Apple or Mac?

IE8 or Internet Explorer 8?

E-mail or email?

For online marketers and SEO experts, this World Cup 2010 the greatest question of all is:

Should I optimize my English language sports website or blog with soccer or football?

The answer is: it all depends.

Depends on what?

Here are some insights into this critical question [...]]]>

There are some good SEO questions:

Apple or Mac?

IE8 or Internet Explorer 8?

E-mail or email?

For online marketers and SEO experts, this World Cup 2010 the greatest question of all is:

Should I optimize my English language sports website or blog with soccer or football?

The answer is: it all depends.

Depends on what?

Here are some insights into this critical question for the period June 11 – July 11, 2010.

Soccer or Football Search Trends through Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. The graph above shows the searches from the terms “soccer” and “football” from 2004 to 2010, ranked by “football”.

When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, there are 6 news that generated a spike in news stories (marked as A, B, C, D, E and F).

The 2 key years to observe are 2006 and 2010 because those are the years when the World Cup 2010 was held (2006: Germany and 2010: South Africa). However, this graph only provides 2 clear insights:

1. On years when the World Cup is celebrated, the number of searches of “soccer” and “football” on Google tends to be closer in number that in non-World Cup years.
2. The “soccer” news references volume is higher in 2010 that it was 2006.

Who is Searching for Football

The blue indicates the volume of “football” searches, while the red indicates the volume of “soccer” searches.

The U.K. clearly dominates the search of “football” in Google with 8 of the top 10 cities in the world searching for this term.

Who is Searching for Soccer

Football purists might jump to say the United States, however the actual results are surprising.

The host country of the 2010 edition of the World Cup lead the pack in the search of “soccer” at Google. Surprisingly, the Canadians, Australians, and Irish are searching for “soccer” at Google more often than the Americans.

Despite its 5th position on the top countries looking for “soccer” at Google, still the U.S. has 5 out of the top 10 cities in the world.

What about Demand?

LinkWorth, a Dallas, Texas based company that specializes in search engine marketing, reports for the term “football” the following keywords that are currently (as of 06/18/2010) being bid for in their system:

football equipment

football memorabilia

football tickets

fantasy football

football odds

football jerseys

On the “soccer” side, there are only bids for: soccer goal.

While there is no guarantee that the presented football terms are strictly related to the FIFA sport and not to the NFL sport, it does appear that there is more SEO demand for football keywords than for soccer keywords.

Recommendations

So what is a SEO expert to do: soccer or football?

Here are some rules of thumb:

• If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM within the United States, you must clearly optimize for “soccer”.  Also, if you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the prices in the following cities: Washington, D.C.; Richardson, TX; Seattle, WA; Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL. These are cities generating most searches for soccer in Google for the United States.
• If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM for any other country in the world (except Canada and South Africa), you should optimize for “football”. If you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the British market because it offers the lion’s share of the search engine market looking for “football”. However, be aware that you will need a considerable budget in order to efficiently compete n Google Adwords for this region.
• In Canada, you need to optimize for both “soccer” and “football”.
• No matter whether you optimize for “soccer” or “football’, the term “soccer goal” is a keyword to always keep in mind. Owners of YouTube channels featuring highlight reels of goals, pay close attention to all the possible variations of this keyword when selecting the tags for your videos.

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering’s comment that approximately 20 – 25% of searches performed each day are completely new queries helps to highlight the increasing need to understand how your customers [...]]]>

This is a guest post by Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based online marketing company, Navaro.

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering’s comment that approximately 20 – 25% of searches performed each day are completely new queries helps to highlight the increasing need to understand how your customers are going to be looking for your products or services on the long tail of searches.

Keyword research is essential to any search engine optimization campaign.  It helps ensure the time and effort put in to attain those high rankings pays off with an increase in the amount of conversions received. The main focus of keyword research though, is to highlight the most rewarding keywords to focus on in terms of traffic driven, a job they do to the best of their ability.

