When I say pitch, I am more specifically talking about the power point document and the presentation you would give in a pitch.  I have also heard quite a few speakers on this subject, who have heard hundreds of these pitches.  So I am going to give Seth Elliot, from On Start-Ups in Miami and Guy Kawasaki “Art Of The Start” credit on many of these concepts, and have added my own and new thoughts to the subject.

The Concept

Before you start to put together the plan, the first question I ask is this a working, day to day business, or is it in a prototype stage.  This is important and how the pitch is put together is influenced by where the project is at.  If you are an early stage “idea” company, then you may need to really figure out what it is you are doing, what is the business model, what is your market and who are your customers.  The pitch is the place where you actually have to use your brain and figure out these details about going to market, customers, and other questions, especially if your idea is still a concept and not a prototype.

Small First Details

Seth Elliot had this small detail at the bottom of his PowerPoint when I saw him present on writing a 10 point pitch.   On every page in his presentation it had, in big letters, his email address and phone number.  The reason he had this, he explained, was that when an Angel or VC would be looking it over, they would often pull a page out and carry that page around, so being able to easily find you and not the first page to contact you is a nice small detail.  Another small detail I like to include is the company logo on every page in either the upper left or right corner, just as a branding thing to remind the listener of the overall brand. I think these small details will get you the funding in the end, because attention to details is important in a pitch.  Strangely enough I am not that attentive to details, so that’s why I have either my biz partner or an editor come and help me with the editing.

10 20 30 Rule

You will hear this in many forms with similar numbers, but this rule comes down to 10 Pages, 20 Minutes, 30 Font.  It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it helps keep you on target.  If the presentation is just 10 minutes, then you are looking at the most 8 pages.  The 30 Font, often a relative impossibility, is all about communications.  Bigger fonts are better, because people reading a pitch will have a hard enough time understanding what you are talking about, less being able to read it.  If your pitch has in it blocks of paragraph text, you will need to break it down and eliminate everything but the bullet points.  I was creating a pitch with a friend of mine recently and I would send him a 9 page pitch in 24 font and he would edit and send it back with 12 pages and 14 and 16 font paragraphs.  I simply took his bullet points and rose the font back up and got it back to 10 pages…  If you can get it to 30 Font, that is amazing! I haven’t yet, but it will always be the goal on my next pitch.

Cover Page

There should be a cover page.  Having a nice logo on there always helps, especially if it conveys what the business is about.   If not, then put a “tag line” in there.  A tag line simply describes the project in a way that breaks it down for the listening so that it is easily understandable.  I am thinking an average logo and an amazing logo makes a big difference.  Won’t comment on the pricing here or where to get it done, but it is important.  Also, on the first page, and I learned this at the Florida Atlantic University MBA communications program, you should always include your name.  I always put right beneath it the location of the presentation, if there is one, and a Month, Year.  You could put a date, but the month year to me tells them the relative time of the presentation.  If you put a date, it may seem like the presentation is a month old already.

Table of Contents Be Gone

Back in the old MBA days they taught us the golden rule, tell em what you are going to tell em, tell em, and then tell em what you’ve told em, i.e. intro, middle part and coverage of what you have told them.  This is fine for an internal corporate project, and most presentations.  The problems with this Table of Contents “TOC”, is there is no time in a pitch.  You have to cut anything out that is friction based.  If you can live with out it, do so.  Most VCs and Angels know the routine, they know what sections will be covered, and in fact if you miss one or add something frivolous you are making a big mistake.

“Overview” Page Not Necessary, Stand-up Routine A Must

Now, it would seem smart to put a page right after the cover page that describes what your company does.  And many presentations I have worked on over the years have  the what we do page, but once again in a pitch, burn what is not necessary.  In my latest pitch I trashed a perfectly good overview page at the last minute, because it did not add to the conversation.  Instead I went into a sort of story telling history, fact based, kind of stand-up routine to explain the concept.  Now many of you are not ready for this, but the true, honest, explanation to the viewer is the best policy.  Using yourself as an example about how you came about being where you are standing, is the best way to go.  For many great ideas we had an aha moment, or go here via a couple incidents.  Either way, there is a story and you should be able to easily rattle this off.

The Problem Page

I like to start with the Problem Page.  I think that while you can’t leave some stuff out, and you can make a mistake of leaving too many things in a pitch, there is not real issue with moving the pages around.  So, in this pitch I used The Problem Slide, but another pitch may start with management or solution.  Key to the problem slide is telling a story about the problem you are solving.  Once again bullet points, in the largest font possible for viewers.  Be specific about the problem being solved.

Next, The Solution Page in Part 2 of “Need An Internet Start-Up Pitch To Raise Capital?”

In my Capitalistic mind it just did not compute.  People give other people money.  Huh? Yes for a charity, but this is not just for charities.  Because I have an idea for a business, let’s say, you are going to give me the funds (with no equity).  Then Andrew the next time I saw him threw in the concept of promotion.  This means that if you give me funds on Peerbackers.com, I get some kind of promotion for my business or whatever.   Well, things have happened in a way since then, to kind of give me a nudge to give Crowd Funding a second look.

