Overview:

Tannenbaums is a 2nd year start up offering real Christmas trees delivered to your home. Tannenbaums is an excellent example of a brand new website achieving quick search engine placement, when generally only sites with tenured domains dominate positions with this difficulty.

Summary:

Being a start-up Tannenbaums number one goal aside from operational issues was exposure. By utilizing  SEO/SEM services Tannenbaums was able to achieve top placement for competitive terms such as “xmas trees” and “christmas trees”, just to name a few. Pictured below is the traffic generated in 2 months with top search engine placement.

Results:

In it’s first year Tannenbaums was able to gain almost 23,000 visits, 78% of which was directly from organic search results. In the 2nd year Tannenbaums received a 35% increase in traffic, despite website problems which hurt it’s organic rankings. 67% of the 2nd year traffic was from search engines. This doesn’t bear in mind that much of the referral traffic and some of the direct traffic was a direct result of top search engine placement.

Overview:

Massage Table Outlet began as a small e-commerce store carrying massage equipment from multiple manufacturers. This site experienced almost  no search engine success before their SEO campaign began.

Summary:

Starting from scratch, Massage Table Outlet had it’s eyes set on top rankings for some very competitive key terms. The term “massage tables” yields over 100,000 searches a month and has very heavy competition in SEO.

Results:

Within 6 months Massage Table Outlet had first page placement and now relishes one of the top 3 spots for  a search term that yields over 200 searches a day. In Jan of 2007 Massage Table Outlet received 16 visits, on Dec 16th of 2008 Massage Table Outlet received 208 visitors and regularly enjoys high traffic and sales.

Donna Bella Milan began as a hair care e-commerce start up, the owners having extensive knowledge and passion in the industry. Like many e-commerce websites, Donna Bella needed exposure to their website in order to make the business a success.

Summary:

Donna Bella began with virtually no search engine ranking. After roughly 7 months Donna Bella was in the top 1 or 2 spots for “hair extensions“, “hair extensions kits” and “Clip in hair extensions“. As a result Donna Bella’s sales skyrocketed thanks to the highly searched and highly targeted terms.

Results:

Donna Bella now receives around 12-15k visits a month, 85% or more coming from search engines. Almost 30% of traffic comes from the term “hair extensions”. During the campaign Donna Bella was immovable from the top 2 spots for any of their targeted terms.

Don’t get fired

The best way to mitigate the bad economy is well to hang onto what you have. Try to make yourself more valuable around the company. I have known lot’s of people who have survived mass lay offs because they were too valuable to fire. This is what you need to be. How do I make myself more valuable?

If you do get fired

Sometimes theres nothing you can do to prevent a lay off. But if you do get fired there are a few things you can do to incerase your job potential.

The Ingredients

Original Content – This is such an important ingredient in blogging. So many people create blogs that have a majority of the content swiped from other blogs and news sources, this of course saves them a lot of time but at what cost.

Quality Content – Having genuinely good content. Yet another problem with bloggers is they think they only need to have something on there and it will benefit them. Where true success comes from having great content that people really want to read.

Trial and Error

In marketing trial and error is kind of a given, you try to predict trends or interests but ultimately the audience will tell you what they want.  The kind of testing I’m talking about is content testing, try new ideas and whatever is the most successful should be repeated, with a new topic of course. The magazine style of writing seems to do the best with formats like top 10 lists or “secrets they don’t tell you” blogs. Lots of use of imagery and interactive content is also very helpful to a successful blog, most people don’t want to read an essay they want quick and easy to process information.

The Secret Ingredient
Most commonly overlooked is the coveted secret ingredient; passion. So many bloggers write for one of two reasons, to make money or to share their personal thoughts and beliefs with the world. This creates a problem where bloggers either have no passion for a subject or become too scattered talking about so many different things many users get lost.

Blog about what you love, stay focused and you will find success.

Business Branding

It seems like the smaller the business, the less awareness or care there is of branding. I think in many cases it’s because of the cost (or assumed cost) of branding. In other cases it’s because businesses don’t think it matters, this holds especially true in service industries. The few cases where branding is actually attempted it usually falls short.

A good brand:
-Motivates customers
-Invokes an emotional response
-Gives you credibility
-Is concise and clear
-Creates customer loyalty

Personal Branding

Personal branding is a completely different beast. The reason being that you’re trying to brand a person rather than an entity. However many of the same principles still apply, you must be very clear with your brand, who are you, whay do you do and most importantly why does it matter??