The Long Tail Search

With 2 billion searches a day this results in 250 million new queries. This works out at 182.5 billion new, never before searched queries a year.  This is rough maths and there’s probably other factors to take into account but you get the point. You can bet the majority of these keywords are going to be variations of previous searches and more likely than not will have four or more words in the query.  You can also be pretty sure that the most important keywords e.g. the product name will be included within these four words.

The trick to capturing these new queries and making sure you get ranked is to picture the way that your potential customers will be looking for your product or service.  For example, if you sell scissors you will most likely want to be showing up on long tail searches such as “where can I buy cheap scissors” and lots of variations on this theme.

Capturing the Long Tail Search

To make sure you are optimized for these sorts of queries we need to break it down. Most long tail search queries can be broken into two parts, being variables and the constants, in this case “where can I buy” and “cheap scissors”.

The “where can I buy” is an example of a variable in the search, the part which will change each time to create these new queries. We can ignore this for now, as this will change constantly resulting in too many variations to realistically target.

The constant in this example is the “cheap scissors”. This is your product of service, your core offering that doesn’t change despite what is put either side of it. It is important to note that if your scissors aren’t cheap this process still applies but the constant in this equation would be just “scissors”  : )

By keeping the “on page” focus on the constant you can optimize well for the core phrases. Ideally the variables will be optimized for via anchor text which will help to strengthen and increase the rankings on the long tail terms. The trick is understanding and recognizing the constant for your product and not targeting a constant that is too long or short.

Conclusion

The variables are the unknown queries, the string of words that appear fleetingly and are never searched again. Owning the constant is the trick to capturing these long tail searches.

The Millennials (or Generation-Y) demographic have proved to be an interesting group that we’ve tried to reach. I’m sure we’ve all read and even seen how different this generation is from previous ones. Whether that is in the workplace, on the street [...]]]>

[This is a guest contribution by Josip Petrusa of It's Josip not Joseph.com]

The Millennials (or Generation-Y) demographic have proved to be an interesting group that we’ve tried to reach. I’m sure we’ve all read and even seen how different this generation is from previous ones. Whether that is in the workplace, on the street and even at home (for those of you who have siblings or even Gen-Y kids), you can tell there is something different about them.

The Millennials have also been the hot-topic in the marketing world. How can you market to a generation that is absolutely everywhere but with no traditional usage of media as opposed to previous generations. The way they read, watch TV and use the internet is different. They might be doing a combination of these, so marketing to them is just being overshadowed by their multi-tasking abilities, but they’re also as likely not to do any of them, so reaching them seems to be near impossible.

As a Millennial and member of Generation-Y myself, I’m going to provide you with 3 insights of how to market to Millennials.

Give it “Viralability”

I know “viralability” (viral-ability) isn’t an actual word but I’m making it one. Viralability is a power characteristic in today’s world that could have immense use in social media. And I know trying to make something viral is not as easy as it seems however, Doritos Viralocity is a great example to follow. Make it something we can relate to, make it something that involves us directly and make it something that is worth the effort. Just watch the message spread.

Status Update Worthy

One thing we love to do is tell the world when something cool, great or exciting is happening to us. In a sense, we love to brag for attention. You’ll always hear about the vacation we’re going on, the sports event we’re going to, the movie we’re seeing, the concert we were at and I could go on and on. Make it something that will give me a reason to tell everyone else about it. A funny and ridiculous video-clip, a great experience or something that even seems exclusive, would all be status update worthy. You have to reinvent cool, great and exciting.

Customer service

This is one that has been around forever but few get it right. It’s pretty simple and I’m not saying you have to be at the will of the customer but some great service will go a long way. I can’t even recall how many times I’ve left one location just to easily walk over to the competitors due to some bad service. Do not follow us around the store. Do not push the sale. Relate to us. Be our friend. We think that we’re entitled to everything, so make us seem entitled. If we’re in a good mood, there are better chances of us buying it then rather than later.

