Come for the Ride…

At the most recent meeting of the Atlanta Gang of 5, the subject of marketing using SEO/SEM came up.  Like most conversations about SEM, the discussion went something like this:

Person 1: I spent $$$$ testing Adwords but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.  It drove some sales, but it didn’t really pay out so we stopped it after X weeks (or months).

Person 2: I also spent $$$ testing Adwords.  It worked but I think I need to hire someone to do it for me cause I’m sure it could be doing better.

Person 3: (Nodding)  We dropped $$$$$$ into Adwords but it really feels like a full time job monitoring it. I wish we had the resources to do it but we don’t.

As someone who used to manage pay-per-click campaigns for various brands, it makes me cringe a little to hear entrepreneurs dive in head first without checking to see if there’s water in the pool.  However, they really can’t be blamed because sometimes large brands do the same thing - the only difference is they have more budget and therefore, more room for error.

Confession: I’ve even done the same… throwing some money in the pool just to see how things would run without properly setting up all the metrics.

The truth is most business owners test Pay-Per-Click to check one thing - Will this drive me more traffic? The answer to this question is a 100% YES! Just like any other marketing tactic, if you throw any money at it, expect to see a lift in traffic through that medium.  However, if that’s the extent of your test, most of you will feel a little empty inside even after getting the answer you want.  After all, it’s similar to playing the slots - will this machine pay me if I put in some money?  Eventually yes…

So how do you REALLY test PPC marketing and when should you hire external help?

With so many things that can be tested and refined in a PPC campaign, if you are new to SEM and can not optimize your campaign in at least 10 ways (seriously, that’s 10), you should probably outsource your campaign creation and let them run the show for at least 2-3 months until the campaign is somewhat optimized.  At that point, if the contract is in your favor, you can hopefully keep the campaign and the work and continue running it on auto pilot for a few months until it needs to be tweaked again.

The reason I would recommend this technique is because most entrepreneurs take risks and many dive into PPC without being properly trained in it. (Let’s face it, it’s what we do.)  Unfortunately, this means throwing money away at an unoptimized campaign and giving up on the whole thing weeks or months later when the ROI doesn’t work out.

Pay-Per-Click can be great at helping you make money!  In fact, the only reason it’s popular IS because it has helped so many mom and pop shops reach the right audience amongst the masses on the internet.  If you’re still not convinced at hiring a professional is the right thing to do (at least for the setup), my next post will highlight some of the things you should look out for when setting up PPC campaigns.

I’ve read a multitude of blogs out there in the last day about how people were incredibly disappointed in what was actually shown at the 2008 WWDC yesterday. Whereas I can understand the disappointment for things like dual cameras for conferencing on the phone, I also understand that most wireless networks do not yet have the infrastructure to handle this sort of bandwidth. Let’s say you start selling 5-10MM more iPhones around the world and these people start to take advantage of this feature on a daily basis, whereas in the US we might be able to ramp up the necessary bandwidth, I hardly believe Denmark, Malta, Peru or Madagascar could handle this out of the box. Out of the box, everything works is Apple’s bread and butter. They understand that people will suffer with a few less features for a user experience not plagued with slow of buggy features (the Windows Mobile Task Manager is a perfect example of the sort of hack Apple has a knack for avoiding).

With all that said, what was shown was absolutely mind blowing. The developers who demoed their products simply blew me out of the water. I recall developing games in Microsoft’s MFC development environment in high school and simply being stonewalled at the obscurity and limiting nature of a development environment. I then look at a combination of what’s in the SDK (I downloaded it shortly after watching the Keynote video) and what was shown and I’m almost ready to delve into trying to create an iPhone app TODAY. The 3D game shown was nothing short of astonishing. The music app, Band, sold me when they got to the “Blues Music Keyboard” and seeing all the Modality Apps made me want to become a doctor. It may sound dumb to you, but this device is more than Apple’s next big money making scheme, this device really can enable the dreams of others (to quote Randy Pausch) by allowing greater flexibility in their day to day life. From presenting information never available to the public in such a rich manner (again, Modality apps) to keeping track of all your information in a centralized location with no fear of losing the data (MobileMe) to sharing your life  and everyday adventures with the easy of taking pictures and blogging through the iPhone 3G, I’m floored and almost ready to be one of the idiots in line on day one for these phones.