So, one of the start-ups I am involved with is now using Peerbackers.com.

iPlanForCollege.com, a well thought out website offering automated college admissions counseling and planning is having a promotion using Crowd Funding on Peerbackers.com:  http://peerbackers.com/projects/help-military-kids-get-to-their-dream-college-1381544279.  The way this promotion works is you go to the iPlan page on Peerbackers.com and you can pay for military young adults to get iPlan college admissions counseling.  You make a kind of donation and the results are a young person gets a service reduced in price or free.

Everything Is Changing, The Jobs Act

Apparently the new jobs act includes a provision that will allow, under specific circumstances, for people to be able to Crowd Fund, giving up to $10k allowed per person, without all the securities and exchange rules.  Now, this is brand new stuff, and hopefully we can all use it to fund our projects in the future, legally and according to the rules.  So, maybe Crowd Funding is really something after all?

iPlan is a cost effective, virtual college admissions counseling service for highly motivated 9th grade through senior high school students looking to attend competitive colleges in the United States.

iPlan works just like going to an in-person counselor; you answer questions about your personal interests, academic and extra-curricular activities and where in the United States regionally you want to attend.  iPlan returns a recommended list of colleges and a road-map to get there.

Please take some time today and visit our new site at iPlanForCollege.com.  Any feedback and/or partnership opportunities can email info@iplanforcollege.com

I wanted to thank a few people for making this site possible.  Without them this would not have happened and the site would not have worked and looked as great as it does.  Some of these people are just people who gave me their opinion or influenced how the site would be built or branded.

Young Kim
Michael Healey (1879 Media)
Shannon Healey (1879 Media)
David Tyreman (World Famous Company)
Linda de Lucca

Phone Numbers, Cell Phones & PDAs Start The Know Nothing Trend

Let’s step back a bit.  I had been in the cell phone business back in the 90s, when the first internal phone books emerged.  They were good and you could choose from a list of people to call, but when you broke, lost your phone or upgraded, you had to go through the painful move your contacts over process. But long before cell phones, landline phones, the old phone companies had those 10 digit numbers you had to remember.  I am saying “had” because I believe phone numbers one day will be so obfuscated, you won’t need to know a number.  In fact maybe you just say a name and your smart device finds that person.

When the Palm emerged (how soon we forget) it had all kinds of contact information apps on it.  When the Palm merged with a cellphone, we were ecstatic.  We would no longer need to keep that litttle black book for phone numbers.  We still had to keep the address book around for the written addresses and some emails at that time.  In the late 2000s as the phones got smarter, we were able to keep our contact list, integrate lists eventually with things like Google and Gmail.   This made it possible when I lost a phone to get back at least an old copy of my contacts.  But we were not free of having to remember some information.

Tell-A-Friend

As a little side note here, we had put the Tell-A-Friend page on almost every site we built up until recently.  The problem of course with Tell-A-Friend is, if you don’t remember their email address, you couldn’t tell a friend.  So how close a friend were they.  So in the early years of the web, you remembered all your friend’s email addresses and if you didn’t,  you copied and pasted it from your email program.  But this is where the little black book came out.

Google Throws A Life Line

Gmail was the first really great implementation of a technology that naturally offered up contact information, such as email addresses and names of previous email contacts in a way that was unobtrusive.  It used a natural intelligence that was not dorky or difficult and did not bother you.  Using my Gmail account, I would just start to type either an email address or a name and it would show the contacts I needed.  You could still search Gmail and find it other ways.  Now, the geeky at-heart will email me and tell me that there were others before Gmail with this capability.  I am sure of that.  But this is the place I remember losing my “email” mind and not having to add email addresses to my little black book.  I think it was around 2003 or so for me, but it doesn’t matter.  What is important is I don’t know your email address if you asked me now!

Make It So Linkedin!  Now We Don’t Have To Remember Ourselves

The emergence of Linkedin.com is much more than just a place for our business info and contact info.  It created a place where we could put our resume information and not really have to maintain a physical resume.  We are not totally there yet, but it is the beginning of another little piece of paper shoved into my little black book going away.  The critical aspect of LinkedIn is it allowed people to change jobs, lose their primary email address, and keep in contact with you regardless.  If you are LinkedIn with somebody, they can change their email address and life is good again.  You don’t lose them.  Next time you login to LinkedIn they have a different email address but life goes on just the same for your contact relationship.  And the ability to use LinkedIn to communicate to you with  “send them a message” changed the game.  This small innovation in the business world has made it so even my little Gmail artificial intelligence is not that important anymore.  The ability to contact and communicate within these types of applications was well underway with the big daddy of them all coming to town, Facebook.com

Social Networks, Honey Where’d My Brain Go?

