I received an email from Quiznos today, the subject line of which was “$2 Off A Large Sub,” pretty standard. But when I glanced in the preview window, my eye caught a big, bold headline stating: “Larry’s second chance at life is your last chance to get $2 off a large Lobster & Seafood Salad Sub.” Well, I was certainly intrigued as I love lobster, so I opened the email.

This email from Quiznos is part of their integrated marketing progem to promote their new Lobster and Seafood Sub. Click to watch the video.

Under the first headline was an even bigger one that said, “The more Lobster & Seafood Salad Subs you ate, the more lobsters we set free.
WATCH THE LOBSTER RELEASE VIDEO“

I was hooked! I had to find out what this was all about. It turns out that because thousands of customers bought Lobster & Seafood Salad Subs, Quiznos set four lobsters, Larry, Lucky, Lainey and Lenny, free. So I clicked on the video link and watched the touching tale of how these lucky lobsters were purchased from a Midwest grocery store and returned to the waters of coastal Maine. Their temporary new home, a fish tank at Quiznos headquarters, was even videoed live and streamed online for four weeks to let people visit them before they were finally transported 1,500 miles and released in the Atlantic Ocean.

I know this all sounds counter-intuitive, freeing live lobsters to sell more lobster salad, but by the time I finished watching the video, my mouth was watering, the $2.00 discount coupon was printing, and I found myself clicking on the “Find a Location” button, all without conscious thought. And once I finish this, I’m out the door.

Now that’s what I call a successful Integrated Marketing Program! The “Like” button counter on the video’s web page showed over 4,000 hits. From an email campaign!

Would you like to get this kind of response from your next marketing campaign? DRIVE can help you to develop your own integrated marketing campaign that combines emails, video, web sites, social networking and more. For more information about who we are and what we do, visit our website, www.DriveYourBusiness.com, or give us a call. In the Indianapolis area, call 317-966-0998.

The study, conducted by User Centric, Inc., a user research firm based in Chicago, was a second look at a 2009 eye-tracking study that compared Google and the recently-release Microsoft Bing search engine. The goals of the study were to:

1. Compare the distribution of attention on equivalent areas of Bing and Google
2. Assess how much attention was captured by elements that were unique to Bing

While there were a few differences noted, the most significant being the higher percentage of Bing users that looked at the right column Sponsored Ads than Google users, the more important finding was that only 42% of visitors to Bing even glanced at the right column ads, and then for a mere two seconds or so. Google right column sponsored ads drew just 25% of the study’s participants.

The study also noted that virtually 100% of visitors looked at the organic results, and about 90% looked at the sponsored ads section at the top of the SERP, on both Bing and Google. Not surprisingly, in most cases the cost for ad placement in the top section is considerably more expensive than for ads in the right column.

When we took a close look at data, what it all boiled down to was that the free, organic search results are still about two and half times more popular with searchers than paid advertisements. So, while some internet marketers tout the latest and greatest in flashy web site design as the best thing since sliced bread, our philosophy of good, solid, "best practice" search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to achieve top rankings in the organic results is still as valid and important, or even more so in these days of "Pandagate", as they ever were. And the more complex the search algorithms become, the more important following correct procedures will be.

There are no real shortcuts to achieving search success. One way or the other, a business is going to pay to gain the visibility needed for successful internet marketing, whether it’s to establish a professionally designed and managed SEO web site to garner top SERP rankings or to pay for placement in the sponsored ad sections. The choice is yours, but 2½ – 1 odds seem pretty good to us.

Read the complete User Centric report: "Eye Tracking Bing vs. Google: A Second Look"

WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. Everything, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community of users.

WordPress offers a couple of options for building a web site or blog site.

1. WordPress.com lets you starts a new, free, hosted blog in just a couple of minutes; just about anyone can do it. Flexibility and design options are limited, but it’s a great choice for someone who wants to start a personal blog. The site address, or URL, would be www.username.wordpress.com

2. Or you can purchase a URL, or web address, for around $15 – $20 depending on the top-level extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.) you want, in which case the web site address would be www.YourURL.com. With this option, you would also need to pay WordPress a small annual fee to accept your domain as your site’s primary URL, plus you (or your domain registrar’s tech support team, like the fine folks at GoDaddy.com) would need to adjust your domain’s DNS settings to point to the WordPress servers.

