Time to conquer the world...

I wish all of the classes I’ve taken at the university level had me as excited as the ones I’m taking this semester.

The class I’m most excited about is my entrepreneurship class. I have the assignment to start a business from ground zero, using only my current resources and 1 dollar of capitol. The business that makes the most money gets 100% in the class. Whoever takes 2nd place gets a 99%, the next gets 98%, then 97% and so on. Guess who is determined to win…

I will be documenting my experiences here on a weekly basis. I’ll let you know what works, what doesn’t, and all of the other nitty gritties.

Right now I’m in the idea phase… I think I know what I want to do, I just need to find out who to do it.

Image courtesy of Businessweek

This weekend I was able to go to Vegas with some friends for the Blog World Expo. It was one of the best weekends of my life, and I spent most of it with a bunch of married mom bloggers. Don’t worry, I behaved.

One of the coolest things about being a blogger is that from time to time you get invited to do cool stuff because you’re willing to write about it.  Here’s an example where this paid off for me…

One of the highlights of the weekend, aside from meeting some of my marketing heroes, and networking with some amazing people, was that we were able to attend the Beatles themed Cirque du Soleil performance called “Love.”

I’ve seen Broadway productions before. I’ve also seen a few shows in Las Vegas.  But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show as interesting, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing as this one. The music, choreography and acrobatics were mind-blowing. Honestly, words really can’t describe how amazing the performance was.

I kind of feel like I cheated the system to get to see the show for the price of a blog post. But honestly, next time I go back, I’ll definitely be in line to purchase a ticket.  It’s just something that you can’t take in with one sitting.

The lesson here? Never discount working for trade, or ignoring people who can become your biggest fans. Next time I hear of someone going to Vegas, guess where I’m going to send them?

Companies are flocking to Social Media like tweens to a High School Musical convention. It’s viewed as the magic pill that transforms you from fool to cool faster than a PSA announcing you’re Zach Efron’s new BFF. The problem is that once companies realize that creating a profitable and reputable Social Media presence actually requires effort and communication, they give up.

If you want to separate your business from every one of your competitors in the social media sphere, you absolutely must be consistent!

Customers appreciate and respect reliability.  If you have commitment issues with your Twitter account (you go multiple days or weeks without even a text), you suffer from blog neglect (inconsistent and less-than useful posts), or you Facebook abandonment, you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re not willing to put in the effort to provide useful, interesting content on a consistent basis, you may want to reconsider using Social Media at all.

This week at Blog World, Social Media tycoons, Patrick O’Keefe; writer, web developer, entrepreneur, community administrator and author of ManagingCommunities.com, Amber Naslund; Director of Community at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding, Wayne Sutton; Partner at OurHashtag and blogger at SocialWayne.com and Robert Scoble; Managing Director at Building43.com at Rackspace and blogger at Scobleizer will be presenting on this and many other social media mistakes made by so many new media n00bs attempting to use this new forum to help their business. You would do well to pay attention to their mad internet skillz.

Last week, I presented at SMCUV with some great friends and incredibly smart marketers, Seth Jenks and Nate Kartchner. We presented strategies and tools to help build a reliable social media strategy and manage your online reputation.

Here’s a look at Nate’s presentation on tools to use to build solid a social media presence, as well as Seth’s list of tools to create an awesome listening tool to help you manage both positive and negative feedback being posted about you on the web.

I had the privilege of speaking on having a cohesive online and offline marketing strategy.  I’m a firm believer that if you want to get the most out of an online social media campaign, you must be practicing the same mentality in the analog world.  Empower your clients and employees to talk about you however they see fit. Give them reasons to talk about you positively. Make them your advocates.

Andy Sernovitz gives some great ideas on the principle of empowerment on his blog. If more companies followed his lead on this, they would have so much more success and loyalty it might just blow their minds.

It’s also important to know who your target audience is.  If you are selling hearing aids, Twitter may not be the best forum for you, as the majority of your market has only heard of the micro-blogging platform at random moments from their favorite Fair and Balanced news station.

You need to make sure you’re paying attention to the right people with the right influence, as Janet Meiners-Thaeler explains on her site. Find your niche of advocates who are willing to talk for you, endorse you and especially trust you. If you’re willing to do this, even if the group is small, your efforts will be rewarded.

Slides from my presentation are forthcoming…

Special thanks to Costa Vida Fred for sharing his time and expertise with us in the Q&A session. What a champ!

Jump on the bandwagon.

I’ve been having some discussions with a good friend of mine over the past few weeks regarding social media.  He just got back from a conference in Arizona.  The conference was full of CEO’s and corporate executives who were (in his words), “drooling over social media,” and he was not at all happy about it.

It seems that as social media has become a more mainstream method of advertising, corporate leaders have begun to  interpret the phenomenon as a magic moneymaking pill. They assume that if they have a Twitter account, or a Facebook fan page that the dollah-billz will just start pouring in.

