My internet experience dates back to 1995 while I was with AT&T’s HR Information Systems Organization.  I had been handling AT&T’s medical claims information system and I proposed using a corporate intranet to deliver summary level reports to executives and decision makers.  HRISO had implemented Peoplesoft (before it had a web interface) to support its 150,000 employees (worldwide).  We had a “research group” that, in my opinion, spent more time playing with the web over 2 years versus developing practical uses.  I was 34.  I was impatient.  I wanted to do something that meant something.  I was also too direct sometimes…well, often.  I will never forget that day while sitting in yet another fantasy discussion about the internet with decision makers when these words jumped out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to block them:  “Are we just going to talk about this forever, or are we going to do it?”  Deafening  silence.  Uh-oh.

I went back to my office looking for available boxes to start packing up my stuff – certain that my AT&T days were numbered.  My boss came by my office the next day and surprisingly said, “We’re done talking about it.  You are in charge of developing a self-service model for all AT&T employees to use.”  I think this was management’s way of saying, “Put your money where your mouth is”.  They called me on it and now I had to walk the talk.  I was allowed to assemble what I still believe may have been the most awesome technical team ever (except of course, the current Beacon Team) and within 6 months we launched AT&T’s Employee Services Website.  It served ~150K employees worldwide.  It was ahead of its time.  It allowed employees to manage their own personal data, view their paystub online, access standard forms (vs printed versions that may have been in their desks for years), utilize online FAQs, contact the HR Help Desk and much more – all with a single, secure login & password (distribution of which was a very difficult component of this project).  Yeah, yeah…this is no big deal nowadays, but in the mid-90’s, it was cutting edge.   I was dubbed “Father of AT&T’s Intranet”, but it wasn’t me – it was an entire team that made this happen very quickly.  This team included John Scaramuzzo who has been my partner here at Beacon since we started over 13 years ago.  He handled the infrastructure, which in itself, required a mammoth effort.  There’s no one better than John to be at the helm of Beacon’s state-of-the-art web hosting services.  People forget that a website is worthless if its hosting infrastructure is poor and not dependable.  No news is good news for his team.  Our data center has been humming along now for 13 years.

Enough about me and John.  That’s really not the point of this post.  It’s more about my excitement about the mix of people in this terrific team we have here at Beacon as we head into 2011.  I have noticed a new energy in Beacon, one that reminds me of my days at AT&T in the mid-90’s when I “stirred the pot” or “rocked the boat” or “pushed the envelope” or whatever cliché works best for you.  Whether it’s creative social media marketing campaigns, new conversion optimization tools & techniques, unique technical solutions for content management, migration to virtual dedicated hosting solutions, utilization of cool aspdotnetstorefront plugins or the start of our new offering of IAPPS, Bridgeline Digital’s fully integrated platform for content management, ecommerce, marketing and analytics – the folks here at Beacon seem to always be thinking about how to take everything to the next level.  That’s how progress is made.

I’m not a big fan of clichés, but I’ve been hearing this a lot lately… “That’s a Good Problem to Have.”  I’m not so sure that there is ever a “good” problem, but there are certainly varying severity levels.  It’s busy at Beacon – busier than I can remember since Beacon opened 12 years ago.  Busy is good.  Managing it is the challenge – certainly not a problem.  To give you an idea, here’s what’s going on…

• Sep 8:  Moderated NCTA’s Emerging Technologies & Trends Breakfast in Greensboro
• Sep 13-14:  Four (4) of us attended the Hannon Hill Cascade Server User Conference in Atlanta, Brad & I spoke at one of the sessions on Sep 13.
• Sep 14-17:  Brad & I attended the Google Analytics Certified Partners Conference in Mt. View CA.
• Oct 6:  We announced our partnership with Bridgeline Digital, read more.
• Oct 13-14:  A Beacon contingent traveled to Boston to meet with two of our clients, The Princeton Review (web marketing strategic planning) and Framingham State University (Cascade Server CMS training).
• Oct 20:  Google staff will visit Beacon to collaborate on Adwords campaign strategies for several of our clients.
• Many new faces – Trained five (5) new employees since August 1; Nine (9) new employees in 2010 with four (4) open jobs still to be filled ASAP!
• Everyone continues to post great information to our blog regularly – showcasing the talent and personality of Beacon.  133 posts this year – so far!
• Several large scale projects (web marketing, web development, consulting, hosting) are in progress, just starting or wrapping up with Winston-Salem State University (NC), Apex Analytix (NC), Biscuitville (NC), Georgia Tech (GA), The Princeton Review (MA), Bassett Furniture (VA), Basin Electric (ND), Burton & Burton (GA), Los Alamos National Labs (NM), Servigistics (GA), University of Houston (TX), Framingham State University (MA), University of Hartford (CT), G-Force (Sealy), Pines International (KS)– to name a few.

