Which icons best promote trust?

Conversions. There’s a lot to discuss. So I’m going to try and keep this simple and stick to one small contributing factor.

A couple of the most recent Internet Marketing consulting gigs I’ve been involved with have been focused on improving conversion rates. Both are websites that don’t struggle getting a decent amount of traffic. The problem is that too many people leave without converting (in both cases the goal is to get people to sign up for a free trial of their service).

In each case there were multiple culprits contributing to low conversion rates. One of the biggest mistakes was the failure to gain people’s trust. Nothing, on either website, told users that the site was legitimate, safe, and could be trusted.

Remember, when someone comes to your website (and it might not be your HOME page by the way) they perform an instant assessment. Among others, they ask themselves two questions,

• “Does this website offer what I’m looking for?”, and
• “Can this website deliver?” – in other words, “Are they full of crap, or are they legit?”

One of the most effective ways to give potential business a quick answer to the second bullet is by using trust icons. These are visual cues that all, in their own way, add the perception of legitimacy and trustworthiness to a website.

Here are my top 5 that I recommend using on your website:

1. Better Business Bureau Accredited Business
If you run a website that does any business in the US, this is the best trust icon. It screams legitimate business. Best of all, it links to the businesses profile and rating with the BBB. If your company doesn’t have a good rating, get that taken care of first before adding this icon to your website. Posting a link to a C+ rating will do more harm than good.

Details: a company must be more than a year old and its website has to have a privacy policy prominently displayed before being considered for the icon. In my experience, as long as a company has both the BBB will “pass” the website. This is a premium seal, so you’ll need to pay an annual fee to be part of the program.

2. Associations / Trade Groups / Memberships
Any business that is part of a larger association or group of companies should leverage that membership and feature that icon on their website. For example, let’s say you’re a realtor. I would recommend having the National Association of Realtors icon on your website. Number one, it’s a quick sign that your firm can be trusted. Number two, I’d be willing to bet it’s a differentiator with your competition. If someone comparing your site to a close competitor sees that icon on your website and not on the other, that may be enough to call you and not the other firm.

Details: it depends on the association. Some will offer an icon with a membership. Some memberships are free and other paid.

3. Payment
If your website processes payments, then it has to have an icon saying that their information will be safe. Examples of icons for payment are PayPal, Authorize.net, Thawte, and Verisign. Each example, in their own way, tells the user that they can feel good about taking their credit card out of their wallet and forking over those hard earned dollars to buy your product or service. Like #2, the biggest error is in this category is the error of omission. When a website doesn’t talk about how payments are processed safely, that’s when a red flag goes up.

Details: in most cases these icons are free. Many payment gateways (like Authorize.net for example) make it really easy to add their icon to your site (because they get the added benefit of an inbound link).

4. McAfee Secure
This one should look familiar because it’s seemingly everywhere. It’s becoming so prevalent that it’s almost a “must have”, which is why it made my list. These days it’s weird when websites don’t have it (btw, great business model for McAfee). This icons says to people that the website can be trusted because it is safe.

Details: this is another premium icon. It’s close to $1,000 per year, so it’s not cheap. The requirements for getting the icon are relatively easy as long as the site is hosted with a legit hosting company. This does work with hosting on shared servers, so you don’t have to have your own dedicated machine to get this.

5. US Flag
Your first instinct might be that adding the stars and stripes is a cheesy 1997 website move that doesn’t belong in today’s real-time web. I’d say you’re wrong. There are plenty of industries where consumers feel better knowing that the website is owned and operated in the US, and not in Europe or Asia. For example, the tax industry. I know from working with clients in that industry that there are companies based in Eastern Europe that perform all kinds of tax preparation and accounting tasks. Think about it, would the average US taxpayer want someone in Europe storing their data and advising them on tax issues? Probably not. But those sites based elsewhere do every well. No one ever thinks it might be operated out of the country. The flag is a subtle way of showing that a business is based and operated in the US. If people assume that means it’s more safe or legitimate, then why not take advantage of that?

Details: there are no requirements (other than being honest about the business being located in the US). And it’s free! I’m sure you are resourceful enough to find the flag somewhere on the web.

The last thing I’ll say is if you buy into the trust icon theory, then don’t hide your icons. Make them prominent so people can see them.

What are your thoughts on trust icons? What do you think my list? What’s missing? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Status updates don't equal quality for SMEs

I’ve talked about my take on Twitter before. My biggest complaint/knock is that there are millions of people Tweeting but far less people listening. Bottom line: too much noise and not enough value compared to other ways to invest time and money in Internet Marketing.

That being said, I’m not totally against Twitter. I’ll agree that there are some ways to put Twitter to use effectively (more on this in a second), but just a very small percentage of Twitterers use the tool effectively.

