Let’s take a very light dip into the world that I’m talking about–where the conversations are taking place that can make your marketing so much more powerful. We’ll come back and examine many of these elements in more detail later, for now we’re just going to take an overview.
A Simple Example–Ke Nalu
Since I have no idea how sophisticated you are in web tech, I’m going to assume you know nearly nothing and you’re starting from a traditional marketing base. As I said before, we’re going to use Ke Nalu, an e-magazine I own, as an example. We’re going to pretend that Ke Nalu sells stand up paddle surfboards. In reality it doesn’t sell anything–Ke Nalu is an experiment and a hobby. This is going to be a learning process for me as well, and I do expect to dramatically improve the performance of Ke Nalu during this process.
The good news about all the tools I’m going to show you is that they are pretty much the leading edge. The bad news is that these things age faster than crab salad. In a year this book will look as current as the goofballs dancing the Frug in a 70’s movie. I can live with that if you remember that what we are doing is looking at HOW things are done, not what tools we use and how they look today. I’m not teaching you how to use these tools, I’m teaching you the conceptual aspects of marketing. That will age pretty quick too, but nothing lasts forever.
Ke Nalu is a highly modified Wordpress blog that uses a special theme, a host of plugins, and a lot of custom programming that I did in PHP and CSS to make it look the way I wanted it to. Or I should say as Diane Jenkins wanted it to since I asked her to design the look and feel. Diane was an excellent graphic designer when we started our company 17 years ago. She’s also my wife: We got married 14 years ago.
When it comes to programming skills, I make a great marketer. I’m a hack, in the old sense of the word, but I get by.
Of course you should go to http://www.kenalu.com and play around on the site, but here’s what the site looks like–fundamentally like the table of contents of a magazine. Each article abstract leads to the pages that comprise the full article. No one ever really sees the full page without scrolling unless they have a larger monitor than my huge Apple display, but you get the idea.
The purple tabs across the top open other feature articles. The green header across the top contains other navigation to the site’s archive, a book on Stand Up Paddle Surfing that I’m theoretically writing, equipment reviews (a popular feature) and housekeeping stuff.
We’ll be talking about navigation choices and how keywords work on pages other than the home page. That’s an important issue in frequently changed and expanding web assets, so it’s useful that you understand that this site is pretty deep.
The short abstracts down the right side contain the abstracts for all the feature articles that are accessed by the purple tabs. Whizzy organizing features (like those purple tabs) can have a negative effect on how both people and search robots view your content. This is as important in print as it is on the web. We need to make people (and robots) recognize quickly that the page they are looking at contains information relevant to their interest. Keywords are how we do that.
Translate the term “keywords” into the phrase “words and images that connect immediately to the prospect’s interest” and you’d find this quick recognition concept in the writings of any of the sages of direct marketing, particularly Herschel Gordon Lewis, and in any good web design book. Indeed the fundamental concept of a Johnson Box in direct marketing and the design philosophies of myriad agencies building successful advertisements, or any designer building a magazine cover are exactly summed up in the idea of keywords and keyword placement.
Let’s set up and examine some of our tools for starting to play with these ideas.
In order to participate effectively in the conversations you need to know which ones are important, and that means Web analytics. I’m using Google Analytics for three reasons–it’s adequate for my purposes, it’s simple to set up, and it’s free.
Wordpress (the blog software I use for Ke Nalu) has it’s own implementation of analytics available on it’s dashboard page. This gives me a pretty good idea of progress, and the interest level in particular posts. But it doesn’t do everything I want and need for the sake of this book. It has the benefit of requiring no setup, but we’re not afraid of a little configuration work, are we.
From the Wordpress dashboard graph you can see that Ke Nalu waxes and wanes in popularity. The big dip at the end is a graphing error–the month of September isn’t over yet–it’s a partial data point. But it most likely will be down from June and July because in the summer I do a lot more vintage car racing than standup surfing, and Ke Nalu goes semi-dormant–it’s pretty much a one-man band. It takes time for the visitor count to change–lots of momentum on the web–so both the peaks and valleys are substantially delayed.
Thirty thousand views sound kind of impressive until you do the math. On average each visitor views three pages so it’s just 10,000 visitors per month. There are simple blogs that receive a hundred times that number of visitors. But that’s a good thing, it gives us a base to work from and an easy way to measure results. If Ke Nalu was already at a million visitors we’d have a tougher time showing clear progress.
