Tag Archives ⇒ niche marketing

Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

September 7, 2009
· Martin Kelley

A poten­tial client recent­ly came to me with an exist­ing site. It cer­tain­ly was slick: the home­page fea­tured a Flash ani­ma­tion of telegenic young pro­fes­sion­als culled from a stock pho­to ser­vice, psuedo-jazz tech­no music, and words sweep­ing in from all sides sell­ing you the com­pa­ny’s ser­vice. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the page had no use­ful con­tent, no call-to-action and no Google PageR­ank. It was an expen­sive design, but I did­n’t need to look at the track­ing stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynam­ic, some­thing that will attract cus­tomers and inter­act with them. Here’s five tips for build­ing a self-marketing website!

One: Use­ful Con­tent for your Tar­get Audience
Give vis­i­tors a rea­son to come to the site. Text-rich, chang­ing con­tent is essen­tial. In prac­ti­cal­i­ty, this means installing a blog and writ­ing posts every few weeks. You’ll see mea­sures like “key­word rel­e­van­cy” increase instant­ly as excerpt­ed text shows up on the home­page. Add videos and pho­tos if your com­pa­ny or team has that exper­tise, but remem­ber: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away some­thing valu­able or useful
Many smart mar­ket­ing sites fea­ture some free give­away right on the home­page: a use­ful quiz, pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis, a PDF how-to guide­book. A builder I worked with went to the trou­ble of post­ing dozens of floor plans & pic­tures to their web­site and com­pil­ing them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your con­tact infor­ma­tion to get it. Once the free mate­r­i­al has been com­piled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask your­self the Three User Questions!
It’s amaz­ing how focused the mind gets when you actu­al­ly sit down to define goals. Just about every web­site can ben­e­fit from this three-step exercise:

  1. Who is the tar­get audience?
  2. What would draw them to the site? 
  3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group togeth­er to through your web­site page by page these ques­tions. Brain­storm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quan­tifi­able actions do you want vis­i­tors to take? It might well just be the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of a con­tact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small busi­ness­es now get a lot of their cus­tomers from their web­sites. Your web­site is an essen­tial piece of your mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­i­ty and you need to be smart about it. Com­pile togeth­er your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alter­nate designs incor­po­rat­ing the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Web­site Opti­miz­er to put the alter­na­tives through their paces. Which one “con­verts” bet­ter, i.e., which design gets you high­er per­cent­ages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve fin­ished a test, move on to the next brain­storm­ing idea and imple­ment it. Always be testing!

An exten­sive series of tests of one site I worked on dou­bled it’s con­ver­sion rate: imag­ine your com­pa­ny dou­bling its inter­net sales? It is com­plete­ly worth spend­ing the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Pro­fes­sion­al Help
If you need to hire a pro­fes­sion­al to help you through this process you’ll almost cer­tain­ly get your mon­ey’s worth! A recent projects cost the cus­tomer $6000 but I was able to doc­u­ment sav­ings of $100,000 per year in his pub­lic­i­ty costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Con­sul­tants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a hon­est and com­pe­tent pro­fes­sion­al web pub­lic­i­ty consultant.

Nonprofits and Social Media

May 5, 2009
· Martin Kelley

I’d like to talk today about social media and non­prof­its. I’ve had a cou­ple of inter­est­ing projects late­ly help­ing non­prof­its put togeth­er Face­book Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twit­ter sites. I think this is an excit­ing way to reach out to audi­ence members. 

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists – tens of thou­sands of users, seg­ment­ed all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seem­ing not spam.

Face­book Pages

A new era is com­ing with social media. A big change is Face­book Pages. These are geared toward adver­tis­ers although you don’t need to have a Face­book adver­tis­ing cam­paign to use them. In March 2009, Face­book redesigned Pages to act much more like typ­i­cal user pro­files: there’s a wall, there’s an activ­i­ty stream, and you can asso­ciate dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions with them. 

Two things about Pages are excit­ing. One is the activ­i­ty stream. Peo­ple who sign up as “fans” of your Page see what you’re putting out in their indi­vid­ual stream. They’ll log into Face­book and see that mes­sages like “Jen just got engaged!” or “Joe is hav­ing a bad hair day” and that your orga­ni­za­tion is hav­ing some great event com­ing up this week­end. You’re seen in the asso­ci­a­tion of hap­py news from their friends. It’s dif­fer­ent from a spam­mish email because it’s com­ing in with the con­text of their friends, which is very pow­er­ful for publicity.

The oth­er nice thing about Face­book Pages is that they’re pub­lic. A lot of por­tions of Face­book aren’t but mak­ing Pages pub­lic means you can point to them from your web­site or oth­er social media campaigns.

