A persona is simply creating a fictional customer profile. In Dinkum’s case, we might imagine a small business owner that sells Christmas trees. For many years the owner sold Christmas trees through stores but now, they’ve noticed more people want to order their trees online and they need to build a presence. How would they find Dinkum?

There are three main persona stages. The first is the “browser” who comes to your site to get information. Our fictional Christmas tree seller might put the words “how to sell online”, “how to create a website”, or “what is search engine optimization” into search engines as part of their discovery process.

The second is the “shopper” who knows what they want but not who to buy from. Our Christmas tree seller would now be using very different search terms such as “best Internet marketing company”, “SEO Philadelphia” or “reviews Internet marketing Philadelphia”.

The third persona is the “buyer”. They know what they want and that they want to buy from you. Their search terms would include “Dinkum Interactive”, “contact Dinkum Interactive” or “services Dinkum Interactive”. Again, it’s the same potential client but they are using very different search terms because they are at different stages of the buying process.

Your website and content needs to speak to these personas as they make their way through the buying process. You need to answer the questions of your browser because one day, they could become a buyer. There are several ways to answer their questions including specialist articles, whitepapers, or page content. The point is, once you imagine yourself as the Christmas tree seller, your head goes to a different set of perspectives and insights. It also helps when framing copy and pay-per-click advertisements. The phrase “buy online marketing – exclusive offer” doesn’t speak to a browser because they’re not ready to buy but it will speak to a buyer.

When creating a persona, you can get as creative as you like. You might imagine a whole life story for your fictional character. The important part is being able to pinpoint their needs and solve their problems. As you might know yourself, one of the most exciting things about searching is finding exactly what you were looking for. When you feel someone is addressing your specific needs, it could be the beginning of a beautiful ongoing sales relationship.

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1331435

Jennifer Fleming is Specialist Content Writer at Dinkum Interactive. With a background in journalism, Jennifer is a best-selling writer, writing coach and media strategist. You can reach her at jennifer@dinkuminteractive.com.

By the time we have explained the importance of choosing relevant keywords, they are on board with wanting to rank the raw data to put their best SEO foot forward with good meta data. Sometimes we struggle with content, but even when we struggle, the client understands the need for well written, user friendly, valuable, keyword rich content throughout their site.

Now comes the hard part. All of this work is just the beginning of the campaign.  ”What do you mean just the beginning?” they ask. “We wrote compelling content, you optimized the site, now we just wait for the visitors to click through!” Maybe it is a symptom of the instant gratification we have come to expect in most other aspects of modern life. Or maybe, just maybe, I have not been successful at educating some clients about the ongoing aspect of SEO.  Recently I read an article on Search Engine Watch that used an expression that I feel really spoke to the issue at hand. On page optimization “buys you a ticket to the competition” but your online strategy helps you win it.

In other words, you can’t hope to become visible and win the hearts and minds of human visitors, until you have made the site friendly to spiders, and valuable to humans.  But that is just opening the door.  Online marketing, link building, paying attention to local search, all  get you over the threshold and into the arena.

Keyword strategy is not a ranking factor, according to the author, Eric Enge, but it makes sure you are in the right game.  Without a well optimized site, search engines have trouble finding you, and if search engines can’t find you for relevant searches, the all important human visitors can’t find you either!

I am going to work on my client education strategy, to make sure it clearly includes the long term nature of SEO, the importance of keywords and good content, not as a ranking factor, but as a relevance factor, and the importance of fresh content, via blogs, articles, press releases, video, social media mentions, bookmarks, and everything else relevant to a given campaign, to keep the site on the radar of the search engine spiders and human visitors.

Content is king, but maybe we haven’t done a good enough job explaining WHY!

If you have client education tips, I would love to hear from you.

Photo Credits:  http://www.sxc.hu/photo/762140 , http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1254879 

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive. She has worked in programming, design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client - tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com, or find her on Twitter, @ReginaSillitti.

The following post is a dead giveaway of the amount of time I spend in the kitchen. However, just as with tennis and music, there is an easy correlation between cooking a delicious meal and executing a successful online marketing effort.

Below, I’ve outlined five elements through which I attempt to break down our process in a way completely unrelated to technology or business. Why? Well, delicious food has a far more comfortable connotation for most people than computers, no? And for good reason!

When you begin cooking, or even cooking in a new style, it’s hard to know where to start. Even with a list of ingredients, without some instruction, it’s nearly impossible to know how to prepare or combine them or the order in which to use them. With some cuisine, it’s even difficult to know where to find them at all! The same goes for marketing your business. You may have heard of all of the ingredients (research, keywords, meta data, link building, optimized press releases, social media, etc.) But what does it all mean?