This phone is right now for the bleeding edge customer. The power user. We know what we’re doing and we use all features of the iPhone on a daily basis. However, the average user like my Mom, my Dad, my Fiancee and my Brother are simply going to be overwhelmed by a phone with many more features than it has. Apple is slowly allowing people to test and try the iPhone and get used to a PDA that works for the average person. Society as a whole is still getting used to the mobile enabled citizen and if they’re going to release a product that lives up to what we expect from Apple (ie. Perfection), they’re going to need more time to ensure that both the product works flawlessly and people are able to use this in such a way that their cited 90% satisfaction rate isn’t tarnished.

But that’s just my take on it, and though I always want more, I also want time to learn some of these features from a developer’s perspective before some more of these great jumps in mobile awesomeness.

This past Monday I attended Startup Riot as an observer. We had originally signed up to pitch but I dropped out last minute due to us not really needing anything. We’re still refining our business to try and rise above the noise so whatever we had wanted to pitch weeks ago would have been outdated by the time the event started.

Overall, the event was great. The venue was easy to find, it was clear to navigate inside and it had a really nice, modern feel to it. I did manage to do some networking and passed some cards out but probably not as much as I would have liked being that I didn’t present.

Being that so many people already wrote nice things about the event, I figured I’ll chime in with some suggestions for next year’s event.

1. Plugs/Sockets! - I know it’s rude to want to play on your laptop and pass notes via backnoise in the background while presenters are speaking, but if both of the above are allowed, then there really should have been more sockets and extension cords on the sides to help make it easy for laptop owners.

2. More Booths - The sponsors got some great exposure from demoing their services at the booths. For the startups that presented, it would have been nice if there were some room carved out for them on the side of the ballroom where they can go stand, demo their product and help answer questions after the pitch. A lot of presenters told the audience they could find them after the presentation to chat - but it was hard to find them all at times. (Maybe startups who wants an elaborate booth could pay for it.)

3. More Job Seekers - I spotted a ton of entrepreneurs, co-founding members and investors. However, besides for Paul who dressed the part, I really couldn’t tell who else was a student or a job seeker. Maybe they could wear a different color name tag?

4. Group the Presentations by Common Elements - 55 companies is a lot of pitches to go through. Even though there were ample breaks in between each group, you could tell by the increasingly harsh comments in the back channel that some people stopped paying attention near the end of the day. If the pitches were grouped by some common element, investors or job seekers would only need to really focus on certain groupings and relax and network during the others.

5. Company Name on Name Labels - While there was probably a great reason why this was omitted, presenting companies should at least have them on their name tag.

With that said, I’m looking forward to next year’s event. Atlanta needs more events like this.

Most of the companies I’ve consulted for had sick budgets that allowed them to buy traffic.  While these techniques are great for them to build an audience and establish a barrier to entry, they don’t do so well for bootstrap startups and/or startups that do not have extensive experience with interactive marketing.

Since KillerStartups was a major fail, and this past week was green week, I’ve decided to run our second test on building organic traffic.  (See what I did there?)

In the world of SEO, in addition white hat, black hat techniques; good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, and tons of other duals, there’s the school of broad and generic terms vs. specific and long tail terms.  While the phrase used cars is the most generic and most popular search term in the automotive industry, chances are a new site no matter how great will not be able to get the top spots for that phrase without some leg work.

Since that phrase will ultimately be one of the primary traffic drivers for organic search - we are setting that as the long term goal.  For the short term, we are focusing on building long tail terms and allowing search stragglers to find us that way.

To do this test, I went to Compete.com to see how users are searching in the automotive space and adopted some pretty broad search rules to be applied to our pages.  Users on the web for the most part are either searching for used cars or they’re searching for specific models close to their area (e.g. nissan pathfinder 98057) To adapt to the search patterns, we changed our URLs, title tags, meta keyword and description tags to match these broad search patterns.

The upgrades were done this past week so I will check back with this in about 2-3 weeks after the engines come back to see if our website gets indexed more.  Right now, we have about 1430 pages indexed on Google which is good but not great.  More to come…

Entrepreneurship sure is getting easier these days. Years ago, it seemed like my only option to network with local entrepreneurs were schoolmates or Chamber of Commerce events. Yeah, I was young and honestly a bit turned off by the official sounding of “chamber of commerce” so I never went to those.

Well, luckily these days, tons of options are now available for like-minded people meet. In addition to local meetup groups, a new networking thing just popped up called Startup Drinks.

You go. You network. You help each other out.

Sounds easy enough… now who’s going to make a complex app to track all of this?