Niche Marketing Matters

Many people cling to an old fashioned notion that the web is easy and cheap. The new reality is that the web is hard and expensive.

The first goal of a website is to be found and that means building a website that is optimized for search. With Google commanding a 70% share of the search market, the only thing that really matters in search is pleasing Google.

Those beautiful flash-based websites of two years ago are now almost worthless, if you want your customers to find you with key words. Google sees a flash page as a blank page. Instead, Google wants key word rich text and lots of it.

What Google really loves is SEO copy. SEO (search engine optimization) copy needs to be written by an SEO engineer who is also a journalist. Gone are the days of the website owner writing his or her own copy —- to be competitive on the web now requires special writing skills that only a search engine could love.

Gone are the days when your brother in law could design your website over a weekend. Being found on the web today now means appearing in the first three pages of an organic search; page four almost doesn’t get opened. Your brother in law cannot help you anymore.

You now need an SEO savvy web team that understands search and can continually optimize your site for search. Be prepared. Being competitive on the web is now hard and expensive.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2010 All rights reserved.

Google is the big dog of search on the web. No other firm really counts. Here is why.

ComScore, a leading score keeper on the web, just released its tabulation of the U.S. search marketplace. According to ComScore, “In September 2009, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 64.9 percent search market share. In September 2009 there were over 13.8 billion searches.”

What this means to website owners is that the other search engines don’t really matter. To be found on the web, you need to build a website that is Google friendly. In the search engine optimization community, SEO experts jokingly suggest that websites need lots of “spider food” to feed the hungry search engines and to keep them coming back for more.

Spider food includes inbound links, SEO copy, proper tagging, searchable URLs, and lots of fresh, original content. Google spiders can never get enough to eat and their tastes can change. Beware of offering the same menu as last year.

Remember that only Google matters when it comes to search.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

A good domain name should have the following elements:

1. It should be easy to spell. Avoid hyphens, double letters or funny spellings. Hyphens get confused with underscores. Double letters can cause confusion. Unusual or clever spelling gets us all in trouble.

2. Domains ending in .com are preferred but .net and .us are becoming more common. This ending suffix is called a domain extension.

3. Two word combinations are preferred. Longer combinations can be hard to remember. I regret to inform you that it seems that almost every two word URL has been taken. Three words may be the only way to go.

4. Made up words and acronyms have been the rage—think Google, Yahoo!, and Zappos. Still the cost of creating a brand for a name like this is astronomical. Interestingly enough Google gives higher rank to URLs that use searchable words. For example, www.nichemarketingmatters.com contains search friendly terms.

5. Short is always better, but good luck with that. It is not easy with .com prefixes.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

When choosing colors for your website, a good “rule of thumb” is three colors are best. Three hues are all it takes to create a mood or atmosphere. More colors than that and your site could end up looking more like a kaleidoscope.

For most websites, the goal of color is to help communicate the mood or feel of the website. Rich browns, oranges, and reds make you feel at home. Black makes a dramatic background and has an artistic feel; you will find photography sites using black for this special touch. Light blue and light green make soothing background colors, but this color scheme is over used and has begun to feel pedestrian.

Logos and accent colors will jump off the page if they are red, orange, or yellow. Yellow is considered to be the most intense color and can also be the most offensive color. Be sure to use these colors sparingly.

Bold color schemes use three complementary or opposite colors which contrast each other. For example, the colors red, white, and blue are opposite colors; they use high contrast to create an energetic appeal. White can make a simple background color with red and blue as accent colors; for a good example go look at the Google homepage.

Industry standards may dictate a norm or standard for color use. For example, when we think of natural or organic products, many website will use greens, browns, and tans to communicate earthiness and a back-to-basics feel.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

If the internet is the Wild West, then search engines are the gunslingers—they decide what sites will be visited or not. If the search engines don’t like your site, you just won’t get found.

If you look at the market share of the search engines, Google is by far the most dominant. The market share breakout for 2007 is as follows:

1. Google 68%
2. Yahoo 16.9%
3. Live Search (MSN) 10.1%
4. AOL 2.0%
5. Ask 1.5%

In fact, these five search engines account for 98% of the market.

A spider is the name of the software robots that crawl around the web looking for and evaluating websites. Google has two main spiders. Googelbot is the spider that records the location of the websites and the content that is found. The second spider is Freshbot which looks for updates to websites. Generally, Google spiders will visit the average site twice a month.

