With the release of Google’s new Chrome browser a couple months back, most people wonder why on earth they would want to download, install and use another web browser. After all, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox seem enough, right? Not to mention Mac users and Safari. Beyond that are a handful of niche browsers such as Opera, Avant, Orca, etc.
Besides the fact that it’s just cool to beta test something from Google (bugs and all), there’s actually a more practical reason for some to use Chrome on a regular basis.
Being built by Google, naturally you would expect Chrome to work seamlessly with Google apps. And you would be right.
From my unscientific experience, apps such as AdWords, Analytics, Gmail, Gdocs and others work much quicker in Chrome.
Oh yeah, the regular web surfing speed is noticeably faster as well…a nice fringe benefit.
For companies or agencies that send a lot of time in AdWords and Analytics, this speed difference is nothing to sniff at. Many a times I have browsers either lock up or just plain creep along in Internet Explorer. For those trying to quickly go in and out of tabs, adjust keyword bids and refresh the screen, the increased speed of Chrome does help.
Of course, we should all be using Google AdWords Editor offline tool. But for those that either like doing our tasks within the web browser or have to do it out of necessity, you’d be well advised to give Chrome a shot.
Just remember, like all beta products there are still a few bugs to be worked out. But hey, it’s Google.
What if I told you there was a way to spy on your competitors’ web strategy, and it was completely legal?
Now what if I told you it was free as well?
The first way to gain insight into your competitions’ SEO strategy–or at least components of it–is something that is built into all major web browsers.
By selecting “View Source”, you can see the code behind the web page. Here you can see within a line of code near the top something called “meta name = “keywords” content = “. The words listed after “content =” are the keywords that web site is using to optimize for.
A good exercise is to find your top competitors’ sites for the keywords you wish to rank high and “View Source”. See what keywords they are targeting, which could give you ideas on other keywords you should optimize your site.
Google’s taken this concept to another level within its new Chrome web browser. By right clicking any element of a web page and selecting “Inspect Element”, you can see every detail behind the element selected.
A third party web site called “Spyfu” lets you peer into the AdWords and PPC strategy of your competitors as well.
While their data isn’t always updated or even that accurate, it is interesting to use to get an idea of your competitors’ daily ad budget, top paid keywords, top organic keywords and other SEO/PPC metrics.
In the dog eat dog competitive world of Search Engine Marketing, one which is only bound to grow even more competitive, every edge against your competitor can only help you.
Want to properly create and manage a Search Engine Marketing campaign that will pay you both short and long-term dividends? Contact us at www.firecrackerpr.com.
Passengers who step foot into my car for the first time always remark on how clean it is. Not only is the exterior washed and sealed with a coat of wax, but the interior is generally kept clear of the usual clutter that people have to shovel to one side when I enter their car. No soda cans littering the floor. Windows relatively clean. I’m pretty sure this borderline obsession with car cleanliness stemmed from an outside sales job in the 1990’s which left me spending the majority of the time in my car. In fact, meals would be had on the go in the car, and even quick snoozes to combat driving drowsiness were taken with the car radio on as my companion.
One tool to help me keep up the appearances is a duster which helps remove light dust build up on cars, especially in the polluted Los Angeles area where I live. These coats of dust quickly become layers of dirt. Mix in any sort of water from sprinklers or rain and you have a very dirty car.
The duster simply requires that every couple of days I quickly run it over the car to keep it dust free. In this easy way, my car is kept looking exceptionally clean. Similarly, making sure to always take out whatever trash I have in the car ensures it doesn’t end up looking like a dumpster.
But all it takes is one month of neglect, and my car ends up looking like a hobo.
Maintaining web sites requires the same dedication. Since a web site may be all a prospect ever sees of you before making their decision, you’ve likely rightly spent a decent amount on building a sharp-looking site with fairly good navigation.
It is all too easy to lapse into neglect and have web sites with the following problems:
-Unnoticed broken links. One of the cardinal sin of poor web sites.
