By Li Evans

We’ve got some exciting news here at the SEMClubhouse. Another great SEO mind has joined not just the clubhouse, but the KeyRelevance staff as well.

Matt McGee of the Small Business Search Marketing Blog, joined our team yesterday!

With companies needing to stretch their marketing dollars, adding Matt McGee, who specializes in working with clients to maximize the return on their online marketing investment, was a great expansion to the KeyRelevance team.

“Google’s Universal Search changed the rules of online marketing,” said Christine Churchill, President and CEO of KeyRelevance. “Search engine optimization still rules, but now it’s the tip of the iceberg of what we need to provide to clients. Online marketing now encompasses not only SEO and Pay Per Click, but blog and video optimization, local and mobile search, social media marketing, and much more. Matt’s specialized knowledge in these areas makes him a valuable addition to our already robust team.”

KeyRelevance’s online team includes well-known SEOs Bill Slawski (SEO By The Sea), Li Evans (Search Marketing Gurus), Jim Gilbert, and now Matt McGee.

“In addition to being a first class SEO, Matt is one of the most positive people I’ve ever known,” added Churchill. “He infuses the element of fun into the workplace.”

A seasoned marketer, Matt has been online since 1994. Matt is a regular speaker at major search industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Small Business Marketing Unleashed. He is also a columnist at Search Engine Land. In his spare time, Matt runs the Small Business Search Marketing blog and one of the oldest and largest independent U2 sites on the Internet at @U2.com.

“KeyRelevance is one of the most respected companies in the search marketing industry, and it’s an honor to join a team with such impeccable credentials. I’ve known Christine, Li, and Bill for years as friends and peers. I’m excited to join them and the rest of the KeyRelevance crew,” says McGee.

By Li Evans

What do you use social media for?

Do you use it to gain links? How about power? Maybe to trick people into thinking you are someone else? Perhaps as leverage to con someone into doing something on another social media site for you?

At SES Toronto I was on the Social Media Success panel. I took this panel very seriously, I wanted to demonstrate how companies are using social media and creating their own success stories. The companies I chose to highlight wanted active conversation, true audience engagements and honest reviews and because they took that approach they had incredible success. I believe with every ounce of my being, social media is about conversations and sharing. I have a huge issue with applying shady link acquisition tactics, power manipulation and common trickery to social media.

There are people in the search industry that think social media is a numbers game, a numbers game that involves links. On the panel there were things presented that made my jaw drop, basically “shady” techniques, things like adding friends just for the numbers, creating multiple profiles, vanity baiting, and using your power on one social media site to gain something on another. To my colleagues on the panel, social media was all about the links and perceived power. Success to them in social media seemed to be about how many links you acquired, and what seemed to be cheap and fast tricks to get them.

I wasn’t alone in my dismay, Rahaf Harfoush expressed her shock at the lack of ethics presented.

People in the search industry wonder why SEO gets the stigma of being the “snake oil salesmen”. People in the search industry wonder why big companies are snubbing SEO, and don’t even look to SEO practitioners for Social Media assistance. Well when you try to apply SEO practices to social media wherein you are using it to gain links alone, or try to manipulate people into thinking things are true that aren’t, that’s how that reputation emerges, and the snubbing occurs.

Social Media is not about links.

Social Media is about conversations and the opportunity to share experiences through those conversations. Links are merely a by-product of a great social media campaign, and search engine rankings are merely a by-product as well. If you are measuring success in social media by the number of links you’ve acquired, you are really and truly missing out on what social media is all about.

What’s going to happen when Google finally devalues links from websites and looks more and puts more weight into what’s going on in social media? Social media offers so much more opportunity for the general public to voice their opinions about brands, products, companies and their opinion of what is really relevant, more so than a meager link from a website. Think of it this way, more people on the internet today participate in social media, than own a website. Guess what? These people are actively telling Google, Yahoo and MSN what they think is relevant by rating, commenting and participating in social media.

No fake profile, or adding friends, or using your “perceived power” is going to be able to easily change this, once it comes.