1. Use a recipe. Dinkum has a “recipe” that is just right for your company. We have a library of tools that we know like the back of our hand, including when and how to use them. Part of our process includes getting to know you and your business, what you do, and what your goals are. Once we understand this, we devise a strategy.
2. Quality of ingredients. We never take a cheap, easy, or underhanded approach. This would not be good for anyone! Just as it takes great care and attention (and perhaps a little extra expense) to grow delicious organic food, the long-term benefits can be huge for both consumers and the environment. Will your site jump to number one on Google in a week? Nope. But will we meet each of the important goals that have been outlined by building and following a solid long-term strategy? Absolutely.
3. Importance of prep work. It’s a team effort! You know your business best. In order for us to do our job well, your contributions to help us gain a complete picture are invaluable. Take care with your intake form and engage with the research we come back with. It can be difficult to carve out time, but these pieces lay the foundation. Have you ever tried to cook without doing any prep work? I have. It’s a frantic mess that takes longer than it should, and the food rarely tastes as good! You get the picture.
4. A little love goes a long way. Just as thinking creatively about a meal and preparing it with love can make all the difference in its quality, once a strategy is in place for your site, implementation and follow through are what makes it all come together. Can’t get us that press release? Need help with some blog posts? We understand, and we’re happy to help. Progress depends on action, so even if the only action that can be accomplished is communicating what you need, take the love you have for what you do and make it happen.
5. Enjoying the fruits of your success. Increased traffic, sales and brand recognition are only some of the benefits you’ll realize by utilizing the SEO and SEM services of Dinkum Interactive. Over time, as your initial goals are met, we will continue to come back, revise, strategize and set new goals. In other words: Enjoy your meal, take what you’ve learned, and let’s keep cooking!

I would be remiss if I didn’t add one more thought to this post: Dinkum Interactive isn’t a supermarket or even a farmer’s market where you pick and choose ingredients (a bit of SEO, a dash of social media).  While many companies offer just that service, we’re more like a fine restaurant or (better yet) a team of personal chefs!  We see the best results when you leverage the expertise of our awesome team to help you evaluate your goals, choose a recipe, gather the ingredients, cook the meal, and judge the results along the way. You never know – a dash of salt or a shake of the pepper mill might be all that is keeping you from that perfect meal.

Photo Credit:  http://www.sxc.hu/photo/781602

Meg recently joined Dinkum Interactive as Director of Operations. Her industry experience spans 9 years and includes website design and development, digital resource management, marketing, online strategy, SEO/SEM, and training and support. Meg’s work at Dinkum is focused around client services and education, quality assurance, marketing, and business operations.

Website Content Is Everywhere

Whether businesses realize it or not, they have plenty of existing content that can easily be recycled for a variety of uses. While I’m discussing recycled content for use on the web, that same content can be used for offline purposes as well, such as marketing materials, article submissions to industry journals, tradeshows and other applications.

Tips to Re-purpose Content

Our experience in developing content for a variety of businesses has given us some insight that businesses may find useful when recycling content for use on the web. Here are a few tips that we’ve learned over the years:

Think Broadly – Before assessing anything, it’s important to think broadly about content. Articles, brochures, interviews, conversations, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), presentations, videos, audio recordings and photographs are just a few examples of content. Remember every customer contact, vendor contact, sale, or event can be mined for content.

Not All Content is Good – After wrapping your head around the types of content, it’s important to understand that not all content is good. Maybe that kid in marketing is a lousy writer or the subject of an article is a bit off-topic, so an understanding of what materials may best meet your goals is valuable. As I mentioned previously, quality website content is relative and subjective; furthermore only your customers and prospects can define “Good.”

Share the Challenge – Regardless of the size of company, sharing the challenge of content creation with employees can be a big win for everyone. Some indirect benefits include:

• It creates a challenge
• It gives employees the ability to contribute in other ways
• It acknowledges employees’ experience, knowledge and expertise

But best of all, it reduces the level of work required to recycle content.

Get Ready to Herd Cats – Most companies can be disorganized at times, so patience should be used when assembling all content for assessment. Involving employees will help in speeding up the process, but that’s not going to cover all of the bases. Vendors, industry publications and anyone else that has created company-focused material should be contacted in an effort to get every bit of valuable content.

Change the Channel – Thinking broadly about they type of content has already been mentioned, but considering the delivery channel is just as important. Content originally created as a written article, such as PowerPoint presentations, Sales Brochures or Owner’s Manuals can be recycled many times using a variety of mediums. A good example is to take a lengthy item already published in an industry journal and repurposing it as several posts for the company blog.

