Google alone was making an average of 1.5 changes per day to how its index ranks web pages and we saw social media burst onto the main stream scene with celebrities, businesses and people of all sorts clamor for a spot on facebook, Twitter and other networks. And that was just the obvious stuff, at least for an Internet marketer

I could go on an on about what took place in 2009 and my predictions for 2010 but what I want to speak with you about right now is how I dropped the ball in 2009 in a big way.

Surprised?

Don’t be. We learn and grow by making mistakes so take a page from my play book this year and don’t make this mistake as your business grows in 2010.

What I did WRONG in 2009:

Hands down the biggest mistake I made in 2009 was not communicating enough with my customers.

With all of the communications methods available to me: cell phones, SMS, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc etc I really dropped the ball on this one.

In retrospect I focused too much on the day-to-day work in front of me and learning new technologies (and some old ones like copywriting) rather than investing quality time getting to know my customers better, managing their expectations and adding value to their lives.

My business grew in 2009 which was a good thing. However, the trick is to grow and be able to take even better care of the people who you are in business to serve in the first place.

Critical lesson: sometimes you can get results for people but by not clearly communicating the results (AKA the value you are creating for them) and insuring they know what you’ve done, you can still loose an account, a customer, and a relationship.

Your current customers are worth far more than any future prospects you might encounter. More than that, if you offer the level of service that I do, one to one in most cases, you’ve got a personal relationship on the line.

The REMEDY

• Communicate early, communicate often
• Stay in touch via whatever means your customers find acceptable. This includes email, SMS, by phone, by video, by snail mail, social media and any other ways you can think of
• On an ongoing basis, find or create relevant ideas, news, and other information to send to your customers but only if it’s something you truly think will add value to their lives
• Continue to get to know your customers by reading their emails, listening to their questions and learning about their businesses, their customers and their industries. Find out what’s important to them and then find a way to help them achieve more, be more, have more and do more of whatever that is.

Tools

• 1 to one email systems like Gmail
• 1 to many email marketing systems (that also have social media integrations) like Vertical Response, Mail Chimp or ExactTarget
• Social Media Tools like Twitter, Facebook, linkedin and Yelp
• Tip: use Ping.fm to update all of you social networks at once
• Video (People can subscribe to your Youtube channel for example)
• Snail Mail (Yep, I just said that)
• Phone
• Cell Phones (SMS, mobile websites, mobile advertising etc)

If you are providing outstanding value, and are sending information that will truly help them succeed, then you’ll be heard, you’ll build the relationship, and you’ll continue to build your business.

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Learning the ins and outs of Google’s content network and improving the results one can achieve with Adwords are still important. But my gut feeling is that advertisers and marketers who, in the coming years, learn to generate and profit from traffic outside of Google’s domain are going to be more successful than those who do not.

Just like Microsoft in its early days, Google has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. However, there’s a growing discontent building, at least in the web marketing industry, with the power Google now wields and its ability to completely kill off, shut down and pretty much put out of business those marketers who it deems as not fitting its interests.

Any time a person, company or country rises to a place of dominance, detractors spring up; it’s a given. People have been crying foul for some time about Google’s business practices and its philosophy of doing no evil is admittedly suspect (I mean why not focus on “doing good” instead?). Detractors and the doubtful aside (of which I am one…I mean I use a lot of Google’s services and only recently realized that if they closed my account on a whim, it would be hugely detrimental to my business) it just makes sense to diversify your traffic sources if you have the means to do so.

So what does that look like?

For one, there are only three ways of getting traffic to a website that I know of:

1. Direct type ins, where people type in your domain name into their browsers. (Typically 10-15% of a sites traffic coming from direct type ins would not be uncommon. In special cases, where a marketer owns a domain such as fish.com or money.com, direct type ins might be the sole means of traffic. How powerful!)
2. Paid advertising: Pay-Per-Click is by and far the method of paid advertising most of us are familiar with. This includes banner advertising and the increasingly popular interactive ads we see on our favorite news sites.
3. Traffic from links: this includes links from Google. Yes, Google does link to your site remember? It links to you in its search results! We don’t tend to think of traffic from search engines like this, we tend to classify it as it’s own type of traffic: search traffic (and links from other websites are generally known as referrals). But really, traffic from search engines boils down to getting traffic from links.

