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All the buzz about Groupon.com, Living Social.com, and more has created yet another avenue for online marketing. Facebook uses a news feed, Social Deals to send coupons and promote coupon sites, currently serving only Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. Google is turning to email to promote it’s coupon and discount site, Google Offers. Zulily is a niche discount site aimed at mothers with babies and young children. The thing going forward with these sites is that there is so much room in the market, that some of these more niche sites will thrive. Rather than sifting through barbers and eateries as in Groupon, that cater to certain localities (which is great too, just different focus), these sites will cater to a more specific, non-local audience.

One such niche site is Markdown.com, recently launched by Glenn Beck. This site is different in that it will only offer deals from companies with values that are near and dear to Beck’s heart. For example, today’s deal is from Chocolate.com. Chocolate.com offers products not from a mass wholesaler, but rather from small business owners all over the country. Beck’s vision for the site is much like his usual dogma “Value and Values”. He willonly promote sites on his Markdown.com that have the values he thinks are worthwhile. Therefore, he is able to reach a very niche audience who will appreciate his efforts, and will in many cases want to support his causes. In this particular case, it happens to be small chocolatiers from all over the country. Not a bad first choice – everyone loves chocolate, and most people in the country want to do all they can to help bolster small businesses. This site is different, enough so that WebProNews contributor Chris Crum posted the About Us page. I think it’s worth reading, so I would suggest you hope over to read all of it, but I’ll post part of it here just so you can see what I am talking about:

“To put it simply, we believe that we can only be a great company if we are a good one. That means being good to our employees, our partners and our customers. It means making the right decisions, not just the easy or profitable ones. But, most of all, it means being the kind of place that we’re proud to say we work at; the kind of business that we’d want to do business with ourselves; and the kind of company that we’d be excited to send our own family and friends to.”

That’s valuable. I think it’s important to do business this way, and honestly, I will look to support this kind of site more than any other – it’s the way business should be done, and it’s the way we do business here.

Marketing on discount sites such as these will continue to be a trend. Since women are the main shoppers, and so many have started shopping online in the last 10 years or so, they are going to expect coupons and discounts. Whenever we go to buy something online, I know I search for a coupon code or wait for some discount first. The ability to target your audience, through niche or location, or a combination of the two, is going to become more and more important, and a great way to drive traffic to your site.

So, have you used a discount site to market your product or service? How’d you do? Would you do it again?

In the last several years Social media has barged onto the marketing scene in a big way. Some might say it just sneaked up on them when they least expected it – while die hard web users will maintain that it has been a little while in coming. Some platforms have come and gone of course (MySpace, anyone?) – and some have really taken off (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). With this explosion in the use of social media, many search engine specialists have said that “social media is how marketing is done now”. I have to say, I both agree and disagree.

Social Media can be great for your business – great opportunities for marketing. Awesome with local search, etc. But do I think this is now the one and only way to market your business? No way. Do I think that Search Marketing, in a more general sense, that includes social is the one and only way to market your business? No, but it is the best, most cost effective and targeted way to market your business.

Just a couple of the more salient points in the argument – search engine marketing helps people who are actively looking for your product or service to find it – they don’t have to know who you are first. Social media primarily helps spread the word among friends and followers. Someone has to know who you are first, even if you initiate the relationship – it’s not going to go anywhere if no one knows who you are – so search engine marking needs to be the first priority when planning a marketing budget for your web site. This will lay the ground work for any social media and local search. I mean, if you are gonna use local search, you should probably optimize for it, especially if you are offering goods and services that are locally based, as in they can’t be shipped. If you are a dentist or install pools, you’ll want to optimize for your locality as well as the goods and services you are offering. Once you have that all in place, or concurrently, you’ll want to get into social media to “spread the word” – social media really is the new word of mouth advertising – so you should use it to your advantage as much as possible – and track what is being said about you online. People are much faster to complain about a restaurant or other business via Twitter or Facebook, than they are to promote it – so if you want it to be used to your benefit, make sure you are paying attention to what’s being said so you can rectify any complaints or issues ASAP.

This will continue to be an discussion as social media gets bigger and bigger. Social media has absolutely changed the way every size of business markets – of course it did – it’s cheap, it’s relatively easy, and it gets some results. It’s essentially put marketing in the hands of the consumer – which is great – more power to the consumer – but this is also why you really have to pay attention to reputation management – it’s essential to know what people are saying about you – the good and the bad. Social media has made it essential that you be friendly, outstanding, and special, or you are going to be tweeted about. If you are rude – tweet, tweet. If you are ordinary, no tweet. If you go above and beyond, likely tweet. Gotta go for the above and beyond – and really that makes everyone work harder, try to be nicer – win win, right?

There’s a great article over at Mashable with some tips on how Social Media has changed Marketing, as well as some things you can do to get started. The author recommends getting your employees tweeting and using social media to promote your company. This is a great idea – but I’d keep in mind that it is the first place they will turn sour on you if you part ways in an unfriendly manner – just sayin’. We’ve all seen it happen a time or two.

It has been noted on several blogs, most notably TechCrunch, that Google seems to be letting go (at least internally)of the term “search”. They have appointed the previously named “search” product group as the “knowledge” product group. Google has seven product groups, and up until now, of course, “Search” had been it’s number one product. The other groups are Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome and YouTube.

