Keeping Good Blogs Alive

In preparing for a class on blogging, I went back and reviewed some of my old posts on blogs and blogging to see if there was something there that would be useful to present in class. I came across a couple of old posts that I thought were still relevant and very useful information.

One of them made a reverence to using "hard links" on your blog template to boost performance on postings of particular interest. I have liked that idea and have already used it to create links to my "tags" that I thought would be useful and convenient for my readers. I don't really want to create hard links to posts on the template because I think it would quickly become so overwhelming, such a large volume of links, as to be more confusing than useful. What that made me think of is the idea of creating a new post occasionally that points back to selected posts from the past.. That seems to me a better way to accomplish the desired result, as it allows me to reflect on and add new thoughts or comments to the material contained in the old posts, while reviving them with new links.

That is when I discovered that finding an old post was not all that easy, even when I knew just what I was looking for! I had no trouble finding the post to read, but locating the individual posting so I could link directly to it was much harder. This made me think about how valuable direct links could be to someone reading the blog who would not have the information to find a particular posting from the past without conducting a real search. That is important because you don't want people to have to search for something that you want them to read. You want to make  it very easy for them to find what you want them to read!

Anyway, with a little effort, I solved the problem and here are the two posts I wanted to revive:

First is a post with some tips for making a blog effective. One of the tips from the author I was quoting dealt with "Reigniting old posts", and his suggestion was a different idea, but triggered the idea I am proposing. I thought ihis suggestions were good in themselves, but was also interested that his ideas suggested something else to me that I used instead. It is important to keep in mind that ideas that you gather in your research should always be adjusted to your own needs and environment. This situation forms a good example of that concept.

Second is a post with an example of a company that found a blogging strategy that increased its business more than ten times! Anything that can do that is certainly worth taking a look at to see how it can be adapted to your circumstances! This example was a winery that gave wine to bloggers who had written about wine. The gift of the wine caused the bloggers to write about the wine on their blogs and the activity and attention turned into a big increase in sales for the winery.

Researching marketing is good because you learn things that can be useful to you as you can see from the "6 Tips" article, but creativity really makes for the big payoff as illustrated by the story in the second article.

Footnote: The winery article said that they increased their business by "more  than a factor of ten"! That is a nice increase, but if I read the numbers correctly, their increase was way, way more than a factor of ten!! Check it out and see what factor you come up with...

Bloggers and (Personal) Brand-Building

 "Nearly six in 10 of all the bloggers surveyed said they were better known in their industry because of their blog..."

Blogging is showing a very high success rate in improving the visibility of a business, for those who use it as a tool for that purpose! Performance is particularly high for part-timers and self employed. These groups report that over two thirds of the respondents have sold products or services as a result of their blogging, and definitely improved their visibility on the Internet. It seems to me that most of the small business users that I deal with in my practice would share important characteristics with those two categories that would indicate that they could expect the same level of positive performance.

I advocate blogging as a promotional tool for all my clients since everyone in business has some kind of story to tell that is potentially interesting and valuable to their prospects. The key to success with this tool is, first and foremost, to begin using it on a regular basis. A blog without content is not going to do anything for your business, so one has to start by creating content. There must be some commitment by the blogger to regular posting to the blog. With that commitment made, the next step is develop a "voice" on the blog that conveys a sense of personal communication with the prospects or clients.

Everyone who is successful in business has a voice that their clients know. The key here is to learn the technique of carrying that voice over to a new medium, the blog. The only way I know of to do that is to begin regular blogging and let the voice develop! Like most any tool, blogging does nothing for you if you don't utilize it!

Synergy of Search and Social Media

"Research has shown that display ad exposure can lift consumer response to paid search."

This research refers to paid search activity, but it seems fair to assume that organic search activity would be influenced in the same way. The point to take away from this article is that your marketing efforts through different approaches support and enhance one another. It is not a good idea to conduct all your marketing efforts through a single vehicle. The success that you have in each approach reinforces the success that you have in other approaches.

To put it another way, look at all the tools that you have available to promote your site and make use of several of them simultaneously rather than putting all your eggs in one basket. Your web site itself, is the core around which your other marketing revolves. This core effort is then supplemented and strengthened by your activities with blogging, newsletters, article publication, press releases, social media sites, reciprocal links, and, yes, even paid Internet ads! Plan to use several of these tools in concert based on your personal and business characteristics and capacities to support different approaches.

