The Net Impact Roadmap

How do video, social media and advances in mobile effect search? What are the search engines changing?

These were just a few of the questions answered at The Net Impact’s Search Engine Strategies Session on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010. The seminar covered current trends in search engine optimization and highlighted the best presentations from the The Net Impact’s SEO team’s recent trip to the Search Engine Strategies Session held in Chicago December 2009. The three presentations presented focused on B2B, Blended Search and Linking.

The first presentation, presented by Angela Cicerelli, Web Account Manager at The Net Impact, covered blended search. Blended search enhances user experience and is another way to engage with potential customer. If you are having troubles ranking for a keyword, blended search just may be the answer. The presentation discussed why we should care about images and videos in search. Social media sites, such as Flickr and YouTube, are now becoming major sources of  website traffic and are appearing in search results. What to take away from the session regarding blended search – The web isn’t about pages anymore, it’s all about streams, feeds and syndication. If information is important, it will find you.

The next presentation, led by Lauren Williamson, Web Content Manager at The Net Impact, highlighted the importance of linking. Link popularity measures the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web page. Recently, social media marketing has become one of the most practical and high quality ways to earn links. The Chicago Search Engine Strategies Session touched on three main reasons why it is important to have a linking program: improve rank, boost traffic and to increase brand exposure. Lauren closed with the statement: “Building links is similar to building relationships – it takes works and is all about quality, not quantity”.

Sonya Sawall, Web Account Manager at The Net Impact, led the final conversation on B2B. Business buyers and decision makers are online, using search engines. Business professionals engage in social networking in order to build relationships that bring business. They rely on search, sometimes throughout the whole buying cycle, and in order to be successful, Internet marketing experts must align their messages with buyers needs throughout each phase of the buying process.

The most important thing learned at The Net Impact’s SES Session: There is one certainty about SEO – the game is always changing. “If you are following a best practice that dates back to 2008 or earlier, toss it away.  It’s now wrong”. 2010 is the year of real-time, personalized results, growing importance of social, community and web mobility. We need to continue to adapt our SEO strategies to stay ahead of the curve.

We hope you all enjoyed the presentation as much as we did, and we look forward to seeing you at the next TNI event!

Check out some great pictures from the event on Flickr!

Five Helpful Tips for Above the Fold

Artistic Sensations Quality Kids and Teen Room Decor

Every once in while it’s good to review the basics for conversion like, “What is working on my Home Page?” For this conversation, I selected a small but mighty retailer of teen and kids furniture, Artistic Sensations.  The Net Impact is currently running several Google Optimizer tests on this site including several to improve conversion.  Yes, you always want to improve conversion. Many of the elements on the current home page for Artistic Sensations are the results of previous tests.  What did we learn and how does it relate to this Home Page Pointers post?  Here are a few quick and easy take-aways:

Finally, keep testing and making changes.  All we know is that this version of your site is what the customer likes today.  As for tomorrow?

Previously, we looked at several open source content management systems that are widely used. Those are great options unless you have a Microsoft server. If that is the case, what are your options?

Here are two options for you to look into:

Dot Net Nuke

Dot Net Nuke is an open source dot net content management system, and like the other content managements systems, has some nice add-ons. Dot Net Nuke has an easy-to-use interface, but it can be buggy when you try to implement your own custom design. Still, it is extremely popular and has lots of ability if you are constrained by or are sticking to the benefits of a dot net machine. The most current release of this freeware like many others is sometimes referred to as the “bleeding edge”. Tackling new releases is not for the unskilled or time constrained developer.

Master Pages

My limited personal knowledge of the technology that goes into master pages, server side includes and the like prevents me from going into further detail about how these technologies work in that respect. We can always engage the tech team here at TNI for that dialog. The point is that implementing master pages is an easy way to save yourself a headache in the future.

The overriding concept and purpose behind master pages is simple: Create one “master page” that controls the border of your web page and only fill-in the middle, content portion of the page individually. Content management systems allow you to do much of the same thing, but with master pages you have the ability to edit actual static page files. For any web site with more than a few pages, this is a great option.

The rate of change required for a website to be considered “current” continues to dictate a shorter and shorter refresh cycle. Because of the need for fresh content and in other ways, up-to-date site features, more and more businesses of all sizes are looking to web solutions like the two above in order to allow new information, graphics and even pages to be created by someone other than the IT team or Webmaster that will still reflect the same brand strategy and maintain the standards in place throughout the rest of the site. Making website updates with relatively the same ease as a blog post looks like a highly desired attribute that businesses will increasingly have on their checklist.

