Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 16, for Friday, May 29th, 2009: “Online Marketing Inside Out”.

Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast, news, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined by my panel of co-hosts.

Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.

Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network.

Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.

Kevin: Hello. On the show today, we have a special treat for you to celebrate the release of SitePoint’s new book Online Marketing Inside Out, we have the two authors with us today. We have Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley.

Brandon Eley is the Interactive Director at Kelsey Advertising and Design and also started 2bigfeet.com, an ecommerce site that sells large-sized shoes.

Shayne Tilley, as you may know, is the Marketing Manager of SitePoint.com, so I know him pretty well which is why I’ll be standing back and letting my co-hosts Brad, Patrick, and Stephan take the reins. 

Hi there, guys.

Brandon: Thanks for having us. 

Shayne: Hi guys. Hi Kevin.
 
Patrick: It’s great to have you on. So we just heard a bit about your bio but I wanted to ask you how you both got started sort of on this online marketing path. I guess Shayne first?

Shayne: Yeah, mine’s almost a full-circle journey. Back in, I think, ’98, ’97, my first introduction to the web was actually building web sites for clients. I did a little bit of freelance whilst I was going through studies at school. Then I sort of found my skills were more in interacting with customers and moved into what you might call more traditional forms of marketing – things like telemarketing, door-to-door sales, and those sort of more traditional forms. Then I couldn’t sort of keep away from my passion for the Web and started to get more and more involved in the marketing side online, and I finally made the big step to move to sitepoint.com a couple of years ago and really haven’t looked back since and I’ve continued to play in this fun field of online marketing.

Brandon: Well, I think it was back in 1999, a friend of mine asked me if I could build a web site and I had never built a web site. So I went immediately to the Web and started looking at online resources like sitepoint.com and started learning web design and built an ecommerce site and we’ve been going strong for about 10 years now. And shortly after that, I started working with clients doing consulting on ecommerce and online marketing and have been doing that for about nine years now.

Brad: First off, hats off. I really enjoyed this book. I read it over the weekend and it’s a really great read. I’ve been around kind of Internet marketing, not as someone who actually did it but as someone who had to work along with it in the IT field and kind of developed with the marketers.

So I guess to start off, there’s so many different ways online that you can kind of market and advertise your site or your services or whatever it might be. Where does someone start? I mean, especially for like a small business, like most of our listeners out there, consultants – where exactly should we start because there’s just so many different things that we can do – it’s almost overwhelming.

Brandon: Buy the book?

Patrick: That’s cheating.

Brad: Well, that’s a good first step.

Shayne: I always sort of think that the starting point should always be in your front yard, so with your own web site; I think any good online marketing strategy starts with a good web site first and foremost. And a web site that takes onboard a number of considerations of where you’d like to head in the future with your promotion, so making sure that your site is optimized for search but also optimized from an accessibility and a usability perspective because no matter how good your promotions might be in terms of getting visitors to your site, if you’re not able to convert them into the outcome you’re looking for, whether that be a member or a sale of a physical product or an email asking you to make an appointment or something like that, if your web site’s not optimized to convert visits into sales, no matter your promotional activity outside of your web site is, it’s not going to be good to sustain long-term business.

Brad: That’s actually a really good point because I guess a lot of people probably automatically assume that it’s going to start with buying Google ads or buying banner ads on various web sites or affiliate programs when, just like you said, it really starts at home – make sure you have a good foundation before you go promoting it.

Stephan: Got a couple of questions from some of the SitePoint members too. The first one is from DV Duvall, and he kind of wants to know what you guys think of the phrase ‘Internet marketer’ and how you would define the term.

Brandon: Sure. I think an Internet marketer would be anybody who markets their web site online, which is a growing number of people. I think that the stats recently show that only 10% of the total marketing budget spent on advertising right now is being spent online. So it’s still a huge room for growth and a lot of people don’t even think to advertise their businesses online. But the growing trend is to move more towards that space, and the stats that I’ve read from Forrester a few days ago showed that it’s going to double to almost 20% by 2014. So I think you’ll see a lot more people focusing on just Internet marketing instead of a blend of agencies that may, you know, do print marketing, radio, television, and Internet. 

I think an Internet marketer is somebody that’s going to focus on, you know, driving traffic and conversions using all of the different types of online marketing like email marketing, pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization.

