First, welcome to those of you from my LinkedIn network. I'm glad you're here and hope that you will take a moment to register and follow my blog -- even if it's just out of curiosity.
What should you expect here? Ideas...lots of ideas.... I want to introduce you to all sorts of marketing, promotion, social media, search-engine optimization, personalized URLs, and more that can help you promote your business.
There came a time in my business when I had to learn how to promote my company better, or risk the loss of it all. That time may be now for you; or maybe you just want to have someone from your industry explain to you the tools of the electronic age.
Let me start with a basic. It's not necessarily lesson one, but it's definitely a great foundation. We'll assume that you already have a web site. I think that's a fair assumption since many of you are members of my LinkedIn network and if not, you are, after all, in the business of software for publishing...
Today you can buy anything on the web. Literally. There was a town in Arizona posted for sale on the web. I don't really know whether or not it was sold because it was listed on the web, but I certainly learned about it because it was on the web. I think most of us will agree that Obama was elected largely due to his grassroots, social media, and general web marketing. Four years ago, I couldn't have picked him out of a crowd, and probably neither could have you. So if you can sell a town and you can elect a president, selling your extensible technology ought to be a walk in the park; right?
Theoretically, every customer with any type of problem in which you specialize in solving is a few keystrokes away from finding you. That's mostly true. Think about your product for a moment. ... What are your key phrases? Your talking points? Your elevator pitch? Ok, now imagine that I am your candidate customer but there's a problem. I don't know your key phrases. I haven't heard your talking points. I've never shared an elevator with you. See the disconnect? I have a problem. I can describe it. You have a solution. You can describe it. I speak in problem language. You speak in solution language. I haven't yet learned your language, but you do speak mine. Sort of.
This is where search engines can help, but they don't work alone. You have to coax them.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, DogPile, and others all have what are called spiders or robots. These are applications that run around the web and index the content of pages. While they're at it, they evaluate the page content's relevancy. Search engines are successful only when they return relevant pages at a find request. If I type in variable-data publishing, and the search engine returns pages about dentists, I will not be a happy searcher and I will try a different search engine. The better the results -- the more relevant the pages -- the more I will come to rely on their product. Since they charge fees for premium ads, their revenue is dependent upon me using their service and seeing those ads.
There are many things to consider when you are trying to create content that search engines will find relevant, and it is not a documented, exact science. What's more, they all index in their own proprietary manner. Just about the time you make it to page one of Google's results for variable-data publishing, someone -- your competitor probably -- comes along and bumps you out of the top spot or maybe completely off page one. What do they know that you don't know? Maybe nothing. It might have been luck of the draw that day, but probably not. They are probably, likely even, more relevant -- or at least appear to be.
While getting up close and personal with these spiders is probably not how you want to spend your day, you can certainly have casual conversations with them. Job one, of course, is to launch a web site or a blog, and job two is to make sure your content is relevant, speaks to the customer, uses phrases they understand (and not just your proprietary phrases for addressing their issue). You can use meta tags and site maps to help the spiders index the right pages and to identify key phrases, but without content to back up the claims of your meta tags, you are not going to make it to page one of those results.
Stop now and check out your home page. What did you find? Did you solve my problem on your home page?
Hold on. Let me ask you again. Did you solve my problem on your home page?
I just visited ten of your web sites. Out of those ten, I found a clear message on one home page. That means that nine out of ten of you have beautiful home pages with links to your products, your store, your partners, your resellers, your locations, alternate languages, engaging Flash, and one of you actually got me to stop and read because you solved my problem.
You can fix that.
In the span of one or two sentences, describe my problem to me in my problem language and solve my problem in your solution language. When you do that, you are creating relevancy between those types of problems and your solution. Now a search spider is going to get it. (I know you are dying to know what one site solved my problem, so here you go http://www.stibosystems.com.)
As a sidebar: resist the urge to solve my problem in a graphic. Solve it in text, make it searchable, and don't be afraid to solve it more than once. I'm fine with you solving my problem three or four times on your home page. It's okay, sometimes I don't get it right away. Maybe you want to approach it from different angles. Then, not only are you solving my problem, but I also get that you have lots of ways to solve it. Now I really like your home page.
So having said all this, is my advice specific to the business of selling extensible technology? Absolutely not. Most of the lessons I've learned and the messages I share have been learned by thousands, if not millions, of others and extolled on millions of listeners. I'm simply telling them again because I've been here with you for the last 20 years and hope that my perspective -- a perspective you share as part of the same industry -- will be helpful to you in finding your way in this electronic age.
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