Up to this point in time, one of the best uses of Twitter is to establish or enhance a brand’s perception by playing the role of a subject matter expert (SME). For example, a real estate broker in a crowded marketplace could differentiate him or herself by avoiding the temptation of tweeting endlessly about their own listings and instead offering helpful content to homebuyers and sellers. Twitter users in that marketplace who subscribe to the broker develop a sense of trust about the broker, making them more likely to be clients. That should result in more business for the broker (a nice ROI).

The benefits of being an SME depend on the specifics of the industry, but the universal benefit is differentiation. And differentiation usually equals more business. For example, it could mean more leads or the ability to charge a higher hourly rate for consulting, speaking, or training.

There are plenty of great examples of  SMEs out there in the Twitterverse, but the one that defines how to be an SME on Twitter is Darren Rovell (Klout score of 75). Darren’s area of expertise is the business of sports. The subject doesn’t really matter, so don’t stop reading because you hate sports. It’s the way Darren uses Twitter to compliment everything else he does (like blogging, for example) that makes him the expert in his field. That’s something we can all learn from.

Here are the keys to becoming an SME on Twitter:
NOTE: Remember, I’m talking only about subject matter experts here. I’m not talking about social media geeks like Robert Scoble (who I like reading and following), celebrities (pick any one of thousands on Twitter) or other personal uses of Twitter.

An original, high-quality tweet from SME Darren Rovell.

1. Stay focused on building credibility.
If you’re goal is to be an SME, then you have to be ultra-focused. That means facing a reality that’s hard for a lot of people to swallow: little-to-no status updates. Listen to me carefully: no one cares what you’re doing or what you just did unless it has something to do with your area of expertise.

For example, let’s say my goal is to be an SME in financial planning. That means I shouldn’t be Tweeting about the tough workout I just had at the gym. Reason number one, no one really cares. Second, that doesn’t do anything to help position me as an SME. It tells people I take care of myself, but it doesn’t make me a better authority on financial planning. The alternative is tweeting tips for people so they can afford a monthly gym membership, or how staying in shape is a way of being fiscally responsible because it cuts down on future health costs.

Back to Darren. If he’s at an event that’s huge in sports business, like the Super Bowl for example, he’ll mention it because he’s probably meeting with a huge sponsor. But you’ll never read Tweets about the great meal he had or how mad he is because his flight is delayed. As a result, his body of work in Twitter has a very high usefulness ratio (meaning a low percentage of his Tweets are useless info like status updates).

2. Be original.
SMEs tweet original content. Period. That means limited retweets.

Why? Because at the end of the day at retweet is an acknowledgment that someone else had something valuable to say. If I am trying to be an SME in social media and 75% of my content are retweets from Mashable, then I’m not very original. And therefore I’m not an SME, I’m just a news channel. There’s a huge difference.

Contributing original content is where Darren is particularly effective. Here are some examples from his Twitter feed that illustrate how to be original:

Original thoughts:
In case you couldn’t figure this one out: original thoughts are your own observations about your subject matter. Being proactive is key, as opposed to always reacting to what someone else in the industry tweeted or wrote in an article. The more original, the more potential value they contain because interested followers are more likely to be engaged in a conversation – critical for Twitter success. To the right is an example of original content from Darren. He observed a professional football player that is holding out for a better contract has been so quiet that he hasn’t even tweeted in a long time. Granted, that might not get you excited. But someone who is really into the subject matter of business and sports would read that and think that’s an interesting observation. And it’s powerful because it didn’t come from anywhere else. Darren thought of it himself and posted it.

Authoritative Opinions
Followers will look to SMEs to chime in with their opinions on things happening in that niche. An SME can’t be afraid to take a stand and stir the waters a bit. In the tweet to the right, Darren has sounded off about a recent trend in college football where teams have decided to ban their players from being able to use social media tools like Twitter during the season (mostly out of a fear that the players will say something that the other team will take offense to, thus additionally motivating the other team). No doubt this was a popular topic in his industry. Darren found a way to take a stand on the topic while trying to get reactions from readers. Again, increased engagement only makes him look better.

3. Plug your stuff, but don’t be a cheesy salesman. The whole point of being an SME is to build up credibility in the marketplace. The more credibility and the more the perceived level of expertise, the better it is for the brand.

In Darren’s case, he’s known as the guy to talk to in situations where sports and business collide. For example, when the whole Tiger Woods drama went down at the end of last year. Darren was the person every network wanted to talk to about how Tiger’s indiscretions were affecting his portfolio of high-paying sponsors. For Darren, the more her makes appearances and the more his opinion is in demand, the more he’s worth. All of that will really pay off the next time he’s up for a contract negotiation.

Back to my point…one of the keys to being an SME is to plug your other content (for example, your blog) without being a cheesy salesman. I never want to click a link when someone teases it with, “Read my blog post” or any other obvious line like that. I’m not saying you should be deceitful to try and get people to read your stuff, I’m just saying you don’t need to go so heavy on the plugging. If your content is good, people will read it. Darren does a good job in the example above.

