niche marketing - Quaker Ranter

Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:09:37 +0000

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience
Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You’ll see measures like “keyword relevancy” increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful
Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions!
It’s amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

Who is the target audience?
What would draw them to the site?
What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one “converts” better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it’s conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Professional Help
If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you’ll almost certainly get your money’s worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Consultants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

Nonprofits and Social Media

Martin Kelley — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:48:49 +0000

I’d like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I’ve had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists–tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.

Facebook Pages

A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don’t need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there’s a wall, there’s an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.

Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as “fans” of your Page see what you’re putting out in their individual stream. They’ll log into Facebook and see that messages like “Jen just got engaged!” or “Joe is having a bad hair day” and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You’re seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It’s different from a spammish email because it’s coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.

The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they’re public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren’t but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.

I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we’ll be able to reach out to people. I’m very excited about this because there’s all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it’s happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.

Intimate, immediate, engaging

What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that’s authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we’ve typically been.

What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I’m not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization’s focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn’t matter where they hosted but you’ll have to make sure they’re embedded on your Facebook fan page.

Building our Facebook Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you’re sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what’s happening: you send out a 140-character “tweet” with an interesting tease about the video you’ve produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.

The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you’re in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you’re organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It’s a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that’s not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).

The New Nonprofit Outreach

I’d love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.

————–

Martin Kelley is a web developer and social media consultant specializing in nonprofits. This post is a loose transcription of his video, Nonprofits and Social Media. This essay is also available on the MartinKelley.com Facebook fan page.

Extending customer relationships through social media

Martin Kelley — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:12:49 +0000

Over on my O’Reilly Media blog, I’ve written “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here’s a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company’s interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms–status updates, calendars, videos–but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media’s evolving role.

Publicizing your blog via Flickr

Martin Kelley — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 02:39:25 +0000

Integrating the Flickr photo sharing service
with your blog is a wonderful way to easily add photos to your site.
With a little extra effort you can get Flickr to work for you.

Flickr in your blog

When you want to embed a Flickr-hosted photograph into one of your
blog entries, first start by going to the photo’s page in Flickr. Click
on the “All Sizes” button on top (with the magnifying glass icon), and
then pick the size you want for your blog post–small and medium work
well for blog entries.

Underneath the resized picture is a box with Flickr’s coding (you have
to be looking at your own account and be logged in to see this). Simply
cut and paste this into your blog entry and the picture will appear
there. If you want your text to wrap around the picture you’ll want to
add a little coding to what Flickr gives you. Somewhere inside the
“img” text you need to add wrapping instructions. An easy place is
between the text that reads:

height=“180” alt=“whatever it says”

…now reads:

height=“180” align=“left” alt=“whatever it says”

Change left to right to have your photo align that way.

Your blog in Flickr

Many users don’t realize that people sometimes find your Flickr
photos and not your blog. Google indexes Flickr nicely and Flickr’s own
search is popular. In the description of your photos you should add a
link back to your own blog. If you have a blog entry concerning that
actual picture, link directly back to that entry.

You’ll have to hand-write the HTML link for this (sorry, Flickr doesn’t have a link button). It should look something like this:

Description of the photo. For more read, What I know about Flickr.

Here’s a screen shot of the editing screen for this Flickr entry:

Results

That post about my trip to a legendary South Jersey locale is one of
the most visited pages on my personal blog. A good bit of it comes from
the links in Flickr!

Remember to put a lot of desired keywords into your Flickr title and
all link text. Keywords are those phrases that you think people might
be searching for.

I am the King of Folksonomy

Martin Kelley — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 03:02:17 +0000

I just relaunched my personal blog a few days ago, moving it from nonviolence.org/martink to quakerranter.org. I plan to write a whole big piece about it in the near future. But my access logs just picked up something amazing.

An
important part of the redesign was an automatic keyword generator.
Posts were run through a script that automatically pulled out keywords
from the text. My 2003 article, Going all the way with Movable Type generated the following tags, which appear as links after the post:

Following the links takes you to similarly-tagged articles. At least
that’s the conceit. When you follow a tag’s link you’re simply doing a
site search for that keyword. A little htaccess rewrite magic is making
the result look like it’s a static category page.

“Fine and well” you’re thinking, “big deal.” Well, here’s what’s
cool. There are 225 entries on the QuakerRanter blog. Google’s just
gone through and indexed the site and is now claiming it contains 1300 pages.
Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I mention any
interesting term, it becomes a page that Google indexes and delivers to
its searchers.

Which brings us to today’s cool piece from the access logs. In
December of 2004 a rather innocent post on Quaker Ranter became the
center of a mini-whirlwind on the political blogs when it mentioned
that I had gotten a call from a CBS News publicist interested in Nonviolence.org.
All political blogs get publicity calls from news and opinion think
tanks trying to suggest (or plant) stories but no one’s supposed to
talk about it. I only mentioned it because it was so unusual. One of
the blogs denouncing the liberal conspiracy my post revealed was the
somewhat slimy Little Green Footballs. After a few weeks the
denunciations died down.

But this morning, someone looked up littlegreenfootballs in Google and came to my site. Because of my automatic keyword generator, tags, and static-loooking links, I’m now the number two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relocated to a days old quakerranter.org. Cool.

