Ideas for Business

Using web analytics can help you better understand your customer’s needs and help you market to them more effectively. It has been found that emails generated from clickstream data saw a 9x improvement in revenue and 32x more in net profit versus undifferentiated broadcast emails (”The ROI of Email Relevance”, Jupiter Research). 

Who has not completed a transaction?

Use your web analytics to see which customers have abandon your shopping cart. After a few days send a reminder email encouraging customers to return and complete the process. You may even want to inform the recipient that their shopping cart will be expiring soon. Another tactic is the include an incentive to purchase the abandon items.

What pages do they visit?

Take a look at the your user’s site usage. Send an email on products or incentives related to the products or categories browsed. It has been found that consumers made an immediate purchase from emails when the email contained the products they were already considering.

When do they visit?

For frequent visitors to your site, invite them to participate in hidden promotions or sweepstakes not available to your other customers. For recent visitors, send a message on the latest products browsed.

From where are they arriving? 

Take a look at what referring domains and URLs visitors are coming from. Use this information to target visitors by sending them a message that asserts or reinforces your competitive or leadership position.

 Why do they do what they do?

Incorporate email demographics into your web anlytics program, you can then learn what products categories and pages are currently appealing to your demographic segment.

How?

You will need to connect a specific email recipient  to the browsing behavior associated with the visitor history or profile in your Web analytics program. You can also use email conversion tracking, in which a customer accesses the site by clicking a trackable link in an email.

There is a challege to using web site behavioral clickstream data as an email targeting tactic. Typically a relatively small portion of the email list lends itself to clickstream targeting.

Contact Sales & Marketing Technologies to learn how we can improve your web site’s success.

by Brent Nau

Internet Marketing Specialist

Web designers, programmers, IT specialist and business marketing departments are all involved in the development of wonderful web sites.

However, few of these professionals care how you rank in the search engines and whether your site produces leads or sales.

If you want to Increase Web Site Traffic you need to see if your site makes any of these web site mistakes and then take action to correct them.

1. Flash Home Page / Web Site
Nothing stops a search engine spider than no readable content. Flash pages can be great for paid traffic, however for organic rankings learn to integrate readable content.

2. Poor Content
Search engines use content to help determine what your web site is about. Try this quick test, if you read your web page copy to a complete stranger, would they know what business you were in? If the answer is No, you need to revise your copy because the search engines don’t know what business you are in either.

3. Calls To Action / Next Steps
For some reason a lot of web sites are built without logical Calls to Action or Next Steps thought out. What is the logical step that your web page has set the user up for and how does this page fit into the Conversion path. Review your site and see if your visitors are lead towards a conversion path or left to choose their own path.

4. Search Engine Friendly urls
Many programmers build amazing dynamic web sites and never consider how or why it is important to rank for every service or product offered on the site. One solution is to use re-writes to create search engine friendly urls that can improve indexing and have been shown to have higher click through rates.

5. URL Server Set Up
How your url is set up on the server can impact your rankings and the use of proper 301 redirects are critical when re-launching your web site. It is important that your IT expert and hosting company understands proper set up.
You now have some insight into how to increase your web site traffic and may have identified areas where you and your business can improve. If you are looking for a more in-depth analysis and understanding of how to improve your web site’s success contact Sales & Marketing Technologies. 1-407-682-2222

by Russell Troutman
Internet Marketing Manager

* Related Articles
Online Marketing before or After Web Site Development

Many search marketing tactics come and go, but one channel of promotion that has steadily evolved is the practice of optimizing press releases for search engines. While it’s true that the future of the traditional press release has been up for debate over the past few years, wire services and the web sites they syndicate content to continue to produce results for the clients of savvy public relations professionals and online marketers.

Yahoo News is still more popular that MSNBC, AOL News or CNN. Being able to rank well on the most popular online news web site as well as Google News simply by optimizing and distributing a press release offers attractive benefits at a nominal cost.

In the course of prepping for an upcoming public relations workshop where I’m speaking on a panel about press release optimization, I thought I’d do a review of the top wire services. Part of that presentation also includes press release optimization tips from industry friends that work at the newswires, where thousands of press releases are distributed daily.

I thought I’d share these tips with Online Marketing Blog readers that will not be in San Francisco this Friday.

Sarah Skerik - Vice President, Distribution Services - PR Newswire

Write a pithy (80 character or less,) descriptive headline that includes important keywords. Don’t be coy with this important real estate. Utilizing important keywords in the headline, and then again in the lead (and throughout your message) reinforces the relevance of your message for those important terms.

Remember that SEO is really the art and science of being found by your audience. For that reason, you have to use the language they use when searching for or discussing topics related to your product or industry. Put more simply - don’t use jargon!

