A recent meeting with one of my clients raised a few issues of metrics and how we can measure ROI through their website. Initially, before I joined Urban Element, the agreed conversions were simply actions on the website. These were things like, Brochure Download or Enquiry.

These are both great in theory, but a) don’t protect our work, and b) don’t give us any solid information. Who cares if there are 100 brochure downloads, if we are unaware of what the clients conversion rate of the brochure is. If we know that they convert at 3% with an average order of £500, then we can place a £15 monetary value (3% of 500) per download and start to truly measure the websites performance.

This now becomes solid information as opposed to a speculative guess.

Alex

Here’s what they’re saying:

Keep track of what your LinkedIn connections are working on and thinking about –See the latest activity for any LinkedIn connection who e-mails you right at the bottom of that e-mail. See who they are connecting with, the articles they are reading and sharing, and the questions they are asking and answering. If they have a Profile Photo, you’ll see that too.

Get the latest contact information for your professional connections – E-mail addresses, profile details, and photos from your LinkedIn connections will start appearing in an Outlook Contacts folder named “LinkedIn” – so now you’ll always have the latest contact information from LinkedIn close at hand. You’ll also be able to e-mail your LinkedIn connections by just typing their name into the Outlook “To:” box and letting Outlook fill-in the rest.

Grow your LinkedIn network with ease – Click the green “Add” icon next to any email sender to easily invite them to join your professional network on LinkedIn.

You can read that article here: http://blog.linkedin.com/2010/02/17/linkedin-microsoft-outlook/

24 Hour Start-up : 24 hours in 3 minutes from White October on Vimeo.

Have just spent a couple of hours with one of the designers working out this monster! It’s always nice to get off the computer and draw stuff out

I’ve been reading up on techniques for extracting information from people in order to let conversation flow as freely as possible. It appealed to me after a meeting not too long ago where the client was very subdued and almost unhelpful due to the fact he couldn’t communicate effectively what it was he was trying to achieve from search engine optimisation.

One method of overcoming this kind of person is to employ the ‘parroting‘ technique which simply involves repeating what the person says in such a way that it invokes them to elaborate on what they just said. Effectively, you are putting the ball back in their court. Subconsciously the natural reaction is to answer the question… For example:

So, what is your main service?
… Well, selling fireplaces.
Oh, Fireplaces?
… Yes, we sell a wide range of fireplaces from iron to marble.
Wow, marble fireplaces are the expensive ones right?…
… There’s two types actually, the marble ones and the marble effect ones and we sell both…
So you specialise in marble fireplaces?
… Well we actually specialise in iron fireplaces, but we do sell marble fireplaces too in addition to chimineas.

Immedietely more information has been extracted. It’s important not to overuse the parroting technique or else you risk looking like an idiot. Instead, subtly tease the technique in conversation being sure to ask other questions too.

How can this translate across to marketing online?

Ultimately in any venture you have, you need a desired outcome. If we simplify any business (online or offline) down, we have the following:

• An audience with a need.
• A product or service that satisfies that need.
• A method of selling that product or service.

Marketing online through a sales page requires compelling copy as a minimum, if you haven’t yet moved to video, that will do the selling for you. The rewards can be huge, afterall hitting it right can make you website a 24/7 selling tool. The difficulty is in getting to that stage!

What sentence do you see?

This exercise came from a seminar with Derek Arden and had me thinking about how a perspective can completely change depending on how you process it in your head.

Your mindset is perhaps the most crucial piece of the puzzle in getting to where you want to be. Without a strong mindset and ambition to do well, you will find yourself procrastinating hour after hour and without really knowing where it is you want to go.

A recent technique I used to create a positive mindset is to balance the things in my life out on paper. I drew a vertical line through the middle of a page, on one side I had “benefit obtained” and on the other, “negativities eliminated”.

Break down your personality (honestly…) traits and where you want to be.

So for example I know that I am often impatient with others and always consciously find myself talking rather than listening. I wrote down what it was I was focusing on; patience. I wrote down what I want to achieve; to become a better listener of others.

The benefits gained would be that I’d be more critical of my own ideas and processes. In turn, I would hopefully make less work of change and would take on board more suggestions. Another benefit would be the ability to formulate better ideas for others. If I listened more to what they were saying, absorbed it and deliberated over it, I would ultimately have more to offer that person.

Negativities eliminated – I would lose that narrow-mindedness I often get when I go head on into an idea. I would also lose a touch of my arrogant side and become more favourable with my peers/collegues when it came to choosing the best decision for the task at hand.

Don’t be afraid to pick out your bad habits and you will grow stronger as a result. Just by losing a little bit of ego, a little bit of your pessimistic side, you can become more opportunist. Imagine yourself 12 months from now, what opportunities do you want to come your way?

So what did you read first, “Opportunity is nowhere” or “Opportunity is now here”?

Alex

I was actually reluctant to join Facebook… I did so because it was the simplest way to keep in touch with friends from home, University and abroad where much of my family live. As soon as I got an iPhone my fb usage went from a couple of check-ups a day to actually being a part of my daily life. Since leaving Uni, my interest has gone down (since I’m no longer raving it up every night and then having to moderate the photos!) but I’m now actively using Twitter to network within my industry and to learn how the whole thing works from an SEOs perspective.

After the defacing of Facebook with all the crap applications that promise to tell me ‘what Disney character I am’ or ‘who is my celebrity lookalike’, it seems that they have taken note of Twitters rise and implemented some of the more useful features such as @reference to refer to anything or anyone.
I have a feeling this will spark an increase in shared links etc across fb and might well increase the marketing capabilities of the social media giant. For example, in my experience there has been a MASSIVE following from UK-based students. I know first-hand how much it’s used and it’s hours per day. Merge this addiction with Twitters @reference function and suddenly you have a lot of people talking and sharing.