I think Face­book fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we’ll be able to reach out to peo­ple. I’m very excit­ed about this because there’s all sorts of easy mul­ti­me­dia pos­si­bil­i­ties. You can inte­grate with Youtube, with Twit­ter, with pod­casts, etc., embed­ded for fans of your Face­book page to see as it’s hap­pen­ing. This is much more excit­ing than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more inter­ac­tive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have con­ver­sa­tions on your sites.

Inti­mate, imme­di­ate, engaging

What the smart non­prof­its are going to be doing is a lot of post­ing in a style that’s authen­tic and inti­mate and less wor­ried about being slick than we’ve typ­i­cal­ly been.

What I would love to see non­prof­its doing is to get seri­ous about video. I’m not talk­ing about fan­cy video, haul­ing in video­g­ra­phers for six months shoot­ing a three minute slick com­mer­cial. Get an inex­pen­sitve video recorder and start doing five minute inter­views with the peo­ple your orga­ni­za­tion serves. This will dif­fer depend­ing on your orga­ni­za­tion’s focus. One advan­tage to sim­ple videos is that you can con­vince even the busiest of your inter­vie­wees to take out a few min­utes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or direct­ly to Face­book video. It does­n’t mat­ter where they host­ed but you’ll have to make sure they’re embed­ded on your Face­book fan page. 

Build­ing our Face­book Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you’re send­ing out or through oth­er sources. Twit­ter is a great way of direct­ing peo­ple to what’s hap­pen­ing: you send out a 140-character “tweet” with an inter­est­ing tease about the video you’ve pro­duced and a link to the Face­book fan page.

The whole goal is to get Face­book fans. Once you’re in as a fan, you show up in their activ­i­ty streams. All the fans get to see the events you’re orga­niz­ing, the videos. If you have extra tick­ets to an upcom­ing event, post about it because peo­ple will see it imme­di­ate­ly. It’s a won­der­ful way to reach peo­ple quick­ly in a way that’s not as intru­sive as email (I sus­pect a lot of younger users are actu­al­ly check­ing their Face­book home­page more often than their emails!).

The New Non­prof­it Outreach

I’d love to see a lot more of these inti­mate, almost home-made videos going up on Face­book fan pages and using fan pages as a way of con­nect­ing with peo­ple. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strong­ly encour­age non­prof­its to use all of these these media to rein­force their mes­sage and to find new ways to reach their audi­ences in a much more engag­ing, inti­mate way. 

— —  —  — –

Mar­tin Kel­ley is a web devel­op­er and social media con­sul­tant spe­cial­iz­ing in non­prof­its. This post is a loose tran­scrip­tion of his video, Non­prof­its and Social Media. This essay is also avail­able on the Mar​tinKel​ley​.com Face­book fan page.

Extending customer relationships through social media

April 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Over on my O’Reil­ly Media blog, I’ve writ­ten “Will Face­book (all but) replace cor­po­rate web­sites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media web­sites are going. Here’s a taste:

The goal of most web­sites is to extend­ed the inter­ac­tion with the vis­i­tor beyond this one vis­it: we seek to sell them a prod­uct, join our mail­ing list, buy tick­ets to our event or sub­scribe to us in a news read­er. Face­book is quick­ly becom­ing the most impor­tant email list and news read­er. If it con­tin­ues to inno­vate (and bor­row ideas from inno­v­a­tive com­peti­tors) it could quick­ly become a major com­mer­cial por­tal as well. As its adop­tion rate climbs with­in the ranks of our tar­get audi­ences, it becomes an effec­tive way to extend vis­i­tor rela­tion­ship and build more inti­mate brand identities.

This will change com­pa­ny’s inter­ac­tions with cus­tomers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time inter­ac­tion. This can take many forms – sta­tus updates, cal­en­dars, videos – but the empha­sis will be on imme­di­a­cy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass mar­ket­ing to a one-on-one respon­sive back and forth. Smart mar­keters will think less in terms of sell­ing and more in terms of rela­tion­ship build­ing. Ana­lyt­ics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to mea­sure the suc­cess of these rela­tion­ships. The reces­sion is bring­ing a new urgency for mea­sur­able results and might actu­al­ly help shift cor­po­rate and non-profit bud­gets away from high-price opin­ions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how orga­ni­za­tions adapt to social medi­a’s evolv­ing role.

I am the King of Folksonomy

September 1, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I just relaunched my per­son­al blog a few days ago, mov­ing it from non​vi​o​lence​.org/​m​a​r​t​ink to quak​er​ran​ter​.org. I plan to write a whole big piece about it in the near future. But my access logs just picked up some­thing amazing.