If history has proven one thing, it’s that there are no magic bullets or secret formulas.  Adapting this incorrect opinion of social media is foolishness.

Social media cannot make a crappy product, a poorly run business, or a weak marketing plan successful.  It’s possible that your product is amazing, your company is groundbreaking and your marketing is visionary, and that social media still isn’t meant for you.

The catch 22 right now is that social media marketing is something that the early adapters don’t want to miss out on, but it’s so new that there are currently very few ways to measure ROI.

So, before committing to jumping on the social media bandwagon, make sure you have goals in mind and a defined value that you would like to glean from your efforts.  Without some sort of metric to track or goal to measure, your efforts in social media will be hollow and fruitless. And, just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should be doing it.

RSS Feeds are probably one of the most useful tools in the business industry.  Ironically, they are probably the most underused tool in the business industry.  Most people don’t even know what an RSS Feed is.  Now is the time to be enlightened. Are you excited? You should be.

If you’ve ever seen this image () on a blog, website, or even your Outlook dashboard, you have seen an RSS Feed subscription button.  RSS Feeds are basically electronic magazine subscriptions.  They allow you to keep tabs on the most current information whether it be your mom’s craft blog or the leading website in your industry.

You can subscribe to RSS Feeds using an RSS Feed Reader (which is free and requires little to no registration). Every time the website you’re subscribed to publishes something new, you will be notified of the new stuff in your Feed Reader. The perks?  You don’t have to memorize your favorite 100 website URL’s and manually bounce to them throughout the day wondering if they have published anything new in an attempt to stay current.  Just keep an eye on your feed!

The two most popular RSS Feed Readers are probably Outlook and Google Reader. (I prefer Google Reader because it contains some really cool features that most other Feed Readers don’t… but use what’s most convenient and easy for you. This is all about making things simple!)

Outlook's RSS Feed Reader

All you need to do to subscribe to a feed is watch for that little orange icon shown above (there’s one in the upper right hand corner of this site), and click on it.  That will take you a page that looks much like this:

RSS Feed Subscription Page

Select the reader that you would like to receive the RSS feed, and hit the “Subscribe Now” button.  Easy as that.  Now, what are you waiting for! Jump on that! Start subscribing. Just don’t get addicted.

Last week, we covered the basics of account setup for a solid PPC campaign.  I said that perhaps the biggest mistake most people make when setting up their PPC campaigns is a poor campaign structure.  If that’s the case, the 2nd biggest mistake people make is poor choice in keywords for their Ad Groups.

The key to choosing the best keywords for your Adwords Ad Groups is to focus on the Long Tail.

The Long Tail

The basic idea behind the Long Tail theory is that every industry contains a handful of super popular widgets (whether it be songs, movies, books, MP3 players or keywords).  These super popular widgets (we’ll call them the ‘hits’) saturate the market, and are consistently selling in high quantities. These hits comprise the head of the long tail graph shown above.  For iTunes, they are the top 100 songs that are purchased millions of ties in a given year. For Netflix, they are the movies that get rented over and over and over.  And in PPC, they are the super-broad keywords that everyone wants to show up for on the SERP’s.

The head of the tail is great… but in PPC, when you get thousands of people bidding on the same keyword, it can get very pricey. Trust me you don’t want to be paying $5+ per click… especially when there is an alternative.

Ironically, companies like Netflix and iTunes, (where the hits are easily measured and understood) more money is made by the accumulation of long tail products than those at the head.  It’s true!  Sure iTunes sells a bajillion copies of Brittany Spears latest single, but the number of bands down that long tail is so long (down to the bands that only sell 1 song) that they blow the hits out of the water.  Pretty cool, eh?

In Pay Per Click advertising, the same idea holds true.  Sure, specific ‘long tail’ keywords have a much smaller search volume than those at the head, but when someone searches for “Blue Schwinn 10-speed bicycle” and they find an ad for “Blue Schwinn 10-speed bicycles” you have suddenly put yourself in a very good position. Obviously this person knows exactly what they want, obviously you are giving it to them.  Your keyword might get clicked on two times a month, but you know what? Each time it’s by somebody who is interested in exactly what you are providing, and it’s costing you pennies instead of dollars!

Put enough long tail keywords in your campaigns, and you are going to find your conversions and your click through rates go through the roof. Your cost per acquisition along with your cost per click should plummet, and you, my friends, will be sitting pretty.

If you’re looking for some help chosing the right keywords for your campaign, here is a great step-by-step article loaded with tips and tools to help you out.

Save Money on Your PPC

I’ve been in the internet marketing industry for a few years now. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients in every facet of the industry, and I have noticed a pattern, especially in clients who want help with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  They have tried for several months, or even years to make PPC a successful form of advertising with a positive ROI for their business… but it was to no avail.  They are frustrated, and often times infuriated because it just isn’t working for them.

