Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• A Beginners Guide to SEO – I realize I post a lot of these, but it’s a pithy subject that’s not well-understood by a lot of people new to online marketing, so whenever I run across a decent article on this I like to share it.




• Why You Need a Business Plan (This Means YOU)
• Biggest Keyword Research Mistakes
• How to Report Content Theives
• Link Building for SEO Beginners
• How to Evaluate the SEO Effectiveness of Your Shopping Cart
• Marketing for Start Ups – The title may not sound riveting, but if you read nothing else this week READ THIS ARTICLE! I think it’s the best one on the list this week. It explains why your marketing ideas aren’t going to cut it. It also has a good section on customer Cost per Acquisition, which echoes my articles last week about having to properly capitalize your business. I like this article because it pays more than lip service to the notion that your marketing has to be remarkable.

Navigating the world of online advertising is tricky; there are so many options and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Two important distinctions to consider are SEM and placement targeted ads. Below is a breakdown of the benefits and drawbacks of these two ad types:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Although many things fall under the header of “SEM”, I am referring specifically to the  ads that appear through search engines. The program you’re probably most familiar with is Google Adwords. The premise is that your ad appears when people are searching for what you sell. For example, you sell vegan cosmetics. I search for “vegan cosmetics”, your ad appears, I click, I go to your site and I buy.

Pros:

• These ads are typically paid for on a cost-per-click basis. You only pay when you get traffic. If no one clicks, you pay nothing.
• You are getting visitors that are looking for exactly what you sell. In theory, this should yield a good number of purchases if your site is optimized for conversions.
• You can control your costs easily, since you choose what you’re willing to pay per click and what your ad budget is for the day.

Cons:

• This advertising method isn’t for beginners. There’s some technical know-how that’s required. You need to understand phrase matching and broad matching, negative keywords and keyword research. You need to understand click fraud and how to spot it. There are professionals who do just CPC advertising for clients because there’s so much technical know-how involved. You can learn to do your own CPC ads, but be prepared to educate yourself.
• This advertising method doesn’t really provide branding benefits. Your target market probably isn’t seeing your brand name over and over every time they visit their favorite website.

Placement Targeted Ads/Banners:
These are ads that you usually see on your favorite blogs. They tend to be standard sizes like 160×600 pixels. The idea with these ads is that your target market gets frequent exposure to your brand, and this creates brand awareness, which in turn increases traffic and sales.

Pros:

• Your brand is being seen by your target market every day. Even if they do not click today and buy, they will be so aware of your brand that they may seek out your website when they have to buy a holiday gift, etc. These ads can also yield a large number of newsletter sign ups or social media followers, which means you can market to these people over and over now that they’ve expressed an interest in your brand.
• These ads can be less expensive that other CPC ads, if you happen to get a good deal and have an ad that’s generating  a high click-through rate. Sometimes you end up only paying a few cents per click, whereas SEM ads are usually over 10 cents/click.
• These ads are somewhat less complicated than SEM ads;  they do not require tons of technical know-how, although design skills are necessary.

Cons:

• Although some placement targeted ads are CPC (Google has a CPC program for placement targeted ads), they are more often paid on a CPM or flat rate basis; this means you pay whether you get clicks or not.
• Unlike SEM, you may be advertising to people when they aren’t in the market to buy stuff, which means no matter how great your ad/products are, you may not see tons of sales immediately. Some people will make impulses purchases, but a lot of people may take weeks or months to actually come make a purchase.
• You need great design skills — not everyone knows how to design nice looking ads, and if your ad design isn’t up to par, it may not get you any clicks.

So which type of advertising should you do? Personally, I do both, and wouldn’t say that one form is right or wrong.  It’s important to understand what to expect from both so you can plan accordingly.

Co-op advertising, through sites like ishopindie.com, has been a nice middle ground for me because they have the expense of placement targeted ads shared among several businesses, but the benefits of brand visibility and impulse purchases are still there. Since I am able to track all the conversions on my site over time, I can see all the traffic from co-op placements that converts right away, and the visitors who convert weeks or months later.

I saw an artisan ask the other day “how can I market my stuff without feeling like a sleazy sales person?” The anxiety of coming off as sleazy or pestering to customers can keep you from marketing your products and services effectively, so below are some surefire ways that keep you from coming off this way.

1. Be There When They Need You
Sometimes people actually want to buy stuff, your best bet at getting money from those people is getting in front of them when they are looking for stuff to buy. Thankfully search engines have made this task easier than ever before. You just have to know how to leverage them. This is why search engine optimization and search engine marketing is extremely important.

