Conducted by Sally Kavanaugh
Academy of Web Specialists
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07:04:05 sallyk Hi everyone - shall we get going then - any particular topics that anyone wants to talk about?
07:14:00 chezparis What other avenues of marketing, besides SEO ,do you recommend
07:14:23 sallyk ok, we can cover that generally.....
07:14:49 sallyk lets try and look at classified and ezines, which I admit are not my strongest point but..#
07:15:56 sallyk ezines, yes. Anything that get you (good) publicity on the net is going to help, I am not sure exactly if there are any link pop advantages, will look into that
07:16:41 sallyk classifieds, give me an example of the sort you are looking at
07:17:35 chezparis I am not sure what you mean by classifieds
07:17:58 sallyk neither am I which is why I asked for an example :)
07:18:25 chezparis I believe Journey mentioned them
07:19:00 sallyk he seems on the java again -
07:19:15 journey Trying to find my sites--Example, online sports mags, similar to sponsored banners, but small text links.
07:19:40 sallyk I see, I have my doubts about them.
07:20:01 sallyk The only ones I have used have provided nothing but then perhaps I didn't get good ones.
07:20:52 sallyk The bottom line must be that any incoming link paid or not is good if it is relevant and/or provides traffic.
07:21:24 sallyk If its relevant and well constructed, i.e. the link is on good keywords its going to help in the link pop stacks,,
07:21:35 sallyk and if it provides traffic that is good in its own right.
07:22:04 sallyk But I would recommend reviewing anything after say 3 months and removing it if it isn't paying its way
07:22:24 journey Thanks, compared to pay-per-click the ads are cheaper, just looking for more exposure
07:22:54 sallyk Can't hurt trying and if it provides the goods fine. Have you all seen Robin's article that has just come out in Market Position
07:23:15 sallyk Newsletter that has just come out on link popularity.
07:24:06 sallyk Building links is becoming even more important I think and in the long run is a very good investment - you don't have to pay per click its there for all time once its been set up
07:24:47 sallyk anyway - I read Robin's article this morning and its one I shall keep for reference. Do you all subscribe to Market Position
07:25:25 chezparis I do
07:25:40 journey Yes, good info
07:25:56 nachtman Yes, but haven't read
Robin's article
07:26:08 simone Yes, I do
07:26:31 sallyk ok, let's get more general and talk about a list of ways of promoting sites
07:27:03 sallyk First I'd say, its like all forms of advertising, its vital to look at things from an overall perspective
07:27:35 sallyk Make your SEO work help your offline advertising, make your stationery drive traffic to the site etc
07:28:17 sallyk I am not sure if we want to get involved in off line advertising, but its worth looking at all the various options for working online
07:28:42 sallyk 1 building links into the site - we have talked about this a bit,
07:29:02 sallyk 2 banner ads and text links we have also mentioned
07:29:07 sallyk AdWords
07:29:42 sallyk I like AdWords as a start to working on a site because you can get such a good idea of how your market thinks - what words and phrases it uses
07:30:06 sallyk 4 SEO, of course
07:30:35 sallyk 5 paid listings - can be expensive but at least things like Overture are easy to control.
07:31:07 sallyk I have just had my fingers a bit burnt by letting a couple of ads run on AdWords while I was away and they seem to have exceeded the daily budget
07:31:30 sallyk not sure yet whether the mistake is mine or Google's, probably mine but its worth being very careful!!
07:32:21 sallyk 6 obviously using the right keywords is very important, whether you are optimizing or bidding on AdWords or overture.
07:33:14 sallyk its worth thinking about the information you get from the net, info from an AdWords campaign and from your stats, and using this in off line promotion..
07:33:51 sallyk any comments anyone - other ideas?
07:34:27 chezparis What sort of budget do you have with Google AdWords, and what is your ROI
07:34:50 sallyk AdWords, I have found, varies amazingly...
07:35:48 sallyk Some campaigns run with bids of less than 30p. I am running one at the moment for accounting software and clicks are about £1.20 each.
07:36:31 sallyk I feel good when I get a click through rate approaching 10% though but not all achieve that.
07:36:52 sallyk What that means in terms of ROI comes onto usability, which I think I talked about last time.
07:37:18 sallyk No good getting lots of traffic if it doesn't do anything profitable
07:38:30 sallyk I think I might have said last time, the most successful campaign I ran produced 3000 clicks in a month from a baseline of about 100 a month, and they didn't make any noticeable extra sales ..