-Copyright years on the bottom that are 1 or 2 years behind. Makes your site look unused.
-Press releases or news announcements on the front page that are outdated. If it’s 5-6 months or earlier, rule of thumb is to move it somewhere inconspicuous.
-Home pages with content or graphics which have not changed in a year.
-Incorrect meta tags, title tags, alt tags and content to rank highly in search engines.
-Stale web copy which doesn’t take into account new market conditions or new products and services.
When it comes time to sit down and address these, it can seem overwhelming. Like a dirty snowball rolling downhill, the list of tasks to address can grow quickly.
The best way to address web site maintenance is the same philosophy as keeping your car neat.
Do it a little bit at a time, all the time.
Here are some tips on web site maintenance:
-Set aside one day of the month to work on the web site.
-Have others look at it with a fresh eye and make recommendations to you.
-Regularly give your web designer changes in bite sized pieces rather than one massive document of changes accumulated over 2 years.
-Make sure you have some sort of web site analysis tool. Google Analytics is the best free tool available and can give you great insight on every nook and cranny of your site.
-Use “View Source” option in Internet Explorer or Firefox (”Inspect Element” in Google Chrome) and see your web site code, including what meta tags, meta description, title tag and alt tags you have for SEO purposes.
At a minimum you are looking to avoid any errors on your web site. Ideally your web site should be a fresh way for you to continually update your prospects and customers on where your company is headed.
Look to Firecracker for your web design and branding needs. Visit us at www.firecrackerpr.com.
Copyright (c) 2008 Firecracker, LLC. If you wish to reprint this article, please list an author credit as “Edward Yang / Firecracker PR” and link the credit to http://www.firecrackerpr.com.
October 5th, 2008 in
web site | tags:
web site |
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If there’s one rule of thumb about the American public, it’s that they cannot stand the appearance of snobbery. Companies break this rule at their own peril.
One school of thought about American elections is that people tend to vote for a President who most identify with them. Since the majority of the electorate is by definition “middle class”, any hint of snobbery turns off a sizable chunk of voters. Some attribute John Kerry’s loss in 2004 to partially this reason. Opponents of Obama have also pointed to comments he’s made to try and paint him as an elitist.
It is a fine line to walk for companies looking to position themselves as hipper than others. If you try too hard, hip quickly becomes tacky. But another danger lurks for hipsters. The very success of what was once hip quickly becomes commonplace and mainstream, thereby not being hip any longer.
One exception to this rule up to this point has been Apple. For over twenty years, Apple’s battles versus Microsoft have been the stuff of tech legends. Strictly by market share it seems the outcome hasn’t even been close: Microsoft has long dominated the personal computer scene.
Apple attempted to counter this by positioning their brand as the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. For many years, Apple played the David role to perfection, and this was reflected in their minuscule market share for the computer.
With the emergence of the iPod and the iPhone, a halo effect has pulled the Mac computer from the sporadic use by graphic designers and educational institutions to the mainstream.
Apple recently launched a series of TV ads to hammer this point home. I’m sure you’ve seen them; a young cheeky “hip” guy talks with a dumpy nerdy older guy. Of course, the analogy is the hip guy represents Apple Mac while the nerdy guy represents Microsoft Windows.
At first, the ads resonated well with me. After all, the problems and complaints about Microsoft Vista are well known to all.
But my impression is that Apple has overplayed their hand.
By continually hammering the image that Microsoft is nerdy, they are in essence saying that the vast majority of PC users are nerdy and stupid.
And this is a big mistake.
Gently poking fun can be an effect marketing tactic, but blatant ridicule can backfire. Similar to the political arena, once the public senses the haughty air of elitism in the business world, you risk turning off a massive segment of the marketplace.
I’ve personally tried using my wife’s Mac laptop, and for the life of me I cannot get used to the Mac OS. Sure it may be better, but for someone raised on the shortcomings of Windows I’ve simply become used to living with them.
For a company to continually tell me that I am out of touch, stupid and nerdy for using Windows is not going to quickly endear me to use a Mac any time soon.