Imagine I want to buy organic infant apparel, imagine that’s what you sell. If you’ve done your search marketing job properly I find your brand through organic search results when I search for “organic infant clothes”. I find your Adwords ads when I search for “organic infant shirts”. I find your products when I look for “organic infant sleepwear” on Google Products. You sell what I want and you’ve positioned yourself to let me know about your products. This is one of the top ways online retailers get sales. (Hint: I have written and linked tons of articles on SEO, here’s where you can find them. SEO and SEM can be very tedious and technical but it’s probably one of the most important things you’ll for for your online business.)

2. Get Permission
The great thing about online marketing is that customers can give you permission to market to them. They can opt into your newsletter, they can follow you on Twitter, they can read your blog, they can subscribe to your Youtube channel, they can like you on Facebook. These are all actions they take to indicate that they want to hear from you so take advantage of this.

Of course you can abuse this privilege, so it’s important to follow some guidelines like making sure you sure content you provide is of interest to your customers and making sure you don’t bug them non-stop. This means you don’t email them 10 times a day or post 10 promotions to Facebook about your current clearance sale. That is sleazy and annoying. But the weekly, monthly or bi-monthly email they signed up for is fine. The daily blog post is great. The handful of Tweets about a new creative project, a funny news story or a request for feedback is well within reason. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to imagine how you’d react if you saw the same content coming from another company’s newsletter, blog or social media accounts.

3. Be the News/Buzz
There’s a difference between the huge Revlon ad in the middle of Self Magazine and the detailed editorial written in Self about the editor-approved best mascaras, right? You want to be the latter. The former is just advertising, but the latter is a product that’s become news and part of the content. Get your products and services in front of the media. Look for opportunities to generate word of mouth from friends and fans. Institute a customer referral program or sponsor a charitable cause that gives people and press outlets a reason to talk about what you’re up to and generate interest in your company.

SOCIAL MEDIA BLOGGING MEME: Be sure to check out Blacksburg Belle’s post today on how to create useful content in social media.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• 9 Ways to Prevent Affiliate Fraud
• Cool Business Card Designs
• Lessons in On-Page Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Audit Checklist by Luna Metrics
• What Hotel Towels Can Teach You About Facebook Fans
• Tips From Meylah on How to Display and Present Your Products Effectively
• How Much Commission Should You Pay Affiliates?
• Gmail Priority Inbox and Its Implications for Email Marketing
• Top Things Customers Expect From Your Website
• Tips and Tricks for Scoring Repeat Business

I’ve been quiet here lately because I’ve been crazy busy getting ready for the holidays. It might seem eons away, but in retail terms, the holidays are almost here. I am trying to wrap up my website enhancements for my own ecommerce website this week and I’ll be sharing my changes next week.

In the meantime, I want to call your attention to holiday advertising. As many of you know, I run co-op advertising websites though Smaller Box. These co-ops allow indie designers to share the cost of advertising and buy expensive ad space we can’t afford on our own. For my own ecommerce business, this form of advertising has been tremendously successful. That’s why I’m looking for partners to advertise with for the holidays.

My goal is to set up a special holiday advertising co-op website and gather enough members to split the cost of ads on sites like  Dlisted, Cute Overload, and Design Sponge. These blogs get millions of views during the holiday months and would bring a deluge of new customers, Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, word of mouth, etc. It’s the kind of reach I could never afford to deliver for my brand on my own, which is why finding partners is a priority.

My goal is to offer membership to this co-op for a flat rate around $500.00 for the full year. (Meaning this one time payment gets your brand into the co-op for 12 months.) Those dues would be used to run ads from early October to end of December. Members would have their products featured on the co-op website all year long, even after the ads stop running. Members would also be able to promote on the co-op newsletters all year long.

Speaking of which, I plan to use the new co-op to get a new mailing list together. All co-op members would be welcome to share their promotions on this new mailing list, plus my existing lists (which go to thousands of indie shopping fans each month). I will be doing a special Cyber Monday mailing in November to the lists and all co-op members will be encouraged to share promotions. I will also be establishing a Twitter account and Facebook fan page for the new co-op so you’ll have even more avenues to promote all year long.

If you’re interested in becoming a part of this new co-op please enter your email address below. Once I get enough co-op members together I’ll email you with more details.  Space will be limited so if you’re interested please sign up now:

When small business owners talk about what they want out of their marketing efforts, the top thing people say is “more sales.” While more sales is always the idea, this answer sort of ignores the forest for the trees. A truly strategic marketing plan isn’t focused simply on immediate sales, it’s focused on overall brand growth, which later translates to a big cumulative effect in terms of sales.

