The WebMarketCentral Blog A blog about B2B marketing, Web 2.0 social media, business blogging tools, micromarkets, B2B lead generation, interactive PR, and web marketing tools and resources. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 19 0 50 2283

Articles from The WebMarketCentral Blog

How to Select an SEO Firm 2007-11-15 05:54:00 Search engine optimization (SEO) is about as close to a no-brainer as any marketing investment gets: you've made a significant investment in designing and building an attractive, easy-to-navigate, content-rich website, so why not invest just a bit more to make sure it's easy to find? Or to put it in Biblical terms, quoting Matthew 5:15, "No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket."SEO is relatively cheap, it brings prospects to your site when they are interested in your product or service, and it enhances your brand image by associating your company with the problem-solving terms your buyers use.So, case made, how do you select an SEO partner? Jonathan Ashton offers Ten Tips For Choosing The Right SEO Partner in the Search Insider blog, including: Don't respond to unsolicited emails from SEOs. Prepare an RFP (good advice in any agency selection process). Get references (of SEO firms from your network of associates, and of clients from prospective SEO providers). Be patient (SEO ...

Generating B2B Website Traffic Through Social Tagging: Follow Up 2007-11-13 06:21:00 Back in May of this year, I reported the results of a test of the impact on B2B website traffic growth using Web 2.0 social tagging. That experiment showed that tagging B2B thought-leadership content on social media sites increased traffic growth for B2B websites by 50%, and on a B2B marketing blog by more than 100%, over 60 days.So—how do the numbers look six months later? Can these traffic growth gains be sustained?As shown here, on the B2B website, WebMarketCentral, traffic growth slowed considerably over the summer before posting a fall rebound, ending with a 12.7% monthly growth rate for the year—still a respectable monthly traffic growth rate, but well below the trend line following the social tagging activity.The traffic change on this blog, however, showed a much different pattern. As shown below, after six months, the growth rate continued to show nearly a 50% increase even after six months, from 8.0% to 10.9%.Three conclusions from this:1) The effect of social tagging on ...

New Report: How to Successfully Launch B2B Products and Services 2007-11-09 06:07:00 A new survey produced by Schneider Associates and the Center for Business Innovation at Babson College details some very interesting findings on what makes for a successful B2B product or service launch. The free report, entitled Business-to-Business Launch Survey, profiles the ten key lessons B2B companies can use to improve their odds for launch success. The study investigated effective product and service launches to help B2B product and service managers improve their launch practices and success rate.Among the most interesting findings in the study (and keep in mind, these are the successful launches): Just 22% of B2B services companies and 37% of product vendors followed a formal, documented launch process—though another third of each group said they used "a general, undocumented repeatable process." Planning most commonly started anywhere from three to 12 months before launch—though nearly 40% of B2B product companies didn't get started until within three months of the plann ...

How to get a Bigger SEM Budget 2007-11-07 05:49:00 In a recent Search Insider post, Gord Hotchkiss asks the question: "Will Agencies Get Search?" After making a convincing argument that search "blows away other channels"—because it makes your product service easy to find when buyers are actually looking for something like it, rather than interrupting them while they are doing some else (which is what most advertising is about), Hotchkiss identifies four reasons: Search is small. Search is measurable. Search is hard ("You’ll never hit a search home run with one inspired brainstorm...You just keep plugging away, tweaking keywords and pulling in prospects"). Search is utilitarian.And concludes by saying "And for all these reasons, I don’t think big agencies will ever truly get search." Maybe he's right, and big agencies won't get it (though smaller agencies, like the one I work for, certainly do). And the more interesting question to me, in looking at the four points above, is: why don't advertisers spend more on search? It's ge ...

New "Top 50 Marketing Blogs to Watch" List 2007-11-06 07:10:00 EvanCarmichael.com just published its list of the Top 50 Marketing Blogs to Watch in 2008. The list of blogs is helpfully broken down into ten categories:- Search Marketing- Online Marketing- Affiliate Marketing- Small Business Marketing- Marketing & Advertising- Business to Business Marketing- Marketing & Technology- Guerrilla Marketing- Brand Marketing- General MarketingIt contains several of my favorites, including the TopRank Online Marketing Blog from Lee Odden, Buzz Marketing for Technology by Paul Dunay, and John Moore's Brand Autopsy, as well as many more worth checking out.EvanCarmichael.com describes itself as "the Internet's #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies. With over 240,000 monthly visitors, 1,600 contributing authors, and 35,000 pages of content no website shares more profiles of famous entrepreneurs and inspires more small business owners than EvanCarmichael.com."*****technorati tags: top 50 marketing blogs 2008, Evan Carmichael, bus ... Marketing