07:38:54 sallyk so I have done them a usability report and am hoping to get some extra work from them to improve things
07:41:26 chezparis How do you handle this with your clients? They are paying for those 3000 clicks with no extra sales...
07:41:31 sallyk I usually start with a budget on AdWords of £1 or £2 per day per ad group. That means I can see how things are going without spending a fortune. It also means I can see if there are any problems I hadn't though off
07:42:35 sallyk The client had a site that wasn't producing the goods. We set a budget and I produced the traffic. When that traffic didn't perform I was able to say - look I've got you the traffic there is something wrong with the way your
site is handling it.
07:44:14 sallyk The budget I think was about £300 ($450??) which is only the cost of a pretty small display ad in a trade and technical mag, it was just that the cost of the keywords was low so the results were quite impressive
07:45:01 sallyk Its very difficult to persuade a client that there is site is badly constructed if they are getting little traffic anyway.
07:45:38 sallyk Clients in that position just tend not to believe in the internet - and say it doesn't work in their market
07:45:41 chezparis Exactly
07:46:26 sallyk Its important with any advertising though to make sure the client understands that the advertising campaign can only produce the enquiries.
07:47:15 sallyk Sales must come from the company follow up - or in the case of the net, from a well constructed website. They are two completely separate processes.
07:48:49 sallyk How many of you have found the problem is not so much in traffic levels as usability once the traffic arrives
07:50:43 chezparis I haven't gotten there yet, but I am anticipating this very problem
07:51:09 sallyk are you looking after one particular site or working for clients
07:51:10 journey Several times-- clients say they need traffic, but they want conversions (sales and leads) and expect SEO to cover this too
07:52:14 sallyk Fine - offer to do a usability report, I find it very interesting to go through and see how the process to a successful visit can be improved
07:52:28 chezparis I have several clients site and one I will be doing myself shortly
07:53:28 sallyk What you said, journey, does raise one point I think. I have a real problem providing all the related services that are needed. A problem in terms of time.
07:53:46 sallyk Yes you need to provide SEO, but that means researching keywords..
07:53:50 chezparis What do you include in a usability report?
07:53:58 sallyk you need to build up links, very time consuming
07:54:07 sallyk you need to look at usability..
07:54:16 sallyk manage paid listings and AdWords
07:54:33 sallyk monitor traffic and I try an provide a monthly 'short traffic report'
07:55:10 sallyk In a usability report I go through the various scenarios that potential visitors might find
07:55:33 sallyk i.e., a visitor might be wanting to buy blue widgets..
07:55:50 sallyk one visitor might be looking on the site to see if it offers blue widgets..
07:56:11 sallyk another visitor might have clicked on an ad word for blue widgets so knows the site has them
07:56:58 sallyk I then follow through how many stages it takes for the various scenarios to buy the blue widget, how easy the stages are, is it obvious where to click etc
07:57:45 sallyk one problem I had was with the form on this site, all fields were required but that was not shown. So if you omitted to say how you had got tot the site, you were thrown back to the form without any reason being given.
07:58:30 sallyk Also, although the site was secure, it didn't say so and the secure pages were displayed inside the frameset of the site which again looked insecure although it wasn't
07:59:37 sallyk Its really just a question of following the process through and then if you can go wrong, going wrong - which comes naturally to me anyway.
08:00:20 sallyk Another area to look at is whether the site has the right sort of ambience.
08:00:54 sallyk To take an extreme example, a financial advice site wants to look very much more serious that one selling cartoons.
08:01:07 sallyk Anyway, times up - any questions before we go?
08:02:04 alanm What do you consider a good click to sale conversion rate?
08:02:14 journey Do you have a separate charge for this?
08:02:22 simone Can we see an example of a usability report?
08:03:12 sallyk A good sales conversion rate is difficult, depends on how competitive a field you are in.
08:04:00 sallyk I charge for my time, so I charge for optimizing or doing a usability report, its all the same daily rate.
08:05:04 sallyk I don't think my client would be very pleased if I published his usability report saying where he was going wrong!! Jakob Neilsen's site www.useit.com is a very good source of excellent, often comment sense information
08:05:19 sallyk sorry, common sense
08:06:02 sallyk thanks for coming everyone, see you all again soon I hope.

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