Netconcepts

SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make

Stephan Spencer — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:48:59 +0000

From title tags to internal linking, from optional excerpts to rel=nofollow, this session covers the biggest search engine optimization mistakes WordPress bloggers make, and how to fix them.

Web Site Design Spotlight: Live, On-the-spot Critique of Retailers’ Sites

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:15:35 +0000

A team of long time e-commerce experts will provide live reviews and makeovers for sites from the audience members. Retailers in the audience will be asked to bring search marketing, user experience, e-commerce strategy and other design questions to this session where experts will view the sites in question and provide answers to fix what ails their web sites. Audience members who volunteer their sites for critique will receive a $25 Starbucks gift card.

Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight

Integrated Email Marketing and Online Communications

Jacqui Jones — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:00:24 +0000

Is your email marketing right on target?
Do you want to improve open rates and conversion rates?
Do your customers view your email communications as spam?
Do you know how to use RSS and blogging to complement your email marketing and online communication efforts?

The value of email marketing in New Zealand has been growing steadily over the years. Not surprisingly email marketing and online communications are the most popular media of choice now, particularly email marketing.

Email is a powerful marketing tool and it integrates well with traditional media. It spurs immediate action, thus generating direct sales, registrations, growth of database and more. It is also more cost effective than paper-based direct mail and achieves greater ROI. However, it is wrought with challenges. And with the passing of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, it’s important for organisations to ensure compliance whilst developing their marketing plans.

Integrated Email Marketing and Online Communications takes a practical approach to ensure continued acquisition, growth and retention of customers through targeted, robust, tried and tested strategies to help lift your email marketing strategies. To help you gain the upper hand over your competition, the course also covers some popular online communications tools that you could implement to supplement your email marketing strategy.

DAY ONE
Digital Communications — Email Marketing, Online and Offline Media
Customers today have more choice available than ever before of how they are communicated with. Customers ultimately want to control the frequency, the content and how they receive their communications. This session covers how email fits within the full marketing mix and how it integrates with other online and offline media.

What are digital communications?
How do digital communications fit within the full marketing mix?
Marketing through email, RSS, blogging, txt, websites
Platforms – desktop computers, mobile devices
Integration with other online media
Integration with offline direct marketing

Developing an Email Strategy
Many companies spend a lot of time, effort and budget acquiring email addresses, but neglect to develop an effective communication strategy once they have them. You’ll learn to develop strategic communication plans to maximise the potential for robust marketing strategies through this session.

Developing the digital communication strategic plan
Objectives, strategies and tactical elements
Understanding the email marketing and digital communications
process
How to integrate email marketing into other online and offline media

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act: Your Legal Obligations
Understand and ensure that your organisation meets the requirements of the Electronic Messages Act 2007.

Definition of spam
Definition of permission levels
Permission vs. memorable permission
Industry guidelines and best practices
How will the Act affect your marketing plans?
What are the penalties and costs associated with breaches?
How tight is the current legislation – what are the ways around it?
How to ensure compliance
International spam laws – do they apply to companies in NZ?

Data Management: Building and Maintaining a List
Data is at the heart of any form of direct marketing including “email”. It pays to identify the data that you need to collect in order to personalise communications and provide effective reporting.

Structuring your database – what type of data do you need?
What are the reporting data requirements?
“Quantity” vs. “Quality” – retaining the active subscriber
Cleaning and maintaining data – changes, adds, deletes, fixing misspellings
What is “provable permission” – recording and time stamping of permission received
“Offline permission” – how to record permission granted through the call centre, trade shows, network meeting and face-to-face sales activity
Managing permission across an organisation

In-House or Outsource – Assessing Email Service Providers
Finding the right email service provider is a critical choice for any company. You will explore and learn ways to find the right vendor and technology to manage your campaigns now and into the future through this session.

How to assess your needs
Questions you should be asking
Assessing email service providers in NZ and overseas
Liaising with your email service provider

DAY TWO
Winning Creative Strategies & Execution for Email
Create email messages that stand out, get read and get the response you plan for.

“Memorable permission” – planning content your subscribers actually want to read
Exploring the 19 creative elements (the from line – email brand value, the subject line, the preview pane, position of logo, ratio of text to images, design layout, number and type of links, navigation bar, inclusion of photography, feature offers, location of call-to-action, the words you use and personalisation etc.)
Email mandatories
What are the technical specifications?
Designing effective landing pages and forms
Use of rich media – video and audio
Eyetracking and multivariate testing

Increasing Conversion Rates
This session covers how to use data to improve conversions such as open rates, click rates, inquiries and sales.

Reporting data
Behavioural targeting
Event triggered campaigns

Deliverability, Filters and Rendering
Learn techniques to avoid the dreaded “spam” folder and “report spam” button.