What are some of the ways you effectively position yourself as an SME? Who are some of the SMEs you think do the best job using Twitter? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

I love chatting about search engine marketing and social media with people. It’s one of the more fun parts of my job. In almost every conversation I have with clients or potential clients, I get asked for my take on one thing or another. I realized that people that I talk to are asking these questions, then people I don’t talk to directly (but they look at my website) probably have the same questions. I put up a page with my up-to-the-minute Internet Marketing philosophies on the most sought after areas in Internet Marketing (at least they are the areas that I get asked about the most).

My opinions on these things change from time-to-time (for example, my opinion on Foursquare changes every few days), so I’m going to do my best to keep updating this.

Of course I have more to say about each area, but it’s designed to be used as my high-level thoughts on each topic. Let me know if you have other areas you’d like me to address.

Here’s a list of basic questions I use when performing a website evaluation or audit on a client website. It gets more technical and geeky than this, but my hope is that this fives you a good idea of some of the things I do to help turn websites around.

GENERAL: questions I ask directly of the owner, or team that runs the website
1. What are the goals of the website? I want to hear from the website’s brass what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not always obvious. And it’s not always what they should be trying to accomplish. Often time there aren’t even any goals.
2. What the history of the website? Tell me specific details about sales (or membership) trends?
3. What’s the history of the site’s SEO strategy? What effect has that had on the site’s performance?
4. Have there been any major traumatic events (like de-indexing or site outages)? How have those affected sales and performance?
5. What’s your keyword strategy? If they have a strategy, I’ll ask to see the latest data they’ve accumulated about what keywords they consider to be most valuable.
6. How well has the stated keyword strategy been implemented on the site?
7. What is your content strategy?

The rest of the questions are what I ask as I evaluate the website.

ON-PAGE SEO
8. Is there any meta data structure? If so, was it done properly?
9. Does the site use unique, intelligent, SEO-friendly page titling?
10. What does the site’s meta data and page titling say about the company’s grasp of keywords?
11. How SEO-savvy is the URL structure being used?
12. What’s the internal linking strategy?
13. How healthy is the code?
14. How much (if at all) is the code affecting the site’s ability to be indexed?
15. Are there any site maps?
16. Do any of the search engines know about their site maps?
17. Are there any RSS feeds?
18. Do the search engines know about their RSS feeds?
19. What does their Webmaster Tools Account reveal?

TRAFFIC
20. What are the traffic patterns (if any) in terms of volume?
21. How is traffic now compared to a historical average? Higher? Lower? Why?
22. Where’s the website’s traffic coming from?
23. Why is traffic coming from those sources? Is is because of link partnerships? Publicity? Blog mentions? Comments?
24. What percentage of the traffic is coming from organic search?
25. What percentage of traffic is coming from paid search?
26. What’s the relationship between the traffic source and the user’s behavior on the site (pageviews, time on site)?
27. What’s the relationship between the traffic source and the conversion rate?
28. In case of higher conversion, what can we learn that can be applied to other sources?
29. In cases of low conversion, why are people not converting into customers? What appears to be the roadblock?

KEYWORDS
30. What keywords does the website rank for?
31. What, specifically, are those ranks per keyword across all search engines?
32. Is there historical data to show how those ranks have changed?
33. What kind of penetration does the website have in organic search?
34. How does the site rank for the search terms they said they were targeting?
35. Are the keywords the website is targeting the right ones? If not, how much potential traffic is being missed as a result?

COMPETITION
36. What’s the state of competition in the industry? Who does the client think they are competing with?
37. According to search (not according to sales), who are they competing with?
38. What are their competitors doing better/worse than they are in terms of content strategy?
39. What do their competitor’s link profiles have that’s missing from our client’s website?

CONTENT & LINKS
40. What’s the state of inbound links?
41. Are the current inbound links helping or hurting?
42. According to the competitor data, are there immediate link-building opportunity?

Darn…didn’t make it to a nice even number like 50!

The answers to these questions help me put together an evaluation designed to help clients  get more qualified traffic and convert at a higher rate.

Have any questions of your own? Are you an SEO with a similar checklist? Feel free to comment or compare your experiences with me in the comment section below.

I’m a proud EVO 4G owner. I’ve had it for just over 2 months now and I love it. It’s allowed me to be much productive when I’m away from my office.

Of the few complaints I have about being a ‘Droid is the lack of solid information about the best apps. The Android Market website is lacking at best. It doesn’t make me want to download any apps and can make the most useful ones hard to find.

All of the apps I have now are recommendations from friends – which is the best/most trusted source for this kind of information. But I don’t like having to constantly ask people and be asked what apps I use the most.

