MWI has never done much outbound marketing. We generally depend on word-of-mouth from existing clients or others who know the firm, or we get clients by people going to Google and typing in “utah seo”. That has served us well. But over the past few years MWI has gotten into the self storage industry and [...]
Marketing
Commentary on bad advertising, good advertising, lame marketing techniques, advertising services, business marketing and advertising, outdoor, radio, TV, print, local, direct, and so much more.
Today’s lesson in using social media websites like Facebook to do Internet marketing will be short and sweet. If you run an ad on Facebook like this: Don’t have it take people to a webpage like this: Any questions?
I recently read The Google Story and am currently reading In the Plex, both of which are biographical pieces covering the history of Google, its founders Brin and Page, its employees, business relationships, and so forth. As I’ve read these books I’ve been able to get some insight into Google’s core business model, which is [...]
I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t need more competition. Maybe I hate to see wasted potential. As I see more and more people losing jobs and waiting around for someone to drop one in their laps, I can’t help wonder why more people don’t go out and create their own jobs. Maybe [...]
I get by with a little help from my friends…I get high (rankings, that is) with a little help from my friends. So…I’m in the midst of a little experiment. You see, I’ve got this new business launching local business directories, and one of the categories is self storage directories, of which we currently have [...]
This post is a question, more than an answer. I’m a bit confused as to why, when I’m giving away something for free that has real value, people aren’t going for it as much as I would have suspected they would. My latest venture launched a week or so ago at DeclareMedia.com. We are building [...]
An open letter to the marketing team at Blendtec: Dear Blendtec, your website needs a search engine optimization overhaul, and my SEO firm is the one to do it. I won’t dwell too much on why you need SEO, other than to point out that your site will show up higher in rankings in Google, [...]
That is, who are Utah’s top 5 SEO professionals as rated by their peers? This is merely an informal survey, but if you’re an SEO professional here in the state of Utah, then who are the other five SEO professionals (other than yourself) who you think are on top of the game or are next [...]
Steimle. How would you say it? All my life I’ve had to deal with people mispronouncing my name when they read it, or spelling my name wrong when I tell it to them and they have to write it down. I probably wasn’t more than four years old when I realized I should always spell [...]
11
Aug
Google Penalty
Well, donloper.com has been penalized by Google, but I’m not sure why. Up until June 16th, 2009 the site would get between 130-300 visitors per day, depending on the day of the week and how frequently I was posting. On June 17th the traffic dropped to 99 visitors, 73 visitors on June 18th, 25 on [...]
A few years ago I found a radio program playing locally called the Forbes Radio Program. It was business focused and only played in Utah on weekends. The host was Gordon Deal, and I loved the program because it was entirely focused on business and the economy. It was kind of like NPR’s Marketplace show, [...]
Do you want a blog but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you just know that you don’t want one of those whatever.blogspot.com blogs because that’s what everyone uses for their personal blogs, and you want a high-end, professional blog. Something that, when people visit, they look at and say “Wow, that’s a really [...]
Like any web marketer I love stats, and that extends to the analytics stats for this blog. I love seeing how many people are reading which posts. Below are the posts that have received the most pageviews over the past 30 days on this blog. Ironically, some of what gets me the most traffic is [...]
I hate progress. I mean, I don’t…but I do. Wouldn’t it just be easier to live on a farm somewhere prior to the invention of the cotton gin and penicillin? We wouldn’t have to worry about cell phones, the Internet, auto repairs, paperwork, Al Gore, or…Twitter, ugh. I admit, I readily jumped on the Linkedin [...]
It is entirely possible that someone in management at Starbucks one day thought “You know, our country really needs more people to get out and volunteer to help their communities and the people around them. Wouldn’t that be great if we could encourage that? What if we gave away a free drink to encourage that [...]
Are you the type that looks at your competitors as threats or opportunities? Apparently Linkedin sees Facebook as such a threat that they’ve systematically banned use of the word “Facebook” on their site, at least in certain parts. Linkedin recently introduced a feature called “LinkedIn Polls” which allows you to create a simple poll which [...]