Remember, those discussions that are happening in social media channels, happen whether you are actively engaged in that conversation or not. So wouldn’t your time be better spent involving yourself with those conversations actively? Or would it be better spent adding a ton of fake friends to MySpace, conning a top Digg user into submitting your link for exchange of Wikipedia article help, or creating fake profiles on StumbleUpon?

Use social media for true customer engagements, be transparent, be honest, be who you are. People want to interact with real people from companies, they want Truth in Marketing. They want to tell stories about how great your employees are, what kind of heart you have and how you care about your customers and audience. The audiences couldn’t give a damn about your links, or how many sock puppet accounts you have.

Maybe when the search industry stops thinking of links first with social media, they will be taken a bit more seriously in the online marketing arena.

By Bill Slawski

There’s an old saying that goes, “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” The right image on a web page can communicate ideas that words may only begin to capture.

An image in a news article may transport a viewer into the middle of the story. A couple of sharp images, from different angles, may inspire someone to buy something online that they might have only purchased offline previously, like shoes or clothes. A portrait of a writer or a business owner or a researcher may bring an increased level of credibility and trust to a web site.

Search Engines and Images

All of the major search engines allow us to search for images in image search web databases. The search engines have also started blending images into their regular Web search results, to add color and diversity to search results, as well as providing a possible way of illustrating different concepts that might be related to a query term with those pictures.

A picture next to a news result may provide context for the news story very quickly, like in the Google search result below:

While search engines index pages and pictures and videos and a host of other objects that they find on the web, their approach to helping us find images has relied upon text, and upon matching keywords that we enter into a search box. A search engine normally indexes images based upon words that appear on the same pages as pictures, in alternative text associated with the images, or in captions for the pictures, or in text that appears in the address, or URL, for the page, or in the words within links to the photo or page where that picture appears.

That reliance upon the words associated with images to index and rank pictures may be changing. Google recently released a paper about PageRank for Product Image Search that looks at similarities within the images themselves to rank pictures in a search. Microsoft just published a patent application on ranking images that looked at nontextual signals about images, such as the number of links pointing to the pictures, how frequently a picture appeared upon a site, sizes and the quality of the pictures, to help rank those images.

A Google patent application from January described ways that a search engine might read text in images, including the words and signs it sees while collecting pictures for its Street Views project for Google Maps. The picture to the right shows the locations of text in a Street Views image that Google could use in its index.

Search engines are getting smarter about how they view, index, and rank images and site owners should probably consider getting smarter about the images that they use on their pages to illustrate what they have to offer.

Making Room for Images in Search

What if we could send a picture to a search engine, and have it return related pictures back, or news stories, or web pages? In an article on the New York Times a couple of years back, The Route From Research to Start-Up, the founder of Nevenengineering described one of the technologies that he was working upon:

Ultimately, the technology “will allow you to point your camera phone at a movie poster or a restaurant and get an immediate review of the film or the fare on your cellphone, which will tap into databases,” said Mr. Neven, who foresees one billion camera phones in use worldwide by 2010.

Imagine snapping a photo, and having a search engine provide you with information about the subject of that picture.

Google acquired Mr. Neven’s startup a couple of years ago, and in the Official Google blog, they told us that one use of the technologies transferred in the acquisition would be A better way to organize photos?
Having software that could look at your photo collection, and index and organize your images based upon what it sees in the pictures themselves is pretty amazing.

But the image recognition technology from Nevenengineering could do more than sort photos. It could also be used to search for information related to images.

And before the company developed a consumer related product, it started out as a biometrics company, providing technology for law enforcement and the military. A presentation on one of their technologies, SIMBA: Single Image Multi-Biometric Analysis (pdf), provides an idea of some of what the company has been capable of when it comes to recognizing faces and associating them with people. And the technology is capable of performing facial recognition in videos as well as still images.

Faces First, Other Image Features Later?

Google doesn’t offer the ability to search based upon images that you upload to the search engine. At least, they don’t yet. But, it appears that they may have a start on technology that could make the possibility into a reality at some point.

Last year, a post on the Google Operating System blog pointed out a way to Restrict Google Image Results to Faces, News by adding a string of text at the end of the addresses, or URLs, for each of those types of searches.

