Throw them a life line.

It came up again in our monthly business review. A nice sale in our pipeline has stalled. It’s a simple but substantial software upgrade. It’s stalled because our customer wants to wait a few months until the company makes another software systems change. Our internal sponsor in the company loves us, and wants to get the upgrade now because it will help him do his job better. We’ve already made a couple of site visits, had some conference calls, laid out our reasoning why they should go forward with the upgrade now rather than later. Our proposal has made the rounds. We have a verbal that they are going to go forward…eventually. But of course, anything could happen between now and eventually, so what can we do to make it happen now?

My suggestion was to give our sponsor some support in the form of a clear, concise, and hopefully compelling written argument that he can use as a “cheat sheet” when trying to remember everything we’ve told him several times and are counting on him to remember and repeat. Heck, hopefully he will cut and paste some of what we write into an e-mail to executives higher up.

Sure, this is fairly tactical stuff, and not as sexy as working on a brochure, or the next webinar, but could well be as important a step in closing the sale as that initial direct mail piece was, and should not be overlooked. And it is so easy for the marketer to create.  We see it as obvious, because we live and breathe our solution every day. Our sponsor sees it, because he’s drank the kool aid. And yet so far we have left it up to him to sell it for us internally.

Two hours later, after getting some good notes about the hurdles ahead of us, our answer to those hurdles, and our list of benefits for doing the upgrade NOW, I crafted a one-page argument, broken into three sections, using subheads, bullets, some bolded elements, and a “for dummies” diagram. Tomorrow, we will e-mail it to our sponsor, who is grateful for the ammo.

Linked In X-Ray Search

I don’t like the fact that Linked In charges a steep monthly fee for the privilege of searching for people by company name and title and seeing their first and last name. Now, if you search within Linkedin.com itself for people, you only get their first name, last initial. However if you use Google site search and add the phrase “powered by” Google will return first and last names of people on Linked In. You can then click on their Linked In profile and hopefully find a bio to shed light on the person’s role. You can also find their colleagues and boss with the handy sidebar that lists people in related searches.

In Google just type site:linked.com “title of target” “company name” “powered by”.

Google Advanced Search

• It helps to search for 2 or three word phrases within quote marks. For example “private fleet” AND “company name” and/or “possible title” (e.g., “transportation manager”).
• Use Chrome, and block every jobs site that ever comes up. Jobs sites wind up being 50%  of the search results, so you want to filter them out. While you are at it, block all the content marketing sites that also return garbage. These are all the directory sites like Manta.com and article sites like ezinearticles.com
• Use other parameters like – before a word to tell google don’t return a page that has this word on it. For example if I am searching for tractor trailer rigs, I want to filter out -monster for “monster trucks” and -Ford -Chevy -dodge -pickup to filter out pickup trucks.

Create your own Custom Google Search Engine

The safest bets for finding free WordPress themes that have not been poisoned with bad codes is from the WordPress theme directory at wordpress.org, or from reputable theme designers, straight from their websites. Beware of a theme that appears from a reputable designer if it is not being downloaded directly from the designer’s site. Theme pirating and hacking is rampant.

Avoid themes that are Creative Commons copyrighted. They should be GPL licensed, meaning they comply with WordPress’ rules for theme development.

The world of theme development for WordPress has shifted in the past year to theme “frameworks.” A theme framework is as it sounds a structure for building themes from the starting point of a well-developed and robust generic starting point. Smashing Magazine offers an overview of why and how frameworks are used. Basically, this is the modern way of running a WordPress themed website that helps you keep your theme updated and ready to accept new functionality as it comes out. A theme framework can look good out of the box, but it is really the “child themes” built off of those frameworks that generate great looking designs on a sturdy structure. Some popular frameworks right now are Thematic, Thesis, and Hybrid.

