Category Archives: Marketing

General marketing comments, ideas, etc.

Business, Marketing, The Law

Help Me, Elizabeth

The time had faded and the grey of obscurity loomed upon me. Would the new YouTube accept my eclectic channel or would the new algorithm swallow me whole? The standard algorithm preferred channels that had one, and only one, focus. The Bryon Lape channel, or LapeTV as it was sometimes known, had no single focus. The videos reflected the whim of the day or questions sent from subscribers. It was not contained within Pop Culture, Beer, Fitness, or Photography. Video topics came and went. Subscribers came and went.

Some weeks, the drunken oddness attracted viewers and subscribers. The Brie Larson fans would defend her selection as Captain Marvel and state she was not hated by the rest of the MCU cast, despite the rumors. They came and left comments on videos that would claim Captain Marvel was not wanted or if her comics were being cancelled. Her fans would quote the sales figures, they would state why Brie Larson is great and how she should be a part of Disney Star Wars. They might down vote a video, but their feedback and comments were welcome. The views count, no matter what.

Then YouTube changed. The FTC and the Attorney General of New York State sued. YouTube lost money. Google lost money. It all changed over night. They did not like losing money. They made changes to the rules. Many channels died. Videos had to be tagged if they were for children. Videos had to be tagged if they were for an audience that is over 18. The FTC said all this was not necessary, not correct. It mattered not. Google made the changes to YouTube. Many channels died. Be careful with the beer reviews. Be careful with the supplement reviews. Tag videos. Mark videos. If the wrong audience saw the video and the wrong metrics were saved, there were serious fines waiting.

Stillness stood upon the Internet. Then, it happened.

Out of the darkness came a voice. LapeTV could exist. Bryon Lape’s channel could exist. Brainmuffin could exist. Channel Dad could exist. All of the oddness could exist. It didn’t matter that the Fandom Menace had rejected the Old Man. It didn’t matter that bullshit had past the channel by. There was a way out of the darkness. There was Elizabeth. She was the path to the answers.

The time had started simply. An experiment to test the viability of the Bryon Lape YouTube channel had started. The subscriber count grew. The numbers were not fantastic, but with minimal efforts the growth became self-sustaining. The people believed and supported the channel. They found honesty and openness. There was no direct effort to market to them. The reviews where seen as honest and proper. People would buy. People would believe. There was truth.

Elizabeth became a part of the behind the scenes. Margaret was quite persuasive in the future of LapeTV. Be honest and open. Do not hide when products were provided and not purchased. Do unboxing videos and state plainly if the products were purchased or provided. Discount links worked. Do not pretend to be something that it wasn’t. It was all good. It all worked. It was all correct.

There wasn’t a pull back. There didn’t need to be. Some channels pretend to be something they are not. Instagram Influencers have been shown to be frauds when they make claims that are not true or they Photoshop images to improve the surroundings. With LapeTV there was no need. Sometimes Channel Dad Bryon Lape was with the World Class Bullshitters, sometimes he was just by himself. He was open and honest always. They audience responded. The channel grew. People subscribed. Bryon Lape visualized 100,000 subscribers and it happened.

When there is a desire to learn from success, there is no need for failure to be expected. While it is possible to learn from failure, it is far more powerful to learn from success. When you learn from success, the pattern to repeat and perfect is provided. When the learning comes from failure only the pattern to avoid is provided. It is far easier to repeat a pattern than to avoid. Seek you first the pattern that provides than the pattern that prohibits. For no greater experience can one provide for themselves than one that can be studied and repeated with even greater success.

Reach out. So much can be had when you maximize your Life.

Fitness, Marketing, The Law

THE START OF THE BEGINNING

The YouTube channel was finally starting to grow. Each week, the number of subscribers rose, as did the amount of increase. Nothing spectacular, but the growth was steady.

When the milestone of reach 2,500 subscribers was reached, a new trend started to develop with the video watches. Previously, the videos about pop culture, in particular Star Wars and Marvel Movies, had been the highest watched. This was in contrast to trends from several years ago when the supplement reviews were king. New subscribers were starting to watch the reviews again, with several reaching more views than the channel had subs. What was going on?