Yeah, that’s right, I don’t have a Twitter account. I’ve never even been to the website. And yet I call myself an Internet marketing professional. I was behind the times on blogging, Facebook, I still don’t use MySpace and doubt I ever will, I have a cellphone that is junk and is almost two years [...]
I’ve been working on niche directories since 1999. Geez, you’d think I’d have more to show for it after almost 10 years, but I’m a bit slow. I guess if I were a politician or corrupt CEO of an ailing public company asking for bailout dollars I’d tell you that “I’ve been refining my business [...]
What is link baiting, you ask? It’s when you develop content on your website that is intended to get other people to link to it, therefore boosting the number of inbound links pointing at your website, which will boost your website’s rankings in the search engines. Generally the best link baiting comes naturally. I wouldn’t [...]
CNN and Careerbuilder just published an article on ten jobs that pay around $80,000 per year, such as attorneys, economists, associate actuaries, marketing managers, pharmacists, and veterinarians. The trouble with all of these jobs is that with rare exceptions they require a four-year college degree or more than that. But there is an 11th job [...]
GM Goodwrench has been running a series of radio ads that have gotten progressively more and more annoying until I can’t contain myself anymore and have to vent. They’ve all featured a rock song in the background with the lyrics “I can’t stop thinking about it”. The song is annoying enough, as though I and [...]
My SEO firm has had a blog dedicated to SEO up at TheOrganicSEO.com for some time, but we’ve let it languish this year. We’re interested in getting it back up and running and turning it into a valuable resource, and if you’re an SEO professional with a penchant for writing we’d like to invite you [...]
In no way is this an attack on anyone…well, maybe it is, but if it is, I’m attacking myself as much as anyone else. This is for all you designers. You creative types. You who work with branding. You people at the advertising, marketing, and design firms and who, in the 80s and 90s, wore [...]
One of our SEO clients is an eating disorder treatment center. We also manage their Google Adwords account, which I’ll refer to as search engine marketing for the remainder of this post. With both SEO and SEM there are two components to a successful campaign; the first is getting traffic to the site, and the [...]
Having just given 10 reasons to not use Facebook I figured I’d try to come up with 10 reasons why to use Facebook. I’ve divided these up into categories. Business Reasons 1. Fill a job position or find one. 2. Because more and more of your business peers are and you don’t want to be [...]
I’ve come up with ten reasons to not use Facebook (see below), but I want to know why you aren’t on Facebook. No, I’m not trying to convince you to use it, I’m just curious about the different reasons people are not using it. I have my own theories, but I’d like to hear it [...]
Google’s terms of service states: 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt [...]
10
Sep
WordPress SEO Tips
A week or so ago I stated that I thought some of my blogs had been hammered in the search engine results pages (SERPs) because of the theme I was using and so I was looking for a new and SEO friendly WordPress theme. While perhaps true that my theme wasn’t the best for SEO, [...]
I haven’t been paying attention to donloper.com rankings lately as I’ve been busy with other things, but apparently it has gotten absolutely hammered. Whereas anything I posted on donloper used to end up at the top of search engines for whatever the topic was, now even a search for “donloper” has it coming up on [...]
If you sell or are privy to sales data for SEO services in Utah are you noticing any decline in lead flow? At MWI we have been, but I figured it was because we haven’t been maintaining our rankings lately, but I just talked with a friend at another firm and he said they’ve been [...]
If you’re in any way involved with search engine optimization / SEO and you have any sort of tie to Utah, please join the newly created Utah SEO group on Linkedin.com.
Recently I’ve created “LDS Entrepreneurs” groups on both Facebook and Linkedin. To join the Facebook group go here and to join the Linkedin group go here. As of this post the Facebook group has 42 members and the Linkedin group, which is growing at the rate of about 10 members per day, has 51 members. [...]
18
Jun
Laundromat Marketing
Unless you’re a laundromat owner or know somebody who is, you can entirely ignore this post. If you’re a laundromat owner, then it’s likely you’ve got some sort of budget for marketing your laundromat, and most of that marketing budget probably goes towards yellow pages and coupons in Money Mailer. That is, if you do [...]