While this dashboard view is helpful, there are far more powerful analytical tools available on the web, and the surprising thing is that many of the very best are free. Like Google Analytics for example.
As you can see from the Google Analytics dashboard, a lot of people showing up at Ke Nalu are typing the URLs directly into their browser or clicking links in a referring site. The site is getting about 150 unique visitors a day who on average look at 3-6 pages depending on the day they visit and what it was that drew them to the site.
At the time of this particular snapshot, 29 percent are direct traffic (they typed Ke Nalu directly into their web browser) 25 percent are coming from particular forums or other referring sites (more about that later) and 45 percent come from search engines like Google. What are they searching for?
Google analytics will show me, but we have so little data on this site yet that it’s not very accurate–I reset Google Analytics on this site so I would have a clean slate for the examples in this book. From prior analysis I can tell you that it’s mostly “Stand Up Paddle” and variations on that keyword. The keywords shown in this report are just from the last two weeks. Google Analytics works best when you have at least a few months worth of data.
We’re going to show you a lot of ways to derive and evaluate Keywords, but analyzing the search terms terms that bring people to your websites is a decent start.
Analytical tools also tell you what’s popular on your site and what isn’t, as well as delivering a wealth of information on bounce rates (the percentage of people who view only the target page and then navigate away), the amount of time people spend on each page or each element of the page, and other related prospect data.
You can cross-tab and fiddle with this information to great effect. But as I said, we’re going to take a very shallow dive into this very deep pool, because this isn’t a book on web analytics. I’m going to have to keep saying those kind of things, as much to remind myself where I’m going as well as to focus you, because we can easily wander away from the premise of the book and spend too much time in an attractive niche.
If you want to compare the use frequency of a number of keywords there is a powerful new tool called Google trends. It’s one of the neat things Google has buried in it’s Lab. To use Trends you enter a set of keywords, separated by commas, and Google provides a graph of the use of the words over the last few years, along with web events that may have sparked upticks in use.
When you are using a tool like this it’s important to eliminate or mitigate the effect of terms that might be in more general use. For example, if I added the word “surf” to the list it would generate a huge trend line that would reduce all the other keyword trends to a squiggle at the baseline. In fact when I first did this example I included the term “SUP”, an acronym stand up folks use as “Stand Up Paddle”. Including SUP blanketed the results because SUP is used in many other ways (including goofy beer commercials), so I modified it to SUP Surf and got better results.
So now we know a little about what people are talking about and where they are coming from. We have some idea how to separate the important conversations from the trivial by looking at what content is popular and how much time people spend with it.
Let’s join some conversations. We’ll start with our top key phrase, stand up paddle and just add the word “forum” or “blog”. We could also use Google’s new Blog Search tool, and we will later.
Here’s where some of the conversations are taking place. Once you join them you’ll find others. The people you talk to (and more important, listen to) will guide you there.
The #1 organic result is StandupZone. Here’s where you have to use your imagination. If you’re running marketing for a big telecom equipment company, what you’re going to be looking for are conversations about your company, your equipment, your competitors, your customer service. You want to go where those conversations are already taking place and join them. I’m also going to stimulate further conversation and get people to visit my blog. Do it right and you’re adding to the community, do it poorly and you’re just a spammer, or a troll, and you’re trying to steal visitors.
That means walk before you run. Ask questions, have a conversation, offer up some knowledge. Make it clear who you are and establish some credibility. In other words, be human–a courteous one.
So I join the conversation. Note that my signature line includes both the URLs for my blogs and the RSS feed links. And you can be a little more blatant if you like, but restraint is called for. forums are peopled by true believers, and they can be very prickly.
PonoBill, huh. This guy looks familiar. Two thousand posts!?! Hey, get a life buddy.
Well, I told you I was into Stand Up Paddle surfing. Pono is Hawaiian, meaning basically “striving for excellence”. I am, but the name really comes from the road my house in Maui is on.
In this case I’ve started a new topic and a new conversation. This topic quickly expanded to eleven people responding and 266 people viewing the posts.
A good number of people come to my blogs because I participate in this forum and other similar ones. I don’t participate in all the forums and blogs that I could–this is just an experiment. But when you do this kind of thing for your company you must make sure there’s representation everywhere that’s important.