When you develop a marketing campaign, try to think about what you want to gain from it, other than sales. Here are a few objectives to consider:

1. Goodwill in the Community
Sometimes companies do things to promote goodwill in their community. It can be sponsoring little league or raising funds for a charity. These sorts of efforts won’t necessarily draw lots of immediate sales, but they associate your brand with something positive and foster brand awareness and brand affinity so that people will patronize your business eventually.

2. Press
Getting media placements is a great way to raise brand awareness and online placements can improve your SEO by providing you with valuable link juice. Sometimes media placements do drive immediate sales, other times the results are delayed.

3. SEO
Getting links and writing high-quality, original content for your site is the way to get search engines to notice you. The idea is that the search engines will bring traffic and that will in turn bring sales. Most of the traffic probably won’t result in sales, but that’s fine. Each person that finds your site becomes a person who knows about your brand.

4. Buzz/Word of Mouth
Brands often do things just to get people talking about them. You might create a viral video or host a giveaway. This sort of thing doesn’t necessarily drive people to make immediate purchases but it gets your brand noticed and talked about, which can drive sales in the future.

5. Brand Affinity/Consumer Engagement
Sometimes companies do things to get their customers to like them a little more. These types of campaigns encourage customer loyalty and positive word of mouth. A company might ask fans to help name a new product. Ben and Jerry’s has a free ice cream day every year. These types of activities make customers prefer your brand and engage with your brand. It builds a better relationship with your fans and keeps them shopping with you.

6. Brand Awareness
If people haven’t heard of you, they can’t shop with you. When Budweiser puts a billboard on a highway, they of course do not expect people to pull over immediately and buy a 6-pack. The idea is to get people to think about the brand so that when it’s time to make a purchase decision, the brand will come to mind.

7. Social Media Connections/Newsletter Sign-ups
Getting permission to market directly to people via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is a huge deal. These types of connections can lead to a consistent stream of sales over time. When you do things like give away a gift card each month to one of your newsletter subscribers, the idea is to get newsletter subscribers, who will hopefully eventually buy stuff. The idea isn’t that all of those people will immediate start opening their wallets. These sorts of campaigns can be a bit of a numbers game. If you have 5,000 Facebook fans and every time you send out a coupon 1% buy something you’re now getting 50 sales each time you send out a promotion on Facebook. It may have taken a couple of years to amass the 5,000 fans and during that entire time your sales may have been a slower trickle from that source. The idea is to see gains over time.

One final thing to keep in mind: all of these marketing objectives tend to feed each other. You can focus on SEO and generate word of mouth. You can aim for brand awareness and end up with better SEO as people link your site once they’ve discovered it. All these different marketing objectives work together to help propel your brand towards success.

I’ve tried to make this point in past posts: marketing is a cumulative effort. When I read comments in the small business blogosphere, the comments I see over and over again are “where are my sales?” and “how can I get more sales?” and “I tried marketing activity X and I didn’t get a flurry of sales!” So many inexperienced online retailers think only about immediate sales, and not the activities that lead to steady business. Thus, I see them dropping an ad they ran on Adwords or a blog as soon as they don’t see an immediate jump in sales, totally discounting secondary types of conversions. I see them dropping the idea of sponsoring giveaways and contests, because they don’t immediately deliver buckets of cash.

Expecting people who saw an ad for your brand once to click-through and buy immediately is like expecting sex on a first date; sometimes it happens, but it’s NOT to be expected. Usually you see someone for a while and you score with them eventually, later, after they’ve gotten to know you and trust you. Getting ecommerce customers is the same way. This means you need consistent visibility and casual contact with prospective customers.

So how can you tell if your marketing activities are leading to the right kind of visibility and leading to relationships that will end in sales? Here are a few indicators you should look for as you’re running your marketing campaigns.

Increase in blog readership
Sometimes prospective customers start out by reading your blog or following your RSS feed. This is why you want to be consistent about posting to your blog and posting content your prospective customers find interesting.

Increase in social media connections
If a site visitor likes your brand, she may follow you on Twitter or fan you on Facebook. Maybe she’s waiting for you to announce a coupon code. Maybe she’s thinking she’ll buy later and wants to keep track of your brand in the meantime.

Increase in newsletter subscription rate
The great thing about newsletter subscribes is that you can actually track the source of your sign ups. This means you’ll know if a banner ad on a certain blog led to these sign ups or if they came from organic search traffic. When a site visitor joins your newsletter, that’s a strong indicator that she plans to buy from you at some point. Maybe next week, maybe at Christmas. This is still a very valuable type of conversion and should not be overlooked.

