Words of wisdom to take your business two levels above your competition

Research and Analysis is part and parcel of business. It’s an important aspect as it gives you vital information about your company, your potential clients via visitors to your website, sales, and profit. You need to analyze your company’s progress to ensure that it is heading where you want it to.

I came across an awesome tool to track and analyze your website’s progress.

*Drumroll*……………………….

Introducing Google Analytics

This fantastic tool allows you to view and analyze your webpage’s report. It allows you to do an analysis on:

• Site usage (visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and new visits)
• Visitors
• Traffic Sources (Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines)
• Content (Pageviews of Content)

You might want to look out for something called “Bouncing Rate”. Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (i.e, visits in which visitors leaves your site from the main page). It is a measure of your page quality therefore a high bounce rate is not a good indicator as your visitor (and potential clients) are not finding relevant information on your entrance page (landing page). To minimize this, you should improve on your landing site’s content and make it more relevant

Whilst it’s good to have a high percentage of new visits, it’s retainment that counts. The higher the percentage of returning visitors, the better (clients! clients! clients!)

These are few of the tools Google Analytics allows you to do to track the progress of your website. I must say that it’s pretty interesting! I can assure you that you’ll be motivated to find ways to improve your site when you see the graph decline.

How inundated are we with advertising these days? So much so that we tune most of it out. This is especially true in today’s digital age, where we are able to TiVo through ads on television or surf past them on the Internet. With this, it makes it more challenging for small business owners out there to come up with advertisements that will be eye-catching enough for your target audience to PAY ATTENTION to it.

Unlike giant behemoths like the CBS Television Network, small businesses have limited budgets and restricted resources. Our marketing, by necessity, is usually much more focused than that of our bigger business brethren. No, we don’t have million-dollar budgets or a gaggle of high-priced, well-educated marketing whizzes coming up with clever ideas for us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow a good idea of theirs when we see one … and I see one. Take a simple idea and make it in such a way that will capture your audiences’ attention

CBS has been collaborating with EggFusion, a company which (well, you can guess by now) uses the egg as a concept for creative advertising and marketing. Besides advertisers, they also reach out to other areas such as producers, retailers and consumers. Now that is what I call being an all-rounder!

No, you may not have a budget that allows you to imprint millions of eggs with your company logo, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be clever. In fact, I would wager that it is your entrepreneurial cleverness that sets you apart. After all, you would not step into the tricky and risky world of business if you weren’t a smarty pants

Use it. Come up with a new idea and run with it. Be different, be remarkable. Do the UNEGGSPECTED

If you want your advertising to “stick” with prospective customers, it’s essential that you appeal to their emotions in some way. I’m sure you’ve had experiences in which you’ve watch an out-of-this-world commercial on TV (be it silly but hilarious like Jack in the Box,  or simply breathtakingly eye catching like the Chanel No. 5 commercial where Nicole Kidman and Baz  teamed up to do a Moulin Rouge style ad). Fail to do this and you might as well be throwing money out the window.

Effective ads sell your message, company, or product. They may or may not be creative, but if you can package some good creative in with a message that appeals to a strong need or want within your target audience, it will certainly help. Like a broken recorder, I emphasize on research, research, and…….research 

Effective ads are convincing. They engage potential customers as if you were speaking directly to them, and when you succeed in making this connection your prospective customer’s thoughts will become your brand itself. So the rule of thumb is that you ‘speak’ to them, to their emotions, to the core of their being.

Even if you achieve the enviable position of having a provocative ad execution with an effective message, your work is far from over. In fact, in the world of advertising, your work is never over!

Continually exposing your customers, prospective customers, and suspects (those who aren’t currently interested in your company or product, but who might be shortly) to the same messaging over a prolonged period of time will lead to stagnation. Eventually, you’ll fail not only to inspire brand loyalty, but also to retain it. Even Coke, one of the world’s most valuable brands, reinvents its messaging and image when it decides they have begun to lose effectiveness. It is human nature to get bored after being exposed repeatedly to the same old advertisement or message. In psychology language, we call this ‘repeated exposure’. Thus, change and adaptation is an essential ingredient to maintaining customers’ loyalty to your brand and services.

