Big Lead Generation using a Small Budget.

Lead Generation on a small budget can be a very effective way to feed your business with profitable top-line revenue.

If I had a small B-to-B business, aside from having good personal referrals and leads, having an effective web marketing program would be next big marketing action I would take.

If you want to have a business website or blog that will give you genuine revenue generating leads, here are proven some ideas that can help give you a big presence on the web and let your business grow.


Content: Define Your Business Goals

Prioritize the most profitable bits of your business for which you want to generate leads. Really define the service or product niche you provide, in order to improve your chances of lead gen success. Then work on those high value/high reward areas first. Use 'long-tail' tactics to create category killers for search. Webpage content should be concise, precise and with an obvious call-to-action. Use more pages to better niche your services, products or solutions.


Make it Easy to Contact Your Business:

Place your Business phone number and email on each webpage, and a link to a web-form if you have one. Make contacting your business easy.


Target Organic Search:

Make sure you have a cluster of coordinated webpages on your website describing those products or services. Create a combination of SEO friendly pages and then more in-depth pages to help sell the qualified visitor to contact you. Then test for organic search ranking after a few weeks, adjust and continue testing and revising until you are on the first page up high in search engine rankings.


Exploit Sensible Paid Search:

This can be very inexpensive if you micro-target and avoid broad search terms. Set you daily budget. Limit the geography and language options. Use long-tail and narrow search-terms to start, you can expand as you see what your real spend is. Use negative search terms to filter out unwanted clicks.


Create Professional Blogs:

Create a few relevant blogs that people will want to read and bring value. LINK those blogs to your website, and cross-link back to the Blogs. You will increase your visitor rate and hopefully your lead gen rate as well.

The Sum is greater than the parts when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. Add up all the steps above, and you will improve your opportunities for attracting great, quality business enquiries.

Want Good Web Leads? Then SEO Matters.

Life without SEO would be Tough for B-to-B Marketers.

SEO Central, Mountain View.

Life without Search Engine Optimization would make attracting quality business enquiries a whole lot tougher. SEO is such an effective weapon for web-marketing lead generation that it is a very top priority for me, exploiting organic, long-tail and paid search options with success.

Thanks to SEO, we’ve been able to generate thousands and thousands of B-to-B enquiries and bring in millions of dollars in high margin revenue... all from having a laser-sharp focus on SEO. SEO has helped transform our business almost beyond recognition compared to when I started managing web marketing in 2003. Without SEO, I’d be handicapped. I can’t image not using SEO as my top lead-gen tool. 

Yes, the page content must be relevant to the actual human visitor, and must have an effective call-to-action. But if one doesn't also apply SEO principles to webpages, those pages most likely will not make page one on search engine results.

Page one Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is where your B-to-B services and products need to be ranked. There is too much competition for the limited space available... publishing a webpage without applying search optimization is like opening a fancy new retail store and failing to put signs on the building. Potential customers will have a hard time finding you or the products you sell.

Of what use is a lowly ranking webpage for search engine lead generation? 
Not much use at all. 

A poorly ranked webpage becomes invisible and may as will not exist for organic search engine marketing.

A great looking webpage, if one measures by ROI and productivity, is not the one that gets design kudos, recognitions or awards from hordes of marketing and advertising 'creatives' meeting at annual conferences. No, a great looking webpage is one that ranks in the top five organic search listings in Google for a key search phrase. This is SEO Bliss. When combined with relevant content and an effective call-to-action, such a SEO'd webpage is a profitable B-toB lead-generation work of high art.

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Adwords Tune-up

Google Adwords is a powerful tool for search engine lead generation and branding, but it can be easy to waste money, clicks and therefore lead generation opportunities if it is not managed to run at optimal effectiveness, speed and efficiency.

This Adwords Check List comes from a B-to-B perspective, where we're going after niche-services leads and clients.

1. Google Ad Optimization:

a. Is your ad written in a way that best attracts the people you are wanting to capture.

b. Is the ad clear and concise, so you can better filter out the rest of the audience you don't want to attract.

c. Does the ad have an implied call-to-action (given the limited ad space).

d. Are you using enough Negative Keyword Terms to help filter out low quality clicks?

Learn more about the importance of negative keywords at:
http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/06/negative-is-positive-with-google.html

2. Google Ad Position:

a. Being in the top position is not always a good thing - - those ads get more clicks but at a lower quality and higher price.

b. Placement at the 3 or 4 spots mean less visitors but higher visitor quality, and less cost.

3. Define what are the desired "Goals" for your Campaigns:

a. Total Clicks, Leads, Sales?

b. Click Rate (CTR) versus Conversion Rates?

For me, high conversion rates for lead generation are much more important than CTR.