An
impor­tant part of the redesign was an auto­mat­ic key­word generator.
Posts were run through a script that auto­mat­i­cal­ly pulled out keywords
from the text. My 2003 arti­cle, Going all the way with Mov­able Type gen­er­at­ed the fol­low­ing tags, which appear as links after the post:

Fol­low­ing the links takes you to similarly-tagged arti­cles. At least
that’s the con­ceit. When you fol­low a tag’s link you’re sim­ply doing a
site search for that key­word. A lit­tle htac­cess rewrite mag­ic is making
the result look like it’s a sta­t­ic cat­e­go­ry page.

“Fine and well” you’re think­ing, “big deal.” Well, here’s what’s
cool. There are 225 entries on the Quak­er­Ran­ter blog. Google’s just
gone through and indexed the site and is now claim­ing it con­tains 1300 pages.
Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I men­tion any
inter­est­ing term, it becomes a page that Google index­es and deliv­ers to
its searchers.

Which brings us to today’s cool piece from the access logs. In
Decem­ber of 2004 a rather inno­cent post on Quak­er Ranter became the
cen­ter of a mini-whirlwind on the polit­i­cal blogs when it mentioned
that I had got­ten a call from a CBS News pub­li­cist inter­est­ed in Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
All polit­i­cal blogs get pub­lic­i­ty calls from news and opin­ion think
tanks try­ing to sug­gest (or plant) sto­ries but no one’s sup­posed to
talk about it. I only men­tioned it because it was so unusu­al. One of
the blogs denounc­ing the lib­er­al con­spir­a­cy my post revealed was the
some­what slimy Lit­tle Green Foot­balls. After a few weeks the
denun­ci­a­tions died down. 

But this morn­ing, some­one looked up lit­tle­green­foot­balls in Google and came to my site. Because of my auto­mat­ic key­word gen­er­a­tor, tags, and static-loooking links, I’m now the num­ber two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relo­cat­ed to a days old quak​er​ran​ter​.org. Cool. 

This mix­ing and match­ing of con­tent and rich manip­u­la­tion of data is some­times lumped togeth­er in the cool bu zzphrase folk­son­o­my.
Note that none of what I’ve done is a trick­ing of Google. Every tag is
real­ly going to a page with that con­tent. These are “nat­ur­al” and
“organ­ic” search results in the lin­go of SEO. I’m just pre­sent­ing my infor­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple for­mats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think I deserve #2 sta­tus for
“lit­tle­green­foot­balls” and I don’t think Google will keep it there for
long. It’s a bit odd that they have ele­vat­ed that par­tic­u­lar term so
high and no oth­ers tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of Feb­ru­ary 2007, Google index­es 3,540 pages
on Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In Decem­ber 2006 30% of
my Google vis­its were to one of the “tags” page. Recon­fig­ur­ing the blog
in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than dou­bled search engines
vis­its, again in a very nat­ur­al and organ­ic way. Adding tags has simply
made what I’ve writ­ten more acces­si­ble to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Short­ly after installing this new sys­tem, my servers started
peri­od­i­cal­ly crash­ing (about once/week). The prob­lem would be multiple
MT-Search process­es over­load­ing the memory. 

My guess is that a search engine spi­der came along and started
index­ing all of the tags. Each link ini­ti­at­ed a search query in Movable
Type. The built-in search for Mov­able Type is just not able to handle
this vol­ume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the prob­lem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I need­ed to install these plu­g­in fix­es.
Then it was fine-tuning the htac­cess files. It was been more work than
I ini­tial­ly expect­ed and the tag results now for­ward to a fun­ny URL that Google does­n’t love as much.

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

August 8, 2006
· Martin Kelley

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web mar­ket­ing fol­lows the rules of any oth­er mode of
pub­lic­i­ty: iden­ti­fy an audi­ence, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your cus­tomers and their needs. A sucess­ful web
cam­paign uti­lizes print mail­ings, man­u­fac­tured buzz, gen­uine word of
mouth and email. Finances can lim­it the options avail­able but everyone
can do something.

One of the most excit­ing aspects of the inter­net is that the most
pop­u­lar sites are usu­al­ly those that have some­thing inter­est­ing to
offer vis­i­tors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can com­pete with giant cor­po­ra­tions. A good strat­e­gy involves
find­ing a niche and build­ing a com­mu­ni­ty around it. Per­son­al­i­ty and idio­syn­cra­cy are actu­al­ly com­pet­i­tive advantages!

It would be cru­el of me to just drop off a com­plet­ed web­site at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more inter­est­ed in build­ing sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of pub­lic­i­ty, from design to launch and
beyond to ana­lyz­ing vis­i­tor pat­terns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want some­one to vis­it your site once, click on a few links
and then dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We want to give your vis­i­tors rea­sons to
come back fre­quent­ly, a qual­i­ty we call “sticky” in web par­lance. Is
your site a use­ful ref­er­ence site? Can we get vis­i­tors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a com­mu­ni­ty of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to vis­it our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the com­pa­nies that will reg­is­ter your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by includ­ing the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay any­one to get the atten­tion of the big search engines. 

