A client received an inquiry from an ad network – would they be open to offering banner ads on their website from advertisers with products that may or may not be unrelated to the client’s website?  It can be rewarding receiving recognition for having grown a website to a size that can attract advertising, but has the website truly reached the Advertising Threshold?

Let’s boil this down: money = good,  ugly ads = bad.   At some point, the site owner hits a threshold where the good outweighs the bad.   There’s a price to pay hitting this threshold – the entire site design, look-and-feel and vibe is compromised by a big banner ad, and that can result in lower time-on-site, lower conversion rate for actual products and services and other consequences.   If the content of the banner ads aren’t in any way aligned to the demographics of the site visitors, then the site owner further risks alienating visitors.

I’m ok with banner ads on my site – how much can I make? asks the client.

A typical ad network pays a “publisher” (the site owner) perhaps $1-3 per thousand impressions (let’s call it a $2 CPM, or “cost per thousand”).   If the site owner receives 10,000 pageviews a month, they might expect to make about $20 a month, which does not get paid out until generally $100 in revenue is accrued.

There are plenty of other ways to structure advertising, be it CPA (cost per acquisition), CPC (cost per click) or some other form of negotiated deal such as a “Site Takeover.” A website with 10,000 monthly pageviews might be able to make significantly more than $20 a month, but regardless of what that revenue target is, the site owner still needs to decide if the website has reached the Advertising Threshold.

(over the edge image h/t hxc_emo)

I recently discussed content strategy with an associate of mine who runs a very successful professional services business with nearly twenty employees.  Combining the content they already produce (articles for print publications) with a moderated democratization of content creation across their employee base could easily produce a thousand or more posts a year.  This creates an amazing foundation for a website and a fast-growing long tail of content.   The impact on their bottom line would be measurable and significant.

I came across a nice article from a company called Lima Bean, which has their own take on a content strategy.  Thought it was worth sharing for the perspective.  An excerpt:

Content really does form the core of any website and it’s vital that you develop a content strategy that is engaging and attracts the right audience. It will also help you to identify key themes; facilitate discussion between key stakeholders; drive meta data creation and assignment; enhance search engine rankings; give life to your brand and build customer trust.

awesome lima bean salad image h/t Guilty Kitchen

I responded to Tea Silvestre’s inquiry about hiring a marketing coach last week. Her post entitled How to Find and Hire the Right Marketing Coach, aggregating the replies from a number of marketing professionals, is now up on her site. There’s a bunch of great information in there from half-a-dozen people who know what they are talking about. Check it out.

gorilla marketing image, h/t GlennPeb

Tea Silvestre, talented proprietress of The Word Chef, asked some of her friends this question: Do you have any cautionary tales or tips on hiring the right Marketing Coach?  While I think she’s putting together the replies into something more substantial than a quick blog post, I thought I’d give her my thoughts here, and share her results with my audience later on.

The notion of a Marketing “Coach” comes with some expectations and assumptions that might not be a great fit for many businesses. I would think of a Coach as someone who shares a lot of possibilities and provides encouragement on an ongoing basis, leaving the actual hard work to the client.

Where this can fail the client is that every small business has very limited time and resources. It’s easy enough to get a client excited about all that (social) media has to offer, but three weeks later, everyone’s busy, deadlines loom, and guess what gets pushed to the side first?

A seasoned Marketing Consultant will weigh the needs of the company, the market they currently reach and want to reach, how they are already marketing, what budget they have, what internal resources they have and the skill-set of those people, what they can easily implement technologically and what might take more significant development, what the balance is between short-term wins and long-term strategic planning, and so much more.

I’d consider asking some of the following questions to weed out the truly seasoned marketing professionals from a less-experienced circus of coaches, gurus and experts (assuming that this would be lean towards internet marketing and social media):

• Who are your clients and what specifically did you do for them?
• What experience do you have in my market segment?
• How do you measure success? What do you draw from metrics that is actionable?
• How do you determine ROI? CPA?
• What has Twitter done for you? What’s it good at, what’s it not good at?
• How do you do keyword research and how is it best used?
• Is what I’m doing going to help in the short term or are we building a long-term foundation? Why?