So now that Facebook is upon us and seemingly consuming 90% of the online time of people who seem to have all the time in the world for Facebook, a second phase of this trend is now kicking in.  We no longer need to remember not just phone numbers or email addresses.  We don’t even have to remember our friend’s names.  When you share a link or webpage on the web and you use one of the many sharing mechanisms, like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Vimeo, and there are others, life has gotten easy to ping somebody.  If you use Facebook sharing to share you can send your message by searching for a face now, right?  That conceptually means that you don’t need to remember anybody’s name anymore.  And I see this trend increasing as Facebook logins and other types of sharing mechanisms seem to be everywhere these days.

The Final Frontier: Smarter Devices Means You Can Be Even Dumber!

When you got your first iPhone and you logged in to iTunes, and you downloaded your first Angry Birds app, the trend became apparent.  You did not have to enter your email address each time.  Just enter a password.  Apple knows who you are, your contact info and basically we don’t need to know ourselves (email-wise).  The whole concept of remembering your email address is becoming less important.  Once you are on an iPad you don’t need to enter your email address to get on a list with an app.  You buy things through iTunes.  And if you use Words With Friends by Zynga you interact with people that you don’t really know and your contact info is embedded somewhere on a hard drive in the cloud (”the keyword for India hard drive storage”).  So smart devices are making it so we don’t need to even know who we are.

What’s Next?

Well, I have no crystal ball, but obviously Facebooking your way around the web, using Facebook to contact and communicate is here to stay.  The smart devices to me represent a major change in how and where this contact info lies.  I noticed recently in my Android phone that I can sync my contacts with Gmail and/or the main company I use so I don’t lose it.  I guess in the near future some of these mechanisms many cross paths either through mergers, acquisitions or just a central control system, like the old phone company.

If you knew me back when I was drinking 8 cups a day, you would never have guessed that I would be caffeine free like this.  Years ago, I was a coffee junkie, and when the urge comes to drink regular caffeine I feign, because I remember the headaches, urge to wake up in the morning and worst of all the half a day spent going home early from a serious migraine and spent the afternoon in bed under a blanket.

My Coffee Legacy

In the early 90s I started to drink an average of 4 or 5 cups of coffee a day.  I had a job back then which put me on a plane every week or every other week to a different city, so getting up early at 5:30AM to make my plane flight at Newark Airport in New Jersey could not happen without a cup of coffee.  There would be a cup or 2 before I left for the office.  These were the days before Starbucks, so we made the coffee ourselves.  Of course this was worse for us compared with Starbucks because we drank it in pots. I mean volume!  We all had a cup in our hands at all times, at meetings, outside, at our desks.  Today, everybody does a run to Starbucks or they have that one cup at a time machine at the office.  Plus, we are talking straight regular American method made coffee, not Expresso drinks or Fraps or whatever.

At the office, at Bell Atlantic Mobile, where I worked at the time, we would sip coffee all day long.  When I would make a trip to Pittsburgh for work, in particular, there was a coffee bean grinder downtown where I could get freshly roasted coffee smell the roaster and stare at beans being processed in bulk. For the first couple years of drinking coffee I did not notice any problems. I even drank coffee Saturday nights after a night out drinking and would go to bed within an hour.

In the mid nineties, when coffee shops started to have open mic nights, I would go down to the local shops in New Jersey and do some of my own readings on stage.  These local shops introduced us to a variety of coffees and flavors and this was about the time Starbucks entered the scene.  I had even started writing coffee reviews for a short-lived online coffee magazine called coffeemag.com, started by an early web designer.

Signs Of A Problem

The first thing you will start noticing beyond the cravings, is a migraine when you don’t have your caffeine by let’s say 10:30 am.  Got a call from my brother years ago around noon time saying he was dying of a headache.  I asked him if he had his coffee.  He said “I have not had one yet today”.  I had to explain to him he was addicted.  Yes, coffee has caffeine, a drug in it, and we get addicted.   Even when you miss it and you have it later on, it is too late, and then  you end up with a migraine that can go all day long.  In fact, the next stage after years of drinking was an occasional chest tightening pain.  No heart problems.  Had that checked.  It seemed the caffeine started to impact my heart a bit.  The final straw was the once a month, I have to go home and crawl into bed impact.  A super migraine would occur, not brought on by missing my coffee, it came on after tons of drinking coffee for weeks on end.  A super migraine would impact me at the end of the week, and I would feel nausea and would need to go home and lay in bed.

God Gave Me A Sign

Around the time I was having chest pains and super migraines there was a story in south florida I watched on the news about teenagers taking caffeine pills.  One girl took just 5 pills, as a way to get high, and she had a heart attack and died.  These five pills were equal to 25 cups of coffee.  The most I had in coffee was about 10 in one day, but I was almost halfway there.  That story was what made me try to stop.  I did not want to be that girl, and I was feeling it in my chest.  I was about 40 at the time, so maybe it is an age thing.  I just couldn’t handle drinking one cup a day.   Either I got off coffee or I was in trouble.

So How Did I Do It?