The reason that this is relevant is that 80% of Google users prefer organic results for a search rather than using a directory or direct entry of the URL or other means. So, the question becomes, how do you maximize your Google ranking?

Here are a few things that you can do:

- Page Tags: Every page needs to be named with the appropriate Meta tag names.
- Page Names: Every page on your site needs to be named with keywords.
- Relevance: Relevance is how closely the keywords in your copy match the keywords in a search.
- Keyword Density: The new rule of thumb is 7 keywords per 100 words of copy.
- Inbound Links: A link from a site outside of your site that directs traffic to your site.
- Relevant and Fresh Content: Daily updates are best. This explains why blogs are so effective at increasing rank.

Manage these things and your Google rank will rise.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

The language of the web sometimes resembles Swahili and this is especially true with domain names. Coming up with a domain name with a .com suffix that matches your company name or offering is darn near impossible.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is should your business or product name match your URL? Conventional wisdom says yes, yet if you do a Google search for some of your favorite brands you will discover that many do not match. For example, if you enter the word “iPod” you get directed to www.apple.com/itunes. Ok, that makes sense.

Most people will do a Google search for a company or product instead of entering a URL. I have seen estimates that up to 80% of companies are found by web searches instead of directly entering a URL. There is a good argument that a perfect match does not really matter much anymore.

My personal take is that it makes sense to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. It is easier for your customers to remember. Now here is the hard part. Just about every two and three word combination for a .com URL is already taken. Don’t believe me? Go to Godaddy.com and enter any three word combo and you will discover that these URLs are already owned by someone else. Amazingly, this applies to the .net, .org, etc. They are almost all gone.

Unbelievable but true. This explains the trend of inventing company or product names. For example, www.Kijiji.com is an online classified ad website that competes with venerable Craigslist. “Kijiji” is Swahili for the word “village”. If you don’t believe me, go visit www.kijiji.com.

An alternative to Swahili or fabricating words is the use of long domain names. Kijiji could have used www.onlineclassifiedadwebsitethatcompeteswithCraigsList.com. I didn’t check but I am pretty sure this URL is available—cheap. But, can your customers remember it?

There is some evidence that longer URLs are easier to remember than single word inventions. Yet, it took me a few years to quit confusing Yahoo! with Wahoo; I just love their fish tacos or is it their pay-per-click advertising? No matter.

Hyphens or underscores can help you create shorter domain names but they confuse me and where is the underscore key on the key board anyway? Maybe you feel the same way.

Another workaround you can try is to add “the” to the beginning of a URL. I think this trick works if your business is known as “The BirdDog Group” which is the name of my publishing company. In this case, “the” has meaning and is logical.

The final challenge is to choose between .com, .net, .org, and the many others now available. Candidly, .com still has cache and is the suffix of choice for businesses. For those that do enter a URL in a search, 99 times out 100 they will enter it with a .com prefix. The choice for you is made easier since most .com URLs are already taken.

I wish you best in your domain name search. Or, as we say in Swahili, “Hakuna matata” which means no worries.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Good negotiators are prepared. It first begins with knowing what you want. Additionally, good negotiators anticipate the wants and needs of the other party.

You need to ask yourself a few basic questions:

1. What do you wish for?
2. What do you deserve?
3. What must you have?
4. When might you walk away from the negotiation?

Next, you need to anticipate the wants and needs of the other party:

1. What do they wish for?
2. What do they deserve?
3. What must they have?
4. When might they walk away from the negotiation?

These questions help you define your objectives in the negotiation. Answering these questions will help you understand the other party’s objections.

You might want to consider the help of a third party to help you assess your knowledge of the other party’s wants and desires. We all have blind spots which can cause us to not see and hear properly. You will want to choose someone whom you respect for their insight and objectivity. I have found that most third parties will identify issues that you have overlooked.

Only after you know these answers can you negotiate well.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

As a follow up to my last blog about driving web traffic with off-line activities, here are some ideas about how you might drive traffic to your website using the web.

1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising. This can be done with Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many others. If done right, this is cheap and effective.

2. Article Marketing. Write short articles for article directory sites such as EzineArticles.com. This improves search rank and creates frequency in a search. This is one of my secrets to success in web marketing.

3. Free Classified Ads. Post ads on free classified ads sites, such as Craigslist and Kijiji. These sites get incredible traffic and you will be found.