Creating an Effective Ad Campaign
So how do you create an effective ad campaign? One way is to go with the single benefit methodology, which directly links your brand to a single benefit. If your deodorant lasts longer, tell the world about it. The characterization or personification angle involves creating a character that expresses the product’s benefits or personality. The narrative methodology involves developing a narrative story with episodes describing a problem and its outcome.

Again, aim to produce advertising that states not only a product’s facts, but that also appeals to emotions. Using the deodorant example, you might accomplish this by playing off your customers’ fears of having body odor at an inopportune time. Your ad must make your audience feel like the MUST have it and that they cannot live without it.

Although a calculated and well thought out advertising campaign may do a good job of creating brand awareness, it may fall short of inducing product preference or, the end goal, purchase. Whatever it may be, don’t give up and treat the customers you have well. As the saying goes, a good deed goes a longgggg way….and you never know,  the power of word of mouth as a form of advertisement can be pretty effective too!

We all know that advertising is like air to our lungs. We NEED it to survive. Same goes for our business…but there’s a difference between good advertising and bad advertising, which you should know by now, has its consequences.

If you hate reading long, wordy stuff….let me give you the shortcut:

Business + Good advertising =  $$$$$$$$$

Typically, advertising and promotion are vital to the success of a business. To successfully advertise you will need to allocate a portion of your budget for such purposes. The size of this percentage will depend on the size of your business and the scope of the market that you are trying to reach. Proportionally, a small business and a multimillion-dollar corporation may spend the same percentage of their budget on advertising. If the advertising campaign is carefully planned to reach the target audience, the resulting increase in business may also be a similar percentage. For example a few well-placed billboards in a small town might generate a 10 percent increase in sales for a small business while a national commercial might produce the same 10 percent increase for a major retail chain. Therefore, do some serious research and budgeting to ensure that the money you allocate does not go to waste.

Your focus, when advertising, needs to be on:

1. The type of media to reach most effectively your target audience
2. The type of advertising campaign you will run, e.g. to promote a new product, to place a familiar product or company name in front of the audience, or to promote a special service or activity
3. The advertising style that best suits your products and/or services
4. How can you reach the most people (within your defined market) for your advertising dollar

Again, my suggestion is that you do some research like handing out questionnaires to your targeted audience. Also ensure that your sample is randomized so that your results will less biased.

When you advertise, you are investing in your own business, and, as with any type of investment, there are risks involved. The major risk is that the advertisements will not generate enough sales to justify the costs of the campaign. As is the case with any investment, through due diligence you will determine the most appropriate and secure means of advertising before taking such risks.

You could write down a list of ways to advertise and list the pros and cons of each type of advertising. For example, advertisement on the web, billboard, magazines, TV, Radio, etc. With that you can hopefully see which type of advertising will give you the most benefits with the least risk.

In a nutshell, do your research, draw up a list of ways to advertise, take a deep breath (just to make it sound dramatic) and make your decision. A calculated risk it is but hey, if you have the guts to start your own business, choosing how you want to advertise your business should be a piece of cake!

It takes some knowledge of basic psychology and human behavior to succeed at marketing. It does not take a genius to figure out what makes people buy (or not buy) things. The human behavior IS psychology baby! Tap into this and you will witness wonders in your business sales

People buy things to either meet their needs or satisfy their wants and desires. As a marketer, you are looking not at what your product has to offer, but at what is motivating your target audience to buy your product or service. For example, people aren’t buying perfume because of the aroma. They are buying romance. The new exercise machine doesn’t sell because of the latest features, but because the customer is buying a healthier, perhaps thinner look. The end result of a product or service is what it does for buyers — how it makes them feel, look, or act. People buy the idea behind it, not the product per say. Therefore, you need to keep broad motivational reasons in mind when planning your marketing campaign.

I suggest you might want to do some research on your target audience to test the effectiveness of your product or service….in psychological term they call it ‘pre-test’ and ‘post-test’. Pre-test is when you conduct your research (using methods such as questionnaires) on a small sample of your target audience before you introduce your product or service and post-test is the same questionnaire given to the same sample of target audience after they tried your service or product. With this, you will roughly know if your product or service will ‘make the cut’.

