At a conference back in September, my co-worker Ralph got stopped by a rep at one of those companies whose goal in life is to buy domain names and then sell them for tons of money.  He told the woman he owned pizzadelivery.com.  She almost fell down.  He, of course, was kidding.

We all know that this industry is a bit “shady” (while at the same time we all wish we had the foresight to buy coke.com when it was first available).  When it comes to companies that sell website domain names, it is a very competitive and lucrative industry.  After all, how much did Go Daddy pay to advertise .co as a top level domain during the Super Bowl. Read the rest of this entry »

In Website Search Engine Ranking Got You Down? Stop the Insanity!, I highlighted all of the reasons why you should not focus on keyword search engine ranking.  In this post, I outline what you should be looking at to ensure success.

Of course, the answer depends on your marketing campaign goals, objectives and the action plan you have in place to fulfill those goals.  However, if you need something to fill the void, here are some things that are going to give you a much better idea of what your website search engine ranking means and could be for you: Read the rest of this entry »

I have found myself once again fighting the good fight about why website search engine rankings are not the thing to focus on.

These conversations usually go something like this:

• Business Owner (who wants to see results, now – believe me, so do we):  I want my website to rank number one for “this keyword” and “that keyword” oh and maybe “this keyword, too.”   How quickly can you make that happen?
• Marketing Director (who has to answer to the higher ups – yes, we understand that):  I Googled “insert brand name keyword” last week and I was number one and now I did it today and I am not on the first page anymore.  What did you do?
• Manager (who wonders how they ended up doing the marketing for the company and are swimming in information – we feel your pain):  I used this keyword ranking checker tool my boss just read about and it says I am number one for “insert keyword” but I am not seeing us at all on the first page when I search.  What’s up with that?

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If I had to give a penny to everyone on the team each time I yelled at my computer, I would be really, really broke.  How is it that our computers can make us online marketers so mad that we respond to them like they are real people?  We know a computer is not human, it has no brain, nor can it feel, yet we find ourselves talking to them as if they understand what they are doing to us.

Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University recently published a book entitled, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop.  Although I have not had the opportunity, i.e. time, yet to read his book, I did catch an interview with him on NPR which prompted me to started thinking about the ways us marketers interact with our computers.

In his book, Nass touches on how technologies can help us improve our relationships and interactions with real people.  Since we often apply the same social rules to our computers as we do with the people in our lives, we end up having high expectations of them.  What Nass argues is that when we project a feeling or emotion on to our computers, it ends up getting projected back onto ourselves.  More often than not, we tend to project too much criticism instead of positive affirmations.  The idea is that flattery is incredibly powerful and we can essentially use our computers as a means of practicing the art of it.

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There have always been and will increasingly be terminology confusion in the online marketing field.  Everyday there are new ideas, innovation concepts and cutting-edge technologies on the horizon, and search and social marketers are in a constant uphill run to absorb the latest trends and lingo.

Add all of that with the need to explain what we do to people outside of the industry, and it becomes very important for us to attempt to keep it simple.  Some of my favorite misconceptions are:

• online marketing is easy and anyone can do it
• your website is all you need
• online marketing is a scam

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