iWebEarth

It’s elementary! Your website is a crime scene and I am going to cry bloody murder!

Every second of every day websites are drawing qualified traffic that’s not converting to leads and customers.

And that’s not the only crime being committed! Companies are not setting goals, they are not benchmarking results and often have no basis to track improvement in their marketing over time.

These are all crimes and I call on all internet marketing CSIs (crime scene investigators) to use their deductive reasoning to solve these five puzzles for improved conversion and business success:

1. HOW – How did visitors learn about your site?
It is critical to know how visitors are learning about your site.  Track referring sites for all your visitors.  You should identify which sites (and types of sites) are sending you the most visitors and visitors that convert to leads.  It’s amazing what a little focus on the best sources can do to improve your conversion rates.

2. WHO – Who are your visitors (and leads and customers)?
Do you know the kinds of visitors (personas) who are most interested in your products and services?  Qualifying questions on forms can capture explicit information about your visitors and implicit clues such as site visits, downloads, and content viewed can tell you a lot about the DNA of your ideal audience.  Use targeted marketing campaigns to home in on suspects who make ideal customers for your business.

3. WHAT – What content interests your visitors?
Do you know what content or keywords are attracting visitors to your site?  Which lead generation offers get the most downloads? Track the performance of all your content.  You can use some clues to optimize or create new content that will attract more visitors and convert more of them into leads.

4. WHICH – Which are your most effective marketing channels?
Is your site a search traffic magnet because your pages rank high for a multitude of keywords?  Perhaps your email campaigns generate fewer visitors but are more influential in converting your audience into customers.  Figure out which of your channels work best so you can use them strategically to generate more traffic (prospects) and convert more customers.

5. WHY – Why do your visitors become customers, or not?
This is toughest (and most subjective) puzzle to solve.  There are a multitude of reasons customers buy: they need your product, they really liked your sales rep, or maybe you came highly recommended.  Ask your customers after every win and document it.  More importantly, in the event of a lost deal ask the prospect why.  Focus on your strengths and work on filling up the gap to ensure a higher win rate.

Are you a marketing CSI facing similar challenging business puzzles? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo Credit: Sashafatcat

Webinar: Website Redesign

Learn how to redesign your website to improve your site conversion and marketing results! Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

In 1993, when Jeff Taylor founded job search site Monster.com, his brand appeared where his audiences lived. Monster advertised during the Super Bowl, had a crop circle ad outside Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and flew promotional blimps.

In 2005, when Jeff launched community site Eons.com, he moved where today’s crowds live: on social networking sites.

A recent HubSpot TV guest, Jeff shared advice about the power of Web 2.0 and engaging crowds online in the video clips below.

Balance Brand and Metrics

Jeff suggests using a combination of metrics and brand to be successful in online marketing. In the past, Jeff ran his brand marketing campaigns using traditional advertising and Web 1.0. “We didn’t actually have all this deep, trenchy measurement that we have today,” he said. Now, companies have access to tools and analytics that make marketing, as Mike Volpe said, “more scientific.”

Jeff’s Eons.com clearly demonstrates this new trend for a more analytical approach in marketing. Soon after its launch, Eons was growing by 100,000 leads per month. “Keep on going. It is working,” Jeff would have responded to this data in his old life. But today he considers other measurement factors that play a central role in his marketing. “The traffic, actually, is growing quickly but the engagement is going down at the same rate,” he observed.

On Web 2.0 traffic alone is not equal to leads. Marketers need to provide value in order to get results. “There is a big difference between 1.0 and 2.0 in terms of how you grow your business,” Jeff said. He believes that there should be a combination between metrics and brand in order for businesses to be successful in marketing.

Engage the Baby Boomers

Find a way to reach out to the Baby Boomer generation as its representatives are increasingly spending their time online. “The reality is that baby boomers are hot on the Web right now,” Jeff said. According to his 2005 research, baby boomers up to the age of 65 are actively involved in online activities. In recent years, Jeff noted, his generation has experienced “a huge engagement” in what the Web has to offer.