The first thing is I limited coffee at home.  I purposely started going to Starbucks to limit how much I drank.  With a pot of coffee, I would feel I had to drink it or throw it away.  It was an economic issue.  At Starbucks, I could control with my spending and time how much I could drink.  First I started to ask for a 50% caffeine, 50% non caffeine coffee.  I did this for about 2 months.  Then I asked for a 75% decaf.  I did that for about 3 months.  Then I finally went for it and said, give me a decaf.  I never went back, and I never had a full regular cup of coffee again.

My Decaf Is My Methadone

So, since I switched, I have drank decaf exclusively.  It doesn’t taste as good as coffee, I know that.  But theoretically I stop drinking decaf, and I will be back on the regular stuff.  It has been 8 years since I quit, and I have no regrets.  I wake up in the morning generally rested and go right to work. I have no urge for caffeine.  I have no crashes at the end of the day or days curled up in a ball in my bed.  I have 2 young boys, so I have to be somewhat awake around them.   Now, there was a big side effect.  I suddenly because drawn to chocolate like I have never been drawn to it before.  Specifically dark chocolate became an obsession for awhile, because it has caffeine in it, but no where near coffee.  I have even lessened this obsession and become relatively caffeine free.  Yes, decaf has a tiny bit in it, but there is the rub, I am just one step away from falling off the wagon.

The Brand New Site

Websites run the gamut.  They start from a 1-10 page biz card like sites, which only show your basic contact us, about us, services, to a full blown combination of existing systems like WordPress & Joomla adding in customized “serious” app development.  They can have 10 lines of programming or in the case of one of my projects over 300,000 lines of programming.  Either way, a brand new spanking web site with some level of serious programming will have this kind of logarithmic ending to the project  It’s even worse than the old 80/20 rule, where 80% of the work is in the last 20%.  It’s more like 95% of the work occurs in the last 5%.

Why so much work at the end?  That’s because you typically have a situation where a lot of things are not known till the very end.  It does not matter what the developer, project manager, third party guy in India tells you.  The hard work in this business starts not on day 1, but day 180, when the petal hits the metal.  And this kind of work has more to do with QA than development, and precision, not hand grenade throwing let’s kind of get it working.  That’s why many outsourced websites, to overseas folks, die on the vine, or cost 10 times what they projected. This detail work is the work that you, the owner, or a close person to you needs to do.  It is not for a guy or gal in a developing nation out there to do.  Not to say that overseas development is not cost effective, it’s saying that I have my doubts after the 7th inning stretch.

Civil Engineering vs. Web Engineering

If you compare building a website to building a building.  They are similar in that there should be some type of project plan.  Where they differ is that a building can’t change, much, once you start building it.  The plans for a building are set in stone, or the building could fail.  A website is more like a big plumbing project in an old house, even for new websites.  You don’t know the full extent of the project, sometimes, till you are in the middle of it.  That’s why many web developers are not so willing to take one price stop shopping when selling their skills.  Smarter web developers now realize that the big work can emerge towards the end, when a few extra things were discovered.

Web Feature Discovery

I mention web feature discovery a lot in my blogs.  That’s because much of the development process on the web is about discovery.  A good case in point is you start building a site, and you end up finding a new opportunity along the way.  An example recently for me is we were building this college admissions counseling website and we realized about halfway through the project that there is an opportunity to create a series of pages, when SEO’d, would drive thousands of visitors.  We would not have thought of this feature, unless we undertook the project.  This is not a sequential process.  This is a mind map type of process, where you start and many different directions appear.  You have to visualize these directions, and rate them and decide which come next, which to ignore and which to take on.

The Migration

Ah, the migration.  Another way to say this is what a p in the a.  When you are moving a website, it is one of those things that can keep you up every night and you are blind while you are doing it.  Even when I had a team of 20 people working for me and with me on a big migration of sites for NTT corp., we could not think of all the details.  Our brains can not contain everything.  When I recently migrated Pre-dating.com, one of my projects, I did it myself.  This was like saying I am going to move myself, and you have a big house of stuff.  It will happen, but it is painful.  I have moved something like 12 times in my adult life and everytime I have to leave something behind and extricate from my life items and things I don’t want to get rid of.  But moving means leaving it.

When migrating, you have this list of all the things that need to happen.  Mind you, some techies are great at migrations.  But no matter what you know and do, there always seems to be an issue you did not think of.  We don’t know everything or sometimes we don’t know much at all.  I moved a site recently and I realized after we moved the reverse DNS was set up incorrectly, so when you looked up the site by IP address it was incorrect.  AOL blocked the email.  Argh!  I got it working, but it was in an area that is not my expertise.  I fixed it, like fixing a migraine headache.  Another issue on a migration I see all the time is slight differences in the servers.  The old server and new server may be the same, but for some reason PHP, mysql, sql server, there is always a difference.   Hopefully the settings don’t cause a major problem, but it often does.  I have even seen a migration and 4 months later the problem is discovered.