Yeah, it’s busy and some may say this is a “good problem”.  As I see it, it’s more of a testament to the talented and dedicated people here at Beacon.

I’m trying to be clever and match my daughter’s use of acronyms.  Yeah, I made it up.  But the first thing that came to my mind was “Wow!  What a Week!” as I sit here on the plane retracing my steps back from San Fran to Atlanta to Greensboro.

FIRST STOP:  Cascade Server Conference (Atlanta)

Four of us (John Scaramuzzo, Justin Klingman, Brad Henry and myself) jumped in a car on Sunday to head to the first stop, Hannon Hill’s Annual Cascade Server Conference in Atlanta.  Those guys really know how to do it.  They put us up w/ great accommodations, provided great information about their current products and got everyone excited about some cool features they have planned for the coming year.  Since many of our clients use Cascade Server, we had the opportunity to chat with some of them that attended the conference (like Silverpop, Los Alamos Labs, Rollins College, University of Hartford).  The Cascade Server CMS product remains strong and well supported as David Cummings, their CEO/President reminded us that Cascade Server has now been out for 7 years and has over 200 clients  (primarily in the Higher Ed vertical).  Pretty amazing for a small company!  It’s interesting to note that Beacon is one of the few Partners that have attended every annual user conference.

Brad Henry and I presented right after lunch – Web Marketing Tactics w/ Cascade Server. (I will provide a link to the video once it’s available).  Brad was certainly the headliner after I gave a quick overview of Beacon.  As always, Brad shared valuable SEO tactics with the audience – tactics that they could take back, apply and make an immediate impact.  However, the highlight was the results of two SEO Audits that Brad provided live for current Cascade Server customers that were in attendance – Auburn University and Health Network System.  He provided very specific advice on areas that can be improved along with confirming areas that were setup well for SEO.  Of course this sparked a nice Q&A session during the last 10 minutes of the presentation.

I also had the pleasure of having lunch with David Klanac, Hannon Hill’s COO, which gave us time to discuss growing our partnership over the coming year to further improve their products and continue providing services to Cascade Server customers.

NEXT STOP:  Google Analytics Certified Partners Conference (Mt. View, CA)

Our presentation ended around 2:30 and Brad & I were off to the airport to catch a flight to San Fran for the Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP) Conference in Mountain View.  This is Beacon’s FOURTH year of attending this conference and as always, it started off with a bang as Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, delivered another captivating keynote address pointing out that GA is a critical tool in supporting the business decision process, but not the only one.  The real key…the real way for consultants to make money w/ GA is NOT to “puke” data back to clients, but to truly partner with clients.  Roll your sleeves up.  Show ROI.  Develop strategies to grow online conversions and identify the right key performance indicators to clearly show VALUE!  I encourage you to check out Avinash on YouTube or at www.kaushik.net.

We heard from many of Google’s engineers, product managers and marketing staff.  Even more importantly, with ~260 attendees and over 190 GACPs worldwide now, the folks at Google LISTENED to us – about issues we were having with the product, clients, marketing, etc. During one session, we actually lined up and presented desired features and/or changes and the entire group voted on whether each should be a high, medium or low priority.  There are several new development projects underway that will change the landscape further.  Our NDA with Google prevents me from providing any details.  However, I will say the Google Team seems more enthusiastic than ever and they certainly have embraced the GACPs.  The first conference had ~15 attendees; the second, ~30 (which I attended) and now, to see nearly 200 partners is truly amazing.  Momentum is growing.  2011 will see more major advances in GA.

On the personal side, I had to take in a Giants-Dodgers game.  AT&T Park is awesome.  Nothing like sitting in a ballpark next to the bay with a hot dog and a cold one.  It was a blast hearing the packed house chant “Beat LA!  Beat LA!” as the Giants won 2-1.

