Well, you won’t learn how from me, but I will be presenting a short diddy about how to measure your blog’s success.

My good friend, Trey Langford, from Building Credibility, is putting on an event with one of Treasure Valley’s New Media moguls, Justin Foster.  Justin is co-founder of Tricycle.  Cost is $10 and the event will be 9:00am to 11:00am on February 7th.  You can get details and pay online at http://www.buildingcredibility.com/Blog_Like_a_Rock_Star.

Anyway, you should definitely come and learn from a pro, and get some pointers on how to know when you got it right :-).

Valitics Internet Marketing is excited to announce our partnership with the fantastic website design firm, Westslope Design.  This partnership has been brewing for awhile now (J  at Westslope designed the Valitics.com and AskValitics.com websites :-).

I could say a million nice things about the guys at Westslope, but the fact that we have formed a partnership should be evidence of my regard for their work.  We have worked with a lot of fantastic designers over the years, and we will continue to work with them.  However, we formed a partnership with Westslope because of our common vision and complementary product offerings.

For all of our customers and potential customers this is very exciting news.   Valitics will now be offering services that we were not able to offer before.  For example, now you can get website design, content management systems, and managed email campaigns (to name a few).  The bonus is that these services will come with Valitics’ reporting, which means you will know what the campaigns are doing for your bottom line.

Check back for more information on this development.  We will be updating our websites with the expanded products and services.

So, you want to optimize your website to create the perfect customer experience?  Well, that is a reasonable expectation if you have a million years to achieve it.  The trick word is “perfect,” right?  Right.

Optimizing a site assumes there is an “optimal,” not a perfect existence.  This is mainly due to conflicting needs.  Last time I wrote about writing for the right crowd, which is complicated when you have several target markets.  Today, I am saying you have to pick the optimal existence, is your site 80% focused on sales and 20% focused on servicing current clients?  Or, is there some other mix?  An optimal mix will support your web strategy and business goals.

Many folks get discouraged when they focus on conversion rates and traffic volumes go down, or they focus on getting paid search impressions and bounce rate goes up.  Your goals, like your audiences, will often conflict, particularly when you have limited resources.  So what should you do?  Pick a strategy mix and test it out.

If your goal is increase your brand recognition, you can bet your website’s overall profitability (ROI) will go down.  It is a fact of life.  Now, in the long term we may expect to reap rewards from our efforts today, which is what branding is all about.  So, with the conflicting goals at hand you just have to pick a mix that you are comfortable with and GO. (more…)

There is much debate in our industry about usability, findability, functionality, and a hundred other ilities.  The debates typically stem from looking at the same problem from a different perspective, and the things we love to argue about are usually easily settled.  There is a solution, and I will share it with you here!

Identify WHO the site is for.

This is the first critical step, whether you come from marketing, IT, development, design, data analysis, management, etc. In every discipline you need a clear picture of who the site is for. I recommend defining your audience, getting a picture of someone in that specific audience and hanging by your computer screen (not even joking).

One of the local boise “findability” companies (Cendesic) bases their value proposition on helping Jane Thompson meet you.  It is a novel concept and ultimately, assuming you have a reasonable business model, should be a primary goal of your company’s marketing efforts (not just web).  If you aren’t convinced yet, take a look at Web Trends’ website.  Same principle of knowing your market, but in this case Web Trends is saying:  You are found, now get to know Claire. (more…)

I keep getting interrupted before I can get this really important note out:

Tanya Vaughan reported on her visit to PubCon this year.  Since I mentioned it earlier, I thought you might enjoy the other half of the story.

I haven’t heard of anyone else attending (from around town anyway); we would all love to hear if you attended any of the “big” conferences this year and what you thought….

As for people outside of Boise, here are two additional reports on PubCon:

• Matt Cutts – Keynote Speaker, Google Guy, and a presence inseparable from search engine optimization
• Rand Fishkin – SEOMoz, Brilliant Search Guy, and links to lots of cool PubCon resources

Not a comprehensive list by any stretch, but these are the “better” of the MANY I read so you won’t have to.

Oh, Merry Christmas!

So this is a little slower than I had hoped, but as promised here are the slides from our presentation (in a handy PDF):  Internet Marketing Slides. 

 Okay, so these are not exactly the slides I promised, but they are essentially the same.  After the SBDC presentation Marc and I were invited to teach two of the “capstone” GB450 courses at Boise State University.  These are those slides — essentially the same though.

Key points from the presentation were basic trends in online marketing — I particularly love the example Tim Kopp shared at a Web Trends conference I attended, regarding Diet Coke and Mentos.  It is an amazing example of the movement in marketing from a highly controlled message to transparency.

Basically, the concept is that with many mediums we can control our message very carefully, and the success equation is a function of reach and frequency.  On the web, as with word-of-mouth marketing, the equation changes significantly.  Product quality, customer service, and the other very important business stuff is taking the starring role of the “marketing message” and it will be your customers, partners, and market mavens that extend it.

So, the moral is, people will see you for what you are and the word will get around — so be great :-).

This Friday, Marc and I are going to be presenting the very broad topic of “Internet Marketing” to some of the smartest business people in Idaho. In preparation for that presentation I am creating slides (I will upload them later so you can take a peak) and deciding how to approach such a huge undertaking — we only have an hour. So far the basic outline looks something like this:

1. Industry Trends
2. Top Ten Internet Marketing Mistakes (this is a lot of fun)
3. The Proven Process for Continuous Improvement
4. Overview of a Few Select Online Marketing Tools
5. Resources for Learning to Use the Tools

(more…)

I am relieved to be done with the very constrictive set of posts giving a waterfront view of website optimization. Now, we can get into the good stuff. What is the good stuff you might ask.

Well, my first stab at the good stuff is with regard to “getting a new website.” I am anxiously anticipating the upcoming posts by an acquaintance of mine at our local grassroots marketing firm. Turns out Sam Swenson, the Blueline web guy, is writing some great stuff about pricing new websites. It is fun and very insightful to get a developer’s view on the industry.

The part that is not surprising, but still frustrating is his absolutely correct answer to the question, “how much should a new website cost?” The answer we all expect and hate — It DEPENDS. Oh, those web developers are just trying to get as much as they can from us right? Wrong. It really does depend. Sam is going into a fair amount of detail about why it depends, and giving you a bit of an idea of what to expect when you go looking.

(more…)

Today I setup the Question and Answers page instead of writing a post. Visit it, ask a question, and get an answer.

So, this is the first “official” Valitics blog post.  According to all of my Web 2.0 Guru friends (Tac Anderson, Justin Beller, Brian Packer, and Justin Foster) around the valley the first post is always the hardest.

 I think the hardest part for me is trying to explain why a web-centric company like ours has taken our sweet time getting this together.  Well, we have been so busy refining our products/services for our customers and reading other web genius blogs that we haven’t written in our own.

We always tell our clients that, “writing relevant content in your blog will help your findability and can validate you as a expert in your field, but beware, you have to write well and write often.”  Up until now Valitics could not commit to writing often.

Okay, our first post is official.  I have attempted to explain why this is the first, and now on to more important matters :-).