The most impor­tant way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audi­ence in mind. What are the key­words you want peo­ple to
find you with? Your town name? Your busi­ness? Some spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to high­light those
phras­es. Here too, being a niche play­er is an advantage. 

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine start­ed attract­ing four times the vis­its after its pro­gram­mer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get vis­i­tors search­ing for
the odd­est things. We can actu­al­ly tell when vis­i­tors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re search­ing for! Google
appar­ent­ly thinks I know “how to flat­ten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you won­der “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your impor­tant search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!

The Revolution will be Online

August 6, 1995
· Martin Kelley

This essay was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in 1995.

IT’S HARD TO IGNORE the sor­ry shape of the social change com­mu­ni­ty. The signs of a col­lapsed move­ment are every­where. Orga­ni­za­tions are clos­ing, cut­ting back, lay­ing off staff, and drop­ping the fre­quen­cy of their magazines. 

On top of this, the basic resources we’ve depend­ed on are get­ting scarcer. Paper prices and postage prices are going up. Direct mail solic­i­ta­tions are for many economically-unfeasible now. With every aban­doned mail­ing list, with every dis­con­tin­ued peace fair, we’re los­ing the infra­struc­ture that used to nour­ish the whole movement. 

Here in Philadel­phia, the last few years have seen food coops close, peace orga­ni­za­tions lay off staff, and the book­stores dis­con­tin­ue their polit­i­cal titles. I’ve been meet­ing peo­ple only a half-generation younger than I who aren’t aware of the basic orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples that the move­ment has built up over the years and who don’t know the mean­ings of Green­ham Com­mon or the Clamshell Alliance

Like many of you, I’m not giv­ing up. We can’t just aban­don our work because it’s becom­ing more dif­fi­cult. We need to strug­gle to find cre­ative ways of get­ting our mes­sage out there and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­ers. What we need is a new media.

The Promise of the Web

The Web’s rev­o­lu­tion is it’s incred­i­bly min­i­mal costs. Fif­teen dol­lars a month gets you a home­page. As an edi­tor at New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers (1991 – 1996), I’ve always had to wor­ry whether we’d lose mon­ey on a par­tic­u­lar edi­to­r­i­al project, and it some­times seemed a rule of thumb that what excit­ed me would­n’t sell. With the Web, we don’t have to wor­ry if an idea isn’t pop­u­lar because we’re not putting the same lev­el of resources into each publication.

Nev­er before has pub­lish­ing been so cheap. Just about any­one can do it. You don’t need a par­tic­u­lar­ly fast or fan­cy com­put­er to put Web pages online. And you don’t have to wor­ry about dis­tri­b­u­tion: if some­one sets their Web brows­er to your address, they’ll get you “prod­uct” instantly.

All the forces push­ing move­ment pub­lish­ing over the edge of finan­cial insol­ven­cy dis­ap­pear when we go online. Switch­ing to the Web is a mat­ter of keep­ing our words in print. The Web is the lat­est inven­tion to open up the dis­tri­b­u­tion of words by birthing new medias. The print­ing press begat mod­ern book pub­lish­ing just as the pho­to­copi­er begat zine cul­ture. The Web can like­wise spawn a media where words can flour­ish with less cap­i­tal than ever before.

Advertising Each Other

The prob­lem with the Web is not acces­si­bil­i­ty, but rather being heard above the noise. Peo­ple gen­er­al­ly find your web­site in two ways. The first is that they see your web address in your newslet­ter, get on their com­put­ers and look you up; this of course only gets you your own peo­ple. The sec­ond way is through links.

Links take you from one web­site to anoth­er. Web­page design­ers try to get linked from sites of sim­i­lar inter­est to theirs, hop­ing the read­ers of the oth­er site will fol­low the link to their web­page. This bounc­ing from site to site is called surf­ing, and it’s the main way around the web.

Link­ing is a very prim­i­tive art nowa­days. The Non­vi­o­lence Web has inter­nal links that active­ly invite read­ers to explore the whole NV-Web. Every­time some­one comes into the NV-Web through a mem­ber group, they will be inticed to stay and dis­cov­er the oth­er groups. By putting social change groups togeth­er in one place, we can have a much-more dynam­ic cross-referencing. Think of it as the equiv­a­lent of trad­ing mail­ing lists in that we can all share those web surfers who find any one of us.

In the web world as in the real one, coop­er­a­tion helps us all. If you’re an activist group doing work on non­vi­o­lent social change then con­tact us and we’ll put your words online. For free. If you have your own web­site already, then let’s talk about how we can crosslink you with oth­er groups work­ing on non­vi­o­lent social change.

Come explore the Non­vi­o­lence Web and let us get you con­nect­ed. Come join our revolution.

In peace,

Mar­tin Kelley