Over the weekend I visited the local Home Depot to pick up a few things. As I pulled into the parking lot I passed the “garden center” and noticed rows and rows of flowers just waiting to be purchased and planted in the front yards of homes all around the community. You would think that’s a good thing, right? Not me. I was mad. Here’s why…

Home Depot is pulling out all the stops to sell people the flowers they need for their yards. That’s fine except for one little thing…they’re selling the flowers a full month before they’re really supposed to be planted. Most folks who plant flowers in this area recommend you wait until after May 15. That’s an entire month from now, but Home Depot is more than willing to sell you flowers a month early and is doing a great job of creating a really attractive display to convince that it’s just fine to get them now. You should see the spread of flowers they have out there. It’s beautiful. It looks like exactly what I would love to have. It’s also way too early to buy them. The likelihood they’ll die between now and next month is pretty good. Tonight it’s going to get down to almost freezing…so case in point!

Here’s why I’m talking about this. Some marketing firms and ad agencies will sell you flowers a month early. They’ll be happy to provide something you want without telling you how and when to use it. It may be good for business, but it’s bad for customers. I understand there’s a level of responsibility on the part of consumers, but when you expect someone to know more about a topic than you do, you also put some trust in their hands. That’s why I’m appalled that Home Depot is selling flowers a month early as if to say, “Go ahead, get you flowers early. The smart people won’t be doing that, but you ignorant folks can give us your cash now.” I’m equally appalled at marketers who sell services to people when they don’t need them.

The bottom line is this: just because it’s available doesn’t mean it’s the right time. Just because they’ll sell it to you doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Just because you bought it doesn’t mean you should use it. That would just be doubling the number of wrong things you’re doing.

In two weeks I’ll be leading a micro conference especially for marketing, advertising, and public relations professionals. So, whether you work in a communications office, marketing staff, PR firm, or advertising agency, you qualify for this micro conference. The 90 minute micro conference will be on April 29 at 10:30am EST and will cover the following:

• Why new media marketing is worth a shift to your marketing strategies
• Growth statistics for new media technologies
• Explanation of the technology, the shift in online culture, and the shift in the way to communicate online
• How to think like a social media marketer
• The most effective strategy for social media marketing

Limited Space (but five spots are FREE)
Space will be limited to 30 companies/organizations. The price is $249 for the 90 minute conference but five of the thirty slots will be given away for free to non profits. If you work for a non profit or know of one that may benefit from the conference, pass this information along to them. All they need to do is send me an email stating who they are, what they do, and why they are interested in social media marketing.

Access For 10 People From Your Organization
Access to the micro conference will be available for listening online or on the phone. Participating businesses and organizations will be able to have up to 10 people from their company attend as well. That means if a couple people in one office want to gather around a phone or computer but someone else is a little less social…everyone can all listen from their respective locations. Or maybe one of the staff is traveling and will be driving all that morning. She can call in and access the entire conference from there.

Conference Recording Available to All Participants
The entire session will be recorded and emailed as an MP3 to the email address provided during the registration process…so even if someone from the staff is out sick that day or you just want it for future reference, you’ll be able to pass it on to the rest of the staff after the conference is over.

Your Questions Answered
The reason for limiting the number of participants is that I want to be able to answer at least one question from each participating organization. Once you sign up send me a question (or several if you like) and I’ll be sure to answer at least one during the course of the micro conference so I can answer something you specifically want addressed.

If you’re ready participate click here or click the “add to cart” button below.

Saturday Night Live’s “Surprise” sketch.

All bloggers want more traffic to their site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a professional blog or some random musings from your life, you want more traffic if you publish a public blog. Sure, you know about blogrolls and link exchanges, but do you ever link specifically to posts to bring some traffic to you blog? You can. Here’s how.

Linking to posts (called trackbacks or pingbacks depending on what your blog tool calls them) is a way to show that you wrote a blog post specifically talking about a post on another blog. That referring link then shows up on the original blog either under the trackback area or in the comments. That referring link can then send people to your blog to see what you had to say on the topic.