To simplify things even further, I’ll go as far as saying there are only two ways to get people to a website:

You can pay for it or you can work (hard) for it. Plain and simple.

Search engines continue to play a major role in directing traffic to websites for the time being. Social media and social networks are also rapidly growing in their influence and ability to drive targeted traffic to sites. Then there’s the opportunity the mobile web presents.

For my purposes here though, my primary interest is in buying traffic.

Some things I will be looking at:

• Ad networks other than those offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Link brokers
• Affiliate networks
• And others

Really I’m just getting started in my research and already I’ve been digging up all sorts of opportunities to drive traffic, leads and sales by other means than though Google.

The web is a big place. Moving ahead into 2010, keep your eyes open for new ways of bringing people to your site and generating the results you’re after. There’s a ton of opportunity out there.

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“Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Every advertising question should be answered by the salesman’s standards. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. Treat it as a salesman and force it to justify itself.” – Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising:

It’s amazing the number of pay-per-click ads, banner ads, text link ads and others forms of web marketing that I come across that seem to forget this fundamental web marketing principle. (Even more amazing is that it took a 100 year old book to remind me!)

Online marketing, and any online advertising you do is really online selling. What it all comes down to is good old fashion salesmanship: buyers and sellers connecting for mutual benefit and all that good stuff.

The quote above is just one of many pearls of wisdom that I’ve “discovered” in legendary ad man, Claude C. Hopkins book, Scientific Advertising.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

Or so the old saying goes. Here are a few more spot on observations from one of modern marketing’s forefathers:

“One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly and convincingly just as a salesman must. But fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention away from the subject. They reveal the hook. Any studied attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.”

All of us have seen evidence of the above paragraph at work, even in this day and age, in 2009. You know what I’m talking about, the bland, 0-personality corporate speak brochure like websites that are nothing more than glorified electronic business cards. What value do they serve?

If only the people behind these sites knew:

“Successful salesman are rarely good speech writers. They have few oratorical graces. They are plain and sincere men who know their customers and know their lines. So it is in ad writing.”

And youtube videos….It never ceases to amaze me the number of videos on youtube.com that receive hundreds of thousands or millions of views. So many of them seem to serve so little purpose. Of course each one offers a lesson, a lesson in what a fraction of the population is interested in for a period of time. Sometimes all they’re after is pure entertainment. Other times it’s music or instruction or information but in every case it’s an emotion, a feeling of some kind that results. What is often the case, as pointed out in the paragraph above is that many of these videos and many of the most profitable websites are often pretty plain looking, unrefined and un-fancy. Yet they work because they deliver whatever it is the viewer is interested in.

My own website is an example of this. It’s quite plain yet it does its job of communicating to people what I’m about, how I can be of service to them and that I have some credibility. It is no means complete or perfect. So how could I improve it? Well, I could make some educated guesses, or I could take another dose of 100 year old Hopkins wisdom and act on the following advice:

“There is one simple and right way to answer many advertising questions. Ask yourself, “Would this help a salesman sell the goods?” “Would it help me sell them if I met the buyer in person?” A fair answer to those questions avoids countless mistakes.”

In Internet marketing speak: does each page of your website, each piece of content-help or hinder your efforts to get your visitors to take a specific action that will lead you and them closer to a sale? (Hint: this refers to conversion optimization which is something I will speak about more in future posts.)

Another related maxim Hopkins urges his readers to take to heart is the idea that none of us on our own has enough knowledge of the general population to make an accurate decision in regards to how to advertise. To say this a bit differently, he tells us to test everything rather than make assumptions about what is right.

That piece of advice continues to be as true in 2009 as it was in 1890. When working with clients I see it time and time again: we tend to make decisions based on inaccurate information or by what is commonly held to be accepted. Now for some things that’s fine. But when we’re talking about the profitability of the online side of your business, why not test major assumptions and be prepared to make changes if you’re wrong? In fact, I’d suggest you adopt this as part of your online strategy and thinking: your web presence should be ever evolving and never remain static for very long.

