Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

In my last post I suggested you download Attensa for Outlook 2.5 and have your feeds delivered to you with intelligence.

Turns out, the new beta version is downloadable on April 10. Tap, tap, tap…
Subscribe to their feed, and they’ll let you know automatically when it’s available.

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I talk quite a bit about the changes in behavior brought on by RSS (define) to those who depend on the online world for information (we keep phone books only in case of power outages).

My spiel goes like this:

• In the 1990’s people surfed for information - clicking hyperlinks to discover cool stuff and wasting hours of fun. (Portals (define) became important in the late 90’s to help people organize information.)
• In the early 2000’s people searched for information - using search engines to find cool stuff.
• In about 2006 people started to subscribe to information - getting cool stuff delivered to you automatically, based on interests you’ve indicated.

RSS has actually made people who use the web extensively to be far more productive:

Imagine being able to have all of your news feeds, all of your competitor’s web site updates and announcements, and all of the latest changes in your partners’ web sites delivered right to your Outlook inbox, as the news and changes are made.

Portland-based Attensa (and new client of mine) has just upped the ante today, with Attensa for Outlook 2.5, an RSS reader that prioritizes articles based on learning your feed and article reading behaviors.

Eric Hayes, with whom I worked at Now Software a million years ago, (and now Attensa’s VP of R&D) has come up with technology that predicts your reading preferences based on your history of consuming feeds - what you read first, what you never open…

The best part? The reader is free. It’s beta - but these guys are rock solid developers - I’ve used their beta software for years. Download Attensa for Outlook and see how quickly it can help you cut through your life’s information overload…

I just hope it doesn’t screen out my blog feeds!

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I’m doing some research today for SnapNames on the bloggers who are influencing the domain name industry. It’s a fun process, following blogrolls and searching Technorati for their “influencer status.”

For me, that simply involves typing in a blog URL and getting the number of inbound links - checking their tag clouds, etc.

I ran across an interesting thread about Johnson & Johnson buying up negative domain names in order to protect their Splenda product line -

splendasucks.net, .org, .biz, .info
splendakills.net, .org, biz .info
splendatruth.com , .net, .org, .biz, .info
splendapoison.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thedangersofsplenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thefactsaboutsplenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thesplendadangers.com, .net, .org, .biz, .inf

Sahar Sarid thinks they were smart to do so. But in a chillingly titled “Splenda Killed My Dog” post (a title that seems to be spreading pretty quickly through the blogosphere) Rene Connor disagrees - saying they left too many names (splendakilledmydog.com was still available last week - I’ll bet it’s not any more!) on the table, and called too much attention to themselves.

I am a firm believer in protecting your brands using domain names. As the practice becomes more ubiquitous for marketers, we’ll all learn more about just how many we should buy to protect ourselves.

And we’ll just know that someone will always come up with a workaround.

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Considering moving your web site to a new web site address?

First, think about it long and hard.

I’ve considered moving my site from janetleejohnson.com to ojohnsonpartners.com, since that’s my business name. But moving your web site to a new domain name is not a simple process.

When I was at Marqui, we moved our blog address and lost all the inbound links - which then took forever to rebuild, and we never actually were able to regain the links we had before we moved to a new domain name.
Need to do it anyway?  Here’s a fantastic step-by-step explanation for how to do it, if you’re up for it.

It contains some very practical tips for marketers to consider as you plot your name change.

Ross Dunne, you’re a gem. Thank you for the wisdom shared.

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Stoney de Geyter, Pole Position Marketing spoke on Keyword Research and Positioning

And afterward, I was fortunate to have lunch with him and a friend (fan) from the Reno area, where they came from - into drippy Portland - which she described as “quaint and cloudy.” Yeah, hey…

Keyword selection is:

• Foundation for all online marketing efforts.
• Learn how to target your audience, define how people find you…
• It can be time-consuming and difficult, but
• If you have the wrong keywords, you can derail your marketing.

This is time-based and cumulative work - it’s important to keep the momentum building for your business.

Phase 1: As you’re coming up with keywords, brainstorm -put yourself in the mind of the searcher. Your ultimate goal - to drive targeted traffic to your site.

• Core terms - unique phrases that summarize what your site is about. i.e. if your product is a duffel bag - ‘Bag’ is too broad - consider duffle bag, sports bag, wholesale bag, etc. as potential terms.
• Start pouring through the website and look at content - what words are used to describe your service. What do your keyword descriptions/etc. say? How does your navigation work?
• Wordtracker (mentioned by several people today), Keyword Discovery, Google, Yahoo, l3xicon.com - all have tools you can use to help deliver keyword suggestions.

When you’ve come up with your most important core terms - he suggests 10 words or so… for each term, look at the following:

• Search volume
• Target audience
• Profit (spend on your higher margin product search terms), and finally,
• Consider your company’s ability to meet demand when your ads are successful…

While you’re going through this phase, don’t analyze, gather… look for search phrases that contain core terms. You’ll end up with 100’s - 1000’s of phrases. Don’t be overwhelmed with numbers.

Phase 2 - sort and select keywords - Keywords that convert with targeted traffic to your site.

• Adidas shouldn’t buy “Air Jordan” as keywords have gotta be relevant. People searching for “Air Jordan” shoes are probably not going to be tempted by an Adidas ad.
• Don’t use inappropriate words or phrases on your site like “discount” or “cheap,” if you’ve got luxury goods - and vice versa.
• Don’t choose broad phrases like “bags” or “shoes.” It’d be a waste of your time.
• Keep track of purely “informational” queries later - you might want to write a whitepaper on informational keywords in your industry and drive traffic that way.
• Make sure you are selecting keywords that are actively being searched. If you’re too specific with search phrases, there’s likely to be no volume.
• The law of large numbers lets you put in specific phrases if there’s volume.
• 2-4 word phrase range is best.

Organizing keywords - get every viable keyword optimized. Both short (general keywords) and long tail (specific phrases). This provides framework for for your long-term search efforts.

Then identify pages on your site, each page should have a specific focus on specific keywords. Create pages if you don’t have content around keywords you’re going to address.
Group keywords by qualifiers - qualifiers can be words like ‘quality,’ ‘durable,’ ‘memorable,’ - but keywords must work together, you shouldn’t match ‘elegant’ with ‘cheap.’ ‘Antique ‘and ‘vintage’ go together. Let there be a natural fit and flow to the content.

Never force natural language. Don’t rush, take your time to select and build the proper foundation.

Emarketingperformance has PDF of good information on keyword research.

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