So, you want to make a buzz?  Do you want to make impact?

Get in line… or you could cut in line.

Most people try to create a buzz by taking the “please everyone” road.  The thinking usually falls in line with “maximize our popularity by making sure we don’t do anything that someone won’t like.”  It does not take a rocket scientist to poke a hole in the logic of that statement.  The Internet is a place that everyone goes to.  Grannies from the backwoods of Tennessee and some of these people are busy clicking away on the Internet looking for what’s important to them.  You can’t please them all.

Why not take notes from what Red vs. Blue did?  They capitalized on something they loved and others loved.  Now these former punk teenagers are making a living producing Internet-based comedy videos.  They were even given a nod by Bungie, the producers of Halo, the video game they used as the backdrop to their comedy.  While you can’t really infringe on intellectual property like a viral video series might, you can identify yourself with what your clients like to follow.

So here’s the question: what are your clients fans of?  Who do they get giddy for?  If you can legitimately put your product on that bandwagon, you have built in publicity.

Sounds crazy?  Sprint didn’t think so. They’ve spent a great deal of money on a campaign for their mobile products featuring the popular Internet radio station, Pandora, Twitter, and others.  Those ads created a buzz.  It captured people’s interest because they were already interested in the subject matter.

So go ahead and cut in line.  Find something that your clients are already interested in, make a legitimate connection to your product or company, and see what happens.

Look around the web and you’ll usually notice three things:

1. A good site will have good user management.
2. There are a lot of poorly designed sites out there.
3. Someone is blabbing about it on Facebook.

We’re here to help you with all three. You already know we can design great sites – but did you know we can make user management for your site a breeze too? If you’re a developer, you know that implementing user management can be a pain. Even something as simple as creating an account for a user to login and store basic credentials can eat a few hours out of your precious budget.

For example, to create a user, you not only will have to figure out if the username or email address is taken, you will have to figure out if the password meets certain requirements on length or complexity. You also have to wonder if the “user” really is some automated robot that’s about to create 1,000 accounts and send an infinite amount of Xanax discount coupons or personal enhancement ads to your friends and family — all from a fake user account with your nice upstanding company name tacked onto the end — which could create some tense moments between you and Grandma at the big summer BBQ. (Grandma just got her first email account, and thanks to you, her first piece of inappropriate spam).

So, you’ve figured out ways around that with some nice validation checks and maybe a free captcha generator that prints out those nice squiggly letters that surely no robot could ever figure out, right? But, once Grandma finally gets her account set up, you’re going to have to worry about her forgetting her password — or wanting to change her email address or username, and then you’ve got a whole other set of problems to worry about.

What about social networking? Won’t you want your Grandma and her knitting group to help you build the popularity of your site by forging friendships with other users on your site, and talking up all the great points and usefulness you’ve provided them? As a developer, you might typically need to set aside a good week of hardcore programming to turn out some sort of respectable social networking, and by that point, you’ve spent one week of your two week budget just on user management and social networking.

This was life before Facebook Connect.  If you haven’t heard, Facebook Connect lets you allow users to login to your site using their Facebook username and password:

What that means to you is that you’ve now got a bonafide login system, password retrieval system, and one of the best social networking engines available — all with about 5 minutes of your time and just a few lines of code. Users can now interact with your site just as they normally would, except they have the built-in convenience of not having to create a new account just to be on yet another site.

Facebook’s Developer pages make it really easy to get started. I could explain it all here, but I won’t waste your time when their instructions are every bit as good as mine. Just follow the short, simple steps and you’ll be well on your way. If you want to see it in action before you integrate it into your site, checkout this nice little demo that Facebook provides: http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/therunaround/

What is an SEO strategy anyway?

I remember wondering this and discovering mixed opinions and differing ideas on how to best define this often mentioned but rarely explained component of website ownership.

Particularly it seems to depend on who you ask. Bring the question to your technical team and get one perspective, and usually the most detailed one, request clarification from a company’s marketing team and receive another perspective but notice the response begins to lose some conviction, ask your business leadership team and in many companies get redirected back to the tech team. However, in this author’s opinion, an SEO strategy is most successful when all three business units above take an active interest and make a dedicated effort in their own ways.