So if your site is going to always be changing, and growing, what’s the best way to go about doing that? Again, Hopkins answers with clarity:

“Some say, “Be very brief. People will read but little.” Would you say that to a salesman? With a prospect standing before him, would you confine him to any certain number of words? That would be an unthinkable handicap.”

He goes on to state that your copy needs to be complete. Just as a salesman needs to be able to fully communicate the benefits to a prospect and how a product or service will satisfy his needs, your site and your ads need to fully explain everything your potential customers need to make a decision about taking the next step with you.

This is another important distinction: your site’s goal really should be to get every visitor to take some kind of action, even a small one that signifies a step closer towards buying from you. Even something as small as adding a Twitter follower to your list or receiving an email address in return for some free information: it’s all a form of progression down your sales funnel.

So how do you get people to take action?

“When you plan and prepare an advertisement keep before you a typical buyer. Don’t think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view. Think of a typical individual man or woman, who is likely to want what you sell.”

Is there anything Uncle Claude doesn’t have an answer for? Again, he reminds us to focus in on the buyer. You need to answer the question “What can I offer them and what action can I get them to take as a result” “What do they need, want, value or desire that I can provide?” Answer that and you’re on the right track.

Stumped? No worries. The following piece of advice will have you figuring out what your customers want in no time:

“Some advertising men go out in person and sell to people before they plan or write an ad. One of the ablest of them has spent weeks on one article, selling from house to house. In this way they learn the reactions from different forms of argument and approach. They learn what possible buyers want and the factors which don’t appeal. It is quite customary to interview hundreds of possible customers. Others send out questionnaires to learn the attitude of buyers. In some way all must learn how to strike responsive chords. Guesswork is very expensive. “

“The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else.”

Such a fundamental marketing lesson isn’t it?

Reading this book reminded me, heck it taught me several fundamental marketing and advertising principles that I never came across in school or read on the massive numbers of Internet marketing blogs, websites and forums I’ve ever come across.

This is a great reminder that there are some principles that have survived over the years despite the rapid and far reaching changes that have been taking place online and off in recent years.

So now that you’ve just had your own blast from the past or kick in the ass depending…what are you going to do about it?

Personally I’m rethinking client projects, and my own websites, sales process and marketing materials in light of this “new” wisdom. So should you.

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Claude C. Hopkins was one of the greatest advertising men of his day (1866-1932).  After an extremely successful career, one that earned him a fortune in his day, he set out to record the principles that he uncovered and to write out his general philosophy on how to attain success in advertising.

The first principle he writes about as outlined in Scientific Advertising is that everything must be tracked and tested. We should never count on our own opinions or the opinions of a few others to decide what’s best where advertising and marketing are concerned.

Mastery is gained by repetition, tracking and learning from experience. It’s been said that it takes 7 years to master something or roughly 10,000 hours of study and application; however, if you continue to do the same things over and over during those 10,000 hours, it’s unlikely you’ll come anywhere close to mastering Internet marketing strategy or any other worthwhile skill.

When it comes to marketing, and especially Internet marketing, everything significant you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis should be tracked and tested.

Here are a few snippets from Hopkins book. Keep in mind these ideas are over 100 years old.

“Individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a part of the organization’s equipment, and a guide to all who follow. Thus, in the course of decades, such agencies become storehouses of advertising experiences, proved principles, and methods.”

“Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences. Under these conditions, where they long exist, advertising and merchandising become exact sciences. Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.”

“We learn principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising, by traced returns… We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle.”

“Our final conclusions are always based on cost per customer or cost per dollar of sale.”

“Some things we learn in this way apply only to particular lines…others apply to all lines. They become fundamentals for advertising in general. They are universally applied. No wise advertiser will ever depart from those unvarying laws.”

So how do you go about tracking and testing your online marketing efforts?

The first way is to install an analytics system such as Google Analytics on your website.

An analytics system will attract the majority of activity that takes place on your site.

The second way is to create and maintain a tracking journal. A tracking journal is simply a document you create where you track your marketing activities over the course of time. Ideally you will monitor and record your activities week to week. Luckily much of the work is done for you by your analytics system, however, there is still a lot of information that your analytics system can’t account for.

