ionadas local LLC

PubCon 2010 Coupon

Without question, my favorite internet marketing conference of the year is PubCon Vegas. Great educational content, fantastic networking, and an excuse to head to Las Vegas right before the holiday season begins. As usual, I will be on a couple of panels this year, although I don’t yet know the topics.

Being known as a fan of PubCon, I’m often asked about discount coupons for attendees. So, I asked the crew at WebmasterWorld if they could help me out, and they gave me the following coupon code for 15% off PubCon Las Vegas:

bc-9237415

The code will expire on October 31, 2010 and must be used at the time of registration. They do not offer retroactive discounts.

I hope to see you there!

Today’s Lesson

Even those of us that are rather experienced in WordPress can get lazy. Sometimes we don’t keep our plugins up to date. And sometimes, PHP is upgraded on your server overnight, and you wake up to the dreaded blank-screen-of-death.

This has been my Monday.

Be deleting all the plugins for my site, I was able to get things running again. I’m currently reinstalling the plugins (and updating them). In the meantime, some of the functionality of this site will not be working.

So, remember this, boys and girls: Keep your WordPress plugins up to date!

Free Workshop: Online Reputation Management

Learn how to manage your company’s reputation with search engines, social media networks, blogs and other online media.

Details:
Tuesday, April 27th at 11am, Dave & Busters, Austin, Texas

This workshop will help you to:

• Monitor the internet for conversations impacting your business.
• Know when and how to engage in conversations online.
• Push problem search results down the page so that they receive less traffic.
• Avoid the potential pitfalls in online reputation management.

The workshop is free, but space is limited, so sign up today!

Guest Post: Do you know the stories of your most desirable visitors?

I first heard the noise during the brief pause between commercials. I was sitting at home watching TV. Tom and the kids had gone to watch my son’s soccer game, and this was a rare chance for me to enjoy some weekend alone time. What I heard would change that. It was the sound of water dripping under the sink. I instantly pictured water seeping into my wood floors, warping them, molding them, ruining them.

When this woman — let’s call her "Sally" — gets to her computer and opens Google, what keywords is she going to enter? She might type in "emergency plumber," "weekend plumber," or "water leak help."

If you are a plumber, are you interested in hearing from her? Do you work weekends? Do you maintain a fleet of trucks around the city? If so, these are keyword phrases that will compliment your business strategy very well. How would you have know to target these keywords if you didn’t know her story?

The Source for Search Keywords

I have a lot of respect for people who create search engine keyword lists. They sit with you for an hour or so, asking questions about your business and your customers. Then, they go away for a day or two, returning with a list of hundreds or thousands of keyword phrases, prioritized by potential value to your business. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

Unfortunately, this is what they usually have to work with:

Sally is a 44-year-old female living in an upper-middle-class ZIP code in suburban Dallas. Her family income is between $150,000 and $200,000 per year. She is married. She has three children between 12 and 18 years of age. Her home is 15 years old and has three bathrooms, five sinks, and a sprinkler system.

Based on this, can you predict what is Sally going to type into Google at any given moment? It’s hard to say without knowing her story.

Segmenting Misses Opportunities

I’ve been thinking about remodeling our master bathroom. We’ve lived in this house a long time and it’s time we started updating it. Mary down the street just finished hers and said I should look for a plumber that can work with the new materials used in modern bathrooms. Apparently it was a problem for her.

This is the same Sally. Same income. Same ZIP code. Same house. But she is going to search very differently, and remodel projects are probably going to be very desirable to a plumbing business. While terms like "bathroom remodel" may be very competitive, a search professional may find valuable terms that focus on bathroom materials such as "plumbing for tile counters," or "toilets on wooden floors."

Same person, different approach.

Naturally, such insights will also affect the content you choose for your site. Your search professional should be able to help you prioritize content based on your customer commentaries.

The Power of the Customer Commentary

The four sentences that I began this post with contain a power that demographics alone can’t deliver.

