By Ryan Swadley

Everyone knows there are plenty of ways to reach a customer today. But why reach a customer online? Today you either have a website or have no window to the outside world. Consumers of today increasingly don’t read newspapers, watch TV, and have limited attention spans. If you have kids you probably know they are lucky to even know what the yellow pages are. Not having a good web presence today is the modern day equivalent of not having a phone number for your business. How will your customers reach you when they are ready to make a purchase?

More and more customers are starting to look for information online and for good reason.

It’s Convenient - It can be done at your own leisure. Whether consumers are shopping for a better dentist or a better hair salon they can look at other opinions and read reviews.
It’s Fast- It can be done without the hassle of driving around and going from store to store. With gas prices skyrocketing there is no wonder why.
Social- Many consumers today still want to make sure that their friends approve of their purchases.
Trusted in Numbers- Whether it is true or not consumers still tend to think “that if everybody is doing it” or “wearing that brand” “eating at that restaurant” then it has to be good.
According to Business Week, December 17th 2007

69% of Consumers will research a planned purchase online, prior to making a store purchase.

62% of Consumers will seek online peer reviews for planned purchases prior to making store purchases.

So just exactly what is a planned purchase? A planned purchase may be a new car, High Definition television, a plumbing service, new golf clubs, a health membership and the list goes on.

Today’s consumers are increasingly migrating to social network sites and seeking peer feedback for many decisions in their life on places such as: MySpace, Facebook, Ning!, Bebo, Linked In and more. These sites are being used to form the 21st Century’s social gathering places for friends, family members and business professionals to share opinions, gather contacts, create memories watch videos, share digital photos and post their current likes and dislikes.

It is the new marketers challenge to connect into this new wave of consumers on their own turf.

Particularly, with the Millenials the ages born from 1982-2002 as they have more or less grew up around technology their whole lives.

Just how much buying power do these milllennials have?

According to Kelly Mooney President & Chief Experience Offer from Resource Interactive

What is the exponential dollar power of the digital millennials?

$200 billion in annual direct spending power, 15%-17% spent online, and “co-purchasing” influence on the buying decisions of America’s households.

How much do the digital millennials influence household purchases?

81% of clothing and apparel purchases
77% of groceries purchases
76% of movie, video, DVD purchases
69% of video games and systems purchases
68% of computer purchases
66% of cell phone and computer software purchases…

So how does your business tap into this elusive audience?

The answers for doing this are not necessarily so obvious and various ways are being deployed by some of today’s top brand’s in different companies today using wikis, Facebook Applications, Google Gadgets, blogging and more. One thing they all have in common is one goal of creating enough buzz and awareness that they create a campaign that spreads on the Internet like wild-fire.

What is the Exact Formula for Success?

While no one has figured out the exact formula as of now the search is still on for the right way to reach this coveted new demographic. Either way, the message is clear the new customer is here to stay and the more your business continues to adapt to the way these millennials communicate the more likely you are to succeed. The challenge for business owners will not only be to reach the consumer of tomorrow but to turn them into “the new consumer of today.”

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Ryan Swadley is the Chief Executive Officer of Paladin Inc. an award winning digital communications firm specializing in web development and leveraging new media marketing channels. He is also a consecutive top ten finalist in the technology category for the Indy’s Best and Brightest award for Business Executives under the age of 40 in 2006 and 2007. Visit: http://www.paladin3d.com/ to learn more.

by Gina Nieves

This month I show you where to place the keywords.

This is part four of an article series on the Building Blocks of Search Engine Success. If you want to read the first three articles, you can read them on my blog.

To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

I should note that this article may contain some website building language that is unfamiliar to you. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, contact a professional developer to add your keywords.

Keyword Placement

You will have search engine success if you follow all of the tips I shared in the previous three articles.

Focus

Focus on no more than three keywords for each page of your website. If you have 15 keywords it is very difficult to place all of the keywords in the areas I list below. For example, if you sell office supplies and copy machines, you want a page just for your copy machines. On that page you optimize your copy machine keywords only.

