smm

Dec 09 2010

Two Easy Tips for Gathering Web Intel

Gathering Intelligence – Intel – On Your Site, Your Competitors and Your Clients? Easy with this 1-2 punch – we just shared it with attendees on our “Underground Strategies” webinar…

1. Compete.com. You can, admittedly, drown in analytics. Google Analytics can tell you a ton about your own site – and, with all the monitoring tools out there, it’s possible to over-analyzed.

Compete.com provides a quick traffic snapshot – over there is ours from the month of October – and you can compare a couple sites at the same time.

Plus, you can do this with a free account – if you want to dig deeper, you can pay for the “Pro” service.

Even though the numbers are from US traffic, you can still get a sense of whether someone is actually making any noise.

FOR INSTANCE: we saw a site promoted on Twitter that claimed they were getting 1000 visitors a day. Quick search on Compete, took us about 1 minute, and we learned that these folks weren’t getting enough visitors to even register.

2. Grader.com. Another fave – specifically the Website Grader. Hubspot provides this tool and it’s powerful. Also, it’s free.

We have been critical of some of the components of Grader’s score, but now is not the time for that. This is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful tools you’ll find for finding out whether or not you are doing things right on the web. And for finding out whether your competitors are doing things right on the web.

FOR INSTANCE: We have an old domain and were trying to gauge what it would take to give it the spice it needs to make a dent. (It’s in, get this, a niche market.) So we ran the domain through the Grader and learned that we might not have that much work to do. Since it scored in the 80s, well, we’re ahead of the game.

By the way, if you missed the webinar, you can still get all the materials – $49 for the slides, audio, and the Underground Strategies report.

Dec 08 2010

Attention Realtors: Lots of You Don’t ‘Get It’

There’s hope, though – SMM Camp 6. Here’s more:

We like niche-focused events that help you learn something. We especially like them when the value that’s given is so over the top that it’s well-worth your time.

Ross Hair and SMM Camp promise to deliver all that tomorrow, December 9, 2010, with a special focus on Mobile Marketing, which is so vital to success of Realtors and Real Estate Investors.

Registration is free — so, if we here at Area 224 do paid webinars pretty often, why would we tell you about a free one?

GOOD QUESTION.

There are tons of free webinars out there, and you’re happy to sign up for them and kick the tires and figure out for yourself.

But, in this case, the investment of TIME is a decent amount – this is a virtual event, and it goes from 10 til 1 Mountain Time.

We look at these from the value exchange standpoint – how much value are you getting, and is it worth your time?

This one is worth it – if you are in the real estate industry and want to understand mobile marketing.

Here’s the link again. Tell Ross we said hi. Oh and we’ll be listening in, too. (When we’re not doing our own webinar.)

Dec 03 2010

Grader.com – We Have Some Questions…

For the most part, we find the tools from Grader.com indispensable. BUT…

If you’ve read the New York Times piece on Decor My Eyes – here’s a link to this frightening SEO tale – you know that there’s an eyewear provider who was able to leverage bad publicity into good search juice.

And, if you’ve been following the developments, you’ll know that Google has made some changes to account for how negative reviews help or hinder SEO results. You can read about those in this article, entitled “What Google’s Search Change Means for Your Website.”

So, why are we picking on Grader.com?

This is why. A 98. Out of 100.

This means that the site still ranks in the top 3 percent of all the sites that Grader has graded based on “Marketing Effectiveness.”

This, despite an MOZ “Page Rank” score of 2, out of 10.

This, despite a “Blog Not Found” listing on the Grader report.

This, despite a “No Twitter Grade” for the site.

One of two things is true: (1) “Marketing Effectiveness” does truly equal “number of indexed pages” (which, in this case, is in excess of 423,000) or “number of inbound links” (more than 14,000; a good chunk probably from the bad reviews), or (2) Grader has yet to update its scoring – since Google just made the change this week.

Thoughts?

Dec 02 2010

Why You Should Join Us on 12/9 for Underground Strategies

Did you ever get the feeling that some marketers have the magic touch?

That some communicators just, well, do it better?

Ever wanted to know the tricks – the ones that make you seem like you’re getting 80 hours of work done in 40? The ones that leave your boss scratching her head, saying “how did he DO that?”

Underground Strategies – Join us for the webinar on 12/9. Here’s the downlow:

Underground Strategies.

Oh, and the really cool thing is that tickets stay at $35 for this Webinar – virtual event, all you need is a phone and a computer – until Monday night (12/6), when they magically go up to $49.

AND – we’re going to randomly select TWO registrants to receive a copy of Holistic Social Media – the complete course – a $90 value.

(We think there are THOUSANDS of dollars of tricks and strategies in the complete course…but that’s a subject for another day.)

Here’s that Underground Strategies link again.

Nov 29 2010

Objectives: Your Social Time Needs Them

What Business Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

Clarity around objectives can make your “social” time much more palatable. Seriously: if the boss knows why you need to do this – or if YOU are the boss and you know why you need to do this – you can better justify the hours spent blogging, tweeting or updating the world on Facebook.

So how DO you set objectives? And can those objectives be purely social?

Some thoughts from here…

1. Awareness – good place to start. But knowing where you want to increase awareness is an even better place to start. Local? Hyper-local? Industry-focused?

We’ve met folks who said, simply, where they are right now is “eyeball acquisition.” Some tweets on a regular schedule, a hundred Facebook “likes” so they have an audience to speak to. Actually, not a bad objective.

2. Measuring can be a soft science. The obsession to measure everything – the obsession with the word “metrics” – has taken a lot of the “social” out of social media.

We made a concerted effort beginning October 1 at Area 224 HQ to blog regularly. By regularly, we said “once a day during the week, give or take.” We missed a few days, we double-posted a couple other days. But the result was a traffic spike – but also an awareness spike. In that we got calls, we got emails, and the inbound marketing machine was, well, working.

3. You work for the boss. If you’re inside Corporate America somewhere, you need to find out who that boss is. You might be in corporate communications, but if it’s the CEO who gets to be the social face of the enterprise, then your objectives are gonna be different.

And you may have to have a heart-to-heart talk with your actual boss: executive positioning and industry thought leadership have just become your objectives as a team.

4. Being social can be an objective. Reconnecting with friends, old classmates, old colleagues – strengthening your actual social network – this is a great use of time. And you can be up front about it to the boss: “having a better LinkedIn network helps us showcase our organization’s expertise, and opens us all up to more business opportunities.”

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