I recently came across this article from eMarketer.

New data provided by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), based on research conducted by Radar Research, sheds light on how search marketing dollars are being spent.

In 2008, $13.5 billion was spent on search marketing. The space was mostly made up of paid placement and search engine optimization (SEO), with a sliver going to technology providers whose software assisted in the execution of search campaigns. Paid search ads saw 88% of the total pie, SEO only 11%.

The ratio of paid placement to SEO will change in the future.

To continue reading this article click here

While on the road to the Kelsey Group Marketplaces 2009 event this week I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up the new book by Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?  Early on in the book, Jarvis quickly states and focuses on the fact that small is the new big. Companies can start up with a couple people and not grow past 20 and still attract a large amount of customers. At Kelsey this was proven over and over again.

Small businesses will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of choices they have to market their business online through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing. A great great of this is the start-up dotMenu, which started out by simply hiring stay at home moms to go out and scan in menus from local restaurants for $2 a piece. This allowed them to keep overhead down, efficiency up, and grow within the constraints of cash flow. In 2008 dotMenu ended up taking 3,000,000 online restaurant orders.

The consistent trend of people connecting, sharing, and collaborating on the internet is only going to have a positive effect on small business marketing. When companies and individuals become more open, competition grows larger. When competition grows larger, innovation begins. Products will start to become more transparent, ROI for marketing efforts will become clearer to small business, and the businesses that provide real value will rise to the top, whether they are small or big.

Every time I attend a Kelsey Conference I am amazed at the overwhelming amount of new start ups attending the conference. But the one thing that is more overwhelming than that is the fact that all these start ups are striking partnerships with companies 1000x their size without even a blink. 2009 is going to bring an enormous amount of opportunities for small business to get online, with the big question not being ‘should we be online, but who should we be online with?’

Now that small is the new big, things are going to be a lot more clear for small business.

According to comScore, Inc., among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35%) did so daily, more than double the size of the audience last year.

In January, 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded application. Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users, while search was the overwhelmingly favored use for SMS-based news and information access, with 14.1 million users. Overall, 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and information in January.

Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore, says “…use of mobile Internet (has) evolved from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives… This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium… to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

Young males are the most avid users of mobile news and information, says the report, with half of 18 to 34-year-old males engaging in the activity. The mobile Internet is also popular among females in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic, with 40 percent accessing it at least once in January.
Donovan concludes, “…much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications and by text-based searches… smartphones and high-end feature phones… comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access… 70% of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”

Concurrently, QuickPlay Media revealed the results of its 2009 independent Market Tools survey focused on mobile TV and video consumption in the US. showing that consumers are confident in the uptake of mobile TV and video, with 78% expecting an increase in usage by 2010. Perceived cost represents the biggest barrier to adoption, with 58% indicating that it is the number one reason they have not viewed TV and video on their mobile phone.

• 55% of respondents stated they are interested in mobile TV and video.
• 46% of respondents are aware that their carrier offers a mobile TV and/or video service,  vs. the 35% percent seen in the 2008
• 49% of respondents have a monthly voice and data plan through their wireless carrier versus 38% who currently use a monthly voice-only plan
• 51% said that they would be willing to accept advertising in return for free TV and video content versus 54% in 2008

Consumers show a preference for snacking on content instead of setting aside dedicated viewing times, says the QuickPlay report. Specific findings include:

• 25% respondents view content in between daily activities, 16% while in transit (i.e. on the bus, etc.) and 11% while waiting in line.
• 66% said they would consider the ability to pause and resume content a deciding factor in whether or not they would watch longer forms of content, such as a full length movie. This number represents an increase from the 57% figure reported in the 2008 survey.
• Of those watching mobile TV and video, 45% have spent 11 to 30 minutes watching a TV show or movie on their mobile phone with 30 % having spent 31 minutes or longer doing so. Additionally, 21% are using mobile TV and video services more than once a week.

For more information from comScore, please visit here, or from QuickPlay Media, go here.

Developing a productive call center actually involves the process of developing productive people. The most important asset in the sales quiver is the team and simply seeking the best persons for the job is simply not enough.  Your leadership must be up to the task of continually developing significant growth and change in their lives.

It has been proven that money is NOT a long term motivator but rather a short term instigator.  The state of being BETTER is truly a long term purpose charged goal of all individuals, and harnessing that leverage is key to curt tailing attrition and generating more happy sales veterans.

Let’s take an inventory of your team development tools and techniques:

What are the primary needs and wants of your team?

How do you recognize if they are infected by fear?

