Web Strategy

Marketers must adopt an entirely new strategy -- more than that, an entirely new mindset. They must get away from trying to create new desires in people, trying to push and force themselves on people, trying to control people. Instead, find a more natural way. Find out what people want, and then give it to them. Offer them value, and they will appreciate that. Be a resource. Give things away. Don't force -- let them come to you, because of all the value you offer. Here's how:

Great social media strategies for resaurants

The financial crisis is likely to hit the fine dining industry very hard. Already there have been reports of exclusive London restaurants slashing their prices in order to maintain a steady flow of clientele and therefore subsequent cashflow. Competing on price, however, is never a wise, or usually profitable, strategy, so dining establishments need to look for alternate ways to bring in the customers. One easy way is to develop a social media strategy to connect with your customers and create a community of regular diners.

Bounce rate has these attributes: 1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click! 2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics. 3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Great tips from Google on reducing your website bounce rates

This is an amazing collection of Google Analytics resources

Get the most out of your Google Analytics with this collection of links to implement, configure and get insights from Google Analytics.

In it's simplest form Word of Mouth (WoM) Marketing is tapping into the conversations that occur between people to sell your product. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WoMMA) defines it as: Word of mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. Effective WoM strategies cultivate and amplify these conversations, understanding that they are the most powerful way to convince a consumer to buy your product.

More than 80% of marketing executives say email, search marketing, and display ads are their company's top performing advertising channels, and many plan to increase spending on them in 2009, according to a survey from Datran Media.

good "checklist" for website planning - a great start to a web strategy

In order to create the perfect Website, firstly you need to have a Website Planning document. Before you can start the process of Website Planning you need to know two key things: · What do you want your Website to say? · Who do you want your Website to say it to? Once you can answer these questions you are ready to proceed and begin "Website Planning".

We've been saying this for years... Even "local" businesses need a web strategy.. Does yours?

In these stats lies a big - but fleeting - opportunity: serving local businesses by helping them use online well. By this, I don't mean doing what local newspapers have been doing: trying to sell them display or directory ads, just as they did in papers but in a new medium. Instead, I mean redefining what it means to help them succeed online. This might mean helping them place ads smartly on Google with good SEO (see Fred Wilson's tweet out of our New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY). It might mean finding was to help local businesses interact more meaningfully with their own communities.

Great local SEO tip

This is a Showcase Lawn Map on the web site of WiseGrass, a small lawncare service provider in central Pennsylvania. It's an embedded Google Map with user-created content for each of the showcase lawns. Here's a list of reasons why this is great:

Great tips from the aWeber blog on what personalization means when it comes to email marketing..

Personalization isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But when it gets misused for the sake of an extra open or click, it becomes a bad thing. It also becomes less effective over time. And it allows us to think that we're creating "personal" emails just by merging a name into the message. A truly personal email addresses the subscriber's needs, desires, fears, preferences and other aspects of their personality.

Excellent post - thanks for sharing Shey

All kinds of tools to track twitter links... Great resources

SEO and analytics tools you may not use - and are priced very well... FREE!

If you've done much publishing on the web, you're probaly already familiar with Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. However, many web workers stick with the same small handful of SEO tools. There are quite a lot of them available online for free, and testing keywords and looking at analytics across multiple tools can make a lot of sense, especially since optimizing them is an inexact science.

Social Monitoring Tools, Keyword Targeting, Noise Elimination, Refined Mentions, Analysis, Take Action... The Social Media Monitoring Funnel is a great guide

The following is a guide to social media monitoring. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the article, I want to emphasize that each company needs its own strategic thought and implementation - and that no two companies should have identical forms of monitoring. Each brand is different, each website is different, and where people talk about your company and what is being said is going to vary. With that in mind, I present to you the Social Media Monitoring Funnel.

Some great quick tips on SEO.. This answers many "beginners" questions...

To show you what I mean, here's a list of SEO questions that I get asked all the time, along with what the answer depends upon, and then a quick answer based on the various factors that might be involved:

This topic is constantly coming up... How can you measure the ROI of social media?

It is easy to predict that we will be talking a lot more about social media measurement and ROI in 2009. The question of ROI becomes more important when there is a market transition from an established form or investment (i.e. traditional media) to an emerging form like social media. Even though the ROI of current or traditional investments may be no less certain, the test is always a higher one to justify a change.

wow

In this article I'll use the SEO filter, made by Andé Scholten, to make some new interesting SEO reports in Google Analytics. I realized that the data, provided by the filter, had given me some new opportunities. It wasn't possible in Google Analytics to get good SEO related reports. The reports I did get were these: * An overview of keywords during a specific period and (after clicking) the landings page on which visitors landed after clicking on the Google result. * An overview of the 'Entrance Keywords' of a specific page.