There is also a psychological aspect to establishing trust and forming a relationship. Like all relationships, trust is the basis of it. Most customers have been burned, treated badly, swindled, or disenchanted at least once. They will not necessarily jump at the opportunity to buy something unless they have a sense of confidence in the seller. In an age where people are tired of receiving spam and a glut of marketing materials, the modern consumer has become savvy and somewhat cynical. Only a company with a strong proven reputation will gain their trust. You, therefore, want to always build a level of trust through quality of service, and this should be reflected in your marketing.

Finally, there are practical factors that enter into marketing. If it is simply inconvenient for a customer to purchase from you or you simply cannot satisfy their needs with the product they are seeking, then don’t attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. Too many sales are lost by trying to do so. Just be who you are (this should apply to your business ethics too). If you don’t, you may risk ending a future relationship with the customer by losing their trust.

In the end you want to sell customers by gaining their trust and building a relationship based on customer satisfaction and by being honest and not trying to be everything to everyone.

If this article is TOO long and annoyingly tiring to read, just remember this: TRUST is everything, work hard at building trust with your customers. Everything else will flow well once you get the hang of that!

I’ve seen many people asking about this, and I’ve seen even more people generally mystified by the way Google works. So most people don’t understand how and when Google crawls and are generally thinking it’s a secret.

It’s not really that big a secret, but it is a bit of a thing to predict when Google does come. Of course if you deal with this stuff as often as I do, you start to become used to the schedules. What is a bit confusing though is how this crawl schedule changes like hell depending on a million factors Google finds important.

We’ll start off with a bit of information from the Google Webmaster Center. As always they give us the follow the guidelines and it depends on many things crap, but a few factors come out as obvious in the process:

• PageRank
• links to a page
• crawling constraints (such as the number of parameters in a URL)

Ok, so we know what helps us. PR is the most important, then links, then the ability of your site to be crawled (that number of parameters refers to the fact that Google doesn’t like many php parameters - use mod_rewrite). So we have a starting point. But as always Google is cryptic and doesn’t really help… So we move on.

As early as 2002 people were asking about the Google crawl schedule, and some were guessing at it. However, results were strange and back them high PR sites were a lot more. However, many have seen Google full crawls at around 1st June, while another had it in May and still moving on in June. An interesting piece of info was that for large sites Googlebot came in at about every three minutes indexing about 2-10 pages a second, which I feel was a bit of a slurp but was made to keep a bit of the strain off the webserver. Their discussion goes offtopic then on, but for the purists, go read…

Our next source is a for dummies book excerpt, in which we get a bunch of terms related to the crawl. In doing research for this I was really surprised to see there’s very little info to be found. Then again, it’s not such a hot topic for SEO, but is somewhat important. They say the deep crawl occurs about every month and that fresh crawls occur randomly. Also, they consider the index as static between deep crawls, in a form called everflux in the strange update given by fresh crawls. My opinion later

There’s not much else on the web, except a mention of the Google Dance. I find all these names so amusing, since they don’t really explain the phenomenon and there’s no dancing involved. I guess they got bored of using crawl in everything. It’s basically the deep crawl, and we get the info that it usually begins at the end of the month, lasting 3-5 days, and usually updates PR. Also, for the people out there who know how to monitor server logs, deep crawl uses an IP range of 216.239.46.x whereas fresh crawl uses the 64.68.82.x range. Also at that link above you can find a so called Google Dance Tool, which could be useful to see what pages Google finds important and crawls, but you could just use webmaster tools for that.

Now for my take on the whole thing. I feel that there’s not two, but three kinds of crawls. Firstly, there’s an almost immediate crawl, from pings and links and basically whichever spider Google uses for Google alerts. That happens at once, and crawls the title and the post, but does not index it. It only notices it’s there. Then, in a few days to a week, the post becomes indexed completely, and starts showing up in Google results (on a quite high position at first, then gradually lower if no further activity on that post is detected, or no search activity for that keyword is detected). The next kind of crawl is a longer-term crawl, which usually includes the homepage, and is done every week, or two weeks, or even a month for less active sites. This updates the cache on your active pages, but doesn’t touch the others. And the last kind of crawl happens about three or four times a year, and reindexes everything. This usually happens in February or March, June, November, or in some cases any other month. Google tends to vary this stuff, presumably due to factors on and off the site. So be prepared for a couple of crawls this year in June (beginning) and mid-November or so, and see if it happens as I’ve predicted.

