The Real Bruce

Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Advertising, Blogging, Pay Per Click, Interactive Strategy, Email Marketing, the list can go on and on. These days it seems everyone has a new area of expertise for generating traffic to your site, or your social networks.

While I believe in almost all of these Internet Marketing Strategies, I often wonder when do we talk about your Corporate Internet Marketing, or you Social Media Strategy, why do so many Internet Marketing companies fail to talk about the most important piece to the puzzle, CONVERSION.

Sure I can drive thousands of visitors to your site. I have used Google’s pay per click service with great success. I have seen companies drive a 100,000 visitors a month to their site using this service. I worked with one company in particular who would spend over $40,000 per month, just to generate traffic. Believe me, it does work.

However, when I asked this company the percentage of visitors they converted on their marketing objective they had no idea. After further review, we discovered it was less than 1%. I may not be a rocket scientist, but that seems like a waste of money. What about CONVERSION?

I now see all these companies who claim they are a Social Media Agency. I even saw a proposal that promised to increase the number of fans a company had on Facebook, and to increase their Twitter followers. Again, this is not a bad thing, but what about CONVERSION?

You need to have a Web Business Strategy for how you are going to convert your traffic to be customers or clients. You need to give them multiple opportunities to execute your objective, and you need to make it so straightforward your visitors have no doubt what you want them to do on your site.

As you make your plan, think about the typical grocery store. Where do they put all of everyday items like milk, eggs, meat, etc? Yep, you are correct in the back of the store. Do you think they have a strategy behind that. Absolutely. They are trying to convert their business objective, and to get you to purchase, look at, smell, and sample, other items on your way to the things you really need. They are all about CONVERSION.

As you look at this blog post you may notice small buttons, or self promotional ads all over the page. Do you thing that we just put them there for design purposes? Absolutely not, we have an objective in mind. We blog to get you to our site. We want to get you to our site to tell you more about Internet marketing and what we do as a Internet Marketing Agency in Indianapolis Indiana. We hope you find the information helpful and also candidly we want you to talk to us more and ultimately become your trusted business partner.

So before you spend next years advertising budget with Google, take a few moments to think about what you will do when you drive traffic to your site. Google may be great at driving traffic, but what about CONVERSION?

As part of Fusework Studios Internet marketing initiative we have been blogging as a team for over a month now, trying to improve our search engine results as well as educate our current or potential partners.

Being the president, of course, I feel I need to set a good example and blog something each and every day. I mean I am “old guy” (at least that is what my staff says) when it comes to Internet marketing with over 15 years of experience in web based strategy. However as I logged in to my blogging software today, my mind went totally blank.

Wow. What am I supposed to do. I am one of the biggest blogging evangelists at our company, I try to offer this service to everyone of our clients. I tell everyone how easy it is to do and how it only takes a few minutes to make a post, but today my mind won’t think of anything.

I begin running through the usual topics in my head. Social media, how to retain customers, search engine optimization, or website strategy. I could speak on any of these topics for hours on a normal day, but today I am completely blank.

I decided to just start typing and something would come to me. I would look at my keywords and I am sure the thoughts would just flow, but they still didn’t.

Next I went to my usual sites for inspiration, digg.com, slashdot.org, and a bunch of the Internet marketing sites I read on a daily basis. Still nothing.

Finally, just when I had give up hope, I received an email, and BAM there it was, a topic. One of my clients had asked me a question via email. It was a question I get asked a lot. Is also one that is a perfect topic for a CEO blogging about Internet marketing.

So now I have my topic. In my next post you will see what it was, but for now, think about what a valuable tool this could be for you and your blog. Instead of answering a similar question over and over again to multiple people via email, type the answer once in a blog entry. Anytime you get the question you can simply send the link along with a simple, “Check out my blog, it has a lot of great answers to questions like yours.” Now you have not only answered the question, but that visitor may subscribe to your blog and you can then interact with them daily.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go see Jerry Seinfeld perform. Before the show I wanted to get some more information about his tour, and what his routine is about now. What I discovered is that “the master of his domain” does not own a domain at all or have any Internet marketing strategy of any kind. This got me thinking, does the most successful comedian of all time really need to have a Website strategy?

Seinfeld seems to be a perfect fit for today’s social media and marketing trend. He makes short observations that his audience finds hilarious. Wouldn’t that be perfect for something like…Twitter? It is what Twitter was made for. If he used it properly he could be one of the most followed people around.

Facebook was my next stop. Of course I found a multitude of Seinfeld pages, but all of them were run by fans and not by the comedian himself. Why would Jerry not want to allow his fans to follow him and see what he is up to on a daily basis?

While attending the show I got a few of my answers. Seinfeld doesn’t really like the connected world we live in. He seemed to understand texting, but confessed he doesn’t do it. He knew about iPhones, but explained he just wants a basic phone and still uses one from years ago. Its no wonder then he doesn’t understand Social media advertising or the Internet Marketing Benefits.

After the show I asked myself this question, “In today’s social media world, if someone like Seinfeld doesn’t get on board, will he become a forgotten star sooner than those who do.” Will kids today remember Dane Cook, because they can download his material on iTunes? Will Seinfeld reruns be over taken by reruns of The Office, because that show has embraced social media advertising?

I guess time will tell. I could go on and on, but yada, yada, yada, I need to get to work.

Post your feedback on this, I would love to hear what you think.