LAST STOP:  Home…which there is no place like!

Another crafty approach to scare smaller businesses into spending money.

Here’s another email message that uses statistics and link to charts to influence the reader.  This approach banks on people being gullible and too lazy to validate the claims.  This is an email that I received quite a while back, but I was saving it so I could vent about it later.

I clicked on the “Your Listings” page to see what was really going on.  This page is designed to support the vendor that owns this site.  At first glance, it makes you say, “Hey, I’m not doing well!”  But let’s peel back the onion here before we panic.  Bassett sells home furniture.  If you were looking to buy furniture, where would you search?  How would you search and what would you search on?

I would bet that MOST people would go to Google and type in “furniture store” or “furniture store fairview heights IL” or something more specific, like “dining room furniture”, depending on how granular of a search they wanted (most people nowadays use 3+ keywords in a search).  So, WHERE IS GOOGLE in this list?

Note that Bassett has visibility in all the ones mentioned.  The only difference is that some have reviews posted and some have paid for higher placement within the respective channel.  More importantly, keep in mind that usage of these marketing channels and directories are so minimal compared to search engines that for the most part, it’s really sufficient to simply be listed.

Also note that the visibility for the website is very high.

Now look at the keywords.  Here’s where I have a real problem.  Bassett is NOT a furniture liquidator.  It does NOT sell gemstones, stereos, precious metals, vcrs, antique furniture, nor are they a warehousing service or a pawnbroker.  These aren’t even close.  From a statistical standpoint, THIS MAKES THE ENTIRE REPORT pretty much WORTHLESS.

Now, let’s check Google (click image below).  Nice.  Out of 180,000 results, they show up in Google Local (1^st page) and are ranked #3 (1^st page) for “Furniture Store2 Fairview Heights IL”.  Lots of real estate on this MOST important page.  For good measure, I checked “furniture Fairview Heights IL” which returned the following (click image below).  A search on “dining room furniture fairview heights IL” displayed Bassett on page 1 and I easily found Bassett in the superpages.com link.

Beware Promises of First Page Rankings!

Email like the one below really gets under my skin.  Read this the email as “You could earn $1 Million Dollars in  30 days!”.  There is no silver bullet; otherwise, Google would lose all of its integrity as the leader in this area.  There are 3 ways to get you on the first page of Google:

#1 – Paid Sponsor Ad (paying top dollar for ad positioning)

#2 – Organic ranking for an irrelevant key phrase (one that no one searches on and doesn’t produce revenue)

#3 – Work hard to do all the things necessary to rank well for high performing key phrases.  This includes having patience and continuous tuning.

This email is a real load of crap.  Used Car Sales will be this sender’s next job.  His email address doesn’t match the URL that he’s promoting.  Warning!

I would challenge this person to get me a first page listing for “internet marketing” (for a reasonable price) and if he accomplishes it within 3-14 days, I will be his biggest fan!  It’s not easy and it won’t happen overnight and I guarantee it won’t be cheap.  We’ve been doing this for 12 years – BUT we rank well in Google for “eCommerce Development” and for “website development”… a couple of very competitive key phrases.  Not bad, considering there are 10.8M and 193M competitors for each of these key phrases, respectively.  For “web marketing, we are ranked #1 locally and for NC-related “web marketing” seraches…and still working on a higher national ranking.

Check back on Friday for the last post for this series.

Creative & Tricky Approach.  This one was quite tricky… Why?  …because I really was hopeful that it would be legitimate and mean something.  However, if I go back to my “what’s the catch” or “this is too easy” mentality, then I begin to smell a rat.  I did a lot of research on this and found many, many posts around the internet that confirmed that this is a pseudo-scam.  Very clever to make companies think that they are “ranked” as one of the “best” of anything.  Get me to put a “best of” seal on my website that links back to theirs.  Then guess what, they build up tons of inbound links, raising the authority of their site in the eyes of Google!  I found many, many websites that took the bait and not only posted the seal, but also issued press releases.  Oh, and while the “best” companies are being sucked into this scam, they tell them that they can get higher rankings by providing more information and possibly advertising on their website!  Now they can generate revenue through ads and possibly sell their contact information to list farms.  I asked myself (not out loud of course), “Why did they pick Beacon?”  “What was the criteria?”  No one ever called me.  I never filled out any applications to be named “Best of”.  Certainly, they didn’t decide one day, “Hey, let’s do some research on Beacon Technologies, comparing their web development services with others [somehow] and rank them!”  It was probably more like, “Let’s send this canned letter and see if Beacon’s management bites on this, makes a big deal about it and provides links to our website!”.