Shayne: Just to add on Brandon’s point there, you get a lot of confusion and people wondering if I’m a search engine specialist or if I’m an online advertising exec or am I a social media expert (I’m still trying to define that one) – am I an online or Internet marketer? And my response to them is absolutely. You’re actively involved in one of the core disciplines that online marketing sits above. So whether it’s affiliate marketing or any of the things I’ve mentioned, that all forms part of the broader discipline which is online marketing. 

Brad: You mentioned social media. Let’s jump right into it because that’s really, that’s all the buzz, obviously. Twitter has really exploded especially just in the last few months. Even since our Twitter episode, it’s probably quadrupled traffic. I’ve noticed the trend as far as people that follow me now, I would say 90% of the people that follow me you can tell are business accounts, and they’re adding as many people as they can and kind of spamming out their services. So my question is, what tips or what would you recommend as far as how a business should maintain and run a Twitter account? What are kind of best practices so you don’t come off as just being a spammer?

Brandon: Be authentic. I think the biggest problem with companies in going into a space like Twitter and Facebook is they act like it’s a corporate machine – like they can just set a bot to auto and publish their RSS feeds and that’s really not the way those spaces work. People want to connect with other real people, not just automated news feeds. So I think if they take that approach and actually assign a real person to talk with a human voice just to their customers or potential customers, then they’ll do just fine.

Brad: I know you mentioned watch the automated posts, but you think doing that at a minimum, if nothing else than just say new blog posts, as long as it’s filtered in between with some live interaction.

Brandon: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with publishing RSS feed. But when that’s all you publish and 10 to 20 a day, very few people want to follow that. I think you get a lot more value when someone’s posting “Hey, did you know … blah blah blah” or “Here’s a great cool tip. Check out this post that we made on a web site but here’s one little nugget out of that post.”

Brad: It really feels like a lot of the people think it’s all about just getting as many possible followers as you can and then just spamming and blasting as many links to them as you can to get them to click through to your sites. And I’m sure that’s going to evolve, obviously, as people are learning what Twitter’s all about, like most of us that have been on for a little while understand but it’s definitely kind of interesting watching it grow right now and seeing the trends that are going on. 

Brandon: It almost feels like the early days of online advertising when you would pay for a million banner ad impressions. So you were getting a lot of untargeted traffic and it didn’t convert well. So now you see the trend is moving towards qualified leads and qualified traffic, you don’t see anybody doing that anymore. I think once people realized that the number of followers you have isn’t the metric you need to use to measure your success on Twitter, that they’ll realize that it’s more about the quality than the quantity.

Brad: Retweets are really where the value’s at is getting people to take what you said and kind of pass it along to their followers and their friends.

Shayne: And the sitepoint.com Twitter account, I think, has followed a very interesting story that just reinforces what Brandon was saying. Well, to be honest, my first post ons sitepoint.com about Twitter was titled “15 Million Reasons Why Twitter Sucks,” which was a balanced view on the pros and cons of Twitter. But we then realized that this growing juggernaut wasn’t going to stop and realized that we had to be involved, and some of you may remember the initial, what we called a “Twitaway” the book giveaway that we had on Twitter that increased our follow count from a couple of thousand to over 20,000 in a space of a week.

But what we found is that the human side of our Twitter account there was no relationship built; it was, in some ways, bought by giving them something for free. So we then allocated a resource to be more involved in terms of the personal side of interacting with our followers online and our Twitter account just sprang to life. The number of re-tweets we were getting on things we were posting increased substantially, and it was just adding that human touch to the corporate Twitter account that really took it into a whole new direction and, I think, very much reinforces Brandon’s point about making sure that there’s that human connection even if it is named as a corporate entity.

Patrick: So let’s talk about that because that’s a good case study, obviously one that you have firsthand knowledge of. How does the SitePoint Twitter account work and how many people tweet from it, are those tweets signed by the individual, what’s the level of interaction, how is it maintained? 

Shayne: We have about probably four different people who may twitter infrequently. We have an individual, Raena – some of you may know her, one of our technical editors – who I guess takes the lead and actively responds to people who might @-replies us a question or respond to any direct messages we might get through. So she’s our number one, you might say, on our Twitter account, and if there’s some additional information that I might want to put out – a special offer or something that I think is important for our followers, that they might get interest from – then I’ll jump in and tweet something, but it’s relatively infrequent.

We don’t sign off with a particular name at this stage but again, it’s something we’re kind of thinking about and looking at whether it’s better to have individuals with a name after SitePoint. So for example, Matt Mickiewicz, one of our founders, has @sitepointmatt. So should I have @sitepointshane and should Raena be @sitepointraena if we’re responding to people in Twitter about topics related to SitePoint?