A patent application published by Google recently described how the search engine can take facial images that it has associated with specific peoples’ names that contain metadata about the identify of those people, and use those pictures to build a statistical model of their faces.

That statistical model could then be used to associate the peoples’ names with other images that don’t contain metadata such as alternative text in alt tags, or captions, or text upon the same pages. The patent application is:

Identifying Images Using Face Recognition
Invented by Jay Yagnik
Assigned to Google
US Patent Application 20080130960
Published June 5, 2008
Filed December 1, 2006

Abstract

A method includes identifying a named entity, retrieving images associated with the named entity, and using a face detection algorithm to perform face detection on the retrieved images to detect faces in the retrieved images. At least one representative face image from the retrieved images is identified, and the representative face image is used to identify one or more additional images representing the at least one named entity.

It makes sense for Google to try to focus upon faces first, before tackling other aspects of indexing images based upon the content of those pictures. If Google can master the indexing of images that it finds upon the Web that don’t have text or metadata associated with them, that may bring the search engine a step closer to being able to provide search results for images uploaded to Google by a searcher.

Breaking the problem of indexing and searching images to one aspect of images, such as facial recognition, could allow the search engine to address image searching in incremental steps. Choosing facial images as a first step in developing a smarter image search technology does have some issues associated with it, especially from a privacy stance. Allowing people to upload images of faces, to search upon those may raise a number of privacy issues that a search engine may not want to address.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Looks at Landmarks

Another approach to indexing and ranking images is going on at Yahoo, in a Flickr related project that takes images that have been tagged with geographic terms and locations, and tries to cluster together images that are similar based upon locations identified in those tags. The tags associated with images include both user created annotations, and automatic annotations from “location-aware cameraphones and GPS integrated cameras.”

Using automatically generated location data, and software that can cluster together similar images to learn about images again goes beyond just looking at the words associated with pictures to learn what they are about.

The narrow focus of this project again allows for the development of a smarter image search technology in an incremental approach - associated with well known locations. It’s possible that this choice of topics won’t raise the number of privacy concerns that Google’s focus upon faces may.

Conclusion

Approaches from search engines to indexing and ranking images may soon be incorporating technologies that move them away from a strict reliance upon text that appears on the same pages as the pictures, if they aren’t already.

Images are being shown in Web search results in increasing numbers, so changes like this happening in an emerging area of search should be something to keep a careful eye upon.

Images on a web site can help illustrate the ideas and concepts on web pages in a way that words alone can’t. If the pictures can capture the essence of a concept or query through the use of text associated with the pictures on those pages, and even in the absence of such text, they may start appearing in blended search results at one of the major search engines.

Using facial recognition technology, or clustering images around landmarks based upon geographical tags and similarities in pictures are just two steps towards the development of image search technology on the web that relies less upon words, and more upon what is captured in those images.

The right picture on a web page may become not only a way to illustrate the ideas being presented on that page, but also a way for people to find that page based upon the content of the image rather than just the words that surround it.

By Li Evans

What do Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama have in common? It is a woman. However, its not the woman that was taking the spotlight Saturday afternoon. No this time its not Hillary, so you need to guess again. Give up?

Mayhill Fowler

WHO?! Yep, that’s right Mayhill Fowler, someone you probably never heard of until today. Both of these polished and charismatic politicians were rocked by this unsuspecting amateur blogger, who is among 2,500 bloggers that write on Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post. The 61 year old, mother of two and Tennessee native, caught both of these high profile people in rather unflattering situations.

Fowler, back in April, caught Barack Obama’s “Bitter” comments on tape and set loose a firestorm for his campaign efforts in my state of Pennsylvania. This was literally non-stop for 2 weeks prior to my state’s primary.

Last week, Fowler was in South Dakota and caught Bill Clinton in what seems to be an unguarded moment when he let loose on his thoughts about Vanity Fair and their article about him.

Fowler, has no journalistic training. Fowler has no online marketing training. Fowler is a citizen journalist who describes herself as a person who “just discovered that I’m impelled to get out there and get the truth of the matter” to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. Armed with her tape recorder (not even an iPod!), Fowler won’t even read her own posts, since the editors tend to change her lead-ins so more people will “click in” to read her pieces.