Significant contribution to this post by S Trachtman.

“Why can’t I just buy a $99 per month package and be number one?”

Every week The Net Impact team runs into a discussion regarding SEO packages offered by other SEO firms. The conversation usually begins with “Why can SEO Company A offer us a SEO package that promises to deliver results for $99 per month while other firms, like TNI, only offer custom solutions that are higher in price?” It is a fair question to ask. One that is not easily explained without first educating our prospects a bit on what SEO really is, or maybe better stated, what it has become. Once upon a time SEO solely meant, to most providers, developing site-appropriate meta data, keywords and submitting to directories. When the bar was lower for most firms competitively, then it was possible for an automated program or an unassociated third party to simply follow a routine and achieve some results. Also, some years ago, there wasn’t the appreciation of how powerful the Internet had become as a marketing tool. Firms did not yet realize that the search engines had become so entrenched into the daily lives of individuals. With those points in mind we now fast forward to 2008. Today, developing a website or operating a website meant to market your services or product without taking organic search and other traffic generation marketing efforts into consideration is, for lack of a better term, marketing suicide. Yes, there are still sites strictly built to support a professionals business card. If your networking is all local and you do not feel the need to drive extra attention to your business then perhaps a GoDaddy hosting account and a Web Site Tonight template could be exactly what you need. No argument. For any firm though that is embroiled in a competitive marketplace or wants to bring in more recognition this solution, without a lot of web-savvy support, just won’t fly.
What should I look for in a SEO service?

Let’s start with the obvious. See how your potential SEO service provider does for their own firm. Do a search on, “Search Engine Marketing firm City” or use your state if you prefer. See if they come up on page one. I absolutely throw out the argument that their SEO service is so busy taking care of customers they cannot do justice to their own site through their own effort. Really? We use our own site as a “test tube” for SEO on a regular basis. Only by continuing to quest for advancement can you achieve superiority.

Next, want to see their site (or your site) as the search engines do? There are many tools available for this test, try out this tool. SEO-Browser.com Or, you can download the Google toolbar to your desktop and check things out. There are way too many other “tools and toys” to mention. The fact is, you have ways to investigate.

Other steps are pretty common sense. Ask for references. Don’t just read testimonials. Review their client’s sites. Do their clients face the same level of competition your firm faces? There is a big difference in the way you would market a national sales automation firm vs. a local plumbing supply firm. Both need SEO, but differently. Interview the SEO firm. Ask tough questions. Ask about their process. See if their past experience matches your needs. Will they require any information from you or is this an automated program? Remember, your competition is product, service, region and keyword specific. How can they exclude you from that process and achieve results?

Finally, weigh your investment. Is this a closed-end package that ties you up for a year or more or are their services month to month? Do they seem eager to sign you up without ever knowing your circumstances? Like any good relationship, you have to feel comfortable that your energy will be well spent as well as your cash.

Make the selection of SEO support more than just a price proposition. Consider the decision based upon the desire to be on page one!

One of the biggest challenges for sales teams today is keeping in contact with potential customers.  Generating leads and staying in contact with them is time consuming and expensive.  It can also distract sales people from providing existing customers the service they need and expect.  Unfortunately, most companies still rely solely on the sales team to develop leads. Since there is so much competition today, requiring your sales team to make constant phone calls, sending out letters and emails, will likely get nowhere.  In fact, there is so much demand for the attention of prospects today; there is now a strong resistance by these prospects to engage with sales people. 

Consumers and buyers no longer rely on sales people for information; they now have the ability to shop and research on-line. They are likely to engage with a sales person only when they get close to a purchase decision.  In the case of on-line purchases, there is typically no engagement with a sales person, so, it’s even more critical to have effective follow-up systems. The current market trends are placing exceptional demands on customer acquisition and retention strategies.  Status quo can be very inefficient and expensive.  Without addressing this new environment, productivity suffers, sales struggle or decline, turn-over increases and customer satisfaction drops.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if there was a way to improve the process of not only lead generation, but, more importantly, lead development?  Wouldn’t it be even better if this process could be automated?  These goals are achievable using new marketing automation technology and by re-defining the role of your sales people.

In direct sales, there is significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of the sales team by improving not only how sales communications are managed, but by whom. Business owners should carefully look at the role of the sales person and the role of their marketing resources.  There should be greater alignment between these two functions; freeing the sales people from unproductive tasks and requiring marketing to take on more responsibility to nurture both prospects and existing customers. Marketing automation tools facilitate this process. 