In the spirit of sharing, here’s my list of apps that I have right now on my phone:

• Bump - I find this more useful for sharing images and apps than contact info. The biggest downside so far is that I rarely run into someone that I want to exchange contact info with that also has this app downloaded.
• Dropbox - this is on my “can;t live without” list. This is an awesome way to share files.
• Evernote - people rave about this one. I use it to notate things I don;t want to forget, but haven’t become a rabid user yet.
• Finance - perfect for keeping an eye on the stock market. Needless to say it integrate perfectly with my Google Finance portfolios.
• Foursquare - not 100% convinced this will always be on the list. I’m still in test mode.
• Fring - it’s downloaded and ready to use. None of my friends have it, so I’m still waiting to use it.
• Google Sky Map - very cool app. Would be even more cool if it weren’t foggy in San Diego every single night.
• Yahoo! Messenger – I use Yahoo! IM a lot in my office. This works well for getting in touch with international colleagues. I refuse to spend money on texting people with international phone numbers.
• Open Spot - I can see the potential value in this, but I don’t live in a crowded metropolitan city, so I’m not the ideal user.
• OpenTable - the best way to make a dinner reservation.
• Pandora – perfect way to listen to the exact music I want.
• ScoreCenter – the easiest way to keep up with my hometown teams.
• Seesmic - the best Twitter app for Android that I’ve used yet. I’m still waiting for Tweetdeck to give a damn.
• Shazam – I use this all the time to find songs I want to put on my iPod.
• Google Voice - I’m easing my way into this one. Right now I’m using it to screen calls and have custom voicemails for groups within my contacts.
• Waze - a real-time crowdsourced traffic app. I love this concept and I’m doing my best to help these guys through their BETA phase. I think this has tons of promise.
• Zillow - what better way to find out what practically any house is worth.

How does this compare to your list? What am I missing? I would love to get your feedback in the comment section below.

I’m 50-plus checkins deep into my Foursquare career and I’ve realized my future as a mayor in the geo-location app is limited. Even though I’m relatively brand new to the game, it’s clear already that there’s only so many mayoral crowns that are within my reach.

The reason? My home office.

Yep. My choice to run a lean internet marketing consulting operation and work at home stifles my ability to become a prolific Foursquare mayor. No Super Mayor badge for me. Bummer.
A quick look at what constitutes a normal week for me backs up my theory:

• A bunch of hours at work (more later why I’m not going to checkin for work)
• Tons of phone calls / virtual meetings (can’t checkin to those) instead of heavy travel
• Lunch meetings (but most days I eat at the office)
• Face-to-face client meetings
• Admin-related trips: places I need to go to for the business. For example, my mailbox, bank, etc.
• Stuff for fun: running, eating out, going to the beach, playing golf

So if you look at my schedule, the only places I realistically have a chance to be mayor are the destinations for my admin trips because I visit each one a few times per week. In fact, right now those are the only places I’m mayor or have been mayor.

Why not my the mayor of my home office? I’m not ready to be that guy who adds his home office as a venue. That seems kind of weird to me. First, I wouldn’t want anyone else checking in – like a random neighbor. Second, isn’t that a cheap mayorship?

Moving down the list, fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t eat lunch outside the office at the same place enough to get a crown. And my face-to-face meetings are usually at coffee shops. There’s no way I’ll be mayor at any of those. Foursquare users flock to those places every day (if not more than once per day). The fact that I go for runs and not to the gym is another limitation. I wish I golfed enough to be mayor at a local course!

So I am announcing now to all of my current and future Foursquare friends: I have no intentions of becoming the Super Mayor I thought I could be. Don’t blame me. Blame my comfy desk in my office.

What are your thoughts? Why do you use Foursquare? Is it for the mayorships or the badges?

I’ve got some quick thoughts about tonight’s LeBron James announcement. From an Internet marketing consultant‘s perspective, here’s what I’ll be paying attention to during the telecast:

First, what’s going to happen to Twitter? Will it hold up? This will be the most watched press conference in the Twitter Era since Tiger’s fake presser a couple of months ago. LeBron has been a trending topic all day. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can avoid putting up the fail whale once his decision becomes official. Twitter has held up fairly well during the World Cup, so you’d think they should be fine. But once he makes it official, it will be like someone let the water run from the Hoover Dam – a giant burst all at once.

Second, every team that’s still in the race better be ready for an onslaught of traffic – especially if he changes teams. So I’ll be watching to see if that winning team’s site stays up or crashes. Put it this way…if I’m in the IT department or web team for the Knicks, Nets, or Heat, I’m not taking a lunch today. There’s too much to do and too much at stake.

For example, a contingency plan for bandwidth better be done or in the works. Once LeBron announces, I’m sure that team’s website will break it’s all-time traffic record for a single day. The website has to stay up. People will want to buy season tickets right away. And the demand for LeBron’s new game jersey will be insane. There’s a ton of money at stake.