Microsoft has quickly latched onto this sentiment with its own ad blitz on TV. “I’m a PC” starts with the dumpy guy but quickly runs through appearances by people from every walk of life. The point of the commercials is that those using a PC will not be stereotyped.
Initial indications are that it has worked. My own personal MSN Messenger instant messaging list of friends has many who’ve put some variation of “I’m a PC” into their personal message.
The next time I walk by a gleaming Apple store, I might admiringly check out the latest and greatest from Steve Jobs’ company. But the image of a snarky guy making fun of me will likely make it quite a while before I plunk down money to purchase a Mac.
Moral of the story: be very careful not to position your company as elitist or snobby.
For those needing branding and other marketing assistance, please visit us at www.firecrackerpr.com for more information.
Copyright (c) 2008 Firecracker, LLC. If you wish to reprint this article, please list an author credit as “Edward Yang / Firecracker PR” and link the credit to http://www.firecrackerpr.com.
If you took an unscientific survey of 10 random Google AdWords ads, it’s highly likely you’ll find 8 or so of them making this mistake.
They’re selling the steak and not the sizzle.
Too often, under-performing Pay Per Click ads are under performing simply because the writer got lazy.
You see, it’s very easy to write about the features of something. It has a 305 horsepower engine. The laptop has a dual core processor. The beauty product has cocoa butter.
It’s harder and more time consuming to write about the benefits. The engine screams with power, pushing you back in your seat. The laptop blazes through having multiple programs open at the same time without slowing down. The beauty product erases lines of aging and crow’s feet.
This is a common mistake in virtually all copywriting. Take a look at web copy on a company’s homepage. Inspect a brochure in an office. Take a random sampling of Google ads and landing pages (if they have one, that is). In fact, I can’t point the finger as there are times I’ve been guilty of having too much of a focus on features rather than benefits.
One of the greatest mistakes made in writing ads for Google AdWords is a focus on features.
This mistake is magnified with Adwords due to the tight restrictions of characters for the ad. For those that don’t know, Google only allows up to 25 characters in the headline and 35 characters in each of the two sentences per ad. In other words, it’s succinct copywriting to the extreme. You basically have 3 short lines to convince a prospect to click on an ad.
Keep your focus like a laser on dazzling the prospect. Don’t bore them to death with a list of features read off of an inventory list.
Here’s an example:
Ad 1:
Customized Gaming PCs
Dual Core AMD Athlon, 3MB RAM,
320GB Hard Drive. Free Shipping!
Ad 2:
Blow Your Competition Away
with a Customized Neon Gaming PC.
Built to Your Exact Specs. Free Shipping!
Ad 1 barely distinguishes it from the other PC ads out there, with a spec that fits almost any profile.
Ad 2 starts with a headline that strikes to the heart of gamers. Using the word “blow” has double meaning. “Neon” invokes an image of a bright pulsing colored PC. “Built to Exact Specs” means it’s completely tuned to their needs.
Which one do you think would be more effective?
Don’t describe your product or service. Dazzle your prospects with the benefits. Make it real. Invoke imagery or emotion. Appeal to their senses.
Dazzle them and you’ll find your click through rates and conversion rates equally dazzling.
By the way, if your business needs help managing your Google AdWords campaign, reach out to us at www.firecrackerpr.com.
As marketers and business owners, we’re so busy every day handling the details of work that we sometimes overlook the little things which could be sapping our business dry.
One example I come across all the time (and one of my biggest pet peeves), is poorly-executed Captcha software.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, Captcha is a field you must enter alphanumeric characters that are shown in a graphic.
The goal of Captcha is to prevent spammers or bots from auto-registering or submitting something online.
Sounds great right? Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
While the intention of Captcha-type software is good (prevent spammers/bots), the unintended consequences could be dire (lost sales or customers).
Let me explain.
I would say about 30% of the Captcha software projects alphanumeric characters which are hard to see or distinguish. Furthermore, since Captcha-type programs are case sensitive, there are all sorts of ways to screw up entering what you see.