Around the 3,000 sub level, a contact came in from a marketing research firm. They wanted to chat about a test venture that would no doubt grow my channel. Surely this is spam and it was ignored. A few days later, a more convincing message was sent and contact was made. They had conducted an honesty survey using several channels and mine rated the highest. A six week experiment was in order to see how much potential there was in a channel that had various topics and was not trying to directly sell anything. This sounded great!

The first two weeks of the experiment was about getting the videos in order and tagging them properly. Several old videos had to go. They were too divisive or too old. Away they went. Others need to be updated for proper tagging. A few thumbnail tweaks here and there as well. Nice and proper. Good, what next?

A consistent schedule was created. Videos would go out three times a week. Sunday afternoons were good for a pop culture video. It could be a single topic or a summary. The experiment would derive which worked better. Tuesday morning at 9 was good for a supplement review or other fitness related video. Friday morning was primetime for a beer review. People were getting ready for the weekend on Friday and a good beer suggestion helped them prepare. There, now stick to this schedule, until it needs to be updated.

Now for the thumbnails. They are too boring. Each should be unique and yet have a familiarity. Each should convey enough insight to be interesting. A format was chosen for each video type. A formula was discovered. Care was taken in their creation. They looked sharp, but not too professional.

The videos themselves needed something that was missing: an air of caring, not one of a hobby. YouTube, after all, was a place of business and the videos need to reflect that. Don’t just throw together a video in minutes. Take some time to prepare and plan them. A consistent introduction was needed for each type. A proper and consistent expectation needed to be created in the mind of the viewer. They should be able to tell what type of video they were watching by the introduction alone. No more sloppy t-shirts, even in the gym. Look like you care. Look like you want to help them. Well, because, you want to do so. The viewer must get that message subconsciously in the first ten seconds. If not, they would be lost. Too often, and they would not return.

Over time, the videos took on the new ideas. By the fourth week, the channel growth was up to 200 new subscribers a week. This was not some drop in the bucket as had been when the Brie Larson/Captain Marvel video exploded. Views hit 1,000 for every video. Then 5,000. This was real growth and people showed their appreciation. The number of likes grew. Comments were left that reflected their desires. They communicated with one another. The first steps to a real YouTube community were being created. Finally! This is Awesome!

The channel was not the only thing to be growing. The marketing research firm was able to collect useful data from subscribers and viewers (surveys, advertisement reactions, social media sharing). This information could be sold or used to help their clients better their marketing efforts. They called and wanted a face to face. They had a new proposal.

It was with a bit of hesitance that a meeting was arranged in Upstate New York. Would the rights to the channel have to be sold or signed away? Would the income continue to grow?

No, on both accounts. Margaret wanted a more direct partnership: full-time consultant. The channel stays in the same hands, but direction and feedback would come from the firm to help it grow. Viewers would also be encouraged to take part in surveys and such to help gauge the value. The largest market was the fitness supplements industry, but it wasn’t the only one. Videos needed to be more often. There were brands interested in offering views discounts on new orders. A few apparel companies wanted to have their wears on display in workout videos. The best, though, was the request for not only interviews with the spokespeople for brands, but workout videos and appearances on their channels. LapeTV was becoming a bigger thing and it needed to grow, quickly.

A new video schedule was created. Sunday afternoons would now be “Conversations with Brainmuffin,” a new interview series like no other. All too often, the same questions are asked repeatedly and the personalities become quite tired of answering them. A new idea was to be tried, let them create their own list of questions, at least in part. What have they never been asked? Is there a question they would like to revise an answer for? New lines of thought? Why does no one ask these questions? A casual conversation was the goal, instead of some firing line style Q&A. Great!

Views about pop culture moved to three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Supplement reviews and taste tests, workout videos, and videos on correct exercise execution came out on Tuesday and Thursday. Beer reviews were still limited to Friday, but beer making would be added from time to time. Interviews with brewers would also be added to “Conversations with Brainmuffin,” but only once a month. Beer just isn’t paying the bills.