Title Tags

The most important location to place the keywords is within your title tag. The words in your title tag tell the search engines what your website is about. I recommend placing your most important keywords in your title tag. Avoid using a title tag such as “About Us". No one is going to type “About Us” into Google when searching for your product.

Here is a sample title tag from my website. I use “Website Design, Internet Marketing, Graphic Design - Putnam…".

Now let’s put it to the test. Go to http://www.google.com/ and search for “website design Putnam County". I rank first on the first page. Now try “Internet Marketing Putnam County". If you notice my page follows all of the elements of search engine friendly design as well.

Header Tags

The header tags are the headlines on your website. Use the h1 and h2 tags when adding headlines to your website. You should try to have a header tag on each page of your website.

Let’s take a test drive by visiting my services page. In the services section of my website I use “Custom Web Design” as a header tag. Now search for “custom web design Putnam county” in Google. My website is on the first page. Not only is the site on the first page but if you look at my results in Google the words “Custom Web Design” is in bold.

Avoid the mistake made by many professional web developers and customers. To enhance the website, all of the headers are a beautiful graphic. I have had, and continue to have, customers that order me to use graphic headers because they believe the look is the most important aspect of the website. It is not…the most important aspect of a website is growing your business.

Body Text

The body text is the text people read on your website. Use your keywords throughout your text; however, make sure it reads well. Readers should enjoy your website and it should look natural. I recommend hiring a professional copywriter if you have a lot of content on your website.

There are more important factors to keyword placement than the areas listed in this article. I have listed the most important factors.

Gina Nieves is the owner of MarkNet Group Web Design. Gina has been providing web design and Internet marketing services since 1998. Gina strongly believes in using your website to fuel the growth of your company. For more information, visit her on the web at www.marknetgroup.com.

By Jeff Levin

Have you ever experienced the power of a cooperative marketing opportunity? If you haven’t, you will decide to make this a major part of your marketing mix by the end of this article, … if you’re interested in long term success in business!

Cooperative Marketing is when…

A Bank offer’s a live Golf Swing Analysis to it’s customers from a local golf instruction school in their lobby.
A CPA arranges a series of FREE Business Workshops from a local Business Coach for their clients.
A Wedding Photographer gives their wonderful clients a FREE wedding shower cake from a local cake designer.

These are just some of the many different methods of arranging one of the easiest and most effective ways of growing a referral based business. Why is that so?

Well if you’ve ever analyzed any of the fastest growing business models that have ever existed, you will always notice that the creator has established a product, service or business opportunity where everybody wins.

As can be seen in the examples above, the Bank, CPA, and Wedding Photographer win, because they now have a way to continue to add value to their client relations that doesn’t cost them anything. The company presenting the business opportunity (Golf Instructor, Business Coach, Cake Designer) wins because it now has an extremely warm & targeted opportunity to be in front of the host company’s clients, and the client (now a prospect of yours) wins by receiving a gift & an opportunity to add value to their business or their lives!

Imagine if you had 3 other businesses that were excited to promote your business to the very clients you spend most of your time & money trying to reach - cold! How would your business look? Excellent. The secret to making this happen for you is written in bold above…

To make this situation really work - it has to be a Win. Win. Win Scenario!

Your alliance must win. Their clients must win. For you to win.

Cooperative Marketing really levels the playing field for small business to compete right along side large companies. Large companies spend a great deal of their own money promoting their business, because then can! If you are like most small businesses, you lack that capital, but what you do not lack is the human capital, the relationships that, if used correctly, can deliver far better results in the communities you have a vested interest in, than your corporate counterparts.

So let’s really bring the power of cooperative marketing into perspective….