To the IT guy’s defense, there hasn’t been a lot of time to plan. The press conference was announced less than 48 hours before the actual event. You could argue, however, that all potential teams should have been anticipating an event like this for the last week. The reality is that only superstar hosting companies can move fast to be ready for the demand. It will all come down to a teams’ relationship with their vendor. For some, it might already be too late. And the sad part is they know it. They know their site is going to crash.

The second reason to work all day today is a website update has to be in perfect alignment with the announcement. Whatever team wins should have LeBron up on their site within seconds. All of the possible outcomes should be working on new banners right now. Have the updates ready now and then just refresh the page.

The last thing I’ll be looking for: will any of the checkin apps geared towards TV viewing make a name for themselves tonight? Unless Americans gear up to watch a boring World Cup matchup on Sunday, this is probably going to be the biggest sporting event (and possibly TV event) of the Summer. Can a service like CrowdZone step it up and make a mark tonight? It’s a great opportunity to make some noise while this niche is still developing.

I don’t really care what team LeBron picks. The fact that he’s having a televised press conference is annoying. But the link to social media and the web is fascinating. Maybe nothing will happen and all will run smoothly. Maybe there will be major failures. I’ll be watching just to see how it all plays out.

Last week Majestic SEO posted a really cool table that you probably didn’t see unless you regularly read a lot of SEO blogs. The table is made up of the Top 200 domains ranked by referring domains. (Majestic, by the way, is one of my favorite SEO tools.)

For those of you unfamiliar with SEO fundamentals or the basics of  search engine optimization, this table lists the websites from around the world that have the most unique domains linking back to their site. So, for example, let’s say your website has a two websites linking to it. One of them is WebsiteA.com and the other is BWebsites.com. That would mean your site has 2 referring domains. Not to mention a lot of work to do to get on Majestic’s next list!

For me – an Internet Marketing consultant who helps companies get more links through content strategies – here are five interesting tidbits I noticed while perusing the list:

1. Volatility isn’t limited to the stock market.
Admittedly, we’re dealing with huge websites and tremendous link volume, but the table shows that things will happen to cause even the biggest websites to make significant moves up or down the list.

Take a look at the biggest movers up the list:

• dot.tk moved up 187 spots from #200 to #13
• verizon.net moved up 117 spots from #183 to #66
• t-online.de moved up 114 spots to #3 from #117
• gmgp.org moved up 83 spots from #128 to #45

Other than the endless rumors about the Verizon iPhone, it’s not obvious at first glance what caused these other movements. We could, however, find out more with a more in-depth competitive analysis. And while we’re on the topic, look what all of that chatter about a product that doesn’t even exist yet did for Verizon…it gave them tons and tons more links!

Flip around the numbers and look at the sites that have fallen down the list. Xanga.com, for example, fell 82 spots to #160. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean xanga.com all-of-a-sudden suffers from worse search rankings now than they did two years ago because they didn’t build links as fast. They could still be a dominant player. It does mean they didn’t build links from new domains as aggressively as the other sites on the list. So this is a good reminder that we can’t rest on our laurels and stop trying to build links. That’s the worst Internet Marketing strategy. We gotta keep building. And building. And building.

2. What happened to eBay?
Ebay’s move downward is worth noting on its own. The auction giant moved from #4 down to #31. You have to wonder what happened there, especially when you see that the other players at the top of the 2008 list (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube) all stayed in the Top 10. Why is eBay building links at a far lesser rate now than they were 2008? Or did they do something to lose a ton of links over the last two years?

3. The BBC is tops for media.
I thought this was sort of a surprise. The BBC’s website, bbc.co.uk, is the top-rated media website at #24. (By media I mean a site run by a traditional media company.) Cnn.com is the next highest at #26 with nearly 125,000 less links than the BBC. The NY Times’ website, nytimes.com, is ranked #34. I’m surprised because New York is the #1 media market in the world, and the Times is supposedly the most revered newspaper in the world.

Other things interesting about the media-related sites:

• Foxnews.com (CNN’s chief rival) ranks at #121 with nearly 800,000 less domains referring links as CNN
• The Wall St. Journals’ site, wsj.com, ranks at #82
• Despite the flourishing state of the so-called celebrity media, none of tabloid sites for gossip made the cut. I would expect that to change in the next two years as more people start to get their news from sources like TMZ.

4. School websites rake in the links.
Out of the top 200 sites listed, 11% are domains for schools. And just about all of them are the big brand names in education.

Here are the top 5 schools on the list. Just for fun I’ve listed the school’s rank in endowment (PDF) in parenthesis to see if there’s any corollary between wealth and domain referral popularity:

1. mit.edu: #73 overall (6)
2. stanford.edu #79 overall (3)
3. berkeley.edu: #83 overall (78)
4. harvard.edu: #87 overall (1)
5. cornell.edu: #124 overall (18)

Way to go Berkeley! They are raking in the domain referrals despite not having huge endowments like the others in the top 5. By the way, MIT’s website ranks ahead of sites for entities you’ve probably heard of like NASA and weather.com.