Optimizing any paid search campaigns like Adwords is an ongoing process. Being successful with paid search is not unlike being an active stock trader. The search engine "search-term market" is never ending, and always dynamic and changing.

Victory goes to the methodical, alert, nimble and opportunistic. Victory can be defined in many ways, but the points above give an idea of the creativity, research and work required to make it happen.

Greg Statal has posted an excellent article entitled "What to do when Adwords doesn't get results" on his blog Digital Tonto. He goes into more detail with ideas one should consider in order to make an Adwords campaign more effective.

Best Regards; Erik Holladay

Freedom of Choice: Give Potential Customers Easy Options for Contacting your Company from your Website.

I have for some years allowed enquries to contact our divisional website through Telephone, Email and Contact Us Form. Adding a Chat option eventually will round things out. The primary goal for B-to-B marketing is make it very easy for a potential or returning customer to contact us! Let them chose the method, as long as we get the lead.

From my experience over the last 5 years, there is a clear pattern of contact preferences from enquiries:

The largest enquiry group uses and prefers the Telephone, and the quality of these leads is on average higher than the other options and often time-sensitive.

Next are Emails, this option is easy and convenient for people to use, and we can often capture complete contact details and attached project information along with the email. We receive very high value enquiries from Executives as emails, for example.

Last are Contact Us Form enquiries. This is not to say these forms are of little value, we also receive high quality leads this way. However, from my experience, using a Contact Us Form is the least popular way our B-to-B clients have wanted to contact us, if given the choice.

Yet, there are significant internal advantages with Contact Us Forms for CRM data capture, analytics, etc. And a Contact Form can be tweaked and optimized to encourage more people to use it.

But the Bottom line for us is the Telephone first, then Email, then Web Form in terms of enquiry options chosen by visitors.

Designing a webform long enough to capture the contact information Bus Dev and Marketing want, but short enough to encourage someone to fill the Contact Us form out and send, involves compromise, flexibility, experimentation and an open-mind.

A special thanks to Howard Sewell, President of Connect Direct, for posting the question
"Contact Us" Forms - Do They Work?" in LinkedIn... this question motivated me to share my experience with Contact Forms, Phone and Email.

How does one Raise Search Engine Rankings? Another View

I wrote this in response to a very good question from someone in LinkedIn, on how to raise your search engine rankings:

Content is King. Precise, Concise and Relevant Content.

Write good content using keywords that your potential customer base is looking for. Monitor your results. Look at the pages that rank higher than your page and, while not copying them, employ similar strategies if they make sense for your product or service.

Support your webpages with focused Blogs that point to your desired webpages. Try and get your URLs listed in relevant industry or user websites. Use Google Adwords to help promote your pages. If your content is relevant and readable, and your tactics to raise your organic search rankings are honest and also relevant, then your chances of getting top rankings will increase significantly.

I have had great success in getting top organic search rankings against as many as 40 million other indexed pages... focused and relevant content does the main work. Content is King.

Sometimes less content, that is distilled to the relevant core, will have the best impact. I have more on this subject at: http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/07/raise-organic-search-rankings-by.html

BING still Bungling Duplicate Search Results

Bing has still not figured out how to completely filter 'similar results' from organic search. Unlike Google, which has the ability to filter out multiple results from the same company or content, BING appears to be unable to accomplish the same simple but vital filtering process.

What does this mean in real world terms?

The example I used to highlight this problem was the same for when BING first came out this Spring. I used a search for 'laboratory outsourcing'. The BING results are still showing a glaring weakness in BING's ability to filter out similar results. The first few organic results are quite good actually (especially since my webpages dominate at the top), but when you get past the 9th indexed link or so, things get very strange and repetitive, many of the pages are essentially of zero use for an individual looking for new information related to 'laboratory outsourcing'. Why? Because one company has identical or similar content present on different national domain websites. BING does not yet understand that these pages all belong to one company, or indeed that the content is similar or identical, so all these pages are listed, page after page after page after page.

I'll give BING some credit, the results are not as bad as 3 months ago... but they have more work to do. BING is very interesting, as a heavy user of Adwords campaigns I need to have a viable alternative to Google. I don't have one yet. And the new Google interface is rather 'interesting', to say the least. BING may be useful yet, if my B-to-B technical services clients start using it.

Adding a Single Keyword Turns a Webpage from Invisible to Dominant

Crafting a B-to-B webpage which controls the top organic websearch results in Google and other search engines takes time, thought and effort. The stakes are high. If your webpage does not show up on page one for organic search results, your page essentially does not exist to search engine users.

Sometimes a very simple head-slapping fix can turn a poorly ranking webpage into a world champion organic search-engine lead machine, beating the competition by ranking at or near the top.

