Mark your calendar! The main event of the year in Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto is coming back again soon on June 16-18 2008. I will be there representing SEMPO Canada along with all representatives of the Canadian Search Marketing Industry. During SES, Ken Jurina & I will host an evening session to present the latest accomplishments within SEMPO Canada. For those who may not know, Search Engine Strategies is the premier event about Search Marketing (SEM) technologies and tactics and we are proud to have this show coming to Canada once a year.

“Alex presented his dynamic and interactive workshop called “eMarketing101: Preliminary Steps” to our entrepreneurs in training at the YMCA New Ventures Network.  Everyone was in awe of his vast knowledge about the subject of search marketing and they now understand how critical using the right keywords in their website can be.  Alex has a great depth of knowledge and years of experience helping businesses to optimize their websites.”

/// Cheryl McNicol
Business Advisor
YMCA Vancouver Downtown
Read more...

Open Directory Project /// A directory project run by thousands of volunteer editors. In principal, this is a very exciting and powerful way to organise the web. In practice, there have been some problems with the behaviour of some of the editors, which has caused some initial difficulty for the organisers. Initially known as NewHoo, the project is now part of Netscape (and therefore of AOL).

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Case Analysis #1: The number 1 reason why you are losing money with your website

So you have a website, hey? Like thousands of other companies. Tell me: How much traffic did you have last week?

You would be surprised to know that most Director of Marketing, senior VP of Marketing do not have a clue about how many visitors, roughly, their website gets in any given time period.

Most business owners will proudly answer this question by saying, I got 20,000 hits last month, thinking that this must be good. If they answer this question in terms of hits, I suddenly realize they don’t know what they are talking about. A hit does not mean anything and it certainly does not mean the amount of people who visited your site. Most people look at the biggest number in their basic stat reports - hits - and that’s how they measure their success… Personally, I use it to measure their failure. Most business owners do not even know what a hit means and more surprisingly, their webmaster may not know it either. Once you progress in the learning curve, you will start to master the language, which will be a very good sign. They key here is education. Most business people do not recognize the need to educate themselves in order to be able to make good decisions for the growth of their business online.

If you can not answer the question: "how much traffic did you have last week?", that necessarily means your are not doing any Search Marketing and you are losing sales, like thousands of other companies who have a beautiful site and have no clue if their site gets visited or not. If you spent $4,000 a month in online promotion, you would make sure to know the answer to this question. Many of you may have budgeted for a site re-design recently but I am curious to know how much you have budgeted in a Search Marketing campaign.
You have invested a lot of money in the design of your website thinking it would help you increase your sales (revenues). But so far, your website looks more like a money pit. You have invested huge amounts of money in it and the returns are, shall we say, slim and you can’t figure out why?

To figure out the answer, simply ask yourself this question:  Who is marketing your website?
a) the company hired to design the site
b) your in house tech person
c) your in house marketing person/team
d) nobody (i.e. we don’t have a budget for that – we just spent all our money in the design of the site).

If you have answered “d”.:  You should have given your money to charity. At least, it would not have been wasted.

If you have answered “a, b or c” : Well you just found what is the number one reason why people are losing money with their website - because it is not properly marketed.

Like most companies, you probably rely on your webmaster or your web designerto make website updates. Some webmaster would take care of your online promotion when they have the time but they rarely do. Frankly, most web designers are not interested to work in gaining more traffic as they are not compensated based on sales. I don’t even think they feel it is part of their job description. Only business owners care about sales. Do you still believe search engines deliver search results for free and that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) means submitting your site to search engines? Submitting a site to search engines is basically irrelevant. That’s why submitting to search engines does not provide any results! You might have realized this. Did you?

Getting 1% of results in Search Marketing takes a few hours per month while building an online reputation is a full time position. What you want to accomplish with your website is up to you. ePublishing in itself does not sell as you might have seen so far, qualified visitors to your site will increase sales. Building a site may take a few weeks or months, while gaining more traffic and maintaining relationship with your customers is an ongoing battle. It is the same amount of sustained effort as building a business. Again, it is up to you if you want to survive in the online marketplace or not. 
It has always surprised me how major organizations invest thousands in their website and no one is working on building traffic. Just so you know, traffic and sales have a direct relationship with one another so if you want more sales, you’d better increase your understanding of Search Marketing and start working on it! As you are reading this, you are losing potential sales as online users cannot find you in search results. Traffic to your site is a very important topic. If you want to learn more, start reading articles about search engine marketing and you will see what you are up against.

May I suggest you start looking at the amount of traffic you have and you may start with this exercise: take some time and try to answer the following questions. While you are making the research and realize you don’t have much traffic, you will likely take the decision to allocate funds to obtain traffic or you would stop maintaining a site that has very little traffic. Your decision should be based on Return On Investment (ROI). It has always been a good measure of success, or failure. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Let me know what you find in answering these questions and if you feel you are ready, we are geared up to discuss the future of your business.