It’s been quite awhile since I’ve last posted and I finally set aside a day to write an article about something I’ve been learning a lot about recently. Many internet entrepreneurs do not understand the distinct differences between lead, demand and  relationship marketing, so I’m going to summarize each to clarify any confusion.

Lead Generation Marketing is when you identify your potential marketing and target your advertisements towards your demographic who is actively seeking your product or services. If you sell shoes, and someone searches “shoes” in Google, you would bid on this keyword and offer your services. It has the most advertiser competition since it’s the most effective, and also often yields the highest conversion rate. If you are in an established industry or even a niche, lead generation works great because customers are seeking your services, all you have to do is guide them in a frictionless experience towards your conversion goal. Paid search marketing is the most common approach, yet its also the easiest to have a negative return on investment because of saturated advertising networks such as Google Adwords, especially in popular industries such as electronics. Exploiting long tale tactics such as bidding on thousands of less popular keywords, synonyms, and typos, is the best approach to reach a positive return on marketing investment.

Demand Generation is much different and consists of identifying your potential market, and targeting potential customers even though they are not actively seeking your product or service. Cold calling is a classic example: a sales person will often have a list of potential customers and he or she will contact each pitching the companies product or service. The customer has been identified, but has no immediate need or desire for the product, and you must tell them why they need your product if they do not have anything like it, or why you are better than the competition if they already have a rival product. This type of marketing focuses on the businesses unique selling point, and its an uphill battle because each customer must first believe that they need the product, and than they must be converted to a sale. Banner advertising is a common example, and averages .3-.8% conversion rate, which is much lower than paid search marketing which hovers around 1-3%.

Relationship Marketing is considered the new darling of the internet marketing space, and focuses on engaging customers who might not be ready to purchase, but have potential to purchase. Relationship marketing often takes months, or sometimes even years, for the engagement to result in a sale, and is reserved only for those who are willing to consistently invest with little upfront return. The most common form of modern relationship is social media marketing, where advertisers focus on strong content and engaging media to keep potential customers interested long enough until they have converted to a customer. Facebook advertising is considered both demand and relationship marketing, which is why companies have found slow success and often quickly give up. Successfully advertising on Facebook requires engaging content, steady time and monetary investment, and implicit conversion tactics. Relationship marketing’s successes are measured much differently than both lead or demand – if a potential customer interacts with the companies brand in any way, its considered a conversion. With Facebook, any “Like”, wall comment, or new fan of the companies Facebook page is considered a conversion.

After building a target customer profile, businesses must then find which strategy  fits their business. At that point, marketers should then delve into the various ad networks and build micro strategies around each platform. Hope this helps and let me know if anyone has questions!

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Designing interactions was previously considered an afterthought. Software and hardware engineers designed and built a functional system that was held together by an interface. Products were often powerful, yet confusing and there was a gap between the user and a functioning product. The interface was largely missing, and recently there has been significant improvement amongst all interface design. Industrial Engineers, such as CEO Mark Hurd of HP have improved office work flow by studying and improving an employee’s interaction between his or her own environment. Design firms such as IDEO and XEROX Parc have improved the connection between a consumer and a tangible product while companies like REGIONAL are improving urban interfaces such as their recent study and interface improvement between the Cuban government and its citizens.  The interface was a relatively unknown concept fifty years ago, yet recently it has begun to merge with traditional design.

Design has always carried an artistic notion, and many designers (i.e. web designers), have artistic backgrounds. By applying the artistic principles, such as shiny buttons, colorful logo’s, and fancy backgrounds, is an interface being created?  One could approach the problem from the other end, and ask if programmers throwing data onto a page creates an interface. An interface is an interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings. IDEO has become successful because they are able to bridge this gap and create a path for the user to easily access the system. This missing gap that has been ignored for so many years is finally being grasped and integrated into traditional academic learning, such as with Stanford’s D.School. Interface design is no longer an afterthought, but rather a specific role that bridges a graphical front-end to the underlying information. Web designers are starting to question the placement of buttons, form fields, text layout, and use colors, various fonts, and gradients to create an eye-flow with end goals such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. The most successful companies are not the most elegant, but rather have a superior underlying system and a usable interface.

Google and Apple are all two companies with excellent interface design. Each is successful because it not only has a superior product, but a user can access the information. A powerful system and a well-designed interface rely on each other, and are equally important. A robust feature set is pointless if it is not usable, and a beautifully designed interface needs to bridge somewhere. One could argue Google’s products, such as its search homepage are boring, but it has the ingredients for success. Apple is an often-studied company for its excellence in design because it can boast exceptional interfaces throughout its computer software and hardware. The interfaces, both tangible and intangible, are both easy to use and understand. But why? Simplicity. Critics often claim Apple’s products are for novice users and Apple “dums down” the products, yet that’s the innovation behind a well-designed interface. It breaks down a complex information structure and allows one to easily interact with it, understand it, play with it, access it. How useful is a feature if no one can use it? It’s fair to argue one can do more with a simplified interface such as a Mac, than a complex, difficult, “advanced” interface, such as a Microsoft Windows. To design an elegant and usable interface, designers have begun to design from the bottom-up.