One more thing, an important factor to crawling is the kind of servers you are hosted on. Use GoDaddy or any other established host rather than hosting on your old machine, so Google can download the data properly. The crawl intensity depends a lot on that. Also, Google does not have the same schedule as Yahoo for example. Yahoo just performed a deep crawl for my site a few days ago, whereas Google didn’t.

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday’s craft in favor of tomorrow’s must-have talent.

“There is less need for system-side knowledge. In the past, IT folks had to understand a lot about memory, drivers and address locations, and what used which interrupt, but nowadays that stuff is plug-and-chug even on many Unix systems,” says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s Tech Communications Network Services unit in Blacksburg. “I feel like all the skills I have picked up along the way are valuable and help shape my thinking and troubleshooting abilities. I don’t know how to value or devalue these skills; it’s like they have taken on new value now.”

Industry watchers would be hard pressed to name specific IT skills as entirely dead or completely useless, but some skills are well on their way to being considered a thing of the past — as reflected by the declining pay associated with them. As hot skills like virtualization rise to the top of company must-have lists, high-tech talents in certain operating systems and specific vendor products fall to the bottom. Here are five high-tech skills that don’t demand the pay they once did.

Plain old HTML

As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5% in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don’t see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. “I’m not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills — HTML programming skills,” says Debbie Joy, lead solution architect for CSC in Phoenix.

Legacy programming languages

Skills in programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder and more don’t rate like they once did.

“Certainly the Cobol people that had a resurgence with the Y2K bug aren’t in demand,” says John Estes, vice president of strategic alliances of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing consultancy. “Certain other applications such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, [which were] very big in the ’90s, are no longer in demand.”

IT work-force and compensation research conducted by Foote Partners revealed that Cobol, PowerBuilder and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills in the second half of 2007. David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners, says the research shows not that such skills aren’t in use today but that companies aren’t willing to pay for them. “There is still a lot of C and Cobol around, though these skills are worth very little paywise,” Foote says.

NetWare

Operating system know-how continues to be in top demand among hiring managers, but expertise in Novell’s network operating system NetWare isn’t keeping up with other technologies in the same area. “Networking software such as NetWare isn’t near what it was in the ’90s,” Estes says. And Foote adds, “Windows Server and Linux skills have replaced, or are replacing, NetWare skills” in terms of demand.

Non-IP network

IP and Internet skills usurped non-IP network expertise and know-how in technologies such as IBM’s System Network Architecture (SNA) continue to rank among the lowest-paying skills. “For networking, IP skills have replaced SNA skills,” Foote says. According to Foote Partners’ research, SNA skills accounted for just 2% of base pay in the fourth quarter of 2007, while security skills made up 17% of base pay.

“Mainframe computing skills, including network components such as SNA, are no longer required in a server-based IP networking environment,” says Martin Webb, manager of data network operations, Ministry of Labour and Citizens’ Services, Province of British Columbia.

PC tech support

The Computer Technology Trade Association (CompTIA) reports that hardware skills and knowledge, including expertise with printers and PCs, are on the decline in terms of demand. CompTIA surveyed 3,578 IT hiring managers to learn which skills would grow in importance over time and the industry organization found: “The skill area expected to decline the most in importance is hardware.”

Foote Partners’ research separately showed an 11.1% decline in pay over the last six months of 2007 for ITIL skills, which are often put in place to streamline IT service management and help desk efforts.

“The ‘move, add and changes’ PC tech function isn’t quite what is used to be,” Robert Half Technology’s Estes says.

Keywords are the in thing as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goes these days. It’s important that to keep in mind when you create a fantastic write up about your company. Three to four key words should do the trick. The trick is to place those words strategically in the first paragraph when you write so the ‘crawlies’ (search engine spiders) will pick it up and chances of your website getting spotted on search engines goes up!