Think about how you go above and beyond the call of duty for your clients. Now, think about how your current alliances do the very same to service their clients. So, what if you purposely arranged opportunities with the other high quality businesses in your area to promote each other in a way that your clients can appreciate & interpret it as additional value being invested in the relationship that you’ve worked hard to establish? Teaming up with one business is great! Teaming up with 20 is better! Using a great cooperative marketing strategy can deliver an equivalent effect to distributing 20,000 bulk mailers in your area, with far better results.

The most difficult part of taking advantage of this extremely effective strategy is finding companies that will allow you to have access to their database.

To do this easily, visit http://www.growthpod.com/ and get started by teaming up with your current referral partners.

There are Traditional methods of cooperative marketing available too.

Follow these steps to work towards landing a successful cooperative marketing opportunity:

1. Choose a business you wish to “cross market” to their database.

2. Explain to the business that you would like to give them something to give, with no obligation to their clients as a sign of customer appreciation.

3. If they choose to move forward, it is critical to take as much work out of the process as possible for the host company. Your offer must go out from the host company on their letterhead and signed by the host company.

4. To make it easy for them to say yes, offer to do all of the envelope stuffing and pay for the postage. If they are ok with you having a copy of their database, offer to take care of all of the administrative tasks, leaving them with absolutely nothing to do.

5. Another great way is to offer to do the same for them, with your database.

Action Plan: Make it a Point to have a minimum of one cooperative marketing campaign in action every month & watch the momentum in your business grow!

Be Outstanding!

Jeff Levin, Online Entrepreneur
Founder of GrowthPOD.com - The I Promote You. You Promote Me! Network

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Jeff Levin is the founder of GrowthPOD.com & a pioneer in online cooperative marketing. Visit http://www.growthpod.com/ to learn more.

by Ron Zasadzinski

I get asked this question frequently. The answer is - almost nothing! That is, if you want your web site to be ranked number one for an obscure search term like “low cost oscillosprockets". (Try a search for that phrase…)

There are number of major issues to consider. Search engine rankings are dependent on the search phrase used, and on how much competition there is for that phrase. By competition, I mean how many other web sites are using that term somewhere in their site.

So if you want to be #1 for “low cost oscillosprockets", we can pretty much guarantee success because there is zero competition. The problem is, there are also zero people searching for that term so being #1 isn’t going to do you any good.

On the other side of the coin, if you want to be ranked #1 for “furniture stores", forget about it. Whereas “oscillosprocket” is used on exactly one web site on the entire World Wide Web, there are seven billion web sites which use the term “furniture store". This is just one reason why no SEO firm worth their salt will promise you #1 for any meaningful phrase. Search engine rankings for competitive phrases are a lot like a school of salmon swimming upstream. There is much you can do to compete, but even if you do everything right it’s quite a challenge to be the first fish to reach the spawning grounds. (One important technique is to find a smaller school of fish. More on that shortly.)

So… “How much does it cost to be #1 in Google?” Turns out, it’s the wrong question to be asking.

Let’s take a step back for a minute. The real goal with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to make your business more successful by driving more qualified visitors to your web site over time. Being #1 for any particular phrase is a lot less important than getting more prospective customers to view your products and services, and ultimately, to buy them.

I can’t emphasize that enough. If your web site is selling products or services, your goal should be to increase profits, not to have any particular rank for any particular search phrase.

So how do you add another comma at the bottom of your balance sheet? You start by optimizing your web site for a range of search phrases, not just one. When my company provides SEO services, we spend quite a bit of time researching keyword phrases using on-line tools we subscribe to, as well as checking out your competitors’ web sites. In consultation with you, we will come up with a list of highly effective keywords. Some will be obvious and popular, but will have substantial competition. The best phrases will be less obvious, are being used by real searchers every day, and won’t have a lot of competing sites (here’s your smaller school of fish). We can compete well for these phrases, and optimizing for a number of them will bring more traffic to your web site.