The return trip was overwhelming. The firm rented most of a floor in the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati as a place for conducting interviews and making the tasting videos. A kitchen area was created to allow for fitness cooking and beer making. An area of the floor was reinforced and a proper gym was created. Starting with local talent and fitness pros (personal trainers, rehabilitation specialists, sports coaches), workout and training routine videos were created. Often, the same people not only wanted to be on “Conversations with Brainmuffin,” but they also wanted to do supplement taste tests. Brands eventually allowed their local spokes person to bring new flavors and products by. The YouTube channel grew and so did the BitChute echo.

Helping with everything locally was Margaret’s trusty assistant, Elizabeth. Keeping everyone on schedule, in particular Brainmuffin himself, was a full-time job. After a month, Margaret knew she had to give up Elizabeth and let her run the operation. A new partnership was crafted: the making of a YouTube channel like none other.

Then, the first development happened. Arnold reached out for an interview in Columbus during the Classic.

Marketing

What’s The Deal With Landing Pages Anyway?

Embed from Getty Images

Talk to any on-line marketer for any length of time and they are sure to ask about your landing pages. If your reaction is “My landing what?” then it is time to learn something about your marketing. Not having the proper landing page will hold you back and cost you money. Take note.

Here’s Why You Need To Use Landing Pages

All the products that you want to sell online are ready. You have already signed up with the Google Adsense program or with other affiliate marketing programs and you have already prepared the ad you want to post on your affiliate’s site. Your mind is now set to being the next most successful online businessman. But is there anything else that you might have forgotten to prepare? Maybe none. But how about your landing pages? Are they all set for your business?

Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad. For affiliate marketing, landing pages would refer to the web page where you, as a merchant, would want your potential customer to be directed after clicking your ad on your affiliate’s website. Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site. Some online businessmen would even use the homepage of their websites as the landing page for their ads. Are these businessmen making a big mistake? Or should you follow their method in creating landing pages for their ads?

Well, you can always follow what most online retailers do, directing their potential customers to the homepages of their websites. But if you want to achieve something more from your online business, and if you want to earn a lot of profits, you better create a special landing page for your web ads. Why? Here are a few reasons why you need to use landing pages for your web ads. And take note, it would do you a lot better if you create a great landing page than a so-so one.

Reason no. 1: It is the only way you earn conversions in an affiliate marketing program.

There are a variety of affiliate marketing programs today, but most of these programs let the merchant pay the affiliate in a pay per click basis. Basically, all you have to do is sign up with the program and submit your ad. The program owner would then distribute your ad to various affiliates who would then place your ad on their websites. Whenever your ad is clicked, a visitor would be directed to your landing page and you would have to pay the affiliate for his service.

As a merchant, you earn in an affiliate program through conversions—that is whenever a visitor that is directed to your site actually buys a product on your site. Without these conversions, you actually earn nothing from the program. Also, the more visitors that your affiliates have directed to your site, the larger would your expense be. And the only way that you can recover from these expenses is through conversions.

Now, you sure won’t get any conversion if you have posted an ad on your affiliate’s site without an actual landing page for the potential customer to be redirected into. It’s just like advertising a product without actually having a store to sell your product. Your advertisement may be enticing enough to encourage people to purchase a product, but without the landing page, how will they know how to purchase the product

It is therefore important to have landing pages for your ads because it is the only way for you to earn something in an affiliate program. Without landing pages, all you do is spend money paying your affiliates without actually getting anything in return.

Reason no. 2: Other web pages may just not be enough.

Many people make the mistake of making their website’s homepage as the landing page for their ads. The same is true for those who make use of other pages like a “contact us” page or a product page. Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contains a lot of links to other pages or to other websites. The same is with the other two pages mentioned. If you want to be successful in an affiliate program, we’re sure that you don’t want your landing page to cater to the needs of various people, most of which may not be really interested with your product.