Biggest surprises on the list? How about Yale at #167 despite having the second largest endowment? Or the school right in my backyard, UC San Diego. They make the list at #197 despite having the 175th largest endowment.

5. Link-building technique don’t have to be obvious.
Ever hear of  #64 on the list, homestead.com? On the outside it’s Intuit’s answer to a Blogspot (#7), Macromedia (#16), WordPress (#17), and Joomla (#52) – a product that builds websites for small businesses. Some might wonder why the heck Intuit offers a such a product. Well, this lists tells you all you need to know. It’s for the domains referrals and links! I’m assuming that every site built using their software links back to Intuit. This may not be a huge revenue generator for Intuit, but it’s a gigantic SEO score for them. It’s a good lesson in how creativity goes a long way to getting links.

Lastly, while a lot of companies would be happy with 50 quality referral domains, the lowest amount on the list has more than 229,000 different domains linking to it. Of course all of these sites are huge sites for big brands, but it’s a good reminder that enough is never truly enough. Never be satisfied with the amount of referring domains and links coming in to your site. Keep striving for more. Your site probably won’t ever make this list, but there’s a huge difference between 50 quality referral domains and 150. Go for it!

What else do you notice on the list? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Here’s the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Curt Dalton, founder of the new search engine NowRelevant.com – yeah that’s right. I said new search engine. I had a chance to chat with Curt this week. He had a lot of great insight’s about the entrepreneurial game and the search business. He’s got an interesting idea.

This interview is super interesting because of the industry involved – one that’s obviously occupied by giants that we’ve all heard of. Here’s our discussion:

B5: Before we get into your new venture, tell me about being an entrepreneur.
For me it has always been about how you think about a problem and how you look to solve it.  I have always been the “I can create a better mouse trap” type thinker.  So, you will strike out some, but you if you stick with it and be persistent you will find success on a project sooner or later.

B5: So tell me about NowRelevant.com.
NowRelevant.com is a new search engine that shows you everything about a subject, but just for the last two weeks. We want to give users relevant information on topics without having to sift through 55 million results that date back to the beginning of time. We’re able to remove spam and SEO dummy sites from the users results as well.

B5: My first reaction is that there are some big players in search. What made you decide to get involved?
Well, NowRelevant.com was our own search engine that we had to build in order to run The Internet Time Machine trend analytics software – one of my other ventures. We realized that over the past 8 years of creating the Time Machine, that we also built a very powerful and new search engine. We are able to get blogs and forums indexed and to the user much quicker than Google can. So we felt like we were on to something.

B5: How do you make money?
NowRelevant.com offers a robust platform for advertisers such as the use of video in PPC ads and a 20 percent commission to affiliates on our pay-per-click (PPC) program.

B5: What’s the profile of your target user?
We see the Twitter-Facebook generation as our ideal user – a user that has tons of information thrown at them everyday but wants just updated, non-spam based results.  They aren’t looking for an historical perspective on the subject of their search, just very recent and current information on the subject.

B5: Is NowRelevant.com backed by any investors, or is it bootstrapped?
As of right now it is a big pair of army boots.  No complaints. We have never tried to raise money yet.

B5:A lot of our readers face the dilemma of how to properly fund their ventures. Can you talk about why you took the company in that direction?
Equity is the most important thing you have in your company, and you should only give it up when it makes tons of sense or you need to do it to survive.  Based on past success we haven’t need to do that with NowRelevant.com or TheInternetTimeMachine.com.  I understand a lot of people don’t have money just laying around to fund their own startup, so the have to give away equity in order to get the ball rolling. But my advice would be: don’t do it if you don’t have to.  Once you introduce shareholders or equity holders, life gets complicated and you have someone you need to report to and explain yourself to.

B5: Back to the business….what, specifically, makes you different from the big dogs in search?
With the historical clutter that frankly overwhelms the web (not all of the html pages are clutter, but much of it is irrelevant content) we wanted to set up a complex system of filtering and algorithms to give you just discussions and information about your subject for the past 14 days only.

Contemporary search engines have all been presenting us with most recent ‘additions’ to the web database, and have concerned themselves with making the most valuable of these new daily additions available to the public on a minute by minute, day to day basis. Search Engines are therefore able to run pay-per-click engines on top of their search interfaces. The advertising media is based purely on keywords input by users at the time of the search, and users of PPC advertising services on search engines have become a target for massive levels of spending incurred as a result of there being a serious lack of a ‘targeted’ and more ‘focused’ PPC engine that allows users to maximize on their PPC exposure by choosing keywords that they know are in demand, or have received considerable mention on the internet.

We allow users of our PPC campaigns to access the wealth of its resources dating back chronologically to exactly 14 days from the time of their search. This enables both the viewers of search results as well as PPC advertisers to target their PPC campaigns to a specific set of keyword phrases that are bound to receive public attention no matter what, enabling advertisers to compete better on NowRelevant.com with a much lower advertiser competition ratio than found on any other search engine.