I believe it is well worth paying $50 for a professionally designed theme built on a widely used WordPress framework. You get the peace of mind that you don’t have malicious code hidden in the theme. You get an installed user base to answer questions you will inevitably have in setting up your website. You get a more professional looking website often enough. And last but not least, you reward the hard work somebody invested in the theme as well as incentivize development out outstanding themes.

I am a big believer in open source resources like WordPress and Joomla for building website that look great and empower people to be able to manage their own websites inexpensively. But when it comes to free themes. You get what you pay for.

Now, just few years ago, the window-shade type pop ups would have been inadequate to the task.  Skyline’s Exalt system uses three individual pop-up banners that can be joined together with magnets. The edges of each banner can be pushed out four inches to help create a curved back wall. The graphics are printed on dye-sublimated cloth rather than vinyl. Cloth doesn’t throw off a glare and looks more sophisticated. Three halogens help light the backdrop so it doesn’t wash out under the trade show lights.

The disadvantages of the old booth was that it was heavier to ship and took time to set up. The old system was essentially a big carpet-covered plastic curved wall to which you attached graphics using velcro. The graphics tended to warp and basically hid all of the carpet, so the whole booth was basically a hundred pound frame to hold a sign. Trade show booth companies still sell these systems, but they are really outdated compared to more lightweight systems.

The advantages of our new booth:

• Lightweight, so it can be checked as baggage when traveling to the show, eliminating shipping costs.
• Carried onto the show floor, eliminating drayage costs ($150 you pay just to have your shipment brought out onto the convention center floor.
• Takes one guy about five minutes to set up.
• Finished product is wrinkle-free and looks high tech, provided you also get halogen lights.
• Is modular, so you can take just one of the banner stands to small events, like a breakfast seminar.

As far as design, I designed the backdrop image myself. I simply Googled “abstract blue background” until I found a vector file I liked, and then I modified it with software until satisfied with the results.  I went to istockphoto to find a quality picture of a warehouse manager. I had to persuade my sales team that the changes to the copy were a good thing, because they had worked very hard to get all the phrases they thought they needed on the old trade show sign. A trade show booth is not a brochure. It is not meant to be read like a brochure. Here is my philosophy about what makes a good trade show booth backdrop:

• SIMPLE. Bold graphics. Think about what makes a good billboard and you get the idea. Instead of having several small graphic elements competing for attention, pick one image and make it BIG as possible.
• FEWER WORDS. You don’t need to bullet out all of your talking points. Your booth should reinforce your brand. You really don’t need much more than your company logo and a thematic tag line. If you don’t want to swap out your graphics for the next show, you are better off putting words that reinforce your value proposition, rather than naming product names or features/benefits.
• DON’T BE CHEESY. Fonts matter. Photography matters. Avoid clip art and obvious stock images.
• RESOLUTION MATTERS. You shouldn’t see pixels standing close to the sign. And you should be able to read every word on the sign from 20 yards away.
• COLOR. Unless you have a reason not to, the color scheme should align with your brand identity. Think about high contrast, for visibility and drama. Oh, and make sure your carpet doesn’t clash.
• Put your LOGO up high so it isn’t blocked by people in the booth.

OLD BOOTH:

Color is off in this photo.

NEW BOOTH:

That's me on the left.

The sales and marketing needs are many, but high on the list is the need for some client case studies. Essentially, Syntelic has a well defined market of about 800 companies that field private trucking fleets. Prior to starting here a week ago, I did not know much about warehouse and transportation logistics. Nonetheless, I read our own literature and set up a phone interview with a current client in one of our verticals (Grocery).  Despite the fact that the client wishes to remain anonymous, this new case study will be a valuable marketing tool to go after other food distributors.

Here is what I know about case studies:

• The standard format, particularly in the software industry is Challenge, Solution, Results. A case study is meant to be digested quickly, so that a prospective customer can see how comparable company dealt with hopefully the same challenges and met those challenges with a solution that produced real results.

