Finally, a new music post! 'Heart of Life'

Posted by Colin Clark on May 28th, 2009 | Comments home title

It’s been a long time since I put up a music post. I was pickin my guitar tonight and I couldn’t resist making a video. This is my acoustic cover of ‘Heart of Life’ by John Mayer. I’m a big believer that your blog should be a reflection of your personality (not just business). I hope you all enjoy it.

#1 Marketing tip to get you through the next 10 years.

Posted by Colin Clark on May 27th, 2009 | Comments home title

It’s no secret that the way we bring products to market is changing drastically. I just returned from a keynote by noted social media expert Jason Falls. He argued that search will become much more important in the next few years with the advent of semantic and local search options.

While I agree with some of this, I think that the #1 way to ensure that your product or service will succeed is to…

Build the marketing into the product and create a new problem for your potential customers.

What the hell does that mean?

Let’s use the iPhone as an example. Back in February I bought an iPhone even though I already had a smartphone that performed all the necessary tasks I needed like email, internet access, etc. I bought an iPhone in spite of this, because it was so freakin cool that it changed my perspective.

I no longer had a smartphone problem, I had an ‘I need an iPhone’ problem.

Suppose your company is called ABC Widgets and you sell widgets. You solve people’s widget problem, and that’s fine, except now you have to compete with every other widget manufacturer on the planet.

Now let’s back up and say that ABC widgets sells super-exclusive (and expensive) widgets that CHANGE what the market demands. All of the sudden people don’t have ‘widget’ problems, they NEED ABC Widgets (even though you charge more)

The marketing is built into the product. You become your market. And you have all the competitive advantage you’ll ever need. Now all you have to do is keep doing it.

As marketing changes and it becomes harder and harder to gain visibility brand recognition is your key to survival.

Consumers Continue to Research Online, Buy Offline (smtusa.com)
Value of Social Media Outreach (webmetricsguru.com)
Jason Falls to Visit Indianapolis to talk Social Media (kylelacy.com)
Planning Your Weekend? Center’d Can Help (mashable.com)
Why a Giant iPhone is Running a Marathon (mashable.com)

You should never ever ever ever SPEND money on marketing.

Posted by Colin Clark on May 26th, 2009 | Comments home title

You should INVEST it.

The #1 issue that I face day in and day out is companies that look at marketing as a cost of doing business. Here’s a reality check. Toilet paper is a cost of doing business. Office equipment is a cost of doing business. Marketing is an investment in the continued profitability of your company.

Lots of people have said there is no way to measure ROI in social media. It’s true that it does take some creative thinking to get reliable estimates of your return. It is VERY difficult to get exact numbers, and I don’t know if that’s even necessary.

Break it up into little bites that are easier to swallow.

Look at each activity you’re doing. Break it down. Look at all the benefits and drawbacks analytically. You don’t need exact numbers to tell if you’re getting something out of it.

The thing to remember is to look at where your marketing budget is going every month and look for places to cut back and areas to increase time and money.

Here are some invalid reasons to pursue a marketing channel.

We’ve always done it.
Everyone else is doing it.
It probably works as well as anything else.

And here are some good reasons.

It’s making us $x per month.
It’s saving us this many hours per month.
It’s helping us connect with this many customers per month.
It’s getting our salespeople in front of this many prospects per month.
It’s making the phone ring this many times per month.

Value of Social Media Outreach (webmetricsguru.com)
Knowledge, Power & Social Media (techrigy.com)
SMCQ11: How do we educate the younger generation to prepare for the modern workforce? (socialmediaclub.org)

What kind of animal is this? Amphibian or Reptile

Posted by Colin Clark on May 21st, 2009 | Comments home title

salamander

I was sitting outside having dinner last night at a Bloomington, Indiana eatery (Upland Brewery) and I noticed this peculiar creature crawling up the side of the building. It looks like either a lizard or a salamander. The problem I have is that it was much bigger than I’ve ever scene an Indiana salamander get, and I’ve never heard of lizards like this occurring this far North.

I’d say it was about 6-8 inches long. Its skin didn’t look like it was very slimy like you’d expect in a salamander. I snapped a few pictures with my iPhone camera. Can anyone tell me what kind of animal this is?

SEO might bore me, but it's still important to know what you're doing.

Posted by Colin Clark on May 20th, 2009 | Comments home title

I’ve had several conversations lately (both online and off) about Search Traffic and whether or not it’s the best way to acquire customers. My argument has typically been that blogs are already search optimized and that you WILL win searches by blogging frequently about what you do. For this reason I’ve be known to say that it makes more sense to focus on a social strategy since you’re going to win searches anyway.

With that said, I DO think that it’s important to set yourself up to win as many searches as possible. Here are a few things to tweak on your Wordpress blog to give it a little more search juice.

A Great SEO Plugin – I used to use the All in One SEO Pack, but yesterday I found a new plugin called the Platinum SEO pack which had more options. Both plugins will help you make sure that you’ve got your Meta information in order and that your site is being crawled correctly.
Do you have a Sitemap? – Google does a pretty good job of crawling and indexing wordpress blogs on it’s own, but just to make sure, I always install the Google sitemap plugin. It automatically generates and updates a valid .xml file every time you write a post while pinging the major search engines to let them know there is new content.
Do you know the hirarchy? Remember, there is a specific order to the importance of different areas and tags on each page and they all interact with wordpress in different ways. Here’s how I rank them in order of importance.

