SEO Review

Handset manufacturers and software providers are all champing at the bit in carving out market share for projected mobile apps sales to reach $17bn by 2012. The global appetite for mobile apps will explode over this decade, but what about mobile SEO?

What for many is glaringly obvious, mobile is set to become the primary access point of the internet in this coming decade. But where do we fit in?

In yet another encounter in the big tech wars, this time it’s Apple that titan Google is taking on. Over the past few months Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has debuted on a host of smartphones, which has riled Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs enough to tell his employees: “Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone.”

Taking this to heart, Apple this month sued Taiwan’s HTC Corp, the maker of touchscreen smartphones using Google software, accusing it of twenty hardware and software patents infringements related to the iPhone.

As if to make matters worse for Mr Jobs, a recent article in TechCrunch confirmed his fears: “I’ve been using the Nexus One with TMobile since mid-December as my primary mobile phone. This is the best Android-powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways. In this rapidly evolving market there is sure to be something better just around the corner. But if you are looking to buy a high-end smartphone right now, this is the phone for you.”

But what will come of this in a time some prematurely describe as the Year of Mobile? According to Jason Steinberg of ClickZ: “2010 is the year of mobile…Everyone in advertising and media has been hearing that statement for nearly three years running. And for the last two, it’s been followed up with a less than reassuring ‘and this time, we mean it’.”

To back that assessment up, the BBC reported: “…developer activity for the iPhone has risen 185% in advance of the iPad’s April arrival. Applications for the iPhone can be ported over to the new device. We have definitely seen a shift back to the iPhone with the anticipation of the iPad and a little bit of the disappointment with the Nexus 1 (Google phone), Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry Analystics told business site MarketWatch.com.”

Already, Google’s Android Marketplace has more than 30,000 apps made for smartphones running on its mobile operating system. Chetan Sharma Consulting told the BBC that the charging model which dominates the app ecosystem is changing. “Advertising and the sale of virtual goods has helped expand choices for developers and we will see all of that ramp up in the next couple of years.”

And, of course, the possibilities are enormous, with 270 million mobile subscribers in the US alone and with 29.1 million of them smartphone users. And in addition to the high numbers in the US, the majority of users in the developing world are going online for the first time using a this device.

As David B Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told the New York Times: “The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility…That has the potential to change the economics of the internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”

Like many in the industry, Google recognises that more and more people are accessing the web via mobile phones rather than the desktop and has openly stated that the Nexus One represents “the next frontier” in the company’s core business.

There can be no doubt that mobile marketing will play an increasingly important role in the overall marketing mix; from searching on the move to social networking, all platforms will become the new staple of internet search.

Although Apple’s recent legal action against HTC may have wider implications for all phone makers that use Google’s Android operating system, Ian Fogg of Forrester Research said that the case against HTC, in which Apple alleges infringement of 20 of its patents, could be the first of many.

But whatever the current legal wrangles, localized content is what search instantly delivers on these devices, so products or services will increasingly need to be related to a geographic area, if they don’t already, and sites should focus on the keyword phrases that identify the geographic scope of the business.

To emphasise this trend, Google Blog comments: “If you’re like us, you’re constantly looking for things in your neighbourhood, whether it’s [restaurants in zurich] or a new [dentist in houston]. If you specify your location in your query, we often show your results on a map…”

All very interesting, but where does all this leave mobile SEO when results from internet search and mobile internet search appear so indistinct at the moment?

John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

If you want to understand how to be successful online, study those who are already successful, and gain an understanding of “what they do” and “why they do what they do…” Then mirror their actions…

I have been very successful using Article Marketing to promote my online businesses, since early 2000…

I have written and distributed many articles that went on to generate sales in the five figures… But for the sake of the FTC, “Very few people will make this kind of money with Article Marketing…”

If you understand the “how and why” of writing great articles, perhaps you can generate more sales from your articles than I have from mine… But if you miss the point of this article, you are likely to never make any money at all with article marketing…

There Are Five Essential Elements of Successful Article Marketing:

1. Title – Many people suggest that you should put your top keywords at the front of your article title, but I don’t subscribe to that methodology. I do include my target keywords in the title, when I can, but an article that is well-optimized for the search engines is worthless if it does not get published… The #1 goal of your articles’ title is to get the article opened!! You must present a title that is going to get the attention of publishers and readers; you must present a title that is going to compel a person to at least open your article to see if they will want to read it…
2. Opening Paragraph – The title got your article opened, but now you need your reader to read the article… Tell your reader why they should keep reading your article and read it to its conclusion… Any reader who does not reach your website from your article is a “missed opportunity” to sell your stuff… Show people why it will be in their best interest to finish reading your article…
3. The Article Body – The article body must meet the promise of the Article Title and the opening paragraph… The article body must retain the interest of the reader to the last word… The article body must tell a story people want to read, and leave them wanting more… The article body must successfully carry the reader to your Author’s Resource Box… When finished reading, the reader must be happy to have read the article…
4. The Authors’ Resource Box – The Authors’ Resource Box needs to transition the reader from your article to your website, by offering a compelling call-to-action to get the reader to go to your website… Tell who you are, but don’t go overboard… People do not care who you are – they only care about what else you can do for them… Jeff Herring wrote a great article that elaborates a bit further on how to construct an effective Resource Box here (http://ezinearticles.com/?id=3624961)…
5. Your Landing Page – You should never try to sell your products or services in your Authors’ Resource Box. Instead, you should try to get the reader to your website, where you have an unlimited number of words, videos, pictures and testimonials to tell the real story of your products or services. Few vendors have the ability to sell a product or service in 500 characters, so you should use your Authors’ Resource Box to get the reader to your website, where you will do the real selling…

Tell A Story People Want To Read

Often, the difference between someone who will try to write an article for $5 and the professional writer who understands the value of his or her work can be defined simply…

The person writing an article for $5 will “beat around the bush” for five hundred words, without ever actually saying anything of any real value to anyone… The person who works for $5 an article is just putting words on a page so that he or she can be paid…

The person who demands $40 to $500 to write an article is a master of story-telling… He or she will tell a story that people will want to read, and therefore a story that publishers will want to publish…

The authors who tell a story that “people are happy to have read” will find their articles on more high-quality websites, and they will find more people visiting their websites, as a result of having read the article…

Words on a page only please search engines, but a story on a page will ALSO attract readers, visitors and paying customers to your website…

Interestingly, most online marketing gurus who advise hiring people to write $5 articles also fail to tell a truth — they fail to point out that articles that pass real link popularity to a website must have link popularity to pass on to your website…

People don’t link to articles that are nothing more than “words on a page”, but people will link to a story that needs telling… Just like with Jeff Herring’s article linked above; his story is worth sharing with you, and as a result, it has gained its own links from people who do not know Jeff personally… (I have never met Jeff Herring or talked to him by phone or email. It was an honest recommendation for a great article written by him.)

Jeff’s article has gained its own link popularity, by merit of it being a good story… As a result, Jeff’s article will pass real link popularity back to his website, because it has real value for readers and real link popularity to share…

Article Marketing Will Not Work For Everyone…

There are a great number of us who have made a lot of money with article marketing… Then there are thousands of others who have never made any money at all with article marketing…

When you want to find success with an online business, you should mirror those people who have been successful…

Article Marketing is no different… If you have ever visited a website or purchased a product, as a result of having read an article that mentioned the website or product, take another look at the article that drove you to action… Try to understand the “how” and “why” that article worked, and then try to figure out how you can duplicate the formula for yourself…

Chances are good that you will see my “Five Essential Elements of Successful Article Marketing” in those articles that you are reviewing…

Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for what I am telling you in this article… Whenever you find an article that moves you to visit the website shown in the Authors’ Resource Box, take another look at the article to see how closely it matches with the “Five Essential Elements” I shared with you in this article… You may be surprised by what you learn…

If you enjoyed this information, you will find that it just scratches the surface of what I have included in my article marketing ebook, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”, available for sale on my website, http://thephantomwriters.com/ My name is Bill Platt, and I have been involved in Article Marketing since early 2000. This article was excerpted in part, from the one shown here.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

I was on a call with a top copywriting expert yesterday who talked about the three words that will always make people give you their money.

It really made me think hard about the headlines I’d been using in my ads, email and even on twitter. This guy was talking about using curiosity as a driving force in your marketing.

Let’s name it curiosity marketing.

Before I give you the three words, let me explain a bit more about curiosity marketing, how people decide to buy things and how your headline and buyer keywords can tap into each step along the buyer’s decision making process.

Killer Headlines

For curiosity marketing to work really well, your headline is the one of the entry points into your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should mirror buyer decision-making processes, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

The headline needs to hit a number of buttons. It doesn’t always have to hit them all, so don’t make your headline needlessly complex. It needs to grab attention first and foremost.

If you were marketing on dog training, you might use a headline like “7 Free Tricks to Stop your Dog Barking”.

What makes this an effective ‘killer’ headline?

• Intrigue. The headline is kind of intriguing since you don’t say what those tricks are so people get curious and want to find out what those tricks are.
• Incentive. The information is “free”, which could remove one obstacle to someone taking a look. If you hook people up with a great deal, they like you and trust you more.
• A Solution. It offers a solution through use of the question “how” and the answer “tricks”.
• Tangible. The number ‘7? adds something tangible and definite about what you’re offering.
• Targeted. The headline is focused on one specific problem, undesirable dog barking, so people searching specifically for help with this one problem, will be highly targeted prospects.

If you were into dog training or were a dog owner searching for a solution to why your dog won’t stop barking, you’d probably click on this, right?

Thus the point of your title is what? To take your visitor to the next step, which is to click your ad, open your email, visit your blog post, read your article.

What you do after they get to your page or blog or whatever comes next in your sales funnel, is partly on how you satisfy the original curiosity and sell them on the next step. (It’s kind of funny to think how the marriage analogy would go in those terms!)

The Buying Decision Process

At this point, you are not expecting someone to buy straight out. People buy from someone they know, like and trust.

Would you ask your girlfriend to move in with you after one date? You’d wine and dine her a few times, and ask after the relationship has developed over time. So now when you pop the question … she may surprise you – your most wanted response!

In marketing, your most wanted response at the start of the buying process is simply that targeted prospects click on your ad, open your email or click the link you give in twitter.

OK, so that got me thinking about what would work in our industry – marketing to the home business opportunity seeker. I’ve always known the importance of researching your buyer keywords.

In other words, you have to identify what people who are looking for a home business are actually looking for … and then draw them in using curiosity.

Identifying Buyer Keywords

The killer keywords are always the starting point of course. What is it that people looking for a business opportunity might be searching for – what solution are they looking for? What’s the problem or situation they want to resolve? What’s their most wanted outcome?

I think it was Perry Marshall who said if someone is out shopping for a drill, they are not searching for a drill they want a hole.

If someone is out searching for dog training, they most probably have a specific and immediate problem they are trying to resolve, like “my dog keeps barking every time we leave him alone in a room and it’s driving us mad, not to mention the complaints from the neighbours!”

Your headline still needs to be relevant to your target audience, but curiosity marketing is about taking people to the next step. How can you entice someone to take the next action step in your sales funnel and ultimately towards a buying decision?

Creating Your Sales Funnel

One approach I have found works really well for creating your sales funnel is to mirror the decision-making processes in your buying chain. In my game, I try to identify probable steps that someone looking for a home business would take.

Once you are clear about what is your ‘most wanted response’ from them at each step, you should be able to more easily identify both headlines and buyer keywords according to where a person has got to in making a decision to buy.

The first step in the sales funnel is to get people INTO your sales funnel. And this is where curiosity marketing to a targeted audience can be really effective.

You’re at the top end of the sales funnel where there is the most competition usually so you’re ad or email has to stand out in the crowd – in the search engine advertising or email inbox.

Throw in an incentive on the back of a curious headline and your click rates will soar. Offer your visitors valuable information – the 7 free tricks – and use curiosity to sell them on taking the next step into your sales funnel.

This next step might be to give you their contact details in exchange for your newsletter and/or a free report so you continue to provide them with useful information. As a follow up, you could offer a low cost product like a training guide or video bootcamp or perhaps a basic subscription.

There’s no limit to the length of your sales funnel. People who have bought on one step are your prime prospects. They are buyers.

Upsell – offer them your next product or an upgrade or extra related product. They are now buyers who like your information or your products and trust its value to them.

A buyer is a buyer is a buyer – Not sure whose quote that is (maybe Russell Brunson told me).

So curiosity marketing is all about taking people to the next step in the buying chain.

My headline on this article (and I’ll tweet and email on this too cos it’s fun!)

What three words will always make people give you their money?

Question: Who would I target this one at?

Answer: People looking for buyer keywords, marketing strategies, conversion tactics, sales training.

Oh, and I guess you want to know what are the three words, yes?

STICK ‘EM UP!

Jay Allyson – Online Entrepreneur & Home Business Coach – GetRichLifestyle.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

We live in an age of clones: somebody makes a very profitable movie about vampires, and the next thing you know we’re all inundated with movies, television shows, books, blogs, websites, and every form of blood-sucking permutation you can imagine.

CSI begets CSI Miami, which begets CSI New York, which begets NCIS, which begets NCIS Los Angeles, which is just about as much as anyone can take. If something is successful, you can be sure more of the same will follow.

Despite the occasional success story, most clones either fail completely, or never live up to the success of their groundbreaking predecessors.

Most of the copycats fail because the clone-masters behind them don’t understand why the original worked, and as a consequence, they clone all the wrong elements. This is as true of commercial presentations as it is with broadcast programming.