Increase in buzz
The more people that come to your website and take an interest in your product line, the more buzz you’ll see. This usually comes across as traffic from social bookmarking sites, web-based email clients, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. It basically means people are coming to your site and telling their friends about it. Maybe their friends are telling their friends, and so on. This type of traffic is a really important part of building a consistent presence for your brand and tends to result in an increase in business over time.

Final thoughts:
One of the top search terms that results in sales on my ecommerce website is my company’s brand name. That means the customer had heard of my company, sought it out, and came to buy stuff. There’s no way to know how they heard of us originally, but I attribute these conversions to the overall effectiveness of my various marketing efforts.

Facebook is my ecommerce site’s #7 source of traffic. Stumbleupon is #4. Twitter is in the top 25. This means people that visit our website share our URL like crazy. So each time someone visits our site, it’s okay if they aren’t buying today, there’s a very good chance they’re sharing our URL and getting our site seen by someone who will make a purchase.

Lastly, I’m able to maximize the effectiveness of my marketing efforts because I have my own website. If I sold on Etsy I wouldn’t be able to give people one-click access to my social media accounts, blog and newsletter. It’s extremely important to have a site that lends itself to these types of secondary conversions, so that you can get sales from late stage buyers later, after they’ve become more familiar with your brand or arrived at an occasion that necessitates a purchase.

Additional Reading: Tracking the Value of Your Marketing Efforts

Making your customers a part of your brand is a great way to increase engagement, build a fan community and solicit customer feedback. At, Ex-Boyfriend, we’ve tried a few different things to build relationships with our customers.

1. Put Your Pin on Our Map
The Ex-Boyfriend website hosts an interactive map which automatically places a pin in each city the company has shipped orders to. To get their hometown pinned, customers simply need to place an order.

The map offers a fun way to see where the brand’s products are being worn (all 50 states and 5 of the 7 continents) and even lists which cities have had the most orders shipped to them. (Chicago is currently #1.)

(How to: Building a map like this for your own site requires a little technical expertise, but it’s not super difficult. The map employs Google Maps technology, which is free and has an API for webmasters.  Simply create a database table that holds the longitude and latitude coordinates of each city your company has shipped to. Then use Google maps to place pins in each location. As new orders come in, update your table if the new order’s city is not already listed in your table. You can find tutorials on Google Maps here.)

2. Help Us Design Our Next Product
Ex-Boyfriend hosted a contest asking fans to suggest concepts for their next t-shirt design. Fans were also invited to vote on the suggestions submitted by the contestants. The winning contestants’ design concepts were brought to life by the brand’s illustrator and the contestants were given free tees.

The contest offered an opportunity for fans to participate in the brand’s creative process and have their ideas realized by a professional designer.

3. Introduce Yourself
Ex-Boyfriend updates their blog each week day with fun content like videos, cocktail recipes and cute pictures of kittens. Fans are welcome to add their commentary, and just recently, Ex-Boyfriend started sharing  fan photos, fan interviews and fan videos. The brand’s illustrator mails a handwritten thank you to each fan who submits their photos/videos.

Got a handy tip for incorporating fans into your brand? Share it in the comments.

You may think spying on your competition sounds a little dirty, but if you’re a savvy marketer, it’s something you’ll want to do. While I don’t advocate copying your competitors’ products, marketing tactics or copy, you can still learn a lot from your competitors and be inspired by them to come up with ideas of your own. So here are 5 places you can easily keep an eye on them:

1. Newsletter
Sign up for your competitors’ mailing lists. Things to take note of:

• newsletter frequency (weekly, monthly, daily)
• subject lines (Do they focus on what’s new in store? Do they pitch special offers?)
• newsletter content (Is it entertaining? How long is the newsletter? Is it informative? Is it just full of promotions?)
• newsletter format (Is it colorful? Is it bulleted? Does it use a lot of images? How did they design their calls to action?)
• special offers and promotions (What promotions are they running? BOGOs? A percentage based discount? Free shipping?)

If the competitors are running a certain kind of promotion over and over, that could indicate that it’s been successful. If they’re doing subject lines that lead with discounts, that could indicate that those types of subjects are getting a better open rate for them.

2. Social Media
Follow the competition on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Pay attention to the content they generate and how fans of their brands interact with them. Are people complaining about the competition on Twitter? If so it might be a good opportunity to woo their customers away.

Is the competition making hilarious Youtube videos and scoring truckloads of views? Maybe it’s time to produce a funny video of your own.

