An Overview and Primer on Web Marketing

Over the last few weeks, we have met with small business owners, venture backed companies and a few enterprise software firms. Here’s a presentation on web marketing we put together for these individuals. Enjoy!

Review of Growing Blog Traffic to the smbZen BizJournal

In our post, Preliminary Results From Blogging and Search Engine Optimization, I shared our soft findings on our efforts to increase blog traffic.  Anecdotally, I found blog traffic to be correlated with two variables: the number of high-quality articles posted, and the length of time the small business blog has been live.  This discovery is supported by data Problogger has collected and by posts on this topic by others.

Since publishing high-quality posts takes time, the two variables are interrelated and I cannot be certain has a greater impact on traffic.  In the ideal world, we’d run an experiment, comprised of the following two scenarios.  In Scenario 1, I launch a site with 1,000 high-quality articles and add them to Google’s search index through the company’s Webmaster Tools.  In Scenario 2, I steadily, over the course of 2-3 years, publish the same 1,000 articles.  What we want to know is whether the amount of traffic I obtain from Scenario 1 at Time(0) roughly equal the traffic from Scenario 2 at Time(2-3 years)?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. However, I have started collecting statistics on the smbZen BizJournal that might yield one.

The Future of Small Business Marketing and Operations

This past February, the Intuit Institute for the Future issued a 32 page report discussing the three trends that will affect small businesses over the next decade.  Given our focus on entrepreneurship and small business here on the smbZen BizJournal, we found the report to be both interesting and incredibly insightful.  The trends are:

1. “The Connected World: Small Business Management On My Time, On My Terms”
2. “Beyond Web 2.0: Technology Fuels Small Business Formation, Operations, and Innovation”
3. “Small Business Marketing: The Mindset from Push to Pull”

In the following sections, we discuss trend two and trend three.

Using Social Media Marketing To Understand Buyer Desire

“Rivers of Revenue” is another books I highly recommend. In Chapter 3, Kristin Zhivago writes about tapping into buyer desire through customer interviews. In the current marketing environment, the growing adoption of blogs and social media tools make this easier and more effective than ever before. Through Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google BlogSearch you can identify bloggers within your target market, and by commenting on these blogs, by truly adding to the conversation, you can overtime, obtain valuable “buyer-centric” feedback.

Let’s review a few of the reasons Zhivago outlines for conducting customer interviews and frame them in social media marketing terms.

Preliminary Results From Blogging and Search Engine Optimization

The two most important factors to search engine traffic growth, according to Problogger Darren Rowse are:

• the steady addition of content
• the gradual increase in incoming links that results from regular publishing

Preliminary data suggests this does work.  Here is a Google Analytics chart that shows daily search engine traffic to this site since November 1st, 2008, approximately fifteen days since Tom and I started posting regularly.

Before jumping to conclusions, please keep in mind that this site and corresponding domain are new and have a Google PageRank of 0.  Despite the handicap in Search Engine Placement Rankings (SERP), the site’s daily search engine traffic since November 15th, has on average doubled.  I attribute the dip seen at November end to the holiday season.

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