Search Suggestion Tools: The Traffic Missing Link
When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers.
No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.
It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.
So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.
Search Suggestion Tools
There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.
How do we do that? And what does it cost?
I really wanted to show my wife I love her no matter what time of the year it is.
My wife and I have been married for almost 30 years. We have been through good times and bad times, flush and lean times. The thing that has been consistent has been that she has always been there for me.
When we first got married I bought her a new watch. This was a very nice watch and she wore it all the time. Then one day, about 3 months ago, the band broke and the watch fell in the road as she was crossing the street. Well you know where this is going, a car ran over the watch and it ended up in a thousand pieces. She was devastated.
I told her to look online and compare watches and find one that she liked. She took my advice and did her research. She was drawn to the Movado Watches. She liked the style of the Esperanza Black Dial. I told her that we just couldn’t afford to spend over $1,100 for a new watch. She understood but was very disappointed. She doesn’t know the real story.
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Where do I begin my Internet Business Development Strategy?
From my Inbox.
A client recently asked some great questions and I thought they deserved to be seen by our readers.
Dwayne,
Thank you for your information. We have been working to address all the issues you made us aware of.If I understand the areas we need to address they are as follows:
1. Our Centric
2. Our Social Message
3. Our Internet Outreach
4. Our Branding
5. Our Website DesignAm I missing anything?
1. The Centric
Tenlittlelaws.info is the website at this time, but the focus is not on the Ten Commandments as much as it is on the Kingdom of God. The Commandments are the elementary laws that teach people how to have basic love for one another. The ultimate result is developing the character to be a citizen through baptism for the Kingdom of God when Christ returns. All people will have an opportunity to learn of God’s way.
Okay then this centric will be the originator of all your content. Sounds good and of course in your business there is plenty of content that can be developed and pushed out to drive interest.
Revelation 21:1-3 is the focus point!
Rev 21:1-3 KJV And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.Where exactly this fits into the Categories I don’t know. We’re still rolling it over in our minds. We have done some checking on the keywords and the numbers are not very high for “kingdom of God”, ”God’s Kingdom”, “Preaching the Gospel” or “Ten Commandments”. Can you assist us in better defining out niche? Do you have a certain link we can go and check the keywords? The Rovin Search Engine Visible was where I was trying to check keywords.
I would not recommend you worry too much about keywords. Depending on keywords to develop the main navigation structure of your site is a losing proposition. You are walking into the teeth of your competitor sites. It is much more effective (in the long run) to develop a site that provides good content that is compelling and informative to the reader. This always wins no matter which fickle turn the masses take in their search volumes… (Please note the advice I just gave you is contrary to the popular SEO guru crap because the main intent of slam down seo is to get to the top of serps as fast as possible with little or no concern for longevity.)
So when developing the main categories you should focus totally on logical semantic relationships to the centric topic of the site. That is why everything starts from there. So make the navigation and categories part of a logical progression from the root keyphrase of the site. Now you can do this yourself for free and be very effective by using tools like Google related topics and the Wonderwheel, and also using other sites Authority as guidance to develop your navigation tree and categories.
Never fear, once you have a solid category structure that provide logical semantic indexing to the search bots, you can go about the business of producing individual content using high search volume keyphrases. So save your keyphrase research for content production. That is where you will get the most from it. Instead focus now on providing the most focused LSI to googlebot.
2. Our Social Message
Can you give me an example? Is it the same as the message on the Twitter and WordPress blog, and Facebook websites by getting people to engage? Mrs. Harrison and I have been working on a power point presentation we were going to make into a video for the website. Would this be more likely used on the social pages?
Social message means the personal level of your market effort. Social engagement really means making yourself real, available, and socially responsible in your marketing. Then we connect the two operations of producing content and providing service. Yes it has to do with Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, but those are only the places where the activity occurs.
The end goal is loyal fans. The method is to reach out, reward, engage, and build loyalty with your audience.
3. Our Internet Outreach
I’m assuming this would be tied to the blog etc.?
Yes sir, by offering to help the suffering and provide them a place of comfort and your teachings to support them. But it also means outreach to other sites that can help develop credibility in your service and message.
4. Our Branding
We have a logo, which I need to make some modifications too. I’ll be making those adjustments. I have a logo which you can use until the revisions are made. It will be generally the same, size, color etc. I have a colored logo and a pencil sketch of the logo which I like. Both are attached. The Logo depicts Revelation 21:1-3. The Scripture and the logo would the same branding.
Oh yes I see the attached logo. This is perfect.
