It’s been a long time since I put up a music post. I was pickin my guitar tonight and I couldn’t resist making a video. This is my acoustic cover of ‘Heart of Life’ by John Mayer. I’m a big believer that your blog should be a reflection of your personality (not just business). I hope you all enjoy it.

  • Share/Bookmark

It’s no secret that the way we bring products to market is changing drastically.  I just returned from a keynote by noted social media expert Jason Falls.  He argued that search will become much more important in the next few years with the advent of semantic and local search options.

While I agree with some of this, I think that the #1 way to ensure that your product or service will succeed is to…

Build the marketing into the product and create a new problem for your potential customers.

What the hell does that mean?

Let’s use the iPhone as an example.  Back in February I bought an iPhone even though I already had a smartphone that performed all the necessary tasks I needed like email, internet access, etc.  I bought an iPhone in spite of this, because it was so freakin cool that it changed my perspective.

I no longer had a smartphone problem, I had an ‘I need an iPhone’ problem.

Suppose your company is called ABC Widgets and you sell widgets.  You solve people’s widget problem, and that’s fine, except now you have to compete with every other widget manufacturer on the planet.

Now let’s back up and say that ABC widgets sells super-exclusive (and expensive) widgets that CHANGE what the market demands.  All of the sudden people don’t have ‘widget’ problems, they NEED ABC Widgets (even though you charge more)

The marketing is built into the product.  You become your market.  And you have all the competitive advantage you’ll ever need.  Now all you have to do is keep doing it.

As marketing changes and it becomes harder and harder to gain visibility brand recognition is your key to survival.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  • Share/Bookmark

You should INVEST it.

The #1 issue that I face day in and day out is companies that look at marketing as a cost of doing business.  Here’s a reality check.  Toilet paper is a cost of doing business.  Office equipment is a cost of doing business.  Marketing is an investment in the continued profitability of your company.

Lots of people have said there is no way to measure ROI in social media.  It’s true that it does take some creative thinking to get reliable estimates of your return.  It is VERY difficult to get exact numbers, and I don’t know if that’s even necessary.  

Break it up into little bites that are easier to swallow.

Look at each activity you’re doing.  Break it down.  Look at all the benefits and drawbacks analytically.  You don’t need exact numbers to tell if you’re getting something out of it.  

The thing to remember is to look at where your marketing budget is going every month and look for places to cut back and areas to increase time and money.

Here are some invalid reasons to pursue a marketing channel.

  1. We’ve always done it.
  2. Everyone else is doing it.
  3. It probably works as well as anything else.

And here are some good reasons.

  1. It’s making us $x per month.
  2. It’s saving us this many  hours per month.
  3. It’s helping us connect with this many customers per month.
  4. It’s getting our salespeople in front of this many prospects per month.
  5. It’s making the phone ring this many times per month.
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  • Share/Bookmark

salamander

I was sitting outside having dinner last night at a Bloomington, Indiana eatery (Upland Brewery) and I noticed this peculiar creature crawling up the side of the building.  It looks like either a lizard or a salamander.  The problem I have is that it was much bigger than I’ve ever scene an Indiana salamander get, and I’ve never heard of lizards like this occurring this far North.

I’d say it was about 6-8 inches long.  Its skin didn’t look like it was very slimy like you’d expect in a salamander.  I snapped a few pictures with my iPhone camera.  Can anyone tell me what kind of animal this is?  

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  • Share/Bookmark

I’ve had several conversations lately (both online and off) about Search Traffic and whether or not it’s the best way to acquire customers.  My argument has typically been that blogs are already search optimized and that you WILL win searches by blogging frequently about what you do.  For this reason I’ve be known to say that it makes more sense to focus on a social strategy since you’re going to win searches anyway.

With that said, I DO think that it’s important to set yourself up to win as many searches as possible.  Here are a few things to tweak on your WordPress blog to give it a little more search juice.

  • A Great SEO Plugin – I used to use the All in One SEO Pack, but yesterday I found a new plugin called the Platinum SEO pack which had more options.  Both plugins will help you make sure that you’ve got your Meta information in order and that your site is being crawled correctly.
  • Do you have a Sitemap? – Google does a pretty good job of crawling and indexing wordpress blogs on it’s own, but just to make sure, I always install the Google sitemap plugin.  It automatically generates and updates a valid .xml file every time you write a post while pinging the major search engines to let them know there is new content.
  • Do you know the hirarchy? Remember, there is a specific order to the importance of different areas and tags on each page and they all interact with wordpress in different ways.  Here’s how I rank them in order of importance.
  1. Your URL – Make sure you set up your permalink structure so that there are keywords in the url’s of your post pages.  You need to include /%postname%/ as part of the equation  and title your posts with keywords that you want to rank for.
  2. <title> tags – for post pages, this will be a combination of your blog title and the post title.  Again, you should title your posts strategically.
  3. <h1> – On post pages this will be the title of your post (starting to see the pattern).
  4. <h2> – Your post titles on the home page will be scripted as <h2> elements.
  5. <h3> – <h6> – I don’t see these used much in wordpress, but feel free to use them within your posts to emphasize important keyword-rich statements.
  • Does Meta matter? – Depends on who you ask.  It’s easy to get it right so I see no reason not to spend a little extra time.  My SEO plugin lets me use Tags and Categories as Meta keywords, so everything works together.
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  • Share/Bookmark
footer
Web Design and Marketing by Tribeswell | Bloomington, IN | Sitemap