Web Strategy

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.

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).

Interesting details on a Web Strategy Survey.. Some interesting details include: - More than 60% had a web strategy that looked at least 6 months out - Only 57% of respondents can say they are confident their existing strategy is effective - Most effective strategies were planned six months in advance

More than 130 internet stakeholders were surveyed in December of 2008 on how they are approaching their web strategy in the upcoming year. Survey respondents represented internet professionals at corporations of all sizes, non-profit organizations and agencies.

If you run an ecommerce site or have clients that do so, this is a great resource for analyzing and configuring your landing pages based on the motivation of the customer.

Today I want to look at motivation from a different angle. I want you to choose a landing page that is top priority for you to optimize. For example, your most profitable product with the highest abandonment rate. I want to get you thinking about which customer motivations are most likely to match your business, your products, your typical customer and your landing page presentation.

Goes to show that online video marketing definitely works - as if you hadn't guessed it yet.

The vast majority of those surveyed (95%) for the report, who have utilized online video as a marketing tool, were satisfied with online video marketing and expect to use it in the future.

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:

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.

A great tool to build social media press releases

PitchEngine shakes up the PR industry making it possible for PR pros, brands, and agencies to build and share digital, social media releases with their contacts for free. Our PitchEngine SMR takes the press release to the next level, eliminating the need for antiquated email attachments, word documents, image CDs, and more. Upgrade to a customized newsroom for your brand or client and we'll host a full archive of your PitchEngine SMRs for your corporate website and share them with our database of media users. Save money, save time, and step up your PR to the next generation with PitchEngine.

14 killer tools to help you evaluate the user experience of your website.Excellent tools to help you figure out who your audience is, what they are doing, and most importantly - why they are leaving your website.

Here's a big problem with web design: If you want to make your website better at turning visitors into customers (or subscribers), you need to understand why most of your visitors are leaving! But those people come and go without trace! How do you know what they wanted? How do you know what would have persuaded them to take action? If you owned a real-life bricks-and-mortar store, this would be easy: You'd hear their objections. You'd be able to ask questions. You'd hear what they muttered as they headed for the door. Capturing the voice-of-the-customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Here are 14 free tools to get you started!

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

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".

Have you ever tried to look at your website/blog/etc on a mobile phone? If you have you know it generally renders crappy and takes forever to load. This is a great option for WordPress users to make their blogs iPhone friendly... It is the #2 smart phone now - do you want to turn potential readers away?

Simply put, it's a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

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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.

A couple insights to future Google additions to their ranking algorithm: brands as noise filters and relationship awareness. Exciting stuff....

If you ask Matt Cutts what big SEO changes are coming up he will tell you "make great content" and so on...never wanting to reveal the weaknesses of their search algorithms. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, is frequently talking to media and investors with intent of pushing Google's agendas and all the exciting stuff that is coming out. In the last 6 months Mr. Schmidt has made a couple quotes that smart SEOs should incorporate into their optimization strategies - one on brands [15], and another on word relationships [16

This post is part of a series examining some oft-neglected online customer touch points and exploring ways to optimize them. Today, I'll look at a type of page very similar to thank you pages - the logout confirmation, or logout thank you page.

Great point - Every touch point matters.. Use your logout/login/thank you/subscribe pages for good. Use them as content outposts. Use them to upsell. Use them to pull people back into your site

We are always talking about building a community. It's the first thing we recommend for many reasons... This is a good overview on how to find, build, and grow your online community

In social media, who you know - or who knows you - can certainly make all the difference. That's why figuring out who to connect with and taking the time to build relationships with these people is key to leveraging the power of social media.

I've been looking at Feed Rinse - That looks very cool. Wonder if they have an API... Could use that in a project I am working on. Thanks for the add Shey.