There’s a lesson here for businesses, public relations specialists and online marketers. It isn’t the A-listers like TechCrunch, Scoble or Rubel that are gettting the scoops these days and they should not be the sole focus of your online marketing efforts to get noticed or “picked up by”. Passionate bloggers who are in your industry writing about what they love best are who you should be paying attention, too.

As someone at one of my WOMMU breakout sessions said “A-Listers” at times can be like echo-chambers.

I couldn’t agree more. Be cognizant of the B,C and even D list bloggers. If those bloggers have any type of SEO training, their blog posts could start to rank right up there with the A-Listers. What’s more important to note, is that these “smaller” bloggers probably have a more passionate reader base, and a “scoop” on an “amateur” bloggers blog, can be just as damaging or beneficial, than the echo-chambers of the A-Listers.

Just ask Barack Obama and Bill Clinton about Mayhill Fowler, that should be enough to convince you.

*photo credit, Thor Swift of the Washington Post.

By Liana “Li” Evans

Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on “The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging“. It’s a great read, and I highly suggest taking the few minutes to take in what Jeremiah’s saying. The reasons he lists are spot on, but Debbie Weil author of the BlogWrite for CEO’s blog and The Corporate Blogging Book, added a few more reasons, and I’ve added a few more. If you haven’t read Debbie’s book, this is another read I highly recommend if you even have the inkling you want to start a blog, or you’ve started one and you are wondering where to go next. If you’re interested, check out my review of The Corporate Blogging Book.

I think these reasons that both Jeremiah and Debbie listed are all spot on, but not just for CEO’s or Corporations. These reasons are spot on for anyone considering starting a blog, from the work at home mom to the startup entrepreneur, or even the stamp collector wanting to convey his passion. Blogging is a commitment, it’s not just a fad.

So here’s the reasons I listed in the comments of Jeremiah’s post, with a little more in-depth explanation.

• Don’t Just Blog to “Blog”
  Blogging because you read about it on TechCrunch, Newsweek or FastCompany isn’t the reason to blog. Just because your competitor is blogging, doesn’t mean you should blog either. Blogging isn’t just a fad anymore, its a commitment, and unless you can give it the time and nurturing it needs, you’ll likely do more damage to your reputation than if you hadn’t blogged at all.
• Don’t Blog Unless You’ve Got Your “Voice” Figured Out
  Will your blog be just one person? Will it be a team of people blogging about different aspects of your company? Will you talk about products, services, issues, events, company news? Before you even start a blog, you should define a clear road map of what is “off limits” to talk about on the blog, how to handle issues as they arise (who handles what, and what’s the tone) and exactly what kind of demeanor will be portrayed on the blog - will it be laid back, straight talk, humorous or just newsy?
• Don’t Blog Unless You’ve Got the Interest
  If you are starting a blog just because “everyone else is” and you really don’t like to right, or communicate with the outside world, perhaps you should rethink this strategy. Why? Because without a doubt, your utter lack of interest, your lack of passion and your lack of love for conveying why people should care will shine through. It will be just like those commercials Ben Stein did for “dry eyes”, he sounds monotonous and boring. If its a reach for you “social” you might want to think about looking at other online strategies to convey your company’s efforts and news.

and lastly…

• Don’t Blog Unless You’ve Got The Resources
  
  Time, people and most importantly content ideas are the resources I’m referring to. Unless you’ve got the time to dedicate to writing a post, responding to comments and even dealing with spam here or there, you might want to think again about starting a blog. If it’s only you writing in the blog, and you don’t have the staff resources to help you out, again, you might want to rethink your strategy. If you can’t plan out your content for at least 2 weeks in advance, you really should rethink this blogging strategy. The worst thing a “blogger” can do, is start off a blog in high speed, slow down and then just stop because they are either burnt out, lack the time, lack the resources or just have no more content to give. You’ve created a following and now you’ve let them down - its nearly impossible to get them back when you find the resources you should have ad in the first place.

* Photo Credit, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid

by Jim Gilbert

WELL… YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST and WE WARNED YOU!