How much time do you invest in their personal vision at work?

Are you expecting them to understand and purchase your mission?

How much time do you spend in significant change in your life?

Your team needs to be heard and understood.

Their belief is key to the selling proposition and they will only truly follow leaders that they respect and trust.  They need a mature parent that has their needs close to heart.  It is necessary to connect with them one on one, in small groups and in team gatherings to discuss what is truly important to THEM.  Let them voice their heart and translate your business decisions, policies and programs to their internal desires.  Remember, it’s easier to sell people what they want then to make them want what you are selling.

Fear is the mind killer.

Every human reacts to fear in one or more of four different ways:
Run away
Attack
Denial
Crippled Stasis
Fear will feed defects and simply stop any sales rep from truly producing.  Fear is based on two facts occurring:  They are afraid of not getting what they deserve or they are afraid of losing what is theirs.  You can not snap a human out of fear by stamping your foot.  Simply put, fear is the absence of HOPE.  So give your team a plan they can believe in.   Demonstrate your experience and saddle up next to them in the dark.  Let them know that they are safe and they will come back to confidence.  We will talk more about this subject later.

Each week talk about change.

Books, tapes, teachers and programs of significant change are necessary for them to connect with work as a purpose filled location in their lives.  They need to know that there is more than a paycheck waiting for them to feel excited about Monday.  There are many great teachers that you can invite via technology into the lecture room to help translate the work experience into an institute of learning and growth.  Meaningful lessons will create leaders that enthusiastically stay!

What is your mission and why should it be theirs?

Building a company should be about personal pride and feeling of participating in an award winning team experience.  Share your vision constantly and get everyone to understand the WHY of it. But most importantly help them connect with it on a basic level.  It must make sense to THEIR mission if you want them to purchase it.  Don’t demand or expect loyalty if you don’t help your group find their own WHY they should.

You can’t give away what you don’t have!

Those who don’t learn can NOT teach.  Watch out for leadership that feels it already knows what it needs to know.  Pride is summed up with:  I KNOW.  Humility is summed up with:  I want to KNOW.  The seeker is growing and has something to pass on.  The man who demands the world follow his plan and is not open to change and grow is no longer learning and is actually of weaker character.  The man who admits their failings and is willing to look at and change their weaknesses is actually of strong character.  Your team will sense the truth of it and will be pulled towards leadership of strong character naturally.

Change…Grow…Learn…Teach…

If work becomes an Institute of Significance, in turn your sales figures will become significant!

I have just read a very well thought through article about how to measure SEO performance. It’s written with traditional SEO done to large sites by SEO specialists but the metrics it speaks about are also relevant for the kind of large/small business SEO that we specialize in. To condense the article to it’s essentials it asks the following questions:

· Are your pages indexed by the large search engines? Ours are submitted and indexed every day

· Do you have back links pointing to your pages? We have an enormous number deployed

· Do you rank well for query term that you care about? We test and adjust to maximize this all the time

· Does your site make money? In our world that means do your marketing dollars make your phone ring….our testing indicates a resounding yes to this metric.

You should ask the same question about your website, enjoy..

March 17, 2009 · by Jill Kocher

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to your site as a whole. “Rankings” measurements will show where in the natural search results your site appears for given search words or phrases. And “traffic and revenue” measurements will show the keywords used to find your site, revenue generated per keyword, the percentage of visitors that purchased products and so forth. This article will explore each of the measurements, which we refer to here as “metrics.”

Indexation Metrics

Indexation is the first critical step to natural search performance. Pages that aren’t indexed have zero chance of ranking in the search engines. However, more indexation isn’t necessarily better because that could indicate that identical pages in your site are duplicated in a search engine’s index, which will decrease a site’s ability to rank because the pages are, essentially, competing against themselves.

What is the “right” indexation number? Most ecommerce sites can only guesstimate based on the number of products they offer. For example, if a site offers 50,000 products but only has 5,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a barrier preventing a search engine from fully “crawling” a site. Conversely, if that same site has 500,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a duplication issue. The site will then have issues with self-competition and split-link popularity, both of which hinder a site’s ability to rank strongly.

Indexation is measured by performing a “site:” query in the major engines. For example, type [site:www.yourdomain.com] into the Google and MSN Live search boxes, without the [brackets]. For Yahoo!, just enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer. These site queries measure how many URLs are indexed in each engine. Compare that number to the number of pages that should exist to determine actions required and progress made.

A complete list of the queries available in Google, some of which are also available on Yahoo! and MSN Live, can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Backlink Metrics

Measuring “backlinks” will show the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links that point to your site, the higher your site will rank in natural search results. However, measuring backlinks varies among the search engines.

