Every company should want to be a pillar of their online community, and in essence help the community while becoming an active part of it as it evolves (remember, your community is your market, so not wanting to become part of your community means you don’t want to offer your products and services to your market!) In order to become a pillar of your community, your company obviously cannot sit on the sidelines doing nothing at all. Your company will need to become an active part of this community in one way or another, but the bottom line is that by helping people find what they want, by brightening their day or making their lives better in some way you will be making the community better than when you found it. Basics rules to follow include: be kind and respectful to your customers and prospective customers (the whole community in fact!), serve the community in the best way possible and produce and distribute the best products to the community.

As a pillar of the community your company will then obtain sales from your market. The more active you are in the community, the more recognized your products will be and the more sales you will receive. This is not only the future of your online market, but this is also the reality of your present day market. As nearly 100% of all business will get online in the next ten years, the competitiveness of the online marketplace will continue to increase and online advertising will eclipse all other forms. In the future your online market will change, but if you are an active part of that market then you will be able to react instantly to these changes in a seamless manner that will make your business more profitable, while keeping your customers and potential customers happy.

We’ve just had a very interesting conversation in the office about how much people spend on traffic, and the bottom line is… they spend a lot. It’s really amazing to see what Web traffic costs, and by putting a number on search engine traffic specifically, it really puts it all in perspective and makes you realize how vital the Internet is to any business.

We started looking at different kinds of stores to see how much they are spending a month on their Google traffic, or how much their organic (free) traffic would be worth if they had to pay for it. We were absolutely blown away at the results. Sure, we expected people to be spending money, and also expected that their organic traffic would cost a lot to reproduce, but we were absolutely amazed at how deep the pockets went.

I’ve got two babies, one 3 months old, and one 20 months old, so we go through a lot of diapers. We recently began purchasing our diapers from Diapers.com because they have free next day shipping and it takes all of the hassle out of getting boxes and boxes of diapers every month. Well somehow Diapers.com got our business, maybe it’s because of the $92,000 worth of Google traffic they buy every month, or maybe because their organic traffic would cost someone without these rankings nearly $220,000 a month to reproduce!

You would expect big chain stores to spend a lot, but we were all shocked to see that Target spends around $2.82 million dollars a month on Google traffic alone! This is insane compared to Walmart who only spends around $55k a month which is the equivalent of a small or medium sized Web only ecommerce store. Target’s organic (free) traffic is also worth about $9 million if you were to have to pay for all of the positions and clicks they get from Google for free, while Walmart’s is worth about $8 million according to our tools.

Putting dollar amounts on other peoples search engine traffic is interesting, but also outlines a very important fact, if you’re not spending money on Web traffic, someone else is. You may not think that you need to purchase Web traffic because it doesn’t apply to your business model. You may think this because you’re a manufacturer, or you’ve got sales people that push sales, but how will you “pull” people to your brand through the use of the Internet if you are nowhere to be found?

In every corner of every market there are people using the Internet to search for products, services and information. In each of these marketplaces there are also online marketers that are showing them exactly what they want to see. Purchasing Web traffic is just one part of running a business, but it is quickly becoming evident that it’s one part of running a “business” when it used to be thought of as only a part of running an “Internet Business”.

With the new year there will be some major changes to how Yahoo! gets their natural search engine listings (organic listings picked through the search engine’s robot) for any given keyword result, including yours. The way Yahoo! used to gather the sites eligible for top results involved allowing sites to pay a flat rate to have their site’s feed (list of links) submitted to the search engine. With this program, called the Yahoo! Paid Inclusion program, sites would typically rank pretty well on Yahoo! for a small cost per click fee. We’ve gotten a few clients amazing #1 and first page listings through this system and it was by far the most cost effective program on the Internet. Another way that we used to get listings for clients on Yahoo! was to pay a nominal annual fee to be included in Yahoo’s search index… which will also be discontinued. (Click the below image for a larger version.)

Paid vs Organic Listings

Many designers, artists, and luxury product manufacturers out there reading this right now are thinking to themselves blah blah blah, so what???… but wait!

This is where the future of the search engines takes another turn. Yesterday Yahoo! announced that they are experimenting with providing real-time search results from services like Twitter. Google already announced similar developments with their search results weeks ago; so now it appears as though we have a “social results race” that has officially been kicked into high gear. Who will be the first to have fully integrated, real-time social media in their search engine results? Who will do it better? Who will gain more searchers? Why should YOU care?

This is why you should care, this will affect your business in one way or another:

The possibility exists, and is getting stronger by the moment, that tweeps (the equivalent of ‘peeps’ on twitter e.g. ‘people on twitter’) will be able to tweet their way to the top of the search engines by having strong, influential, authoritative twitter accounts. This means that if your competition already has a twitter account, or if some angry customer has been on twitter for years, you can probably expect that their tweets from twitter will be served right up there with your corporate website when someone searches for your brand name on Google or Yahoo! If someone went to a showroom and wants to get more information about your products or services and searches for your name or brand name you don’t want the competition’s tweets showing up above yours for everyone to see.