A recurring example involves location-targeted webpages. The 'local' or 'regional' webpages were not ranking for key location-specific search terms the stakeholders want. When I reviewed the problem pages, it was apparent that actual name of that targeted location was not on the pages... not in the headlines, not in the text, not anywhere. So how could a search engine make the connection? It couldn't. By simply adding the place name to the pages in key spots, the problem was solved and the previously "invisible" webpages transformed into page one ranking pages on Google for organic search.

There are times when an easy common sense fix will solve a major SEO problem. It is easy to overlook a content issue or enhancement, no one is perfect. This is why having others look at our work is so important...

 Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be). 

Raise Organic Search Rankings by Reducing Page Content

Reducing the content on a key web-page, if properly done, can rocket a newly slimmed-down page to new organic ranking heights for competitive and valuable Google search terms.

Having a poorly ranking web-page is an opportunity for improvement. First look at the total situation and purpose of the web-page.

1. What I am selling?

2. Who am I selling to?

3. Is my content Concise and Precise?

3a. Can I split up the content on this page into new pages?

3b. Can I reduce the remaining content on my original page?

Many web-pages suffer poor SEO due to long scrolling text, non-essential words and phrases. The same page could suffer from secondary and tertiary content that should stand alone as separate web-pages. The web-page is not focused enough for Google give a good ranking for the keyword(s) the page is trying to target. Too much content, too many subjects produces a page that is not focused, not precise, not concise and not as relevant as it could be.

The Relevancy and Ranking Fix is simple in theory:

1. Put the page on a words diet: streamline the content.

2. Follow good SEO copy-writing practice and don't 'pack' your keywords.

3.Take out surplus content not directly related to the page's mission.

4. Put any important newly removed content into a new, dedicated web-page(s) that is cross-linked with the original page.

When done, instead of having one long, scrolling web-page there may be one, two or three shorter, more concise web-pages that are relevant and related... offering greater content value to visitors and higher relevancy to Google.

This process takes some thought and work. But if done correctly, you'll see spectacular results.

I have web-pages that routinely rank 1, 2, 3, 4 against millions of other indexed Google pages for key search terms... because over the years I have streamlined content, split content and generally tried to make the pages precise and concise and cross-linked to other relevant web-pages.

I have also been happily surprised to see an unexpected web-page become a top-ranked page for a key competitive search-term. When that happens, I am flexible enough to often seize the opportunity and keep the page optimized for visitor relevancy and SEO. It's a gift from Google that can be taken complete advantage of.

Patience and success by trial and error are the norm. Google is the ultimate judge on organic page rankings.... we can only keep trying. Victory may take months to achieve, but the resulting high quality web enquiries produced make the effort worth it.

Managing Adwords Avoids Increasing PPC Cost

Many B2B Adwords managers suffer increasing costs of pay-per-click campaigns in order to "stay competitive". And every Adword veteran has treasured paid search-terms that were not only effective, but really cheap and cheerful a few years ago. Now, thanks to more competition for keywords on a global scale, these same search terms are becoming more and more expensive to run with high rankings.

But there are strategies which help avoid this PPC price trap...

During the last year, I didn't experience Adword PPC inflation, but rather PPC deflation.

My overall global campaign costs are reduced and campaign quality has increased:

1. Total Adword Spend down over 50%
2. Already low Cost per Conversion down over 50%
3. Cost per Click down over 25%

And by spending less and with more selectively I gained better quality:

1. An already high Conversion Rate jumped over 35% from the prior year.
2. With conservatively counted conversion rates of over 8%, 20% and higher.

To get these happy results, I focused on separating search-term wheat from the chaff, by going for more long-tail terms and exact and phrase match options which have relevance to my targeted customers, micro-managing time and location settings, using Adsense content ad filters heavily, and using google hegative search terms aggresively to help my campaigns stay focused on the markets I wanted, and where and when I wanted them. I was able to acheive this across campaigns, global geography and languages without using an outside consultant.

Simple Adword campaign changes can yield big results.

Ad Position:
Another great way to limit PPC costs is to focus on the number 3 or 4 or 5 ad positions. Why? 1 and 2 get more clicks, this is true, but they get many more casual clicks of lower quality. You pay more for less.

By being lower in rankings but high enough to get noticed you filter out casual clicks and attract more quality visitors from the core market you seek. You pay less for more.

Monitor Conversion Rates before Click-Through-Rates:
For B2B at least, getting conversions for the sales funnel is more useful for ROI than the initial clicks. Follow conversion rates closely. Click-through rates do offer guidance for potential keyword search term trimming, enhancement and improvement. But the Conversion Rate rules as a top priority for gauging your campaign quality, effectiveness and efficiency.

Trim, Filter and Block Search Term Options:
For example, if you were targeting "Engineering Services", which is very broad search term, back in 2003 it was cheap, but it's not now. The search term is hyper-competitive in Google Adwords. But instead of total surrender, or gritting your teeth and paying more and more in a never-ending price war spiral with your competition, get creative with long-tail search terms to help get around tough PPC situations like this.