While our focus here is on Internet tools, don't overlook the importance of what you do in more traditional marketing through your use of business cards, letterhead, brochures, promotional gifts, and networking, which also reinforce your online marketing efforts. A well managed mixture of approaches could be more effective for your business than a single-minded focus on one strategy alone!

How to Build Links Fast: 101 Tips & Strategies

"Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings."

The authors of this article have provided a very useful list of ways to get links for your web site, and illustrated it by starting with a tip that really works! This blog post proves that it works!

Reviewing this list is definitely worth your time. You won't find every item useful for your own business, but there are plenty of things that can be very helpful to you, and work in your specific environment. Within the 101 items on the list are about 30 bad ideas pointing out bad practices, so be sure that you note the point in the list where it switches from things-to-do to things-to-NOT-do!

You do need to go through the list to get the details, but I will summarize some of the key ideas here.

• Become an authority and create lists. There are a number of specifics listed in this general concept, but the basic idea is to put something on your site that is worth linking to. Observe that I am proving this concept by blogging about this list and linking you to it!
• Use PPC judiciously. This is the most interesting idea I have come across giving a reason to use PPC ("Pay Per Click")! The idea is that, after you have created a "link magnet" (see the first point!), you promote that page by purchasing some keyword phrases that will get traffic directly to that information. If it works for you, you will get a lot of leverage for the money spent on PPC.
• Use news and syndication. We talk about this technique all the time in our search engine marketing clinic. The list provides several specific ideas that you can use in pursuing this approach. Basically, you are planting links all around the web with this approach.
• Directories, social media, etc. Many directories can be really helpful to you, and all social media are becoming much more important and useful.
• Join local organizations that provide links. Many professional associations include a link to your site on the membership lists. Look into these in your business field and consider local chambers of commerce, networking groups, etc., etc., etc.....

There are many more concepts in the list, but this should be enough to give you the idea. Near the bottom of the list, the authors switch to telling you things to avoid. Many  of these just have to be tongue in cheek to fill out their total of 101 ideas, but many of them are practices that used to work or techniques that people actively use today, but that can get you in trouble if you get caught at it. These are worth your time to review, but make sure you have mentally switched gears to put a big "X" through each of these points as you absorb them!

Addendum: I posted this article on 10/3, and set up a PPC campaign to send traffic to it. On 10/17, when I checked my traffic, this page had ten times the pageviews of the next highest page on my blog! I have to believe this works!!

How to Launch an Article Series

"... how to get more marketing mileage out of my blog posts"

We frequently comment in our Internet Marketing Clinic that "Content is King!" What that means is that having good content on your web site is the best thing you can do to achieve good rankings in search engine results.

Almost everyone with a web site feels the pressure of generating good content for their site and is looking for ideas to get more material. This blog posting offers a nice technique for creating more of that content as a spin-off from the work you have already done. The basic idea is that you elaborate on things you have already done. Every good article that you create has points made within it that can suggest further detail that might be of value. Not only can you review your previous articles to look for these points, but you can anticipate this whenever you draft a new article by thinking in terms of lists of relevant points that are easily expandable in the future.

Every time I browse my web site, I find ideas that I could say more about or points that leave me feeling that I have not completely described what I was trying to say. Try this on you own site. Re-read your material and ask yourself, "if I were not familiar with this issue and reading this for the first time, what questions might I still have?" I am sure you will find triggers for more articles with this process!

Blogging Has Come a Long Way, Baby

"“Blogging activity presents new opportunities for marketers to monitor and influence conversations relevant to their businesses,” says Mr. Verna. “Opportunities no marketer should ignore.”"

Research cited in this article reports 86.8 million Internet users in 2008 who read blogs at least monthly. This is estimated to be 45% of Internet users! These are big numbers and command the attention of anyone who is marketing on the web. These numbers are projected to grow over the next five years, both the absolute count and the percentage of total users. One major rule of marketing is that you have to go where the audience goes. For someone interested in marketing on the web, that means you have to get involved in blogging!

To read the article, click on the title link...

Paying for Creativity in a Digital World

"Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”"

This is a concept that is central to promoting your business over the Internet, and one that businesses new to the web frequently have to struggle to understand. As we emphasize constantly in our free Internet Marketing classes, content is the key to success on the web, and the content must be meaningful and valuable to the targets of the outreach effort that the web site is.