• Even though you might have a ton of good quotes and want to pack your case studies with information about your product or service, resist the urge. Short is better than long. An easy to read format is better than something that looks like a long article .
• Professional-looking design can set you apart. I’m no designer, but I think I have an eye for good design. It includes white space, clean lines, an attractive color palette, and effective font usage (1 or 2 fonts, kerning, leading, and the right spacing between paragraphs and headlines.

I have five more case studies to produce quickly, and then a major overhaul of Syntelic’s website over the next three weeks.

President Obama's Facebook Page

Put your best foot forward with your Facebook Page or pages. First, have some clear objectives. How does your Facebook presence integrate with your website, blog, and other marketing efforts, online and offline? How will you provide content for the page? How will you manage engagement with your Facebook fans?

Create a Custom Landing Page

What do your page visitors see when they come to your page?

Basic: The default landing page will be your wall posts.  From there, visitors can click on the tabs at the top of the page to access other pages and applications, or they can scroll down and click on the left sidebar boxes.  You can delete stuff, and drop and drag to rearrange tabs and boxes.

• When you import a picture for the upper left hand corner real estate, consider its importance in branding your page. It can be as big as 200 x 600 pixels, so I recommend maximizing that real estate and Photoshopping something nice that shows humans (Facebook is all about the personal), your logo, and the “elevator pitch” about your products or services. Tie it in with the look and feel of your other marketing presences.
• Eliminate tabs and boxes that you aren’t using. Don’t be afraid to edit down like any good designer. Less is more.
• Have a plan to post something at least 3 times a week. Anything less signals that you aren’t really committed to your Facebook presence.

Intermediate: Install and use the Static FBML App. When you do this, you can set it to be the default tab that people see who have not “liked” your page. In this way, you put your best foot forward with first time visitors. And your followers can still access (but will have less reason to) once they have become followers by liking your page. Steps:

1. Add the app to your page account
2. Under your page’s upper left corner image click on Edit Page.
3. Find the FBML app listed under apps and click on “application settings.”
4. Add it as either a top navigation page or a left sidebar box. Or do both.
5. You can purchase some nice looking FBML templates for about $15 or use this free one as your first effort. If you know how to edit HTML, you can make the free template look pretty good. If you are a coding demon, have at it.
6. Click on settings and choose Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else: (your FBML page)

Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse

If you think about why people like Facebook these days, it’s either to follow the thought leader or keep their finger on the pulse of deals and special offers for the brands they care about.  Here are things to consider:

• Make your first time visitor (FBML) landing page tease the fact that your followers have access to your good stuff (relevant wall posts, promotions, deals, events, etc.) Then it goes without saying, live up to this promise.
• Install a promotions App to run promotions. Could be a giveaway, a contest, our a coupon. If you set them up the right way, they will have a viral element of getting people to tell their friends about you. Think about how you can point people to your exclusive Facebook promotions from other places–trade shows, websites, packaging.  The rules for promotions can be tricky, but the vendors such as Wildfire make it easy.

Further Tweaking

• You can include RSS feeds of your corporate/organization blog so that every blog post automatically posts to your Facebook wall. Automation is good. Be careful though if many of your followers are already subscribed to your blog. If they feel it is redundant you may actually hurt yourself as followers “hide” you from their feed. Also, don’t overshare. More than twice a day and you are raising the odds of people resenting your contribution to their information overload. Also, if each and every blog post isn’t relevant to your followers, then don’t integrate but post selectively and manually.
• You can also put an RSS feed in a tab rather than into your Wall feed.
• You can add additional apps for content such as Slideshare presentations, You Tube videos, photos, polls, and more. Again, don’t feel the need to add everything and create a content ghost town, but rather start with something you can do well or that makes sense for your business. (e.g., some businesses can easily post great pictures and others have nothing to do with pictures).