Ask yourself; who are your real, paying, customers?

If your target is the Engineering Services for the Nuclear Cold Fusion Industry, for example, then you have options which will be cheaper to run and more effective. Try not using the high cost search term "Engineering Services", it is too broad and expensive. Try more focused search terms like "Cold Fusion Engineering" or "Cold Fusion Energy Engineering" or "Fusion Widget Engineering", etc. Google's Keyword Tool can help you discover related many terms as searched for in Google. Choose quality search terms over 'popular' ones. A search term may be very popular, but perhaps too broad and expensive to run an ad for. Going for long-tail search terms will usually be much less expensive than "Engineering Services".

Extremely important when using the Keyword tool is to also identify the -negative search terms you want listed. Using negative search terms reduces the chance your ad will show up for a search term that is not related to your product or service, thus helping avoid wasted clicks, which saves your campaign budget. For example, having a negative term set for "software" and "web" is a wise idea for any campaign going after "Cold Fusion Engineering" search terms! You don't want to be confused with a software company if your product is a service providing nuclear industry technical engineering expertise.

It is true that there will always be search terms that you absolutely want.... you along with 10 of your favorite cut-throat competitors. In those cases still try to find allied long-tail search terms and negative terms you can use...use the geography and time settings. These and other tactics will help you keep your PPC spend down.

In B2B marketing, there are thousands of technical and industry niche search terms which produce few clicks but yield high quality visitors and profits. It takes some time to research and implement these actions, but they will pay off in the end.

Twitter Infiltrates Business-to-Business Marketing

Twitter Trends Spotted for Business-to-Business. Sysomos issues June 2009 Report on Twitter Users and Habits across the world.

I looked at Twitter in the past as a purely social media gadget used by teenagers and young adults... not a serious marketing and promotional tool for grown-up B2B businesses. I opened a Twitter account in 2008 to research this new web product and measure any potential it had for B2B... slim pickings back then, and I stopped looking at my Twitter account.

But now, Twitter B2B users are starting to Tweet to real business and potential customers. Things are changing for Tweeter and B2B as marketers and others realize the growing Tweeter user population brings great potential value in spreading short, easy to digest messages, often linked to a key webpage. This very young trend should grow into the next decade.

This year I observed hundreds of attendees, for the first time, use Twitter at a large, major industry conference. They were being kept up-to-date on conference news and activities before, during and after the event with real-time 'Tweets'. That was my Eureka moment on Twitter... time to take it seriously and grow with the B2B trend now happening.

Look at some major businesses using Twitter to update customers, employees, potential customers and others: Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, three General Electric B2B divisions, Apple Computer, Google. The WSJ and FT Tweets actually serve as Headline News Feed Services.

And did I mention that Twitter (so far) is free to senders and receivers? For small business owners, this communication tool can be a great way to get your message out... the only cost is your short amount of time needed to send out a Tweet.

The young may an overwhelming majority of Tweeters now, but they will grow older, mature and become tax paying citizens with real jobs making real business decisions... time is on Twitters side.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the 'good' Roman Emperors, said "Observe constantly that all things take place by change." When it comes to web marketing and technologies, this wisdom is timeless.

Here is an excellent and detailed global Twitter-user demographics and habits report prepared by Sysomos Inc researchers Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Harshdeep Singh, called "An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World" . If you are remotely interested in learning more about Twitter, take a look!

You can follow my periodic blogs on Twitter, where I have a small but growing group of 'followers': https://twitter.com/ErikHolladay . I only started to seriously use Twitter in the last few months, it was that one B2B conference (attendance 50,000) which was the catalyst for me to see change was coming!

Twitter is only going to be as good as a company makes it. I attended another massive industry conference recently... they too set-up a twitter account but never used it during the conference... missing an audience of over 70,000 attendees. They even announced that they're focused on 'reaching out to the public' with a Social Media campaign... but someone forgot to "Tweet". Twitter will be a hit and miss learning curve scenario for everyone in B2B.

How to Promote Your Website On a Limited Budget

Earlier I focused on how to promote your website using free tactics and tools. Free was fun. Now we're looking at Paid Promotion... paying for great cost-effective results is fun. Paying for poor results is not fun at all, don't let that happen to you!

This follow-up blog will list effective tactics you should try when promoting your website and you have pending money... there are a many things you can do to promote your website, even on a limited budget! Careful planning can vastly increase a website's audience exposure and visitor rates with little additional investment.

1. Stationary, Business Cards, Fliers, Brochures:
Putting your website address on these items adds zero cost to your budget, or small marginal costs if you want the address to pop with a special color. If you are investing in the usual printed materials that go with a business, make sure your website is included on all of them. Anything printed on paper that includes your business name and contact details should have your website listed! Prospective customers will visit your site and generate valuable business leads because your website was printed on something.