When choosing a landing page, you must always have the customer directed into that page in mind. Therefore, your landing page must be relevant to the keywords and the contents you placed on your ad. It is also important that the landing page can induce your visitor to take action—that is to purchase your product or at least provide leads for potential customers.

Final Word

You probably entered into an affiliate marketing program with these things in mind: to save on advertising expenses and to gain more profit. But if you get into an affiliate marketing program without actually having a landing page, you’ll end up paying too much without getting anything in return. So if you still don’t have a landing page for your ads, you better start creating one now. And don’t get us wrong; it isn’t enough for you to have just a landing page—it should be a great landing page!

Marketing

Google Penalties?

How to do seo for a website
How to do seo for a website (Photo credit: SEOPlanter)

You work hard on your website. You hire good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. You write good content and are careful to make it organic. You know content is king and you do your best to make it so. You are ranking high for your key terms and words. Things are great. Sales are coming in and good traffic finding your website. All is good with the world.

One day visits to your site drop a bit. The next day, the visits are done more. Sales start to drop. The content must be getting stale you surmise, so you make more. You go about making back links to your site from others that make sense. You do more SEO. Surely this will help, it doesn’t. Your page ranking goes from the top of the first to last on the twentieth. Soon you are on the hundredth page. What is going on?

Google’s Changing Algorithms

Google does its best to make searching work for the general user. There are many spam sites out there that generate machine readable content, but to the human they make no sense. This only serves the marketer, not the genuine business owner. Your site doesn’t have this content non-sense, but it still drops. Why is Google penalizing your site?

Let’s take a look at a few things.

That Darned 404 Page

Are there pages that have changed or gone out of use? Are there still some links out there that are no longer valid? Do some searching and update them. If they cannot be updated, provide a redirect. What about internal links? Are they all valid? No, get them updated and corrected. Google will mark your site when there are dead links.

How Good Is Your Content?

Do you copy and paste your content? Perhaps change a few words here and there? Not good. Make your pages unique. Repeated content will get a bad mark.

Where did you get your content? Is it yours? If it belongs to someone else, did you pay for it? Not only is copy and pasting within your site bad, copying it from somewhere else is bad as well. It is one thing to hire a copywriter. It is purely another to steal it.

Keywords are a great way to give more meaning and value to your pages, but be careful. Stuffing words into tags can get a mark against you. Keep the keywords relevant to your actual content. One guideline is to use 160 characters in your page description. Don’t get all blabbery and write a book there.

What Of Those External Links?

Back links are not necessarily bad, but follow two ideals. First, make sure the sites relate clearly to your site and the content. Don’t just start stuffing links everywhere, make them count. Second, are these other sites in the same language or in the same country as yours? Unless you are posting in German, don’t visit German sites and plant links. Stick to the related and familiar. Otherwise, Google may smack your efforts.

Don’t Get Cute

Some people will buy links and believe this will help their ranks. In the old days, yes. Perhaps even now it may work for a short time, but Google does not like the practice as it is seen as gaming the system. Don’t fall for the slick ads and keep away from buying links.

Page content is only a part of the solution. How your pages are constructed also matters. Just as keyword stuffing is not good, neither is using the H1 tag too liberally, lots of anchor text, or hiding content or links. With each new generation, Google’s algorithm is trying to read content more like a human that a machine. This means your structure is being reviewed and graded. Think hiding content full of great keywords will help? Wrong! Don’t get cute with the content nor the structure. Make the page good for humans and stay away from phoney keyword tricks.

 The More Comments The Better, Correct?

Those who do not follow these guidelines will find your site and leave comments. These are spammers looking to push all manner of crappy products and sometimes they are pure scammers. Moderate your comments for these very occurrences and deny them. Have some there already? Mark these as spam and delete them. Sure, you do not control the comments people leave, but you can control whether or not these are published and seen by the search engines.

But, wait. Don’t I want the comments? Isn’t it great that people have found my site? Yes, it is nice they found you, but Google may hold their comments against you. Be the site moderator and let the comments help you, not harm.

