3W Design Group - Media

If anyone out ther wants lessons in writing, subscribing or just talking about blogs - contact me! I am a true believer.

Intense keyword research involves discovery of not just words but key phrases that people type into search engines when looking for certain goods and services. The benefit of having the most popular search terms online is obvious. Let’s take it one step further. What if you could put those keywords to work for you in print as well. I read recently about a whitewater rafting company that figured they needed to focus their pay-per-click advertising on terms like “family vacations” to get more clicks to their website. After intense keyword research, they realized the biggest customer  for their service were corporations who were looking for team building exercises for their employees. So they focused not only their online efforts on “team building”  but also their offline efforts as well. The sent direct mail postcards to corporations to tout their rafting service

The moral of the story? Today, when advertising/marketing dollars are scarce, get more online and offline bang for your buck by incorporating intense keyword research. And when you’re ready to embark on this marketing journey, call 3W Design. We have been turning leading edge technologies into business opportunities for our clients for over 13 years and we can do it for you!

These four items are tried and true and inexpensive to do. Enough rhyming, here are my 4 critical ideas to get your business noticed online in hard times (kind of an other rhyme…sorry):

1) Start a blog. It will help you in organic search engine results. Organic is yet another jargonistic word online but essentially refers to the search engine positioning you end up with without Paying Per Click to Google or Yahoo. Why does it do this? Constantly changing content helps your position in search engines. Contextual stories, meaning stories that match the rest of the text in your website/blog about your business. Plus it gives you a casual conversation with your clients or guests at a very small price - the price of the time it takes you to write or “post” new content.

2) Place banner ads throughout your website. Announce special web-only deals and invite readers to opt in to your RSS feed or your FeedBurner email subscription service to receive your blog or newsletter.

3) Add testimonials to your website. In some cases a good testimonial can win over the person who is on the fence about your good or service. Utilize former clients, or even employees who give a pitch about how great your restaurant, motel, professional service is. If you use an employee, make it seem as if they are waiting to do a good job for any new prospective clients.

4) Send out press releases. Press releases can be generated in-house, collectively by a group banding together in a community or by hiring a professional writer. I recommend using a professional (we have two amazing writers we work with) so the writing is tight and concise, engaging the journalist on the other end (be it a blogger, newspaper or magazine writer) to perhaps write a bigger story. Plus press releases can be recycled to your website after publication. And most importantly tell an engaging story with a good hook and a call to action ending.

So these are my 4 top ways to get started marketing your business in a down economy. All involve the option of utilizing a professional or the spirit of DIY. More next week on some higher end yet cost effective solutions.

Ciao!

Every morning my email contains the daily Ad Age MediaWorks newsletter. It’s always interesting, however this morning it was a cold, sobering, glass of water in the face: Will Print Survive the Next Five Years? The author, Nat Ives, recounts last week’s bad news for magazines including the fact that the venerable Christian Science Monitor is folding its 100-year-old daily print edition in favor of the web and a weekly publication; Time, Inc. announced 300-700 layoffs; Gannett is planning on laying off 10% of its local-newspaper staff; Condé Nast is revising Men’s Vogue to a twice-yearly pub while their newest magazine Portfolio is being shrunk and its website is going to just a few pages. The last batch of bad news was that Radar, the edgy pop culture magazine (full disclosure, I was a subscriber) closed down.

Is there a silver lining in this motherlode of bad news? I think there is light at the end of the tunnel for those news providers who adapt to the news consuming habits of the coming generations. To the twenty and thirty year olds, reading the newspapers mean reading the dot com version, not purchasing the copy you eventually have to recycle. And therein lies the challenge. This landscape is going to look very different in the next 2 years and will affect not only popular titles like Vanity Fair, but trade magazines too, which has both big worldwide players as well as small regional publishers.

It is going to be an exciting time to be in content creation and distribution. There will be bumps along the way, one of which was emphasized in another article in the same Ad Age MediaWorks. The article, written again by Nat Ives and Natalie Zmuda announced Macy’s department store cutting ALL magazine spending for the first half of 2009. Thats SIX MONTHS OF PRINT SPENDING BY A MAJOR U.S RETAILER! That is a big bump and it will be interesting to see how the publishing industry deals with it and what we are left with after the transition.

Stay tuned.

Through the years Gregg and I have secured Door County domains in order to pursue a business idea. However great the ideas were, we have always lacked the sales force to bring them to proper fruition. So today I am announcing the sale of some very cool Door County domain names with lots of potential.

One additional note: in the case of doorcountywisconsinrealestate.com, we have a real live analog commercial property for sale too. Check it out and if any of the properties interest you contact me!

1) searchdoorcounty.com & doorcountysearch.com 3W set up a spare top page and created a database that returned the names of “subscriber participants” in the search results. Probably a better way is to include ALL of Door County and sell advertising on the results page. While this can be a stand-alone business model, it certainly meshes nicely with the products and services you already offer. Plus the name is easy to remember. It is a viable income generating idea and the search pages can end up being a Google magnet. If you want the domain and as well as the PSD graphics that go with it, we can work that out.

2) doorcountyworkandplay.com At one time we linked this domain to the real estate site we created for our commercial property that is for sale as a way to increase its footprint on the web.

3) doorcountywisconsinrealestate.com This domain had also been linked to our commercial property that is for sale in an effort to increase the footprint of the site online. We are selling the domain as is - a keyword rich domain that can serve as an online link to commercial, residential, investment and vacant land for sale in Door County. You can gear it to MLS members only or open it up to the FSBO market too. The possibilities are endless. It was another project we developed on paper, which we were not prepared from a time or personnel standpoint to turn into a finished service.

4) door-county-wisconsin.com What can I say. Keyword rich. Search engine relevant. A fine addition to any suite of Door County domains.