For Google, enter a “link:” query such as [link:www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. This is a measure of how many backlinks are coming into the entire domain. However, Google only gives the true measure of backlinks in its Webmaster Tools, which anyone can access once they have a Google account.

For Yahoo!, enter the domain into Yahoo! Site Explorer. Click on the “InLinks” tab and filter the results to show four different data sets: (1) all backlinks (internal & external), (2) only external backlinks, (3) only to the home page and (4) to the whole site.

For MSN, the “link:” query is currently disabled in MSN Live, so backlinks cannot be measured there.

How many backlinks should a site have? There is no way to estimate in the way we can for indexation, and the engines aren’t known for giving accurate, specific or detailed backlink data, unfortunately. The best advice for measuring backlinks is to watch the trend rather than be concerned about individual numbers. And more high quality links are always better.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool for scanning and reporting on backlink trends, including number and diversity of domains linking in, anchor text diversity, and a number of other reports.

Ranking Metrics

Rankings are a tricky metric to report on. Rankings (i.e. where your site appears in natural search listings) vary greatly between singular and plural versions of the same term. Moreover, personalized and blended search affect individual rankings so that no two people are likely to get the same ranking result. However, I suggest a couple of ways to attack this issue.

· Targeted. Choose a select set of keyword terms that you’ll target based on keyword research. These will probably include the trophy terms for which management aspires to rank. Use a subscription rank checker such as WebCEO or a free tool such as the Rank Checker plug in for Firefox to check the rankings for the terms you’re targeting. These tools will give you only the rankings for the terms you specify, for the domains you specify.

· Aggregate. Subscription tools like Enquisite offer the ability to track the page on which a term ranks for every keyword that drives natural search to your site. So, say that [widgets] drove 10 visits to mydomain.com. Enquisite would report which URLs on my site drove those 10 visits, and what page in the search results the rankings were on. The information can be sliced and sorted by keyword, URL, IP, date, engine, and more.

Traffic and Revenue Metrics

Natural search-referred traffic is a common measurement in most analytics programs. The “holy grail” for measuring SEO effectiveness is frequently a report combining URL, keyword, traffic, orders, and revenue. Such a report tells you which URLs are effective, and by omission, which are not. It tells you which keywords and keyword phrases drive traffic, and by omission which don’t. And it tells you which URLs and terms drive sales through natural search and which don’t.

Consider which pages were optimized and how, for which keywords. Those pages and keywords are the ones where you should expect to see growth. Only by performing large-scale programmatic optimizations, like title tags across the entire site, would you expect to see a site-wide increase in traffic. Most optimization efforts will improve performance for individual pages and keywords. Knowing which pages and keywords are most valuable to your business will guide those optimization efforts.

You can see the full article here

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1014-Measuring-SEO-Performance

In this economy it’s tough to see really great companies having such a horrible time of it. Google is down to 325, newspapers with storied histories are dropping like flies (the mighty Seattle Post Intelligencer published its last print edition this morning) and media innovators in the local space like SpotRunner have just announced another large round of layoffs. Given this desolate landscape there is clearly a move towards value.

We work with thousands of local companies making sure they are clearly incredibly focused on maximizing their limited marketing budgets. Our typical customers are very sensitive to both the cost of marketing and the value they get from it. As the yellow pages collect dust at the back of closets local businesses still need to reach out to people looking for all over the nation our low cost high impact package which gets our customers new business through search. We do one thing really well. We get small business to the top of the search results for search terms they care about for a low monthly fee. It may not be as cool as TV advertising and it certainly doesn’t have the tradition that print advertising has, but it works and it’s affordable for most businesses.

How important is it that local businesses get to the front of search?….well there are several things driving this issue. First is behavior, people online search in a particular way. In search they go to the front page and typically select from the results displayed on that page. Very few ever look further than the first page…if you aren’t on that page then the chances are that online is not going to generate many customers for you. How big is the opportunity? Let’s look at the numbers: There is certainly a lot of search traffic going on. Reports differ but typically US search volume is in the 15-20 billion per month range and depending on whose numbers you believe anything up to 40% of those have some level of local interest. That’s a lot of search, lots of people looking for goods and services.

However if you take the number of people looking for things and divide that huge number by the number of locations and activities people are searching there may only be a few hundred people searching for any service or product in any location in any month. The good news is that those people are highly focused on finding what they are looking for and typically close to a buying decision and those intensely valuable searches are going to be spread between the companies on the front page of search.