Will you be number #1 for some of those phrases? It still doesn’t matter. Really. Even if you are ranked #1, you probably won’t be for long. Search engine rankings change every day. For example, over just a three week period on the MSN search engine in January 2008, my company ranked 2nd, then 1st, then 3rd for the search phrase “web site design fort collins". In Google we were ranked 3d, then 5th, then 6th in the same time frame.

Does this concern me? Not at all. Results are what matter. In that time frame we had three times as many inquiries for our services as the same period a year ago. Search Engine Optimization is like the stock market. If you watch it on a daily basis you’ll drive yourself crazy. If you keep the long term goal in mind, put in effort on a regular, steady basis, you will get excellent long term results.

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Ron is the owner of CodeGeek.net, a Fort Collins, Colorado web design agency serving clients across the United States. Simple or fancy, we do web sites right.

by Ron Zasadzinski

Maintaining your own web site can be easy with the right tools. By maintenance, I mean having the ability to update the content of your web site, including text and pictures. As a web site owner, there are a number of options available to you.


Adobe Contribute

This incredible off-the-shelf software is so easy to use, you won’t believe it. If your web site is comprised of static HTML files as many small and medium sized sites are, this could be the perfect choice for your web site maintenance. Adobe Contribute allows you to edit text and add or delete images from your web site. It is so easy to use that within 10 minutes I was able to demonstrate it to my most computer-phobic client and he understood its basic functions.

Contribute also has advanced functions that provide rollback capability - if you edit a page and it doesn’t look right you can “rollback” to one of several previous versions of the page. Contribute can be used to create new pages on your web site by copying existing pages too. The software costs about $170 from Adobe, and in many cases we can set it up to work with existing web sites including those designed by other agencies.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Building your web site around a Content Management System is another way for web site owners to update their own content. With a CMS, the content of your web site resides in a database rather than in static HTML files. The design and layout of your site will need to be coded specifically to work with the particular CMS chosen. When someone visits your web page, the content for that page is pulled out of the database and inserted into the layout.

When updating your site with a CMS, you’ll log into an administrative part of your web site that allows you to edit the contents of the database.

For large web sites this is just about the only way to go so that site-wide design and content changes can be managed efficiently. For small and medium sized web sites, a CMS can be effective. There are a number of tradeoffs to consider. Once your site is set up with a particular CMS, you are pretty much tied to it - moving your web site to a different Content Management System can be fairly involved. In some cases the content can be migrated, but in almost all cases the design will need to be recoded to work with the new CMS.

It is important to consider how easy the CMS interface is to use. They range from simple to complex. None are as easy to use as Adobe Contribute which doesn’t store information in a database at all, it lets you edit your web pages directly.

When a CMS is the chosen solution, we strongly recommend going with an open source CMS. There are many excellent systems available. Wordpress (which is Blogging software but can be used to manage a web site as well), Joomla, Drupal, and Web Site Baker are popular and have varying capabilities.

Going with a widely used, open source CMS means that if you have a falling out with your web developer, another developer can jump right in. Also, open source Content Management Systems can be moved from one web site hosting company to another.

If your developer employs a custom CMS for you, you are almost certainly going to be tied to that developer and unable to have anyone else work on the site, or to move the site at all. If it ever needed to be moved you’ll probably be redesigning the whole thing from scratch.

Hiring out your updates

One other option to consider is having your web developer make the web site updates for you. This can be the best option if you are busy and have challenges finding the time to update your web site, or if your company is looking to outsource your website maintenance. The important factors here are finding a web development company that has good communication skills, can respond quickly to your requests, and has discounted rates for ongoing web site maintenance.

CodeGeek.net meets all three requirements, and we maintain web sites for a number of companies, both large and small. We are able to respond quickly because we have a number of team members whose dedicated job is just making web site updates. Our web site maintenance rates are also significantly discounted from our regular web site development rates. It’s our way of saying thank you to our many loyal customers.

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Ron is the owner of CodeGeek.net, a Fort Collins, Colorado web design agency serving clients across the United States. Simple or fancy, we do web sites right.