Over the next few weeks, I plan on posting about some of the most common and easily avoided mistakes when attempting to manage the PPC campaigns for your company… especially if you’re working on a small budget. (PPC campaigns with small budgets are my specialty.)

The first and most common mistake in a campaign that is not performing well can be attributed (almost 100% of the time) to campaign structure.

The most efficient PPC campaigns with high CTRs, a low CPC and high conversion rate almost always follow the same pattern.

1. Campaigns and Ad Groups must be clearly and specifically labeled. Currently, if you log into your Adwords account and find between 1 and 3 ad groups, and they are named “Ad Group 1,” “Ad Group 2,” and “Ad Group 3,” and they are all part of “Campaign 1,” you can be absolutely sure that you are not using PPC in a way that maximizes your results.
2. Each Ad Group should contain a small handful of highly specific and relevant keywords. If you are selling red bicycles and blue bicycles, don’t put them in an Ad Group labeled ‘Bicycles’ and move on. Break it down! Make an Ad Group for blue bicycles, and one for red bicycles.  If you have different brands of red bicycles, then break down your red bicycle into multiple, smaller Ad Groups.
3. Each Ad Group needs to contain 2-3 slightly distinct ads that are relevant to (and hopefully including) the keywords in the Ad Group they pertain to.  Make sure each ad contains a call to action! The reason for multiple ads is to perform A/B testing or multivariate testing.  Almost always, one ad results in a much higher conversion rate than the other.  Knowing which ads work best for your campaign will help you to maximize your ROI.
4. Each ad and keyword needs to be sending whoever clicks on your ad to a highly relevant landing page. This is probably the most consistently made mistake in the PPC industry.  You trigger your highly specific ad about blue K2 mountain bikes with very specific keywords only to drop your potential client on your homepage, implying, “Good luck! Hope you have a good time finding the product you thought we were going to send you to!” If you’re advertising a blue K2 mountain bike, send them to the blue K2 mountain bike page on your site, for heavens sake!

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but campaign structure is the foundation to a successful and lasting PPC campaign that can generate significant revenue for your business. The Adwords Editor is a great PPC tool that can help you fix a messy campaign, or quickly and efficiently create a new one.  If you’re just starting PPC, save yourself the trouble, and just set things up right the first time.

The Pizza Factory

One of my favorite things to see is a local company reach out to communicate and reward their customers… especially when it involves social media.  This past week I saw just such a thing.

Local restaurant, The Pizza Factory in Provo, Utah started a Twitter account.  They found and followed all the locals in no time at all.  Then, suddenly, they started Tweeting about some incredible giveaways.  Every day, about twice a day, Pizza Factory managers were giving away free large pizzas, family size pastas and entire pies for dessert.

The boys here at the office picked up on the scent of free food and decided to test the offer.  Sure enough, of the 100 or so followers that receive The Pizza Factory’s tweets, they were the first to arrive on location to collect the winnings.  They ordered their free Chicken Alfredo Pizza (which I know from first hand experience is delicious) and were ready to walk out the door when the manager asked them if they would like to claim the other two prizes that had been announced earlier that day, (a family size pasta dish and a fruit pie) because nobody had come by to claim them.

Apparently, despite offering to give away entire family-size meals, few people were actually coming by to try to claim the prizes.  This can be attributed to a few different reasons.

1. Free food is tempting. Very tempting. But if I’m not guaranteed the food, do I want to chance going in to claim it? What if the only reason I’m going is the fact that I’m going to get a free meal? Imagine the shame of turning around to explain the situation to your hungry family and friends as you walk out of the establishment. Crappy thought, no?
2. There is an unwritten law of social media stating that the main purpose of social networking is increasing communication between two parties with a mutual bond or interest.  Currently The Pizza Factory is not talking directly to anyone. They’re not engaging their fans. And, they’re not doing what is possibly the most important thing…
3. They aren’t getting anything out of it!  What good is a marketing campaign if it has significant value to your customers, but very little or no value to you?  Let me answer that for you. It is not good.

So, rather than put effort into giving your product away, why not design a quick marketing campaign that gives away food on a daily or weekly basis for people who blog about you and link to your site. (SEO 1o1: Google likes you more when you have links pointing to your site.)  This encourages involvement of lots of people at once, and doesn’t put a strange and insecure time constraint on the contest, ie: Will I make it in time to claim the prize before everyone else?

All in all, props to The Pizza factory for making a positive move in the right direction.  With a little tweaking, not only will they have great interaction with a thriving fan base who loves delicious pizza, but they will also be getting something out of it! (I’d blog for free pizza any day.)

By the way, here are some deliciously free Breadtwists on me.  Thank me later!