Go Do It

There are other items too, such as sitemaps and slow loading times, but this is a good list to get started. Websites cannot just be built once and let be. Each week, there should be some updates to your site and they should be meaningful. Moderator your traffic and understand from where it comes. Put attention into those paths ways and look to find more link them. A little bit each week goes a long way to keeping your site ranked high. When your site drops, don’t panic and understand what is happening. Then take action to properly fix the bad marks and improve your rank.

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Internet Marketing

When Will Google See Me?

English: a chart to describe the search engine...
English: a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing a blog is a good way to attract potential customers to your business, but there is an art to the science. The web is crawling with all manner of experts who claim they know how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and that will rank you high on results for terms your potential customers use. Great. But they all claim it and they all can’t be correct. After all, how many different websites will be using the terms you want?

Do a keyword search using Google’s tool and you will see how popular certain search criteria are. Really think these experts will get you ranked high on those? They will say choose different ones that are not so competitive. If your are selling jackets and sweaters on your site, why would you want to rank high for terms like wool thread or outer clothing? The terms need to be relevant or it will nor work properly.

Regular readers of this blog will start to wonder if I’m repeating myself as there are several posts here lamenting the plights of SEO and the rip-off artists that prey upon those who have new domain registrations. True and this is not a repeat as much as it is a flow of consciousness rant. Google keeps changing their search engine rules and staying up to date on the latest techniques is exhausting. My blog doesn’t even rank highest for my name, Bryon Lape. Why is that?

A few weeks ago, I moved all the content for my blog to a domain that is my name. I’ve had bryonlape.com for quite some time, but I was using a permanent forward to the old domain. The content was exported and then imported to a newer WordPress server. Several of the posts have been pushed to Twitter and the old site has been redirecting to a BlueHost capture day for weeks.

And so what?

Searches for phrases from the old site reveal that Google has not yet followed the content. The results that are shown are still the old domain and must be fetched from Google’s cache to be viewed. I even searched for my name this domain was nearly at the bottom of the list. How is that? My name is in the title of this blog and in the domain. Surely that should rank higher. My nickname of Brainmuffin ranks worse with Google still believing I’m really wanting bran muffins. Arg!

I’ve had several nicknames over the years, with Brainmuffin being the most recent and given to me nearly 20 years ago. Two others of mine, Ropeman and Schnurmann, go back to high school nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps I should blog on their meaning and origins too and see if Google ever ranks them high enough to recognize.

There are times I truly do not understand Google’s algorithms and why pages rank as they do. Microsoft uses this lack of understanding on the part of users in their Bing ad campaigns. It is not too infrequently that Google will return a mismatch of pages and one has to use the phrase remove feature to remove them. Search for a business opportunity review and it gets worse.

This latter inquiry is not all the fault of Google though. Remember those SEO experts? Some of them have a service behind them that puts your content all over the web, with changes made here and there to make the search engines believe the content is different. It is this manner of inorganic content that Google is trying to combat with all their algorithm changes. Sometimes it works, other times it really hurts the small business website.

So, now here I am. I make new content and post in different places. I wait a day or two and search for terms in my content. Often the pages returned are irrelevant and the old site continues to be returned. I have moved. When will Google see me?

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Marketing

Time For Moving

Time
Time (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn (back soon, sorry for not commenting))

Since the creation of this blog, it has been hosted at BlueHost. Fairly inexpensive, it was a good place to start. As there was originally an idea of trying to make money with the blog, a more marketing directed feel was used and a commercial package purchased. The domain for my name, Bryon Lape, was purchased later and was always intended to replace “The Road To The Future”.

The admins at BlueHost never seemed able to change the answering domain for my blog, so originally bryonlape.com was given a permanent forward via Go Daddy. That worked for the most part, but wasn’t what was wanted. Also, the other two domains for the site became old and useless, but try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of them.

Despite the advertised price, the cost for hosting at BlueHost ran more than $400 a year. This was ridiculous for a WordPress site that generated no income. Time to move on.

