October 13, 2009

New Polling Site—Qwanz.com!

I’m very pleased to announce that a polling site I’ve been working on is now live!

Qwanz is not exactly like a typical polling site. In fact, the best way to understand it is that polling sites are what people used because Qwanz didn’t exist. The site’s key feature is this: it gives users the tools to forward poll results to wherever they’ll do the most good. Outraged that Olympia Snowe now supports the health care bill? Once you fill out the survey, you can use Qwanz to contact her press secretary directly! Annoyed about the Guardian gag order? You can use Qwanz to tell Carter Ruck exactly what you think!

(Qwanz has just launched, so there are bound to be errors. Please feel free to send me any comments, criticisms, or suggestions—though it would be even better if you could create a Qwanz poll about them, instead!)

October 7, 2009

SMX East: Last Day!

One more day before the regular blog-posting schedule resumes. Meanwhile, I’ve written another SMX sum-up: Integrating SEO with PR, traditional marketing, IT, and more.

You may also want to check out some pieces by my fellow Blue Fountain Media SEO specialists, including Zack Sinkler’s SMX analytics session summary and Alhan Keser‘s “How to be successful on Youtube.”

October 5, 2009

SMX East: Say Hello

For the next two days, I’ll be at SMX East. Expect few to no blog entries on this site; I’ll be updating my employer’s blog, instead. Today’s post is there: Basic search engine optimization for small business. If you’re just getting started, it’s exactly what you need.

October 2, 2009

Delete Your Facebook Fanpage—Now

I’m tired of people who pitch social media marketing as a way to make sales. Either they aren’t measuring the results they get for clients, or they don’t care. Every good case study is either about how someone used a famous friend’s endorsement to make new sales, or how they made a tiny number of low-profit transactions they probably would have made anyway.

I hate pitching social media marketing—but I still do it, because it does serve a purpose. But the most important part of the pitch is the warning: if you follow the convention wisdom, your social media presence is almost certainly costing you sales.

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October 1, 2009

The Four Rules of SEO and Writing Calls to Action

90% of your site’s success is determined by two things:

The first thing a visitor reads—the headline.

The last thing a visitor reads—the call to action.

Which might be why search engines treat these pieces of text as significant: it’s not that they tel you what a site is about, but that they’re the part of a page writers can least afford to write badly. That’s not a disadvantage. Your call to action can bring in more users and conversions, if you follow the rules.

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