I wanted to share a thoughtful article I read this morning by Sam Hickmann on his blog SamHickmann.

In the article, Sam shows us that ideas, strategy and even enthusiasm must be weighted against current priorities or suffer “running on a treadmill” that never ends.  He goes further to say, ”What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a “nice to have” by morning”. And “nice to have” isn’t worth putting everything else on hold.”which is something which we all struggle with everyday as business people.

Maybe there should be a new advertising channel to be addressed by IAB, “Business ADHD” or “Cocktail keenness” to allow for businesses to better approach what is ‘cool to have’ as opposed to ‘can not live without.

For more simple and thoughtful perspectives, please feel free to visit Sam’s blog.

Thanks Sam!

As i am about to head to my second year at SXSW, I have decided to put together a few posts which will give you a different experience as well as possibly provide you with an opportunity to find all that is odd with SXSW.

To truly enjoy or at least properly experience SXSW, it is critical to identify key things which will ensure your success.  This can be in the way of good walking shoes, drinking water or even making sure to know where to charge your various tech tools.

Adam Kleinberg’s panel on “7 Reasons Your Employees Hate You”

ReadWriteWeb’ “My 5 Must-See SXSW Panels – What Are Yours?”

Scrib’s “20 Tips To Know Before headed to SXSW”

Let me know what panels you are attending or parties.  That said, if you are looking for a epic SXSW party list, please feel free to subscribe to my Plancast:

http://plancast.com/jaidecker

So if you are in town and want to meet up, please feel free to ping me.  I will be joining a couple of our clients like Context Optional and Flipboard, but there will be pleanty of time to meet and chat with new people.

Here is an interesting article from the New York Times what talks about how Google is working to “devalue” sites which tend to be only “content farms” like eHow and others.  However, as this is good for use users, but it does not bode well for small affiliate sites as they may be considered “content farms”.

Google is also doing this as a result of large companies who use affiliate marketing to help resell their products.  What happens is that these resellers who utilize affiliate marketing to generate revenue (resellers) from the larger companies are starting to compete with the larger companies for search engine rankings, keywords and placement rankings.  This is due to the resellers using paid search(SEM) to generate lots of traffic and as an added benefit it also increase their website’s over all page rankings.

Example: Expedia uses an affiliate provider Commission Junction to push their white label ticket buying service to small travel sites like LowFairs.com to resell Expedia’s tickets for a fee.  However, as companies like LowFairs are able to use over 75% of their revenue on paid advertising their page rankings increase to a point where they are pushing Expedia out of the top natural search spots.

As you might not know, Google prices their paid search based on several factors, but the most key is a website Quality Score.  The higher the Quality Score, the cheaper the paid search, however is goes the other way as well.  Now with the Quality Score reduction for small resellers, Google will be charging more for the same advertising the resellers were previously were buying.  Thus Google will get a HUGE increase in revenue.

Your website’s conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to sales on your site.  Knowing your website’s conversion rate is the cornerstone of your business as it determines successes of your marketing initiatives, website and landing pages.

If you find that your website’s sales to visitor rates are falling below expectations, it is important to identify the problem quickly. The problem may not necessarily be the look or feel of the site, but by uncovering issues the site’s over all performance will benefit.

To work out your conversion rate, divide the number of monthly sales on your site by the number of monthly visitors to your site, then multiply by 100 to get the percentage. Good conversion rates tend to hover between 1% and 3%. If your conversion rate is much lower than 1%, or 1 in 100 visitors making a purchase, then there is room for improvement!

How to increase your conversion rate

There are many factors that can influence a website’s conversion rate. Look at your site design, sales copy, usability, and shopping cart abandon rate.  After reviewing your website’s performance data work out the areas that should be improved. Then, when you have made the changes, monitor your website performance rate — with dedication, testing and monitoring your analytics, you will see your conversion rate improve.

It helps to think of your website’s sales process as a funnel. Visitors enter the funnel at the top (say, the homepage). Each step in the sales process (homepage, product page, shopping cart, checkout) moves shoppers further down the funnel until they pop out of the end (the sale). Shoppers can abandon the sale at any stage in the funnel, so look at each stage in turn and see how you can improve its conversion rate.

Here is a list of data from a recent publication from the folks at  Royal PingDom‘s 2010 publication regarding a breakout why 2010 was important. This data can used in a deck to illustrate the landscape of several markets, technologies and users in the US. With this data, you can them extrapolate % of users and non-users and compare it to your company’s ownership. by this, you are then able to set a benchmark for growth, improvement and optimization.

• There were 255 million websites as of December 2010

• There were 2 billion videos watched each day on YouTube

• As of June 30, there were very nearly 2 billion Internet users

(266.2 million – Internet users in North America)

• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010

• 107 trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2010

• There were 1.88 billion email users worldwide

• There were 152 million blogs on the Internet (as tracked by
• BlogPulse)

• 64% of Americans shopped online over the holidays

During my many years working with clients, professionals and prospects within digital marketing there is a common question which seems to be never be thoroughly answered.

What are the benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

To better illustrate the benefits of SEO, I will break it out into bullets points.  This way you can see how SEO not only pays for itself in a short period of time, but also provides compounded benefits which help a company’s overall profit and performance opportunities.