Leading companies are now integrating nurture programs into both their on-line and off-line marketing and sales strategies. These companies have their sales and marketing teams work together for the same goals – getting and keeping customers.  They rely on a marketing function to generate new leads and maintain contact with those new leads. Through this nurturing process, they also qualify the leads.  Once they are considered qualified, or reach some trigger point, then the lead is sent to sales.  With marketing automation technology, this can be automated and integrated with CRM software or other business applications. This strategy allows the sales team to stay in front of their customers more often, thereby building stronger relationships and improving retention rates. 

To help companies address this challenge, The Net Impact has partnered with Marketing Solutions, Inc (MSI), based in Chesterfield, Missouri.  MSI specializes in marketing automation software and lead nurturing programs.  Together, our combined resources offer small and mid-sized businesses a resource to improve their lead generation, lead conversion rates and customer retention.

Learn more about how technology can help your lead conversion at this St. Louis-area seminar.

We looked at Zen Cart before as a nice, open source shopping cart.  However, there are still plenty of other options if you have specialized products or are looking for something cheap with an easy-to-use interfaace.

The Shopping Cart Alternatives

There are plenty of monthly services that you can use for your shopping cart that may also give you a headstart instead of building the cart yourself.  Among those options are Ebay Stores, Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, and ProStores.  These services are just the tip of the iceberg. 

While each of these services is different, as a whole they do have general advantages over creating your own shopping cart.  Those advantages include:

1. Ease of Design

For the most part, the previously mentioned store applications offer template designs.  Template designs offer an effective, easy way for you to design a nice looking web site and get the web site launched quickly.  There are often templates that can be purchased for other shopping cart interfaces such as Zen Cart, but they still require some adjustments on the part of the store owner.

2. Customization

On one hand, complete shopping cart customization is only provided through creating your own shopping cart.  However, if you don’t have that type of ability or budget, using one of the preceding pre-packaged shopping carts offers plenty of flexibility in design and layout in most cases.

3. All-in-One Solutions

Most of the monthly store shopping carts have one other advantage that can save you time: Credit card processing.  While you may need to install modules or simply configure your account information with shopping carts like Zen Cart, many of the pre-packaged stores listed above do the credit card processing for you and make this process easier.

4. Non-Technical Advantages

Don’t know HTML or some other technologies necessary to design a web site or edit components?  The overriding purpose of these previously mentioned online stores, in most cases, is to give you the ability to design a store without using any code.

5. Safety

In general, using one of these pre-packaged stores is safer than coming up with a design yourself.  The designs provided by these store services have often been tested, so you know whether or not they make effective stores that will lead to conversions.  Also, you can get technical support from the store services if you ever run into problems.

Affiliate Stores

Somewhat closely related to shopping cart stores is the ever-growing affiliate store.  CafePress.com and Zazzle are two very popular affiliate stores that you can use to design your own apparel and sell it to customers.  CafePress seems to be the market leader, but Zazzle is catching up.  Both affiliate stores allow you to customize clothing, cups, and all sorts of other apparel with your logo and other designs.  CafePress lets you setup your own press, while you get a percentage of the sale with Zazzle.  Like the shopping cart stores listed above, these two affiliate stores are easy to setup, design and customize your apparel.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

For any web site making money through advertising revenue, the creation and deployment of a media kit is an extremely important process.  The media kit for web sites is an informative guide to advertising on a web site, often including advertisement prices, banner locations and available advertising space.

The creation of the media kit can be a complicated and daunting task if you have never done it before.  Where do you even start?

The following steps will help you get started, and from there it will be a piece of cake.

1. Take an Inventory

Do you have existing advertising?  Do you know how many ads you will be putting on your web site?  Before setting up a media kit, it is a good idea to nail down the foundation of your advertising availability so that you know exactly what you will be offering to potential advertisers.

2. Evaluate Competitors

How are your competitors doing their advertising?  Your competitors can tell you a lot about not only where to put the advertising but also the advertising landscape.  If bigger competitors are struggling to find advertisers, it could be an indication that the advertising dollars in your web site’s industry are not available.  If this is the case, you may want to hold off on creating a media kit or adjust your plan to attract advertisers that are cautious about advertising in your industry.

3. Find Samples

There are media kit samples all over the internet, and evaluating what you like and don’t like is a good starting point for creating your media kit.  Simply type in “web site media kit” into your favorite search engine, and you should get thousands of results.  This is also a good idea to take an inventory on the format of the media kit – PDF or webpage.