What Am I Saying

I am just venting on the issues in taking sites live, and I can’t give you much than a pat on the back when it goes live, whether its a new site or a migration.  This is an accomplishment, regardless of what you techie friends would say.  There are many sites which refuse to change, move, migrate or improve because of fears of disaster.  The disasters, I have seen them, so there are a good possibility no matter what you do. They happen and you deal with it!

Don’t Make Me Think Example

A good example in the book is the word “Search” vs. “Quick Search” on a search form on a website.  The slight difference of the wording “Quick Search” actually makes people think for a second, like is this search really quicker, where is the real search?  According to Krug, if you are making people think, the sites usability is lessened and therefor things like conversion rates drop and quality of the site is lower.

Word Famous & Now We Are Starting To Think

I was sitting in on a brand building call by David Tyreman, founder of World Famous Company, and a guru extraordinaire on brand building, this week and he was covering the concept of making sure customers are in their comfort zone, whether as they arrive on your site, your business, in between, or right before buying or during the transaction.  This is part of the larger concept of improving and creating your world famous brand.

Brand Comfort Zone

This comfort zone covers both physical and virtual spaces.  By physical, a good example for our speed dating business, is when people are getting ready for a speed dating event, are they comfortable, happy, at ease and in the proper zone right before an event.  Trust me people are nervously standing around, especially looking at people walking in the door, wondering if they are going to be in the event.  For a virtual website, have you created an environment on the website that eases the visitors comfort level and therefor improved their comfort zone? An interesting example is Apple.com.  They follow few standards.  Often on the Apple.com website, I have to search around and find what to click on and discover stuff.  But that is what Apple is all about.  It is a tug of war between being Apple (branding) and Making People Not think.  Well, this is what I am noticing is a diversion from Don’t Make Me Think, in fact, it’s the time you want people to think, because you are using your brand to improve their comfort zone.

VictoriasSecret.com’s Pink Bag

Back in 2001 or so, I was working at abcdistributing.com, specifically on their website analytics and their cart.  abcdistributing.com, which I occasionally talk about in my blog, is the unsung hero of catalog companies that only women who love catalogs know about.  They used to get thousands of orders a day online, so small improvements in their site design made a big difference.  I was looking around back then and noticed that Victoria’s Secret was the first website to really introduce a different kind of a cart.  Theirs was “Add To Bag”.  Cart’s were just simply “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons back then, so when I saw this nicely branded little bag, i was impressed.  It was really my first introduction to how online branding can be extended to comfort zones online.  I just did not know it back then.  I tried to think of a way to extend this to abc distributing, a business that did not believe in branding, and all I was able to think of was this box they shipped out had this little fish icon on it.   Everybody remembered them that way. That was their brand at the time, and therefor I pushed to switch their “Add To Cart” to “Add To Box” with a little box icon…  Of course they did not go for it, but it stuck in my mind.  Finally, thank you David, for explaining to us what this is about!

Be Uniquely The Same

So, in the end what I think this means is not everything online fits a cookie cutter way of doing things.  Don’t Make Me Think obviously is a great example to start with in building user interface designs.  It says don’t put something in a place on a site like a search box on the bottom left, or a menu bar in the middle of a page (not at the top), or the company logo in the middle of the page or change wording like About to “Who we are”.  But there are exceptions, many exceptions, but exceptions that have to do with branding, where you want people to think!  Another good example of a client of mine recently, who switched the word “Services” to the word “Benefits”.  Or a site that uses “Start Your Journey” vs. “Buy Now”.  So, it appears, good branding, especially improving the customer comfort zone, trumps Don’t Make Me Think.  Sorry Steve Krug, sometimes you gotta think!

If you are reading this article, you may want to check the first two parts here:

This is the first article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan
This is the second article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan

The more I think about writing a plan for a company’s online marketing efforts, I think about all the cookie-cutter, repetitive actions taken out there by thousands and thousands of website owners and marketers.  This means people are starting to following standards in online marketing and trust me there are many things you should do and are doing right now!   But, in a few cases, I’ve noticed that some things in marketing are much more important and easy to do than others, and just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to do it or should be putting resources into it.  Just because the other kids are doing it is not enough…

What I am talking about is making strategic decisions about what is not just easy, but what is going to give you the biggest bang for you buck.  Now, that is a very important part of the online marketing plan, such as what to first and then next, and so on.  But even before many things can be done, there is and always will be a lot of extra setup work.  If you want to have an email marketing campaign system in place, you need to at least have a solution to collect emails, possibly segment them, store them in a database, and then find an email sending solution,  and then analyze and follow up. But you can’t get ahead of yourself, in that the pillars of a successful part of your marketing may revolve around the SEQUENCE in setting things up.  If you just started sending out marketing email, because you were not patient, from the same server as your business correspondence communications (things like receipts, support and customer interaction) and have not come up with a separate domain for sending your email, you may have gotten things out of sequence… Not the end of the world if you are a start-up, but if you had separate domains you were sending from, you would have protected your business correspondence (your real world important email) from getting black-listed.