• High ROI

Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, SEO brings you a higher Return On your Investment than any comparable form of marketing.

• Reduces Search Engine Marketing (PPC / SEM)Costs

Before initiating a SEM campaign, search engines will rank and qualify your PPC landing pages and website based on the keywords you are bidding on.  If your site receives a low quality score, the campaign CPC can penalize upwards of 30 to 60%

• Tracking and Measuring Performance

By utilizing website analytics, companies are able to weigh traffic, marketing initiatives and demographic information to make informed business decisions.

• Long Term Search Engine Positioning

Once in place, a properly designed and optimized website will retain long term rankings /positioning within all major search engines well beyond that of any PPC generated rankings.

• Reach Targeted Traffic / Searchers

SEO increases not only the volume but the quality of searchers to your website who are actively searching for your service or product.

• SEO Doesn’t Sleep

As opposed to PPC where time, Geotargeting and budget affect the reach of a campaign, SEO is always on and works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days every year.

• Increase Brand Visibility

SEO is not targeted to just the US, but is able to be reached by anyone, anywhere in the world.

• Increased Conversions / Sales

SEO increases sales of your product and service by providing influential content at the right time to push the searcher into a customer.

• Website Listing

All major search engines list, rank and qualify your site based what is called a Quality Score.  By optimizing your website, search engines will be able to properly list all aspect of your site

• More Cost-Effective

Due to its inexpensive costs and long last opportunity, SEO is among the most cost-effective ways of marketing to-date

• Increased User Interactivity

By providing concise content which is relevant to the keywords that the searcher is looking for, the opportunity for the searcher to stay on site is greatly increased and therefore so it opportunity.

• Cross-Browser technology Compatibility

A properly optimized site will be able to identify, track and customize itself based on the browser, device and language it is being requested from.

• Navigable by the Engines

Properly optimized, all links should function correctly and all pages should be accessible to the engines, thus making your site easy for the engines to index and correctly categories.

In a recent artical by comScore’s Linda Abraham, she says is that ADVERTISING is no longer a great way to generate the click.  Essentially, that 3% of all users represent 62% of all clicks and there needs to be new ways of measuring and capturing sucsess.

If you ask Matt Drudge, (Drudge Report) who generates approximately 600 million clicks PER DAY, he will tell you that clicks are a tremendous metric of engagement. It is just that he is using CONTENT to generate these 600 million clicks a day. He generates more clicks than he does page views daily.

I have no doubt in my mind that the day will come when folks in the media business start understanding what business we are in. If we are in the business of engaging audiences, then let’s give them what they want to engage with; content. Instead, we move around the edges of a solution. There is nothing wrong with the click as a currency. But it is “easier” to change the currency than understanding what business we are really in.

So the question is, “How do you measure success, beyond that of a click?”

http://paidcontent.org/files/uploads/DLD_2011_Linda_Abraham.pdf

Well, it is 2011 and i want to know what iPad apps you cant live without in 2010.

The reason why i am asking if that i am recently, I am seeing more and more apps are either location based technology or consolidating existing services or content.  Also, do you look for apps that are listed in the Apple App Store or do you do a bit of research via external sources?

If you like you can break them out into categories for those of you are a bit OCD.  Try this:

• Games
• Social
• Navigation
• Entertainment
• Music

So let me know whats on your mind and iPad

With over 35 million subscribers and counting, GroupOn targets local businesses to provide its members daily deals and just might be the fastest growing internet company ever. In a mere two years the company has sold 18mm coupons in 35 countries with less than 3,000 staff which mostly consists of sales.

As you remember, earlier this month, Groupon rejected a buyout offer from Google reported to be worth about $6bn. There are also rumors that the founder and chief executive, Andrew Mason, is looking into floating the company on the Nasdaq. Mason confirmed via Twitter a few weeks back that the company was looking for new funds. “Groupon is in the process of completing a new round of financing – we’ll let everyone know when there’s more to announce,” he Tweeted.

I’m a big believer in the potential of Groupon (and many other similar opportunities), but at some point soon they are going to have to allow more flexibility in offers.

That way GroupOn works is that 50% off requirements with the balance being split between the advertiser and Groupon means that the advertiser is selling their product/service for 25% of the normal value. I believe a lot of the initial advertisers have had the “shiny metal object” affect here and have jumped in without understanding the true cost/return.

Of course with a lower offer, the revenue for Groupon goes down as well, but sometime soon there’s going to need to be a shift in the balance. Most businesses can’t afford to sell anything for 25% of their normal rates, even with the promise of bringing in new customers who will become loyal. Like any coupon offer, Groupon attracts the discount focused buyer, who tends to have lower brand allegiance. They also do a pretty good job of bringing in your regular customers taking advantage of a discount offer they didn’t need to make a sale.

If businesses don’t need to give away as much of their profits and Groupon can make the revenue they need on less, there will be success. But if they stay true to the metrics now, I don’t see it making it in the long haul.

So here is a couple of things for you to think about:
If Groupon raises $950m, it would be the largest equity financing since Pixar, but with this purchase, could they just buy their way into new markets? Would impending partnerships like CitySearch & Yelp be a problem in their future? What about Google’s attempt to enter into the coupon market?