Add Value – Just because you’re recycling content, you shouldn’t be lazy about it. While it’s possible to use existing content without making alterations, it’s probably not a good idea. How would you feel if you were watching a video about a cutting edge technology that originally came out a year ago? Use your existing content as a base and add some value too.

Recycled Website Content: Examples

After offering some helpful tips on content recycling, I thought that I’d offer a few examples. These are just a handful of ways in which businesses can get more mileage out of materials they have already created:

PowerPoint Presentation – Business presentations are a great source of web content. Post the presentation on SlideShare, use the presentation as the focus of a blog post or create an embeddable video using an application like Camtasia to make it more dynamic.

Deconstruct an Article – Take a previously published article and break it into smaller pieces for a set of blog posts; if the original is not posted on your website, then post it.
Press Releases – Press releases can be used in an original or adapted form. Since most traditional press releases are pretty dry, don’t hesitate to make changes that make a press release more interesting and enjoyable to read.

Republish Old Posts with a New Spin – Maybe you’d like to forget that mid-90s prediction about the internet going nowhere, but you can refresh the subject and get some use out of it by writing about why you were wrong. Furthermore, you could build on it by creating a series on the biggest developments that proved you wrong.

Photos – Treat your photos of company events, products, industry trade shows and everything else as potentially valuable content. Sure, you can use them on your site, but you can also use them to build links via Flickr. Note: Remember to tag them correctly and use the proper Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/  license that requires a link back to your preferred page.

E-Newsletters – Non date-sensitive (aka Evergreen) content can always be used on a website or blog, but what about a company’s email newsletter? Alternatively, all that hard work in creating content for the newsletter should not go to waste when it can be used in another form, like on a blog, in a brochure or on the company website.

Go Mine for Gold

Most companies that struggle to create website content do so unnecessarily. With the application a little creative thinking and some elbow grease, content recycling can be an effective technique to minimize work and maximize online marketing performance.

So what are you waiting for? Get your helmet on and start digging for gold.

Do you need some help creating a Content Development Strategy for your business or website? Contact Dinkum Interactive and we’ll be happy to give you a hand.

Bill Rowland

For anyone interested, the prior posts in the series include:

Website Content Basics: Going Old School
Website Content Basics: What Is Good Content?
Website Content Basics: Planning Is Important

Online reputation management is becoming increasingly important to businesses of all sizes. A recent article in the Philadelphia Business Journal offers a great reminder that successful companies are proactive when it comes to protecting their brand on the net.

Comcast Protects Xfinity

Web Addresses Ready for Any Comcast Brand Displeasure (Note: Requires Subscription) describes a perfect example of the best defense is a good offense.  As Comcast rolls out its Xfinity service, Wilmington Delaware’s Corporation Service Company (CSC) has registered the majority of website addresses that would interest any disgruntled customer intent on sticking it to the man. Addresses ending in .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .tv for each of four names — xfinitysucks, xfinitytvsucks, xfinityinternetsucks and xfinityvoicesucks have all been registered. While CSC bills itself as as “your single source to secure, promote and protect brands,” the company could just as easily be a nefarious organization looking to damage Comcast or any other company.

Philadelphia Companies In Need of Protection (?)

Whether it’s foreign fraudsters, bored teenagers or customers that have had an uncustomary bad experience, smart businesses should take all reasonable precautions to protect their brand on the internet. After some thought, I took a few moments to find a few Philadelphia-area businesses that may need to protect themselves:

TastyKakeSucks.com
AstraZenecaSucks.com
AnthropologieSucks.com
PepBoysSucks.com
DietzandWatsonSucks.com

While these are intended only as an example, companies that deal directly with the public should take steps to avoid some neer-do-well ruining their hard work.

How Can an Online Reputation Be Protected?

It’s safe to say that protecting your online reputation will be a continual process, however creating a basic plan and sticking to it will help keep you out of trouble and minimize any damage. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Create a Plan – It doesn’t have to be an equivalent to the Normandy invasion, but a plan will keep you focused on what needs to be done.
2. Protect Your Domain – Register the .com, .net, .org, and .info versions of your primary domain name
3. Listen to What’s Being Said About You – Start by setting up a Google Alert to identify online mentions and listening using social media. You can learn more about it in a prior post .
4. Respond to Criticism When Appropriate – Face it, sometimes we screw up. Businesses, like humans, are imperfect. With this said, don’t feel as though every complaint warrants a response; they don’t. However, if a negative comment of significance is made, first try to resolve the issue and second ask them to amend their comment once satisfied.
5. Bury Bad Stuff When Necessary – Sometimes customers cannot be satisfied no matter what you do. If that bad comment or disparaging video bubbles on to the first page in Google, bury it with a competing post or video that will move the negative item off the first page.