Conclusion

Though marketing to Millennials might seem to be difficult, it’s just a matter of understanding how we act. And since we are that much different, marketing to us has to be just as different but not difficult.

From obsessed Tweeterers to so called Twitter socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on Twitter right now.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Founded in 2003, [...]]]>

What do Twitter users want?

From obsessed Tweeterers to so called Twitter socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on Twitter right now.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Who is Chitika?

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 80,000 websites.

How did Chitika find out what Twitter users want?

For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is aplatform for earning daily ad revenue.  They performed a study based on a sample of 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network.

What do Twitter users want?

From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced [...]]]>

What do Facebook users want?

From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Who is Chitika?

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 80,000 websites.

How did Chitika find out what Facebook users want?

For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is aplatform for earning daily ad revenue.  They performed a study based on a sample of 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network.

What do Facebook users want?

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Recently I got back in touch with a close friend whose hobby is to tune up his cars and “pimp them out” like that famous MTV show.

One important part of his hobby is to look for car accessories and truck accessories that add a distinctive touch.

He spends a lot of [...]]]>

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Recently I got back in touch with a close friend whose hobby is to tune up his cars and “pimp them out” like that famous MTV show.

One important part of his hobby is to look for car accessories and truck accessories that add a distinctive touch.

He spends a lot of time looking online for custom grilles, spoilers, wheels, car floor mats, body kits, tail lights, and all things automotive that unveil beauty and style to his rides.

Talking with him about his online searches for car parts, reminded me a lot of a previous article where I discussed how to attract fashionistas online.

We started talking about his experience in several websites and what made his search easier and what didn’t.  Here’s a review of what I learned about the user experience of a car enthusiast visiting websites for car parts: what turns him off and what engages him.

What Turns Online Car Enthusiasts Off

1. “They’re not only forcing you to see their ads, but they’re all out there being pushy”.

At the top of his list are the ads with a small animation that have a “teeny tiny x close  thingy” that you can never find. These ads bother him a lot because they get in his way.  “They’re not only forcing you to see them…but they’re all out there being pushy”, he said. “I understand that websites like to generate some revenue selling ad space but I prefer that they stick to listing brands or making smart use of logos or recognizable brand images”.

2. Lack of Redundancy

“This might sound counter-intuitive but I prefer to have at least 3 different ways to find what I am looking for. One day I like checking out long lists of names. Another day I might like to check only images. The next day I might give a query tool a try.”

Conclusion: intrusive ads and lack of variety in ways of navigating the website diminish the user experience.

What Engages Car Enthusiasts Online

1.  Continous Live Online Support

“Nothing is more annoying than seeing a button for LIVE online support and then finding out that the schedules are very restricted. If you put out there that you have a live chat feature, then you should invest in making it as continuous as possible. If you cannot afford it, then you’re better off providing an e-mail address or contact form.”

2.Recognizable colors, trademarks or patterns around the website

“I am very brand loyal.” If you invest so much in developing a brand and trademarking logos, patterns and slogans, make savvy use of them online. Use them around your website. Do some A/B testing to find out what makes your links/images more actionable to your website visitors.

3. Girls, girls, girls

“This may sound like a no-brainer, but it is so hard to do. Car tuning is a very macho-like hobby, so of course I am going to look into your website if you have cute girls. However, just like live chat, you need to be consistent and keep up the section. Nothing is more disappointing than seeing the same set of pictures for 3 months in a row. If you have a section with pictures, keep it up to date!”

Conclusion:  car enthusiasts require a reliable and continuous live chat feature, smart use of recognizable brands and trademarks, and a picture section that is updated on a regular basis.

Everybody wants to know the answer.

Here’s an excellent example of how to use Twitter efficiently and effectively in a marketing campaign.

Note: screen shots were taken by Amit Gupta from Photojojo. He’s  an amazing entrepreneur and all-around-nice guy that I had [...]]]>

This is a question that I get on a daily basis.