Your URL – Make sure you set up your permalink structure so that there are keywords in the url’s of your post pages. You need to include /%postname%/ as part of the equation and title your posts with keywords that you want to rank for.
<title> tags – for post pages, this will be a combination of your blog title and the post title. Again, you should title your posts strategically.
<h1> – On post pages this will be the title of your post (starting to see the pattern).
<h2> – Your post titles on the home page will be scripted as <h2> elements.
<h3> – <h6> – I don’t see these used much in wordpress, but feel free to use them within your posts to emphasize important keyword-rich statements.

Does Meta matter? – Depends on who you ask. It’s easy to get it right so I see no reason not to spend a little extra time. My SEO plugin lets me use Tags and Categories as Meta keywords, so everything works together.

10 Point Crash Course in Blog SEO (davidrisley.com)
How to change your wordpress permalink without loosing traffic (shoutmeloud.com)
Automatic Relevant Backlinks to Your Wordpress Blog (howtospoter.com)

Block Twitter Spammers Weekend

Posted by Colin Clark on May 14th, 2009 | Comments home title

Hi everyone. I’ve recently been getting worried because I love the Twitter community, but it seems to be getting infiltrated by a lot of SPAM accounts, so I thought I’d declare this weekend the official #blockspammers event. Here’s all you have to do. Just go through your follower list and find a few spammers and BLOCK them. Don’t just unfollow, because they’ll just follow you back. The only way we’re going to combat these sicko’s is to take a firm stand. Here are some tips if you don’t know what a spammer looks like…

1. They have tons of followers, and no one follows them back and no updates.

2. They exhibit the same qualities as #1 and also have a picture of a girl with ‘rockin hot boobs’. In fact rockin mammaries are one of the #1 indicators of spam. Careful though, some legit Twitter accounts have pictures like this and are actually real.

3. They only tweet garbage links.

4. They send you an extremely shady auto-reply if you follow them back.

All right everyone, happy SPAM blocking. If anyone has any other tips for identifying Twitter spammers leave em in the comments below.

Officially endorsing BeTweeted

Posted by Colin Clark on May 14th, 2009 | Comments home title

I had lunch with Nick Carter yesterday. Nick is a local Indianapolis entrepreneur who’s seen some great success with Address Two, which is a ridiculously simple to use and cheap CRM. He was telling me about his new venture BeTweeted. BeTweeted is basically a Pay Per Click marketing tool for spreading your message on twitter.

Here’s how it works… You want to generate buzz for your business. You give BeTweeted a monthly budget. Twitterers (aka – Tweeple) can then Tweet out your message to their network. Each click-through comes out of your monthly budget and the person that tweeted gets a small percentage (I don’t think you’re going to hear of many people retiring at 25 from their BeTweeted proceeds).

I think the model is solid. It’s definitely SPAM-free and ethical and I think that it would be a great tool for lots of businesses to use to augment their existing emarketing efforts. Check out the video…

3 Tips For Running An Effective Ppc Campaign (techburgh.com)
Understanding How Social Media Impacts the Purchase Path (adamhcohen.com)

I'll do anything for anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Posted by Colin Clark on May 14th, 2009 | Comments home title

nichemarketingbullseye1

I meet people all the time who struggle to find a niche. This is completely normal. No one wants to turn away business, and just because you have a target niche doesn’t mean that you have to turn away money when it’s pointed your way. Finding a niche is profitable in a few different ways.

You gain a reputation for serving your niche.
Because of that reputation, people know which business to refer to you.
You can partner with other businesses that also serve that niche.
You’ll develop lots of success stories that you can tell to new prospects (same industry = more relevant).

How does this relate to social media?

There is so much going on in the social web. It’s very difficult to get your message to to right people. Choosing a niche makes it much easier.
You can set up a blog or lens or whatever that serves your particular niche and invite prospects to interact with you there.
A website or blog that is targeted at a niche is much more relevant to your prospects than one that is directed only at your products and services. (I call this erecting a web monument to yourself)
It’s much easier to connect with the thought leaders and experts in one niche than all of them.

The Last Design Update I'll Ever Make… Promise

Posted by Colin Clark on May 12th, 2009 | Comments home title

simplicity

For my readers who have been with me for a while, you might have noticed that I’ve been a little ADD with my blog design. My problem is that I just get sick of the same old thing day in and day out. One day I want more features, the next I feel like it looks too cluttered.

I knew that I needed a blog theme that would last for a long long time so I started looking at the really high-traffic blogs like livecrunch, techcrunch, mashable, engadget, and boing boing and I discovered one simple fact… they’re all extremely simple in their design. They all have a plain white background and few design elements. I really like that the content is the center of attention.

I’d been looking for a suitable ‘plain white’ theme that I really liked for a while and when I saw that woothemes released this one a while back I put it on my list of things to do. I’m just now getting around to it.

I still need to customize the header image a bit and play with the widgets, but all-in-all I’m loving it. What do you think?

Is the “Classic” Blog Dying? [Technology and Making] (silverknife.co.uk)
How Comcast Bought Its Way Into Boing Boing’s Good Graces (gawker.com)
Time’s Top 25 Blogs 2009 (raddevon.com)
Kid on Drugs – Boing Boing (via Facebook) (boingboing.net)

Social media can't help you. You don't qualify.

Posted by Colin Clark on May 8th, 2009 | Comments home title

outwiththeold

Not every business is a good fit for social media marketing. Some organizations just aren’t set up for it. There are too many rules you have to follow, non-disclosure agreements, compliance regulations, and old-school thinkers. Let me throw out a statement that might surprise some people.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!

Here’s the issue. The walls around traditional media are slowly crumbling. We’re not talking about fewer people buying newspapers. We’re talking about newspapers going out of business. What do you do if you rely on newspaper ads to make the phone ring and your local newspaper goes out of business?

It makes no sense to change your whole marketing model all at once, but it does make a lot of sense to start trying to understand where the world is going and how you’re going to fit into it.