A few searches revealed several competitors. Also, it was learned that WordPress would export the content for importing into a new site. Excellent.

The new hosting service chosen was HostGator. Like Blue, they also allow for reselling of their hosting services. I’ll look into that later, perhaps. Now it is setup, update DNS for the domain with Go Daddy, wait a day for it to propagate (where is TTL these days???), connect with the WordPress backend and install plugins, and then upload the old content.

During the import, there were a few errors, but the content looks to be there. There may be a couple of files that will require moving later, not sure. The first blog post “When Not To Be In Business” is there with the date of April 29, 2011. Wow, three years I’ve been at this and still no one reads it.

Time to move forward. The old site will get retired soon. The old account deactivated. They should have done what I asked.

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Marketing

Claiming My Name

English: "Golden girl" – Horses (unk...
English: “Golden girl” – Horses (unknown breed, Isabelle or Palomino coloured): Mare with a foal, somewhere in Surrey, UK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Formerly, I have written about Search Engine Optimization and how I was able to get the results from Google for a former classmate of mine, Edwina Marquand, to have my blog at the top of the list. That’s great if anyone should come looking for Edwina or want to know more about her love of horses, but what about my name? What happens when one enters Bryon Lape into Google?

For years, doing a personal search brought back the oddest of results. Often, Google would search for each term separately and the list contained links to everything but me. As the algorithm developed, old USENET postings came up first. Even as I started blogging, it took quite some time before Bryon Lape was me. What does it take to claim yourself?

Knowing how the various search engines optimize indexing plays a key role in getting Search Engine Optimization to work. At one time, deep linking was the way to go. The images. Video. Crosslinks. Deep crosslinks. Links with better titles and meta-data. On and on it went. The more recent algorithms started to look at text as a human reader. The days of producing what looks to a human like random text so the keywords, in this case Bryon Lape, turned up a pertain percentage of the time are quickly coming to an end. Marketers still find ways around it, but content, real, human readable content, is truly King.

So, what about Edwina Marquand? Well, she’s still out there somewhere. I’ve not spoken to her since near the end of the 7th grade at Hayfield Intermediate School (June 1981). I imagine she’s been married for 20 years or more, has several children and probably doesn’t full remember Bryon Lape from 6th and 7th grade. No matter. I will hold a memory in my mind and heart till I cannot and remember her stories of horses.

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Commentary

Hit Capturing SEO

Serinda Swan as Zatanna Zatara on Smallville.
Serinda Swan as Zatanna Zatara on Smallville. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Getting the right Search Engine Optimization is crucial to any website. Have the wrong key words and your site will generate the wrong traffic. Content is king and SEO is how the people find the king. It is not something to get wrong.

I have long wondered if it is possible to use SEO as a method of subterfuge. That is, choose words that are not actually correct for a website, but pull in interesting traffic anyway. What to do though is the question.

I wrote an article about a date with Nikki Dial. The story was based on a long reoccurring dream. Perhaps more correctly as a day dream. I’ve held Nikki in high esteem for years. Did having Nikki Dial in the site content bring in more visitors? Yes, it did. As my site is not geared to making conversions to sales, it didn’t mean more money. It did mean, however, more spammers found the site and have left crap comments that do to bogus selling sites. Not really what was meant.

What about using other names? Perhaps an article about Serinda Swan? Write about her loveliness being in TRON: Legacy. The wonderfully tight outfit that showed her curves to every 12 year old boy living in us all. The eyes. Oh my, there is much there.

Not into movies? Serinda Swan recently posed for Maxim. The pictures are hot, of course, and Serinda looks marvelous in everyone. Makes for wanting her to pose in other, more revealing magazines.

Serinda Swan isn’t the only lovely lady one could use for some SEO. The overly boobed German model Jordan Carver is another. She augmented her 5’6″ frame with implants that give her 32HH breasts. Even without her surgery, Jordan is still very lovely and could easily make a post about her. That is, if you want a great deal of traffic from people looking for pictures of Jordan Carver nude.