As is widely known, Google’s mission statement so far has been: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. I guess it makes sense that Google’s product is, in more accurate terms is actually knowledge. They are compiling knowledge and making it easier for users to find. I don’t think too many people are going to be switching all the terminology associated with ‘search’ right away, but who knows down the line? Google, for the foreseeable future, owns 70% of the market share in what we now call ‘search’. Perhaps down the road the terminology will switch to Knowledge Engine Optimization – rather than Search Engine Optimization. This change in terminology could have a desirable effect on some site owners. If they know that they need to provide information…i.e. – knowledge, it may make them more likely to produce more relevant sites, copy, etc.

As Michael Arrington from TechCrunch pointed out ‘The problem is, “search” still means “search.”’ Google hasn’t really promoted this change, and they have made some internal personnel changes along with this name change. I think what it gets down to is specifics. Search will always be search, but that will become known as the user end, not the provider end. Google is making these subtle but purposeful changes to let their staff, and later, the public know that they are in the business of providing knowledge. If your site does not provide knowledge, it probably won’t do too well in Google’s “Knowledge” rankings. At least, that’s where this is headed, in my opinion. Not a drastic change in actuality. Google has always maintained that relevance was key. If you have a highly relevant site for your niche, topic or keyphrase, then you will do well. If not, then your site might not rank as well as you would like. Google, in it’s massive book scanning, map making, etc., etc….has been on a knowledge gathering spree all along. Perhaps they have decided that it’s time to drive the focus on making that knowledge as accessible to the public as possible. Or maybe they are just being incredibly arrogant. What’s your call?

While Social Media as an online marketing strategy is a great idea, it should always be secondary to search engine optimization, primarily the organic optimization that should always be a number one priority with any site. Things like selecting keyphrases, writing and optimizing great copy, tags, anchor texts, what have you – is going to give you the best ROI.

That being said, social media is good, too, and should be a secondary consideration. Jamie Turner over at Mashable has a pretty interesting post about the Social Media ROI Cycle. According to Jamie’s post, there are three stages of a social media ROI cycle: Launch, Management and Optimization. A bit backwards from the way we do and SEO strategy, at least from a web developer’s best practices standpoint. We would, depending on what the client wanted to undertake, recommend for a new site, while the copy is being developed, optimization going forward would be a great thing – ready for the search engines at launch. Any social media strategy should be on top of a traditional SEO campaign.

This is of course the best case scenario, but it makes the most sense. Once you launch, you manage, or analyze and tweak your on going SEO efforts, which might include some social media. Regularly re-examining your strategy will help you decide if social media is a good fit for your company. Regular tweaking of your ongoing SEO is a must. Good copy, a well developed site, and carefully constructed SEO is always going to give you a good ROI. Social media is great, and has been the icing on many cakes so far, and it will continue to be a major part of any online marketing strategy. But SEO is the cake, it’s fundamental.

In the last week two major retailers have been penalized by Google for what many would term “grey hat” practices. They employed some different strategies that some might find questionable, and others might think that perhaps there were no direct Google policies against it, so why not go for it?

There are many, many ways to plan and implement SEO strategy, and some of them do fall into a grey area. A really good SEO won’t try most of them, and will stick to what is considered “white hat” or “ethical SEO”. Overstock.com, as of yesterday, their rankings dropped to the 5th or 6th pages for many phrases that they had been ranking well for in the past, according to the Wall Street Journal. Overstock approached colleges and universities, asking them to link to product pages for bunk beds and other items with a 10% off discount for college students and faculty. It’s a good idea, except that it doesn’t fall within Google guidelines. I don’t know that I would call it unethical. More stupid, since you really don’t want to be penalized by Google. Therefore, it falls into the “grey” category.
JC Penny has also has some trouble in recent weeks with Google. It seems that JC Penny did not do their homework before hiring an SEO, and ended up getting more than they bargained for. You’d think they would have questions for this SEO when they were suddenly ranking first for everything from area rugs to dresses. It was eventually brought to light that the SEO was employing some seriously stupid, and majorly black hat SEO techniques. I guess the guy paid a good bit to throw a couple thousand links back to JC Penny all over the web with anchor text like “dresses” and “samsonite luggage” and hundreds more on sites all over the web. Some had a vague relevancy, but most did not. So, JC Penny’s rankings are tanking. JC Penny is also firing back, unappreciative of the “exposé” by the New York Times, or Google’s response. Within hours JC Penny’s rankings all fell significantly.

So what is up Google’s sleeve after a month of big retailers using some grey hat and black hat strategies to gain rankings? They’ve come up with algorithm designed to weed out “cheaters” and low quality sites. What’s a low quality site? Any site that does not serve it’s own purpose: link and content farms, ones with no copy or little copy, just ads, or copied content. The new algo will help Google determine how people interact with the sites. It’s supposed to weed out low quality sites, but the specifics of how it works, of course, have not been released. Some data from Chrome, I am sure helps them determine what users consider low quality sites.

I think that no matter what search engine you use, you have to consider what has always been the case with search. This algo changes none of that – you still have to go with high quality content, fresh content. And a white hat SEO…

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380306,00.asp
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2011/02/25/did-googles-algorithm-update-go-far-enough-on-content-farms