Users of our search facilities will be able to retrieve a specific subset of information dating back on 14 days, allowing them to immediately benefit from the most up to date and recently mentioned information. Users of the our PPC engine will therefore be able to reap the benefits of a highly focused PPC campaign where advertiser competition for a specific set of keywords changes by the minute – it’s based on the most recent information coming into our databases by the minute, so there’s no chance of the same CPC levels staying for more than a minute either!

B5: Let’s move on to marketing. This is a really unique situation since I’m guessing you’re probably not going to market on Google. How are you going to get users?
I believe for a search engine to make it a group of people have to own it, as in put it into their personality, as in “I use NowRelevant.com because I am relevant and in the moment”.  So we are doing viral videos, and blog posts about it in order to promote a social trust and word-of-mouth feel. You can’t just put banners up and say “go use us”.

People like to buy something, not be sold something.  That is a big distinction.  If somone finds NowRelevant.com from a video or blog, then they can pass it along to their friends as a new and exciting thing, as opposed to seeing a banner and having it shoved in their face.

B5: What tips can you share with our readers about traffic acquisition?
Well, great question. That’s the golden goose right there. You can have the most life-altering product ever created, but without traffic, you are dead. There is no magic bullet.

I believe in a two-pronged approach: do your testing with PPC to get traffic started and see how things convert. But also put time and money into your long term link-building and viral markets.

Much like life, marketing isn’t 100% this, or 100% that. You need to do a little of this, a little of that. Give it time. Build up creditiblity slowly. The Internet is craving authority figures and sites. As the amount of pages on the Internet doubles every 9 months, everyone needs an authority figure in a niche to tell them which product or idea to follow since there is too much information out there for one person to follow.

B5: How much of this entrepreneurial life that we live is skill versus luck?
You create your own luck by working at it everyday and not giving up.  Everyday you need to do something productive for your business. Adding links in blog comments, starting forum conversations, starting an ad campaign. Whatever. Just do something positive to grow your business everyday and those little increments will add up to a lot over a year or two. Lucky breaks, as they are called, often happen because you have been working everyday on something and then finally caught someone’s attention or Google noticed you.

B5: What are NowRelevant.com’s plans for the future?
We hope to increase our spiders so we can pull from more sources as we grow. We think there is huge demand for non-corporate based results that Google is stuck showing due its size and corporate relationships. Adding spiders for different languages would be big as well.
Thanks again to Curt for sharing his thoughts.

Got any reactions? What do you think about Curt’s take on search? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

One of the common questions I get asked about Internet Marketing strategy is about how long of a commitment it takes for a website to perform well in search. What I’ve found is that the person is really asking if they can put in a few months of work towards improving their search positioning and then reap the benefits.

When I hear that question, I often think about a quote from Hall-of-Fame basketball star Larry Bird.

Don’t laugh. Hear me out.

Someone asked #33 why he works so hard (in case you didn’t know, the guy was renowned for his work ethic). His response went something like this,

“I work so hard because I know that there’s always someone better than me out there working even harder than I am.”

Before you get mad at me for attributing the quote to Larry Legend because you think someone else said it, forget it. This child of the 80′s remembers it coming from one of my boyhood heroes. It certainly didn’t come from Magic Johnson.

Larry’s quote rings true with Internet Marketing, in general, and search engine optimization and  social media marketing, in particular, for two main reasons:

1. The hard work never stops - even when you’re on top, there’s still work to be done to stay on top. So even when your website ranks at or near the top of search, for example, the fun is just beginning. At that point it’s your job to protect that position from everyone that wants to take it from you.

2. Someone is always working hard(er) - every day that you take off from your content strategy, you can assume that someone else is doing something to beat you. Assume that there are websites – more than one of them – spending time, resources, and money to improve their positioning in search, social media, and online reputation. The greater the competition, the more than needs to be done to not only keep up, but to surpass them.

To bring it all back to the original question , “How long should our company be thinking about committing to Internet Marketing?”.

The real answer is: forever. It never stops. Your company needs to have a smart and sensible Internet marketing strategy from before the website launches and continue it for as long as it exists.

And if you’ve had a website for a while and haven’t had any strategy for using search to bring in leads, then you are behind! You need to put in the work necessary to get caught up with your competition.

What are some other examples of the worst Internet Marketing strategies? Let’s talk about them in the comment section below.

I’d be willing to bet that 99% of people who have watched more than 1 minute of World Cup coverage on TV has asked a question similar to this:

“What the heck is that noise?”

Inevitably people find the answer. Either they call their buddy to find out if their TV is also making a strange humming noise that sounds like 1 million bumble bees or they head to the search engines and Twitter and figure out it’s the sound of tens of thousands of crazed soccer fans all playing the vuvuzela all at once – non stop for a 90-minute soccer game.