See our original article at:
googles-automatic-match-more-greedy-than-expanded-broad-match

 
If you need the quick summary and don’t have time to read our original article, here you go:

• If your Adwords keywords (Exact, Phrase and Broad match types — including expanded broad match) don’t make your ads show… Automatic Match Will!

Call me somewhat of a cynic, but I have a very tough time relating this to “producing better relevance”. I have personally seen what broad match (with expanded broad match) can do when it gets out of control and have found ways to prevent the excessive spend from occurring. Thank goodness…

But there is GOOD news — you can OPT out!

For the moment the Beta description is still available (Automatic Match Beta),

 
BUT
 
Try using the AdWords help function (while logged in) searching for “Automatic Match” and you get this:
Your search — “automatic match” — did not match any answers in the AdWords Help Center.

 

Why is it hidden? Go Figure!

By Liana Evans
Every company large or small wishes for the kind of brand loyalists and promoters that companies like Apple, Webkinz, and Starbucks have. Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out how to attain that kind of brand loyalty, and most of those companies fail. To a point, even Apple fails at capturing the opportunity of furthering their brand because they do not engage and empower their fan base nearly as ofter or to the potential they could.

While at the WOMMA WOMM-U event, I sat in a breakout session that focused on “Building Sustainable WOM Strategies”. There was a lot of key take aways I got from that session, but one of the ones that really hit me, that I see so many companies fail at is empowering their brand promoters or brand loyalists.

It’s great to have those rabid fans who talk about your products or services and how great and wonderful they think they are to everyone they meet. Word of mouth like that can be better than running a commercial on Desperate Housewives for 3 weeks, especially in a world of DV-R and TIVO. Having an unpaid spokes person, who’s had personal experience with your brand, willingly promoting it and touching their friends is a great thing to have.

Having those is great, but can you make it a better situation, not just for you but for them? Can you empower those brand loyalists? Can you make their recommendation more than just words? Can you make their words become actual engagement opportunities with the people they are speaking with? Do you think it’s possible to even track this type of empowerment?

The answer to all of these is yes.

Yes you can empower your brand loyalists, and yes you can track these types of engagements if you plan and strategize for it. But you are probably sitting here wondering ‘But How?!’ Well there are a lot of ways to do it, you really need to stop and think about your audience and how they speak about you. The key to empowering your evangelists is in understanding what’s in it for them. What do they gain from promoting your brand, and what can they gain from being empowered to promote a brand they love?

From coupons to exclusive opportunities, these are just some of the ways brands can empower their most loyal customers. By giving them something to “back up” what they are telling their friends, families and neighbors, it gives these listeners another reason to really believe what they are saying could possibly be true. As people we are skeptical of people who seem to always promote without any back up, but empower that promoter, and you’ve got an entirely different ballgame on your hands.

By Li Evans

This past week, I had the opportunity to attend the WOMM-U event put on by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association). This was a great experience for me, as I’ve been an avid promoter of WOMMA for a while now, including when I do training for my Social Media classes at SES Training. The WOMM-U event followed my Denver Social Media Class, so this was perfect timing, to have this event follow right after.

What I found most interesting is how different forms of marketing approach Social Media. It’s great when you get to bounce your ideas, practices and thoughts on strategies with the head marketing folks from Dell, Apple and even OPI cosmetics. When you sit in a round table discussion with only 8 people or less, a lot of ideas can be bounced around, vetted out and understood.

That’s what I got to experience with the WOM Strategy track for the breakout sessions at WOMM-U. The track had six 30 minute sessions on different areas of Word of Mouth strategy including: Building a Sustained WOM Program, KPI’s that Work, Selling WOM Programs to the CEO, CO & CMO, Measuring ROI of Fans, Going for Big, Fast Buzz Now & How Does WOM Scale. I attended 5 of the 6 sessions and they had some great takeaways.

Building Big, Fast Buzz Now:

• Evangelism is key to this. People who are whole-heartedly behind your product, brand or service can be your best allies with creating big, fast spreading Word of Mouth campaigns.
• The internet has become a form of entertainment. Today, it is essential that companies have strong creatives for their Word of Mouth campaigns.
• At the end of the day, its people talking to people. That’s how the conversation spreads, that’s how Word of Mouth spreads, if you don’t have an interesting story, people just aren’t going to talk to others about you, your brand or your products or services.