Everybody wants to know the answer.

Here’s an excellent example of how to use Twitter efficiently and effectively in a marketing campaign.

Note: screen shots were taken by Amit Gupta from Photojojo. He’s  an amazing entrepreneur and all-around-nice guy that I had the pleasure of meeting back in my iLovePhotos days. Here’s a great interview with Amit that I edited.

Twitter Marketing Campaign from MacHeist

From Wikipedia: MacHeist is a website that resells Mac OS X shareware. The site has become known for its marketing tactics. These tactics include challenges (or “heists”) that entitle successful customers to free software licenses and/or discounts, as well as the concept of selling software in a bundle that increases in size as more customers purchase the bundle. The site was founded by John Casasanta, Phillip Ryu, and Scott Meinzer.

Step 1: Provide a great reason for people to pay attention to your product or service.

MacHeist does not develop software but resells it. Their talent is in finding key software that people want and make it free and/or provide a deep discount.  Providing something for free is a true art and is reviewed greatly in the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (author also of The Long Tail).

MacHeist did it right by offering the $12.95 iPhone app Voice Candy for FREE!

Step 2: Don’t ask for an e-mail or a sign-up – this is a Twitter promo!

This is the part that gets people confused. Why would you not want to gather e-mail information for future e-mail updates? While permission-based e-mail marketing is a valid strategy, this is not the place for it. Your mission here is to provide a one-for-one exchange, a tweet/follow for a free download. Asking for an e-mail would become a two-for-one exchange so people might feel turned off.

Step 3: Provide a simple process for following your Twitter account and tweeting your well-designed tweet.

Conclusions:

• Provide a great incentive (from the point of view of the customer, not yours!) to act on your Twitter campaign.
• Keep it straightforward and ask O-N-L-Y for a follow and a tweet. Craft a simple, short and strong tweet.
• Bonus: if you’re able to design a mosaic (like the one from MacHeist) of the people that have acted on your campaign, that’s awesome! However, a RSS feed of a Twitter search looking for an exact match of your tweet would work too.

About the author: Since 2007 Damian Davila Rojas lives at Honolulu, Hawaii doing marketing, public relations, and web analytics. His research interests are viral marketing and how to use web metrics to make better strategic business decisions.  Follow Damian on Twitter at @idaconcpts.

The field of Educational Technology (ET) explores the [...]]]>

A MBA degree is a highly coveted degree for online marketing practitioners because it backs up our professional practice. However, throughout our MBA education we are hardly exposed to a field that is very relevant to our practice: online education, also known as educational technology.

The field of Educational Technology (ET) explores the potential use and impact of learning technologies in a variety of contexts, and  determines good practices of curriculum design and technology integration.

Educational technology programs such as the Master of Educational Technology at the University of British Columbia provide learning opportunities in:

• Teaching/Instruction using Learning Technologies
• Planning and Management of Learning Technologies
• Design and Development of Learning Technologies

How does educational technology relate to online marketing?

Effective teaching with technology draws on

current research and best practice to show how to integrate technology into teaching.

The field of educational technology provides several decision model for selecting appropriate technologies for teaching in various education scenarios.

In simple words: online educators are always looking for best practices to optimize the online learning experience (a.k.a. online engagement).

Optimize online engagement. Now there are 3 words that ANY online marketer is always looking for.

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An example of a decision model

A book that stands out in the field of educational technology is Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education by Bates and Poole (2003). From this book, one great decision model that summarizes key factors to consider when designing and analyzing the implementation of technology education in any kind of learning-teaching experience is the SECTIONS model.

The elements of the SECTIONS model are (Bates and Poole, 2003):

Students: The reality of the students, their social and economical context. Also, it is important to take into account their access to technology and speed of internet connection.

Ease to use: The educational technology needs to be easy to use both for students and teachers. The software and hardware needs to end-user oriented rather than designer oriented.