Promote Your Page

Put a Facebook widget on your website. They come in various configurations, such as showing a block of faces of your followers. Put a “share with friends” widget on every page of content on your site–pick a universal one such as “share this.” Your own staff should participate by “liking” wall posts at least once a week or even commenting so all their Facebook friends regularly get exposed to the page.

Fact is, most people click through on the #1 position at the top of the first page of search engine results. Or they click on #2 and #3, and that’s the vast majority of click-throughs folks. Everything else are just scraps.The first spot gets twice the clicks of spot #2, according to research from ad network Chitka.

Two other studies, one by AOL and one by Cornell research indicate that the first spot gets about half of all clicks. #2 gets 13% and spot #3 gets roughly 9-10%. Thus, 75% of search clicks are given to the top three spots. The click percentages go down as you go down the top ten spots, and fall off the map even if you are on top of page two of search results (i.e., about 0.66%).

Of course, the precise numbers will vary quite a bit based on the phrase itself and the industry. The bottom line is, if you aren’t on page one, you aren’t even in the game, and if you aren’t in the top three slots, you aren’t achieving very good performance. For high volume, highly competitive words, you don’t have a prayer of getting the top slot. For example MasterCard is going to be in the top spot for MasterCard. Also, at this point in history, Wikipedia dominates the top three slots for many, many terms. So what we are talking about are the less competitive keywords where search volume might be 40,000-100,000 a month. And of course all those “long-tail” phrases.

See also: How to rank for your keywords (coming soon)

SEO Defined

“SEO” (search engine optimization) can seem like a black box to many people. Companies if they are at all enlightened about wanting to grow organic traffic to their website(s) know they need SEO. But what is it and how do you get it? First, you can outsource it, but know what you are getting for money, and especially understand what your SEO vendor is doing under the hood. There are “black hat SEO” techniques that can get you fast results but may not last or be sustainable. Worse, blackhat techniques can also backfire and wipe out hard earned gains in web traffic in an instant. There are also “white hat SEO” techniques that are good long term safer strategies but may take time, resources, and patience to pull off.

The reality is that “grayhat” SEO is probably what most SEO marketing vendors are doing when you pay them money and expect ROI. They may be doing good stuff and they may also be doing things that Google wouldn’t like if Google could spot it, but nothing so bad that it would damage their client’s web traffic or reputation.

Building Links for SEO

What it all comes down to at the end of the day is “link building.” You need links, lots of links, and the right kind of links to get top engine results, and the right kind of results that lead to conversions into sales/actions on your website.  This is where SEO is as much an art as a science, because Google, Yahoo, and Bing set the rules with their search engine algorithms. Those rules are not published, and so everybody is constantly experimenting and trying new things to see what works. And what works today may not work as well tomorrow.

The easiest part of SEO is making sure your web pages are optimized for the search engines. I’ll save that for another post. That’s old school. You are thinking about title tags, subheads, and keywords on a page and in your URLs? Good.

The next easiest thing is setting up the right internal linking strategy on your website.

Then there is the importance of content, giving the world a reason to visit your site, and want to bookmark it or otherwise link to it.

Last but not least, in fact critical, is how to get good quality inbound or external links so the search engines will reward you by placing you ahead of your competitors for the key words that matter for you. Have a commercial kitchen for rent in Northern Virginia? Then you want to be in the top slots for Google searches on “commercial kitchen NOVA” or “commercial kitchen Arlington, VA” and so on.

Factors in Linkbuilding

• Total number of links (you can never have too many of them).
• How quickly you acquired them. Get too many too fast from certain sources and Google will actually penalize you. A steady stream is best.
• The quality of the site or page linking to you. This is also talked about as the “pagerank” of the URL from whence the link came. Domains that have been around a few years rank higher than a site created last week.  Popular highly trafficked sites also provide quality, such as the Yahoo directory, You Tube, and newspaper sites.
• How your link mixes in with other links on that page. If your link is just part of a spammers link farm, it doesn’t have much value for instance.
• Keyword anchors. Meaning the hyperlink is on the keywords you are trying to rank in the search engines.
• If the content of the linking site relates to the content on your site, that’s a very good thing.
• The links are not tagged with “nofollow.” Such tags are supposed to mean that Google does not factor them in but they may still be given some weight.
• The domain extensions of .gov and .edu are known to be favored by Google, but obviously it can be hard to give a government site or a legitimate education site a reason to link to you.