So for each area of marketing you need to accomplish for your website, I use a rating system for the priority, ease of implementation, time to implement, and other factors.  Then based on these additional factors the priority may change.  For instance, getting online with a website is still at the top of this list.  One thing that is just as easy is creating videos, that are nicely tagged and have content on Youtube pointing back to your site.  The same thing with easy to implement blog software like WordPress or Blogger, which also points back to your site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes.  So things have  changed in online marketing.  What was first things first 10 or 5 years ago is not the same.  Video and Blogs are now ground zero…not necessarily email… Email is important and the core, but it is a layer now above the website, videos, blogs, picture and other stuff you can easily use to draw traffic. What you have to infer from this, is it is a hell of a lot easier to get out a video camera and make a Youtube video than getting a great email campaign in place.  Email campaigns mean more HTML, images possibly, landing pages, etc.

So as part of your prioritization in your online marketing plan, you need to come up with all the ways you are going to market online and focus in on a few quick wins.  This is especially true if you want to make something happen now.  Everything these days is about now, not later.  Yes, some marketing efforts will take some time, but things like fixing a domain name to all be www. or buying a domain name can be done today.  Things like fixing a title per page or a url per page can be done now,  not later.

Help Is On The Way

Like I have said in my previous parts of writing a strategic online marketing plan, there are  many, I mean many SEO and marketing firms out there to deliver your marketing program.  But, there few, like me, who actually act as your marketing exec and help you write a plan.  It is the writing of this plan you can’t leave to a one trick pony SEO firm.  It needs to be an in-house, maybe a consultant like myself, developed thing that represents you and your business. Email me at dgudema AT gmail dot com if you want to discuss it…

Just Say No

You can just say no to cookie-cutter marketing approaches, because quite frankly what is good for the gander may not be good for the goose.  If you are a law firm, then how you do marketing is different than an online store.  Don’t fall into a trap that they are all the same, everybody needs to do the same thing.  The only reason you may hear this programmed thinking from your marketing expert/SEO guy/gal is, that is what they know.  What “THEY KNOW” is a common problem in the online world, because we are all limited to what we know. One time I went around and asked a dozen different programmers what language to use.  Each one gave me a different language because that is what they know.  The each sweared that it was the one and only and the best!  What they know is not a guide to what you need to do and in what sequence.  This is a task for a VP of online marketing, not a third party SEO firm.  Remember if you own the website, you use marketing firms to carry out your plan, and rarely do they have what it takes to name the plan and tell you what to do.  Control over your marketing and what you are doing is important and starts from home not externally.

There are many ways to cut a cake and marketing is that cake.  I recently ran into a technique being used for a website marketing to seniors and they had removed all website links, forcing the seniors to go down ONE and ONE SINGLE path.  There was only one way to go through their homepage and it required entering an email address… Why this restriction?  What was going on?  Well, after I noticed they were using Google Optimizer, an A/B and Multivariate testing tool, I realized they must know something and they tested and in fact it may be a smart move for them.  Did the senior really want to go in many directions/places and the answer was maybe not.  Maybe 5% were pissed off and left, but the numbers may be high in the conversion rates on those who entered their email address and stayed.  This was about herding the cattle, and it raised some interesting psychological issues with website marketing.  Some things may be counter intuitive and not straight forward.  How do you figure this out?  You have to test!

Testing

In the prioritization should be some testing.  You don’t know, so you test.  Testing is cheap and easy.  $50 in a pay per click account or putting up a page to find out if people click through, fill in a form, etc.  This is the best way to go about figuring out what works.

There is always more.  I will be adding a fourth article coming up on the same topic… Writing a strategic online marketing plan.

Online Marketing Foundation

When I say online marketing foundation, this goes even deeper than marketing, it typically revolves around technology.  A lot of marketing executives will go for the jugular in their job and try to achieve, but achievement may not be possible if the basic infrastructure is not in place, and worse, a serious campaign can be completely a waste if a simple thing like collecting email addresses is not built correctly.  One simple case in point, is one company I worked for collected customer names without separating the first and last names in the DB.  This was a marketing foundation structural problem.  We could not send out the emails in a personalized fashion, because we were not getting the information in the database correctly.  Often executives want to tackle the marketing issue head on with a nuclear weapon that has no army structure behind it.  If you invade a country and have no plans or ability to manage the situation, you will have chaos.  So, this is what is recommended first:

1. Get a good website.

Believe it or not, there is a tiny percentage of companies who market without a good website.  This has to be ready for any campaign.  What I mean by good website, is one that can spell out your value proposition and contains the customer motivation [for arriving at the site].

2. Get a good, structured email collection method in place.

You need to be able to collect email addresses and segmenting them would be a good start.

3. Get the ability to allow customers to optout.

This is critical before sending your first email campaign.  Without it, you may end up pissing off not just people.  If you piss off the email providers such as gmail, yahoo, microsoft or aol, you will have bigger problems.