What should you do???

Sign up for a twitter account with your brand’s name and start tweeting daily, or better yet, hire us to do it for you. We manage numerous twitter accounts for ourselves and for our clients and these accounts have become some of the most high quality, influential twitter feeds in their respective industries. The next step is to really take this social media marketing thing seriously, because your company’s tweets and your company’s website will not be enough. You will need to be in numerous social networking arenas such as facebook, digg and others if you want to be able to have enough search engine listings to push ‘joe shmo’s’ tweets down in the search results. The more content and social media you put out the better, and this cannot just be done in a quick blast, but must be continuously maintained so that it doesn’t hurt your brand’s image. I often see a brand that makes a good, initial effort at creating and updating a twitter account, but then they let it die with their last message tarnishing their brand’s image with something like “We will have big news for all of our followers tomorrow! Stay tuned! 3:25 PM Mar 18th, 2008″.

Social media marketing is not new, but the impact that it will be playing in the near future with millions of people on twitter and facebook could have on every website out there is monumental( note: there are more people on facebook worldwide then there are people in the U.S.). It is much better to be prepared for the social search listings by maximizing your social presence through social networking platforms today, then be very very sorry tomorrow. Don’t forget that by building your own social presence now you will also be catering to your clients and consumers of tomorrow. Those companies that do not increase their brand awareness online and through social media will miss out on the new luxury marketplace of tomorrow.

However,  you may be surprised that the number one place reporters go to learn more about your company (aside from your PR firm) is your website! According to this survey, 69 percent of respondents go to company websites to assist in their reporting. (They go to blogs 66 percent of the time, Wikipedia 51 percent of the time, to Online videos 47 percent of the time, and use Twitter or other microblogging services 30 percent of time. Podcasts and instant messaging are used 25 percent of the time.) With this information in hand, it is not hard to deduce that your website counts, BIG TIME! Keeping it updated with the correct information and your new product offerings is actually extremely important for your PR opportunities. Most times, if journalists can’t find what they’re looking for on a website, they might not include that company in their story or they may publish incorrect information about your company. Journalists repeatedly say that poor website usability could reduce or completely eliminate their press coverage of a company. But let’s not blame them, they are on deadline and looking for fact-laden quality information quickly. Keeping your website clean and easy to navigate is essential. Just as essential as having a press page on your website where you can direct reporters to your PR firm where they can get the information and images they are looking for in a timely manner.

This is the way the Web and search engines function:

1. New, updated or more feature-rich websites gain more exposure by both people and the search engines.
2. New, unique and interesting content is highly valued by both its readers and the search engines.
3. New and compelling exposure through the Web sits in the mind of the buyers so that when they are ready to purchase they’ve already made their decision on your brand, or at the very least your brand is fresh in their minds.
4. Search engines see the added Online branding efforts as a plus for your company’s brand and its website/s.

Regardless of whether or not you’re actively writing new content for the Web, putting pictures on your site, engaging Web users in all the different forms of social media or improving your websites – your competition is! This means if you’ve been so stressed about your business (and rightfully so in tough times) that you’ve totally forgotten about the Web, then you’ve actually taken an even bigger step backwards. In fact, many of your competitors might have been putting more into their Online holdings while your business was doing nothing.

Based on the cost effectiveness of investing in websites and content verses any other form of marketing or business expansion, many businesses use these downturns as times to really focus on the Web. The experiences, search engine listings, bookmarks and ideas that the active Online marketer has gained during the tough times will come back ten fold as the economy picks up and consumer confidence returns. Just think, even if someone has never heard of your company, but they are ready to do some research on a product that they’re interested in for their home,  the first place they’re going to do research is often the Internet. If you have been actively building your Online presence and show up in the places they are looking for information, then you are much more likely to get the sale. If you have been letting this part of your business sit on the back burner during the recession, then I fear you’ll be coming out of this downturn even worse off then you would have figured.

It’s never too late to market your brand Online, but just keep in mind that the longer you wait, the larger the hurdle gets as the competition gains your market share and Online authority with the search engines and Web users.

- The website was built with a dated technology or one that is literally unreadable by the search engines (much like our old site found here)
- They built a website and let it get stale, dusty and die
- They are doing nothing to market their website online

If you have not seen a return on the investment of your website, then it may be time to examine whether or not you’re getting all you can out of this investment? Or is your website like a new, expensive toy that you bought out of impulse and never use?