When looking for some marketing help, remember that there’s no mandatory certification process. There’s no MD or JD or PhD after someone’s name. There may not be a whole lot to go on other than what they tell you. So do some homework, look into their background, ask some tough questions and find the right person who can fit with your organization, whether that’s a Coach or Consultant or Agency or Guy or Gal.

lovely tea image h/t nkzs

On the official Google Blog, there was a post a week or so ago entitled “Giving you fresher, more recent search results.”

This post shows how Google continues to improve near-real-time and timely search without cannibalizing or otherwise discounting the value of their vast index of the web and the deep amount of information that represents. Put it another way: Google knows that sometimes you want really timely information and sometimes you don’t, and this draws a contrast with real-time search from platforms such as Twitter.

Here’s how Google frames it:

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

While every company can draw something different from these ideas, the bottom line remains – it reinforces the need for high quality, fresh unique content, which drives search traffic, a long tail of content and community engagement.

minty fresh photo h/t csontoslea

Onesheet went into beta today. It looks awesome and even better, doesn’t require the band to maintain it. Here’s how Onesheet describes their service:

Onesheet allows musicians to set up a web presence in minutes using content from other websites they’re already updating. They simply connect their existing social networks and services immediately have a website full of content already posted across the web: music, videos, photos, concert dates, blogs, social streams, mailing list signups, online stores and more.

So what you get is a beautiful splash page for your band which aggregates information from all the other places you update.

Why is this awesome?

A key component of “reputation management” is the process of creating visibility for your band or business or self to the exclusion of negative, misleading or otherwise uncontrollable information sources.

Perhaps the greatest all-time reputation management FAIL is Rick Santorum. Google “santorum” and you’ll see why a single website contributes to undermining the viability of the ex-Senator as a Presidential candidate.

So, Onesheet is the kind of service that can be used to fill up that first page of Google results. If you control ten different websites or online presences for your band or business or self, and can push those to the first page of results, it excludes any potential negative listings. That’s a key element of reputation management.

Try this: Google yourself (c’mon you know you’ve done it). What do you see? Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter? Is there anything negative there? Creating new profiles at different services like Onesheet will help you avoid getting into the same frothy mess as Rick Santorum, and help effectively manage your online reputation.

ICANN, the non-profit organization that controls Internet naming protocols (including top-level domains (TLD’s) such as .com, .net, .org and newcomers like .biz and .jobs) has voted to open up the system so that groups can apply to create virtually any TLD such as .music or .food.

This is a tidal shift in the Internet world, although its been brewing for more than a decade. In 2001, for instance, there was a group that attempted to get .god certified. I took part in an early-registration period, and had .god become a TLD, I’d be one of those wealthy domaineers that own an island in the South Pacific. I had early-registered perhaps 100 incredible names, including baseball.god, buddhist.god and micro.god to name a few.

Enough about me – I wanted to collect some reactions to the ICANN decision from around the web.

Los Angeles Times
“…interest groups could stake out their own corner of the Web by offering every auto junkie a .car domain name, every law firm a .law address, and every restaurant a site that ended with .food. But just like real estate in the real world, this new virtual land won’t come cheap. The price tag to get a new domain created is $185,000.”

Media Beat
“The move marks the biggest change to Internet addresses in nearly four decades. It means companies and other organizations can apply to turn their brands into an internet domain extension, such as .iPad or .Prius.”

