Have Clear Economic Targets– Determine how aggressively or how conservatively you should be advertising and stick to your numbers. Before throwing more money at generating traffic, make sure your pages have high conversion rates.

Shift Dollars Into The Strongest Channel–This may mean moving money into organic search. It may mean moving it into pay-per-click—or another medium! Now isn’t the time to maintain historic channel budget allocation simply because “we’ve always done it that way.”

Revisit Your Overall Marketing Strategy–Make sure that web site content and keywords reflect current market place conditions. Ensure that best practices are in place. For example, this might be a time that there are increased brand searches, as well as price/value messages.

Protect Your Bottom-Line–Don’t let revenue targets established a year ago drive decisions you’re making now.

Review Strategic Objectives–This might be the time for short-term ROI campaigns versus branding tactics.

Use Niche Marketing Tactics to Cut Costs: Focus Search Geographically–Instead of using search to build a broad national customer base, focus on local geographic areas (towns and cities) that are the highest concentration of your business sector. For example, Google local search emphasizes the nearest geographic center of the city. So, if you are a business that services the entire city, and your actual address isn’t relevant to your customers, then using a P.O. box near the the center of town is likely to improve SEO rankings. This strategy is not advised for restaurants or boutiques– businesses where physical proximity matters to its customers.

Maintain Search Presence–Targeted campaigns, even at highly reduced spending levels, are better than stopping SEO efforts, which are maximized over time.

Stay Calm–The American entrepreneurial spirit will prevail.

“Human” communication is also important when writing your SEO content. Think about it. What is the desired result of your marketing campaign? To communicate your message to other humans who will buy from you.

Nasty, keyword stuffed prose just won’t accomplish your desired outcome. Traffic is important, sales feeds your babies. So no matter where you plan to put content, make sure it is human readable.

Not only do you avoid being blocked by corporate firewalls because someone else sharing the same IP is a porn site, you also get a quicker trust factor from the search engines. Trust is important because until you are trusted, you remain low in the rankings no matter what you do.

Another piece of advice to build your domain’s trust: always make sure your registration has over a year before it expires. Google thinks spammers are cheap and lazy – only registering domains for a year and on shared IP accounts.

The process of creativity intrigues me. I have made a study of it. I get very passionate about creative problem solving. And what I find fascinating is that many people, if not most people, are afraid to go into the dimly lit world where creativity awaits. I am not alone in this observation. David White, a creativity consultant, observes in his book “The Heart Aroused” that in the ancient poem Beowulf, a stag about to run into a deep lake, instead prefers to stand and die. The fear of the deep, dark waters was more intimidating than fear of death. He likens the edge of the lake to the edge of our fear.

I want to offer you assistance of myself and the other Corporate Performance Artists to face that edge. We have dove deep into the lake of creativity. In Art, Technology, and Business. And unlike Beowulf, who hides his sword, we do not hide the tools that make us successful. We help you learn and understand from what we accomplish.

While the pool of creativity from which we can offer services is large, I will give you some specific areas that we are immediately prepared to help:

• Search Engine Optimization – driving more targeted traffic to your web site.
• Custom Web Development – building web sites, ecommerce, and applications for the Internet
• Rich Internet Applications – creating state-of-the-art media and database applications for the web and desktop
• Business Development and Market Research - helping you plan your Internet Business
• Online Reputation Management and Fundraising – for non-profits raising their game.

We take on a very few client partners, preferring to give exclusivity with an appropriate reward. We are currently seeking to add another relationship. We are seeking fee based or revenue share relationships. Some equity opportunities might be accepted. We also seek to work with non-profits that want to increase their online fundraising.

Our track record includes: building major systems for Fortune 500 companies, helping launch a CAFM startup that was purchased by a larger company, raising several million for a dot-com that became profitable, creating the technology for a successful online retailer, and launching a print on demand solution. Currently we are helping a music and a media startup. We also have several SEO client partners doing very well.

We need another client partner. Are you wanting to dive deep into the pool? Give me a call at 646-334-1885.

Search professionals, myself included, aren’t surprised by these findings, but Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are still shaking their heads with genuine shock. The average CPG spends 1% or less of their total advertising dollars on search. They have a lot of work ahead of them to move their product websites up to first page rankings.

Earlier today I arbitrarily searched “gentle dish detergents” on behalf of everyone with detergent-abused hands and wondered if my personal favorite, Dawn, would show up. A few environmentally friendly dish detergents appeared in the top spots. Dawn dish detergent showed up in fifth and sixth positions, but it wasn’t the company site; it was epionions.com and a North Carolina woman who undertook her own study of which dish detergent did the best job of gently cleaning black, sticky oil off of birds. (Dawn won the test.) I stopped looking for the dawn-dish.com site after the fifth results page. Clearly, they have some work to do to improve their rankings for “gentle dish detergents.”