4. Blogging. My web business strategy is based on this method. It really works. Write with key words.

5. YouTube. YouTube is coming of age. A clever video can drive monster traffic to your site. If you have not been to YouTube recently, you will be blown away with the volume of content. It is no longer just a novelty site—you can do serious research there.

6. Forums and Social Networks: Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or “groups” on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Both forums and social networks are great web tools that have come of age, but you have to be a player to get the benefits. Get involved.

7. Blog Comments. Visit blogs that cover your industry or space and leave comments with your URL. Position yourself as a thought leader by commenting back to other bloggers.

8. Email Newsletters. While you may forward these to existing customers, they will get forwarded to buddy lists. This is viral marketing as its best.

9. Content Aggregators. Submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators. There are many others. Do a search for content aggregators.

10. Blog Sites. Subscribe and post to blog sites like Digg and Delicious.

This is just a small list of the on-line activities that will that drive traffic to your site.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

When you think about methods to drive visitor traffic to your website, I bet you mostly think of web related activities. These on-line activities are great, but don’t overlook the offline methods which can be surprisingly effective.

Here are few ideas:

Signage- If you have a bricks and mortar business, include your URL on the outdoor sign.

Invoices- Always include your website address on your printed bills. Make it easy for your customer to find you.

Promotional Items- T-shirts, coffee mugs and pens are frequent choices for logos but be sure to include your URL.

Bumper Stickers- I hate these, but they work too.

Post Flyers- For a small business, the bulletin board at the community center, church, or school is a great way to remind people about your site.

Business Cards- This is a no brainer, but frequently small business owners forget to put their URLs on their cards.

Tattoos- For those of you who are really committed to driving traffic to your website, consider getting a conspicuous URL on your forearm? Count me out on this one.

Leave Fliers - Leave fliers for website at your local university library, restaurants, or stores.

Letterheads and Stationery - Create a letterhead to use for all your off-line communication. List your website address on all forms of company correspondence.

Outdoor Advertising- Advertise on bus benches and billboards.

Newspaper Ads- They’re often pretty cheap and local papers can have a circulation of thousands.
Wear Your URL- Make a custom hat or shirt with your URL on it.

Stickers – Stickers can be very useful especially if you sell to a young demographic.

Direct Mail- You can print up some postcards (with your web address very visible on them) and send them to specially selected customers.

Press Releases- Send a press release to all of the media outlets in your area, including newspapers, radio stations, and television stations.

Printed Newsletters- With a newsletter, companies can communicate with existing and potential customers on a regular basis.

Wrap Your Car- Some people sell advertising space on their car to make some money but you can advertise your own website on your car and it really works and drives traffic to your website. You can find car wrapping services in your city and pay them to wrap up your car. The rear windshield is the most important part.

Give Lectures- Target city community centers, schools, colleges and universities.

Letters- Write letters to the editor. Just have a very small byline at the bottom of your article and introduce your website. If you are a good writer, it will be a great way to drive free traffic to your website.

As you can see, there many off-line ways to drive traffic to your website. I think you get the picture.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Getting found on the Internet is what really matters in web marketing. No matter how great your offering is, you are nowhere if they cannot find you. To be found you need “rank” and “frequency”.

According to marketing writer Seth Godin, when there are 2 million Google matches for a search, the number one match gets 10,000 times more traffic as the number 40. With an average of 10 search results per page, this means you literally must be found on the first page of the search results. This is called “rank”.

“Frequency” is the number of times you are found in a search. For instance, do a Google search for “Pepsi” which is a unique brand name; be sure to filter it by putting quotation marks (i.e. “”) outside the word Pepsi. On the first page of the search results you will see that Pepsi gets multiple matches or hits. Thus, the searcher sees the brand name multiple times which increases brand awareness.

Getting both rank and frequency is done by doing web marketing basics well. They include:

1. Article Marketing- Submitting articles for distribution by article directories which published on e-zines.
2. Blogging- Frequency of blog submissions will please the search engine spiders.
3. Pay-per-click advertising- This costs real money, but it works.
4. Keywords- Writing with words that searchers will use to found you.
5. Meta Tags- “Under the hood” web code which is used by the spiders to remember where you are.
6. Fresh Website Content- Maybe the number one criteria in the search engine algorithms.
7. Linking- Sharing links with other sites that list your site.
8. Relevance- Offering something that people want. Duh.
9. Web directories- Getting registered on all pertinent directories, paid or not.

While there may be many other web marketing best practices, if you do these I can nearly guarantee that your website will get both rank and frequency.

And, you will be found.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.