Brad: Regarding social media, is it essential for online companies or, I guess even companies in general who have a presence in these social networks like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace – I mean do you feel like that’s step one of kind of online advertising - create your accounts, connect them to your company’s identity or web site, and then go from there?

Brandon: I think the first step is probably monitoring social media. People are talking about companies, whether they’re participating or not. So, in that respect, I think companies should definitely become familiar with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and start monitoring for mentions of their name and in that respect they’ll probably have an opening to start participating very similar to ComCast.

@comcastcares on Twitter started listening to what people are saying about the customer service and found a huge market there to deliver quality customer service to their customers. But people are talking about you and your company and if you’re not there listening, you have no idea there’s a whole ecosystem there of either great reviews or bad reviews that can spread like wildfire. You were talking about re-tweeting earlier, it’s those bad reviews and bad things that happened that get re-tweeted tens of thousands of times.

Patrick: I’ll ask a question from the forum. Ryan Reese on the forum wanted to know: Where do you find is the best place or spot to advertise? What gets you the most traffic from advertising? 

Brandon: I would say it depends. It definitely depends on the type of product or service you sell, what kind of customer you’re going after, what industry you’re in or what demographic you’re targeting. Pay-per-click might be very effective for some people, while the marketing on social media – sites talking to people individually and creating some kind of a personal relationship with them – might work better for other people. I think it probably has a lot to do with the type of products and services that you’re selling. 

Brad: I have a couple of questions on email marketing. I know chapter 6 was all about email marketing which I think is a great topic because anyone who’s ever had to maintain a large – a larger list, I should say, not a million or 10 million list but even a few hundred thousand list – has felt the pain that I felt doing that and it’s very time consuming. You listed out some good tips and stuff, but I was wondering if you could share – especially from small business perspective that’s – I have a small business so that’s what interests me the most – what tips do you have or suggestions would you have for maintaining and kind of growing your newsletter, and when it does grow, how do you maintain it once it gets a certain size because it almost does become a full-time job?

Shayne: From a small business perspective, I know I iterate this a little bit in the book but I’ll give them one highly recommended site and that’s Campaign Monitor. I’ve used them for small and large lists and whilst there’s a few different competitors on the market, I’m a staunch supporter that when you’re just starting and you might not be familiar with the dynamics of email marketing, Campaign Monitor is the first place you should go and check out and seriously consider whether hosting or managing your whole list and email infrastructure on your own server is wise compared to some of the breadth of services that those guys offer.

Secondary to that, there are other groups like MailChimp and a few others that we do mention in the book but from a beginner’s standpoint, if you’re looking to dip your toe into email marketing then I couldn’t speak any more highly of Campaign Monitor. They take a lot of the hassle and frustration, Brad, that you were probably alluding to out of the picture and do a lot of the hard work for you. 

Brad: Yes, I mean it really becomes … it just seems when you send out an email and it’s a large list that you really have to spend – and maybe it’s bad doing it this way, but it feels like you spend extra time to make sure it’s absolutely flawless. I’m sure you should be doing that even when you have five people on your list, but it just seems more apparent when you have 500,000 people on your list.

It got to where just at my previous job, it was a large e-commerce site, to send out an email blast, it would take me the good majority of the day just to get it set up between setting up the email, testing it out, this and that. But I understand the value associated with it because I could see the return – and you go on a little bit of this in your book or quite a bit of this is a tracking and tracking your campaigns to actually put a value on what it’s giving you so it’s just one of those things that kind of … yeah, it has an interesting spot on my heart, I guess.

Shayne: And when you say you might take a whole day to create an email campaign, I can spread that over two to three days. I’ll spend sometimes, an entire day just working on the copy of the email – have I got the right message, have I got the strongest call to action, am I focusing on the benefits of what I’m trying to say rather than features, is it readable, is it compatible with the various different email clients both online and desktop? So I can spend just a whole day working on the content and the presentation of an email and a whole day working on the segmentation and another day measuring and tracking and going through all the data. There is not an easy way to condense that down into a 5 minute job, but given the return on investment that a really well-run email marketing can bring, spending three days is well worth it in terms of the returns and substantial returns it can give you.

Brad: That’s great. I’m glad I’m not the only one that takes that long. It just felt like there was some art to it that I wasn’t quite getting. 

