L.A. Management Company

Ventures Magazine - October 2007

Reprint from Ventures Magazine (Charlotte Chamber of Commerce)

Create a Multimedia Web Site That Works
By Lou Amico

As technology moves forward and more people become adept to the technology, the way we do business and capture attention for our business changes. The Web is the number one tool for information gathering. Whether looking for a place to eat or for a product or service, information gatherers want all the information at their fingertips. According to Public Relations Tactics, more than 90 percent of business people use the Internet to research major business decisions. However, simply having a Web site is not enough. Driving people to your Web site (and keeping them there) is more important than ever.

Utilizing Web Site Optimization

It is estimated that roughly 80 percent of us use Internet search engines to find a product or service, and 55 percent of us make a purchase as a result of an Internet search. When a person is searching for a product or service that you provide, you want your Web site to be at the top of the search pages for the search terms they enter. This can be achieved through Web site optimization.

Web site optimization increases the visibility and ranking or position of your Web site on the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and MSN, among others. In essence, a Web site can be designed and positioned to be found on the first couple of pages of search engines for industry key words without paying for position.

An easy way to do this is to submit your site to search engines and directories. Our company uses specialized software to submit all the pages of a company’s Web site to hundreds of search engines and directories automatically. We also use software that provides us with site ranking reports on what page and position a Web site is located for specific keywords on any search engine.

Another component is to update code in the site and improve content so that it is friendlier to search engine spiders. Your Web site should say exactly what it is you do and include words that people would use to search for your company, product or service.

Establishing Yourself as a Credible Resource

You can go one step further in establishing yourself as a credible resource. Create search engine-friendly public relations and marketing materials. Include hyperlinks and key phrases in your press releases that link back to your Web site. When these releases are posted on other PR and news sites, it provides another link to drive people to your Web site and another source the search engines will pick up related to your company. When a potential customer types in “Widgets in Charlotte,” your company Web site along with other Web sites that have promoted your successes will come up on their search. It’s fantastic when your potential customers can see your company listed favorably in the media when they do a search for your product or service.

The Use of Video

Once you have driven traffic to your site, you need a reason for them to stay and be engaged. People tend to remember 70 percent of what they see and hear, opposed to 20 percent of what they read. And they will retain the information for a longer period of time if they are actively involved in getting the communication. Video is a powerful tool to use on your Web site. It provides a controlled, interactive method of visual communication to demonstrate your company mission, proposition, product and service.

A good quality video does not have to cost a lot to be effective. Promotional videos should last three to five minutes and concentrate on the benefits and unique features of your product or service. Videos should tell a good story, follow a logical path and be targeted to the right audience.

Lou Amico is founder and president of LA Management Company, a multi-media marketing firm based in Denver, North Carolina. He can be reached at 704.560.6274, or visit www.lamanagementco.com for more information.

Lou Amico and Joe Zammit

Written by Melissa Hankins    
Sunday, 30 September 2007 
Work hard, play hard—on the lake

Lou Amico used to start and end every day mired in bumper-to-bumper traffic as he commuted to and from his job in Manhattan. Now he lives in Charlotte—and he doesn’t deal with traffic at all.

Charlotte has its fair share of highway snarls, but Amico found a way around them. He seldom climbs into a car anymore. He fires up a boat.

A few years ago, the marketing exec started traveling to his business partner’s house by way of Lake Norman. And now he’s spending more than commute time on the water. “We’ve been entertaining clients on the boat, holding business meetings,” Amico says. “Turns out this working on the water—it makes really good business sense.”

Amico is president of a multimedia marketing and communications firm called LA Management Co. He started the business here after he and his business partner, Joe Zammit, decided to abandon the rat race in New York City. Coincidentally, they both had family in Charlotte and so they were familiar with the area. When they began to talk about the possibility of moving here, “we sent out this mass kind of e-mail looking to see if we could find work, and we got eight appointments right away,” Amico says.