Thus when the characters aren’t level, you can’t tell if that letter “c” is upper case or lower case. Same with “S” or “O”.
Speaking of “O”, is that a letter O or the number zero?
I’ve had experiences where I’ve literally wanted to throw my computer out the window. Not only is it hard to figure out, but if you get it wrong they randomly generate a new string.
How many customers or prospects could your business be losing on the backend because you don’t walk in their shoes to see what their experience is like?
You spend precious resources and hard dollars to get them to come to your web site.
Don’t lose them on something as silly as this.
Walk in their shoes or risk losing them forever.
Need marketing or public relations help? Contact us at www.firecrackerpr.com for more details.
Common wisdom is usually the path to follies.
Sounds like some wise saying from the past, but really I just made it up.
IT and marketing web sites are littered with whitepapers on best practices. I have participated in the industry trend of writing articles and papers on what “best practices” are for a certain segment.
The truth of the matter is, marketing is not one size fits all. If it were, it would be exceedingly simple to excel in marketing.
What works for one company is no guarantee it will work for you. The only way to be sure is to start small and test, test, test.
Measure everything.
Discard what doesn’t work and keep what does.
One real world example of this was the “best practice” of using landing pages in Pay Per Click campaigns. I’ve preached the necessity of using landing pages incessantly.
Thus when we started up an AdWords campaign for a yearbook printing company, likewise we followed conventional wisdom with an attractive landing page.
A conversion in this case was a form filled out for more information.
We ran two campaigns side by side: our new one and their original campaign. Contrary to our set up, their original campaign dumped all ad clickers to their homepage. As most SEM firms will attest, this is one of the no-nos we preach against.
Sixty days into the campaign with a good sample size to draw conclusions from, we had to admit one thing: our landing page leads, while much greater in number, were of much worse quality than the leads they generated from sending visitors to the home page.
So on paper, everything looked great. Our click through rate was high, our cost per click was low and our conversion rates were fantastic.
Just one problem: our leads sucked.
Having had a big scoop of humble pie, we tested changing the destination from our landing pages to their homepage. Instantly the number of leads fell but the quality dramatically improved.
Why was this the case? Our best guess is that the service they were looking for was a bit more complex, thus necessitating reading more information on the topic before committing seriously to being contacted.
And in the end, it sometimes doesn’t matter “why”. All that matters is “how”.
“Why” did the landing pages not work? Who knows.
“How” can we reverse the problem? Answer: try something different.
Don’t be afraid to buck best practices. Test everything aggressively.
For all your Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization needs, visit us at www.FirecrackerPR.com.
One area marketers or business owners rarely like to think about is how to handle customers who want to cancel a service. While it is correct that you should do everything you can to retain a customer (since the cost to acquire a customer far outweighs the cost to retain), there’s a fine line you need to walk. As the Gambler once said, you gotta know when to hold them and know when to fold them.
There is nothing that will raise the ire of a customer more than making it extremely difficult to cancel a service or subscription.
Let’s take two real life examples I’ve run into recently.
Example #1. Fast Pitch Networking (www.fastpitchnetworking.com) - I signed up for this service which was touted as a social networking site for PR. It also seems I signed up for the premium service for $27 a month, and decided to cancel that service as it wasn’t generating any leads for me.
Here’s my first warning sign: “How do I Downgrade My Membership?
In order to downgrade your membership you need to CALL US (941) 309-5339. Note: Sending us an email WILL NOT guarantee your membership has been downgraded. You must call.”
Well after 4 calls I’ve come to realize one thing. No live person will likely ever pick up the phone there. Regardless if you call during office hours, an automated message always comes on to say all attendants are busy and to leave a message. After leaving a message, I’ve still not received a call back. I think it’s clear what they’re doing here, and I’m not amused one bit.
So my last resort is to call the friendly folks at American Express Business who excel in providing the best customer service this side of your spouse. I explained the situation and they’ve filed a Dispute Payment.