5. Our Website Design
We have allocated $750 as our beginning budget, but when you break it down into hours, it’s only thirty hours. Everything we’ve discussed up to this point will need to be scaled back. I don’t know how much you can get done in thirty hours.
This will take you a long way David. That is a decent budget and could take you through the theme setup, conversion to CMS and content migration (in fact you can save even more money if you do the content conversion yourself) and well into some social media outreach and link building.
In fact if you are not too terribly concerned with making the site visually stunning then we can work from a basic magazine design or news design and go a long way on your budget. We’ll do our best to make the work count and also to let you guys do as much of it as possible. I know the hours thing is scary, but it’s going to take me well over an hour just to answer this email not to mention the other exchanges we’ve made up to this point. So I would think it obvious that we’re not totally money focused here at Rovin Net Internet Business Consulting. 
At this point I would say that the look of the website could stay the same, but the CMS and SEO codes would be the focus point. I would like to have a new design, but I believe it’s functionality is more important than it’s looks.
Please understand that using a CMS requires a theme. We can make a basic theme of build off one already in our library and go from there. It would take much longer to develop a theme to match the current site design than it would to customize a solid, attractive theme we already have access to.
We need more of a break down and get specific about what we hope to achieve in this venture. As you said before, we need a clear understanding of what is going to happen and the cost. If we can have some design changes in the looks that won’t take away from the functionality design then we can proceed to change the looks.
Oh yes. Developing the site will change the looks and functionality, but it will be for the better. In one swoop you will be adding RSS feeds, social bookmarking capabilities, comments and site interaction features, tag cloud navigation, improved site semantics and buoyancy links, automated SEO features and pinging to search engines, easier image management and posting, a uniform theme, etc etc etc…
I cannot tell you what you need to achieve in this venture. We can only provide the tools. The ultimate direction must come from you. We don’t know much about your inner-gearing. Do you have a membership / congregation to pull resources from? Do you have a mailing list? Are you planning to produce video? Etc Etc Those are unanswered questions and as long as they are unknows it will be difficult to provide the definitive answers you’re looking for.
With this all being said, have I given you enough information you can generate a plan of action on your part. I keep thinking that the redesign of the website has to be driven by us if we hope to keep the cost down by us giving you a look and you executing it; otherwise, the hours would be spent on design work. Please don’t hold back, I need you to be blunt and to the point with what we’re discussing. I need to make decisions based on your input.
To be blunt, I think that if you have a commitment to reach out to people, deliver your message in various forms and media, engage them where they are congregating, provide them with compelling messages of hope, relieve their fear, offer help when asked and ask them to help you promote your program, reward them with a unified and beneficial message, and be a leader; you will win. In your life and in your ministry brother.
As far as a plan of action:
1 – Gather a logical outline of the main categories of your site (not the one you have now but the idea one you want). Making sure you do not confuse titles of articles with categories of content. This will become your new navigation system
2 – Make a list (a tweet sheet) of at least 100 small quotes and scriptures that provide guidance. Keep each quote below 100 character – including spaces – so we still have room for a shortlink back to your site.
3 – Make a list of the prime keywords that you would like to attack. You can acquire this using the Google public keyword suggestion tool. Just go to Google and type in Keyword suggestion tool and Google usually puts its tool at the top. Limit your list to 50 keywords for now that have the most searches.
4 – Take each keyphrase from this list and sort it into the category structure you set up in step #1. So each keyphrase is now under the site navigation in one category or another.
5 – Take each keyphrase and do research on it to compose an informative article on it of at least 500 words. Make sure the article is 100% about that keyphrase. You can have opinion of course, but it should be about the topic. Compile the images you want to use or illustration as well as any supporting information like Youtube video links, tables and charts, links etc so each article is a nice little niche information package.
6 – Go over each article and look for every opportunity to utilize the other keywords in your master list. Highlight those in the copy because when you publish them those keyphrases will be used as cross links to your other articles and sections to provide SEO buoyancy for the site.
7 – Extract the most salient points of interest from each article. Use that to make a talking point outline you can adlib a video/audio/podcast delivery from. We’ll need this later to drive a multimedia marketing campaign for you.
8 – Compile a list of the top 20 or 30 most authoritative sites you would most like to get a link from. Then compose a open honest email message you can send to their administrator at a later date to solicit a link exchange.
9 – Compile a list of all the people you know and prepare a message for them asking them to visit your new site and to consider please mentioning your site to their friends, visit your facebook organization page and liking it, and also to follow your updates on Twitter.