18
Jun
The Future of SEO
I think search engine optimization is going to follow the same path as web design, just 10 years behind it. When I started my web design firm in 1999 I thought I was on the cusp of being wildly rich and amazingly successful. After all, I knew other people who had started web development firms, [...]
Unless you’re living in a cave or have taken the Four Hour Work Week to heart and have abandoned reading any news then you’ve heard about the new iPhone coming out July 11th. I have been interested in the next version of the iPhone not because it would be a 3G phone (i.e. faster Internet [...]
I just became aware of a trademark/branding issue that affects someone I know. I don’t know the guy well, by any means, but I know who he is, and I figured “Hey, I should probably let this guy know about this, just in case he’s interested.” So I went to his website, clicked through to [...]
Now honestly, who would create an ad like this and honestly think “Yes, this is the type of woman who needs to lose 25 lbs.” Not that this topic is new. The controversy over marketing, its effects on young women, the apparent rise in diseases like anorexia and bulimia and the subsequent need for eating [...]
1. Not updating your copyright. Nothing says “Our website isn’t very important to us” like having © 2007 well into February 2008. Changing it on January 1st says just the opposite. If you want to make life easy, get a script that automatically updates your copyright so you don’t have to. 2. Neglecting to update [...]
MWI just launched a few more of our simple directories, namely Boston web design firms, Boston SEO Firms, and Utah SEO Firms.
This post is purely an experiment in search engine optimization. Yes, I’ve talked about moving my business to Boston before, but it’s starting to get more and more serious and I think we might actually make it this year. And if’n I do, that means optimizing my SEO firm’s site for a new group of [...]
Have you used StumbleUpon in ways that have helped your business? If so, I’m collecting StumbleUpon success stories.
Apparently Utah SEO firm Vizad is setting up various blogs with “fake” content as part of their SEO methodology. That is, they set up a blog, make it look as thought it’s some person, post all sorts of content related to their clients along with contextual links, and in this way build up incoming links [...]
It’s official, for now…people trust newspaper ads more than they trust the ads they see in search engines courtesy of Google Adwords and the like, according to a study of marketing and advertising by Nielsen. At first I thought “Man, that’s surprising…and it stinks” but now that I think about it, yeah, I also trust [...]
As of today I’ve seen in happen in five days. It’s a brand new website on a brand new URL. The website has just a few pages of content. And yet if you search for “shoulder pain pump litigation” in Google you’ll see it there, smiling away in the #1 organic search result. I’ve covered [...]
The last time I wrote about the state of the Utah SEO industry was in May of 2006, so it’s probably time for an update, especially after all the activity going on just within the last month or two. There have been a number of Utah SEO firms that have popped up, along with a [...]
If you could enter a contest for $500 simply by putting a link from your website to another website, and your chances of winning were roughly one in a hundred, would you take 30 seconds and do it? That’s my latest experiment in linkbaiting (see My Web Design Company Contest on the MWI blog for [...]
You’re probably not like me, but if you are, you wonder how people are able to spend thousands of dollars per month on a billboard that can’t be read by anyone in a moving car or which is so ugly as to make customers less likely to buy the advertiser’s products. For those of you [...]
This post is a question, not a statement. The question is how does one go about marketing a high-quality B2B product or service to customers who are at best price-sensitive, and at worst just plain cheap? Add to the situation that the product/service is a new offering, and the marketplace is already crowded with offerings [...]
Linkbaiting, linkbait, link bait, or whatever your term of choice, is pretty much what it sounds like–putting out bait in the hopes of getting links. Here’s an example: I just created a post on another blog called “If the 2008 Elections Were Based on SEO.” While perhaps not the most fascinating piece of literature you’ve [...]
If you’re not into SEO you won’t be interested in this post. But if you are, then well, you’re in for a treat. The long-awaited SEO forums are finally up and running at http://forum.theorganicseo.com/. We’ve got tips, tools, and techniques forums on keyword research, link building, linkbait, and SEO tools. We’ve got forums on other [...]