4. Develop an Outline

Writing a media kit seems like a big process, but it really comes down to what you learned when writing a paper in school.  Plan ahead with an outline.  Outlining the media kit will make the process much faster, rather than adding and subtracting sections in a disorganized fashion without an outline.

5. Create the Media Kit

Once the media kit is mapped out, it is time to start putting it together.  Since your media kit is an important tool in your advertising sales, it is important to make it look neat and provide traditional calls to action.  Creating the media kit can take some time, but the difference between a good and a bad media kit can easily be reflected in sales.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

One of the misnomers in e-commerce is that your store needs a shopping cart.  Sure, a store like Amazon.com or Buy.com with a huge, unmanageable inventory does need a shopping cart system, but a shopping cart could be a waste of time for simpler stores.

If you are selling a few individual products and don’t offer package savings or other special deals, shopping carts could be a waste of resources.   If the vast majority of your customers only buy one product or service, why implement a more complicated shopping cart that could actually frustrate your customers and eventually lead them away from your product?

There are several options if you don’t use a shopping cart.  Among them are the use of a “Buy Now” or “Add Product” button on each individual product, a contact us prompt for potential leads to inquire about services, and simply setting up a 1-800 number to take phone inquiries.

For the purpose of an e-commerce store’s shopping cart replacement, the “Buy Now” or “Add Product” buttons are probably your best option.  Possible payment processing solutions for this arrangement include Paypal, Google Checkout, Versign, and 2Checkout.com.

Examples of types of e-commerce stores that can possibly do without a full shopping cart include book authors, bands, companies with individual, customizable solutions, expensive products and other random items that are sold individually such as cell phones and server hosting plans.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

Aside from offering advertising, affiliate programs are an excellent way to make money on your web site without producing or selling a product of your own. Before going any further, let’s clarify the definition of an affiliate program in this context.

“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” -Wikipedia

Affiliate programs can expand the value of your web site for your visitors, becoming a one-stop shop for the services that they use. However, the wrong affiliate programs can annoy your users and lead them away from your web site. When considering whether to add particular affiliate programs, a careful evaluation of the programs available is important. The following are four ways to help you choose the right affiliate program for your web site.

1. Reputation

Is the affiliate program reputable? This is by far the most important criteria when choosing affiliate programs. Not only do you need to know whether the program is reputable for payment purposes, but also whether the program will deliver on its promises when you send your own visitors elsewhere. If a visitor is not happy with a product that they received from your referral, that reflects poorly on your web site. Be sure to ask the right questions and get all the information before committing to an affiliate program. For every industry, there are several reputable affiliate programs. If you have doubts about one affiliate program, don’t hesitate to try others.

2. Compensation

Most web sites make compensation their first priority when considering affiliate programs. Certainly, your compensation is important, but you also must consider the type of products that you are selling in the affiliate programs and how likely your users are to buy these products. Even if your return for a computer-related affiliate program is great, you probably are not going to get much return on the affiliate program if your web site is about pets.

3. Service

How responsive is the affiliate program to problems and issues? How quickly do you get paid? Are your payments on time? Some of these issues are learned the hard way through trial and error, but once again, you can learn a lot by asking the right questions of your affiliate. Service may not seem like a huge issue before choosing an affiliate program, but it is definitely an important consideration as you start to generate revenue from the program.

4. Attractiveness

More than likely, your affiliate program has banners. These banners are meant to sell the products from the affiliate programs and drive traffic to the vendors. Like any other advertising, if the banners or messages are attractive, they are more likely to bring traffic. If your marketing message or advertising banners posted on your web site are unattractive, you could simply be wasting space. The same can be said for the landing pages and overall web site design of the seller.

May 2008 TNI Test: Theaudiobookstore.com 

May 2008 TNI Test: GoodCheapWineGuide.com 

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

Not mentioned in the previous “free stuff” blog was the contest strategy.  Free contests are very similar to the aforementioned free strategies in purpose, and for some products there is more upside with drawing attention to your product and collecting potentially valuable customer information.

Artistic Sensations, an e-commerce toy and gift store, is an excellent existing example of this strategy.  They are driving traffic and interest with their Holiday Loft Bed Giveaway.  In the process, Artistic Sensations is generating interest in their products, learning what their customers like most, and drawing attention through the contest

Giving away free products can be an investment, but if implemented properly, the return on investment in new customers, attention, PR and additional customer information collected has the ability to generate value many times over. 

The key is to develop a well thought out, extensive plan.  In the right industries, this strategy has limitless potential.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager at The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.