Joe Beaulaurier - Interactive Marketing Manager - PRWeb

Link your strategically important search keywords to deep relevant pages in your site, not the front page. Use your keyword links to connect the strategically important keyword terms in your press releases to the most relevant deep pages within your site. If they don’t exist, create appropriate deep pages (aka landing pages) and place content on them that is specifically relevant to the keywords. For instance, if you are selling bicycles and are linking the words “mountain bikes” from within your press release, be sure to link to the page that details your company’s mountain bike offerings.

Laura Sturaitis - Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy - Business Wire

I think my best tip for clients on the topic of optimizing their press release for search and social media, is to begin to think of the press release not just as a media relations tool, as it has been historically, but instead to view creating a press release as compiling a mini web page on the news or topic being written about.

If you think of a press release like this from the very moment that you open your Word document to start writing, you immediately begin to write it differently, for example:

• You use formatting like bold, italics, bullet points, short headlines and subheads that not only makes the page easier to read online, but also enhances SEO.

• You insert a company logo for branding and embed photos, graphics and video links in your press release to show what you are writing about in pictures, graphs, sound & motion, rather than simply trying to describe it in words…very web friendly.

• You incorporate links from your targeted keywords in the press release, not only to have your release rank for those keywords in the search engines, but also so your press release can operate as a portal to additional information on those topics, driving traffic to your website and hopefully to landing pages utilizing the same keywords.

The beauty of thinking of the press release in this way is that when these things are considered at the outset in writing the release, you can then measure how successful your release has been not only by how many news stories or blog posts were written about it, but also how well the release ranked in the search engines and how well it drives traffic, sales, or other actions from online visitors to your website.

I often say in the world of user generated content, the people in the best position to deliver meaningful, relevant content are professional communicators and the press release can be a powerful tool to do this because of its extensive reach online not only as a media relations tool but now as a direct-to-consumer communication via search engines and other online reach.

Kevin Dill - Product Manager, Social and Multimedia Products - Marketwire

Many people believe that SEO involves just researching and improving upon press release keywords, phrases, META tags, etc. There are other ways to search engine optimize the press release for additional search engine pickup or search engine visibility (SEV).

Add an audio link such as a podcast or product announcement into your press release. If you have an RSS feed associated with your releases, you can direct Apple iTunes to pick up the audio automatically and include it in a freely available channel on iTunes.com. With 70 million iTunes subscribers, why not? There are also several audio aggregators on the web which spider audio links and make them keyword searchable.

Consider choosing a newswire which will allow “external” multimedia content hosting. For example, YouTube for video or Flickr for photos. These sites are spidered by the major search engines as well as being searchable “social” directories within the site. YouTube is the third largest search engine.

Now you have created a press release which is truly “optimized”. You have taken your multimedia elements and integrated them into large compartmentalized sites for expanded availability. You will get additional search engine pickup of your content external to normal press release distribution channels as well as additional presence in popular searchable portals.

For posts on the topic of press release optimization and online PR tactics, be sure to visit:

• Press Releases as Marketing Tools - Bullet list of practical tips.
• Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae? - Hot off the press at Search Engine Watch from Greg Jarboe
• Push Pull PR and Social Media - Where does social media fit into online PR? Find out here.
• The Power of Social Media Blogs and PR - Four podcast interview segments with RSS Ray.
• Lowdown on Press Release Optimization - Oldie but a goodie from 2005.

Do you have press release optimization and distribution tips that you’d like to share? We’d love to see them in the comments.

Sponsored By: Need to learn SEO? Announcing the best online SEM courses from SEMPO Institute.

In Print

Yours truly and my mommy blog, A Mama's Rant got a sizable mention in Beth Snyder Bulik's article at Advertising Age, Advertisers Promise You More Family Time. (If you want to see the post she referenced, click on The Dodge Caravan Dilemma.)

Stopping by Border's this weekend, I looked through a copy of The Rough Guide to Blogging, a book I've recommended to beginning bloggers just from the reviews at Amazon. In the back was a list of the author's favorite blogs including my food and diet blog, This Mama Cooks! Unfortunately, he spelled the blog's name wrong, but the URL will get them there just the same.

In Person

I recently gave a beginning blogging workshop, "Blogging at Breakfast" for members and friends of the Northern Colorado Writer's Association (NCWA). It was so successful that Kerrie Flanagan, the group's director, has asked me to do two blogging workshops at the NCWA's April conference.

I was already signed up to do one, but we both felt that there was enough interest for two - "Using Blogging and Social Media to Promote Your Book" and "Earn Money with Your Blog." If you're interested in signing up, go to the group's website.

In the Blogosphere

ClubMom.com - The folks at ClubMom have terminated the ClubMom MomBlogs program where I had my children's books and cooking blog, A Readable Feast. They're now putting all their efforts into to CafeMom, a social networking site for moms. It was a business decision. Basically they get tons more traffic per day at CafeMom than they do per month on the blogs.