So Amico moved with his wife, Janet, and their two teenagers in August 2003, and Zammit followed a year later. Amico has a waterfront house in Denver; Zammit lives on the lake in Mooresville. “As soon as Joe moved here, I began using the boat to commute,” Amico says. “I walk out to my dock, start up the boat, and light a cigar.”

Soon after, the pair began entertaining clients like Diamond Springs Water and Charlotte Copy Data on Amico’s boat.

“Obviously your clients are going to feel comfortable when you get them relaxed,” adds Zammit. “And then you can get down to business much easier.”

Cornelius resident Patrick Heidrich owns the Charlotte arm of Sandler Sales Institute and he, too, uses Lake Norman to woo clients. “We’ll go wakeboarding instead of golfing,” Heidrich says. “The lake gives you so many options.”

In the coming days, Google will be adding click-to-play video. These video ads will compete for placement on sites in the Google content network with other text, Flash and image ads. As with other Google AdWords products, advertisers can choose to bid on a Cost-Per-Click or Cost-Per-Impression basis.

These ads will be supported by both site and keyword-targeted campaigns. You can choose to serve your video ad on a specific site or on pages in Google’s content network that relate to your product or service. You will also have the ability to geo-target your video ads internationally, nationally, or locally.

Unlike some intrusive advertising, users will have complete control. When a page loads, only a static image will be visible; the video will not start playing until the user initiates it. He or she will be able to advance the video, pause it, adjust the volume or click through to the advertiser’s site, as you can see in the example below:

That’s great, you may say, but video is only for big branding oriented advertisers. We beg to differ. This feature makes video ads much more accessible to all advertisers. Now, an owner of a small bed & breakfast in Lake Tahoe can put a video tour of his beautiful chalet right next to an article that talks about skiing the epic slopes of Squaw Valley.

Tips for Making Your Pages Search Engine Friendly:

As with many other things which are unseen, there is a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding the use of meta-tags on web pages. The meta tags are information packets in the head portion of a web page.

Though there are several possible meta tags that may be included in the head of a web page, the ones which are most important for search engine optimization are the Title Tag, the Description tag and the Keywords tag.

The title tag is really one of the most important single things you can work on for improving your website’s search engine results. Go to Google and make a search for any particular key word If you look at the top ten entries in that search you will see that all of them have this key word in the title, sometimes more than once. So when writing your title tag, it is helpful to have your keywords included in the title tag, and not only in the tag, near the beginning of the title.

Suppose that your company is the Acme Manufacturing Company and you are selling electric widgets and you are located in California. What should your title tag be? Most people would opt for the name of their company as the first word of the title. It makes sense, in that it looks good in the blue strip at the top of the browser, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to get a good ranking in search results for your keywords “electric widgets, California”.

The first few words of your title tag are very important. People may not be searching for Acme Manufacturing, unless it is a very important brand, but they are searching for electric widgets, and they may not want to purchase it from someone in New York, especially if it is not a mail-order type item.

In addition, if there are tons of widget companies, it will be difficult to get to the top of the heap in a search simply for the term “widgets”. But if it is “widgets, California”, then you will have a good chance of getting a high ranking if you put the keyword California prominently in the title. So, if you are in a very competitive category and your customers don’t already know about you, then you might consider a title tag like this “Electric widgets from Acme Manufacturing of California” or even better “Electric Widgets in California produced by Acme Manufacturing.”

Some guidelines for the title tag suggest that this tag be limited to 70-80 characters including spaces. I confess to have used more on several occasions.

The next tag that has to be done is the Description tag. Many search engines use the description tag as a way to tell the searchers what the page is about. On MSN, for example, the description of the site shown underneath the title is the description that has been placed in the description tag.

The description tag is thus important in two respects: the search engine robot searches it for keywords to “get an idea” of what the page is about, and this tag will be seen by the surfers as they scroll down through the search results. If it is an interesting and well-written description then they may click through to visit the site. So this tag should be well written but also contain the important keywords that you wish to highlight.

Going back to our example of Acme Manufacturing. We could make a description tag that reads as follows: “Acme Manufacturing is the largest producer of electric widgets in California, providing round the clock service and warrantees on all products.” This description contains the keywords again and also says something about the company.