Shayne: Look, there is a bit of art but there’s also a bit of science as well. For example, I won’t send… Say for example, I want to send an email to 50,000 SitePoint customers. I won’t send the email that I think is the best for them; I’ll actually segment out that 50,000 into maybe two or three groups of 1,000 or 2,000 each. The day before or a couple of days before, I’ll send different versions to those groups that I’ve segmented out. I’ll have a look at what’s converted the best and then I’ll run with that high converting email to the rest of the group. So whilst you might think you’ve done the best sort of email you can, your customers will ultimately tell you what one is actually the best.

Patrick: So wait – the art? Science? The art and science? Wait a minute.

Shayne: Hey.

Brandon: I think another thing is the testing. We used to spend a large amount of our time testing and tweaking the HTML emails to make sure they showed up properly in all of the different clients. You’ve got so many different versions of Outlook and Thunderbird and Mac Mail, and then you’ve got the vast member of web-based services, like Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo!. We found a service called Litmus (litmusapp.com) that you just point it to your email letter and it’ll test it across all of the different services and desktop clients and show you how it displays. And that saves us a ton of time in testing. 

Stephan: Hey guys, I’ve got another question from the forums. It’s from TheRookie. He says that people spend too much time worrying about Google and I guess the question is do you guys agree with that and what value should people put on back-links against content. And how do you level that out and how do you know when some is too much, etc?

Shayne: Google is very important. Search engines are an extremely valuable source of traffic and to sort of ignore them and say well, they’re not important to me, I think if you’re running an online business in any form, you’re kind of kidding yourself. Again, search engine optimization is interesting because of the fact that there’s no black and white and there’s about a thousand shades of gray and you can wander the vast space of the Internet and get different answers from different people. But it doesn’t take away from the core fundamentals of making sure that the way Google sees your site is exactly how you want it to. So your web site is 100% optimized for search engines, it’s crawlable, it’s responsive, it’s getting all pages indexed. The content that you’re presenting on your site is valuable, is relevant to the keywords or the searches people will be making in Google that you would likely want to come and visit your site. 

In terms of developing links, again, there are various different ways to go about it, some much, much more valuable than others. Again, I could probably fill a whole podcast talking about linking. But again, it still is very important. 

I was at a search engine conference about a month ago and these are the cream of the crop when it comes to search engine optimization, and 90-95% of what they were talking about was all about getting effective links and the value of links and what it means and those sorts of things. So whilst there are a 199 other measures that Google puts on your site in terms of your page rank, linking is still a very strong part of it, and I don’t think Google as a whole should be forgotten and nor should developing an effective link-building approach. 

Brad: Could you guys talk, while we’re on the SEO topic, talk about keyword analysis a little bit. I think it’s one of those areas of SEO that’s not really understood as well as it probably should be and a lot of people really don’t do it at all. But I think it would be really beneficial definitely for our listeners and for me as well, to hear your thoughts on keyword analysis. 

Brandon: I think the main point behind keyword analysis is choosing the right key phrases that you want to target, whether you’re talking about organic search engine - the content that’s going on in your site, and the linking, the link building that you’re going to put in the search engine optimized phrases in your link text - or pay-per-click - what terms you’re actually bidding on. If you’re not choosing the right terms, you could be picking terms that either don’t convert well or have very, very little traffic and you’re spending lots of your time and energy optimizing your site to rank for terms that get 20 visitors a month or 20 searches a month.

We use a couple of tools to do most of our keyword research. We use Word Tracker and the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator. And between those, we get a pretty good idea of the amount of traffic that a keyword phrase gets. So if we were marketing a specific product, we would go to the Google Keyword Tool and find a hundred different phrases and compare them based on the estimated traffic that they get so that we know which we should focus on as opposed to which we may have a great chance of getting very high rankings for but aren’t going to generate any traffic to our site.

Brad: And kind of to go along with that, could you kind of talk about – and you touched on this a little bit – but about kind of long tail and what exactly long tail means and how web sites can benefit from utilizing some of those keywords.

Brandon: The long tail describes keyword phrases that are very targeted and very specific. If you type in a one word phrase in a search engine like ‘books’, you’re going to get a hundred million results that come up and you’re also going to have very generic results. You might get Amazon, a couple of large bookstores but if you’re not looking for that – if you’re looking for something more specific, typically you’re not just looking for books; you’re looking for a specific kind of book like an online marketing book or a gardening book. So the more specific you get in typing in your phrases, the more targeted your results. 