4. Landing Pages

If you are going to be running marketing campaigns, then specialized landing pages help even more in building out your foundation.

5. Checkout

Now most companies allow customers to buy products online, but if you don’t have it in place and you are pushing customers to your site, you need to give them a place to buy.

6. Contact us

We mentioned email collection above, but customers “Don’t Need To Think”, so they need to be able to easily contact your company.

I am sure there are a lot more structural pieces, but these are a good start.  Notice these are part of the online marketing plan, but they are more than that, they are the building blocks for success.  You need to make sure these are ready for the high volume of traffic you are going to receive.

Online Marketing Plan Areas Explained

I am going to explain each of these areas of online marketing.  Some may not have occurred to be online marketing places for your business, but you may find that they have a greater impact than you would have ever expected.  This is where, in my final article, I will get into priorities, and why making certain decisions to go after low hanging fruit, is critical.

1. Create A Website
   No need to say more.  You and I know what a website is.  Maybe a few people out there think they have a website, because they have a Facebook page.  It is close, but not exactly.
2. Email Marketing
   Once again very easy to understand.  You get together a message and send it via email to potential or existing customers.
3. Search Engine Optimization
   While many have made this a business, it is simple enough.  You make sure your site content, titles, urls and meta tags are optimized for the search engines, mainly Google today.
4. Pay Per Click
   Once again, everybody pretty much knows this. You pay for each click on a Google or others and it is a bid process based on the highest bidder paying for the click.  Google focuses on the top 3.
5. Adwords
   A variation on pay per click, with the variation focused on words showing up on third party content sites, not on the search engines.  This seems to be a big one through Google and it is a way to get traffic.
6. Banner Ads
   This is an old standby.  It is basically an image that people pay for customers to view and get clicks through.  I believe the days of banner ads are coming back.
7. Video Marketing (Youtube)
   A lot of companies don’t understand the power of video marketing.  Thanks to the relationship between Youtube and Google, which are the same company, video can now be seen much higher in the search engines.  The ability to push up video, convert it to flash, comment, tag and search engine optimize your video, this is a high growth marketing area your business may need to take advantage of.  I believe its the future of marketing.
8. Facebook Marketing
   This is really a hot topic right now, as companies are trying to figure out a way to market through social networks. Best part of this type of marketing is the ability to analyze and understand exact keywords and affinity relationships (close relationships) that exist between your product/service and related search terms.  Also facebook marketing harkens back to banner ads and is a rebirth of the banner ad.
9. Linkedin Marketing
   This is just starting and like Facebook will be on a growth area for a while.  If your business is B2B then this is where you should be looking to spend your marketing dollars.  If you are related to the human resources area, it is pay dirt time.
10. Photo Marketing
    Just like video on Youtube a lot of companies misunderstand the power of photo marketing.  You can easily push up hundreds of photos to Picassa (once again a google property and then name, tag, categorize, geotag and comment on these photos.  This information will get indexed on the search engine. This is a low hanging fruit of online marketing and a place, if you have access to images, you need to be!
11. Webinars
    Killer webinars are coming to your town and if you don’t act now you will lose out.  Apparently make products and services need to be shown through a demo.  But there is something out there today that will prepare your webinar in advance so that it does not have to be live.  It can be almost on demand.  Ever notice that during a TV ad they are giving out a url to watch their webinar (especially pharmaceuticals).  This is a great advertising medium for specialized products and services, like health related and that is where your business should be spending its dollars.
12. Chat Sessions
    We were investigating chat sessions way back in 2001 when they came to market.  Some online businesses I know live off the marketing capability of chat sessions and convert most of their traffic via chat sessions.  Don’t under estimate the power of this technology and it is getting more sophisticated as time goes by.  The day is coming when Skype enters this market and you will be able to video chat with any customer!
13. Teleseminars
    Just like video seminars, teleseminars are easy to put together, and unlike webinars, teleseminars can easily be accessed.  So therefor the conversion rate of teleseminars will be much higher, because people can listen easily at work, on the road or anywhere they feel like it.  Ignore this area and you will miss out on a lot of low hanging fruit.
14. Landing Page Marketing
    This is just a reminder that any website can go out and create a landing page separate from the site home page.  Now, place that landing page on a separate domain name, with an optimized title and now you have a new way to gather traffic.  Initially landing pages were for emails, but they are not that way anymore. They can be for search engines, seminars, events, webinars, teleseminars, even SMS.  You keep it this way for many reasons, some of which is a specialized campaign for that medium.  Either way, you control the medium and using landing pages is a great way to do it.  Use a product out there like HiConversion.com and you are set!
15. Affinity Marketing
    Affinity Marketing is not a vertical technology, but rather a horizontal method of approaching online marketing.  It refers to finding relationships with your current customer base.  I like to use the free and cheap Quantcast.com to figure these relationships out, but you could go to Neilsens/Jupiter or Hitwise or others and buy the expensive demographic data.  Either way, if you search at Quantcast.com you will find that people who visit your site or your competitors also visit sites X, Y and Z, and that’s how you figure out there is an “Affinity” between your site and theres.  This is important in deciding where and how to advertise in the long tail [for longer pay per click phrases].
16. Affiliate Marketing
    Affiliate marketing, which I now akin to adwords, was the old place we used to give out URLs with codes and pay out to sites and people who drive traffic.  I personally don’t find it to be a very effective way to market for certain products.  For dating products, like my old speed dating business, affiliate marketing was not just important, it was the life blood. So, this really depends on the type of business you are in!  If it is more personal than commercial, sometimes it makes sense.  Commission Junction is still one of the big players, but I am seeing this area slowly disappearing from the big sites out there.
17. Lead Generation Marketing
    When the old ad “Win A Free Ipod” came out a couple years ago, lead generation marketing had hit an apex.  It is still quite a big field unto itself. You can buy leads from other people who will sell them to you, especially in businesses like Cruise Lines, Online Education, Mortgages and Online Car Buying.  I mention these four, because all four are the hottest lead gen markets known on the web just about.  Meanwhile, your lead generation yourself, needs to be taken care of first!
18. Viral Marketing
    This is an old area of marketing.  Remember the ad, “And She Had Two Friends, And She Had Two Friends, And She Had Two Friends”.  Viral marketing really can work if you enable people to do it.  We used to have the old “Tell A Friend” page. That’s old hat.  Now you have these Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Linkedin, Facebook login aps, that allow you tell your whole world about whatever you are doing.  Viral marketing is the basis of social media marketing!
19. Guerilla Marketing
    Guerilla Marketing takes us in a whole new direction.  It was really popular a few years ago, when the old had to be seen video got passed around or the famous cartoonists about George Bush came out.  I see Guerilla marketing as a crazy, underground way of getting your product or service out and it is still possible online to do it.  Things can grow like wildfire if they are funny or somehow are a “Got To Be Read or Seen Situation”.  Seems like the only stuff I get like this these days are Tea Party crazy friends of mine sending me stupid diatribes about the world ending!
20. Mobile/Smart Device Marketing
    This area of marketing is just getting started.  I am seeing newer and newer technologies showing up on my Ipad, and all are banner ad or video based.  Sorry Google, text links are old technology on the Ipad, and it seems like people want the image or video ads.  Just having an app to download is part of this marketing effort, and if you supposed to be in the cutting edge you should have an Ipad, Android and Windows Smart Device compatible app.
21. Blog Marketing
    Even though I do blog alot using WordPress, I think this area may be a little overblown. Do this area right and you will get a lot of visits, especially if you master tagging, categorization, titles, metas and get posted out to all the right RPC servers in the blogosphere…  If your product/service requires a little more explaining or some leadership in your industry, this is a key area of your business.  Remember though, it is not a foundation.  You need to have a site and checkout and email collection to do this right!
22. Twitter Marketing
    If you have ever used TinyUrl.com, you know all about twitter marketing.  We hear a lot about marketing through Twitter, but Twitter in some ways is really another form of viral marketing, where you can push out a product release or some other message to your customers or potential customers in a PUSH fashion.  I say push, because things like blogging and tweeting are all about push.  You push, instead of pull, which is the old search engine methodology. Therefor it is a bigger bang for your buck.  But remember once again, no foundation, no orders, make no money…