In a thriving economy most companies and Marketers don’t think of Inbound Marketing tactics such as PR, search engine optimization and social networking as ways of meeting their businesses goals. These methods are often overshadowed by traditional mass media tactics that drive pending sales. However, with the increasing popularity of Online Media, and the fact that people are more careful where and how they spend their money in our current economic situation, Inbound Marketing is an absolute must for any company, and especially high end brands (see Bringing Your Brand Online To Reach Luxury Customers).

People today do not go on the Internet because they want to be sold something, and consumers today are not in any rush to spend money. Their low intensity and distaste for online sales pitches do not play a role in Inbound Marketing, and instead define exactly what Inbound Marketing is. Inbound Marketing is intended to boost a company’s brand awareness, relevance and ease of “findability” for the consumer, not to bombard them with sales pitches. Inbound Marketing is really the act of offering the information and content that the consumers are looking for at the exact moment when they are searching for this information on the Web. In this case the content and information is showing up for searches, and in places where consumers are actively looking for your product or service.

As opposed to Outbound or Direct Marking, with Inbound Marketing your company will be easy to find, and only when you are offering exactly what the consumer is looking for. Even if the consumer doesn’t make a purchase when they are searching, when they are ready to purchase, the company that was able to provide them with the information they were looking while they were looking for information will win the sale. In today’s Online marketplace many are viewing Inbound Marketing as the major strategy to be used for securing the online future of a company. By laying the channels for easy “findability” and two way communication it will allow their online brand to grow and continue to deploy more and more Inbound Marketing techniques.

Through traditional PR practices a very well established and magnificent brand image can be built by sending out press kits, establishing good connections and relationships with the media outlets and purchasing ads in publications. In this day and age, however, all of this work can also help to establish a strong online brand as well. Because it is so much easier to publish content on line with the use of Content Management Systems, we are seeing a much larger rate of publicity coming through the online form then we have seen previously.

Residual online press coverage is excellent, but you may not be taking full advantage of this occurrence if you are not also optimizing your press for the Web. Through optimizing your PR efforts for the Web you can provide your brand with a more prevalent online presence. For years we have been optimizing and targeting online media sources as well as print, and with the evolution of new and emerging online technologies we continue to move further into combining all PR efforts with our Internet Marketing efforts. These two practices go hand in hand, so not to couple them would be shortsighted. As we continue to release new materials and market our products we expect to find an increasing number of online coverage from our efforts which will help our client’s Web and offline presence grow.

@ : This is what you use to reply to someone’s post, but if you already have a twitter account you should already know this. If you want to see what people have said as replies to you, login to your account and go to the twitter homepage (http://twitter.com/home ). You will then need to click the @yourusername in the right sidebar to see your replies.

RT: This stands for “ReTweet” and means that you are just sharing this tweet that you read from someone you’re following, with your followers

DM: This means “Direct Message” and is just like a PM in other social networks which stands for a “Private Message”. To get your DM’s go to the homepage of twitter when you’re logged in and click “Direct Messages” on the right sidebar.

PRT: This acronym can mean two things which makes it confusing. It can mean “Please ReTweet” or “Partial ReTweet”. I like to think of it as the former instead of the latter because who would really care if you amended a retweet anyway?

TMB: Tweet Me Back – If you really want a response this may help

ROFL: Rolling on the floor laughing – This is one of the man variations of LOL – laughing out loud

BTW: By the way – a good acronym for shortening something similar to PS – post script

#: Hashmarks – these are not meant to be an acronym to be used literally, but are a way to tag something so that when someone searches for a topic, the tweet that uses these for that particular grouping will show up. One example is “#haiku”. When you put this in the twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23haiku ) you can see who all of the haiku’s that were tagged with this hashmark phrase.

The simplest form of tracking is visitor tracking which will tell you how many visitors came to your site, where they came from, what pages they visited, how long they were on your site and each page, what browser and operating system they are using, and if they clicked on a link to leave. This is all the most basic information that a tracking system will tell you, but not necessarily the most important. The most important information that a tracking system can log is if these visitors completed one of your online goals.

This means that the first step in any Internet Marketing strategies should definitely be to define what the goals of your website are. The answer “to get X amount of visitors to it” is a common answer, but is not a goal. What are the visitors supposed to do once they get to your site? Why do you care if they’re on your site in the first place? Some real, measurable goals include:

• Filling out a form or survey
• Sending an email or inquiry form
• Purchasing something on the site
• Clicking through to another website
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Signing up for a membership
• Using your online tool
• Sharing your content or sending an email to a friend through your website

These are all things that could be considered your website’s goals, and each goal can be tracked with a properly configured website and tracking system. When these goals are being tracked as conversions, then you are able to tell which sources of traffic, search engines, blogs, social networks, etc. are sending the most amounts of qualified visitors that are converting and accomplishing your website’s goals. Being aware of the goals of your website, and tracking & reporting the conversions of these goals and realizing the progress will determine the success of your website.