How does the competition use social media? Do they entertain? Do they inform? Do they delve into behind the scenes? How do their customers react to their posts? Do their customers seem engaged by their content? Do their follow/fan counts go up or down?

3. Google’s Link Search
See who’s giving your competitors links. Plug link:competitorurl.com into Google and search away. (You would enter your competitor’s url of course.) This should give you some ideas on how to get links to your own website. Are they in certain directories? Are they linked by coupon websites? Are they linked on Squidoo lenses or blogs? Take note of where they’ve received links and then try to get those types of links for your own site.

4. Press page
If the competition has a press page, take note of where they’ve received press. Chances are the same publications will give you press, so you may as well add them to your press list. Make sure you check out each press outlet to see if it’s truly a match for your brand. For example, if you and the competition both sell jewelry but your competitor got into Cat Fancy because she has a cat necklace in her collection, that doesn’t mean you’ll get into Cat Fancy too, unless you also have cat themed jewelry.

Take note of which items your competitor got press for. This might tell you what’s hot right now, but it will also give you insight into the particular taste of the publications that gave the competition press.

5. Website
Notice what’s new on your competitors’ websites. What new products are they pushing? Do they have any promotional specials or sales going on? Notice what they have on clearance that they’re trying to get rid of, this could be an indicator of an item that didn’t sell well.

Some sites will flat-out say what items are their best sellers, and you can use this information to look for clues about pricing, product design or sales copy. Some sites won’t tell you what their best sellers are by may feature their best sellers in a splash image on their home page.

Bonus spy tactic: You can put the names of your competitors into Google Alerts and get an alert every time they’re mentioned online. Doing this may result in an overwhelming amount of information so you may want to do this sparingly.

A final word of warning: Don’t assume your competitors have it all figured out. While it’s fine to see what they’re up to, don’t base major business decisions solely on the competition’s playbook. The competition isn’t always right. Thus, they should be A source of ideas, not THE source of ideas.

Yesterday I wrote an article about the cumulative effects of marketing and a reader asked how I track my results. First and foremost, if you missed my article yesterday, let me repeat YOU CANNOT PERFECTLY TRACK EVERYTHING. You just can’t. Things happen indirectly as a result of your marketing, that’s where some of that cumulative magic comes in. (Read my article from yesterday for examples of this.)

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk about what you can track using Google Analytics (because it’s free and pretty easy to use):

1. Bounce Rates
When you find a way of promoting your site be it advertising, guest blogging, cross-promoting, etc. You’ll want to pay attention to what the incoming traffic from these sources does. If your traffic has a high bounce rate from a source (meaning the vast majority of visitors leave after viewing one page) that source might not be very well-targeted for you and you may want to turn your attention elsewhere.

2. CPC
CPC, or cost-per-click, is what you pay to get a person to come to your site. It’s easy calculate a CPC for an ad. If I pay $100 for an ad and I get 500 clicks then I paid 20 cents per click. The tricky thing is everything has a CPC, even “free” stuff. (Side rant: There is no such thing is as FREE marketing. I am so sick of hearing about FREE marketing. All marketing costs money unless you don’t subscribe to the thought that time is money. And if you don’t you should. Your time is valuable. If your FREE marketing costs 20 hours it is 20 hours x  your hourly rate. Sometimes FREE can be expensive.)

To calculate CPC on stuff you don’t pay for, such as blogging, SEO, etc. keep track of the hours you spend on those things. Then decide what you think your time is worth hourly. If you spend 2 hours per week blogging and you think your time is worth $25 per hour, you spend $50/week blogging. Now go into your site stats and see how much traffic your blog generates. If your blog gets 100 visitors per week you are paying 50 cents per click.

3. Conversions
This is the metric we look at most often. How much did a traffic source result in direct sales? I recommend that, if possible, you track other things than sales, such as Facebook fanning, Twitter following, newsletter sign ups, etc.

Tracking that stuff can be difficult because you either need to be pretty tech savvy or spend money on fancy technology. Google Analytics is free and it will track sales and newsletter sign ups (assuming you can install Google tracking code on your thank you pages for newsletter and sales). It won’t track your Facebook and Twitter sign ups at this time but it’s better than nothing.  (I am sure eventually you will be able to track that stuff with Google Analytics, but not today.)

4. Overall Traffic
You should be seeing an overall increase in traffic as you spend more time and money on your marketing efforts.  I know that as we increased our advertising expenditures on our ecommerce website we saw a drastic increase in site traffic from all over the place. It’s because more people were coming to our site, sharing our links with friends, spreading our site around via word of mouth, etc.