Businesses that are accustomed to selling their knowledge have to realize that their model of promotion over the web involves giving knowledge away in order to attract prospects. This often requires an adjustment in understanding the business model. Different businesses have different problems with adjusting to this proposition. In the article cited, sales of ancillary products are used to make up the difference in income production. Krugman describes how the Grateful Dead gave away their music, but made up for that through sale of "hats, T-shirts and performance tickets." That model will not work for many professional businesses that are now marketing over the Internet.

Attorneys, CPA's, counselors of all kinds who have specialized knowledge have to learn how to present their services with a different value proposition. One idea is that what they are really selling is not their knowledge of a particular environment, but the expert application of that knowledge to a specific situation that the prospect is facing! Anyone should be able to understand the difference between getting general advice over a website and the value of having a knowledgeable professional examine your particular case and help you determine how to deal with whatever problem you are attempting to solve. It is this sort of distinction that professionals have to get comfortable with in order to be successful in marketing over the Internet.

Using SEO as an example, we give away a great deal of knowledge about optimizing a site for substantial performance, but there is no substitute for having a professional SEO marketer work with the particular requirements of your business, your marketplace, and your site to achieve a dominance on the web that rewards your business with a high level of targeted traffic. Every business faces slightly different challenges, and knowing the tools that are available and identifying the best way to utilize them in each particular situation is where the value of the professional practitioner comes into play!

Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool

"But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday."

We are always on the lookout for new ways to utilize Internet "features" to improve the marketing of our businesses. this article had a new twist described in it that I thought was really interesting.

In all of our classes about blogging, we have emphasized the idea of informing readers about some aspect of your principle business. This article, by contrast, points out how someone can choose a popular topic to blog about in order to attract traffic that the business can benefit from simply by being the sponsor of the blog. This strikes me as being the same approach as used in traditional advertising, where the shows that businesses sponsor on television and radio are not about the business, but attract demographics that are of interest to the business. Education about the business itself takes place only in the ads that the sponsor has attracted traffic to!

This is one of those ideas that seem so simple and obvious that I cannot understand why we have not seen it and talked about it before this time!

One other element of this story also needs to be emphasized, and that is the frequency with which the author of this blog posts to the blog. Note that he posts to the blog "... about five times each weekday." That is a lot of posting, but that is a big part of what makes it work for the author!

Google's “Query Deserves Freshness” or QDF

"QDF is clearly a very interesting model but what really interests me is how I can use it to drive traffic to my websites."

Some time ago in a previous post I wrote about Google tweaking its algorithm to place more emphasis on current information when search volume points to a particular interest in a topic. At that point, I didn't have a name for this feature, but in this blog post I found the name and a more in-depth description of that feature.

What this whole discussion is about, in short, is that if Google notices an increase in search volume for a particular topic, it will boost the rankings for new information that meets the search criteria so that newer information ear at the top of the rankings. Without this artificial boost, the basic algorithm tends to prefer better established pages, that is, older information!

This phenomenon can be quite relevant to sites that have something to do with something that might be mentioned in news stories that draw a lot of attention. For example (I know this seems like a bit of a stretch, but it is for real), if you sell equipment to monitor earthquake activity (how many people do?), you should realize that any reports of earthquakes will trigger a response on the search engines looking for more information. If you have a current posting on your blog about your equipment that would rank on the kinds of searches that people do to find out about current earthquake activity, you will likely see a surge in traffic as a result.

To take another example, the article says, "... what happens when cities suffer power failures. “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds,”. The quote is from a Google engineer named Amit Singhal, who was also quoted in the New York Times article about Google. That illustrates how quickly all this happpens and tells you something about how quickly you need to respond to news items in order to get the benefit for your site!

This same article (the main article referenced in the title link), led me to an interesting tool, which, unfortunately, I cannot seem to find my way back to at the moment. This tool was called "Hot Topics" and is something one can use to see what topics are "hot" on various locations.

What happened when I was on the page of this tool was that I typed in a phrase and hit "Search", and it began opening a series of windows for various other sites where it had submitted my phrase as a search. These other sites included Google, digg, Reddit, and many more. On the results pages, I could see an indication of what activity these was going on related to the search phrase I had submitted. This is a quick way to cover a lot of sites to see what is going on around the web in relation to a particular phrase, and to find what you might want to write about yourself to get your own 'buzz" effet going. I found the whole thing very interesting, but, unfortunately, closed the window before I had captured the link, and now I can't find it again. If anyone reading this comes across this tool, I would appreciate a referral!