I am not a professional copywriter, but I know when I don’t understand something. I respect those companies that can clearly and concisely communicate what it is they do and I admire the skills of the copywriter or marketer who creates good messaging. Getting your message across to the majority of recipients shouldn’t be a [...]
16
Dec
SEO Training
Part of the service we will be offering at our subsidiary The SEO Consultants (the site is definitely under construction at the moment) is search engine optimization training. We’ve seen instances where companies hire an outside firm for a period of time, but then realize their need for SEO services is large enough that they [...]
You don’t have to provide search engine optimization services very long before you start seeing that many, if not most, people have a slew of misconceptions about SEO. Inspired by Lee Odden’s post on Five Myths About SEO I’ve created my own list of statements born out of misunderstandings about SEO as follows: “SEO means [...]
I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Jennifer Napier-Pearce along with Ethan Millard for today’s podcast distributed by InsideUtah. The topic was the newly named Energy Solutions Arena, formerly known as the Delta Center and home to NBA team the Utah Jazz.
We just met with a prospective SEO client yesterday. They’ve been using another Utah-based SEO firm who shall remain nameless. The client actually didn’t want to tell us who they had been using, but we ended up finding out anyway in the course of doing research in preparation for our meeting. During the meeting we [...]
Getting a link from Digg’s homepage can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of people visiting your website. A public relations consultant can get 100 or 1,000 times the normal value of a press release if they can somehow get it on Digg’s homepage, where links to content on other websites stay or go [...]
The Delta Center is no more, long live the…Energy Solutions Arena? Those who know me know that I’m not into mainstream sports. The worst date I’ve ever been on…well, second worst, was when my soon-to-be-wife took me to a BYU basketball game. I was miserable the entire time and couldn’t wait to leave. The only [...]
I’m calling you out. You firms who claim to know something about Internet marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing–whatever you call it, and yet who haven’t been able to get your own sites ranked in Google for any terms relevant to the profession. Richter7 – “We develop Internet marketing strategies…” Cogbox – “Put us to [...]
The title is not “How to Create Controversy,” it’s “How to, Create Controversy.” Or should that be a semi-colon instead of a comma? I can never remember. Based on purely unintentional and anecdotal experiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to drive more traffic to your blog and get more comments there [...]
22
Oct
Why Ford is Doomed
What do Wal-Mart, Ford, the Los Angeles Times, and The Yellow Pages have in common? They’re all doomed. But two of these are doomed for one reason, and the other two are doomed for another. The Los Angeles Times shares the same plight that all newspapers do or will suffer, that of declining readership. Similarly, [...]
16
Oct
SEO Survey Results
A few weeks ago I posted a link to a survey about search engine optimization with the incentive of one of those who filled out the survey being able to win an iPod Clip Shuffle. And the winner is Joel H. There’s probably only one of you Joel, so I think you know who you [...]
SEOmoz is a search engine optimization firm in Seattle, and I’ve recently subscribed to their seo blog. I’ve been impressed with the firm’s openness to publish their pricing on their website, and this latest post Pitching an SEO Client is just one more example of how open they are to share their methodologies and internal [...]
I don’t usually solicit comments with my blog posts, but this is one on which I would genuinely like to get your opinion. The more negative your opinion, the more you can poke holes, point out flaws, expose idiocy, the better. MWI will soon be launching a new SEO service. It’s not that the service [...]
Click here to take survey. MWI is getting ready to launch a new service related to search engine optimization, and would appreciate your input. As an incentive we’re giving away an iPod Clip Shuffle.
MWI has officially launched a blog at TheOrganicSEO.com that is all about organic or “natural” search engine optimization. The site features articles with SEO advice, techniques, practices, etc., a news section covering the SEO industry, an SEO forum, and an SEO directory. The site is brand new so the content is sparse in places, and [...]