Selling WOMM Programs to the CEO, CO & CMO:

• Word of Mouth Marketing programs are a natural outgrowth of great customer service. If your company already is known for providing great customer support, word of mouth is very easy to come by.
• One of the keys to creating a long time, good word of mouth marketing program is to make promises that your company can keep. Even if they are small, eventually the numerous small promises, add up to a continuous, reliable track record that people can come to rely and trust in.
• Small project that give back to the community that has formed around the brand, product or service, return good incremental value. They also create and build a trusting relationship, and when that happens, word of mouth starts to spread.

Building a Sustained WOM Program:

• WOM should be done by all marketing units, not just the online unit, or the customer retention. Getting all areas involved helps to ensure the WOM program keeps moving along.
• You need to listen to how your audience is promoting you, understand how they are saying things, not just “what they are saying”.
• Product or Service co-creation is a great way to get community involvement and help to continually spread word of mouth.

KPI’s That Work:

• Four areas to look at in WOM: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy & Influence
• Consumers have become very fluid now and their touch points have become fuzzy, and therefore it becomes very difficult to track.
• Word of Mouth Marketing has shattered the linear tracking of how consumers purchase products and services, both in brick and mortar stores, as well as online. Understanding what is “success” is key to understanding your KPI’s

Measuring the ROI of Fans:

• You need to understand what your fans / evangelists are willing to do for you. Understanding this, can give you valuable insight into your evangelists true value.
• You need to understand that there are different types of fans / evangelists: Adovacates, Influencers and Promoters are just a few of the types.
• Using your advocates can lead to decreased costs.

There was a lot more in these sessions, some really great take aways were given. The open environment of the round tables, and being able to ask the moderators about their past experiences was invaluable. It’s not every day you get to pick the brains of the folks who helped Leggo and Intuit, and this WOMM-U event provided just that.

Hats off to the entire WOMMA team that put this event together, it was worth every minute I spent there! For more conference coverage of the WOMM-U event by WOMMA, check out Search Marketing Gurus. For all the fun in photo form check out the WOMM-U Flickr set I set up, too

by Christine Churchill

If you’re looking for inspiration for a summer trip that combines professional development, culture, and natural beauty, here’s a suggestion: combine professional training with a family vacation. Treat yourself to the high powered Search Engine Strategies Toronto Conference and instead of flying straight home, bring the family and explore Toronto and Canada.

SES Toronto is scheduled for June 16-18.  The first day is a full day of training consisting of  four-hour blocks of personalized instruction given by some of the top experts in the country.  Toronto’s training sessions include Link Building taught by the Link Goddess herself, Debra Mastaler, SEO Tools taught by the creative and fun loving Todd Malicoat, Search Engine Marketing Metrics and Myths taught by ex-Googler Adam Goldberg, and Social Media Marketing taught by KeyRelevance’s own social media dynamo, Liana Evans.

June 17 and 18 are the actual conference dates. I was pleased to see my dear friends Fredrick Marckini and Bryan Eisenberg giving the keynotes. When you walk out of their keynotes, your mind will be going a hundred miles an hour, filled with a fresh perspective and stimulating ideas.

Alan K’necht, President of K’nechtology and I are teaming up on the second day of the conference to do the Keyword Research session. Alan and I have spoken together on panels in the past and he is one of my favorite people. Alan doesn’t hold back on his advice. He is one of the most open and forthright people in the industry. I’m excited about our session and our goal is that after our presentations you will have an arsenal of keyword research techniques at your disposal.

Plan a few extra days to explore Toronto and Canada. Toronto is an exceptional Canadian city, and you would be well served to take advantage of the opportunity to get to know it better. The CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Harbourfront on Lake Ontario offer something for every member of the family. Hope to see you there.