6 Tips for Blogging in 2008

"... blogging is an excellent way to manage PR ..."

This is a nice piece on blogging with tips that we can all use. The key message that came across to me from this article was that you really need to pay attention to the small details of working your blog in order to get it to work most effectively for you.

For example, the author recommends hard coding keyword-rich links on the sidebar of your blog pointing to blog entries that are particularly important to your site. This kind of technique goes well beyond the concept of posting regularly to your blog to keep your content alive and fresh.

He also talks about writing keyword-rich titles for your entries, then, after posting them (and presumably, letting them get indexed?), returning to the entry and changing the titles to something that will be more eye-catching for readers. This reminds me of the difference between how newspaper headlines are written and how article titles or headlines need to be written for the web. Newspapers have had to adjust how their writers create headlines in order to make the stories findable on the Internet. I have even heard that search engines have made special adjustments to their search algorithms to accommodate newspapers' need for both kinds of headlines.

Overall, the message remains, the rewards go to those who pay attention to detail and have the persistence to apply good techniques to their work.

Make Your Blog Work Better!

"Google shows more recent results if a search query that wasn't popular before suddenly gets many searches. Google analyzes the search volume and the blog post volume to decide if a special search term or topic is hot or not."

A recent newsletter posting points to a way to make your blog perform better for your site. The key seems to be to stay aware of what is "hot" that might be relevant to your site, and make sure that you get a blog posted immediately. What this article says is that Google provides additional ranking emphasis for current blog entries for searches that suddenly take a jump in volume. What this means is that if there is a news item, for example, that attracts a lot of attention to a subject that is relevant to your business, it is to your advantage to put something up on your blog commenting on the event.

Suppose, for example, that you are selling coffee on the web. One day you see a news report saying that coffee has been determined to be good for your health in some way that was not realized previously (a story that was prominent recently). News stories like that attract a lot of attention to a topic for a short while, and you can anticipate that this will be reflected in search volume.

What you should do is to think about what people who hear about that story and want more information might search for, and post a blog immediately using those words to make some comment or observation about the story. You don't have to have anything earth-shattering to say about it, a simple article mentioning the story line and saying what you think about it will be sufficient. The point is to get something on-line immediately to take advantage of the boost that Google will give the topic for a short window of time.

If you are lucky and the story does attract attention, and if you have picked the right terms, you could get a huge boost for your blog in a very short period of time. This kind of short term volume increase for your site can also have a persistent, lingering effect on your rankings in searches over time.

As always, the advantage goes to those of us who stay on top of our field and are persistent in applying the right principles to our marketing eforts!

So Does Blogging Really Work? Here's the Proof.

An interesting post provides some insights to using blogs to promote your business. The first part of the posting is all about Dell turning around its attitude to blogging for businesses, and is an interesting story about the impact hat blogging can have on a company. It is not really too relevant to most small businesses except in that it shows that the wrong kind of attention can really hurt you! In most cases, small businesses don't have the visibility for that to be much of an issue. Attention is what they are trying to get!

To me, the more interesting part of this post has to do with the South African winery that took up blogging. If you read the details, they increased their business volume by more than a factor of ten! Yes, I did say ten! They state that they were selling some 40,000 cases of wine per year when they began their blog, and are now approaching 40,000 cases per week. Who would not like this result!

Their efforts in marketing through their blog go well beyond posting information on the blog, but that was the starting point. In their case, they began giving wine away to people on the blog, which is sure to get attention, but, for a tenfold increase in sales, it makes a lot of sense! The lesson here is that by using your blog creatively in your business arena, you can have a huge impact. You can be sure that these people are believers in the power of the Internet to promote business.

For more information about blogging and how to use the Internet effectively, browse some of our presentations that we have made in our free Internet Marketing Clinic at the University of Houston Small business Development Center.

Optimize Your Text for Search Engines!

"Notice that I also changed the sub-title of the book from “Fire Your Boss, Toss Your Alarm Clock, and Double Your Income With An Easy Transition Into Self-Employment” to “How To Work At Home With The Perfect Small Business Opportunity” for the Amazon copy."

Reading an excellent blog about how to start a business on the Internet, I came across this quote. I have often talked about how newspapers have had to change the way they write their headlines in order to accommodate search engines, and I thought this was a great illustration of the point I was trying to make.

