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Jay Berkowitz: Thank you all for coming. Our presentation today is called Ten Free or Low Cost Strategies for Marketing in a Recession and my background is actually mentioned. I was fortunate to start my career working for Coca–Cola and McDonalds, and got into the internet very early with Sprint back in ’94 and ’95, and moved to Florida to work in a copy called eDiets and we took that company to about $50 million, and I was asked to speak at a Direct Marketing Association event, and I wrote a presentation called the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing.
After that event, five or six people came up to me and they said that was really great. Do you do any consulting? I said, “Sure buy me lunch, I consult,” and they said, “No, no consulting.” So I started the business in the fall of 2003. I’ve been fortunate to be involved with the American Marketing Association and that’s why I was so excited to have this opportunity, and I’m the past president of our Florida chapter, and I’m also involved with the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association. SEMPO is a great organization--the search engine marketing professional’s organization. I also mentioned the University of San Francisco.
We just launched, just February 1st, an internet marketing certificate course and it’s a really comprehensive online course that you take digitally. So it’s all videos that you watch and interactive components to the course and you can find that at yousendfriendonline.com. People ask what is Ten Golden Rules because it started with the presentation of the Ten Golden Rules of internet marketing. We’re really a consulting business and we’ve helped everyone from NBC, Kaplan Education, 1–800–PetMeds and I’ll have some examples in the presentation. We do things like landing pages and conversion strategies. When you get people to a website, how do you get them to take an action? Videos are really popular, of course, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in the presentation.
Viral marketing spreads like a virus from person to person. We also call it word of mouse–thank you–and search marketing, of course, and we’ll talk a lot about that today. How to get listed on the left side and the right side of Google search as any other search engines? We were recently featured in the Wall Street journal, the Las Vegas review, the business journals and I’ve made by TV debut about three months ago on Fox Business.
My objectives today are to share with you ten free or low cost strategies for marketing in a recession and we’re very internet-focused. We’ll talk about how to convert website visits into leads or sales. We’ll talk about which online business models are working today. How do you social media in web 2.01? I mean I spent a little bit of time on building a personal brand tremendously important today given the current economic situation. You need to start building your own personal brand and differentiating yourself using a number of these online tools. We’ll talk about how to do that. We’ll review a number of your websites, we’ll share some advance tips and strategies. So in each section, I’m going to have the basic stuff and then a couple of advanced tips for those of you who are actually working in the digital space.
A quick pull, if you wouldn’t mind, shove hands. How many people have read a blog? Okay, almost everybody. I’m going to start asking how many people haven’t. How many have commented on someone else’s blog? About three quarters of the room. How many have their own blog? That’s awesome. I see about 30 hands which should be about 30% of the room. How many have listened to a podcast? That’s great, about 80%. So you guys are really plugged in here. This is going to be fun. How many have their own podcast, any podcasters in the room? I got half a hand up there. You did one once? Okay, great. Anyone have a video cast? One over here, great. How many have watched the Youtube video? Everyone, I assume. How many have uploaded their own Youtube video? We’ve got about 20 hands. Who’s on Twitter? Awesome, we’ve got about 40 hands. And Google – who’s running a Google Adwords campaign, and how many are doing some SEO? Okay, so about 20 and 20 for those. Great, thank you for participating.
So let’s get into the Ten Free or Low Cost strategies for marketing on the internet in a recession. And the first one we’re going to focus on is free Search Engine Optimization techniques because it’s really the most powerful real estate in the world today, perhaps, with real estate going in the toilet. And this is a straightforward Google search and this is a search for Florida marketing consultant, and our company comes up in the number one position in the free area. First I’m going to designate the paid area or what Google designates as sponsored links on the top on the right hand side. I’m going to talk about that in a minute but what I’m focused on here is the free area.
Now, a lot of times I’m going say Google when I’m talking the search engine marketing because Google is about 65% of the market. So if you can do well on Google, typically the same strategies work really well in MSN and Yahoo and that’s about 90% of the marketplace. So if I say Google, sometimes I’m interchangeably talking about the search engines.
Now, 72% of people state that they prefer to click on the left hand side in the free or natural search engine results. So that’s what I’m talking about here, the natural or organic. It’s kind of like the PR of the internet because if you write your website well, it’s like writing a press release well and we get picked up in a newspaper. If you write your website, design your website and do the right things, you’re going to get picked up on the left hand side by the organic search engines.
This is a tool on my browser across the top here called SeoQuake—Quake like an earthquake--and what we’re going to look at now is a bunch of free tools. We’re going to look at some key website measures. So the first one we’re going to look at is called Alexa ranking, and Alexa ranks every website across the internet. They give you one number. So the number one website in the world is Yahoo and that’s based on unique visitors and number of pages viewed on the internet on that website.
So number three is Google. Number 192,423 is our site, Ten Golden Rules. So we’re in the top 200,000 websites according to Alexa for unique visitors and page views. Number 2,687,000 is the Charleston CBB, the Convention of Business Bureau. Beautiful shot there on the site. And number 4,449,000 which is still a really important website, and the top 4,500,000 websites is the AMA site that you all signed up on for this event.
So this tool starts giving us some indication on how our website performs and I’m going to take you through a bunch of free tools, and the real value of these tools is to build a snapshot of how your company performs versus your competitors. You can also use these tools if you’re an agency or if you’re a web development company to take a look at the website versus their competitors and build a snapshot of how that website ranks across the number of these tools. Don’t put too much stock in Alexa or any one tool but look at the tools across the range of tools.
So Alexa is nice to know big deal you know, we’re highly ranked or whatever. Google PageRank is really important to know because it’s a little snapshot, it’s not perfect, but it’s a little peak into Google’s algorithm. How important does Google rank your website? And really what they’re ranking your website on with PageRank is the links from other sites to your site because a vote from another site or a link from another site makes your site important.
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