OK, you may have noticed that I did not mention buying every version of your domain name appended by the term “sucks” – You got me there… Unless you serve hundreds of thousands of people and have more money than God, it probably won’t pay. But if you’re Comcast, it might.

How do you protect your online reputation? Have you heard any online reputation management horror stories? Please share them in the comments.

Bill Rowland

For Most Businesses, Measuring Traffic is Futile

While this article is interesting, it simply doesn’t matter for most businesses. Traffic measurement has always been an inexact “science” and this article is simply a reminder. Absolute Unique Visitors, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Hits and Conversions can all be defined differently by each business; furthermore each statistic will vary in importance depending on individual organization goals. Essentially, it reminds me of PageRank; it’s an overly simplified metric that everyone can understand.

Focus on What Matters to You

In my opinion, measuring web traffic is a red herring that draws attention away from what really matters to individual businesses. Off the top of my head, here are a few examples of metrics that may be more impactful:

Conversion – Moving prospects through the steps of a conversion funnel is important. Whether the conversion is a sale, subscription to an email list, or the download of a White Paper, it should directly lead to sales. Why focus on traffic when it does it cannot be converted to something that leads to revenue?
Abnormally High Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate generally measures the percentage of traffic that leaves a page without navigating to another page on the website. While this can be interpreted differently, it may make more sense to determine why existing users are leaving rather than those arriving on the site.
Traffic Composition – While the quantity of traffic may not matter, it can be argued that its’ composition does. A higher proportion of direct traffic and traffic from an AdWords campaign may suggest that the business should place greater emphasis on broadening its ability to attract users beyond those that already know the company or that it directly pays for.

The Takeaway

Measuring website traffic is complicated and convoluted at best. While it’s understandable that many businesses use it to measure their online performance, this may be misguided. Businesses should carefully determine whether focusing on website traffic is the most productive use of their time.

What would your advice be to businesses that want to measure their online performance? Is measuring traffic a productive use of time? Why or Why Not?

Bill Rowland

Who Said Content is King?

Anyone that has ever performed research on how to write content for a website, blog, article, press release or any other online medium has surely encountered the phrase “Content is King.” Sure, it’s important to create good content to provide value for users, but what exactly is “good” content? In the second post on my series of creating content I’ll attempt to answer that question.

A good way to get started might be to check out my first post Website Content Basics: Going Old School which offers some background on how users read on the web.

Content is King: It’s Not That Simple

Creating good content is not simple, so the continued use of the “Content is King” shorthand is really a disservice to every business working to attract users, prospects and customers to its website and blog. Essentially it’s a tidy way to define what can be a messy process and unfortunately many businesses dive right in without giving content creation much thought. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but some advance thought into what that business’ target may find useful is a good place to start.  Let’s look at some of the content most people enjoy.

Characteristics of Good Content

While most people may not be able to define “Good Content,” we all can generally identify a several characteristics that make a particular post or video standout. Here are a few that I’ve come up with:

Unique – A story, approach, or perspective that nobody else has is inherently interesting
Solves a Problem – We all have daily problems that we need to solve and help solving them quickly & efficiently can be compelling.
Educates – The early purpose of the internet still holds true; people want to learn about their subjects of interest.
Entertains – Entertainment may not be a deal-breaker, but good content often entertains.

Generally, I think that good content includes at least one of these components and becomes even more compelling if it includes more than one.

Characteristics of Bad Content

Haven’t we all been repulsed by some really bad content at some point? It’s sometimes easier to define “good” by understanding what is “bad.” Here are a few qualities that I feel define sucky content:

Self Centered – As a consumer and prospect, I’m selfish. I want to know how it helps me. Not the publisher.
Confusing – If the content is visually confusing, tricky to operate of difficult to understand, most will normally leave. I know I do.
Negative – Unless it’s celebrity gossip, negativity rarely helps.
Overly Dense – Few web users want to read “War & Peace” or watch a 1 hour video. Make it feel manageable.
Ugly – Hey, if content is uncomfortable to consume, fewer people will consume it.

I’m sure that I may have missed a few; if I did, tell me what drives you nuts in the comments.