I’ve started reading Andy Beal’s SEO blog dubbed MarketingPilgrim lately and the guy seems to be on top of things. The latest good reading from his site was a piece titled “Signs You Need to Switch SEO Providers“. There are several things I agree with Andy on. Allow me to share one and why I [...]
MWI is developing the identity and content for a subsidiary called The SEO Consultants. I’ve been working on an SEO presentation which I’d like to solicit feedback on. If you’re interested/willing, click on the link, download the file, check it out, and let me know what you think. Is it too long, too short, boring, [...]
I’ve become fascinated by what companies do when they are having serious problems, especially when they include advertising as part of their survival strategy. My fascination stems from how many of these “We’ve got to turn things around, fast!” advertising campaigns merely confirm to the public that said company is not just in trouble, but [...]
Have you ever been in the business of selling something, be it a product or service, and you’ve had to compete against someone else to get a deal, and you lose the deal? Nobody wins all the time. But later you find out that you lost the deal because the person/company you were competing against [...]
Many technology (and engineering firms and auto manufacturers for that matter) have a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy things. Some people buy a product instead of a competing product because they’ve researched the technical specs, features, capabilities, etc. and for those reasons they feel one product is superior to another. But the vast majority [...]
If you are a home builder or a realtor then your business is selling houses. You’re also somewhat uncomfortable around computers or people who talk about computers, and you know people are using the Internet to sell houses but you’re not sure how they’re doing it because every time someone sells you some new service [...]
I recently was invited to participate in a marketing research study on blogging. The study was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director, Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
No, I am not selling a townhouse in the city of Herriman, Utah. I am researching the possibility of buying one. So why is it that after 20 minutes of searching Google, trying to find someone who is selling townhouses in Herriman, I haven’t been able to find anything even close to information about what [...]
Pet peeves? Yeah, I’ve got a few. One of them has to do with being poorly marketed to. I don’t mind people marketing to me, but for the sake of Pete do your research and use your basic intelligence to create something that will have at least a chance of reaching me.
For many, there is confusion over what is meant by “search engine optimization” vs “search engine marketing.” After all, if I’m optimizing my website so that it gets more traffic and I make more money, isn’t that marketing using search engines?
Before MWI started doing search engine optimization we had an informal partnership with an seo company and I got to sit in on one of their presentations to a mutual client. As keywords were discussed the client said they only had a few keywords they wanted to get ranked for, maybe 20 or 30. Our [...]
If a firm states on their website that “we’re highly skilled in search engine optimization” would you find it strange if their website doesn’t rank well (if at all) in search engines nor does it appear that any attempt has been made to optimize their site for search engines? I regularly run reports using Web [...]
In a recent post on the performance of MWI’s search engine optimization page a commenter brought up the point that MWI’s page has underscores in it vs dashes or hyphens, and that he had heard that dashes or hyphens are better for SEO than underscores. An article by SEO expert Matt Cutts from August 2005 [...]
Sometimes you have to laugh at the thing you do that don’t work out as planned. Case in point, MWI just ran an ad in Connect Magazine that says “MWI does search engine optmization. Go to Google and search for ‘utah search engine optimization‘ and then come get a proposal from us.” The idea is [...]
I’ve revised my ten top search engine optimization tips and created a search engine optimization whitepaper for MWI’s website. Full content available below.
If you use Google’s AdWords for pay-per-click advertising on Google you might have questioned the validity of the numbers AdWords gives you, like I have. Today I saw something, once again, that I find hard to believe and which causes me question whether AdWords is entirely accurate.
We always tell our clients that they can’t rank #1 for every keyword or keyword combination they want. The opposite is true as well. You can’t not rank for every keyword you don’t want either. For example, here are some of the rankings my firm has that stump me at first until I start looking [...]
This post is in no way related to a previous post in which I promised free iPods to anyone who referred a search engine optimization client to MWI. This is about something you’ve probably heard of, may have participated in, or maybe you just thought it was a scam. I thought it was a scam, [...]