Example #2. Bigfoot Communications - Having used this site for conference calls, I noticed a charge of $28 on my card but didn’t recall using their service enough to have justified it. Trying to contact them is just as difficult. First off, the default is a contact us form to fill out. Then they do provide a phone number but no one answers the phone either. Finally, in the past 10 days every time I try to log in to my account, I get some server Apache long error message script regardless of what browser I’m using. For a company that sells conference calling solutions which should be considered mission critical for many that use it, that is simply not acceptable. So I can’t log in and I can’t get hold of anyone. Looks like I’ll be calling AmEx again shortly.
The moral of the story is this: don’t make your customers run around and jump through hoops to avoid their cancellation of service. The frustration and anger you generate could spill over into the blogosphere or word of mouth. After all, you never know when one of those angry customers could be the owner of a PR and marketing firm 
Ed
One of my biggest pet peeves is the razor/razor cartridge business model that drives the ink printer industry.
As most people know, printer companies don’t make anything off the actual printer itself. That’s why they are usually given away free or at a substantial discount. Where they get you is in the re-purchasing of the ink cartridges which sell for obscene amounts of money; you can easily pay $20 for a cartridge that you know cost them a couple of bucks to make.
Today at Office Depot I decided to try a refill kit marketed for the price of an actual cartridge, but they claimed to refill the cartridge up to five times. That means it would only cost 20% of a replacement cartridge! Brushing off my wife’s skepticism, I bought it and hurried home to give it a shot.
One hour and two sets of permanently stained hands later, I came to the realization that doing-it-yourself sometimes ends up costing you much more time and money than the alternative.
This applies to many things in life. That’s why we hire experts to take care of things we might otherwise wonder if we could do ourselves.
One of the most frequent questions I hear is, why should I pay you to do our PR/SEO/Google AdWords when I can do it myself? After all, it doesn’t seem like rocket science.
Often times what these companies will find is that they end us spending too much time working on something they don’t fully understand. They may end up spending more money to undo the mistakes they made than if they had just hired experts to do it right the first time. And they may damage their company image and sales if they make mistakes while trying to do it themselves.
Penny wise, pound foolish? It does often apply in marketing.
July 12th, 2008 in
Google AdWords,
branding,
marketing,
public relations,
search engine marketing,
search engine optimization | tags:
Google AdWords,
marketing,
public relations,
search engine optimization,
SEO |
1 Comment
Google AdWords is literally the greatest thing invented for marketers since sliced bread.
The amount of control and reporting given by Google is astounding, with the ability to control your campaign in real-time and instantly reach a potential market of millions.
What’s made Google AdWords so successful is the relevancy of your ads popping up beside search results just as someone is looking for what you may have to offer.
But the simplicity of AdWords is also its danger. The vast majority of Firecracker’s clients have tried, unsuccessfully, to manage their own AdWord campaigns.
And you can be sure of one thing. If you aren’t paying attention to AdWords, you will quickly find yourself in negative ROI territory. Stories abound of companies who are disillusioned with AdWords as the cost of advertising skyrocket for little in return.
The secret to succeeding with Google AdWords is actually very simple to know, but difficult to implement.
The secret is, you must constantly test test test.
While this secret holds true for marketing in general, no other means of marketing has the instant statistical feedback and the ability to slice and dice data in so many ways as Google Analytics does.
If you do not test, you do not know what to do to improve your results.
What should you test? In a word, everything. Test headlines, test inserting dynamic keywords, test ad copy, test capital letters, test call to actions, test landing pages, test offers.
Without a solid understanding of multivariate testing (testing multiple variables at once), at least start by doing Split A/B tests (fancy way of saying hold one constant, change the other and see what the result is).
Unfortunately in this day and age, few people have the time to test and measure AdWord campaigns. That is where a firm such as Firecracker can come in handy. We do it so you don’t have to.
Remember, start testing and tracking results. Success is consistently doing little things right over time. If you persevere, the results will follow.