Marketing Pilgrim
“Don’t think it’s going to be something that everyone is going to be able to either use or afford. In other words, this is not a situation for the little guys… Expect there will be attempts to game and hijack these domains even with the higher cost barrier to entry and the general rules to be applied to these domains. It’s the Internet after all so if there is something to be hijacked or ‘stolen’ there will be attempts. It actually might be fun to watch who will be the first non-brand to be clever enough to run the gauntlet and come out with a prized hostage domain on the other side.”

engadget
“It’s entirely likely that a new wave of legal spats will crop up with regard to trademarks — we’re guessing lawyers in Mountain View won’t be too fond of Google.phones falling into non-corporate hands — but hey, that’s half the fun from the sidelines. We’ll be keeping an eye out for a final decision, and we’ll be sure to let you know if ICANN fesses up to what it’ll be doing with those stratospheric new fees.”

CircleID
“However, ICANN in this four page memo doubles down on its position that only those trademarks with proof of actual use should be included. In this article I explained how the ICANN Board is caught between a rock and a hard place and why the path they have outlined in their memo is the worst of two evils.”

Urban Christian News
“The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal at a meeting in Singapore despite fears that opening up new suffixes could cause some confusion. “This is the biggest change to domain names since the creation of ‘.com’ 26 years ago,” said Theo Hnarakis, chief executive of Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services, a California-based company that provides online branding services.”

(photo credit: papaleguas)

I was invited to give a presentation called “Engage New Audiences and Recruit Volunteers with Social Media” for the 2011 Volunteer Ventura Summit put on by the City of Ventura. I re-recorded the presentation for internet distribution, following. It’s 17 minutes long and is a nice overview of the basics, along with some easy-to-implement action items for any small non-profit organization looking to share their story online.

I’ve done a couple posts on WebPosition recently, and one of the comments discussed a site ranking software package called Advanced Web Ranking. I’m giving the 30-day trial a spin, and in full disclosure, the company offers an Enterprise license for a review, which does not include the maintenance contract, for which I’d have to pay separately.

Installation and Setup

Advanced Web Ranking installed quite smoothly on a Mac. The 78MB file expands to about 120MB (including the server app and another program called Advanced Link Manager). The 30-day trial authorization was completed without a hitch.

Once you fire up the program, you are prompted to start a Tutorial, which includes a demo project containing the “historical data for some of the best news websites on four of the most important search engines.”

Documentation

Documentation, in the form of tutorials, feature overview, menu details, user interface and more, is exhaustive. It is well-formatted, well-written English and includes screenshots throughout. In short, it demonstrates that AWR is a very deep program filled with functionality, and the depth and quality of documentation gives confidence that everything will run as it should.

Key Features

There are a ridiculous number of features in Advanced Web Ranking, so I’ll cherry-pick a few that I think will be quite useful as I use this program more and more.

Triggers – these create customized filters and special reports. For instance, you can create a Trigger that will generate a report whenever a specific keyword goes up or down 5 places or more in a specific search engine. For sites that play close to the edge in SEO where there is a danger of being de-indexed, or for brand-new, or newly-optimized sites where there is a lot of movement in rankings, this could be a very useful seo software feature.

Keyword Research Tool – this keyword research tool allows users to tie into Google Keyword Tool and others, taking results and plugging them (or “extracting”) into the searched web ranking keywords.

Event Logger – this sure looks handy for those managing multiple projects and multiple clients. In an easy-to-use interface, you can see when projects have run, when they are scheduled, what emails have been sent, error notification and more. The list includes:

• Scheduled Updates
• Multiple Scheduled Updates
• Sending Emails
• FTP Uploads
• Generating Reports
• Application Errors

Local Search Engines Manager – this allows you to specify a localization. So if you are in Topeka, doing local search engine optimization for an insurance company in Billings, you can specify a Billings localization that will produce results that a local searcher would see.

Proxy Support – I don’t love the idea of pinging Google for search engine results, where I’d much rather see an online version that does this without any threat of blacklisting. That said, there is proxy support, so I will look into using this, along with any throttle features I find. I would note that the link provided to get a key to the Google AJAX API is broken.

I recommend going through the Global Settings / Preferences, and setting up Performance (including Performance Settings / Browser Emulation and Search Engine API’s) first, so as to throttle back inquiries and stay under reasonable search thresholds. AWR’s position is that their Search Friendly settings are good enough, but I choose to be a little more conservative than that.

