Project Management Skills

It's been a long time, the spring's been and gone and now the summers' pretty much been and gone, but it's been a busy time here.

Project management work has been coming in, with our online marketing skills, especially SEO expertise, I think that we provide a good service for clients and y'know what, it's enjoyable!
Pitching for new client work, looking at how the site can be better designed for usability and adding extra functions to increase user engagement are good fun to work on, something to get the teeth into.
You can basically think of a wish list and add it all in! As long as it's backed up with rationale.
Proceeding that, having won the contract with all the marketing innovations just listed, then becoming the middleman between the client and developers is a great lesson in relationship management. But it's a satisfying job, bringing the project in on time, within budget and creating a site that both the client and it's users like. So, I say, bring 'em on!

Facilitating UGC For Your Site

One of the defining aspects of web 2.0 is based around User Generated Content or UGC. This is defined by "A web site owner provides facilities for site visitors to add comments or copy to existing pages create their own pages and reviews or upload their own media such as images, audio and video clips.” It is said that by 2010, UGC will account for 70% of the web’s content.

Enabling this facility on your website offers a wealth of benefits. It requires a certain amount of moderation but it means that your customers are doing your work for you. They are rating or reviewing your products, your quality of service, advocating your company to fellow users which in turn helps to both keep the site fresh for search engines and helps to retain those users as loyal customers.
On average, a loyal customer is 5 x more profitable to you than a new customer.

Enabling UGC on your site means customers are returning to the site to add content, whilst there, they may have a look around to see what else is new and what current promotions are being held.
A “sticky” site is something that every website owner strives to achieve.
Content can be provided in many different formats which can subsequently be shared via other social media tools – video files which can be uploaded to YouTube, photos which can be shared on Flickr, all linking back to your site. Once the content is taken off your site, it requires monitoring to manage your reputation. Tools such as http://www.google.com/alerts and http://www.blogpulse.com help you do this by sending you a weekly report with a round up of where your company has been mentioned on the web.
Remember that no matter how good your search engine rankings are, a static website will start to fall out of the search engine rankings unless content is regularly added to it. With so much competition, it’s up to you to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Adwords Qualification

Well I finally got a bit of time to take the Adwords Professional qualification. I'd heard that it was difficult and that you really needed all of the hour and a half alloted to complete the exam.
In actual fact, it wasn't as difficult as I'd expected and took only an hour to complete - obviously I'm pleased to be able to say that I passed it :-)
I'm now spurred on to take the Analytics exam, although I think that might be a different case as analytics is pretty technical which I can only take soo far. I think that'll be one for the new year as I've my IDM exam coming up in December and need all the spare time I've got to gem up for that (and practice my handwriting - crazy that exams about using the digital medium, and we have to write by hand)

The 80/20 Rule

Having just had a bit of a discussion with a client about traffic for their site. Namely, what search terms are converting traffic, once you take out any references to the company name, I thought it an interesting topic.
You would expect any SEO campaign to focus on a core number of search terms with which to promote the site. My client has been complaining that those terms are not converting into visitors very well, that if you divide the number of visitors arriving at the site under those specific terms with the amount spent per month - it equates to a hefty CPC.
Well it does if you look at it like that :-) However what the client doesn't seem to appreciate is the other terms that are bringing in traffic to the site. You'd never expect to just see traffic to the site based solely on 5 terms for example. The Long tail principle, comes from the 80/20 rule. 20% of the traffic to your site is coming from those specific terms whilst the significant 80% is coming from related terms. The total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the total of top 10 terms.
Once you bring in this 80%, the CPC looks alot healthier.