For me, the biggest market to attack is the student market. These guys have time, money (although mostly loaned!) and a care-free attitude with it, especially in the upcoming weeks where freshers are starting their term. I must have spent £400+ in my first freshers week and I couldn’t tell you what I got from that apart from a lot of good memories. But, I do not regret spending lots of money in the situation – I’m meeting new friends, mingling with new people and climatising to a new place and a house full of people I barely know. It will be interesting to monitor how clubs/bars etc utilise the reference function (if at all) to spread the “pass-it-on” factor and chain their way to more business.

In my experience, there were three clubs all vying for position on the student nights. I know first-hand that facebook played a huge, HUGE part in dictating where people went. The social proof light flashes, people follow the crowd. Facebook was responsible for losing one of the bigger student nights in my University which demonstrated how powerful social media can be. Infact, a friend of mine who started the group was offered a job for his good work!

As an SEO, I’m involved in something that usually triggers an automatic facial reaction – a raised eyebrow, widened eyes or a blank stare. Those three letters give nothing away, only to those who know its meaning. I’ve been trying to work out the easiest definition possible to pass on to others who are relatively unaware of this industry, still in its infancy and growing rapidly into an unavoidable business strategy. Companies are realising that an online presence is essential. With it, they reach an almost infinite audience with which to pitch their product at any time of the day, any day of the week with minimal resources. The increase in conversions, if the strategies are employed correctly, is inevitable. Those companies who shy away, or simply don’t know about the necessity of SEO are left behind whilst their competition soars past them. I find it hard not to give the same bemused look to the business owner who doesn’t know what SEO is. After all, isn’t it their job to know?

So what do I do as an SEO? The expanded wording of this acronym does little to inform the non-technical. ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ just about makes sense to the casual internet user who would define the internet as ‘Google’. It would be easy enough to say that my job is to rank websites at the top of the search engines for certain terms. This, however, would be a pretty modest explanation to what we do. The truth is that we assist in so much more than just ranking websites. That’s simply another metric and the one that clients care most about with their limited knowledge. They see it as a league table and if you’re not near the top, you’re near the bottom. I have access to sensitive information that business owners place a lot of trust in me for having, and rightly so. I often think my job is to ‘lead the blind’ to where they are apprehensive to tread. SMEs who don’t have the budget of the larger corporations are very much scared of ploughing money into something they know next to nothing about. Yet once the explanation is there, they understand its necessity.

The reassurance, in my opinion, to this is that everything I do as an SEO is (or should be) measurable. My job is to negotiate and advise realistic targets with clients and work to achieve them within an agreed time. SEO is not a quick fix like so many would like it to be, it can be a long and arduous journey. Going back to the measurable part, this is what I love about my job. I learn about my clients business… Their audience, demographics, products/services, competition and so much more. My own knowledge of marketing becomes much clearer with every client I work with. I have the opportunity to work in many industries and with many audiences. Ultimately I become involved in the business strategy and do my best to reward trust with measurable success. I take pride in becoming a consultant to online ventures and this makes me work harder to achieve goals. With their success comes my own. On a day-to-day basis I analyse metrics and tweak aspects of my clients online profile to improve the results – but this isn’t what I love doing. I’m not a magician with numbers, but for this I have others who are to help me. That’s their job as they see it, and its what they excel at. I could just keep quiet and let my client direct me I guess, but that wouldn’t be me. I like to invoke thought and ideas.

The reward of this is that as the trust grows between myself and my clients, they begin to understand that rankings are not necessarily the be-all and end-all. That Google isn’t the only method of finding their website, product or service. Their eyes are opened to the far larger scope of the online world and all that comes with it… Often with great excitement at the prospect of what it could mean for their business. This is the part I love – being the bridge between online and offline strategy. My love for SEO is only equal to my love for business and trade. Both are equally high on my agenda. Linking the two together is what really defines my job and where I want my career to go.

I’ve really only skimmed the surface of the SEO title in this post. I see SEO as just the canopy of a very large umbrella – to explain this in detail would need far much more than just a blog post (and someone far smarter than me to write it!). As a new industry, it’s growing so fast that we can’t possibly specialise in every part of it. To say I’m an expert metrics analyst would be blowing my skills well out of proportion. To say I am a social media expert would be insulting those who are. When it comes to developing and applying new and exisiting business strategies, to my knowledge of the online world – that I am good at. My creative background, love for marketing psychology and incessant interest in business has sort of moulded me that way. If my degree had read maths instead of graphic design, perhaps this article would be different. Probably. My title is still an SEO, but what I do does not apply to all who share the same label. I’m eager to meet many SEOs – to ask them what they do. Would each definition will be different? Probably.

The first step is to create your keyword list in excel as shown below:

To the right of the main keyword column, you can see that I have the phrase match copied in. I achieve this easily by using this formula:

=”["&A149&"]” (where A149 equals the cell of the broad term you want to use)

This tells excel to copy into the cell the broad match term and add a “[" and "]” to the end of the word. Copy this down the list to replicate.

Next we need the exact match variation. Unless I’ve missed something, Excel doesn’t allow the same method to use quotation marks within quotation marks… It messes up.

So… Copy the phrase match list (the [ ] ones) and copy them into Notepad. Now press CTRL+A (select all) and then CTRL+H (Find and Replace). Insert ‘[‘ into the find box, and ” into the replace with box:

Click ‘Replace All’ and then repeat using the other ‘[‘ to change the other side. This whole process takes under a minute and can save you a lot of time generating phrase and exact match variations of your broad match PPC keyword lists.