In an economy headed for nuclear winter with local businesses looking to squeeze the last drop of value out of their marketing dollars our low cost high impact search visibility package is a great fit. We will focus on making our product the richest deepest most effective way for local businesses to get customers, it’s all we do and it’s what we do best.

eLocal Listing LLC of Temecula, CA, pioneers of local search marketing and search engine optimization, today announced a strategic partnership with MediaSpan Group Inc, a leading provider of digital content management and online marketing solutions, to provide eLocal Listing’s Found Fast Technology™ platform to more than 1,500 of MediaSpan’s newspaper and radio clients.

“Our local media customers are always looking for new ways to engage their audience, increase traffic and drive new revenue streams online,”

… said MediaSpan Executive Vice President of online services, Steven Barth.

“eLocal Listing’s proven SEO platform meets this need by providing powerful local search technology as well as added revenue and growth opportunities.”

eLocal Listing’s Premium and Standard Products, which utilize the Found Fast Technology™ platform, will enable local and regional media publishers to incorporate eLocal’s powerful search engine optimization solutions to get their clients found on the major search engines.

“We are pleased to partner with MediaSpan, enabling their publishers to offer a more valuable advertising experience to their clients,”

… said Tim Judd, CEO of eLocal Listing LLC.

“Combining eLocal Listing’s online advertising solutions with MediaSpan’s traditional TV and radio advertising packages will create a strong marketing media mix and will increase revenue for MediaSpan’s publishers and broadcasters. In these challenging economic times, the ability to reach local customers both on and offline is key for the best long term growth of local media, their advertisers and MediaSpan.”

MediaSpan’s publishers and broadcasters can expect to begin incorporating eLocal Listing’s online marketing products into their advertising packages in the second quarter of 2009.”

According to the U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast, 2008-2013, by BIA Advisory Services and its Kelsey Group, current and foreseeable economic conditions will reduce overall local advertising spending through 2013. BIA/Kelsey forecasts U.S. local advertising revenues to decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate.

Only the local interactive segment will show growth throughout the forecast period. All other local media will experience marginal to rapid declines in the next 18 to 36 months, says the report. A small number of traditional media will rebound with a revived economy beginning in 2011, though most traditional media will continue to decline at a slower pace.

According to the forecast, the interactive segment (mobile, Internet Yellow Pages, local search, online verticals and classifieds, voice search, e-mail marketing and other interactive revenues generated by traditional media players) will grow from $14 billion in 2008 to $32.1 billion in 2013. The traditional segment (newspapers, direct mail, television, radio, print Yellow Pages, non-digital out of home, cable TV and magazines) will decrease from $141.3 billion in 2008 to $112.4 billion in 2013.

Tom Buono, president and CEO, BIA Advisory Services, says…

“As the shift to online accelerates, and the demand for accountability metrics grows, there is an increased urgency for traditional media companies to develop and embrace new business models that incorporate digital strategies… to drive business…”

Neal Polachek, CEO, The Kelsey Group, concludes …

“the share shift… could actually be more pronounced… successful integration will require considerable attention to business models, product innovation and sales channel evolution.”

Last Friday Oprah dedicated her show to Facebook, the social networking phenomenon that now boasts over 175 million active users, of which I am one.  Founded in 2004 by a bunch of very smart (check out how many of them went to Harvard), YOUNG entrepreneurs (and I emphasize young), who were able to see monetary value in a social utility that “helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family, and coworkers.”

Now, you know if you have a Facebook account that they ask a lot of questions; they want to know who you are so that they can drive targeted advertising/marketing to your page and to that of your friends who they assume share some of the same interests, and well, let’s face it, buying patterns.  Facebook strategically places seemingly non-intrusive ads on your “wall.”   The ads are simply an image and some text .. I almost didn’t realize that they were ads! Isn’t that part of the power of subliminal marketing strategy used by so many companies to lure consumers in to purchasing ..

Take a beautiful young lady , who is in the “marrying age” and “in a serious relationship”, what type of ads do you think appear on her page .. Diamond ads, no pressure here.  … My husband, a Kiwi, has a Quantas ad and well, me, I am a little disappointed with the ad that appears on my home page;  Belisi Skin Tightener. I knew I should have had Aaron touch up that photo, but none the less, they “knew” that she was young and maybe knew that I wasn’t quite so young.

