Archive for March, 2010

What Doesn’t Work In Social Media

What Doesn't Work In Social MediaHave you ever done a social media campaign autopsy?  It can be ugly.

Analyzing what doesn’t work in social media is as informative as looking at the successful campaigns.  After all, we must learn from our mistakes in order to move forward and be successful.

Often, I think we make Social Media more difficult than it needs to be.  It is nothing more than communicating with customers, prospects, partners, colleagues, friends and family through a growing number of new tools.

Some of the tools available to us that were not a decade or so ago are:

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Posted by Rob Reed March 31st, 2010 at 1:59 pm to Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Button Up

At Terrakon, we are conversion minded.

A website, or landing page can be beautiful, breathtaking and bring a tear to one’s eye- but if it doesn’t convert, all that emotional strife may be for nothing.  If you want your site or landing page to convert, you have to be of the philosophy that you must tell your visitors what to do, and how to act.  [I have used the metaphor before, lead the horse to water and tell it how to drink.]

However, some businesses choose to use graphic designers to design their site – who are less conversion-minded and instead prefer to design something that looks amazing and flippantly artful.   As a result, they don’t like buttons.  We, in the internet marketing world call them call to actions and they are a HUGE

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Posted by Rob Reed March 28th, 2010 at 7:00 am to Pay Per Click Advertising, Website Design & Conversion

A Picture [ad] is Worth a Thousand Clicks

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is no longer a special secret in the back pocket of some refined online marketers.  Instead, it is a popular tool utilized by businesses galore [as well their competition].  As a result, it is important that PPC advertisers continue to find ways to set their ads apart.  As online marketing grows, it’s becoming imperative that we as advertisers find ways to set ourselves apart from the competition.

One way to do so is to add image ads to mix.  Image ads, also known as banner ads run on the Google content network and can add an additional variable to your ad testing. Not only can they serve to attract more attention, but they allow you to further brand / design your online ad, and best utilize the space for which you are paying.

The following tips are important to remember as you venture into the land of image ads:

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Posted by Rob Reed March 25th, 2010 at 1:53 pm to Marketing, Pay Per Click Advertising

Improving Website Performance: How To Convert Eyeballs Into Earnings

Improving Website PerformanceI see it all the time.  And I die a little bit inside each time.

A website with no clear objectives.

The first step in improving website performance is to know exactly what you would like your website visitors to do when they visit your website.

Dust off that strategic plan and set of written actionable business objectives and get your website in line with those goals.

Are these some of the objectives you have for your business?

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Posted by Rob Reed March 23rd, 2010 at 2:31 pm to Marketing, Website Design & Conversion

How Google Is Upsetting The Apple Cart

Google Social Media RankingsFor years, those of us in the Search Engine Optimization community have known the one thing that is the difference between ranking and not ranking for a keyword phrase:

LINKS.

What Is The Link Graph?

Google’s algorithm was developed with the revolutionary premise that information that is on a website is not as “trustworthy” as the information that can be gleaned about a website on other web properties.

In other words, Google looks at the number of “referrals” that a web page is getting from other web properties.  These “referrals” come in the form of hyperlinks that are pointing at a web page from some other web page.

For example:

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Posted by Rob Reed March 11th, 2010 at 4:03 pm to Marketing, Search Engine Optimization