2. Promotional Giveaways, Signage, Advertisements:
Again, little or no additional cost is involved in adding your website to these promotional tools. You're already paying for a sign or giveaways, add your website so that people can learn more about your business and convert to leads.

3. Live LARGE with Budgeted Adwords Campaigns:
Think online paid-search advertisements are expensive, hard to measure and for the big boys? Then you would be wrong! Google Adwords is one of the most measureable and cost effective for-pay advertising mediums in the known universe. You can control how much you spend, and where and when you spend it. The biggest challenge is to learn using Adword Text Ads to best advantage for your business, including ad and search term optimization and use of negative search terms. If you want to advertise your local business in your metro area only between 2 PM and 10 PM Monday to Friday.... and spend a maximum of 4 cents a click at 3 dollars a day, you can do it! If you want to cover a state, province or entire country on Saturdays in Spanish only... you can do that too. With Adsense, you can even partially segment your market by gender and age group.

4. Print Ads, Radio Ads, TV ads, Direct Mailers:

If you run ads anywhere for any reason... make sure your website is listed or mentioned. Without the web address, you risk losing many business generation opportunities. This as important as listing a phone number.

5. Your Email Signature:
It is amazing how many people don't take advantage of this simple and free option on your email. List your website at the bottom of your emails, along with your phone number, fax, twitter etc. Costs nothing and again you encourage people to click on the link to your site.

6. Press Releases and Email Campaigns:
Press releases and email campaigns can be expensive or cheap depending upon which service you use and how broad you want the PR or campaign distributed. But what gives the press release and email enduring value is to make sure you have not only a link to the homepage but also a link to an appropriate landing page that focuses on the service or news your press release was targeting. If you also load a modified version of the PR or email newsletter into your website you'll have an excellent webpage that can increase your Search Engine results for years. So while you usually have to pay for a decent press release service and the initial email campaign, you can take steps to extract value many times over the original cost.

You can enjoy first-class lead generation results on an economy budget if you get your website promoted well. Watch the spending and focus on value-for-money... you can produce ROI results that will dwarf any investments you made in your initial campaign, promotional, advertising and stationary investments. Just remember to always include your website!

Learning to Live With The BOMB: Google Search

Questions about Google's Search Engine, Algorithm, Competition:

Another great question on LinkedIn prompted me to offer some search engine marketing thoughts on the dominance of Google and having to learn to "Live With The Bomb".... Google's Search Engine Algorithm.

Lead generation lives and dies by Google's Search relevancy rankings and evolving algorithms. Google Search criteria are always evolving. We depend upon high rankings to pull in quality B2B leads via Google organic search. In short, the Algorithm can make things very lucrative for us or very frustrating.

A few Google inspired thoughts:

1. Google owns search related patents, but the algorithm is a strategic, dynamic and proprietary tool... while patents offer protection they are public and eventually expire, competition can see your secrets and work to duplicate them once the patent is expired, or worse, create a 'work-around' of the patent and release a competitive product even sooner. This needs to be confirmed, but I suspect Google would not want to patent any version of the search algorithm for public viewing, a situation similar to Coca-Cola keeping the original formula for Coke locked up in a safe, and never patenting the formula.

2. I find Google's search results much better as a general rule, more relevant. They filter better, they handle 'similar results' better, they index more webpages, and they hire very intelligent people to work on making the site ever more relevant for the search engine user. This is one reason why technical and business professionals overwhelming use Google, as high as 80% usage. I often get strange or odd results using BING, Yahoo and all those little engines out there trying to survive or be the next Google.

3. Google is dominant because they had first-mover advantage and produced a great product early on. Everybody else has been playing catch-up ever since. Having praised Google, I have to say near-monopolies make me a bit nervous. I depend upon Google for business, I use it for my personal use search almost exclusively, I use Gmail, Chrome and other exanding bits of the Google empire. I even visited GooglePlex in Mountain View, California (Awsome). I really like Google.... but Google needs a worthy competitor to keep them on their toes and give us customers optimal choices in the market. Perhaps BING or a revived Yahoo can play that role in the future.

How to Promote Your Website. Let Me Count the Ways...

Or How to Promote your Website in 10,000 Easy Steps:

Someone in LinkedIn Recently asked a very good, simple question, "What is the best way to promote my website?". As often happens, a simple question can have a virtual torrent of good answers. There are a huge number of effective ways to promote your website, using a variety of tactics- some free, some pay, some creative, some very basic.

