Web Strategy

Pancheros, a burrito restaraunt, is briding the gap between social media and its brick and mortar operations. Excellent web strategy

As far as I know Pancheros has become the first national chain of fast food restaurants to integrate Twitter promotion with their physical store locations. I am pretty happy about it, I feel like I helped get the effort going. I wonder how long it will be before McDonalds, Burger King and Taco Bell follow their lead.

Hyperlocal search strategy is an often underlooked market for many local businesses - especially the local service industry. If you are a plumber in Des Moines, IA and you aren't in the "local listings" when you search "des moines, ia plumber" - than the people companies listed are stealing business from you... Even if you are the #1 organic search result

The top web search results are buried by three local search results. If you're a local business, and you want to get traffic, you'd better get placement in that 'three box' (or in some cases, 'ten box') that shows local results. On the bright side, this version of universal search gives you yet another way to hop, skip and jump right past all the other web search results. All you need to know is how to best position your site for a local search listing.

With floods of e-mail arriving every hour, most people are ruthless about deleting anything they even suspect won't interest them. Not only that, they're also just as likely to report unwanted e-mails as spam as they are to delete them. So if you're not writing compelling subject lines that get the e-mails opened, all your hard work is lost. Here are five tips for writing effective e-mail subject lines that can easily double the open (and click-through) rates on your next e-mail.

How Wal-Mart got social media wrong and how they fixed it

Rather than forcing the message with their own branded community, fake blogs, and corporate blogs, Walmart gets it right by creating a platform for customers and pundits to tell their story

Andy, you may want to add the tag "groundswell" to your bookmark.

A chapter by chapter blook report on Groundswell. Features video, presentation and a link to FriendFeed room

Great tips on using twitter for social media marketing

Follow these ten basic strategies for improving your marketing effort on Twitter and you will notice a big difference in how much traffic Twitter can bring to your business. Marketing on Twitter is not difficult, but there are some basic rules that you need to follow if you want to be successful in such an endeavor. Whether you are selling a product or a service, or just trying to gain attention for your web presence, Twitter is an advantageous way to attract interest in who you are and what your company is all about.

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

Great way to use animated gifs for video representation in your email campaign. Use this for 360 product views, slideshows, etc... Only problem is no sound - but works in all major email clients (including web based clients like GMail)

Recently, someone took the idea of video email a step further and created an email marketing campaign that used video in a way that I hadn't thought feasible - and it displayed properly in nearly all major email programs!

Discussing Web Strategies to help you become more findable and engaging online

Well, you can't specifically track the exact position of the keyword that was clicked like you can do with AdWords. But it is possible to determine the page he was on. A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from 'personalized search' or 'local results' that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. People see other results than you see with your ranking tools. And therefore you need Google Analytics to do the real ranking.

Great post from Michael Fruchter on getting started in Social Media... Everything from personal branding to blogging to Twitter

Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.

Great rundown on what keyword research means and 7 tips on how to increase traffic using effective keyword techniques. Great ideas for the SEM aspect of your web strategy

Keywords are phrases for which you would want your blog to be found in search engine results. Keywords help your blog get recognized by search engines, and as a result, help your potential customers find your blog. Your keywords are what you would expect your target audience to search for to find your blog content. Keyword research means researching the phrases that are going to be used by your potential customer to find your blog in a search engine. Keyword research should result in a set of keyword phrases that you should target in your blog content.

This is an AMAZING digest of internet marketing posts from 2008 covering SEO, Social Media tools and strategy, twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blogging etc. This is a must read for any internet marketer from beginner to advanced.

Here's how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts "series," I take posts that are typically timeless - they're not confined to a specific event or news occurrence - they're valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you'll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road. These posts range from beginner to advanced with a greater emphasis on the more intermediate posts. I'd argue that if you're starting your Internet Marketing business with not much know-how, you should check out the 2007 posts; in fact, most may still find them relevant regardless of the skill level.

As I mentioned last year - as well as on many posts since - analytics is a critical facet of your web strategy not only because it provides measurement, but it is one of the most valuable research tools you have at your disposal. Most people install analytics on their website and never look at the data again. There are many reasons for this. Some people don't have time and most just don't know what the data means.

Last year this time we posted about setting up a budget for your web strategy.. So, we decided to do the same this year. When we plan a web strategy for our clients it always includes a cost budget and time budget . Here's a generic version of our web strategy budget, including what 48Web budgets for our web strategy. This post turned out extremely long so we'll be releasing it in chunks - for easier reading. In this post we'll cover the hosting aspect of your web strategy.

Great insight into customer anxiety and its effects on e-commerce conversion rates. This is a great resource for increasing your conversion rates in your ecommerce strategy.

The e-tailing group conducted a consumer survey last summer and found that product descriptions were the most important to help make a purchase decision, followed by the merchant's guarantee, stock availability and quality of images. (One can assume for certain categories like jewelry and apparel, images are even more important).

Great rundown of social media and new media success in 2008

2008 was a newsworthy - albeit, topsy-turvy - year for marketers and researchers. Importantly, social media evolved from experimental sideline to a mainstream attraction. Twitter saw huge growth rates, Barack Obama rewrote the rules of digital marketing, and user-engagement, and "service is marketing" Zappos.com re-wrote new rules for building brands and rewiring e-commerce. Facebook trended upward, MySpace held steady, and reputation-broker Wikipedia continued marching to the top of Google search results.

Google Analytics is a very useful free tool for tracking site statistics. For most users, however, it never becomes more than just a pretty interface with intersting graphs. The resources below will help anyone, from the beginner to those who have been using Google Analytics for some time, learn how to get the most out of this great tool.