Happy Holidays

Wishing you and yours all the best this winter season!

Feeling the Love, NOT!

Part of my morning ritual is sipping coffee and glancing through the blogs, as I try to jolt myself to consciousness. It’s a good way for me to keep up with what my competitors are up to. So, imagine my surprise when I realized I was the main topic of a competitor’s blog and that he hated me. Seriously, he wrote that he “hated” me and went to go on to say he hated all SF bloggers. And get ready for this, he says that the only reason we blog is self-promotion. Well, duh!

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy blogging. But, let’s be honest it is about self promotion. I blog with the hopes that you find my insights so profound that you can’t get to the phone fast enough to hire our firm. No need to push, there’s plenty to go around . . .

In his diatribe expounding on our negative virtues, he managed to mention our company name twice, our blog three times and was even kind enough to offer the respective URLs. Normally, I have to beg for such coverage. And while some make take his word for our evilness, others will visit us to see what the fuss is about and ultimately drive traffic to our site. Cool.

If you’re like me, your first instinct is to respond. Don’t, unless there is something factually inaccurate. He is simply stating his feelings, nothing to negate there. Don’t try to fix it. While to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met this person – I doubt there is anything I’m going to say that will change his mind about me, SF Bloggers or SF in general (which is quite lovely for the record!).

If someone blogs negatively about you –

• Respond only if there are any factual inaccuracies being conveyed.
• Avoid a flame war; you only get dragged into the mud.
• Remember, it’ still publicity!

Internet Strategies

We assist clients in making the most of their web presence. Internet strategies are more than putting a website online and hoping for the best. Internet marketing includes web site design, communication plans, branding, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, pay per click and integration with existing business tools for inventory control and financial reporting. We emphasize content driven web sites with the latest search engine optimization techniques to target your customer base.

SF Internet strategies

SEM or SEO?

After awhile all the letters start sound alike.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the broad term used to describe the efforts to drive traffic to your site. While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are tactics to make your site more web search friendly to increase organic (non paid) rankings, SEO is a subset of SEM.

In addition to SEO, SEM includes Paid Inclusion -

• Banner Ads
• Pay Per Click

The advantage is paid inclusion immediately generates traffic to your site. However, if clicks don’t turn into sales, then paid inclusion can be very expensive. Any paid inclusion campaign should be monitored closely and measured regularly to insure there is a return on investment. Many companies have specialist who will help you set up campaigns and establish budgets. Their advice can be quite helpful.

The one thing to be careful of is allowing these companies to automatically reload your account. If you’re not paying attention, you can end up with huge charges to your credit card. I prefer to turn off that setting (not all companies allow you to do that – red flag in my book) and manually reload the account when the balances are used up.

Increasing Alexa rankings

The two tools we use most to monitor our web efforts are Google Analytics and Alexa.com.

The folks over at SiteProNews have done a good job sumarizing 10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking, check it out.

To be successful you need to be constantly measuring your progress towards your goals. Regularly measuring your website data will tell you what's working, what needs to be changed and what's missing.

You can Download the Alexa Toolbar for free.