and in-house labor.  Finally, divide your fixed costs by your gross margin. That tells you how many sales you must make to pay for your basic web expenses. 

Fixed costs + gross margin = break-even point

Costs of sales are expenses that vary with the amount sold, such as shipping and handling, commissions, or credit card fees.  For more accuracy, you can subtract these from your revenues as well.  Divide the results into your fixed costs to get the break-even point. 

Figuring out whether you’ll make money online

Return on investment (ROI) looks at the rate at which you recover your investment in site development or marketing.  Often you calculate ROI for a period of a year.  To calculate ROI, simply divide the profits (not revenue) by the amount of money invested to get a percentage rate of return: 

Profits + investment = rate of return

You can also express ROI by how long it will take to earn back your investment.  An annual 50% ROI means it will take two years to recover your investment.  As with acquisition costs, you can compute ROI for your original investment in site development, for any single marketing campaign or technique, or across an entire years worth of Web expenses. 

Remember:  Don’t spend more on marketing then you can make back.  Losing money on every sale is not a good business plan. =}