This mixing and matching of content and rich manipulation of data is sometimes lumped together in the cool bu zzphrase folksonomy.
Note that none of what I’ve done is a tricking of Google. Every tag is
really going to a page with that content. These are “natural” and
“organic” search results in the lingo of SEO. I’m just presenting my information in multiple formats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think I deserve #2 status for
“littlegreenfootballs” and I don’t think Google will keep it there for
long. It’s a bit odd that they have elevated that particular term so
high and no others tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of February 2007, Google indexes 3,540 pages
on QuakerRanter.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In December 2006 30% of
my Google visits were to one of the “tags” page. Reconfiguring the blog
in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than doubled search engines
visits, again in a very natural and organic way. Adding tags has simply
made what I’ve written more accessible to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Shortly after installing this new system, my servers started
periodically crashing (about once/week). The problem would be multiple
MT-Search processes overloading the memory.

My guess is that a search engine spider came along and started
indexing all of the tags. Each link initiated a search query in Movable
Type. The built-in search for Movable Type is just not able to handle
this volume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the problem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I needed to install these plugin fixes.
Then it was fine-tuning the htaccess files. It was been more work than
I initially expected and the tag results now forward to a funny URL that Google doesn’t love as much.

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:08:31 +0000

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web marketing follows the rules of any other mode of
publicity: identify an audience, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your customers and their needs. A sucessful web
campaign utilizes print mailings, manufactured buzz, genuine word of
mouth and email. Finances can limit the options available but everyone
can do something.

One of the most exciting aspects of the internet is that the most
popular sites are usually those that have something interesting to
offer visitors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can compete with giant corporations. A good strategy involves
finding a niche and building a community around it. Personality and idiosyncracy are actually competitive advantages!

It would be cruel of me to just drop off a completed website at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more interested in building sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of publicity, from design to launch and
beyond to analyzing visitor patterns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want someone to visit your site once, click on a few links
and then disappear forever. We want to give your visitors reasons to
come back frequently, a quality we call “sticky” in web parlance. Is
your site a useful reference site? Can we get visitors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a community of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to visit our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the companies that will register your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
competitive advantage by including the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay anyone to get the attention of the big search engines.

The most important way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audience in mind. What are the keywords you want people to
find you with? Your town name? Your business? Some specific quality of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to highlight those
phrases. Here too, being a niche player is an advantage.

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine started attracting four times the visits after its programmer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get visitors searching for
the oddest things. We can actually tell when visitors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re searching for! Google
apparently thinks I know “how to flatten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you wonder “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your important search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!

The Revolution will be Online

Martin Kelley — Mon, 07 Aug 1995 03:13:32 +0000

This essay was originally written in 1995.

IT’S HARD TO IGNORE the sorry shape of the social change community. The signs of a collapsed movement are everywhere. Organizations are closing, cutting back, laying off staff, and dropping the frequency of their magazines.

On top of this, the basic resources we’ve depended on are getting scarcer. Paper prices and postage prices are going up. Direct mail solicitations are for many economically-unfeasible now. With every abandoned mailing list, with every discontinued peace fair, we’re losing the infrastructure that used to nourish the whole movement.

Here in Philadelphia, the last few years have seen food coops close, peace organizations lay off staff, and the bookstores discontinue their political titles. I’ve been meeting people only a half-generation younger than I who aren’t aware of the basic organizing principles that the movement has built up over the years and who don’t know the meanings of Greenham Common or the Clamshell Alliance

Like many of you, I’m not giving up. We can’t just abandon our work because it’s becoming more difficult. We need to struggle to find creative ways of getting our message out there and communicating with others. What we need is a new media.

The Promise of the Web

The Web’s revolution is it’s incredibly minimal costs. Fifteen dollars a month gets you a homepage. As an editor at New Society Publishers (1991–1996), I’ve always had to worry whether we’d lose money on a particular editorial project, and it sometimes seemed a rule of thumb that what excited me wouldn’t sell. With the Web, we don’t have to worry if an idea isn’t popular because we’re not putting the same level of resources into each publication.

Never before has publishing been so cheap. Just about anyone can do it. You don’t need a particularly fast or fancy computer to put Web pages online. And you don’t have to worry about distribution: if someone sets their Web browser to your address, they’ll get you “product” instantly.

All the forces pushing movement publishing over the edge of financial insolvency disappear when we go online. Switching to the Web is a matter of keeping our words in print. The Web is the latest invention to open up the distribution of words by birthing new medias. The printing press begat modern book publishing just as the photocopier begat zine culture. The Web can likewise spawn a media where words can flourish with less capital than ever before.

Advertising Each Other

The problem with the Web is not accessibility, but rather being heard above the noise. People generally find your website in two ways. The first is that they see your web address in your newsletter, get on their computers and look you up; this of course only gets you your own people. The second way is through links.

Links take you from one website to another. Webpage designers try to get linked from sites of similar interest to theirs, hoping the readers of the other site will follow the link to their webpage. This bouncing from site to site is called surfing, and it’s the main way around the web.

Linking is a very primitive art nowadays. The Nonviolence Web has internal links that actively invite readers to explore the whole NV-Web. Everytime someone comes into the NV-Web through a member group, they will be inticed to stay and discover the other groups. By putting social change groups together in one place, we can have a much-more dynamic cross-referencing. Think of it as the equivalent of trading mailing lists in that we can all share those web surfers who find any one of us.

In the web world as in the real one, cooperation helps us all. If you’re an activist group doing work on nonviolent social change then contact us and we’ll put your words online. For free. If you have your own website already, then let’s talk about how we can crosslink you with other groups working on nonviolent social change.

Come explore the Nonviolence Web and let us get you connected. Come join our revolution.

In peace,

Martin Kelley