Targeted, focused advertising .. seems national advertisers have caught the Facebook Advertising bug, but isn’t there an opportunity for small businesses who rely on local exposure, local customers, and local dollars.  Yes, the answer is yes.  Facebook’s ad bidding tools allow businesses to narrowly target consumers by using the IP address and a member’s profile information (and their friends’ profile information as well) to determine a user’s location, interest, age, employment and even favorite television show.   This is targeted, focused marketing at its best.  Much better than other traditional advertising because you not only know who sees your ad, but who clicks on it and how/when it converts.  This is a great opportunity for local businesses to spend their dwindling advertising budget on a very focused audience at an affordable price.  eLocal Listing includes “social marketing aspects” in our product offerings and is currently offering Social Advertising to its Corporate Strategic Alliance Partners, as well as local business reviews.

I will write more about advertising on Facebook in another post, but for now I have to get online and buy that skin tightener I saw on my Profile.

In pt.1 of building a successful dev team we looked at a very practical way that we can enhance the value of our dev team by writing code that easy to use and update by other members on our team…

In this article we are going to touch on something a bit less tangible but no less important, actually it is probably the most important element in establishing a successful development team. Communication is, in my opinion, the most foundational piece of a strong development team.

Where skill, and resources may come up short, if strong communication is in place a team can overcome prepare in advance, and address some of these shortcomings more readily, setting them on the road to success.

With many teams built of diverse parties setting up solid lines of communication is key. Developers, project managers, marketing, front end designers, and quality assurance personnel are just a few of the many parties that make up a solid dev team for products and projects. With so many different people, perspectives, and skill sets touching the project it can become very easy for details to slip through the cracks that end up slowing down the workflow, hindering progress, delaying deadlines, and contributing to headaches and frustrations on all ends.

Those of us who work in this team environment have experienced this in one form or another, and more than likely something will slip through regardless. With this in mind I have compiled a few simple practices, along with a couple of applications that can help open up the lines of communication.

Learn to Dabble in Disciplines.

One great way to increase the value of your contribution to the development/project team is to gain an understanding of the other team members disciplines. This doesn’t mean that we have to become experts in their fields but gaining an understanding of their roles and responsibilities will help us to provide the right information in the right format to make their job that much easier (not to mention score some brownie points with them).

In our team I have found it helpful when preparing front end designs to ask alot of questions of our engineers, so as to avoid providing files, designs that simply aren’t practical from a development perspective. I am still a pretty big noob when it comes to .net but since that is the framework we develop in I have made an effort to understand their world, and what would make life easier for them. I would suggest even going beyond frameworks and code, and find out how to prep designs, and deliver files in a way that makes life easier for them.

By expanding our horizons to understand each of the team’s disciplines we make life a bit easier for everyone, and learn to communicate more effectively in ways that help others be more efficient, and well equipped in their roles within the team environment. Besides the initial benefits we also expand our skill set which opens up new avenues within our current jobs, as well as in our future endeavors. We should never stop learning.

Go get your Intel

This is a very critical point. We can only be responsible for ourselves, and I would strongly encourage all of us to be proactive in getting info about projects/products. If you are unsure about something, ask, and then ask again until you feel comfortable with your understanding of the scope, and your role in the project.

This brings the focus to the most important aspect of communication… Listening, don’t just hear what is being said, listen, ask questions and make sure that you understand, repeat what is being said back to the team, that way there is little room for misunderstanding, and mis-communication, it will also validate your team members, showing them that you value their input and efforts in the project. Some of this may sound pretty rigid, but if we can take these extra steps it will really help us in the communication process.

Tools of the Trade

In some circumstances team members may work remotely or off-shore this can also make communication a bit tough at times. Using tools/apps can help bridge the gaps, and keep everyone on the same page.

For project collaboration, task management, file sharing, time tracking, and version tracking we use Basecamp by 37signals. I am sure there are other project management software/apps out there but this one has proven itself to be a very valuable tool, and is very affordable.

For more immediate communication we also use Skype as this allows for instant access when questions, and issues may arise.

There are other resources out there, and if your team isn’t using something I would encourage you to be proactive, find something that will fit best with your team.

Wrapping Up

By no means is this a call to arms, my hope is that we can be encouraged in our efforts to better our development team. This effort starts with us, team development is an investment in our projects and fellow team members. Listening, learning other skills, and being proactive in communication are just a couple of foundational ideas for better team communication, as projects come and go many different situations will arise, and they will provide new challenges, as long as we are communicating openly the challenges can be faced, overcome, and turned in to successful solutions.

Next up in the series “There is no “I” in Team, and no “U” in Win” dealing with conflict, and disagreements in development.

1) Building a Successful Dev Team

2) Coding In a Team Environment

3) Building Development Team Communication