But first, consider the strategy of your website, its purpose in life, and the resources available for web promotion. Here is an 80,000 ft. view... with more to come. How, when and where to promote your website will greatly depend upon your goals and situation. Questions to ask include:

1. What markets and what clientle are your real target market?

2. How can you reach them? What are your options?

3. Do you have a budget to help reach them? How big is your budget?

4. How do you prioritize, given a limited budget?

Today I will focus on FREE PROMOTIONAL TACTICS. Here are just a few strategic areas to consider using for gratis website promotion tools:

"FREE" PROMOTION:

Free is always a favorite option. But it demands constant work and requires time, creativity, inspiration, enthusiasm, dedication and solid work ethic.

1. Good Content and Product: Focus, be relevant to your target market. Give them value and update often so they want to come back. Without this basic feature you may take one step back for every step forward. Good website navigation and fast downloading are also very important. Be precise, concise and relevant. Don't forget your keywords and phrases, watch for typos, etc.

2. Search Engine Optimization: Needless to say, your website must be found and indexed by the Search Engines. Submitting your new website to the Search Engines is highly suggested. If you build a site that meets point one above, the indexing will come. This step is so important it cannot be over-emphasized.

3. Blogging: Want to get your site more exposure on the web? Create some focused and credible Blogs that all point to your Website. Each Blog should focus on a 'category-killer' topic. These are, need I remind you, free and easy to set up. Stay true to the topic. If your site is a B2B site, then don't stray off-topic. Add Blog comments to other people's blogs if relevant, and always include your website link.

4. Social Media and News Feeds: Web 2.0 tools are becoming more integrated into the business world mainstream. Set up Pages on Linked-In, FaceBook, etc. that all point back to your website... keep the content fresh and on topic. Set up a Twitter account and have a connection to your Twitter page on all your Blogs, Social Media Sites and your Website... get a following and send out Tweets as relevant. Set-up Newsfeeds.

5. Email Newsletters: We all despise spam, but if you send out a fairly regular newsletter that is short and links to your webpage, this is free promotion that is linked to relevant web content, always the best option. Set-up an email registration option on your site, include opt-out and cultivate a quality email contact list.

6. Get Your Website Cited, Linked and Quoted by Others: Encourage relevant Blogs, News Sites, Industry Sites, User Sites, and more to list your website address... and thank anyone out there who writes something in the web who positively mentions your business or site. Build your network and give that network content that motivates them to cite your website. This can include White Papers, real News, etc.

7. Press Releases and Free Media PR: Cultivate print media, trade journal and website contacts... you may benefit from an article written about your company, be sure to include your website address.There are a number of sites that now offer "Free" or very inexpensive opportunities for you to issue press releases. These press releases should always include your landing-page website link. These sites are not as effective as the big ones like BusinessWire, but they will help your cause. You'll know your PR is making a difference on the web when it generates a "Google News Alert". Sign up for Google's News Alert service and make sure you list the key terms you want to track... free service.

There are many Free tactics to promote your website, but since there really are 10,000 different ways to promote your site I cannot hope know or to list them all here! ; ) The next website promotion article will focus more on the for-pay tactics.... also very effective at promoting your site. There are great tactics to fit any budget.

Back to the Future with Static A-Z Directories

Static A to Z Directories Work.

The Rosetta Stone was a Directory of Sorts.

Call me a "flat-page" reactionary, but, along with good Website Navigation, Cross-Linking, and an Internal Search Engine, I prefer looking at static A-Z directories to allow quicker navigation to relevant webpages.

A-Z listing offer a superior and more efficient experience compared to using flash-enhanced, clicky, interactive "Alpha Adventures" that do not allow broad A-Z scanning, and often result in frustrating dead-ends.

I'm not saying don't use interactive directories, but low-tech flat A-Z pages are very effective, from our experience. Use them both!

With a one-view flat A-Z directory, a visitor can quickly drill-down and find what they are looking for. Website visitors seem to prefer this approach, as these flat A-Z pages enjoy the lowest exit rates on the entire website and have strong traffic flow. In effect, for us, visitors have voted their preference with their mouses. Results were so good we scrapped our complex interactive flash option to find countries... it was not being used.

These mini A-Z pages also benefit us by acting as Site Maps for focused website services and locations sections. They increase link exposure for lower tier service pages, helping our organic search engine rankings. Often these A-Z pages are themselves ranking in top organic search results, based upon on their own merits. These are tremendous benefits for a B2B lead generation website.

As our large B2B website was rapidly growing in services and locations, the expanding complexity of the site demanded further classification, drill-down and navigation tools to help visitors find what they wanted, when they wanted it. We beefed up our website with a better search engine, but needed more. A-Z listings are of course long familiar, in print. I concluded that if this approach has thrived these hundreds of years and was still a durable, popular and common standard, it was good enough to try on the web.

Daring to go Retro, we built a collection of focused and hiearchical static .html A-Z Services and Locations webpages in key folders and sections of the website... with relevant listings linking to niche webpages focused on a particular service or location.

