*Jozzua Notes from a Business and Marketing Strategist/Tactician

Essential Web Marketing Truths

I found out some essential web-marketing truths in the past year. I learned this through my personal experimentation with Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.

• Search Engine Optimization isn't enough. You have to create Buzz. That's Marketing. When I joined the Philippine SEO contest, I made a website and started doing all those technical SEO. I created SEO-friendly webpages that used Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for design. I traded links, and found other sources of links. I created a wordpress theme to generate links coming to my site. All that didn't really get me to the first page of the Search Engine Results for the keywords I was after. It was only after reading Marc's post on how creative Filipinos were that it dawned on me. I should think of something creative too! Well, I did. I made a comic strip:


Creating this comic gave people something to talk about. It created buzz. I suddenly stumbled into something that worked! It was quite effective that my website entry was able to get free links from other bloggers - even other contestants. The comic was even mentioned in the popular seroundtable website. What's the lesson here? Seth Godin's Purple Cow principle worked. I had made something remarkable and it got noticed. Thanks to that comic strip, people now remember me, personally.

• You should continuously test. Test your ads. Test you landing pages. The great thing about the Internet, especially about Google Adwords is that you can immediately implement a marketing campaign and get results by the next day. You can find out which Google Ads perform better and use that. Then create another new ad and run a comparative test with the previous Ad and see which works better. You can create two different landing pages and see which one converts leads. Scrap the other one and then create another new or better landing page. Then test it all over again. Peary Marshall tells the story of how they once had a seminar relating to Tolkien and Spirituality. They had four different titles for the seminar. To find out which one is the best, they ran the titles on Google Adwords. They didn't have a landing page and just had the Ad redirect to a Tolkien Fan site. Based on the tests they were able to determine the title which received the most clicks. They ran that Seminar title and it was quite successful.

  
  

• Along with testing, you should always measure the results and keep improving. What is a test if you didn't record and document the results? There is simply no way for you to know how you are performing if you don't look at your analytic data. Look at it and learn from it. In this past week my top visits for jozzua.com were to articles on Philippine restaurants. In fact, my most popular web page this week was the article on eat-all-you-can places in Metro Manila. My guess is that people were gearing up for their Valentine dates. I had this validated when my next top post was a piece on where to take your sweetheart on Valentines. Knowing this, I can now create more Philippine Valentine Articles, right?
• Marketing is still about building relationships. People are bombarded with information on the Internet and they have to weed out which ones they like. If you seriously form an engaging and honest relationship with your target market, they will trust you. When they do, they will buy from you. That's the whole idea behind email marketing. You shouldn't send your client's spam. Send them something real and useful. They will remember you for it.
• Marketing is a continuous learning process. You simply can't say that I've done this and this works for me forever. For instance, web popups used to generate a lot of leads for businesses. People became eventually annoyed with it and used popup blockers and filters and this technique lost it's strength. Knowing this, these marketing ideas may actually change by next year. I don't know. I'll just have to keep learning.

If you want to start a web business, get a hold of these basic truths and figure out how to implement for you.