RocksTech

The internet has dramatically changed marketing from the old “hit-em with-sledge-hammer-over-&_over” outbound tactics such as direct mail and TV, to the new “electro-magnet” inbound marketing tactics such as blogs and social media. There is a simple explanation for this… Inbound Marketing costs 60% less. Despite the obviously higher ROI, many organizations have not even begun to use inbound marketing tactics mostly because they do not know how.

Fortunately the Inbound Marketing University (IMU) has developed a free inbound marketing training program and certification process to help quickly move the knowledge needed to execute effective inbound marketing tactics for your organization. Use the following IMU video training modules to learn the basics of inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing University Certification Program

If you have specific questions, or need more customized assistance for your group, don’t hesitate to reach out to RocksTech using the following form:

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Using the registered trademark symbol in a web page’s title tag will NOT help your search engine rankings (it can only dilute the keyword relevancy)

• If it was helpful, then everyone would use it to establish credibility.
• People don’t search using the circle R in the search queries.
• The most militant brand trademark enforcers (www.Microsoft.com) do NOT use registered trademarks in the title tag. Instead they do it graphically.

Once legal ownership is established, it is unnecessary to include a trademark symbol with every instance of a term.

Not only is overuse of a symbol cumbersome to readers, but it limits the relevancy between your posted content and the actual terms people are using to search for your site. The solution is to trademark only the first instance of any product or brand name on any given page. By doing this you establish the legal ownership of the trademark and leave the successive instances free and clear for easy readability and search engine keyword density calculations.

If you do choose to use the registered trademark symbol in web page text… make sure to use a space to separate it from the keywords (treat it like a word).

Work to achieve up to (but not exceeding) 7% keyword density of desired keywords within the total body of text. A good web page will have at least 200 words.

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Senior managers are usually focused on the bottom line – it’s their job! If you are presenting social media solutions make sure you have a plan to remove the following roadblocks that keep Senior managers from supporting you newest social media plans:

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The following video does a great job describing the paradigm shifts that needs to occur in order to manage social media successfully.

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We currently use a free tool name RankChecker that works with Firefox, but it can only handle a few keywords at a time, so it can take days to compare 20-40 keywords across 4-8 competitor URLs. Of course we do something else while we are waiting for the results to come in, but this process easily consumes several hours.

I’ve identified 4 tools that can do the same task in a few minutes and are hosted in the cloud so we don’t need to worry about installing software on our local computers.

http://www.seocockpit.com

http://authoritylabs.com

http://raven-seo-tools.com

http://ci.trellian.com

Bottom line – I recommend that you subscribe to a service named Raven at http://raven-seo-tools.com

This tool does a good job of tracking SE rankings and also includes some other desired functions such as:

• Unlimited domains
• Link tracking
• White label reporting
• Social Media Persona manager
• Automatic reporting of keyword and competitor research, link building, keyword rankings, and site analytics.

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Don’t show paid search ads to people who are researching you for legal or regulatory reasons. Use the following list of negative paid search keywords to block these people from seeing your ads. Of course these -keywords do not apply if your product/service solves a regulatory/compliance issue.

act
act of
compliance
law
laws
legal
legislation
regulation
regulations

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I met with a few people from Google this week and they made a point to watch the following Youtube video in the middle of our meeting:

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You don’t need to pay for job candidates to find your site. If they want they job, they can find their own way to your site. Use the following list of negative keywords to prevent your paid search ads from appearing for common employment and career-related searches:

career
careers
employment
hiring
intern
interns
internship
internships
job
jobs
recruiter
recruiting
resume
resumes
salaries
salary

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A few months ago I was explaining the social media strategy to some very successful sales consultants over lunch. In my passion for the topic I blurted out the phrase “they just don’t get it” in reference to some challenges we were discussing. One of the consultants called me on this statement and asked “How do you know if someone ‘get’s it’? How do you measure the paradigm shift?” I fumbled the answer and offered to send them a copy of Jeff Jarvis’ book “What Would Google Do” to explain it better than I could. But it is a fair question and it deserves a concise, well thought out answer. Now its 3:57 am on December 27th. I should be sleeping but I’m up with the stomach flu, and I definitely should not be thinking about work, but my thoughts on the topic are clear and concise at the moment.

The answer to this question, an the point of this post is this… The new media paradigm manages abundance, where as old media manages scarcity.

Supply and demand dictates that scarcity creates value (ie gold, time, wisdom, etc…). Conversely, abundance deludes value.

Traditional media specialists are tasked with managing a limited number of opportunities to display the message such as minutes of air time, percent of a printed page, or number of billboards. Let’s call this number of opportunities the “available shelf space” because it is easy to visualize. Because of the limited shelf space, media planners were measured on their ability to negotiate a good deal, get the shelf space before someone else does, and prove that the advertisement is actually consuming prime real estate within the valuable shelf space. In old media it was often assumed that better position, or more frequent displays of the message would deliver more results. And emphasis is placed on how nice the message appeared to be. You know how it goes… “Lets get so-and-so’s approval on this before we print this 10,475 times on the back cover of this magazine”.

Conversely, internet technology provides virtually unlimited shelf space. Advertisers can now display thier message for “free” and only pay when it delivers actual results. This situation aligns the interests of advertisers and media and has given birth to the pay per performance industry which fuels Google, Yahoo and Bing. The result is is a new method to measure success that emphasizes mathematical testing over creative brilliance thus creating “disposable ads” that are quickly deployed and tested against a slew of similar ads in a ruthless competition to learn the mind of the market.

Old media asked…
Did my ad show in the right place/time?
What is the cost per opportunities?
What can we do to attract more interest?

New media asks…
How fast can I learn the insights?
What ads converted to revenue and why?
What does the market want?

I’m going to abruptly end this post because I’ve just learned that Mike Moran wrote a whole book on the subject (see http://www.doitwrongquickly.com/). I’ll post more after I finish reading this book.

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