10 – Compile a series of short messages that welcomes someone to your ministry, explains the mission you are on, delves into the message you are giving and how it will benefit them. Design this series of messages in a conversational voice (like you are talking to them in an email) and keep them in bite size chunks of 100 to 300 words each. Develop them in a logical sequence that will take the person from welcome to full understanding and even to loyal supporter. This series will become your first email autoresponder series. We’ll plug that into MailChimp to interlock with your other social messages.
Okay sir this should be a good start. Ironically I stopped at 10 steps (probably the marketer in me) but it should be plenty to get started with.
We can begin the site migration and CMS process any time. but this will give you plenty to work on so the project is always in a forward motion.
Thanks;
Dwayne
Full Speed Ahead with All Stop
Man what a brand!
The folks over a Q-Based Healthcare have busted out their new All Stop brand. The brand is topped by their new logo (caduceus / Asclepius staff and forward leaning fonts). The colors are strong and keep the medical theme moving forward. I imagine it took a few heated marketing meetings to approve the bold red & green color scheme, but I have to admit it works! The new look speaks to power, knowledge, and vitality.
The new All Stop brand name is technically a rebranding of their flagship DermaTechRx product line. They do have a statement about this on their site at http://www.allstop.com/faq/brand_notice.html
So why All Stop?
Folks who remember the DermaTechRx product line know they worked great on various skin ailments. Q-Based has been selling relief for arthritis pain, scabies, lice, eczema, bed bugs, poison ivy and ringworm for years. The bulk of their business is done online and they claim nearly 200,000 satisfied customers. I have used their products and always been satisfied.
All Stop has become their new brand to signify the power of the products to STOP ALL the ailments they are designed to treat. They certainly can stop lice and bed bugs, and ringworm (oh my), but more than that; these solutions help thousands of people help themselves with affordable home treatment solutions.
Not everyone can afford to go to a doctor for non life-threatening problems. Smart shoppers have learned to leverage Q-Based ‘heathcare advisors’ (read customer service reps) to get helpful tips on saving money and using products wisely. Issues never more important than now; with a ragged economy and rapidly increasing food and fuel costs.
Smart Shoppers… Smart Marketers.
So the brand works well to express the product. All Stop products work for many common ailments and parasites. Need to treat bed bugs? They have that. Raging Jock itch? You’re covered. (With my sympathies).
Along with the rebrand, their website has also undergone some effective retooling work. Now their sites are SEO compliant. The structure follow logical tree flow and their URLs are really search engine friendly. In the last week they look to be adding some link building features. With the new design they could easily move into the social networking traffic cloud.
Check out a corporate page at www.allstop.com or a sample affliction landing page at: http://www.allstop.com/lice/head-lice-treatment Pay close attention to the new packaging. More facelift work here. I suspect these folks are going retail shelf any day now. I’ll post updates as they grow. It is very interesting to watch a young growth company like this in its early stages.
Thick or Thin Affiliate? Work vs Worry
The thick and thin of affiliate marketing often comes down to a trade-off between work and worry.
Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.
versus…
Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.
Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.
Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.
Socially Conscious Marketing
Socially Conscious Marketing comes from a place of truth — not deception. It comes from a place of giving — not taking. As the name implies, being a socially conscious marketer means you hold yourself accountable to your clients or customers and you strive to be conscious of the impact of your message — beyond just getting the sale.
In the business development world, people want to grow relationships. It is often assumed that both sides want to develop the relationship. But in internet marketing, the relationship is often just one way. The buyer is going along with their life and the marketer is trying to persuade them to take an offer or make a decision — often when they are not really ready to make one.
The best way to bring all these things together and to make everyone happy (on both sides of the relationship) is to build trust and report with your audience. If we stop trying to hurry the close and push the service or product we always win.
The BizDevMark team is actually doing this with our marketing — to you. We are here for you every day, providing free content and resources to help make your life better. We very rarely present an offer or sales pitch because that is not what this site is about. We prefer to build a relationship and be accountable to you.
Yes I know that sounds corny and trite but it is the truth. So if you’re a marketing professional your job is to do the same thing over and over, until you can’t tell your friends from your prospects!
Dwayne
DermaTechRx – The Dermatech Research Center
Still following the folks at Q-Based and this week they are unveiling their brand new version of the dermatechrx.com website. No longer an ecommerce site, now Dermatech has been retooled to be a free and comprehensive research center and media library covering all manner of skin ailments and research into cures for such things and carpal tunnel syndrome, scabies, skin parasites, arthritis, and more.
For several years DermaTechRx was the brand for Q-Based products. Now they have expanded into their All Stop line of products are making the best use of the newly designed DermaTechrx website to help people learn from their research and experience in skin related problems, topical pain relief, and human parasites.
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