By explicit definition, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

From that we gather that something needs to be optimized to create some desired effect on search engines. Okay, but clearly we are not going to all this trouble simply to benefit some search engines. The actual desired effect is increasing awareness and traffic to your website. So what is the difference between SEO and traditional marketing?

Generally speaking – nothing at all. SEO is a succinct way to say marketing the website.

Some people may argue that this term only applies to making the site itself contextually friendly to search engine spiders. To which I respond, why then are one way and reciprocal links a corner stone of SEO strategy? It’s near common knowledge that good one way links are the most heavily weighed consideration by the Google system of ranking. So while some companies content may be relying on title tags and meta data, more ambitious organizations will take a more comprehensive approach and reap the benefits.

In my opinion, SEO can be divided into the following two main elements; content relevancy and online footprint. A website dedicated to cell phones should not rank anywhere on a search for sail boats. Just like a site dedicated to Wal-Mart would not rank as high as Wal-Mart.com itself. In this example, not only is the latter’s content most relevant to the search term – but Wal-Mart’s multimillion dollar marketing budget, solidifies their rank domination.

The keys to content relevancy are, understanding the nature of your content, defining and enhancing that content, and continuously expanding upon the content.

Search engines crawl your pages and certain pieces of data will receive greater weight based on how that data is defined. Definition occurs at the HTML level. The most heavily weighted words are obviously – the FQDN, or site name itself. A domain name will override nearly all other factors.

Other strongly weighted pieces of content include, your title tag, content wrapped in heading tags and a page’s meta description. Putting the right content in your url’s, titles, headings and meta tags is your method of communicating to the search engine what the content is and how importantly that content is relative to the rest of the page. On the low end of the spectrum would be content wrapped in paragraph tags or content not defined at all. Another example is providing accurate description in your image’s ALT attribute. A search engine spider has no idea what a graphics illustrates. However, by including descriptive text in the title and/or alt attributes you are able to inform search engines that your site contains those 100 pictures of Selma Hayek - which consequently improves your relevancy to any Selma Hayek searches. Equally important is making sure a search engine spider can navigate your entire site.

These are the fundamentals, or the basics. Slightly more advanced is the process of keyword analysis. With single product e-commerce sites identifying your keywords is straightforward. However, with a news or informational site even understanding your keywords becomes much more complicated. Regardless of one product or thousands of different product types, the battle over keywords and key phrases is highly competitive.

According to emarketer.com, U.S companies are spending approximately 10% of their annual advertising budgets on the web today, compared to 7.5% two years ago. On the surface that doesn’t look like a mind-boggling jump in online spending, but in the advertising world these types of philosophical shifts take time to develop - but when it eventually happens it doesn’t take too long for the momentum to pick up. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with advertising budgets.

Some things to consider:

• Consumers are in more control now than ever before.
• Brands are living and dying by social acceptance.
• There have been dramatic changes in usage patterns.
• Economy is down, technology advances are up.

Ten years ago, I sat in my advertising campaigns class at Texas Tech University listening to the professor preach about reach and frequency, target markets, cost per impression, media spending between TV, print, radio and newspaper, integrated marketing plans, surveying customers, and so on … all good points for a young, aspiring ad exec to learn but, not surprisingly in 1998, any insight into internet-based advertising and marketing was untold and unknown.

And so, 10 years later, the shift is upon us. And it’s all good.

Advertisers are realizing the tremendous benefits of going online with their money. For one, search marketing is easy to track and allows you to quantify a true ROI unlike spending dollars on an outdoor billboard or magazine ad.

It’s also non-intrusive compared to the 23 minutes of each TV programming hour that is taken up by unwanted commercials. The viewer is enjoying the program, investing their time to only get that time interrupted by a commercial that probably has little relevance to their life. Enter the greatness of the DVR.

With Search Marketing, the advertiser is not intruding on the searcher’s life … merely waiting and prepared for when the time comes that the consumer is searching for that advertiser’s specific product or company. Again, the consumer is in control now, and likes it that way.

The soaring popularity of social networking sites online has opened new channels for companies to generate brand awareness and interest. Word of mouth has always been the best form of advertising and with sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, the communication lines have never been as open or as far-reaching.

So, you may be like many business owners and marketers these days who are trying to find the most cost-effective ways to spend advertising dollars that will translate into more sales, better brand awareness and increased market share. The tide is turning away from traditional methods and heading more into the digital arena. The same emarketer.com study referred to earlier estimates that 15% of most ad budgets will go towards online marketing by 2013 … that’s double the original 7.5% spent just six years earlier. A clear indication that the shift is on.

