Archive for August, 2005

Web site marketing work is like scaffolding. You can skip it, but every effort you undertake after that will require much more effort. Savings are an illusion.

As anyone in the construction trade will tell you, scaffolding is essential. It costs time and money to erect, rent or buy, and disassemble. But once it is properly placed, everything else goes smoothly.

You can do a better job of painting, installing, removing, etc. on the 2nd floor. Not being able to justify SEO work is a bit like trying to work on a 2-story house without the budget for scaffolding. Everything else gets harder. You must work twice or three times as hard to do any task. It’s less safe, it wears down your staff, and makes you late for your goals.

It’s really hard to figure out the best way to package SEO, and I’m open to any feedback others might have. Right now, hourly makes sense. I’d love to find useful packages, but there are so many differences between clients and it might be an unacceptable compromise.

Learned something enormously important for Clicktracks Pro users who are trying to track “goal pages” which are the “thank you” pages of forms submitted using Frontpage Web Components.

Clicktracks can’t see the thank you page. So a good way to handle this is to set up an inline frame on the site (tiny ok) that leads to a semaphore page, which Clicktracks can see. I use a little “information sent” status message inside the frame. Then I set Clicktracks to look at the semaphore page rather than the frontpage form success page.

If anyone has another idea, let me know [other than dumping Frontpage, which most of you will probably say]

Aggg… it’s maddening. Everything about the Adwords interface is creeping, it seems to be getting worse from day to day. Page changes take a minute (I’m on a T1 line)… please Google, help us - we’re trying to get work done here!

Embracing the web in a proactive way is critical to success. It’s not possible to just sit back and let a website do the work. You have to get involved. So get out there and mingle. Learn how to blog. Build your web business by word of mouth. Search Engines can only go so far.

Lots of folks ready to do re-design work all of a sudden… Exciting to be working on eagles.org and looking in to some other adwords campaigns.

I just finished my latest article for Business Lexington “The bloggers will see you now” and the research for it helped me to remember why I’m in this business - it’s exciting and ever-changing! I wanted to interview bloggers from Lexington, but had a real hard time getting in touch with any. I will try on the next article.

Last time, I wrote about email policies and etiquette in “Watson, Come Here, My in-box is full” This article was easy to write - I had every idea already in my head.

Just started “The Tipping Point” having just read “Blink” - looking forward to it.

This was one of those days when you crank hard the entire day and before you know it, it’s 6:00 and you start trying to figure out where the time went.

Well some things did happen today worth mentioning. Ask Jeeves fired up its pay-per-click site this afternoon.

I learned that if you advertise on Miva and Yahoo! Search Marketing together, your Miva listings will get near zero clicks b/c the affiliates won’t list a given site twice - and Miva has large overlap with the others. Mystery solved on why my entire Miva campaign went through ZERO clicks this weekend… Yahoo! SM was sucking them up!

I also wrote some javascript to help with landing page tracking - filling in a referrer and landing page for lead forms for my client. My tracking URLs give me what I want, but this way the leads they get have a little bit of “history” themselves. Who knows, we may be able to target lead packages based on their last few pages viewed.

Working through custom reports on Webtrends. I’m fine with creating them, but getting them to show properly for all users has proven a pain.

Well, finally - my blog looks like the rest of my site!