mommyjenlin

Stories Matter The web moves in phases. The first phase was presence. In 1999 when I built my first website, FoundObjects.com (now RIP sadly), having a website was sufficient to generate Return On Investment (ROI). The next phase was the battle for commerce. The move from "brochure-ware", websites that were little more than printed brochures that happened to be online, to limited interactivity. Once the conversational door was open the social tsunami began. Where once we lucky few Internet marketers lectured now, in the social era, we listen and curate. Having conversations means we develop different kinds of websites. One easy to spot difference is the ubiquity of social share buttons. Social signals such as Facebook Likes and Tweets confirm our claims and the conversations taking place on our new more social websites. Why Stories Matter NOW No one speaks first, so conversations must be present and robust. Speaking in stories creates more vulnerability than "marketing ...

Diversified Content Marketing No one cared when I preached, "Content marketing" in 2003. Now everyone is creating "inbound marketing". Some good things happen when everyone does something online. Overall quality of whatever the group marketing is doing tends to go up. One very big bad thing happens too. Chances for your content to shine are reduced by the noise of success. This post is about how to fortify your content marketing with the four horsemen: Four Horsemen of Content Marketing * Content creation. * Content curation. * User Generated Content (UGC) engine. * Ecommerce. Content Marketing Horseman #1: Create Daily When you don't know what you don't know create a lot of content every day, but always have "narrowing the funnel" as your goal. Narrowing the funnel is when you can safely reduce your traffic net because you know what content brings converting traffic. The key is connecting the top of your content marketing funnel (traffic generatio...

Vestique Women's Apparel Store & New SEO Had lunch on Friday with Heather King . Heather is a talented online ecommerce merchant helping the equally talented founders of Vestique , a successful women's apparel retailer in Raleigh, Charlotte and Greenville North Carolina, move from bricks to clicks. Vestique, like many catalog or brick and mortar retailers, faces unique challenges after Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates including: Pages not supported by social shares don't get much New SEO traction.  Social Shares hard to get because inventory moves so fast and unpredictably.  Inventory uncertainty hampers inbound link building. Uniting inventory, website and Point of Sale (POS) systems is a challenge.  Time crunch for founders and shoppers.  Here is Vestique's Internet marketing data: Bricks, Clicks and New SEO This post is about sharing ideas to help Vestique and other online merchants harness the power of our "new SEO". This "new SEO...

Amazon As Cautionary Tale I follow Amazon pagecounts closely. Prior to Google's Panda and Penguin updates Amazon was slouching toward a billion pages inside of Google. At a billion pages in Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) the distinction between Amazon and Google becomes less and less. Then Google's Zoo of change (Panda followed by Penguin) hit. Now Amazon is down to 127M pages. I realize "down to" seems absurd with such a large number of pages in Google, but better than 90% of Amazon's "pages" have been swept away. Amazon was LATE to the social game. Amazon's ability to generate new pages via their own machine code was astounding and robust. In platforms vs. websites I wrote about how if the Brooklyn Bridge fell into the Hudson tomorrow Amazon would have a landing page with fully cooked content up within minutes. And such technical wizardry used to be enough. Amazon's ability to create new pages by combining pieces of old used ...