First, the "story" is written from the point of view of the prospect – the potential visitor to your Web site. This means that it is written using the vocabulary of the customer, not the vocabulary of the business or industry. Sally would rarely say something like, "I suspected the elbow pipe was leaking around the seal and my wood floors were being ruined."

Second, it tells us exactly why she is searching for a plumber, giving us more potential keywords to investigate. In the hands of a talented search professional, phrases like "emergency plumbing," "after hours plumber," and "how to shut off water" could be parlayed into hundreds of otherwise overlooked opportunities.

Third, it highlights the importance of Google Maps and the "seven pack." Because Sally can feel her wood floors rotting, proximity is going to be a key motivator in her selection of a solution. In most searches, the map is a convenience to the searcher. In Sally’s situation it is crucial to be in that list of seven.

Aren’t these stories too specific to be helpful?

You may feel that these stories are too specific, and that you would be missing a great many searches by focusing on a few specific customer commentaries. If you are the only plumber in your area, you may not need such detail. Chances are, you are not. Furthermore, your competition is learning every day how to make the search engines work in their favor.

Neither of these stories omits the broader keyword phrases that you would be interested in. However, your ability to specifically target those customers who fit your strategic advantages will ensure that you stay one step ahead of your competition.

If you’re going to be depending on search engines for leads and sales in 2010, you need to help your search term research along. Write the stories of your best visitors in their words and find those valuable search terms that everyone else is missing.

Brian Massey is The Conversion Scientist™ and he has the lab coat to prove it. Brian develops visitor personas for businesses of all sizes so that they can focus their marketing dollars in the places that will deliver the leads and sales that help them grow.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

Guest Post: The Importance of Web Content

You’ve done all the right things to draw your target market to your online presence. You’ve optimized your website for Google Maps so you show up in location-based searches. You’ve dropped the right keywords in the right places to ensure a high ranking on organic search results. You’ve invested in Google AdWords or a similar SEO-based advertising campaign to make sure you appear on your prospects’ search destinations. And now you’re developing a strong online brand through social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and their rapidly proliferating kin. Your prospects respond to your brilliant strategies by flocking to your website to learn more.

Now comes the final step — keeping those shoppers on your site long enough to turn them into buyers.

Strong website content can help you get the best return on your online branding investment. You must stop visitors in their tracks within their first few seconds on your site to still that mouse hand. Exciting copy, vivid images, and easily navigated pages are all crucial to viewer retention — they’re the online equivalent of a TV announcer yelling, “Don’t touch that dial!”

How do you grab your new friends’ attention within those first few critical seconds?

Well, if you’ve taken your SEO seriously up to this point, then you already have one big advantage — keywords and key phrases. If your prospects are using these terms in their searches, then you can already guess what kind of verbiage pushes their buttons. Use those terms, by all means, but use them sensibly. Larding your text with keywords, with no concern for flow or eloquence, may enhance your search results, but the resulting clumsiness in the writing may cancel out any gain. Drawing more visitors to a poorly written website isn’t likely to boost business.

Even when the writing is perfect, watch out for other little slip-ups that can lessen your website’s overall impact. Consider the humble hyperlink, for instance. Links are great for guiding your reader to the next stage of the sale — and links written in detailed, targeted language can improve your Google-readiness. But drop a compelling link into the first sentence of your Home page copy, and you can forget about your visitors reading anything below that link — they’ve already been whisked away to another page. Don’t upstage yourself.

Finally, make sure your written message is consistent across all your online media. Your website, your tweets, your LinkedIn profile — everything you do online should form one congruent, powerful statement about what your company stands for. Once you get all your marketing tools supporting each other, you’ll be able to truly leverage the awesome power of the Internet for future business success.

William Reynolds is a freelance copywriter based in Austin, Texas who specializes in web content, print-marketing copy, radio/TV commercial scripts, and ghostwritten articles for corporate clients nationwide. His writing samples and other information can be viewed at ReynoldsWriting.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.