Brian Armstrong, the author of this fine blog, goes on to say that "... very few people search for terms like “breaking free”, “fire your boss”, or “self-employment”... " so he rewrote his text to something that people would be searching for. In this article, and in several other of his posts, he talks about the importance of keyword research to determine what people are actually searching for. This is crucial to making your website deliver the kind of traffic you need to support your business.

I highly recommend this blog as a reference for great information about making money from the Internet. Brian's focus is more on how to make money from a blog than from moving product or services, but his writing style is easy to read and full of great information.

Mastering Both Kinds Of Link Building - Authority & Reputation

"... presence builds presence - simply being present in more channels will lead to you getting more links, more authority, more PageRank."

Here is a nice article outlining several important points about successful link building approaches.

The author makes a distinction between pursuing links based on page rank versus links based on anchor text. I have never made that sort of distinction in my own campaigns, but it is an interesting perspective.

What I like about this article is that he talks about the importance of getting good anchor text on internal links (those on the same site) as well as on external links (those on other sites that point to yours.) He also emphasizes the benefits of LOTS of promotion, that is, getting your presence out on the web in as many ways as you possibly can (see the quote above)!

Many of our classes have addressed such tools as article sites, press release sites, and blogs. These are all valuable tools for increasing your visibility on the web, and part of their appeal is their residual power once you have gotten them out there! With this residual power, the placements are also accumulative, that is, they all add up to more and more power for your site.

For effective marketing, the lessons are still, "Content, content, content" and "persistence" in pursuing good techniques for your site.

Setting up RSS feeds from your site

In our last class, the question came up about how to set up others to subscribe to an RSS feed from your site. I have prepared a short presentation that outlines a few steps for enabling someone to establish your feed on three different portal pages, MyYahoo, Google and Start. Click on the title link above to go to the presentation (a PDF file, which may load slowly!)

This presentation does not address how to create the feed, which is covered elsewhere in our class materials, but assumes that you are starting with some kind of blogging software that sets up the feed for you automatically.

Here is a link to the Yahoo instructions for setting up the feed on someon's MyYahoo page, which they will have to have created prior to using this process. In similar fashion, Google instructions will enable someone to pull your feed into their Google Portal page.

Other portals will have similar arrangements that you should be able to find by going to those sites and searching them for something like "add to ...", where they will show you the setup like this.

These instructions all presume that the persons pulling in the feeds will have established the pages that they want to pull the feed to in advance of utilizing these buttons. That will require (in the case of Yahoo or Google) setting up accounts with them first, but those are free accounts.

For a presentation on how to set up the RSS feed from your site (not from your blog, which will have its own process built-in to the blogging software, we have a class presentation (another PDF file) on "Setting up an RSS Feed".

How to Use RSS on Your Site

RSS, accoding to this author, is "... this decade's answer to business-to-consumer (B2C) e-mail; ..."

There are various creative ways to utilize RSS feeds on your site. A few suggestions from this article make the point. They include:

• Blog and article comments.
• Errata sheets.
• Shipment tracking.
• Newly released and sale items.
• Updated user agreements, policies, and practices.

In our clinic, we have discussed use of RSS primarily in the contextof the first item only. As with any marketing on the web, it pays to be thinking of the client and what the client needs, wants, or can use. Each of these suggestions points to a different kind of value that RSS can provide for the users.

Remember the lesson: "If you help your clients, they will help your business!"

Blogging for Business

Blogging has many faces! We have talked many times about how to use a blog to add content to your website, but, like most things we discuss, it is not a cakewalk.

This article is focused on using a blog to create income for the creator, but the points about the effort involved pertain to the kinds of blogs that we discuss in the Internet Marketing Clinic.

"The cost of building a readership for a blog, by contrast, is nil. ... For people like Ms Armstrong, who has about 1m visitors to her site a month, this makes blogging worthwhile. But it is not for everybody, she notes. She works about seven hours a day on her site, and continues to work while on holiday. Mr Malik concurs. “It's not easy,” he says. Building his audience has “taken me five years, and a lot of sleepless nights.”

Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search

A new blog search engine is coming out in beta which has generated some favorable comment in several notable locations.

"Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. As with web search, Sphere attempts to understand link structures, who's linking to whom, and what are the quality of the links. Crucial to this analysis is an attempt to understand who's starting or leading discussions in contrast to those bloggers who are simply commenting on existing conversations.
Sphere also looks at meta data, things like posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other non-keyword related data.