Link Building Strategies

So what might a good link-building strategy look like?

1. Create compelling content on your site that other sites would want to link to. This is perhaps the best strategy for an organization with a limited budget. If you have a huge budget, there are SEO firms that can generate tons of links by brute force. But if you have a page that is a definitive article on a subject, all you really have to do is publicize its existence and perhaps maintain it, and links will organically appear like mushrooms after a rainstorm. This is also known as “link baiting.” Just be sure that the content that gets the links, and hence the traffic, aligns with what you are trying to do on your site. If you are a chef selling pasta, your content naturally would be about pasta and not celebrity gossip, because the celebrity gossip fans may or may not convert into pasta buyers.
2. Write content for other websites (a regular column, blog guest posts, and press releases) with a link back to your site. Create PDFs (e.g., e-books) with embedded links to your site. When these PDFs are republished you’ll get links.
3. Use article syndication sites such as ezinearticles and articlesbase.com. These sites are one of the few places where you can create an external dofollow link with good pagerank. Your content has to be original. If you write good articles with great headlines, bloggers will likely pick some of them up and more links will be created.
4. Leave lots of blog comments (where the link is a dofollow link meaning it is not tagged nofollow). These are hard to find. However, if your comment is not considered spam, the blogger may be willing to remove the no follow tag. Some WordPress sites are installing a dofollow plugin, but the comments they approve must be on topic. Most sites today hold comments in moderation, so its only the blackhat SEO type using software to spam comments with (dangerous) links who can get around this.
5. Submit your site to only major directories and niche directories in your industry. There are thousands and thousands of directory sites and most are crap. They either demand a link exchange–which is a near valueless link and can even penalize you–or they simply have no value, or again a negative value because Google know who they are.
6. Somewhat time consuming, and somewhat grayhat SEO is utilizing Web2.0 websites to create profiles and blogs as a way to create links back to your “money site” or the mothership.  If you cross-link these sites/profiles the right way (and there is a wrong way) you can increase the linking power.
7. Ask. Pick up the phone and contact webmasters, or e-mail them, asking for a link (begging won’t work, but hopefully you have something good on your site that they wouldn’t mind linking to. )
8. Install social bookmarking widgets on all your pages and ask your website visitors to bookmark your content. (but I’m finding that fewer people are clicking on these widgets these days).
9. Pinging your new content to RSS feeds, installing scripts that drop in your hyperlink when people or bots scrape your site to steal content or if bloggers are just cutting and pasting content.

You can also “rent links” that get added to iffy blogs that exist only as revenue generators for the link renting companies or mystery individuals who set them up. You can spot these fake sites because the content is meaningless if read by an actual human. In the blackhat/grayhat world, you can also buy links. This is the dirty little secret of the SEO companies. It can be cost effective, but those SEO companies really need to know there stuff to avoid getting caught and penalized by Google.

So, hopefully you can see what all is involved in link building–creating content and getting it properly formatted and out there. You can either do it yourself with staff–heck even interns–or outsource it. However, you may be disappointed at the number of links you get dollar for dollar through outsourcing.  An SEO firm for example might want $3,000 a month to write just four three paragraph articles for article syndication, and spend the rest of your SEO budget on reporting how many directories they submitted your site to each month, and then sprinkle in a few paid for or rented links.  If they can show you movement on one or two keywords you care about, they hope you will keep paying them month to month.

So get smart about SEO and think about your hyperlinks.