Cloning a successful format is not the same as Slipstreaming. Clone marketing is just rote copying of technical elements without any reference to why the original worked, whereas Slipstream marketing takes a familiar idea and plays off it like a great jazz musician reinterprets an old standard.

Kleenex “Let It Out” Campaign: Recognizing The Emotional Value Proposition

What is more generic than facial tissue? A consumable paper product that you use once and discard; it is the very definition of a commodity, and as we all know commodity-sales are primarily based on price. Enter Kimberly Clark, one company that has managed to turn their commodity product into the industry standard to the extent that the commodity itself has become known by Kimberly Clark’s designated brand name – Kleenex.

The Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign is just one example of a company that recognizes that in order to turn their commodity product into something of higher value, they have to link it to what we refer to as “an emotional value proposition:” the implied psychological or emotional connection between the product and the consumer.

The original series of Web videos was housed on a dedicated video microsite. The series of videos showed a casually dressed interviewer with an engaging personality asking people to sit down on a couch in the middle of a busy street to chat about some significant emotional moment in their lives. Some people talked about their children; one woman even discussed Katrina and the impact it had on her. People cried, and people laughed, until tears came to their eyes, at which point, the interviewer handed each person a Kleenex: Kleenex and emotions go hand-in-hand. Let It Out, the concept was brilliant.

The following version was created for television; it is a compendium of clips from various videos, and as good as it is, it doesn’t have the same emotional power of the Web video versions that concentrated on each person’s emotional response to the interviewer’s questions. It’s good, but not as good, but it does serve to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the individual videos are no longer available.

Kleenex “Let It Out” TV Commercial

Everything in the commercial works: the interviewer’s manner and personality, the visual imagery of the couch in the street, and the memorable music message. It’s all good, very, very good.

On The Other Hand…

Rogers Communication Inc. is a large Canadian communication company that provides digital cable TV, high speed Internet, and mobile phone services. Their primary competition would be Bell Canada.

In order to promote their new Home Phone service Rogers initiated a series of commercials featuring a man on the street interviewing people passing by, asking them to compare their phone service to their competitors. They used a red and blue couch in the street with the red side of the couch representing Rogers and the blue side representing Bell. They handed each person a blue phone and asked them to call a friend or relative; then they handed the person a red phone representing Rogers, and asked them to call the same person. Then the interviewer asked them to compare the service, which according to the commercial was the same. The difference of course was in the price.

Anyone who has seen both campaigns could come to only one conclusion, and that is the Roger’s commercials were patterned after the Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign. Did it work? Take a look.

Rogers Home Phone Campaign

On a very superficial level, the commercials are eerily the same, both have a couch in the street, an interviewer, and a passerby; but on an emotional and psychological level, they are as far apart as you can get.

Kleenex tied the use of their product to people’s most personal feelings, their response to emotional reminiscence, while Rogers relied on price only. Their service isn’t better, it’s the same; it’s just cheaper so the ad says. The Kleenex interviewer is courteous, interested, and responsive, while the Rogers representative is glib, and a bit smarmy.

The Technique and Why It Worked

The Kleenex campaign works for all kinds of reasons, the most important of which is that it engages the audience with an intriguing visual presentation that resonates on a psychological level by providing an emotional value proposition associated with their brand. On the other hand, Roger’s value proposition is price.

You may say, price is important, but pricing tactics are a dangerous game. Competitors aren’t just going to sit back and let you drive them out of business. If you fire a price missile across your competitor’s bow, you can bet they’ll respond, and that’s exactly what Bell did.

Whoops!

By not understanding what Kleenex had done in their campaign, and not following Kleenex’s precedent by associating their brand with an emotionally resonant value proposition, they laid themselves wide open to a slipstreamed response by their competitors, who created a campaign that riffed on their imagery, and one-upped them with an alternate price comparison.

Rogers Advertisement

Bell Advertisement

Conclusion

If a commodity product like facial tissue can become a major brand by employing marketing strategies that emphasize their emotional value proposition, then so can your product or service. Delivering a marketing message based on it’s underlying emotional value is a better strategy than price and feature selling, a tactic guaranteed to be short-lived. Features are forever being added and prices are continually under competitive pressure, but emotional relevance is sustainable.

For many companies, it is very difficult for them to see the emotional value their offering brings to the table, but the conceptual basis of any effective marketing campaign starts with discovering that underlying human connection your product or service has with its audience.

About The Author

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design and marketing firm that specializes in Web-video Marketing Campaigns and Video Websites. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com, www.136words.com, and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.