Nothing dashes the hopes of a new site owner more than running stats on their new pride and joy only to find that no one seems to be visiting their site.

I’ve seen countless start-ups launch fabulous sites with tons of promise only to lose their momentum due to a lack of repeat visitors. So let’s assume you’ve created a wonderful site with a good premise. You’ve gotten the initial word out and have had plenty of first-time visitors. How, then, do you get these valued visitors to come back for more?

It boils down to one very simple premise – your site has to give a user a reason to come back to your site once, twice or dozens of times per day. It isn’t easy and sometimes can take a lot of trial and error, but here are two basic strategies for transforming your first-time visitors into diehard fans.

It starts with content. People primarily use the Internet for one basic function - getting information. You must provide that information in an easily digestible fashion. That’s part of the reason why blogs and sites like Twitter have taken off. Someone can get the content they want in a quick and usable format. Web sites are all about filling a niche. Assuming you’ve found your niche, it is up to you to identify what your users want (or better yet what they need!) to see on a regular basis. Then you’ve got to provide it.

It can be painful as it takes lots of time and commitment. But content is the fuel that feeds the beast and you can’t have a successful site with it.

Do I mean to say that every successful site has someone sitting around writing new articles 24/7? No. Well, yes in a way.

The next strategy for keeping people knocking down your digital doorway is to create an online community and let them provide your content. “User-driven content” isn’t just an Internet buzz word. It’s also a great source of free content, and it builds a sense of community that can be a very powerful driving force in getting people back to your site.

When I started RotoJunkie.com in 1999, the first and most important decision made was to include a message board on the site. After word got out that there was a new place on the ‘Net to talk about how much we hate the Yankees or how bad Texas pitching can be, people started flooding to the site. What started out as a hobby and a way to teach myself HTML became a successful Web business all because of the power of online communities. We used to joke that RotoJunkie was probably playing a role in bringing down corporate America with all the lost hours that employees spent on our site during the day!

So, the concept is simple. Give your users a reason that they have to come back to your site as often as possible. Do that, then you’ll see your traffic and your profits start to rise.

Some of the dingiest diners and dives serve the best food on the planet. We’ve got a few places in our neck of the woods that fit the bill - nondescript or even crumbling on the outside but a mind-blowing culinary experience within.

That brick-and-mortar atmosphere can work for some small businesses. But it’s a recipe for disaster online.

The appearance, functionality and overall feel of your website is so crucial to success. Visitors form an instant impression about your business or your brand upon arriving to your home or landing page. Unfair or not, that impression will color their opinion of your credibility and your ability to deliver quality products or services.

You might make the best widget on the planet, but it’s tough to inspire potential consumers to action if they can’t get past your circa-1997 Web site. There are a host of simple templates companies can rely on to spruce up their aesthetics, but those do present some limitations.

While looks are everything, there’s a bit more to consider when thinking about your online presence and web design - boosting your standing in the search engines. On this note, we cede the floor to search optimization guru Aaron Wall, who has addressed the importance of quality design multiple times on this blog (SEObook):

“As spam continues to spread across the web, investing in a unique design helps set your site apart from most other sites. The difference between “spam” and what is worthy of subscribing to is often not much more than good content formatting, clear writing, and a strong site design.

Making a site accessible, usable, and professional looking might cost you $10,000 or more by the time you are done with it. If you are low on funds, it might make more sense to spend that money on brand building and marketing, but if you want designers and high authority webmasters to read your site and link at your site it is much easier if your site looks professional.

Off the start I did not believe that coding errors or design mattered that much, but if you want web designers and developers to link to you, then your site has to pass the sniff test. That consideration is much more important if you write a tech blog than if you run a fairly static e-commerce site.”

We can’t stress it enough - credibility is key. Not just for your potential customers, but for independent experts, technicians, bloggers and others who can vouch for your reputation, point prospective clients your way and generally help serve as reference points to your site.

We at lifeBLUE have built our reputation on crafting intelligent, beautiful and intuitive web design. Our team of expert programmers, designers and content creators understands the vital importance of functional, awe-inspiring design. You can check out some our handiwork in our portfolio.