Don’t like any of these names? It is easy to choose more. Keegan Connor Tracy played in Jake 2.0, Battlestar Galactica and Once Upon A Time. The lovely and cruel character Regina Mills as played by Lana Parrilla would make a good article. Her ass is enough to write about for days. A Lost fan? Emilie de Ravin was a lovely blonde on Lost and is now a lovely brunette on Once Upon A Time. There’s an interesting twist.

Search Engine Optimization is a sticky wicket. Finding the right mix is key. Finding the right mix is the hardest portion. Play with them all.

 

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Commentary, Marketing

Content Is King

Lifesize Religious King Statue with Spear
Lifesize Religious King Statue with Spear (Photo credit: epSos.de)

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are two main ways to go: do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. The techniques used by either path are the same, though the professional may have access to more tools and options. Create content all over the Internet that points back to your site. Use the proper keywords the right number of times and SEO will be yours. Spam them too much and Google will ignore you.

Many people go at the keywords with reckless abandon. They use Google’s Adword Keyword tool and make list and after list of good keywords. They do all the can to work these keys words into articles to make them look like Search Engine Optimization wizards. They create content that seems odd and fantastic. They forget a key element.

Content is King.

In the early days of Internet marketing, it was easy. Find several blog sites and copy the same article to them all. Perhaps change a few words here or there, but that was about it. Post the article and let the search engines find them. Leads poured into business opportunities and people made money. People also complained and Google struck back: the infamous Google slap! Leads dried up overnight. Adword accounts were closed. The money makers had to find a new way.

The content makers realized they needed to create a few different versions of the same article. Someone figured out to use a formula to the paragraphs of the article and them made a routine to randomly swap them out. Those posted all over the Internet lead to hit rates climbing again. Come across one of the pages though and they were not humanly readable.

Google got smarter. Along came Panda.

More and more, the search engines look at context, as well as, the content. Does the content flow? Is it human readable? Is it duplicated? Is it just greeking? With each update, both Google and Bing learn the context. Along cam mobile and raised the bar again. Google search on an iPhone is not only optimized for text, it is also optimized for time and place. Google knows where you are and what the time is. In the same spot it may return different first pages depending on if it is 10am or 6pm. Your content needs to reflect such changes.

Content, after all, is King.

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Marketing

Conference In Phoenix

Customers are Ignoring You
Customers are Ignoring You (Photo credit: ronploof)

Last week I attended the AAA Marketing/IT conference. It is an annual conference to cover ideas and trends going on in the world of marketing and information technology. This year, the conference was held outside of Phoenix near Chandler. The Wild Horse Resort held host.

The last conference was held 18 months ago in Boca Raton, Florida. The main message then was social, social, social. Twitter and Facebook  were becoming good and powerful tools by which to push marketing messages. They are new ways to reach current customers and a new audience. For technologists, the social sites can be a headache with their increase in network traffic. Nearly every workshop was related to using social, leveraging social, accessing social and using social.

Time frames on the Internet move quickly. The short 18 months between conferences have lead to the latest trend: mobile. The discussion of mobile in all its facets was the main idea of the conference, repeated over and over. Experts from Google spoke on using mobile to reach the younger customers and the importance of knowing what kind of device is being used to access your website and what time of day it is. Adaptive design is a must on your website. If customers have a bad mobile experience on your site, it is very difficult to get them back.

The use of a mobile application is another way to access the customer. It must allow the user to be flexible and use it in ways intuitive to them. Make the customer work too much on using your mobile application and they will remove it. It too needs to take location and time of day into account. It must adapt. It must keep their attention.

The age of mobile is here. Smartphone sales have outpaced desktop computers for the last few years. This year, the number of smartphones on the Internet will be greater than number of desktop computers. More and more of your customers will access your web site from mobile devices of various types: phones, tablets and phonelets. They come in different sizes and every user on them expects to use your site within the proper context of their device.

Get mobilized or get left behind.

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