The obligatory follow-up question everyone asks:

“What the heck is a vuvuzela?”

Here’s the wikipedia definition:
The vuvuzela (English pronunciation: /vuːvuːˈzeɪlə/) , sometimes called a “lepatata” (its Setswana name) or a stadium horn, is a blowing horn approximately 1 m (3 ft 3 in) in length. It is commonly blown by fans at football matches in South Africa. The instrument requires some lip and lung strength to blow and emits a loud monotone.

So what does all of this have to do with Internet Marketing?

For me, this phenomenon is the latest example of why it’s so difficult to plan on building a viral marketing campaign. Don’t doubt this is a phenomenon, by the way. Here’s the ultimate proof: vuvuzela apps are flooding the iphone and android marketplaces. One app, Vuvuzela 2010, claims over 750,000 downloads. Remember, the World Cup is in it’s fourth day!

More than once recently I’ve been asked by companies to help them produce a viral marketing campaign or a viral video.

Here’s what I always tell people: while it’s not impossible to create that next great ‘thing’, the odds are overwhelmingly against that from happening and it might as well be impossible. Why? Because look at what becomes viral – a video of a young couple dancing down the aisle while they get married.There are far more effective ways to look for ROI in marketing.

Want more proof that viral is unpredictable? The latest example is a 3 foot piece of plastic, that probably costs 50 cents to make, has the whole world talking.

The bottom line is this: we all want to create the next great viral sensation. But the vuvuzela reminds us that viral can, and usually does, happen purely by accident. No one planned for this annoying horn to become the center of attention. The smart bet is to build a brand brick by brick, engage in the fundamentals of unique, optimized content with an efficient user experience. Sure, it leads to a longer road to success. But it works.And the ROI is far higher.

What are your thoughts? Let’s chat in the comment section below.

It’s probably because I’m a sports fan, but I’ve always been fascinated with the way pro sports leagues here in America package their content to fans. I love watching to see how the leagues adapt (or fail to adapt) to web and social media trends to make it easier for fans to follow their favorite players and teams. League websites have evolved over the years from team, roster, and schedule listings to, in some cases, a better alternative to watching the game on your TV.

What’s really interesting to me is that in today’s world where content is king, the leagues have the opposite problem of most brands. They actually have too much content. Instead of wracking their brain for new ideas of content to create, they have to instead figure out how to take the content being created with every game and package it in a way that fans want and want repeatedly.  They have to do it for a wide variety of fans. Diehards, casual fans, fantasy players, and people new to the sport. And, the leagues have to do it across all mediums – the web, TV, games, and mobile.

Of the four major sports leagues, MLB (via MLB.com) has always been the best at the content game. I’m not going to list every reason why because that’s a topic for another day, but I wanted to point out something I noticed on their site recently. In my opinion it’s a great example of an established brand (MLB is over 120 years old) effectively integrating social media.

A quick background on why I went to the site. I was looking for a recap of Stephen Strasburg’s debut. For those of you unaware, this kid is basically expected to be the next big thing in baseball. He made his debut a couple of nights ago. Although I had seen some of the game on TV, I wanted to read a recap of the game and see his final stats.

When I went to MLB’s site, I was given everything I wanted. There was the box score with the stats. There was a recap I could read and video highlights (awesome). But there was also something called “Pulse” (pictured). Here’s the example for the game I looked up.

Pulse is basically a visual representation of the game on a line graph. There’s one produced for every game. You’ll notice there are several rows in the table they created for this game. One has video highlights of cool plays placed at the exact moment in the game when they happened. The other has a symbol of home plate for every time there’s a play that scores a run.

Big deal you say. Well, I haven’t got to the really cool part yet. The lines (there’s one for each team) is basically a crowdsourcing of Tweets that happened during the game. One line for each team’s fans.

To the right is an example of a 7th-inning Tweet by a fan blown away by Strasburg’s performance (pretty common feeling by fans on that night).

What’s really cool about this is without seeing the game, I can instantly tell by looking at the Pulse the most exciting parts of the games. That’s because I can easily see the Tweet volume has peaked and that means there’s probably a highlight I can watch. What’s even more cool is I can get a feel for what people thought of that moment – almost like being at the game and hearing the crowd or being someplace where the game is being shown on TV. Think about that for a second. That’s insight that I can’t get from a highlight or a text recap written by the local beat writer.

Just for fun, here’s another example. This is the Pulse of the infamous June 3 game where a bad call cost Tiger’s pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game – arguably one of the most controversial moments in baseball in the last 25 years. Look at the spike at the end when the call happened in the 9th inning! That orange line is the Tweet volume of Tiger fans.

Bottom line: I’m a huge believer in the real-time feel that crowdsourcing produces. I think it’s where the social web is headed. What MLB is doing is great and should give other brands and websites cause to think about similar ways of using data that’s out there to create unique, valuable, and engaging experiences for users.