July 26,
2006
In This Issue:
1. Participation Marketing and You
2. In the News - Keyword Difficulty tool, Color
tool, Speaking at SES
3. More News Headlines
4. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Participation Marketing and You
This might be a bit oversimplified, but when it
comes to online marketing, you essentially have
two choices: A) wait for customers to find you,
or B) go out and find your customers.
Typically, we all choose Plan A, whether we know
it or not. Even when you're building a great web
site, optimizing it for search engine friendliness,
writing great content, supporting it with a PPC
campaign on Google or Yahoo -- all of that assumes
that, ultimately, the customer is going to have
to search for and find you.
All of those things you do for Plan A are good
ideas, but rather than sit back and wait for customers
to come to you, how about trying Plan B? In Plan
B, you go out and find your customers where they
are -- on message boards, blogs, social / community
web sites, etc. For example, no matter what industry
you're in, chances are there's a Yahoo Group or
Google Group of potential customers talking about
the kind of products or services you offer. Chances
are there are bloggers talking about the same
things, or even a Flickr group dedicated to the
products / services you offer.
If you can find out where potential customers
are hanging out, why wouldn't you reach out to
them and make yourself known?
On ClickZ, Heidi Cohen wrote a good article about
this earlier this month. She calls it "social
marketing;" I prefer "participation
marketing." It's the same thing, either way.
It's Plan B, and it's something you should be
thinking about and doing if you own a business
or run a business web site.
ClickZ: Social
Marketing: Reach Out and Engage Consumers
_________________
In The News
Keyword Difficulty Tool
SEOmoz, a Seattle-based company, has an interesting
tool that helps you analyze how difficult your
task might be to compete on a chosen search term.
It's called a "Keyword Difficulty Tool,"
and you simply give it the term you want to analyze
and the tool takes over. It checks a variety of
stats about the term, including how many references
appear in Google for the term, the number of searches
done on the term, and more. And after a short
while, you get a snapshot of how competitive the
term is. It's not perfect, but an interesting
approach -- and even if you already know how competitive
some of your terms are, the tool may help explain
why. You'll need an SEOmoz account and a Google
API to use it, and there are quick links for both
to help you get started.
SEOmoz: Keyword
Difficulty Tool
Color Contrast Tool
Another tool to share, this one more for the web
designers in the reading audience. This is a "Color
Contrast Analyzer," and you'll find it helpful
when working with risky color combinations in
your design work. You give it two colors -- a
foreground color and a background color -- and
the tool will tell you if there's sufficient differences
in both brightness and color. The determination
is based on W3C web standards.
JuicyStudio: Color
Contrast Analyzer
Speaking at SES next month
It's an honor to share the news that I've been
invited to speak next month at the big Search
Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. I'll
be speaking Wednesday, August 9th, on a panel
titled "Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small
Budgets." My plan is to share some information
comparing pros and cons of hiring an SEO company
or doing SEO yourself, using local search, and
some of what I mentioned to lead-off this Net
Gains -- participation marketing. If any of you
are planning to be in San Jose, please do let
me know!
SES
San Jose, Wednesday agenda
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time
to read. These are just some of the headlines
we've posted to OWTweb.com in recent days.
7
tips on writing a web site landing page sequence
July 25, 2006 - Excess Voice
Analyzing
the Google AdWords landing page algorithm
July 24, 2006 - Search Engine Watch
The
two most common mistakes when writing with keywords
July 21, 2006 - Search Engine Guide
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
Wrapping it Up
All three of those articles linked above in "More
News Headlines" are excellent. I hope you
didn't just scroll past them. :-)
That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
The OWT Newsletter is a weekly service
offered free to anyone interested in learning
more about web development, search engine optimization/marketing,
and just about anything else related to running
a business web site. You don't need to be an OWT
client to subscribe to our newsletter!
Subscribing and unsubscribing can
be done online at OWTweb.com. You may share this
newsletter with others as long as the newsletter
is shared in its entirety.
Private replies to emails will
be written if we have time, but we don't provide
web site critiques or consulting services for
free. You can learn more about our web development
and search engine marketing services online at
www.owtweb.com. |