Wireframes, focus groups, card indexing exercises, and paper prototyping have all become rising stars amongst software and web design. Designers are beginning to use the artistic aspects of design to enhance an interface. An exercise I conducted recently for a client began by ranking their company colors by brightness, for brighter colors have a greater ability to pull the eye: green, orange, and gray. I had several target users vertically rank/sort every page element the client had requested on the page, and asked what they wanted to see first, down till the webpage element they wanted to see last. Site title was first, followed by site navigation, page title, and so on. After they ranked the items, I designed a wire prototype largely based on this feedback using a layout program called Omnigraffle. The design was pure layout, and was still black and white boxes. After I designed the layout, I had the same users group each page element into three categories: very important, somewhat important, and least important. I went to my wire frame layout, and applied the most eye-catching palette color (orange), to any “important” page element, the secondary palette color (green), to any “somewhat important” element, and finally the tertiary palette color (gray), to the least important elements. The result was a page layout designed to flow with the eye, but used color to highlight the most important items as the eye shifted from left to right, top to bottom.

A bottom-up approach to interface design? I think so!

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I took some time to write up an SEO site checklist for my friend Adnan over at CarThrottle.com. I figured I would post it here for the rest of the readers. I didn’t go into detail about each step, so feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. These are the basic steps every web developer should go through once a website is launched, and should never be overlooked or skipped.

Site Profiling 1 Hour
Create website profile and cull data such as backlinks, pagerank, site strengths/weaknesses, broken links, analytics breakdown, industry or product information, and competitor analysis.

Keyword Analysis 2 Hours
Research and create a full list of relevant keywords and long tail phrases to use for keyword content, PPC campaigns, Google Trends, and meta data rewriting

Rewrite Meta Data 2 Hours
Using keyword analysis create page specific dynamic page titles, description, keywords and other page meta data.

Fix HTML Tags 3 Hours
Add HTML tags to pages. Key tags include alt, title, abbreviation, link, heading, paragraph, and (no)follow.

Optimize Page Content 3 Hours
Add keyword density to page content (under 3%), create fresh content section, rich product descriptions, reduce text in images, check for duplicate content, and optimize intra-site linking.

Robot Profiling 2 Hours
Run Lynx robot browser test, create and submit XML sitemap, robots.txt, rewrite page URL’s, 301 redirects, custom 404 errors, specify canonical URL, and setup Google Web Master.

Basic Directory Submission 2 Hours
Add website listing to general directory list, specifically DMOZ, as well as research and submit to niche industry directories.

Estimated Total: 12-15 Hours

Also if you have a WordPress blog there’s a lot you can do that is specifically for the publishing platform, and I’ll post more details about that later.

If anyone is interested in SEO work for their own website please contact me, and I can create a proposal along with a cost estimate.

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An economic boom is a jackpot for everyone, but as business markets mature, supply begins to exceed demand, companies expand too quickly, and individuals become greedy, both individuals and businesses are stretched too thin. At this point the slightlest market irregularity can throw the economy into a downward spiral overnight and everyone is left wondering what happened. Here’s 8 tips for making the most of a down economy: [click to continue→]

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Every marketer or website owners dreams of that traffic spike. Crashing servers, thousands of unique visitors per hour. The Digg Effect. The TechCrunch Effect. Call it what you want, but powerful sources have ways of driving enormous amounts of traffic to your website within a short period of time. Many websites are not prepared for such amounts of traffic not only because they can’t scale, but also because they are not setup to foster repeat visits. The traffic will hit a spike within hours of the initial posting, and only decline for weeks, even months, until it stabilizes and continues along its pattern of organic growth. Web properties vulnerable to these social media spikes, generally blogs, online startups, or social media websites themselves, should be properly setup to take advantage of traffic influxes. [click to continue→]

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• redesigning his blog using Thesis.. almost done take a look and let me know what you think #
• also looking for interesting people to follow that tweet about business, startups, design, or art…. any recommendations? #

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I was at an entrepreneur seminar on campus last month, and Director Bill Howe was talking about how he owns an auto dealer consulting business. He went on to say that he helps auto dealers improve customer service and marketing. His business had a name, a logo, business card, and he was listed as President. The problem was that he was the only employee, and instead of owning a business, he was merely a freelance consultant.
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I was recently hired as a social media marketing consultant to promote their online stores. Their main store acheived 900% growth in 2007 and was listed as one of Inc Magazines fastest growing small companies. After reading a book about social media marketing, the owner wanted to experiment with some of the strategies and assigned me $500 and one month to use social media marketing to improve the SEO on his store’s blogs. [click to continue→]

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