There are more, and I will update this page when I find more…  Thanks for taking time to read my blog today.  There will be a third entry in this how to write a strategic online marketing plan series…

If you are reading this and want to check out the first article

This is the first article in this series on writing a strategic online marketing plan – Part 1

This is the third article in this series on writing a strategic online marketing plan – Part 3

My understanding and from what I can tell it is true social networking / social media tracking, everything from Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ Circles, Digg, Redit, etc.  Just when you thought there was nothing new in web analytics, this comes along, and it was about time.  Despite the fact that I am not that keen on using social networking, tracking how well they are working is critical to understanding if they work at all, because there is sometimes  evidence sometimes it does not work well for ecommerce, but that is to be determined.

So next time you see the LIKE button on a website, and you click it, and you are logged into a social network, that information will automatically be tracked in Google.  I guess what is next is they will know when we wake up and fall asleep… maybe.

How do you see these new analytics in Google Analytics?

You have to switch over to NEW VERSION.     I noticed this click-able highlighted line in red at the top of my browser while looking over Google Analytics this morning.  Once you click over to the new version, you have to select an existing site you have in the system.  Once you click on a site, you will see a new layout of the data and that is where you will notice new stuff on the left and a different layout.  It’s under VISITORS, that you will see the word SOCIAL.  If you click on SOCIAL, you will see a couple new areas that represent “Social Engagement”.  They break it down to Engagement, Action and Pages.  I am still trying to figure this out, but apparently if somebody clicks that “LIKE” button for Twitter, Facebook and Google then you have socially engaged them…  This means that all your previous traffic is not social engaged.

That’s it for now!  Good luck figuring out how to analyze your Social Engagement!