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In this presentation to The Wisconsin Publishers’ Production Club’s (WPPC) Catalog Innovations meeting in January, Netconcepts’ Director of E-Business, Hershel Reese explains how Web 2.0 has great implications for catalogers and publishers online.

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

 

 Interview with Hershel Reese and Web 2.0 [37:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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With tens of millions of users (but probably not the purported 100 million), MySpace.com is a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you consider that MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.

But MySpace is hard for many of us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many young people with short attention spans, despite the fact that the design/usability is so atrocious, the Web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many profiles that are obviously fake, spam, duplicated, or abandoned?

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It’s 2007 already. If you are like most merchants, you’ve followed the advice of your NSO firm and completed some basic site optimization projects. You routinely spot check your Google indexation, and your rankings on 100 or so “trophy” keywords to show your executive team. And a look at your web analytics shows your natural search channel sales growing. So what’s wrong with this picture?
Let the Long Tail of natural search and KPI metrics strengthen your website through best practice SEO.

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The WordPress plugin “Replace by Referrer”, written by Charlie Evans, Sr. Developer at Netconcepts, was designed for a client who had advanced tracking capabilities in place but no way to utilize them. When prospect phone calls came in they wanted to know which search engine referred them. Additionally, they wanted to offer a different phone number displayed for each search engine. The Replace by Referrer plugin was developed to automatically replace defined text on pages and posts within content depending on search engine referrer.

If Google refers a visitor to your site, a custom phone number (specific to Google traffic) or a custom link (to a specific Google referred landing page) will be displayed to that visitor. The same technology can be applied to MSN (rebranded as Live Search), Yahoo, and all other search engines as well without having multiple pages for each search engine.

It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• Allows you to replace specific text strings in pages and posts with search engine specific referrer content.
• Session identification specific to search engine. Replace by Referrer remembers which search engine the visitor came from throughout your entire site.
• And best of all, it’s FREE!

Download the plugin!

Installation instructions

1. Upload replace_by_referrer.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Go to Plugin Editor
4. Click the “Replace by Referrer” file in the right hand column
5. Scroll down to “// comment about this replacement” (See example below)

   // comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
    'google' => 'google1',
    'msn' => 'msn1',
    'yahoo' => 'yahoo1',
    'default' => 'default1',
)

   Replace google1, msn1, yahoo1, or default1 with any text string.

   For Example:
   // comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
    'google' => '1-888-207-1109',
    'msn' => '<a href="http://www.netconcepts.com">netconcepts</a>',
    'yahoo' => '<img src="http://www.example_image_URL.com" />',
    'default' => 'This default text would appear in place of {test1} if the referrer is not Google, MSN, or Yahoo',
)

6. When you have everything configured, insert {test1} within a post or page where ever you want the specified text seen above to appear.

Note: In the example seen above, if Google were the referrer, {test1} would appear as “1-888-207-1109″, if MSN were the referrer, {test1} would appear as netconcepts, etc.

To-do

• Configure all the referrers and replacements via the WordPress options menu in the Admin, as opposed to hardcoded in the plugin.
• Modify the code so that you can serve the text string based on referring keyword, as opposed to referring by search engine.

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback by commenting to this post.

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Heidi Cohen, author for ClickZ, discusses the latest Advice & Opinions. By & for Marketers. In this section, Cohen gives high-level explanations for “Ten Trends to Drive Traffic and Sales in 2007.”

At top if this list are “social media” outlets and proper “search marketing.” Cohen gains input from Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer for his expertise on these trends.

Spencer first describes the importance of social networks and their key role in today’s marketing. He goes on to explain the dynamics of search marketing and how companies will need to tap into the Long Tail of natural search if they want to seriously compete in the market place.

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P J Fusco’s unscientific survey shows marketers are still missing the boat on PPC. Selecting only jingles and buzzwords that didn’t include brand names, she decided to see if the big names were putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to the Web. And the results were surprising, says Netconcepts’ PJ Fusco in this article for ClickZ.

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Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.

In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.

Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.

Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.

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As a brand owner, it is important to recognize the role in which search marketing plays in the wider marketing mix and understand that it is more than sprinkling a handful of keywords on pages. Natural search marketing or search engine optimization is more than just keywords.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

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Have you considered incorporating content partners and marketing partners into your online strategy? For example, partnering with content providers who could augment your own content with additional related content? Or partering with sites whose visitors match your target market?… If, for example, you wanted to reach women online, you could partner with a site like iVillage.com and build a microsite together, then have them promote it through their site and subscription lists.

Think about the sites you advertise on as potential partners. Join forces and create a microsite together and then promote it to a joint captive audience. Or make a deal with them and syndicate some useful content onto their site. For example, you could develop a whole library of useful tips and, rather than doing standard banner ads, you could provide these tips to your partner, who would then fold it with the rest of their content. Et voila!… “Sponsored content”!

Even better if, between the two of you, you can develop some sort of “hook” or viral component, such as a funny video, an addictive game, a downloadable ebook, worksheet, calculator, widget, etc…

Got an example to share of a site where the whole is greater than the sum of the partners? Post a comment!

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