Zephyr Marketing

My email got spammed today by Promotion-N-Motion…picture this. Your business is now on fire with all the “traffic” you’re getting by sign peddlers. I can’t figure out if this is remarkable or just plain annoying! If I saw one barreling by I’d probably give it  look, and a laugh? Would I be grinning at the remarkable ingenuity or how ridiculous this seems? Yeah…I think I’ll pass.

 Are you curious about how stuff works? Interested in how best to leverage and get the most out of the tools, applications and solutions that are out there? If so, you may find this feature useful.

I want to tell you about a very cool and cost effective feature Constant Contact has recently added to their email marketing service called, Email Campaign Archive. For just $5 more a month you can add this service to your email marketing program. Email Campaign Archive allows you to essentially save a copy of your published eNewsletters, Announcements, Press Releases - or whatever you send out from Constant Contact, and archive them on a page you can integrate in with your website!With a little effort in customizing the look and feel of your archive menu page, you can have it look like it’s part of your website’s design. To see an example of this, click on the link below which will take you to a page on a website I created for a community service organization:

Click to view an example Email Campaign Archive solution integrated with an organization’s website.

 Email Campaign Archive is a great way to give your communications a longer life and make them available long after their initial release.

Are you thinking about building a new website - or launching a new company, service or product line but don’t know how to go about it? We typically start by brainstorming a list of names. We hope to stumble upon something as clever, catchy and successful as “Google”, or “Coca-Cola.” We gravitate to names that are intensely personal or meaningful - to us. But, will it have meaning to the niche market we hope to attract?Harry Beckwith wrote a book called, “The Invisible Touch.” In it he outlines what he calls, “The Four Keys to Modern Marketing.” Key #2: Brand. Here’s a list of some concepts we can think about when it comes time to picking a name, a brand:

• A brand does not merely attract clients, it convinces clients that they got just what the brand promised.
• What attractive and desirable qualities should my brand embody?
• Choose a name that is unique, sensory, creative and outstanding (e.g. Red Pepper).
• Look for a name that makes the prospect, not you, sound important.
• The more commonplace you sound, the less interest you will attract.
• Say your name out loud, and listen very carefully.
• Keep your name short - eleven letters or four syllables max.

One more thing to add to Mr. Beckwith’s discussion: Look for a name you’d like to see at the top of the search engine results. Learn to think like your ideal customer thinks. What’s important to them? What are their needs? What are they looking for? Have keyword research done that will show you how effective your name can potentially be in being visible in the Search Engine results, AND your target market. Now, your domain name alone won’t bring you to the top, but it’s a great starting point from which to build everything else upon: Title and Description Tags, Web Content, File Names, etc. 

I recently completed some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training. One short statement in the course stood out with respect to the site URL: “Include the keywords (that your target market is searching for) in the URL, short and meaningful.” Think about making your URL part of, or the same as your company name, your brand. And, as we learn from Mr. Beckwith: Make it your domain. Own it. Be it.

Related Link: Search Engine Optimization: Four Vital Steps for Optimizing Your Website

Before we can talk about website content, we need to define “Internet Marketing.” I think of it in terms of the strategies, tools and tactics we implement in order to make our websites more visible to our target market. Let’s face it; the Internet is a medium that is quite clearly becoming more focused on non-intrusive forms of getting connected. We use Internet Search Engines to find things WE are interested in looking up. We respond to stimulus that is relevant and compelling - to OUR needs. We hate being bombarded by Spam and Pop-ups that interrupt us and make us hit the delete key or the close window button.

Today, more and more businesses are developing Internet Marketing strategies recognizing we’ve moved to a market driven more by consumers than the push of interruption marketers. To become more visible and attractive to their target audience, business websites are becoming more interactive. They are blogging, producing videos and podcasts; they are engaging their audience with web widget and social media marketing. They’re offering webinars via email marketing to interested subscribers, and they’re writing articles, white papers and eBooks and making them available for FREE on their websites! Plus, they’re writing compelling and interesting content!

Of all the strategies and things we can do to become attractive and more visible to our prospects, the holy grail of Internet marketing is to optimize your website’s content. If you don’t get your website content right you can forget about being found on the Internet. Gillian Meier of Blue Magnet, an Internet Marketing and Training company in South Africa writes, “an essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.” Optimizing our website’s content means:

• Having text on our web pages that is relevant to our audience’s interests
• Minimizing or eliminating the use of flash and other technologies that Search Engines can’t index, and that irritate us humans to no end! (audio or video that automatically plays when a page loads)
• Incorporating relevant keywords in our headings, anchor text and content
• Writing for both the human reader and the Search Engines
• Pages with easy navigation for visitors and that Search Engines can index
• Information architecture that is clean and uncluttered with plenty of white space with the important information above the fold
• Writing robot friendly text: H1 and H2 Tags, Title Tags, Meta Tags, Alt Optimization
• Investing in professionally written website content - by a web content copywriter

Optimizing website content is also referred to as “Offline Optimization.” It involves all the things you can do within your website itself to get noticed by the Search Engines and engaged with your site visitors. Online Optimization is all of the things you can do outside of your website to draw attention or to drive traffic to your site. It includes such activities as submitting your site to general and industry related directories, getting inbound links from other quality sites and making sure you are being indexed by all leading Search Engines.I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, don’t neglect the impact of optimized content to the success of your Internet marketing efforts. “The number one reason a website fails is because of poorly written content” (Michelle Howe, “Turn Browsers into Buyers”).

Just getting started with blogging on Zephyr Marketing. Just completed creating the RSS Feed and burning it through Feedburner, getting the RSS Feed icon / chicklet added to the right sidebar. And I put a Feedburner link just below it. There’s much to do in terms of customizing the design and content widgets, plugins, etc. This is just a start and hoping to avoid the high abandonment rate (82% of all blogs have been abandoned).

 I’ve found the book, WordPress 2, Visual Quickstart Guide to be very helpful in the process of downloading, configuring and customizing WordPress…so far. One tip I have is to document everything and keep track of codes, how to guides you can download and of course usernames and passwords. Make sure when you give your blog a name in Feedburner that it’s the name you want others to view when they subscribe to your feed. I just chose the default name that was pre-populated. Now I want to see if there’s a way to change it so I can give my Blog a feed name that is more meaningful.