3. WordPress.org allows you to publish your web site on a hosting service like GoDaddy.com, which has very inexpensive hosting plans specifically for the WordPress content management system. The downloadable WordPress software is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything, from a multiple-contributor “community” blog to an entrepreneur’s e-commerce storefront to a corporate web site. With thousands of available plugins, widgets, and themes, WordPress is limited only by imagination. technical know-how and time.

Sounds easy, right? Well it’s not, and that’s where we come in. While it is true that just about anyone can slap a web site together and get it online, it takes a lot of time and training to learn where to find and how to use plug-ins, how to use widgets, how to edit templates and change styles, and numerous other aspects of WordPress to make a great web site.

Additionally, DRIVE utilizes “Best Practice” techniques to build a well designed, search engine optimized (SEO) web site that will generate rankings on the organic search results pages of Google, Bing, and other search engines. It cannot be learned overnight.

The bottom line? Two years ago, a good commercial or e-commerce web site might have cost as much as $10,000 and taken 6 – 8 weeks to get online. Today, utilizing the power of the WordPress platform, we can build a site in half the time and for a fraction of the cost.

If you need to give your business a web presence, or it’s time to update an old or under-performing web site, give DRIVE a call at (317) 966-0998. We’ll be happy to answer any of your questions and, if needed, perform a free Competitive Performance Analysis of your existing web site.

]]> http://driveyourbusiness.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/comparing-shopping-carts-and-cms/feed/ 0 driveyourbusiness http://driveyourbusiness.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/being-social-is-not-just-common-courtesy-its-vital-to-business-survival/ http://driveyourbusiness.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/being-social-is-not-just-common-courtesy-its-vital-to-business-survival/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:57:07 +0000 Staff http://driveyourbusiness.wordpress.com/?p=80 Continue reading →]]> As the popularity of social networking grows, so does the importance it plays as part of your overall online marketing strategy. DRIVE’s social networking specialists can help you:

• Understand the different markets that are available on the various social networking sites.
• Understand the varieties of tactics that can be employed to best communicate with your target audience on those social sites.
• Create content to publish on the social sites.
• Set up and develop your blogging strategy. We can even write expert content for you as ghost bloggers.
• Establish an email marketing campaign as part of your social networking.

This last item is vitally important because social networking is beginning to replace email newsletters due to email in-boxes getting inundated with messages and newsletters we don’t really care about.

• While existing newsletter strategies already in place for existing customers is still important to a degree, the ability to develop new social networking strategies is equally important.
• Don’t forget, the percentage of the population that regularly visits Facebook is the same as the percentage of your customers that are on Facebook, as well.
• If your customers are on Facebook, you need to reach them there.

The Statistics Speak for Themselves; Social Networking is a Growth Market – Just Ask Facebook

The appearance of icons for popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (click on icons to open social networking sites in a new window) on traditional offline advertising venues highlight the importance businesses place on social networking to reach their target market.

To illustrate this, according to a Nielsen Company report, in December 2009 the average U.S. Internet user spent an estimated 68 hours online (both at home and at work).

In that time, on average:

• Nearly 2700 websites were viewed, with an average visit of 57 seconds per site.
• One hour and 53 minutes is spent on Google
• Two hours and 40 minutes on AOL (which could be considered the first social networking venue)
• Three hours and 8 minutes on Yahoo (including their popular email service)
• And a whopping five hours and 25 minutes on Facebook, an 82% increase over the same time a year earlier. And their popularity just keeps growing.
  • As of February 2010, the average time spent on Facebook was up to more than seven hours per month.
  • The average user spent more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined.

Contending with the Future of Social Networking

Many internet users spend more time logged into social network sites than watching TV, and are much more receptive to that environment because the user chooses where to receive information, as opposed to having information forced upon them.

It is also important to remember that while they might be on Facebook this year, they could be into something else “new” by next year.

• You need to stay abreast of the ever-changing landscape of the segmented target markets that are using, or not using any longer, particular social networking sites.
• You should include your social networking site information on your offline marketing materials, including TV, radio, and especially print advertising. The mere presence of those Facebook and Twitter logos on your website says something about you to your audience.
• Create content to publish on the social sites.
• Set up and develop your blogging strategy. We can even write expert content for you as ghost bloggers.
• Establish an email marketing campaign as part of your social networking.

If that is something that you think is important to your target market, then it is very important that you have those programs in place or you won’t meet your audience’s expectations and will get beaten by your competitors who do meet their target market in the places they expect to see you.

AxeHeaven.com manufactures and sells miniature replicas of guitars made famous by Rock ‘n Roll stars from the 60′s through today. They currently offer more than 175 replica guitars from over 75 musicians, from Ace Frehley to Zakk Wylde.