Some guidelines for description length recommend a maximum length of 250 characters. Once again there is no precision about this, but it is good to be cautious until you are already entered into a search engine’s index.

The last of the important meta tags relevant to search engine optimization is the keywords tag. In this tag you have a chance to list your important keywords, but this time they do not have to be in a coherent phrase as in the Title and Description. Put your important keywords near the beginning. Make sure that all the keywords used in the title and the description tags are again listed. On top of that, add prominent keywords, especially those that appear in the actual text of the page you are optimizing. For the Acme Manufacturing company we could have these keywords: “widgets, widget, electric widgets, California, widgets in California, Acme Manufacturing, service, warrantee, warrantees”.

Many pundits advise against excessive repetition of any single keyword even if they appear in different phrases separated by commas. Once again the guidelines vary and are not precise but it would be better to be conservative at first. How big should the keywords section be? 800-1000 is the estimate provided by some search engines and commentators alike. (Lately some of the main search engines have begun to disregard the keywords tag in their computations of rank, but some search engines continue to use it, so you can still include it in your metatags.)

The thing to remember about meta tags is that they are just one part of search engine optimization. If your text is keyword rich and your page structure allows the search engines to get to this text easily and if, on top of this, you have crafted your meta tags well, then you have an excellent chance of getting the search engine positioning results that you are aiming for.
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About the Author: Akash Kumar is a search engine optimization expert and also the founder of vistadivine.com – an economical search engine optimization firm.

Everyone wants “organic” or “free” traffic, but it’s a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you build a good content-rich site and do the things on this list, you’ll get traffic and help your ranking at the same time.

1. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Get traffic in an hour with PPC. Google and Overture (now Yahoo). Don’t bother with others until you make these two work. The key to this is to know your visitor value, bid on hundreds of key words and phrases and split test your ads and track each key word, phrase or ad separately.

2. Distribute Your Content – write articles of value to your target market. Distribute that content for other webmasters to use on their sites as long as they keep the link back to you in a “resource box” at the end of each article. Distribute your articles through article directories, ezines, and distribution services. The key to make this work is valuable content.

3. Submit Press Releases – submit electronic press releases frequently with news of interest to the media and your target market. Since press releases are news, if they get picked up, it will be quickly and you may get hundreds of links back to your site this way. Key to make this work: write 300 – 500 word releases, include a link back to you, and have them written and distributed by experts who know how to optimize each release for key words (not typical PR firms).

4. Set Up a Blog with RSS – to be effective, blogs must have frequently updated content. Base yours on information helpful to your customers, not sales pitches. Don’t do it unless you can commit some ongoing time to it. Seth Godin says the keys to a successful blog are: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness (short & to the point), and Controversy. The key to making this work is to make it interesting to your visitors, submit to blog directories, ping the search engines when you post and distribute your content with RSS.

5. Get One-Way Incoming Links – All the previous tips will create incoming, one-way links but you can also buy links from other sites from text link brokers. Don’t do reciprocal linking, it’s dead. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google Page Rank higher than “0″. A site Google rates as “0″ may be because they are penalizing it for some reason. If you link to it, you’ll get penalized too.

The key to making this work: Make sure links have your key words in the anchor text and make sure they are text, not graphical links. Make sure they are from other relevant sites, not link farms or FFA (Free for All) sites. The ideal is links from relevant pages without many other links.

6. Give Other Sites Your Testimonial – let them publish it on their web site as long as they link back to you. This can get you a one-way link from a site that would otherwise not give it to you. The key to make this work: keep it short and to the point.

7. Email Promotions – Advertise in Ezines, place ads in someone else’s email newsletters that reach your target market. The key to make this work: track everything carefully

8. Joint Ventures – Get promoted to your JV partner’s customer database by your JV partner. John Reese sold over $1 Million of his information product in 24 hours exclusively by using joint venture promotions from his partners sending his offer to their customer lists. He paid his partners commissions on sales. The key to make this work: know your visitor value and have a tested and proven sales page that converts well BEFORE you contact JV prospects.