Costs: Whatever costs have to be taken into accounted to implement the educational technology. This includes, but are not limited to: a) initial investment, b) production costs, c) maintenance costs, d) training of personnel and e) updating costs.

Teaching and learning: The technology must match the key elements and ideas of the teaching-learning experience to be implemented in the course.

Interactivity: According to Bates and Poole (2003) there are two kinds of interaction, one consists of individual interactions of the individual with the course material and the second consists of social interactions between two or more individuals about the course material (p. 99). Most educational technologies need to provide both experiences so that students are able to fully develop their metacogntive abilities. Also, another important interaction to consider is the interaction between instructor and student.

Organizational Issues: The appropriate authorities (i.e. school district, school director, parents, etc) must approve the use of the technology, especially if minors are going to have access to it.

Novelty: The key to create intrinsic motivation in students. The use of the technology must cause satisfaction not pain to the student!

Speed: The technology must reflect the reality of the context of the student. The use of multimedia is awesome…only if the students have appropriate bandwidth.

Conclusion

Just replace student for customer and you have 8 key considerations when planning any online marketing campaign.

Photobucket.

Facebook.

These are just some of the many options available these days for sharing photos online. I’ve always wondered what are the true drivers for one person to choose one option over the other, so that is why I started this online poll at LinkedIn.

What drives you to choose a service to share [...]]]>

Flickr.

Photobucket.

Facebook.

These are just some of the many options available these days for sharing photos online. I’ve always wondered what are the true drivers for one person to choose one option over the other, so that is why I started this online poll at LinkedIn.

What drives you to choose a service to share photos online?

Ease of use is the king feature not only across genders but also across age groups.

A male search engine marketing specialist explains the reasoning behind the the preference of ease of use:

Ease of use for me. I do not want to spend hours figuring out on how to customize the features. Another factor for me would be the strength of privacy features.

What about price?

Surprisingly, price was not indicated as major influence in selecting a service to share photos online.  Only 6% of all respondents pointed out price as the major driver for selecting a service to share photos online.

A plausible explanation for this is provided by a male HR software developer:

I worry more about online services that never charge at any level. Its a good bet they will not be in business for a long time. I rather spend a small amount, get some hard copy pics my kid can hold, and have a service that will be around in the long term.

In general people don’t mind spending money on keeping their pictures safely stored, either online or at home. A female real state financial analyst reported spending spending $129 at Costo to purchase a 500GB hard drive and several respondents told me that they have no problem dishing out the close to $25 dollars/year for a Flickr Pro account.

Even though, people in general are willing to spend some money in keeping or sharing their photos online, they are easily turned off by hidden charges.

A female law student provides an example:

I will tell you what completely turned me off: Kodak Gallery recently started threatening to delete your account if you didn’t make any purchases from them within a certain time period. I ordered back-up discs of all pics I had on there and deleted my account myself!

What about other features?

Throughout the gathering of the answers, there was a constant demand for other answer options. Here are a couple ones.

I use Flickr because it has an open API, and as a result, there are millions of 3rd party applications and easy ways to embed in websites without having to use a flickr-branded widget. Flickr, Picasa, Kodak, Shutterfly, etc, are all pretty easy use, but Flickr is easy to use, tag and share. – Male sales engineer.

For me, “unlimited” is only one “acceptable” storage size. But, because I’m not a professional photographer, more than 5 GB is same as unlimited. - Male programmer.

I agree with the sharing a large amount of photos easily, and sharing those photos without making the people you are sending your photos to create an account to see them!!! - Female law student.

Conclusion

When developing an online photo sharing service, make your number one priority that it is easy to use. A second important feature is that it needs to be highly viral (“my friend are already there!”).  However, your service doesn’t necessary need to be the “talk of the town”. Users of online photo sharing services prefer user friendliness over “what’s hot now” any time.

If you build an easy-to-use product that is highly viral, your own users entitle you to charge a price. Just make sure that you’re very clear about that price.