For example, if I were to do a write up about 2LevelsAbove, I would use three keywords – 2LevelsAbove, Search Engine Optimization and startup business. I will then write in a way that would place these words in the first few lines of the first paragraph….something like this:

2LevelsAbove is a company dedicated in helping startup businesses gain popularity in the virtual world using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and creating a fantastic web site for our clients.

If you only have one of the top 10 spots in Google searches for important key words - here are some ways get more visibility there.

Here are three places that will let you (responsibly) publish information with links to your site. The new thing you write ranks well quickly because it is on existing sites that have great ranking.

1. answers.yahoo.com - Strategically creating good questions and answers will get ranked well on search engines and generate traffic to your website or blog. Use the tool and do not always promote something, or the same thing.
2. Squidoo.com - Publish your lens with resources and outbound links. Be sure to use the keywords you are targetting in your tags and titles.
3. HubPages.com - Freakishly fast and high ranking in Google after publishing on this. Build HubPages on your targeted topic and be sure to include a few links to what you are promoting.

In all three of these cases, you have to add value. If you just post blatant promotional items, it will get far fewer results (and possibly removed.). So be a little smart and post something intellectual

The Dallas Business Journal recently ran a story on , Wasp Barcode Technologies, describing how they went from spending enormous amounts of money on PPC to focusing more on traditional SEO and link building. The strategy paid off — Wasp spent less and got better results. These are the kind of results every small to medium sized business would like to enjoy.

Wasp cut its external spending by 13% and reinvested the funds into in-house personnel, who “re-architected” the site so users would find it easier to use and more relevant. Those steps meant optimizing the site for specific key words such as “asset tracking” and “inventory control” and continuing to add richer online content, including slide show presentations, Webinars and YouTube demos. This strategy also including increasing the link popularity of the site by both natural and aggressive means.

The efforts are paying off in a multitude of ways. In 2007, the company’s Web hits grew by 60%, topping 600,000 visits. “The added visibility makes the company appear large and established, and bodes well with resellers such as Fry’s and Staples who rely on brand awareness to sell Wasp’s products,” Wasp President Steve Coffman said. “It also helps Wasp reach small businesses, which often turn to the Web for technology guidance.”

While a PPC campaign can deliver traffic with relative ease, it can be very costly and has no real longevity — once you stop shelling out the cash, the traffic goes away. SEO and link building require a lot more creative effort but can have more sustainable results. It also allows a business to target a larger base of users as most studies reveal that 75 - 80% of searchers click on organic listings as opposed to paid listings.

Wasp learned this after spending considerable funds on Google AdWords and other PPC programs. That is not to say that they did not learn from the PPC experience. They most likely were able to gather intelligence on specific terms searchers were looking for related to their products. They also very likely learned how to improve conversions for each keyword search they attracted.

So the lesson to learn here is to lay your foundation with SEO, link building and maybe even some social media marketing. If you have additional budget, incorporate the PPC as well. However, don’t overlook the potential that a strategic SEO and link building campaign has to offer in your web marketing efforts.

“Building links are just like making friends in college or your hometown, you seek out those who have similar interests,” says Gardi, The senior vice president of Teoma.

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. No marketing tool can replace the effectiveness of word of mouth advertising. The same principle applies to website links. When a trusted site links to yours, people follow the recommendation. That is how linking works.

2 Levels Above is an experienced hand in the field of link building campaigns. 2 Levels Above assists you in making your link building and website promotion easier and faster. We perform the following functions:

1. Find websites to link with
2. Make link requests
3. Process, organize, and manage links
4. Ensure that the search engines find or “spider” your link partners
5. Check frequently to see if your links are still on your partner’s websites

We are avid about providing the best link marketing services to compliment your ongoing Search Engine Optimization programs.

Our linking building processes are broken down in to the following categories.

Reciprocal link building
Directory Submission
Buying Text Advertisements
Buying Sitewide Text Links
Buying Sitewide links across web journals / weblogs / blogs
Buying Links from Related sites
Article Reproduction
Press Releases
Pagerank Optimization / Pagerank Increase.