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Mission accomplished. You got the sale! They submitted the form. High fives all around. But wait, there’s more. Isn’t there?

A lot of times, this confirmation page is out of mind for marketers, because you can’t see it unless you complete a sale/action, and who fills out a form or buys something from their own website?  But don’t pass up this “dead end” as an opportunity to get your web user to stay in the dance just a little longer.

Things you can do for your customers:

• Put another offer there. Is there something else they could buy? An accessory? A complimentary product or service? An extended warranty? Maybe they saw these same offers a screen or two ago, but that was when they were a prospect. You know more about them now at the confirmation page. Maybe you can give them a special discount that is only viewable on the confirmation page. Amazon is a master at making sure there are more buying offers on its confirmation pages, squeezing every last drop of buyer interest. You just bought this, so you probably want to buy this. Airlines do it too. Now that you booked your flight, don’t you need a hotel room or rental car?
• Encourage them to go somewhere else. Provide links to your Facebook Page, Twitter Page, You Tube pages, Blog, etc.
• Give them a quick check box to sign up for your newsletter or for co-reg offers (offers from third-parties).
• Give them some love in the form of sweet extras to download to support the sale, such as How To’s or Tips Guides. This helps reassure them that they did the right thing, and builds your brand.

E-Mail Marketing Dead Ends

Too often the newsletter editors forget to always tie in the content of newsletters with products or services to be marketed. This is especially true for siloed organizations. They make the newsletter’s click-through landing page a marketing dead-end. So, they brag about open rates and click through rates, but the page isn’t converting any traffic into sales. Or maybe it is, but for only a segment of the company’s business.

For example, and association’s publishing department may produce e-newsletters but neglect to use the landing page to market upcoming webinars or seminars.  Or Membership has a laser-beam focus on growing member revenues with its e-mail campaigns, but have no internal incentive to promote other revenue streams.

If you have an editorial calendar, or editorial meetings for your e-newsletters, you can give your marketing folks or fellow department heads more lead time to salt the landing page with marketing tie ins. Instead of worrying about packing your e-newsletter with banner ads that people don’t click on anyway, think about putting those same marketing messages on the click-through-to-read-the-rest landing page.

Why People Like a Facebook Page

1. They just like you. They use your brand or aspire to it and they want all their friends to know.
2. They expect that you will post relevant news, gossip, and fun stuff about the brand, product, or event into their feed.
3. They had some incentive to do it. For example a contest.
4. You caught their attention with some clever post that they were exposed to when one of your followers commented or “liked” the item. They don’t know much about you, but are curious enough “like” your page to learn more.

Social Media Missed Bet

It was a huge revelation to me to discover the National Association of Homebuilder’s Follow Us on Social Media page. I saw that the NAHB had set up several FB pages, Twitter profiles and other social media pages. The official NAHB Facebook page has 2,311 followers. But a Facebook page entitled $8,000 Home Buyer Tax Credit has 14,667 followers!

That means the NAHB has a captive audience of more than 14,000 people who have identified themselves as being interested in the first time homebuyer’s $8,000 tax credit. Sadly, the association doesn’t seem to be interested in capitalizing on this page. The association posted a couple of times earlier in the year, and then only posted again this week for the first time in many weeks, because it looks like an extension for the tax credit for people who are already under contract is now dead.  The post had 17 likes (no options for Teeth Gnashing or “Hate” yet) and 47 comments. This is a signal that the page is capable of generating engagement.  In contrast, the NAHB is staying on top of its official page, posting a few times on a weekly basis.

Think about a Fan page (or several) that could work for you.

1. Make the title something that many people would naturally want to say the LIKE by clicking on the like button. Imaging how it might go viral as friends see that their friends liked it.
2. Don’t abuse the audience with posts that are not related to the page’s topic.
3. But leverage it! Find ways to keep it updated, with links back to your main website or official Facebook page.

OK, so I’m off to brainstorm some pages for the MiCash prepaid debit card.