By Li Evans

Whether you are doing a PPC campaign, an SEO initiative or even social media outreach you have have to have a plan. Without an online marketing strategy in place, how will you every know where to go, how to get there and what to do once your get there? If you don’t have a strategy, it’s kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if its sticks (and is done). That’s not good for the cook - you waste spaghetti, time and have to clean the wall, and it’s certainly not good in online marketing - you waste resources, time and are left scratching your head in bewilderment.

When you are looking at starting an online marketing strategy, there’s some basic things you should take into account. Making sure all your bases are covered, will save you a lot of hassle and a lot of headaches in the long run. Sure, it may take a few more hours in planning, but it can gain you so much more in the end.

Research First
Research is probably the single most, foundational thing any marketer can do. Know your industry inside and out. Know your industry and how it relates in both an online and an offline marketing environment. Who’s your competition? Nine times out of ten, your competition is different offline than it is online.

How are people searching for you, the products or services you provide and is it different than the jargon you use? Do you want to focus on brand building or focus on the services / products? Can you do something totally different online than you do offline? By doing your research first, you can be prepared to make the right decisions and most likely get a leg up on the competition.

Decide What Online Marketing Facets To Utilize
Do I need to do PPC first? How about starting an online forum? What low hanging fruit can I pick from in the SEO world? Do I need to re-energerize my email marketing campaign? Maybe I need to do some videos & and images? Maybe, you need a piece of everything?

Knowing what approach you are going to utilize, SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email, Multimedia, Online PR or any other segments of online marketing is key to making a strategy work. Doing the research first will help you to determine what segments you really need to hone in on. If it’s a brand new site, you’ll likely need to boost that PPC campaign first, then bring in the SEO. If its an established site, maybe a little bit of social media is needed. Make sure your plan spells out what exactly you will need to use so that all the players on your team know where to put their time & resources.

Coordinate Offline & Online Marketing Initiatives
One of the biggest blunders large brands make is not coordinating their offline marketing with their online efforts. What happens when a commerical hits really big on TV? Most people head to YouTube looking for it, or they head to the company’s site. If offline and online don’t mesh, someone else can take advantage of that company’s “miss”.

It’s not enough to just put up a video or a photo, or even a blog post these days. Coordinating offline, with all facets of online marketing is needed. More often these days, people do not use just one source to find what they are looking for. They may start at a search engine, but then the go off to social sites looking for information, too. Planning and strategizing for this is essential to your marketing success.

Decide What To Measure
One of the most important things to do from the very beginning of any online marketing effort is to decide what is going to be measured. Is it incoming traffic, is it time on site, is it number of pages in a visit or maybe its conversions? Not only is this important, but it’s important to segment that measurement.

By segmenting the measurements, you are going to know where and how these items are succeeding or failing. You can know whether its a landing page or the home page that’s driving the bounce rate up. Is that particular keyword really focused on what it needs to be? Is there a problem with your shopping cart? All of these can be seen if you decide what to measure and what segments to look at before you implement that online marketing initiative.

What Are Your Success Factors?
So you’ve got an idea of what you want to do online marketing wise, right? Well how are you going to determine whether or not that initiative is successful? Traffic & hits alone can’t give you a whole picture. Just because your traffic went up, doesn’t mean that your plan was a success.

Did you get new subscribers? Did anyone buy the product or service you were promoting? Did you get new links pointing into the marketing piece you launched? Did that email get opened more and did the receivers click through? Without setting goals and deciding on what is deemed a success, you are never going to know whether or not that marketing strategy was truly a success or a colossal blunder that shouldn’t be repeated again.

What Happens Next?
It’s not enough to just plan for “right now”, you need to also plan for “what’s next”. Is your marketing strategy agile enough to be able to capitalize on a successful viral marketing piece? Is your online marketing plan taking into account that PPC effort is tanking and costing too much? What are the contingencies you’ve set in place?

If you don’t plan for what’s next, you could miss out on some great opportunities that come your way from both successes and failures. Also planning for what comes next gives your team something to strive for an attain - the next milestone in the online marketing plan. Knowing what you’d like to do next, also helps you to keep an eye out both budget and resource wise before you actually implement. If your team also knows what is coming next, you have multiple eyes looking out to make the next action in your online marketing strategy a success.