For instance, if I wrote a post about how Seth Godin gives a good explanation on the types of people who use Firefox rather than Explorer, I would link to it as I’ve done here and grab the trackback link at the end of his post. That trackback link can then be inserted into a special trackback field within Wordpress (some blog tools can do this automatically…just check how your blog platform deals with these or try this). Then my post referring to Seth’s post would show up on his blog.

Wordpress is especially generous to pingbacks. If you were to link to this post for instance (the permanent link) it would show up in the comments. Wordpress works like this for all users unless the blog’s author has specifically turned the feature off.

The strategy here is that you add value to the conversation and get to bring people over to your blog to see what you’ve said. It’s better than a comment because it shows you took some time to really respond to the blog post. People who read the comments will be more likely to click over to see what you said because they also recognize that you took the time to write it.

One final thought here…don’t be a jerk. Don’t trackback unless you have something valuable to add. There is such a thing as spam trackbacks and spam pingbacks and you don’t want to be one of those. Just add something to the conversation and you’ll be fine.

If you have a blog I hope you see it as a strategic marketing tool for your business or organization because it is. One thing you should be doing is blogging specific keywords and phrases that describe you and your business, products, or services. If you have a Google AdWord account you have already identified the keywords you want to be recognized for, so why not use those same keywords straegically in your blog post titles and throughout the posts themselves?

The stats I continue to see pop up after doing a little research suggest that 70% of online searchers prefer natural search results compared to paid search results like AdWords. That’s why it’s important to be found on the left-hand side of the Google search page more than the right-hand side. You get more than twice the traffic.

Here’s how it can work…

Let’s say I want to be discovered as a new media marketing or social media marketing expert in the Nashville area (which would be nice but I personally don’t want to be too geographically fixed so I wouldn’t necessarily use these specific combinations of keywords). I would probably do a steady stream of posts over the course of several months where I would use the words “social media” or “new media” and “Nashville” in the post titles and through the blog posts themselves. I would also look for variations on these keywords like “social media marketing” and “middle Tennessee” or “new media marketing” and “Nashville-area.” I could even get more specific with phrases like “social media consulting” or “new media coaching” and then also tie that into the Nashville or middle Tennessee keywords.

As you can see there’s a lot that can be done here and it’s just the beginning. There are all kinds of alternative phrases I haven’t even gotten into like digital marketing, online advertising, interactive media, interactive marketing, etc. I expect if you just took 15 minutes to focus on the keywords for your business you would come up with a nice, long list too. Once you get your list, identify the top ten most important ones so you know where to put the bulk of your energy.

One more thing to do is to really focusing on tagging your posts with the same keywords as you’ll see I’ve done below with the same keywords that you use in your posts. Jeff, over at Mossy Creek Custom saw a great increase in traffic to his blog once he started tagging more specifically.

After a few weeks start searching the keywords to see if your posts are turning up. Also, check your stats and see if there are some specific keywords that seem to be sending a lot of people to your blog. You may be surprised

So, to recap, here are four things to do:

1. Identify your keywords. If you haven’t identified your keywords with a Google AdWords account, take some time to create a list of all the phrases you would hope to be found under in a Google search. After this, pick out the top 10 that are most important and start with those.
2. Post strategically and regularly. If you post four times a week, maybe one of the four posts every week will be a strategic post with your selected keywords. You should plan to do this for a few months to get good coverage because it may take that long before you see it show up on Google depending on how competitive your particluar market is.
3. Tag you posts. Tag well. Tag often. Tag like you marketing life depends on it…ok, not that much, but you get the idea.
4. Measure. Check to see what’s working and what isn’t. You may have some surprisingly high performing keywords that you didn’t expect. If so, you should consider blogging about them more often.

This is certainly off the beaten path of my normal blog posts but too funny not to share. My friend C.H. told me he realized this week that he’s getting old and out of touch.

While listening to the local radio station a few days ago, C.H. heard a promotion for an upcoming concert and the announcer was making a really big deal about giving away “$48 tickets for Fifty Cent.” This completely dumbfounded C.H. because he thought, “Why the heck would the radio station promote a giveaway for a concert yet charge the winner fifty cents to win the tickets? Can’t they just give them away for 100% if the ticket value? Is there some kind of tax implication to the station for giving away the full value of the tickets? Is the radio station just so cheap that they’ll pay the first $47.50 but not cover the remaining fifty cents? What a lame giveaway. Why can’t the station come up with a measly fifty cents more?”

