Traditional marketing can only give you an estimate on impressions. Digital and web marketing technologies can take you all the way. Let me give you an example.

Traditional

Let’s say that you purchased space on a billboard on the freeway. What information did the billboard company give you? Is it accurate? They can fairly accurately give you the amount of cars that drive past that point per month, but what does that tell you? Read On

As 2009 begins to blasts into 2010 I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do more with less, on how to focus on the most important, and on how to let good things not get done and instead focus on the getting the best things done. I hear over and over again, “We need more visitors to our site” or “We need to get 20,000 visits per month and we’ll be all set.” Lets step back a bit and think about what those visitors mean to the business.

If my website gets 100 visitors today and I sell my product or service to 2 of them, then my conversion rate is 2.0%. Could I get this conversion rate up to 4.0% and sell twice as much stuff with the same amount of visits? In a word, yes. This can be accomplished by optimizing the conversion process on the website. The folks over at Conversion Rate Experts have a great “free” article that includes 108 things you can do to improve your conversion rate. All 108 are very insightful and worth the time to read.
Read On

Ever wonder if there is a stable, predictable equation for figuring out if your ROI will be worthwhile on your Internet marketing investment? There is!

There are lots of variables and assumptions you’ll have to make, but the more data you make these assumptions from, the better your prediction model will be.

Read On

If you’ve been reading PPC blogs for any amount of time, you’ll notice that much of what you read seems to be tailored for businesses with big budgets and slick websites. Mind you, there’s tons of great advice and food for thought out there–it just may not help the SMB owner with limited development resources and budget.

Working at OrangeSoda has equipped me with a wealth of experience in dealing with the challenges of using PPC effectively with a less-than-perfect website. Here are a few of the most common problems I’ve come across, along with ideas for how to work around the problem without making wholesale changes to your website:

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Neal Conan recently interviewed author Daniel Pink about his new book entitled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

The interview and book discuss what motivates employees to work. The premise of the book is that traditional motivation for superior work is counterproductive. Pink says, “Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.” Read On

In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of having quality website text. One item that I didn’t mention: don’t copy or use content from other people’s websites. Read On

SEMMYS.org hosts annual awards for honoring the best blog posts of the year in search engine marketing. This year, OrangeSoda’s Janet Thaeler wrote an article entitled “Top 10 Ways to Save Your Online Reputation in 2009.” It was nominated in the “reputation management” category. OrangeSoda is honored to share the limelight with other big names in online marketing such as Shoemoney, Vanessa Fox, and Aaron Wall, all of which have also been nominated for the SEMMYS.

Visit the SEMMYs site to check out our nomination and VOTE here:  http://www.semmys.org/category/reputation-management/

Thank you to everyone who has nominated us, voted for us, and especially those of you who will be voting for us. If you haven’t voted yet, please take a moment and vote.

Thanks again everyone who made this possible!

Ideas for Selecting a Keyword

Choosing a quality keyword can be a daunting task. Targeting a keyword that doesn’t have search volume, yield relevant visitor traffic, or that is too competitive for your budget are a few issues you must avoid in order to have a successful SEO campaign. So, where do you begin? Read On

About a month ago I posted about the need to have a blog in a post called: Focus or Fail: Blog Marketing.

Have you done anything about it? I’ve been thinking about possible barriers to getting started with your blog. Let’s discuss it and I’ll provide a possible solution to each.

Barriers to Blogging (really just excuses):

1. I just don’t have the IT resources or the tech know how to get a blog setup.
2. I just don’t have the time to blog.
3. I’m scared about what people will think about my writing.
4. I’m just not a very good writer.
5. I don’t know what to write about (finding your voice).

Read On