The Axe Heaven website, originally built on the CartSEO v. 2.0 platform, has been upgraded to version 6.5, which features a variety of Web 2.0 tools that lets visitors perform a number of functions directly from the web page, such as:

• Alter text size, print the page
• Send a page as an email
• Create a bookmark
• Post directly to news and social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace

The CartSEO™ shopping cart technology was developed by DRIVE to improve on the lack of search engine-friendliness inherent in most traditional online carts. CartSEO offers ever-present static HTML files to the search engines for ranking rather than the less-friendly built-to-order “dynamic” pages delivered by most e-commerce shopping carts.

New features of the CartSEO 6.5 platform include:

A full-function Content Management System (CMS) that creates static non-product pages as easily as product pages with a WYSIWYG text editor.

• Events Calendar
• Polling Capability
• Media Manager
• Flash Video Manager
• Customized RSS news and/or blog feeds to web pages.

“CartSEO 6.5 is a vast improvement over our original product,” stated DRIVE president Ken Zweigel. “Not only have we made it easier to add products to the shopping cart, we now provide all the tools needed to easily build and maintain effective, user-friendly, content-driven web pages that a web site needs to attain high rankings on the major search engine results pages.”

The new website is powered by CartSEO, DRIVE’s proprietary content management system and integrated retail shopping cart technology, which was developed by DRIVE to improve on the lack of search engine-friendliness inherent in most traditional online carts. CartSEO offers ever-present static HTML files for the search engines to rank rather than the less-friendly built-to-order “dynamic” pages delivered by most e-commerce shopping carts.

The website’s updated graphic design was provided by DRIVE’s partner company BE Branded. The streamlined style offers an eye-catching, user-friendly navigation structure to give visitors easy access to information about the company’s search engine marketing, lead generation, and online sales solutions. For more information, click here to visit the DRIVE website.

Social media is just another form of gaining visibility in front of an audience so they can determine if they like the way you think. If used properly, it can certainly be effective, but the time required is offset by the lack of time for other traditional marketing, which still works.

I know several social media “experts,” but I do not fully-understand how they bring real long-term ROI to their clients for the specdialized work they do. I assume they set up social networking accounts and sites and train the old folks how to use the technology,but then they leave it up to the client to do take on the additional responsibility to make it work. I hear some of them bill quite a bit each month, so more power to them.

We basically do the same thing, but we provide the services to make somewhat more-established tools work effectively. We apply social networking tools and tactics for our clients as needed (solo blogs, corporate blogware, ghost blogging, message board forums) but I can’t say that I have used many other platforms because I have yet to have a call for them from our more-traditional client base. Perhaps that’s my mistake, because I also can’t say they don’t work – and Twitter seems to be the next big thing despite or because of the fact that it can be used in many different ways and it is a very simple application.

In the end, it is all marketing, so we definitely need to keep up on it and use it despite our generation gap. Great branding and web technology combined seem to be the driving forces of successful marketing as we move forward in the Google Economy. As you know, my head has been buried in the SEO sand for about seven years, so I will use my blog as part of my social networking coming out party, and then continue the celebration with other tools soons.

As if by wizardry, I have connected with someone by just writing about Twitter. Now, I really am curious to see what would happen if I put the same focus into that easy-to-use platform as I have into my search-engine-friendly shopping cart for the last few years.

I’m just afraid, based on what I’ve seen locally and read about, that I’ll get addicted and never get any work done again. I already have so many source of info deluging me daily that I would have to make a radical adjutment to something in order to have the bandwidth to absorb any more data input.

But I have found time to blog thrice this week, so anything is possible. The trick, I am discovering is to just let it flow out at first to get in the rhythm, then worry about accomplishing any goals, such as getting the phrase freelance SEO copywriter into the post to help populate an underserved compended page created to help with my search engine optimization strategy. (Sorry, couldn’t resist throwing in another self-serving keyword phrase.)

He said that Twitter is helping him establish new relationships that actually do lead to new business as a web developer. So, it seems that Twitter is just another new tool to gain visibility, which is exactly what search engine optimization or old-school direct marketing is all about.

As a lead generation specialist focused on marketing strategy and tactics development, I think that’s a good thing, if you find the time and have (and can afford) the patience to learn the system and let it take its natural course over time.

I know I need to get in there and do it, but finding the time will be the challenge. I’m just starting to find time to blog, so we’ll see how long it takes to fit Twitter into the mix.