If your company is spending a lot of money on Internet Marketing then “offline”, or “lead tracking” and reporting is also very important to your business. With lead tracking you pass the online visitor data from (say they search for “kitchen & bath manufacturers” on Google and found your paid listing), into your CRM software so that as the lead is automatically entered into your offline software and you can tell what campaign the lead came from. This is very important information because even though you might get a ton of leads from a specific paid traffic source (which you would be able to tell from online conversion tracking), these leads might not amount to anything and be completely untargeted. As you can see, this information would be very valuable as you could cease to purchase this traffic if the leads were not giving you any true return on your investment.

Let’s say your site does have tracking capabilities; do you know how to use them? Tracking software can be very technical and configuring and reading the data is an art unto itself. Most sites are equipped with “Server Statistics” which are provided by your hosting company, but these statistics tell you very little and are not as accurate as other systems. Typically a third party statistics system is used for nearly all tracking and reporting needs. These systems can be free or cost as much as $40,000 a month for just the use of the statistics software alone.

Having someone that can read the data and understand what is going on with your website’s statistics can be worth ten times the cost of some of these expensive tracking software packages. It is great if you have visitor and lead tracking in place, but if you’re not doing anything with the data then what’s the point. Regular, weekly if not daily review of your website’s traffic reports are needed to react quickly to potential opportunities and business opportunities. If all of the sudden you get major press coverage, a largely popular search term result in a search engine etc. you may need to react accordingly by changing your hosting plan, putting a pop-up offer on the popular page or take some other immediate action in order to monetize your good fortune.

During the presidential elections one such event took place that could’ve made one website owner a lot of money had they been tracking, or at least reacted to a monumental change in website visitors. JoeThePlumber.com was receiving a few hundred visitors a month (200-300 total visitors a month), but when the politicians began using the coined term “Joe the Plumber” in ever presidential speech and interview the web traffic for this little website went through the roof. In the month of October alone he received about 160,000 visitors. This traffic, if properly monetized could have made him hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few short months. If this website’s owner didn’t have tracking installed on his website he would’ve had no clue at the huge influx of traffic or the need to monetize this visitor traffic (assuming he was also living in a cave).

This example shows us how by not doing something as simple as tracking our website’s visitors, we can miss the boat and be left wandering aimlessly through the online world. Without tracking you cannot react to online occurrences like the “joe the plumber” occurrence. Without tracking you can’t improve your website, or justify a proposal to improving your website because you will not know what has been working, what will work in the future or what will not work. Do not invest in any paid Internet Marketing without traffic because you will be throwing darts at a dartboard in the pitch black. Without tracking software and an experienced analyst reading the data Return on Investment cannot be determined effectively. For any questions, or to inquire about DRS & Associates Tracking and Reporting Services feel free to contact us here or email us at info@drs-associates.com

It was created in 2006 by CEO Evan Williams, and now it is mostly owned by venture capitalists investors that have yet to really monetize the micro blogging service. It appears as though the owners of twitter will be trying to inject ads similar to those seen on Google.com & Yahoo.com as a way to make revenue with this website.

There are myriad ways that people are using twitter today, but the main features and usability of the service is quite simple. When you sign up for an account you get your own link www.twitter.com/yourusername and then with this new account you can post as many “tweets” as you want. These tweets are then displayed on your profile page listed above. Tweets show up on other people who are following you (“followers”) homepages when they are logged in. When you publish a tweet you can prohibit access of delivery to those in their circle of friends or allow anybody to see them. Tons of different services, mobile applications and other websites allow you to send and receive tweets with their software, applications etc.

The phenomenon of the growth of twitter as one of the largest social platforms on the Web is amazing, but not entirely unexpected. With the use of the Internet growing widely, combined with the direct messages from advertisements throughout the day, people’s attention span has grown accustom to bite sized bits of information. Everyone has jumped on board the twitter bandwagon, everyone from companies like Starbucks and GM to the President of The United States now use twitter to update readers on their day to day happenings.

The reason that so many people and businesses are using twitter on a daily business is because it gives them another, very effective way to connect with thousands of real people every day. Many consumers value social communication like that of twitter posts more than any other type of customer service, marketing, or form of communication. People who use twitter are receiving tidbits of information that they are very interested in, and it comes from across all the Web. These microblogs keep twitter users entertained, informed and in touch with the people, products, services and companies they love.

Here are some interesting industry twitter feeds that we have found valuable and entertaining:

http://twitter.com/styleture – Notable Designs and Functional Living Spaces
http://twitter.com/methome – Metropolitan Home Magazine
http://twitter.com/InStyledotcom – In Style Magazine
http://twitter.com/Interior_Design – Interior Design Magazine
http://twitter.com/archiCentral – ArchiCentral – Architectural News
http://twitter.com/hgtvdecorating – HGTV Decorating