Internet Marketing for Independent Professionals

It occurred to me the other day that most current internet marketing resources are designed for the hobbyist, the person who enjoys tinkering with their web site, honing their AdWords copy and e-mail offers, and pouring over their Google Analytics reports. Those folks are well served already, so I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon.

This site is for independent professionals and small-business owners who don’t care about internet marketing. Well, you care about it, the same way you care about your Yellow Pages ad, your logo design, or your utilities. But you’re not about to divert time away from your core business activities to learn the intricacies of print advertising, graphic design, or plumbing.

My mission is to help you benefit from the power of internet marketing without having to learn the details of every new business practice and technical advance that comes along. To be honest, I don’t know yet exactly how this will pan out. I will certainly blog a lot about this, and I will flesh out the “Internet Marketing” articles, always aiming to give you non-jargon-ey advice and step-by-step guides to the 20% of internet marketing activities that will give you 80% of the results you need. I may even succumb to the frequent requests I get to offer consulting services (but don’t call me yet).

Stay tuned. . .

Gerry McGovern is clearly excited by the way the web has demystified the economy and empowered consumers. By tapping into their collective wisdom, customers and citizens can make better decisions and finally get big business and government to pay attention to them. As he opened his talk, he contrasted this informed society with the information society we’ve already heard so much about.

But that wasn’t the main point of the event. This presentation was about “customer carewords,” the very small batch of words that describe the main ideas and tasks that customers have come to your web site to learn about or accomplish. These words typically have a positive connotation, and they alway resonate with the customer’s gut impressions of your business. Figuring out what these words are and using them appropriately on your web site can result in big improvements in sales and other web site activities.

One of the biggest disconnects between customers and businesses is the language they each use. Companies have their internal lingo, and it all too rarely meshes with the way customers articulate their needs. Airline customers are looking for “cheap flights,” but airlines continue year after year to promote “low fares.” College students are looking for “career” help, but colleges are pushing “courses.” HR departments push “learning,” but employees are looking for “training.” (This, by the way, is why I’ve always favored search engine marketing over other forms of marketing - in order to effectively promote your web site to search engines and their users, you have to get out of your own head and into your customer’s.) Anyhow, the lesson here is, Use the language of your customer, not your internal jargon, to address your web site visitors.

Gerry has developed a three-step methodology to identify these customer carewords. His system is designed for big enterprises with tons of resources and the ability to poll large numbers of people, so it is of limited use to small businesses and independent professionals, but I’ll talk about it a bit anyway.

His method involves 1) brainstorming and other research to come up with a list of about 100 possible carewords, 2) polling a few hundred site users to see which words they think are most important (you’d be surprised, he says, at how many folks are willing to fill in 100 boxes to indicate their top word choices), and 3) analyzing the results. He says it’s remarkable how consistent the results are - you can pretty much always reliably identify the top 3-5 carewords with a sample size of 100 and the top 10 with a sample of 400. Companies (his clients include Toyota, Rolls-Royce, and the BBC) have seen huge improvements of click-through rates in on-site calls to action by replacing old copy with carewords discovered this way.

I talked with Gerry after the presentation and asked him if he could imagine a way to scale this methodology down for us small-business folks. He couldn’t (it’s survey data, after all, and you need numbers for that), but he’s open to possibly being polled about careword research best practices some time in the future. I urged him to explore the idea of developing a careword research tool, something analogous to WordTracker, but I got the sense that it won’t rise to the top of his to-do list any time soon ;>

A couple of ideas I took home from this talk:

1. Even if you can’t employ Gerry’s detailed methodology in the rigorous way he does, do what you can try to figure out what the “long neck” of your customer’s careword distribution is. That is, try to figure out the top carewords (the “long neck” is the left side of the typical keyword distribution chart that shows the most commonly used terms, the right side being the “long tail” of less-commonly-used terms) that matter to your customers. You’re probably already doing a lot of the stuff in his preparation step if you’re doing keyword research for search engine marketing campaigns (using WordTracker and other keyword research tools, evaluating competing businesses’ keyword strategies, looking at your web analytics data, etc.). Instead of a full-on poll, you can do mini-polls of a few customers at a time and begin to get a sense of which words keep percolating to the top. I’m going to buy Gerry’s book, Killer Web Content, and try to figure out other ways to bring his enterprise-level content strategies to the small-biz world.

2. The search terms that bring customers to a web site are often/usually different from these customer carewords. Someone searching for a “cheap hotel” won’t respond well to a landing page with a headline that says “Stay at Our Cheap Hotel.” Search terms get people to your site. Once they’re there you need to use customer carewords in your calls to action and other content to address their needs in the terms that they expect. Or, as Gerry put it, “Search gets them to your site; carewords take them through your site.”

Steve Krug, a usability expert, gave a presentation in Seattle tonight on web site usability entitled, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Perfect Web Page.” He says usability comes down to two main things:

1. Use effective “You Are Here” indicators to let readers know where they are in a site. These should be ubiquitous and consistent, and they should be LOUDER than parallel but less important elements on the page. See the way StumbleUpon uses “live” tabs that are brighter than other navigation choices and that blend into the main content background color for a good example of what he’s talking about.