ClubMom offered very generous terms. They're letting us keep our content, the banner artwork, and our blog's name. (That's huge because most blog networks don't let you keep your content let alone all the other stuff.) They told us we didn't need to post anymore (our contracts weren't up until the end of the year). Plus they were nice enough to give us severance pay. What a class act.

So I'm taking the blog, to be called My Readable Feast, and moving it to www.myreadablefast.com around January 1, 2008. The content will be exported with the help of my friends at One by One Media to my very first self-hosted WordPress blog. I'm so excited!

Since it's currently on a TypePad account, it's going to be a lot of work to clean it up and correct links and graphics. And now that the blog is mine, I want to monetize properly, and build up a sizable RSS readership. This means I will need concentrate on marketing, too.

451Press.com - With this huge project on my horizon, I've decided to end my time with 451Press and my blog, Teacher Smackdown. I enjoyed working with 451Press, but the payout for the amount of time I put into it wasn't worth it. Plus I felt it was diluting my brand as a parenting and food blogger to write about teachers abusing kids. It's too bad, because the blogging community and staff at 451Press are awesome. I recommend blogging for them if you're a beginning blogger and don't want to mess around with setting up a blog on your own.

And Online

The irony about being let go at ClubMom is that in reality I'm not leaving them. In fact, they're my new boss. I've been hired to be a part-time community manager on the CafeMom site. I look forward to learning the ropes, getting to know the staff, the other managers, and the community at CafeMom. But I'm pleased that I can continue my mission of being active in the motherhood community and supporting moms within them.

In conclusion, all I can say is that 2008 will be very exciting. Hope you can stick around.

In Print

Yours truly and my mommy blog, A Mama's Rant got a sizable mention in Beth Snyder Bulik's article at Advertising Age, Advertisers Promise You More Family Time. (If you want to see the post she referenced, click on The Dodge Caravan Dilemma.)

Stopping by Border's this weekend, I looked through a copy of The Rough Guide to Blogging, a book I've recommended to beginning bloggers just from the reviews at Amazon. In the back was a list of the author's favorite blogs including my food and diet blog, This Mama Cooks! Unfortunately, he spelled the blog's name wrong, but the URL will get them there just the same.

In Person

I recently gave a beginning blogging workshop, "Blogging at Breakfast" for members and friends of the Northern Colorado Writer's Association (NCWA). It was so successful that Kerrie Flanagan, the group's director, has asked me to do two blogging workshops at the NCWA's April conference.

I was already signed up to do one, but we both felt that there was enough interest for two - "Using Blogging and Social Media to Promote Your Book" and "Earn Money with Your Blog." If you're interested in signing up, go to the group's website.

In the Blogosphere

ClubMom.com - The folks at ClubMom have terminated the ClubMom MomBlogs program where I had my children's books and cooking blog, A Readable Feast. They're now putting all their efforts into to CafeMom, a social networking site for moms. It was a business decision. Basically they get tons more traffic per day at CafeMom than they do per month on the blogs.

ClubMom offered very generous terms. They're letting us keep our content, the banner artwork, and our blog's name. (That's huge because most blog networks don't let you keep your content let alone all the other stuff.) They told us we didn't need to post anymore (our contracts weren't up until the end of the year). Plus they were nice enough to give us severance pay. What a class act.

So I'm taking the blog, to be called My Readable Feast, and moving it to www.myreadablefast.com around January 1, 2008. The content will be exported with the help of my friends at One by One Media to my very first self-hosted WordPress blog. I'm so excited!

Since it's currently on a TypePad account, it's going to be a lot of work to clean it up and correct links and graphics. And now that the blog is mine, I want to monetize properly, and build up a sizable RSS readership. This means I will need concentrate on marketing, too.

451Press.com - With this huge project on my horizon, I've decided to end my time with 451Press and my blog, Teacher Smackdown. I enjoyed working with 451Press, but the payout for the amount of time I put into it wasn't worth it. Plus I felt it was diluting my brand as a parenting and food blogger to write about teachers abusing kids. It's too bad, because the blogging community and staff at 451Press are awesome. I recommend blogging for them if you're a beginning blogger and don't want to mess around with setting up a blog on your own.

And Online

The irony about being let go at ClubMom is that in reality I'm not leaving them. In fact, they're my new boss. I've been hired to be a part-time community manager on the CafeMom site. I look forward to learning the ropes, getting to know the staff, the other managers, and the community at CafeMom. But I'm pleased that I can continue my mission of being active in the motherhood community and supporting moms within them.

In conclusion, all I can say is that 2008 will be very exciting. Hope you can stick around.