My wife told me to search “flake-proof mascara,” because she was curious to see if her favorite brand, L’Oreal, showed up. Sorry to say, it didn’t, and I stopped looking after the fifth results page. However, websites selling Paula Dorf’s mascara filled the top 10 positions, and Paula’s company site, pauladorf.com, had a respectable second page position. We had never heard of Paula Dorf before today, but now my wife is going to buy and try Paula’s mascara. Did L’Oreal just lose a customer to Paula? Very possibly.

It’s a very good thing that “The Digital Shelf” study hit the newsstands. Now CPG companies can see the tremendous, untapped potential of search for their consumer brands. Search will help them reach a much wider audience of people who aren’t just looking for coupons, but are genuinely looking for product information to make an intelligent buying decision. After all, there’s a lot more room on a website for compelling product information and demonstrations than there is in a 30-second TV commercial or a half-page magazine ad.

CPG companies are waking up to very good news. They are beginning to understand that “search is, indeed, synonymous with reach.” Search can reach the millions of potential customers who are hunting on line for their kind of products. Now all they have to do is increase their Internet budgets and watch the magic happen.

2007 FTC Workshop: Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology

The study is a joint project of ComScore, SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) Proctor and Gamble and Yahoo, and it’s creating quite a buzz online these days.

Entitled “The Digital Shelf: the Opportunity for Search Marketing in Consumer Packaged Goods,” the extensive study found out that the majority of American consumers visited at least one package-goods website during the first three months of 2007. Search was the driver of a good percentage of their visits.

Look at these numbers: Food products led the pack with nearly 44 million category site visitors from search. Baby products generated 15.7 million visitors; personal care products followed with 9.8 million and household products attracted 1.7 million visitors. Search created a significant percentage of those visits: 60% of visitors to baby product sites; 47% of visitors to food sites; 27% of visitors to personal care sites, and 23% of visitors to household products sites.

They’re not just clipping coupons

More fascinating statistics: The study also revealed that the majority of non-searchers and searchers weren’t just clipping electronic coupons (that activity accounted for 47% of non-searchers and 40% of searchers). The bigger numbers came from people seeking information and help about consumer products – 73% of searchers and 58% of non-searchers.

This is a pivotal report for all of us in the Search Engine Marketing profession. It proves that search is playing an ever-increasing role in how consumers make important buying decisions, whether it’s shopping for a mortgage or finding out how safe their baby foods are.

Not only is search bringing more traffic to CPG sites, that traffic is first-class. Searchers are predominately female, with higher incomes, better educated, and bigger spenders than non-search traffic.

The potential for search is tremendous for CPG companies who are now spending a mere sliver of their advertising budgets on search. It looks like search can reach the mass audiences these major conglomerates have been having such a hard time reaching in traditional, offline media.

“The Digital Shelf” study is huge for SEM professionals like me who have always known that search would become a ever-increasing part of people’s lives. Search helps make sense of our information-overloaded society and all of the choices we face. It helps us make better, faster decisions whether we are house hunting or shoe shopping.

Subject for our next article: “Bridging the CPG Search Gap.” Consumers are searching online for CPG products, but even their favorite products are hard to find.

This development doesn’t mean that link building no longer works; it just means that thoughtless, irrelevant link building won’t pass the test anymore. Relevant links from and to other sites are still a basic and important way search engines judge the value and trustworthiness of your website in the bigger context of the Internet community.

So the real question is: how do you build links in a way that generates valuable links in Google’s eyes? Here are a few guidelines that will get you started in the right direction:

1. Don’t build your links too fast because Google will see your activity as a large, red flag emblazoned with the word “SPAM.”
2. Build links with a relevant context in mind. If you have a pet supplies site, linking to sites that feature leash-free dog parks, pet charities, veterinarians, dog trainers, boarding facilities, animal shelters, pet shows and so forth, would be examples of relevant links.
3. Build links with high-quality, relevant sites. If you are a member of professional organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, link to their sites and ask them to list your website in your member information.
4. Rent links from a reputable link broker like www.text-link-ads.com. Top websites know their value in the link-building world and, like most things in life; you get what you pay for. If you don’t have the time to link build on your own, a broker is the perfect alternative.
5. Be an event sponsor for a charity that is close to your heart or a professional conference in your industry. Event sites always link back to their sponsors.

I hope I’ve helped you understand that link building as a search engine marketing strategy is in a new era now, and you have to do it the right way to reap the rewards.

As always, if you’re ready to power your site and improve your rankings with Search Engine Marketing, give Corporate Performance Artists a call, and we’ll show you some ways to get started.