2. Use prominent, well-placed page titles to let users know what the page is about. These titles should, of course, be consistent with the link you clicked on to get there (e.g., if you click on a link that says “Green Blocks” you should land on a page with a prominent title that says “Green Blocks”).

That’s it. Use those two elements consistently across your web site and your site visitors will happily navigate your site.

In the “Stump the Chump” part of the session, he took a look at my new web site, Bodywork U, which he found no major flaws with (though I did leave the presentation with a to-do list of ways to better apply his advice to the site).

In the Q&A session after his presentation, someone asked about the best way to use breadcrumb trails. He said that any one page on a site should have only one breadcrumb trail and that if you link to it from some other place on the site think of it as a cross reference. I love this observation. For one thing it’s the way I’ve always used breadcrumb trails. For another, I love that this now well-established usage works differently than the source of the analogy - that is, a real breadcrumb trail would be a list of the pages you had visited previously to get to the current page.

I also made a small-world connection with Steve after the session. He had mentioned that he went to Boston College, and I know a bunch of BC alumni from my East Coast days, so I asked and, what do you know, it turns out he’s good friends with my pal Jim in Boston.

I ran into a Google ad sales rep at a web usability presentation in Fremont tonight. He offered these tips for creating effective AdWords ad:

1. Use a call to action in your copy. This is a basic ad-writing concept, but it was good to be reminded of its importance.

2. Use dynamic keyword insertion. The syntax is {keyword:_________}. This will put the keyword that the searcher used to get to the page in your ad headline (if it fits; if not, your default copy will appear). This can dramatically improve your click-through rate. One caution I would add here. High click-through rates aren’t all you’re looking for from these ads. Be sure to monitor the conversion rate of these clicks, too. Reflecting the searcher’s interest by putting their words in your headline will certainly improve the CTR, but if your landing page doesn’t actually offer what they’re looking for, it may not get you the conversion you want.

3. Do a lot of A-B testing. Again, this is a pretty basic tactic for evaluating any ad campaign, but it’s so easy to do with AdWords, and the results can be so effective, that it’s good to be reminded to always have this technique in mind.

Yes, it’s completely crazy to do this even as I launch Bodywork U, my new massage education web site, but here it is: 80/20 Internet Marketing.

You know how when you have the exact same conversation approximately two thousand times you realize that maybe there’s something you need to do? In my case the conversation has been with friends who are independent professionals and small business owners, and it typically goes something like this: “Oh, you know about online marketing. Can you build my web site and get it listed at Google?” These are inevitably people I like, even love, and it kills me to leave them at the mercy of their web-developer nephews and other ill-prepared marketing advisers, but I simply don’t have the time to do internet marketing consulting these days (two full-time jobs is plenty).

Theoretically, I could help you get the kind of results that I have with the web site for my Seattle massage therapy practice, but it would cost several thousand dollars and take years. More to the point, it would drive me crazy and impoverish me to do this for you at rates that small businesses are typically able to pay, so the goal of this site is to empower you to do internet marketing yourself. I’ll do this by posting as much info here as I can on how to do the myriad of activities that comprise internet marketing, always focusing on how to do the 20% of work that will give you 80% of the internet marketing results you need.

Qualifications

Why should you pay attention to what I say here?

I’ve been intrigued by, and involved in, the small-business and indie-professional market ever since I developed a magazine prototype for “Home Business” magazine at a summer publishing course 20+ years ago. Since then I have built my own book publishing company, launched or been a principal in several start-up businesses, and run both an internet marketing consultancy and an independent massage practice. I have also hosted regular networking events for independent business people (the Fremont Noodle House Group) for the past ten years. Most of my friends are entrepreneurs, massage therapists, personal trainers, dance teachers, musicians, real estate agents, free-lance writers and editors, and computer consultants. So I know a fair amount about being an independent professional and running a small business.

I have been marketing online since 1989, browsing the web since before it was invented, building web sites since 1994, producing big database-driven publications since 1996, and practicing and writing about search engine optimization and other internet marketing topics since 1998. From 1998 to 2001 I was a senior manager at an internet start-up called workz.com, where I wrote about web design and development and internet marketing and managed several marketing initiatives. After that I was Director of Marketing at another start-up that delivered internet marketing services to small software development companies. And from 1997 to 2003 I consulted with a number of internet start-ups on business planning and search engine optimization. All of this experience has given me a broad and deep background in the business, creative, and technical aspects of online publishing and internet marketing.

What to expect

The idea/hope/plan is to share with you my internet marketing expertise in the form of informational and how-to articles, case studies, and random blog entries. I’m having a lot of fun getting back up to speed on state-of-the-art internet marketing as I launch Bodywork U, and I hope I’ll be able to quickly share many of my findings here for you to use. I’ll also try as often as possible to address the many questions and requests I get from friends (hang on, Michael - help is on the way ;> ) .