The long tail is, people are seeing that you get a much higher return on investment and a much higher conversion rate when people deep link within your site. They come to a detail page by typing in a 10-word search phrase, and they land on a page on your site that’s specifically about that, like northeastern gardening. They land on your page and it talks about a very specific type of plant that you’re gardening and you’re going to get a visitor that’s much more likely to convert with whatever you’re selling.

So the longtail kind of focuses on getting much more targeted visitors where there are fewer people searching for those phrases. If you can get those on the right page of your site then you’re going to have a much better chance of converting them.

Brad: On my company’s blog, I’ve actually kind of utilized that a little bit with the long tail and when I write articles, I mean, I write about the topics that are relevant to us as a company but I also, I always kind of think in the back of my head about terms that may be aren’t as common but people would be searching for, or longer phrases like you said. I’ve seen some pretty good click through rates on my stuff. It seems like just my organic stats on traffic coming in are increasing across the boards since I’ve been doing this. So I think it’s definitely something that people should look into kind of those long tail phrases and terms because I mean it’s just getting so saturated out there with all these SEO-heavy sites that are coded more for search engines than they are for actual users.

Patrick: The final question today comes from the forums. It’s from TIG2009 and it’s kind of a pie in the sky question: What will be the next big thing that will revolutionize the way we see Internet marketing today?

Shayne: Wow. Good question. I’ll put my perspective on it first, I guess. What I’m seeing is the amalgamation, you might say, of mainstream marketing and Internet marketing. The next big thing, in my view, is the integration between the two. We’ve seen some case studies of where true marketing strategies have seamlessly integrated their offline activity with their online activity and are really reaping significant benefits from that. So I daresay that the big thing will actually be the elimination of the word ‘Internet’ from the term of marketing today and marketing will just inherently encompass the online space. It will cease to be an independent aspect of marketing.

Brandon: I definitely agree with that. I also think that the next big thing is adoption. I mean only 10% of the total marketing budget spent last year in 2008 was spent on online marketing. So as that grows, I mean, the estimates are only to 20% by 2014 – I’d like to see that more like 30 or 40%. I’d love to see more companies adopt online marketing as it gains more reputation, as people see it as more of a valuable tool for their marketing toolbox to put along with radio, print, television, and other types of marketing because it’s got so many benefits. It’s very measurable, very easy to track the success of a campaign and change it and improve it, increase your conversion rate and increase your profitability. Hopefully, a lot more people will be taking advantage of that. 

Patrick: So before we go today, why don’t you both tell us where you can be found online – web sites, blogs, Twitter profiles etc. Brandon?

Brandon: I blog online at brandoneley.com and I own 2bigfeet.com and our company’s site is kelseyads.com. And I’m @beley on Twitter. 

Shayne: And you can grab me on Twitter @ShayneT. And you can pretty much stumble on any part of sitepoint.com and you’ll find me somewhere. Predominantly on the forums, I go under the name shaynetilley. 

Patrick: And Shayne, you guys are doing a special bundle with Problogger on the book, right?

Shayne: Thanks for putting that out, Patrick. It’s an exclusive offer on sitepoint.com. We’ve actually partnered with Darren Rowse (a.k.a. Problogger) as some of you may have been following his “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” program on Problogger. We’ve actually partnered with him and are giving away an ebook which is a derivation of that program which is worth $20 free for anyone who buys “Online Marketing Inside Out” from sitepoint.com.

Patrick: Awesome. Well thanks, guys, for joining us today and best of luck with the book.

Shayne: Thanks for having us.

Brandon: Thanks for having us. 

Patrick: Again, that was Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley, co-authors of “Online Marketing Inside Out”. It’s a new book from – who else – SitePoint, and it can be purchased on sitepoint.com and Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble stores, and wherever fine books are sold.

Kevin: And that brings our episode to an end. Wow. That was nice to sit back and listen to that one. Good work, guys. 

Let’s go around the table and let everyone know where we can find us.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios and you can find my blog at strangework.com and Twitter’s @WilliamsBa.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, on Twitter as @iFroggy.  

Stephan: And I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on badice.com and I’m @ssegraves on Twitter. 

Kevin: I’m Kevin Yank. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast. Leave comments on this episode and subscribe to receive every show automatically.

You can email your feedback if you prefer, to podcast@sitepoint.com podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions for us. We’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice. 

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. 

Thanks for listening.