WMC Interviews: Jared Reitzin 2007-11-05 06:19:00 Last week I got an update from Jared Reitzin, CEO of digital marketing firm mobileStorm and creator of the Entrepreneur Success blog.mobileStorm offers products and services that help any size organization—from small businesses to Global 2000 enterprises—quickly, easily and reliably create, deliver and analyze successful email marketing, mobile marketing, voice, fax, and rss marketing campaigns. The company's on-demand tools include Stun!, a hosted service that is a simple, yet powerful customer communications solution specially designed for small-to medium-sized businesses, and Bolt, a hosted service built to support the needs of large enterprises to deploy marketing, customer service and transactional messaging programs. Jared's blog covers topics such as the latest laws surrounding digital marketing, as well as multi-channel marketing and new marketing technologies.Here's our conversation:WebMarketCentral (WMC): So Jared, what did you do before starting mobileStorm? What’s ...

Two More Social Media Sites to Check Out 2007-11-01 07:23:00 Here's another social media tagging site look into, as well as a new place to keep track of everything web-related that's important to you.First, Zanby is a new social media site. Okay, with Digg, del.icio.us, Searchles, Zimbio et al does the world really need another such site? In this case, yes—Zanby combines features common to other social tagging sites (such as the ability to browse and create groups) with a powerful set of collaboration features, such as the ability to upload/share documents and photos, create lists, arrange events and start or contribute to message threads. That makes it useful for everything from moms setting up playdates, to community organizing, to collaborative online research projects. As they describe the environment on their About Us page, "The Zanby suite of tools will allow groups to scale naturally from small gatherings to large businesses with enterprise organizational needs."Second, Jeff Rusinow, formerly of Christmas.com, has launched a new site, ...

Seven More Essential SEO Tools 2007-10-30 05:56:00 Optimizing your website for organic search is a matter of doing the right things, and doing those things right. Utilize SEO best practices, and use free online tools to track and improve your results. Here are a handful of tools that can help analyze and improve your efforts on both counts.First, you need to know how well you site ranks today across your list of key search phrases on the most popular search engines. Two tools that automate this process are:Search Engine Rankings from Mike's Marketing ToolsSearch Engine Keyword Position from SEO ToolsTo optimize your rankings, your most important keywords should have a density in the range of 3-5%. To check keyword density, use this tool:Keyword Cloud from SEO ToolsPage content is the single most important determinant of your search engine rank, but crafting proper meta tags is also critical. Meta tags aren't difficult to write for anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML, but you use an automated tool to create them such as:Meta Tag Gen ...

What is the True State of Search Marketing? 2007-10-26 07:02:00 On Wednesday this week, MarketingSherpa hosted a presentation on Search Marketing Trends and Tactics (that's the link to the PDF; the audio is here). The same day, Bill Gadless at the B2B Web Strategy Blog wrote a post on The True State of B2B Search Engine Marketing. Combining information from the two paints an interesting picture of the current search marketing landscape.Bill notes the gap between high interest in search marketing and the low actual adoption. In his words, "everyone’s intrigued; but very few are yet investing much of their budget with the help of a professional SEO firm." He concludes by writing, "The lack of attention SEO and PPC are receiving from B2B marketers is troubling."Research from MarketingSherpa, on the other hand, demonstrates that the businesses who are investing these areas are seeing substantial ROI and increasing their spending. Overall, roughly 40% of web marketers plan double-digit increases in search marketing with Google next year; about a quar ... Marketing

Book Review: Value Acceleration 2007-10-24 08:55:00 The central contention of Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage by Mitchell Goozé and Ralph Mroz comes down to three points: 1) virtually every functional discipline in the modern organization (accounting, engineering, production etc.) is now run using established processes; 2) marketing and sales organizations are broken because they lack such processes; 3) companies can create an "unbeatable" competitive advantage by incorporating an overarching sales and marketing process, borrowing principles from the manufacturing realm.Goozé and Mroz argue that marketing (defined as the entire process of determining customer needs, guiding product development based on customer and competitive intelligence, promotion and sales) is the central function of every company—it aligns marketplace needs with the organization's core competencies. Therefore, "An integrated-process model and objective management methods to manage that process lay the foundation ...