For example the delay between when you promote a story on Digg or another social news site and when that story begins generating traffic to your site. Or how long it takes Google to recognize an inbound link after it’s been created from another site that you own. These are good things to know and things that can only be figured out by meticulous tracking.

A few of the things is would be good to track include:

• The date of any posts to your blog and where you promoted these posts online
• The date, websites uses, and number of links you create on any given day
• Any and all changes to your pay-per-click marketing campaigns
• Any videos, emails or other content you create that resides on a third party website
• Any social media campaigns
• Your social media graph or the growth of your social networks over time
• The amount of traffic your sites receive each month
• The number of leads and sales you’re making each month

And so on…

I prefer to use Google Docs for this kind of thing so I always have easy access to the tracker wherever I am. The tracker should be used with your analytics reports – compare them from time to time, every 1-2 weeks so you maintain a tight watch on what’s working and what’s not.

Tracking leads to specific knowledge instead of generalities and specific knowledge of what works is powerful. Specific knowledge is what you should be after here. And the more specific you get in terms of results being generated, the more of an edge you’ll have over the vast number of people who operate on general principles, who fail to track, and who end up operating sloppily as a result.

If Hopkins was alive today, I think he’d end this post with this final, concise reminder. Take it to heart and apply it to your own online marketing and traffic generation efforts:

“Success is a rarity, maximum success an impossibility, unless one is guided by laws as immutable as the law of gravitation. No guesswork is permitted.” – Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

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The first thing everyone should understand is that there are only two fundamental types of traffic: paid and unpaid. Paid traffic includes: online advertising such as pay-per-click marketing, and banner advertising. Unpaid traffic or natural traffic is traffic that your site receives without you having to directly invest in getting it there. Examples would be a well optimized website showing up in the search results for terms a phrases people are searching for, social media traffic that has resulted from people taking an interest in what your business offers, any press or coverage you receive from bloggers or main stream media that was not paid for.

A couple of quick thoughts on the two types of traffic:

1. Ideally, every website would be promoted with a combination of the two.
2. Natural traffic (unpaid traffic) still has a cost in terms of time and energy invested to create the content people are visiting in the first place
3. Paid traffic is often short term while natural or unpaid traffic often continues to bring in traffic for an extended period of time. For example, a banner ad only brings in traffic as long as you pay for it but a well written blog post or nicely put together video on Youtube may continue to bring in traffic for years to come.

Investing VS Spending

Another fundamental concept is that every time you do something to grow your web presence, it should be seen as an investment and not an expense or cost. This may not be the proper way to look at it from an accountant’s point of view but I find that if you look at putting the money, time, and effort into marketing your site as an investment it’s easier to do. Your online marketing especially should be seen as an investment that needs to pay you a return. If there’s no potential return then what’s the point? I bring this up because many people still have the old advertising mentality that thinks that advertising and marketing is an expense that may or may not pay off. 

Aside from making it easier to do, there is another reason for adopting this line of thinking. That reason is that on the web, just about everything you do to promote your site can be tracked and if it can be tracked and quantified then a return can be calculated. 

Over time as you test methods of traffic generation against each other, you will build a portfolio of “investments” you can choose from where the return on investment (ROI) and expected results are clear ahead of time. 

Test Everything…then test some more!

The third fundamental concept of Internet marketing is testing. While you may not be able to afford every possible method of generating traffic, leads, and sales online at first, you can always start small, pay attention to the results and track your progress. 

Everything should be tested; from the color of your website, to your photos to your offers to various ad formats and advertising platforms etc. The list is truly endless but don’t let this overwhelm you. The key is to pick a few things (marketing tools or concepts) you are going to focus on and then make it a habit to test the various aspects of how you apply each one. For example, if you choose to build an email list and write a newsletter like this one, you might test various ways of asking people to join your list. You might test different subject lines, different content ideas, different calls to action and different offers. The key is continual testing and tracking of your results.

Really it’s about practice and refinement. The more times you practice a sales pitch to a prospective client and the more prospects you see and the more variations you use in the shortest amount of time possible the faster you will arrive at your destination. The great thing about the web is that just about anything can be tested, changed, updated and tracked and this can all happen in a relatively short amount of time. The other interesting thing about the Internet is that small adjustments in how you do things can often bring huge improvements in results. Case in point, in some of the Google Adwords ads I’ve written for my clients, simply by using a variation of a word – e.g changing the word “need” to “want” in the body of an ad – I’ve seen an ad pull 20-30% more clicks. On the web it is often about the small details and each of these details can be tested. 