After really being perplexed by this strange radio promotion it finally dawned on him. The tickets aren’t going to cost fifty cents. The tickets are for 50 Cent…the rapper. It’s a 50 Cent concert. Guess the radio station’s promotion isn’t so bad after all, though maybe their phrasing was. Or maybe it was just lost in translation on a guy who’s not quite as in touch as he thought. Whatever the case, I got a good laugh out of this.

Ok, so I know I used a Rhett and Link video a few weeks ago but I had to get this one in too. Enjoy!

The Facebook Song

I think the business of website development is going through a major shift. With the power of current blog platforms and the ease with which they can be used as a valid alternative to traditional websites, I believe small web shops are going to have to adapt and/or specialize in something else or their business is dead meat.

In the good old days (about four years ago) you could build a website from the bottom up if you were talented enough or you had to pay someone to build a website for you. Fact is, many of those sites amount to little more than what we see on blogs today, but it was the only way to really get a decent, well branded web presence. There were some do it yourself type of website tools with templates you could choose from, but by and large if you were serious about being online you didn’t go that route.

That’s not the case anymore. Blog platforms can be customized beautifully these days with a fraction of the development time and cost because the entire backend of the site is already done. That’s a huge shift for the web design business because traditional shops (and I’ve worked for and with some) would have their own code set for building sites or they would start from scratch. Customers got charged like crazy for sites that would really be no big deal in this day and age. The worst part is not everyone knows this and some web shops are still selling their services like always.

All I’m saying here is that it’s no longer necessary to look only to a web design firm to build your web presence. My friend Cory Miller began a venture a while back to start building on Wordpress and selling the designs so he can deliver an entire web presence on a platform he didn’t have to build. You can check it out at iThemes.com and you’ll see the designs are really sharp. Nathan Moore and the Anthology Creative crew did my blog on Wordpress and I love it. It’s clean, simple, gives me everything I could want, and it’s a full website that covers everything I need.

This web development shift is great for customers. They are generally better looking sites that are easy to manage and much cheaper than what some companies charge.

If this feels a little too doom and gloom for the web designers then you’re not seeing the opportunities. I actually think the future is bright in the web design/development world if they adapt to the changes or become specialized. Here are three areas that seem wide open for growth:

• Blog Design Specialists: Blogs have emerged as a great platform for a web presence that meets the needs of what many people want when they think about getting a website. The web designers who are focused on providing a great web presence with a focus on ease of use, function, and beauty will do well. Their counterparts building sites the old way, however, will still be charging clients to use some bulky, proprietary stuff their company is married to.
• The Flash/Controlled Media Specialists: Some people want to control the entire online experience for users and Flash or some other controlled online media like that is always going to be a preference for those people. Blogs won’t cut it in that regard and the specialists who can do this well will likely be in demand for a long time.
• The Big, Bad, Complex Website Specialist: There are some websites that are just too big and bad to warrant being built on a blog platform. You’re not going to see Amazon.com or anything like that switching over to a blog so there will always be a need for the large and highly complex site specialists.

I should note if anyone is wondering…I don’t build websites. I know enough HTML to get into trouble and  my design skills are mediocre at best. This entire perspective is based on the opportunities for consumers and my observations about how the market is changing. It’s as simple as this: the days of paying more than five or ten thousand dollars for a website are gone except in some select scenarios. In many cases you can get more than enough for what you need for under $1000. Just be aware of that next you want a website.

I admit that I’m not an SEO guy and and don’t want to be. There are lots of specialists who know the ins and outs of how to get the most Google juice out of your website or blog and it’s worth knowing where to go for that kind of help.

Eric Holter and the team at Newfangled Web Factory, located in the shadow of the University of North Carolina, (no kidding…they’re right down the road from the campus) have put together a two part series on search engine optimization. The video below is the first of two they’ve done to help people understand how to do search engine optimization better. You can read more about Newfangled’s two-part series on SEO here (part 1) and here (part 2).

How to do SEO