Reporting

Customized Headers and Footers – reports can be customized with a block of HTML code, or a stylesheet language called XSL.

Sending Reports – AWR can be configured to automatically generate reports and send by email. Included is a basic address book, and the ability to add text to the body of the email that goes out. This is designed to work seamlessly with Scheduled Reports, so that for instance, you can create a client report, schedule it for a daily run, and then automatically email the client.

Custom Filters – this allows you to create your own filter, combining existing, or default, filters and user created conditions that might include the current position, previous position, best position, the page, page rank, and other data points that may be affected by a change.

Report Page Setup – note all reports are set up by default as A4 (used in Europe). If you’re in the US, you’ll have to go into preferences and set this to LETTER (8 1/2 x 11).

Summary

This appears to be robust, useful software. I’ve been running some reports the last day or so, and I can see that getting things to look like I want them to will take a bit of time and wrangling, but its all doable. I’ll update this post with anything I especially love or hate, but in the meantime, I’m pretty excited about Advanced Web Ranking, and how it can help me serve my clients.

Advanced Link Manager is another link manager software application from the same company. It does link building and link popularity, for website owners and SEO professionals. It has the following features, which I’ll check out, and either update in this post or write a new one:

• Analyze Domain Quality – Analyze the quality of one or multiple domains of your potential link partners.
• Google Maps Webpages Importer – Analyze the web pages displayed in Google Maps for a specific local business result.
• Website Crawler – Get insights from specific or multiple pages of a website by crawling it’s pages.
• Email reports – Tired of always having to switch the application to send email for potential link partners?.
• Webpage Analyzer – Improve onpage optimization by analyzing pages from your website and your competitors websites.
• Scheduled Updates – Get the work done even while you’re away from your computer.
• Search Engine Friendly – Human emulation technology that makes search engine requests indistinguishable from a web browser.
• Reciprocal Linking – Keep track of your link exchange campaigns by using multiple way link exchange tracking.
• Import referrers – Avoid the time consuming task of searching on search engines, for links that are not yet in their results.
• Printable reports

There’s an interesting phenomenon that we are all guilty of at times – we assume that our own user experience is typical and applicable to a much more widespread approach to a user base. It happens to designers who don’t test their work in all browsers. It happens to marketers who assume their copy SHOULD work without extensive keyword research and A/B testing. And it happens to restaurateurs, fashion designers, musicians, architects and on and on.

This came up recently where a client was internally discussing how to roll out a component of a marketing campaign. It involved some web technology that works fine for some people but not for everyone. Positions were taken based on their own personal experience: “it works fine for me, so this is the most effective way to roll it out to 1,000 people.”

While intuition and experience certainly plays a key role in marketing, and can be part of the iterative process of improving websites, apps, etc., my intuition said that we would have some distinct challenges providing a consistent user experience. While what we wanted to do would be a great user experience for some people, for other people it would kind of suck, and potentially damage the brand.

So we did our homework. We Googled a whole bunch of articles, blog posts and case studies, and ultimately determined that without some fairly expensive third-party solutions, we could not guarantee a consistently good user experience. That led us to follow some best practices in the campaign that aren’t as innovative as originally planned, but we know should work for everyone and hopefully produce the intended effect.

What’s the takeaway? You may have a great idea, and it may be based on how you see the web. Or your menu, or the fall fashion line or that add-on to your house. But to extrapolate that idea, and assume it is indicative of the typical user experience is just that: an assumption. It’s an assumption until you test, research and discuss, until ultimately what you put out in the world is for your audience and not for yourself.

As I proofread this post, I hear Seth Godin in my head – that the other side of the coin is breaking the rules, innovating, not making decisions by committee and cutting the red tape.  I’ll dive into that in another post sometime.  Share your thoughts below.

(puppy photo courtesy dani_gi)