Data collection and tracking
Filters and list management
Deliverability reporting codes – messages sent back from ISPs
About false positives
Whitelisting – how to get your message delivered every single time
Image suppression – what’s getting delivered?
Authentication and reputation
Rendering your message in email readers

RSS – Spam Free Communications
Is RSS the holy grail of online communications? Lean how to send communications that are completely spam free.

What is RSS and why use it?
What are some of the popular RSS readers available?
iRSS – individualized RSS, sending personalised communications just like email
Content distribution and syndication

Blogging – Participating in the Ongoing Conversation

The New Zealand and international blogospheres
Starting a blog - how to choose a theme
Posting content – what, how, when
Dealing with comments
Making friends – increase your presence in the blogosphere
Integrating your blog with email and RSS
Use of video (vlogging) and audio (podcasting)
Reporting on performance

Ecommerce Blogging: Who, What And When

Jeff Muendel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:49:52 +0000

If you’ve even remotely considered adding a blog for your eCommerce site, then this article is for you. In this article originally featured on Practical eCommerce, Jeff Muendel helps eCommerce business owners design a strategy behind blogging.

A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more likely to follow a blog or subscribe via RSS than to visit the corporate site repeatedly. So, several avenues of search optimization and online marketing can be addressed with a single blog entity.

From the SEO benefits of business blogging to how it can help your customers, Jeff covers the basics of “who, what and when” of blogging. Read the full article at Practical eCommerce here.

Website Metrics and ROI: Getting the Most out of Your Online Marketing Spend

Stephan Spencer — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:08:58 +0000

In this teleseminar, learn what to measure, including…

Abandonment metrics - for uncovering why visitors are leaving your site prematurely
Conversion metrics - for insight into your acquisition funnel
Retention metrics - for boosting your customer retention
Search engine metrics - for obtaining the best return on your search marketing investment
Email marketing metrics - for achieving the highest response rates from your email campaigns

Is your web site successful? Is your online marketing — including your SEO, paid search ads, email campaigns — all working, and how can you find out? The answer lies in metrics. It’s hard to improve upon something you’re not measuring. You could drop $100,000 on a high-end web analytics package. But if you don’t have a staffer dedicated to making sense of all those reports and taking some sort action as a result, it’s wasted money. Better to spend $10,000 on a lesser web analytics solution and $90,000 for a salary to employ someone highly skilled in web analytics. In fact, you’d be surprised the powerful tools you can get for free (and yes, we’ll go over some of the most exciting ones during the teleseminar). However, right now your first investment should be in signing up for this teleseminar.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer — Founder and President, Netconcepts
Avinash Kaushik — Author, Speaker and Analytics Evangelist

Driving Engagement Through Widgets and Gadgets

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:49:29 +0000

iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo - social networks are the hottest topic of Web 2.0. Recent developments such as Google’s OpenSocial platform may further accelerate the explosive growth in widget and gadget application users. So what do widgets really mean to your customers and to your bottom line? What monetization strategies should you focus on to ensure widgets are more than just a buzzword to your organization? And how to you prevent your widget from becoming another lost or unused orphan among thousands of other apps? Misty Locke, co-founder and president of Range Online Media, has been working with numerous retailers to determine the most innovative, engaging and measurable approach to web applications. Misty will lead a discussion with other industry experts to answer these questions and to tackle how to succeed with widgets and gadgets today, pitfalls to avoid and emerging opportunities beyond 2008.

Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com

Audio Interview with Expedia.com SEO manager Chris Alan

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:35:00 +0000

In this interview, Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, sits down with Chris Alan, SEO manager for Expedia.com. Chris is a SEO veteran who currently manages all aspects of Expedia’s natural search channel, including keyword campaigns, landing pages, and more. We talk about common pitfalls that companies fall into when managing large, keyword campaigns as well as a number of other useful tips for big and small websites.

If you prefer to read this interview, check out the abridged transcript.

This podcast is now available for you to listen to.

Interview with Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Anti-Spam Team

Stephan Spencer — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:35:05 +0000

In early December, I spoke at the PubCon conference where I had the chance to sit down with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-spam team.

Matt was kind enough to agree to an interview, where he shared invaluable tips about Flash, syndicating content, the change to their supplemental results, and a lot more. His insight and advice is really helpful; he provides clarity on topics that can be really confusing.

If you prefer a written transcript, you can read the interview transcript with Matt Cutts on my blog. I invite you to listen to the podcast interview, which is available now.

Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:48:36 +0000

Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDFs, docs, podcasts and RSS feeds.

Panelists:
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Content Acquisition, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision

Interactive Marketing: Reaching Customers

Stephan Spencer — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:35:00 +0000

Search engine marketing

Making your site “search engine friendly”
“Pay-per-click” search advertising
Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts