The Evolving Internet Marketer

The Internet is a “…Want it Now” Medium

Gimmee, mine, wantit; the favorite words of my 2 and 3 year old children (back when I had 2 & 3 year old children).

Well guess what, the web is populated with the emotional equivalent of 3 year olds. We want it now, we don’t want to wait, we don’t want to have to click too many times. We want to enter one word in Google and slam, bam, thank you Sam, there’s a page of perfect search results.

Heaven forbid you frustrate us in our efforts; you bury what we need 12 layers down in your Minotaur’s maze of a website; you hide our precious info behind an insidious email-asking-for, phone-number-requesting form. And, worst of all, you make us wait: Under construction, coming soon, available Spring 2010… Yeah, right!

What’s causing my terrible twos to flair up again? Took a look at a friend’s site. Hadn’t been there in a while and noted he was now promoting 2 new newsletters like this:

Newsletter Title (Spring 2007)
2 Newsletter Title (Spring 2007)

And that’s it. No link, no subscribe now box – nothing. Just a couple of lines of promise as real as the phone number you got in the bar last night.

Guess what? IT’S SPRING! Where’s the newsletter! Anyway, I dashed off an email telling him…

       Took at quick peek at your web site. Had a couple of suggestions…

       Get rid of Spring 2007 on your pending cool ideas newsletters, replace
       them with “subscribe now” and start taking subscriptions. Not only
       will a potential subscriber not check back periodically to see if your ‘pending’
       ezines are available yet but you’ll frustrate them because they can’t have
       it now… the web is a “have it now” medium. Oh yeah, having subscribers
       is also motivation to get that ezine out sooner, rather than later…

To summarize:

• Under construction in any form is verboten on the web
• If you want them to know it’s coming but it’s not ready yet, give them something. Let them sign up to receive notification of when it’s ready and incentivize them to do so by offering some sort of premium. You’ll replace frustration with anticipation - a much better feeling to leave your visitors with and you collect contact info to boot, YAY!
• Having a list of real people waiting for you to stop procrastinating and start delivering is a great incentive to stop procrastinating and start delivering … (What?)
• Never keep your site visitors’ waiting because on the web, they won’t!

Apple Polishes a Brilliant Ad Campaign

I love these guys, don’t you?

You can watch Mac and PC and their gentle sparring on TV and the Web. Apple’s Get a Mac campaign ads are funny and biting at the same time. PC’s so clueless and Mac is so cool. PC is the nerd and Mac is the cool guy that all nerd’s aspire to be (unless you’re Bill Gates himself who’s so rich that cool is irrelevant!).

The beauty of these ads is that they play up the strengths of the Mac while displaying the flaws in the PC but in a humorous, not a mocking manner. They don’t rile up us PC owners; getting us all righteous – and defensive - with indignation. Instead we just shake our heads and laugh along, somewhat abashedly and deep in our heart-of-hearts we kinda wish that we had a cool Mac instead of this screen freezing, blue screening, error spewing, pile of plastic and silicon (sorry, lost what little cool I had for a sec!).

Anyway, kudos to Apple for a great campaign, and thanks for being nice to PC – he needs friends like Mac who accept him for who he is, flaws and all!

Where to Concentrate Limited Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Resources?

DUH! Google of course.

Google’s search market share continues to soar. InformationWeek cites the following statistics…

“Some 64% of U.S. searches went through Google in March, according to data released on Wednesday by Internet metrics firm Hitwise, up from 58% in March 2006.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com saw 22%, 9%, and 3% of U.S. searches and each of the three posted a decline in search traffic from a year ago. The remaining 5% of searches went through 48 separate smaller search engines…” 

What’s it mean for internet search marketers? Well, in real estate the mantra has always been: location, location, location! Turned around for the web, the mantra may well be: search, search, search! Accordingly, if you’ve got limited resources to attract internet traffic, you might think twice about Yahoo’s (new?) paid inclusion program and up your allocation to your Google AdWords campaign.

Who is Your Search Engine Competition? Use ‘intitle’ to Find Out

This article was inspired by Jill Whalen of High Rankings(r) Advisor.

So you make the best banana cream pie in the world and you want everyone to know about it and order it from your web site. You figure a top 10 ranking in Google will help do the trick but how do you know who your search engine competition is?

You can type the words banana cream pie into Google and you’ll find that Google reports 1,470,000 search results that have those 3 words somewhere in their content. That’s a lot of pie. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these sites have anything to do with banana cream pie; could be a blogger talking about how he prefers bananas with cream to pie.

If you enclose the words in quotes, e.g., “banana cream pie”, then your forcing Google (or any search engine) to only return search results that treat the words as a single phrase. This yields 267,000 results for the phrase “banana cream pie” – still a whole lot of pie. But who’s really working to attract visitors interested in banana cream pie? You can make the assumption that if their serious BCP purveyors they will have optimized their site for the term and, accordingly, it will show up in the title tag. Google allows you to search for web pages who have included the phrase in the pages ‘title tag‘ by using the ‘intitle‘ search parameter like this: intitle:”banana cream pie”. This returns 597 listings for web pages with banana cream pie in the title tag — a more manageable number of sites to deal with from a competitive stand point.

The ‘intitle‘ search parameter is not unique to Google. You can use it at Yahoo.com, Ask.com or your favorite search property.