You can also flip that statement on its head and come at it from another angle which is to only test huge changes. It’s sometimes too slow to vary every minute detail of a campaign or website for example. In this case you might be best served by making drastic changes and monitoring the results. They key again is to test, test, test!

Test your ad copy, test your landing page copy, test your email copy, email subject lines, and so on. If you’re launching a new site, test what domain name you will go with, test different page layouts and so on. There really is no limit. Yes, you have to be practical about how you use your time, just know that sometimes huge performance increases are a small change away. Also know that by testing and refining each aspect of your site and online marketing, as long as you track your results and keep what works, in time you will end up with compounded, positive results.

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Here are 7 easy steps:

1. Create a free account at www.budurl.com
2. Find a newsworthy story/blog post and shrink the story’s URL using Budurl
3. Paste the shortened link into Twitter and write a catchy intro
4. Post the story
5. Monitor clicks via your bud account
6. Rinse and repeat to test various copy/stories
7. Divide total number of clicks by total number of followers to determine what percentage of followers respond to each link/post

Bonus tip: use the notes section of Bud to better track the URLs and stories you’re following

Bonus tip #2: in the notes section, paste in the exact wording you used when posting to Twitter to keep track of Twitter copy that your followers respond to

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I wore a less flashy watch to a meeting today and will be tweaking the site in the coming week or so to see if I can simplify it a bit (yes, it’s already quite simple and I can do better!).

With all the talk lately of recession, marketing in tough economic times etc etc, it makes sense for marketers to be a little less flashy and focus their messages more on the bottom line and how they can make and save their clients money.

For me, that means the site needs to be less about adding widgets and more about focusing on good, solid, valuable content that my clients will find applicable to their businesses.

On that note today’s tip is:  go back to basics.

Practical applications:

• Update and simplify your web site’s theme / design 
• Don’t be afraid to use or go back to plain text emails or simplified HTML
• If blogging or using Twitter, focus on practical tips and less theory (marketers are the most guilty of breaking this one)

I think going frugal is a trend we’re going to see catch on and stick for the next couple of years. As more ideas on this topic come to mind, I’ll post them here.

What steps are you taking to “go frugal”  in 2009″ 

Post thoughts to comments.

Update: Read about the New Frugal Google

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“Ideas on Tap is a light business networking event for hi-tech professionals in Vancouver plus internet advertisers, social media marketers, bloggers, video game developers and other fans of the tech community.”

The turnout was great (I’d say about 200+ easy) and people were friendly and willing to chat about all things tech. Twitter was of course the topic of many conversations on account of the fact that so many of us locally in the industry have met online first and then face to face at events like this. Funny how it works these days, you meet online first and then in person.

I met @shanegibson, a local speaker, sales trainer and author and @johnchow, a local blogger who has gained international renown for his money making ideas and tactics over at www.johnchow.com. I also spoke with @chrisbreikss and @cydb of 6s Marketing (who hosts the event) and a ton of other cool locals including friends from Wallup Creative and more.

The event was a blast – always great to put faces to names and to meet new and interesting people in the social media / web marketing sphere.

So what’s next up for the local social mediaratzi? Everyone’s heading to Word Camp Whistler for the weekend. Unfortuneately I won’t be attending but may meet up with the gang for beers as I’m heading out the door myself to hit Whistler to do some boarding this weekend.

If you’re up there get in touch: @adamkillam 

Cheers!

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“Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I’m Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.” stated the first post.

“The New Whitehouse.gov” as they’re calling it will focus on communication, transparency, and participation.

Obama’s use of Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce.com Ideas has already proven his team’s ability to take advantage of the social web to reach out and gain support from and communicate with the people. The addition of the new blog to Whitehouse.gov is another great step in the right direction for the new President.

Congrats Obama. We’re all watching!

Related items:

• People’s thoughts on Twitter during the inaguration
• Obama’s facebook page
• #inaguration on Twitter
• Follow Barack Obama on Twitter

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