We’ll be announcing this promotion officially through the MWI newsletter (yes, we’re going to start sending it out again), but I figured why not get things started right now. Without further ado, I announce the MWI Free iPod SEO Referral Program. It’s a simple program. You refer a client to MWI who signs up for [...]
If you were searching for a search engine optimization (SEO) company what keyword search terms would you search for in a search engine? Could I use the word “search” once more? Most people feel more comfortable dealing with businesses that located within the same geographic area. This is because it facilitates face-to-face interaction, and there’s [...]
Need suggestions for keywords and you wish you knew what people were searching for? Yes, to anyone who’s involved with SEO this is very basic, but for those starting out this is still a helpful tool. Simple go over to http://inventory.overture.com and type in a keyword. It will give you a list of keyword combinations [...]
I don’t mean to brag, but search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the funnest things I’ve ever been involved with, and MWI is doing a fairly good job at it. I believe a SEO firm isn’t worth much if they don’t rank anywhere themselves, the same way a design firm isn’t doing a good [...]
Don’t you hate it when you’re almost finished with a blog post and then you accidentally hit the keystroke to go back a page in your browser, and when you hit the forward button it reloads the page and you lose everything you typed? Arrgh! So, as I was saying… I just stumbled onto Ignition [...]
I often wonder how it is that adults can so easily forget what it was like to be a teenager. I think about this frequently, because I frequently see marketing and advertising campaigns, designed to target the 13-20 year-old demographic, that are so completely out of touch as to be damaging to the brand, product, [...]
Sure, there’s nothing new about an online magazine, they’re all over the place. But I’ll bet you probably haven’t seen one like Worked Magazine. Leave it to skaters to think “Well, what if the online magazine actually looked and worked like a real magazine?” Go to http://www.workedmagazine.com/, and then click on the right where it [...]
As a small business owner you’re already swamped with more things to do than you have time for, and yet whenever someone says they can tell you how to sell more, be more profitable, and generally make more money, you feel obligated to pay attention. You’ve got bills to pay, and anything that can help [...]
I just read The Best Way To Save Money On Advertising – Target Locally. It tells you what many search engine marketing experts (and even amateurs) have known for a while–if you want a better ROI, get local.
I like the MovableType platform for blogging, now that I’ve learned it. It sure was a pain to set up though. I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t technically inclined. But now that I’ve learned it I can’t use anything else because I’ve made this huge investment of time. Anyway, I just learned something [...]
Have you heard the Training Table’s radio ads lately for their low-carb burgers? When I say they’re a little behind I don’t mean that’s what you get from eating them, I mean they missed the boat, they’re not on the ball, they’re not with it, they’re a tad bit off.
18
Jun
CEOs Who Blog
Just saw a link to a page of CEO bloggers on Paul Allen’s blog.
http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/reel_player.php?XkNbYWSwTr I don’t know who made this, I don’t know anything about it. I’m too lazy/busy to find out at the moment. But it’s hilarious and had to be posted.
15
Apr
Guerilla Marketing
What exactly is guerilla marketing? It’s a term used to describe marketing that is unconventional and generally inexpensive and maybe just a bit sneaky. It comes from the jungle’s of Central America where neo-Fascist rebels called Serbs engage in guerilla warfare, which is a type of advertising campaign designed to undercut the local phone companies [...]
15
Apr
Mail Order Chickens
Another entry in the saga of “attraction-based marketing”–Mail Order Chickens. http://www.mailorderchickens.org/ Despite the fact that I’m incredibly busy at work, I couldn’t help but spend 15 minutes looking at this bizarre website. Apparently it has something to do with social causes related to Ghana, IMF, the World Bank, and Christopher Walken.
I’m sure someone else is doing this but I’m going to start my own one of these days–The Bad Billboard Project. Basically I’m going to stop my car on the freeway in the middle of traffic whenever I see a bad billboard and take a photo with the digital camera I haven’t bought yet and [...]
A few months ago we started house-sitting for my in-laws. Part of the deal is that we have to pay the bills for Dish TV, which comes with Tivo. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s Tivo, but evidently Tivo has done a good enough job with branding that I don’t know the name of any [...]