For instance, baby boomers have been finding and bringing value into the blogosphere and the social mediasphere. Jeff attributed this involvement in web journals and blogs to the good writing skills of his generation. It is not surprising then, that baby boomers also caught up on social networking sites like Twitter. Their involvement in writing, Jeff believes, “is perfect for 140 characters.”

Raise the Conversation Levels

Conduct careful research about hiring companies to enhance your communication with potential employers. “Today you are one click away from a massive amount of information about a company,” Jeff said. And you need to be equipped with knowledge accordingly. “It is in the job seeker’s best interest to be an expert in the company that they are interviewing with,” he said.

Companies, on the other hand, should be fully aware of who their job candidates are. Personal blogs, professional LinkedIn profiles and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter provide great opportunities to meet potential employees. “We need to know a lot more about each other and raise the level of the conversations,” Jeff said.

Webinar: Rethinking Marketing

Want to learn more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your business? Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

When talking to marketers who haven’t yet seen the “social media light,” I forget that this stuff is still pretty new. 

When I wrote about the need for a social network like Twitter – several years before Twitter was conceived – I never thought that my days would be filled teaching veteran marketers how to build social media service offerings. 

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we’ve finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it’s about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

A new e-book from Channel V Media (a HubSpot customer and partner) lays out a good plan for agencies and companies trying to develop a social media plan.

They’ve spelled out 12 key things you must consider when developing a social media program for your business.

It’s a good handbook for in-house marketers, as well as agencies, who are still trying to figure out how to replace their piece-meal campaign-after-campaign approach with a full-blown social media program.

Here’s the 12 Steps:

1. Audience Identification. If you know who your audience is, you’re already one step ahead of the game. The next step is to figure out where they interact online.
2. Platform Development & Design. Figuring out how to engage and interact with this audience.
3. Brand Campaign Integration. It’s possible for a social media program to piggyback off a good brand campaign, but it has to be transformed into its cooler younger brother.
4. Content Creation/Coordination. You must create a consistent message.
5. Goal Mapping. In other words, how do you measure your success? Is it brand mentions? Traffic? Email sign ups? Leads? Sales? 
6. Brand Identity. Everyone that is engaging via social media on your team must understand your goals and messaging.
7. Audience Attraction. Larger brands like to start spreading the word of their new, fancy and glossy initiatives at the outset, but if your social media program is good, your audience will find them on their own and the spread the word for you.  
8. Social Media Listening. If you don’t know what people are saying about you and your products, their related interests and more, how are you going to interact with them?
9. Community & Social Responsibility. Social responsibility is increasingly expected of everyone – and this engagement is an essential part of your online identity. 
10. Internal/External Community Engagement & Response. Be everywhere. All the time. It’s up to you to let people know that you are listening, engaging, helping, and offering solutions.
11. Brand Advocacy. Authenticity and transparency are such huge aspects of social media, your social media and management team must be 100% on board.
12. Customer Service. Good customer service involves listening (within and outside of social media) and responding appropriately. 

The ebook has a lot more content, advice and context for these rules. Download it here for free.

Photo: fotopakismo

Webinar: How to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

You’re already using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You even have 1,000+ followers on Twitter, 500 contacts on LinkedIn and 2,500 friends on Facebook.

What? You’re not closing new deals every day? 

Networking online requires similar skills as networking in the real world. It’s pretty easy to collect a bunch of friends or followers on social networking sites, just like it’s easy to go and hand out 100  business cards at a networking event. 

If you’re using social media and you’re not getting business results from it, maybe you’re doing it wrong. Here are three common mistakes that any business networker should be able to relate to:

You Only Talk About Yourself. 

If you’ve been to a chamber of commerce networking event, you’ve seen these guys. They show up with a nice suit, some cologne, a stack of business cards and they start introducing themselves to anyone who’ll listen. They don’t ask questions, they don’t bother to find out what others do, and most egregiously, they don’t bother to find out whether you have a need for what they do. They simply start talking about what they do and why they’re the best.  Then, they shove their card in your pocket and move on to the next victim. 