The idea of A-Z Listed Webpages is simple and effective:

An A-Z High Level Directory page for a "Wild Animals" Website for example, could include:

Top Level A-Z Directory:A

Aardvarks (linked to Aardvarks main webpage)

B

Badgers (linked to Badgers main webpage)

A person looking for Aardvarks can click on the Aardvark link. Once on the dedicated Aardvark section in the website.... another more focused Aardvark A-Z directory webpage helps the visitor further drill-down:

Second Level A-Z Directory:

A

Abyssinian Aardvarks (linked to Abyssinian Aardvarks webpage)

Albanian Aardvarks (linked to Albanian Aardvark webpage)

B

Bengal Aardvards (linked to Bengal Aardvarks webpage)

Bulgarian Aardvarks (linked to Bulgarian Aardvarks webpage)

... and so on. An Aardvark-searching visitor has reached Aardvark Nirvana in terms of information.

Low-tech, retro, flat, html A-Z directory pages have worked very well for us and more importantly, for our B2B website visitors.

A to Z Lists on Websites Really Work

CROSS-LINK IT - For Better Sales and Leads

Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

I am called many things, but being negative is usually not one of them. However, when it comes to managing Google Adwords campaigns, I am proud to wallow in negativity!

Using "Negative Keywords" can greatly filter out and reduce wasted clicks on your Adword campaigns, lessen the chance of confused (irrelevant) visitors and help your overall campaign costs, conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. They also help reduce the load on enquiry centers handling the enquiries. I am a big fan of the aggressive use of intelligently selected negative keywords.

Adding negative keywords and search terms is rather easy... you can add them manually and/or, (strongly advised) research the term first with the Google Keyword Tool. You'll be amazed at the sheer number of similar search terms entered by people which have no relevance or value to your B2B campaigns.

An example of a negative term is one related to a desired search term, for example, 'Chemical Lab'. I want people who need professional B2B chemical analysis services. I don't want people looking for a 'Lab' as in 'Labrador Retreiver', or a 'Lab' puppy. So -dog, -dogs, -puppy, -puppies, etc, all go negative for this campaign. This is a simple task with the Keyword tool. For us, other great related negative terms include '-job', '-jobs', '-drug lab' etc. Filter the worthless search terms as much as you can.

I have quite a few campaigns where my negative terms outnumber my positive search terms... and these campaigns greatly benefit from this strong filtering. Conversion rates jump, costs slump. Very positive results from going negative.

Caution: Negative Search Terms and Names can have a very powerful filtering impact, and if you are not careful, unintended consequences can hurt your campaign. For example, if I had used 'lab puppy' as a broad negative search term, I could be filtering out other desirable 'lab' related searches. Going negative for [lab puppy] is better. Using only 'puppy', a very specific one word negative search term, is the least risky of all. I try to keep my negative search terms to one word each. Keep this possibility in mind when adding negative phrases or word combinations.

I use negative keyword terms in B2B campaigns across global business streams, niches, regions and languages, a 24/7 operation. Going negative helped reduce my spend on poor quality clicks and sparked higher conversion rates. If you're not using negative search terms yet, you're likely wasting money and time, which is never a good situation.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Increase Adword Conversions and Reduce Adword Spend, Take One

I received a good Paid Search question from a SEM marketer in LinkedIn recently:

"We use Google Adwords, about $X000 a month I think and most of our conversions are unqualified leads. We have tried different campaigns, keywords and a competitive approach, but nothing seems to work too well. Any advice?"

I use Google Adwords for driving in B2B enquiries, it is an important part of our web lead generation efforts along with Organic Search (our top priority). I use Adwords across the world for key global markets and languages. I manage these large campaigns on a daily basis, because trends and news across the world can change and drive new business opportunities.

Last year I concluded that we should attempt to raise our Conversion Rates (already considered 'good' by Google) and lower the cost-per-conversion (already low) and reduce overall Adword Spend. The goal was to squeeze even more efficiency out of every Adwords dollar I spend.

I acheived this result by Optimizing Search Terms and Filtering, Filtering and Filtering.

Before diving into Adwords tactics and strategies, the content on your landing page must be optimized first and foremost.... landing page content should be focused, concise and precise. Let the visitor know exactly what you offer, the benefits, and include a call to action. This greatly helps filter out low-quality visitors not relevant to your business.

Since last summer, I reduced Adword spend by over 50% and increased conversion rates by over 100%, and cut cost-per-conversion significantly. This took time and attention, coupled with a good understanding of target markets.

To find good search terms, the Adwords Keyword Tool is a great source. Looking for long-tail niche terms is like looking for gold nuggets... worth the effort. Great search-terms can also be found in your Analytics and from you Customers and Busines Development reps.

