I read an interesting post from Bill McCloskey on the need for specialization. Bill has a point, but I think there's a counterpoint, too, when specialization gets out of control.
Bill makes the case for specialization in a straightforward way: "I submit that the über marketer who is expert in all the various forms of interactive marketing is someone who just doesn't exist, or is very bad at a lot of things. An interactive jack of all trades, master of none, is not the person you want heading up your email marketing efforts."
I'm a big advocate of measuring the success of your site, but many marketers find the statistics intimidating. Many marketers are more comfortable with the dreaded "anecdotal evidence" than they are with numbers—that's changing, but slowly. I am wondering if the intimidation might be caused by statisticians themselves.
I love it when I get a comment that is better than the original post. Last week, I chimed in with some thoughts on Google's experiment with pay-per-action (PPA) advertising, and I got a hugely detailed comment this weekend on that post, so go re-read that entry to see it. (I'll wait.) When you come back, I'd like to talk about it more.
It's been rumored for a while, but it's finally being tested, as Google has announced a beta program to test pay-per-action (PPA) AdWords bidding. The Snap search engine has done PPA for years, but obviously it is big news when Google does it. I first speculated on this two years ago when Google acquired the Urchin analytics firm (now Google Analytics), but it's finally here. What does it mean to search marketers?
Avinash Kaushik has a thought-provoking post on how to optimize your search marketing budget. He is right on in his assertion that most search marketing programs are far too heavily skewed to popular brand keywords—the words people who already know you use.
Quick: Which online marketing technique, according to Foresee Results, is used by 72 percent of the top Internet retailers and is the most influential factor in purchase for 39% of all buyers? The answer is customer ratings and reviews.
So why aren’t you using them on your site?
Great post by Melissa Burdon at grokdotcom on the real goal of search marketing—conversions. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how much I agree.
No matter what you sell, the cheapest way to get your message out there is to get your customers to do it for you. But how do you create content that practically compels readers to pass it on? What makes someone decide to take the step of introducing your content to someone who trusts them?
We've talked before about the Three Rs of Internet Marketing—to be real, relevant, and responsive. One way to be both real and relevant is with fact-based marketing. I spoke with someone who has consciously lowered the volume on his hype machine.
We've talked about why searchers click on your site search results, but what about when they don't? Because sometimes they won't. If you know why searchers fail to click on
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