Regardless, I believe we are one of the best, but I would prefer that we be deemed such by much more legitimate criteria.

…continued 

“Professional Blogging” – Be Careful.   Yes, there are theories about blogging having a positive effective on organic search results, but I’m a big fan of “doing things for the right reasons”.  Otherwise, it will catch up with you.  I’m not opposed to having industry experts post on a blog that aren’t necessarily part of the company, but it has to be managed well and provide real value.  Building up what we call the “footprint” (relevant content) under your website certainly provides more information to the major search engines when they crawl your website and should improve your organic positioning…if it is done right.

Collect Email Addresses…the right way.  Use your website, social media and other channels to collect email information legitimately.  Make this a goal of your website by setting up goals and tracking accordingly in Google Analytics.

…stay tuned for chapter 3 on Monday!

Over the last few months, I’ve been collecting email from companies and individuals who are peddling web marketing services.  I get bombarded with these types of email messages daily as I’m sure you do.  Our Barracuda spam filter is very good, but some still sneak through – so I can only imagine how many are actually being sent out by these web marketing wannabes with their snake oil that’s guaranteed to work wonders.  To make matters worse, if you are peddling web marketing services, why are they landing in my email box?  We are a competitor!  This is what we do, which tells me they are just spamming businesses!

So I figure it’s fair game for me to push back – in my own “subtle” way – on some of these annoying, time-wasting attempts to take money from unsuspecting business owners.

They use scare tactics.  They overwhelm you with jargon and sales talk.  They make it seem like you are really LOSING because your website cannot be found.  They make it seem so easy and make it sound like they have a magic wand.  The truth of the matter is this.  Yes, there are small things (low-cost) and big things (high cost) that you can do to improve the visibility of your website on the internet, but to get the most for your money, it requires knowledge across all the major marketing channels, analytical skills to put your money where it will get you the best results for YOUR SPECIFIC business and technical expertise to deliver your brand/message and products effectively.  Of course, web marketing isn’t about “Let’s throw this out there and hope it works”.  It’s about creating & executing a strategy that targets your prospective customers effectively, testing on a small scale (maybe in a specific geographic area), measuring results, tuning the strategy, then expanding the efforts and repeating the process.  Always, ALWAYS demand a report to show at the very minimum:  traffic, conversions and return on investment.

I met with the CFO of a company just this morning that said, “I’m paying $75 per month for SEO and I have no idea whether it’s doing anything.  I don’t receive any reports or communications from my vendor.”  A billion things ran through my mind, but I took a deep breath before I spoke and simply made two points:  “First, you can’t manage what you can’t measure – so demand regular reporting from your vendor.  Secondly, if you are only paying $75 per month for SEO, you are wasting your money.”

I know everyone gets email solicitations regularly for web marketing services.  Our customers share them with us and as I said above, we get them directly.  I thought it would be fun to look at several of these – and of course, comment on them.   I have 4 more “chapters” to this blog that I plan to post over the next week.  I’m starting out with a couple of really lame solicitations, but be sure to check out future chapters to this multi-post as they get much more interesting and tricky.

“Promote Your Online Store” (See Below).  Get Serious!  This was sent to the email address of our website maintenance group from “quangtrungserver.com”.  But at the end, it says to contact an email address for “bizarre designs”.  Sounds like a real legit web marketing business, huh?  Secondly, after reading THEIR poor marketing pitch, why would anyone WANT them to market their business in any way whatsoever?  Then at the very end it says, “Note: Though this is not an automated email, we are sending these emails [What??? Are there more?]  to all those people [What???]  whom we find eligible of using our services[Lucky me!]. To unsubscribe from future mails (i.e., to ensure that we do not contact you again for this matter), please send a blank email with NO as Subject.”   Wow.  I guess there are some businesses out there that bite on stuff like this; otherwise there wouldn’t be email like this floating around out there.