9. Get Affiliates – If selling a product, offer a commission to affiliates to sell for you. Each affiliate’s link to your sales letter conversion page will bring you traffic and a better search engine rank too. The key to making this work is to make it financially attractive to your affiliates and give them everything they need to promote your product or service.  Make it brain dead easy for them to do.

10. Buy Other Web Sites – Find web sites that already rank high on your keywords and verify their traffic with the site owner and independent tools. Make sure you get ownership of the domain – you can let them still use their content elsewhere. Check deleteddomains.com to see what domains you can register for a few dollars that their owners have let expire. The key to making this work: Check Google page rank, Alexa rank and the number of back links for any site  before you buy a web site.

One marketer I know challenged some SEO experts to see who could get ranked highest on a given term in 24 hours. He won, the techies did a lot of slick things, but the marketer just bought the site that was already # 1.

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Joe McVoy is a marketing consultant who has had experience starting up & growing businesses. He founded 2  companies selling to Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers, a mail order company and an Internet marketing business.  He helps clients with traditional marketing, direct marketing, on-line marketing and has a free newsletter & resources at:  http://www.profitablemarketingsystems.com

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Four Vital Steps for Optimizing Your Website

Search engine optimization is best defined as the art and science of building web pages that are both search engine friendly and user friendly. Below are four basic steps that you should take when optimizing your web pages.

1. Emphasize Text and Not Graphics.

While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a search engine is trying to classify pages by text and not by images. If you have an opening page with a beautiful picture of a flower arragement in a wicker basket and only two words of text saying “enter here” then this page will not rank high in searches for Wicker Baskets. Similarly, if you have a headline with important text containing your site’s keywords, it should not be displayed as a gif or jpeg image. Pages that are all flash or all images are not search engine friendly, and often are not user friendly as well.

2. Links to Your Interior Pages Should Be Easily Found by Search Engines

While most people will probably enter your site through the main page, many will enter after doing searches which lead them to your inner pages. The best way to make sure that search engines will find and index your inner pages is to include text links to these pages.

3. Build Your Pages Around Specific Keywords or Phrases

Robotic search engines and human users have one thing in common: they are trying to figure out what your site is all about. It is possible to build separate web pages which explain and give importance to various aspects of your organization’s activity. These sub pages can be optimized so that they perform well in searches for your various keywords.

4. Your Keywords Should Appear in Strategic Portions of Your Web Pages

If your site is about wicker baskets, then these words should appear in the following places of your html pages:

a. In the File Name or the URL.

If your site is called www.wickerbaskets.com then this will give you a head start in any searches for this term. Similarly, if your company is called Acme Crafts, you may have a web page with this url:  www.acmecrafts.com/wickerbaskets.html

The URL or file name is an important indicator to a search engine, so don’t miss the opportunity to put your important term either in your main domain name or in your file names.

b. In the Title Tag

The text that is displayed in the blue line at the top of your browser is your title tag. The title tag is located in the <head> section of the document. If your main phrase is “Wicker Baskets” then the title tag in your html document should look something like this: <title>Wicker Baskets: Wicker Basket Information by Acme Crafts</title>

c. In the Description Tag

The description tag is not seen on the web page but search engines often display it as the text which gives the searcher an idea of what your page is about. The description tag should be compelling, and make someone want to click and see your page, while also containing the keywords that are in your url and your title tag. A description tag for this site might look as follows: <meta name=”description” content=”Wicker Baskets: Design your Wicker Basket with the help of Acme Crafts. You will find up-to-date information on designing your own wicker baskets on our website.”>

d. In the Headlines

Just as someone reading a newspaper looks at headlines to find out what is important, a search engine robot looks at the headlines of a web page in order to pick up the essential feature of that page. Put your main phrase in a headline and place it near the top of the page. Your headline text should be enclosed with special header tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3>. A headline tag for our hypothetical page could be written as follows: <h1>Design your own Wicker Baskets with our online basket builder .</h1>