The Answer? It Depends

Unfortunately, if you were looking for a definitive, comprehensive answer to the question “What is Good Content” you’ll be disappointed. A quick review of the characteristics of both good and bad content suggests two things:

Content Quality is Subjective – Content quality is subjective because it is directly tied to the knowledge or experience of both the content creator and reader. What may be useful, educational or entertaining to you may not be for me. The key is positioning your content in a way that will resonate with your prospects as helpful, educational, entertaining, etc…

Content Quality is Relative – Your content will be judged relative to that of your competition. Remember the grading curve in secondary or high school? Well, your content is graded on a curve as well. As a result, it may be either easier or more difficult to have content recognized as good. So businesses should look around to understand how they can create content that beats their competitors.

Only Your Prospects and Customers Can Define Good Content

With the understanding that the purpose of creating content is to either directly or indirectly generate business, only your prospects and customers can define good content. Therefore, it’s imperative that businesses have a clear understanding of what their clients find useful, how clients consume content and then create content to suit that need. Seems like a version of marketing 101, eh?

Bill Rowland

Website Content Takeaway # 1: Users Don’t Read

Generally, I agree with this premise but I think that it’s overly broad and should be modified to: Unmotivated Users Won’t Focus. Understandably, website visitors have varying levels of motivation and some may be more willing than others to sift through bad content. Furthermore, with the adoption of video and audio businesses can effectively communicate their message without creating copy.

Motivating users to focus is very important and a good place to start is creating interesting and compelling content. It’s important to understand that the subject is not the only factor that makes content interesting and compelling;  I’ll touch on some other factors that can even make “industrial valves & fittings” interesting in the coming weeks.

Website Content Takeaway # 2: Understand the User

Businesses that keep their website users in mind will be more successful than those that write for the masses. A good understanding of user needs will help businesses create content that users value, increasing website use and conversion into customers. For example, visitors to the website of an electrical supply distributor specializing in commercial equipment will find much more value in content targeted toward commercial work than residential work. While this example is pretty obvious, I’ll discuss some others later in the series that aren’t.

Website Content Takeaway # 3: KISS

Most people understand the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method; I think that the results of the measured usability kept it simple and understandable. Essentially, the test measured the improved usability when making website copy concise, scannable, objective and a combination of the three. The summary table can be seen here:

Source: How Users Read on the Web

Miraculously, creating content that was concise, scannable and objective improved usability by 124%. While time may have affected the exact numbers, using the KISS method in creating website content today is still worthwhile and I’ll address what is included later in the series.

What do you think about this dose of the Old School?  Does it still make sense?

Bill Rowland

Does your company need help to improve its Search Engine Optimization? Contact Dinkum Interactive

Keywords: content creation, Jakok Nielsen, online marketing

Essentially, Google has adopted its PageRank algorithm to evaluate the reputation of Twitter users for inclusion in real time search results. Although it’s still early, there are a number of factors that may affect the ability of a given tweet to show up in real time search results and the Econsultancy article presents a brain dump on some of the most likely factors. Here, I offer a few brief comments:

Presence of Hashtags – This one seems a bit grey. Inclusion of hashtags in a trending topic suggests spam. How we define “trending” is a big part of this one. I don’t know.

Presence of Keywords – I think this is common sense. ‘Nuff said.

Unique content – While real time search filters information quickly, it’s more likely that Google will use a reputation score before the order of publication.

Recency – Of course tweets from dormant or seldom used accounts will be less likely to be included in real time search.

User Name – I’m not sure on this one; 15 characters is enough to include keywords but I think that keywords in the bio is more likely to matter.

Age of Account – Naturally, recently opened accounts could be spammers so I would think that this could be significant.

Keyword Focused Accounts – I suppose that if every tweet is about sofas the user may know a lot about the subject, but it seems pretty manufactured. Kinda like all the links with the same anchor text…

External Links from Non-Social Sites – Seems likely. Echoing the use of “link diversity”…

Quantity Helps – I think general activity is more likely to create authority than specific types of activity, like retweets… just my guess.

Ratios – This seems to make sense. Generally, users with greater authority probably have more followers than those that don’t. Could this mean that auto-following is spammy & bad?

Lists – Something I never thought of; presence on other users’ lists implies quality and value. I learned something here.

These are just my thoughts and are not based on any objective data. What do you think affects a Twitter user’s tweets in Google’s real time search?

Bill Rowland

Whether you’re a regular reader or a first time visitor, we’d like to know what you’re interested in learning more about on the Dinkum Interactive Blog?

Give Us a Hand By Answering a Question?

The areas of interest includes:

• Social Media
• Case Studies
• SEO Basics
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Web Analytics
• Interviews

Update: For those that answered our one question survey, thanks. We’ll be publishing the results shortly.
Bill Rowland