How bad is this one?  Enough said.

Math Quiz Time! A red car leaves the Beacon offices exactly 5 minutes ahead of a blue car. Both cars are the same make and model. They each travel exactly 750 miles at exactly the same speed and take the exact same route and only stop to fill up with gas, which takes exactly 15 minutes each time. First one to arrive wins $100K. Which one arrives first?

Answer: The blue car wins by 10 minutes. Why? Because I’m driving it.

The real reason is because the blue car performs better. It gets better gas mileage and only needs to fill up once during the trip.  The winner is the driver that gets the best return on his investment in gas (fewer fill-ups).

Similarly, there are now many good websites, promoting the same products/services and investing in web marketing.  So how do you win?  Perform better.  Make your website & web marketing dollars work effectively for you.  Have an expert mechanic look under the hood – a web marketing specialist.  Some people choose to avoid getting such help. Maybe it’s similar to my wife telling me to go to the doctor when I’m sick and me responding, “Nah, I’ll just fight through it!” For your website, one thing’s certain – avoiding expert input perpetuates lost opportunity and lost revenue. I have never heard anyone say, “Well, I’ve gotten all I can get out of my website!” You can always get more. I’m sure many of you have been to conferences and seen real-time assessments of websites by web marketing experts, usually SEO gurus. It takes some real courage to put your site issues out there for everyone in the audience to see and hear. Yet everyone in attendance learns how to get more visits, conversions, revenue and activity. Keep in mind…They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have problems of their own!

So what if you could get a reliable assessment of your business’s web marketing situation? How do you stack up against your competitors in terms of rankings, visitors, key phrases? Are you ahead or behind your competition in the social media channels (Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, etc.)? What would an expert see under the hood of your Google Adwords or other PPC accounts? And most importantly, is Google Analytics doing everything it can to support your web marketing decisions? It’s really all about improving performance.

Beacon does this every day and we love it. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little geeky. Quite bluntly, our job is to help our customers win (“make more money”). It either happens or it doesn’t. There’s no hiding. Recently, a prospective client asked me, “What happens if Beacon doesn’t deliver?” My response was, “We get fired, which damages our credibility and our future.” Every successful entity knows its strengths and weaknesses – then builds a strategy accordingly. If you are an NFL fan, you know that every team works all week preparing for Sunday. What are they doing? Improving on their strengths. Shoring up their weaknesses. Evaluating their opponent’s strengths & weaknesses. Strategizing to win!

Sometimes I go on and on about the staff here at Beacon, but I was sitting in a conference call yesterday with a very large, international corporation, listening to a readout of the Google Analytics & Web Marketing Assessment that we had just completed for them. I was absolutely blown away. Our client was too, particularly with how thorough the report and recommendations were. A week of analysis & research produced a 13-page roadmap for this client that WILL change their business. It was filled with detailed, client-specific recommendations – NOT canned SEO or PPC best practices.

1. Among the many, many factors required for a good SEO strategy, we
2. Examined all their domains - recommending optimal utilzation
3. Identified duplicate content issues & provided instructions to address them
4. Provided guidance & detailed instructions for improving meta data
5. Provided recommendations to improve navigational structure and coding
6. Reworked the HTML and XML sitemaps
7. Provided specific guidance for using their CMS-generated Robots.txt file
8. Conducted key phrase research and subsequent density checks which produced specific instructions on how to improve content pages
9. Evaluated the Site Search tool to identify strengths & weaknesses
10. Evaluated internal & external linking structure

The majority of the assessment focused on Google Analytics. The roadmap documented our findings, recommendations and even snippets of code to apply. In several cases, we went ahead and updated Google Analytics to improve tracking and reporting while we were doing the evaluation. Remember, this is a group of inter-related domains, not a single domain, with thousands of web pages. This comprehensive Assessment evaluated

1. Profiles (Raw, Mobile, Subdomains)
2. Tracking Code Utilization
3. Goals & Funnels (across domains, Downloads, Registrations, Forms, etc)
4. Site Search Tracking/Configuration
5. URL Builder (provided detailed instructions for better campaign tracking)
6. Reporting
7. Advanced Statistics (Event Tracking, Heatmaps/Site Overlay)
8. Advanced Segments (setup Adwords Visitor Navigation)
9. Microsite Tracking
10. Annotations (applied appropriately to document changes that can be referenced to understand differences in statistics going forward)

And last, a full Competitive Analysis was performed against our client’s top 6 competitors across 33 different areas (including the social media networks, which I highly recommend).