If you don’t like the look of the h1 tag, then use a smaller tag, h2 or h3, or adjust your site’s style sheet so that the h1 tag is displayed in a small font which better matches your body text.

e. In the Body Text of Your Page

Your main keywords or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of text and in a natural way throughout the text and also at the end of the page. In normal writing you would first introduce your subject, then explain what it is about and then summarize at the end. Follow this same procedure when you start writing your web page. Pages written in this style will automatically have correct keyword density and distribution.

f. In Anchor Text on Your Page

Anchor text is the clickable portion of links on your web page. Suppose you are describing your Wicker Baskets and you want to direct your web visitors to an inside page with more information about this subject. Instead of making a link that says “click here,” it would be better to have a link that says “Click here for more information about Wicker Baskets” or even better, the link text will only be “Wicker Baskets” and the “click here” will be rendered as normal text.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization steps when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily understood by your visitors, and easily classified and
indexed by search engines.

Short Term Vs Long Term Marketing

In order to create consistent sales cycles and a positive growth trend businesses usually engage in both short and long term marketing efforts.

Short-term marketing efforts tend to cause sudden sales spikes which rarely last. These sharp sales increases are usually the result of a targeted marketing campaign or time limited offer. While short-term marketing produces sales, long-term marketing efforts must be mixed in to sustain sales.

Short Term Online Marketing

Mentions
Positive product mentions in forums, newsgroups or within trade organizations can result in a traffic or sales surge. Product endorsements and newsgroup conversations are difficult for marketers to control and time, so while product mentions in forums are short-term marketing, they lack the organized exposure necessary to maintain sales momentum.

Discounts
Marketing campaigns that involve coupons, discounts or time-limited offers can also generate product interest. It is important to use promotional offers sparingly or long-term sales could be jeopardized by having customers “wait” for the next offer to purchase.

PPC / Advertising
The easiest and fastest way to generate product interest is, of course, to pay for it. Pay-per-click campaigns are known to drive significant targeted traffic. Sadly, when the campaign funding ends, the traffic and sales generally do, too. Regardless, it is important for marketers to realize that with short-term marketing, sellers can often control sales and infuse cash into a fledgling product, service or business.

Short-term marketing is also useful for test-marketing new products or split-testing to find the appropriate price point. With pay-per-click advertising marketers can control the ebb and flow of site visitors and make a determination about what banners, keywords, text copy and graphics convert at the highest rate. The lessons learned in short-term marketing can then be implemented in the long-term marketing strategy. Marketers can determine the effectiveness of sales copy and landing pages, implementing them in a long range of marketing activities.

Long Term Online Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Undoubtedly the most time consuming, yet important aspect of long-term marketing involves preparing and optimizing a website for search engines. Currently the majority of Internet surfers seeking a product or information look to search engines. Most Internet surfers use keywords to search for the product, service or information that they are looking for. Knowing your audience and optimizing a site for keywords and phrases that potential consumers would use in their search for a product or service is critical to being found on the Internet.

Search engine optimization pays long-term dividends, but is an ongoing process, as the search engines themselves are constantly evolving their algorithms. The goal of search engines is to provide web surfers the best sites suited to the web surfers’ search terms.

Often, changes implemented will not be “seen” by search engines for several months. It is important to follow search engine guidelines and be patient.

Fresh Content & Communication
A stream of fresh content like newsletters, tips or blog posts will result in long-term quality traffic. Fresh content that is posted and updated on a regular basis will encourage visitors to return. Archived content will build a base for a variety of related keywords.

Syndicated Articles
Related industry articles will result in genuine interest from a very targeted audience. Providing related content articles that are available for syndication will result in links back from websites that contain similar content. Over time, articles can define a company’s expertise on a subject area. Ultimately, syndicated articles can build confidence with prospective customers and a level of trust.

When designing a marketing campaign, consider threading long-term and short-term marketing efforts so that sales are stable and consistent. By implementing a marketing plan that involves both short and long-term efforts, sales success can be achieved.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.