I’m pretty sure I don’t have to make the connection here. Be sure to send this link to anyone who’s throwing up all over their Twitter stream. 

You Don’t Have Contact Information on Your Business Cards ( Which You Printed on Free VistaPrint Stock)

I’ve been there. I know how hard it is to bootstrap a company. It’s really tempting to get those free business cards from VistaPrint and save $50.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I ordered my first box that way until a cohort of mine smacked me around a bit. 

The online equivalent of the VistaPrint business card is the free blogger blog or the GoDaddy $10/month website. These things wreak of “I just started my biz. I don’t have any clients. I can’t really afford to get a website.”

Even more importantly, though, these websites don’t have what it takes to turn the traffic you attract from social media into sales leads for you. Having a website without compelling offers, landing pages and calls to action is the offline equivalent of handing out business cards that don’t say what you do and don’t have any contact information on them. 

You Never Ask for Their Business Card or Ask if You Should Follow Up.

Newbies at networking events will swap business cards like handshakes. Some people measure their networking event success by how many business cards they swapped. But, a seasoned networker knows that it’s not quantity, but quality. I learned most of what I know about real world networking from Rick Roberge, Mark Paskell and Jason Kallio. These guys taught me to ask questions and find out whether people had any problems that I could solve, and then ask people if they’d want to talk about that over coffee or a phone call. If I couldn’t directly help someone, they also taught me to connect them with someone who could.

Both of these practices will work online too. Ask good questions and pay attention to what other people are saying. Proactively follow up after you connect with people and try to be a resource for whatever issues they’re struggling with, whether you can sell them something to fix those issues, or not. If you focus on helping people, people will want to find out how they can help you.

Photo: oooh.oooh

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

Inbound marketing may start with creating content, but it doesn’t end there.

As a business marketer or content creator, your instinct may be to hold on to the content you’ve created and post it only to your website in the hopes of forcing people back to your website. But if you’re doing that – holding your content hostage – you’re losing out on free marketing that social media sharing sites will do for you.

By posting your content on social media sharing sites you can leverage those websites’ networks as well as the easy-to-use built-in sharing features of those sites, like easy share links, tagging, and subscription.

Video:

Have some customer case studies? Interviews with your CEO? Recorded presentations from your last conference? Post them to video sharing sites:

1.) YouTube – If your video is under 10 minutes (and the shorter the better), YouTube is the best site for sharing your videos. Key sharing features: tagging, social media share links, video embedding, subscriptions

2.) Blip.tv – If your video is more than 10 minutes, use a site like blip.tv (or Vimeo or Viddler) to post your videos. Key sharing features: tagging, automatic iTunes (and other video) syndication, creative commons licensing, video embedding, subscriptions

Or, use a tool like Visible Measures to post and track your videos across many video sites.

Documents/Presentations:

Take all those slide presentations, ebooks, whitepapers, and post them to:

3.) SlideShare – Take your existing documents (PPT, PDF, etc.) and post them to a SlideShare (or Scribd or Docstoc). Key sharing features: tagging, social media share links, document embedding, subscriptions

Photos:

Whether it’s photos of your team, screenshots of your product, or even funny cartoons, post them online:

4.) Flickr – For any of your images (or even some short videos), flickr is a fantastic sharing site. Key sharing features: tagging, creative commons licensing, slideshow embedding

5.) Facebook – Facebook is an incredibly powerful social network that allows people to share all sorts of content, and photos are among the most popular applications. Facebook now has over 200 million active users, and more than 850 million photos are uploaded every month. Key sharing features: news feed update (when you upload photos, tag people, or people comment on them), tagging (people)

Events:

Have an event coming up? List it on these sites:

6.) Upcoming -Upcoming is an event sharing site hosted by Yahoo. Key sharing points: share your events with your friends

7.) Facebook – Yes, I’m listing Facebook again. But Facebook events are another great (and frequently used) application for sharing events. Key sharing points: news feed update (when creating, attending, commenting on events)

8.) LinkedIn - Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has an event posting/sharing feature. Key sharing features: posted in LinkedIn network updates (when creating or attending events)

Have you had success posting your content on these sharing sites? Do you have others that have worked well for you? Share your experiences in the comments.