At the end of the call, I was thinking “Wow” because we (Beacon) had just provided a wealth of valuable information to this new client – a wealth of information that would make an immediate, long-lasting impact on how they were going to invest their time and money going forward. There was a short silence on the other end of the phone – you know, that brief, but seemingly eternal dead air time that makes you worry somewhat. But they soon jumped in and said what I was thinking, “Wow, that was extremely thorough and great information – exactly what we were looking for.” However, the best part was hearing them say, “OK, how can Beacon help us make it happen?” Now the fun starts!

I’ve been a sports freak nearly all my life – as a player, coach and fan.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that success is dependent on three main things:  hard work, skill level and most of all, teamwork.  We’ve all heard the sayings “There’s no ‘I’ in TEAM” and “You win as a team and you lose as a team.”  Yes, there are “stars” (highly skilled players) on every team, but all the members of the team have to contribute to be successful.  Watch a pass play unfold during a football game from above  (where you can’t see their numbers or faces) as the receivers run their routes, the linemen execute their blocks, the backfield blocks or  slips out into the flat and the quarterback reads the defense to hopefully make the best choice for his team to advance.  Or watch a baseball game from high above (again, the names and faces don’t matter) as a ball is hit to the gap and you will see EVERY player take action with players backing up each other, lining up for a relay and communicating during the play.  To me, it’s a work of art that requires commitment from every team member.

In the business world, it’s no different.  Success is dependent on the same 3 things and I was so thrilled to see it “live” during a meeting this past Friday.  I know.  I know.  “Thrilled” during a meeting?  What?  If I was Jim Gaffigan (the comedian), I would now mutter under my breath, “This guy’s sick”.  Anyway, our Web Marketing Team has grown quickly over the last few years and as a result, we’ve carefully brought in some tremendous marketing and technology talent to take great care of Beacon’s clients, many of which are extremely high profile with high expectations.  When we started the web marketing business unit here at Beacon over 10 years ago, it was primarily search engine optimization (organic) with a single specialist assigned to our clients.  Once we got to a point where we had enough SEO clients to justify adding more staff, I quickly realized that the overall knowledge base of the team grew exponentially because they could bounce ideas off each other, discuss techniques and essentially, provide significantly more value to our client base.

Like in any competitive arena, players have a choice:  They can play for themselves or they can play for the team.  But guess what, our clients’ success and Beacon’s success requires teamwork.  I’ve seen way too many “one-person shops” that just can’t compete and their clients truly have “all their eggs in one basket” (I hate clichés, but this works here!).  Can a one-man shop seriously stay current and provide expertise in all the critical areas – SEO, PPC, social media marketing (SMM), Google Analytics, eMail, Shopping Engines, Google Website Optimizer, and many other areas?  It’s essentially evolving into a model that is very similar to an IT Development Team – requiring varying areas of expertise. Beacon’s clients get a team of experts – a team that works hard and shares information to win the marketing battles that occur on the internet.

This leads me back to this “thrilling meeting”…

So I’m sitting at the end of our board room table and the entire web marketing team is in attendance.  Every Friday morning, we come together to discuss 2-3 of our clients in depth from a marketing, technical and business standpoint.  Collectively, we look at their website.  We look at their pay-per-click ads.  We look at their key phrases and SEO results.  We dig deep into Google Analytics and review Google Website Optimizer testing results.  We talk about what’s working and what isn’t.  We brainstorm for new ideas.  We share alternative approaches, new techniques and the latest industry information.  Well, at last Friday’s meeting it dawned on me that it’s like a surgical team (or, for the sports theme, maybe it’s more like a “chalk talk”).  This group is totally focused as a TEAM, not as individuals, for the sole purpose of providing the best results for our clients.  It was truly amazing to see this group of bona fide experts working together to make a good thing even better – much like watching that pass play or handling that ball hit to the gap.  I’m looking forward to next Friday’s meeting!