Website Promotion is not Voodoo

The tactics of Local Facebook Marketing just got a whole lot easier to understand. Sarah Smith gave up the goods in her presentation at the Local Search Summit. It turns out there are some very subversive ways to use current Facebook technologies. Marketing on Facebook just got a lot easier.

Local Search Summit 09

Don Campbell gives a great overview of the ideas presented in our “Using Facebook and Twitter to Drive Local Leads” session. And, I’m looking forward to Aaron Irizarry posting the rest of the video…

Everyday we get emails about online, marketing webinars. “How to increase your ROI on the web”, “Why you need to supplement your campaign with PPC”, “Why do trains no longer have cabooses”.  It’s endless!

Fisheye Webcam - Don't try this at home

As a website promotion company we get requests for all manner of online marketing services and I was given a task of creating and broadcasting a marketing webinar for one of my clients.

My first thought was, “Oh cool- a webinar. This should be interesting.” My second thought was, “holy crap, I have never done this before.

Editor’s note: this is the first in a series we’re calling “Don’t Believe The Hype”

• Merlin and the War of the Dragons film Pirates of Silicon Valley ipod

Rocket Scientist or Pretender to The Throne?

“It’s OK, you’re not cheating on Google”, says the autopopulated search box on the Leapfish homepage. But is Leapfish, the new meta search kid on the block, just another flash in the pan as far as it’s search aspirations are concerned? Innovation and new applications are always welcome in the world of search. It’s obvious however, that except for their “click-free search”, Leapfish is offering nothing new.

Image Courtesy of Flickr User timlewisnm

It’s pretty simple: marketing on the Internet is, on one level, about dominating as much real estate on page 1 of Google as possible.

The typical places to dominate are the left side of the page (natural or organic search results) and the right side of the page (paid search results). However, with the abundance of online directories aggressively marketing themselves, the ability to own more of page 1 of Google for a certain key phrase is more and more attainable.

Holy cow it’s taken me a long time to write this! But that’s good news because I’ve been adding to my own understanding in the meantime.

I have been intending to post on this since before my friend Chris Schultz wrote his “10 Tips for Launching Your Startup” in which he brushed on the core concept, the Customer Engagement Cycle: A C I P R (Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention (Referral)).

Take for instance the “Referral” above, I’ve come to realize that this is as valuable as “Retention” in the model. And sometimes is more effectively leveraged toward referral than repurchase.

How apropriate that our first flickr photo is also a new baby.

Please help us launch the career of another search marketer Violet Marie Moran-Thompson.

Violet Marie is the latest addition to our team of influencers. She joined us on Tuesday April 22nd.

Pillow Talk psp
Tuesday April 22nd is both Earth Day, and the closing day of Small Business Marketing Unleashed.

The Sugarland Express download

Violet’s mom Eva (left) was critical in our preparation for that event and responsible for just-in-time delivery of all of our conference swag.

And Violet’s aunt Angie (sporting the logo) is critical to Search Influence operations as our controller.

The New York times is out with and interesting piece on Plastic Surgery Internet Marketing and how effective it can be.

Update: I’ve expanded on this post greatly in: Internet Marketing for Plastic Surgeons – Less Scary than You Think.

You may also be interested in: Convert Offline – Everybody’s Doing It

I’m sad to say we weren’t featured. That said, we absolutely believe in Internet Marketing for Plastic Surgeons (as any of our Plastic Surgery Clients will tell you).

I may say more later but for now, here’s the NY Times piece.

At the risk of repeating myself, Miriam of Solas Web Design in her SEO Igloo blog has been engaged for a few weeks in an investigation of Local SEO culminating with a series of interviews. Miriam was nice to include me and most recently asked me to respond to some questions from the comments on one of her recent posts.

This is an answer both to Miriam and to current and future clients wondering about our process.

What this post will not cover:

• Managing offline conversion (I’m working on a case study for this)