Extremely important in helping filter out casual or confused Adword clicks is an aggressive use of Negative Search Terms. Heavy use of negative keywords helps to greatly reduce the number of unwanted clicks from casual or confused visitors.

Use of Phrase "keyword" and Exact [keyword] search terms also helps focus and filter how and when your ad will show.

Using the Adword Geography and Time Scheduling features is very important to help reduce low quality clicks. If you don't want to show ads in a particular Nation or State, make sure your settings are correct. If you don't want to show ads between 11 PM and 5 AM in Texas, make sure this is covered.

Your Price per click settings and Budget settings are also important. This helps determine ad rankings, and Ad rankings help determine the number of people who click the ad.

Ad Ranking is very important. Many ads I run are at the number 2, 3, 4 or lower positions, and I am very happy.

Why? Because I only want the Qualified Visitor... someone who is motivated or interested in doing business with my company. I don't want casual visitors who click the number one ranked ad out of curiosity or confusion... those can be wasted clicks that hurt Conversion results and raise cost.

My efforts resulted in a much higher conversion rates and significant reduction in spending. And yet... one can go too far in this process. At some point focus can be so tight that good potential enquiries from people who use a low-quality search term can be lost. I am considering this challenge... so I may engineer a reduction in conversions to widen the Adwords Campaign focus for certain niche campaigns. Running large and successful Adwords campaigns is not unlike being an active Stock Trader... daily attention is required in a dynamic market for Search Terms.

Erik Holladay

Google Adwords Professional

Global Marketing Director

New Microsoft BING Search Engine and Curious Search Results

I'm starting to experiment with Microsoft's new search engine, BING. We take advantage of search engine marketing to generate thousands of B2B leads on a global basis. Google is very important to us but we must also pay close attention to alternative search engines. And Microsoft's new BING engine is one to watch and consider using for organic and paid search. Initial searches results for technical terms look good at first result, and rival Google for relevancy.

However, I also find that BING in its current launch version will also list many similar webpages from one company that has multiple national website domains. To the point of it being too much of a good thing. This means that one company's domains can produce indexing results which translate into webpages which could dominate entire pages of search results for key search terms..... not a satisfactory result for someone researching for information or vendors. Google does a much better job of filtering domains at this point. BING shows great promise, but the ability of one company to crowd out other results for pages and pages due to URL strategy is a flaw which needs to be addressed in Bing's early days.

Type “Laboratory Outsourcing” into BING and you’ll see what I mean. The first page has reasonably good results and is more or less consistent with Google. But then one company's national domain strategy takes over and complete pages are filled with that company's national domain site results… not good for a user searching for information or vendors. To be clear, it is not the fault of that company so many of their pages show up in BING search results... it is BING that needs to do a better job of sorting and filtering 'similar results'. See the attached results image.

Best Regards; Erik Holladay

Professional Profile of Erik Holladay

Erik Holladay Professional Overview:

Twitter: @ErikHolladay
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikholladay

Skilled, high-energy professional with a strong, unbroken track-record of success in technical sales, B-to-B marketing, and business development.

My expertise includes USA and International Sales, B-to-B marketing, industrial, technical, and business development, driving in top-line revenues at high margins in a cost-effective manner. Customers range from major international corporations to large national companies and smaller localized firms.

I understand marketing and sales, generating significant numbers of quality enquiries for the sales funnel that convert to new sales and tactical and strategic business project opportunities, from $1,000 sales to Million Dollar projects.

My expertise in Web B-to-B marketing and Search Engine Marketing brings Intertek tens of thousands of quality business enquiries across global markets and languages each year, producing millions of dollars in profitable top-line organic growth.

Similar success is achieved by attracting executive and high-level decision-maker enquiries for key strategic project and acquisition opportunities.

I have significant experience with successful Search Engine Optimization, Adwords, PR, CRM Integration, Sales Funnel Activity, Advertising, Trade Shows and other marketing channels across industries, markets, languages and geographies.

My marketing work, combined with a strong professional work-ethic, results in the demand generation of thousands of quality enquiries on a global basis, which convert into profitable business for the Intertek business units I represent.

Marketing and Sales Strengths:
Marketing, business development, lead generation, search engine marketing, SEO optimization, B-to-B marketing, B-to-B Sales, strategic and tactical marketing and business development, trade show management, sales management, adept multi-tasker, proven top 10% performer for sales and marketing, and more.

I know how to both market and sell services and products, often with complex and technical features and benefits.

Industries:
Chemical, Oil & Gas, Refining, Electronics, Micro-electronics and Semiconductors, Pharmaceuticals, Mining, Construction, Biotechnology, R&D, Materials, Food & Agri, Laboratory, Academia, and other diverse manufacturing, and more.

See more details at: http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/p/cv-for-erik-holladay.html

Updated December 2016