New on WebMarketCentral: Marketing Careers and Events 2007-10-22 07:17:00 Two new sections have recently been added to the fastest-growing web marketing portal—a Marketing and Sales Career Opportunities section, powered by CareerBuilder, and an extensive calendar of Marketing Events.The Career Opportunities area enables you to search for jobs by category, including Advertising, Public Relations, Graphic Design and B2B Sales. You can refine searches by location and keyword, and access a variety of job-seeker tools. For those who are hiring rather than looking, this section also provides an array of tools for employers.The Marketing Events calendar features marketing-related event dates and descriptions from around the world, displayed by week and frequently updated. Use this page to make sure you don't miss any important events (such as the upcoming Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas) or to promote your events.These two new sections continue to expand the B2C and B2B marketing resources available on WebMarketCentral, including the top marketing b ... Marketing

Blog Marketing for Non-Bloggers 2007-10-18 06:35:00 Rarely do I drop what I'm doing to read a newsletter article, but that's what happened when I came across Elge Premeau's Using Blogs to Attract Attention (Without Having Your Own) in the RainToday newsletter. Premeau accurately points out that while writing your own blog is hard work, promoting your company, product or service through blogs doesn't have to be: "60% of bloggers have not updated their blogs in the last 60 days...So, why not tap into the audiences other blogs attract (presumably the blogs that are updated more frequently) and participate in the blogosphere without doing the hard work of creating and marketing a blog?"Premeau recommends commenting on popular (and relevant to your business, obviously) blogs as a way of getting exposure and demonstrating your own thought leadership in your field without making the commitment to your own blog. She helpfully provides advice on how to find relevant blogs to comment on, track them, and write appropriate, productive comments. ... Marketing

WMC Interviews: Dale Underwood 2007-10-16 06:45:00 This week I caught up with Dale Underwood, CEO of EchoQuote, an automated lead capture web service provider. EchoQuote enables B2B companies to automatically create customized price quotes based on the requester's email address and distribute lead information to an internal sales team or channel. The philosophy behind the product is simple: between your website, analysts, publications and social media, prospects can now learn pretty much everything they want to know about your product or service before ever contacting you—except the price. EchoQuote fills that gap, on a pay-as-you-go pricing model that minimizes risk.WebMarketCentral (WMC): What did you do before EchoQuote? What’s your background? Dale Underwood (DAU): I’ve been directly involved with information technology my entire career. I started out as a datacenter operator (I worked in the computer center at Virginia Tech while in high school), turned programmer, sales engineer, salesman and finally business owner. I ...

The TruthLaidBear Comes Out of Hiding 2007-10-12 14:53:00 If you're not familiar with The Truth Laid Bear, it's a kind of cool blog tracking site that's been for the past three years by the eponymous N.Z. Bear (no one knows what "N.Z." stands for except that it's not "New Zealand"). Today, the Bear came out publicly. Here's the bulk of his message:Folks:I hope you’ll forgive a brief commercial interruption. After five+ years as a pseudonymous ursine fellow online, the time has come for me to step out from behind the curtain.Hi ! My name is Rob Neppell. You may know me from such websites as The Truth Laid Bear and Porkbusters. I’m not actually a bear, but I play one on the Internet.The occasion? I am now ready to publicly announce the real "big thing" I've been hinting at for some time: TTLB is now part of my new company: Kithbridge, Inc.I’ve described Kithbridge as follows:Kithbridge, Inc. was launched as an evolution of one of the blogosphere's original and most successful blog-tracking sites, The Truth Laid Bear. While The Trut ...

The New "Relations" in Interactive PR 2007-10-11 07:30:00 The umbrella term of "public relations" (PR) has always covered a number of specialties: media relations (primarily), investor relations, analyst relations, community relations, even employee relations. The social networking of Web 2.0 and interactive PR has added two new "relations" to the mix—let's call them market relations and blogger relations.Market relations is the practice of writing news releases (not press releases) that are targeted directly at your prospects rather than journalists (though media folks may pick up on these as well). This is a central concept of David Meerman Scott's recent book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR (reviewed here). While press releases are about you—you've released a new product, or hit a milestone, or signed a new partner alliance for example—news releases are about the interests of your market. They aren't designed to promote your product or service directly, but rather to position your company as a thought leader.News release top ...