Flickr photo credit: wlodi

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

According to Google, Michael Jackson did not pass away two days ago. Instead, the search engine is serving a customized result (powered by Wikipedia) stating that the King of Pop died on August 30th 2007 :

Such is the shameful problem of Google depending on “user generated content” from Wikipedia as a trusted resource, serving the obituary of an little known English writer named Michael Jackson during a time when the world is searching for information on the death of THE Michael Jackson. Google, you need to fix this immediately.

Thanks to Anirudh Koul for sending this over.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Michael Jackson Died in 2007 : According to Google & Wikipedia

Are you a frequent speaker at search conferences? Getting prepared for the search conference must take plenty of time and effort. Well, here is a great tip how you can drive another benefit from your conference presentation: turn your PowerPoint presentation into the video file, record your speech and here you go: you have some great video content to promote and generate additional leads!

Here is a quick guide on how you can convert your PowerPoint presentation into a video:

Use a screen recording application to record your slideshow as it plays on your screen:

ScreenToaster is a free web-based tool that captures the screen and creates a movie. It requires registration (with email confirmation) after which you will be able to start recording immediately:

• Using the shortcut (Alt+S) you’ll be able to start and pause recording any time.
• Upload the video directly to Youtube or download it to your computer.

It currently doesn’t allow to add audio (the feature is promised to be coming soon) but you can add subtitles though.

CamStudio (Windows only, use Copernicus for Mac) is a nice free desktop capture program that records all screen and audio activity and creates standard .avi files.

Use a specialized application converting any PPT into the video file

PPT To Video Scout 1.57 (cost: USD 58.85 with 30-day free trial available) is a very easy-to-use reliable desktop application that converts your PowerPoint file into the video and adds sound:

• The utility converts PowerPoint presentations into AVI or MPEG video with sound;
• Supported video formats: MPEG, AVI, DivX, xDIV, DVD, VideoCD
• The program integrates itself into PowerPoint: you can use “Convert To AVI” command in File menu to launch conversion.

You can choose the capture format: normal (as viewed by F5 in PowerPoint), automatic slide show, manual mode (i.e. you click over the slides). You can also set the video quality and resolution:

After a very self-explanatory wizard you’ll be able to click over your PowerPoint slides while commenting on each of them; the utility will be capturing the screen while you are clicking and talking and turning into the video of the format you have set previously.

PPTmovie ($39.95 for personal edition with free trial available) is the cheapest yet very handy desktop application that not only can convert .ppt files to .avi, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .flv files but also add narrations or music background while converting:

• Trial limitations: watermark (”to remove this message, buy PPTMovie”);
• Requirements: MS Windows 2000/XP, MS PowerPoint installed, DirectX 9.0 or above.

To record the music you just need to turn the favorite track on and PPTmovie will record it from your speakers without any noise while converting. Or you can record your comments to any slide you would like by using your microphone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Turn Your PowerPoint Presentation into a Video for More Exposure

So finally, Google is opening up its Voice Account service, formerly known as Grand Central. The Official Google Blog announced that email invites will be sent out to those who have requested for an invitation when Google Voice was launched in March 2009. Likewise, previous Grand Central users who opted out of the service when Google acquired it in 2007 will also be receiving email invites.

Although no exact date was given, expectations are that the invitations will be sent out as early as starting today or soon.

The Google Voice invitation will contain a link to the online instructions for setting up a new Google Voice account. Google has also added a number picker that will let users search by area code and text.

If you haven’t signed up  to receive the invites, you can still register by visiting this link.

You might want to check our previous coverage of Google Voice.

Or better yet, watch the video to learn more about Google Voice.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Voice Sending Invites to Non-Grand Central Users