And finally, Sphere's algorithm content does some heavy lifting with semantic analysis of blog postings."

This article by Chris Sherman, an always reliable and authoritative source, goes into much more detail about the featues of the new engine and how it is intended to solve parts of the relevance issue. In following up on this story, I also went to the home page of Sphere and found other links to comments in other search engine blogs. I was not able to explore the engine myself, as their server is presently overloaded by the response they have received, and they have closed off access temporarily. I did learn a lot by following the other links, which I recommend to all who might be interested in more detail.

What I found interesting about this whole discussion in these various locations is the insight that it provides to how search engines must approach the problem of determining relevance for their search results. All search engines are wrestling with this problem as the Internet continues to expand, and the solutions that this talented group of developers come up with will be echoed in the solutions that other search engine developers employ in their engines. No one has the complete answer yet, of course, but, as we progress up the learning curve, the steps that one group finds to be successful will be copied by all the others.

For webmasters and business owners trying to keep up with effective marketing on the web, understanding the direction that developers are moving with their algorithms is the best route to success in the competitive Internet arena.

As always, the basic message is to provide good content to the audience on the web. Remember that what all the developers are trying to find and deliver is the best content that they can locate to deliver to their users. If you consistently provide that, the search engines developers who find the best algorithm will be more and more likely to prefer your content to other content offered by less effective marketers. All the techniques that we teach in our Internet Marketing Clinic are simply ways to communicate more efficiently with the search engines to let them know that your content is truly the best they will find!

"Add to My Yahoo" now available!

The "My Yahoo" button is for the use of our customers who have established their own access to MyYahoo by creating a Yahoo account and setting up their portal page on that service. Look for these buttons on the header of any page on our site and use them to ensure that you always know immediately of the latest announcement of tips concerning Internet Marketing that we have made available.

Technorati Profile

89 percent of companies currently blog or plan to start in the near future.

"Over half the respondents have launched one or more blogs within the last year, and 10 percent have blogged for over three years. The study finds a higher adoption rate among smaller companies. Fifty-eight percent of corporate blogs represent companies with less than 100 employees, while companies with over 1,000 employees take up 16 percent of the blogosphere's corporate segment. The same trend rings true from a revenue standpoint; companies with under $100 million in revenues account for 45 percent of corporate blogs. "

Here is a trend that is really amazing. Blogs have caught on so fast it is stunning!

It must be that the technology is so easy that it encourages people to adopt it who would otherwise shy away. Since these blogs are generally easily syndicated, this makes a very easy means of spreading information across the web, allowing users to keep in touch with information sources who provide content of interest to them.

The message for your business is three-fold. First, you better get on board this trend, or you will be left behind. Second, you need to make sure that your blog is RSS-ready. And, third, as always, you must pay attention to the quality of what you put up on the web, as your content must be enticing enough to attract its proper audience. If you do this successfully, the rewards will accrue to your site and to your business!

Retail importance of search continues to grow!

"Dieringer noted that 114.1 million adults searched for product information on the web last year, and that 98.9 million of this group went on to make purchases either online or offline. By comparison, 106.7 million adults made purchases through catalogs, direct-mail and telemarketing, it added."

According to this information, the web has overtaken several traditional avenues of marketing.

'Our research shows that the Internet now influences the purchase decisions of as many shoppers as mail order catalogs, direct mail, and telemarketing combined.' "

This information reinforces again the fact that the marketplace served by search engine marketing is a significant and growing part of retail activity around the world.

Going beyond web stats

We have talked in many of our clinic sessions about the value of studying and using your web stats to improve your site operation. This article discusses a technique for going beyond the activity stats to try to identify what is going on in the minds of the visitors to the site.

The article is a case study of how one firm used a commercial opinion-gathering tool to collect feedback from users. There is a particularly interesting chart included that illustrates where this information gathering fits into the evaluation scheme. The stats reviews that we have discussed account for about half the elements in the evaluation cycle.

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR"Avaya execs wanted to know much more than how many visitors a page received. Marketers had questions like:
o How satisfied are visitors with my site section?
o What problems or frustrations do they encounter there?
o Is the content effective -- is it meeting visitor's expectations?
o How could I tweak the site to encourage visitor loyalty?
o Are there design changes we could make to improve marketing campaign results?"