As you can see, it has taken a huge dip since its launch and continues to decline.

This goes to show you that just because you claim to have the biggest index, doesn’t mean you can compete and steal market share from the “Big 3″ (Google, Yahoo, Bing).  Google is where they are at today because they focus on innovation. They pride themselves on providing quality search results by constantly improving their algorithm and adding new features.  This is something that I believe Cuil needs to improve on in the near future or continue to fade into oblivion.

Mashable wrote a blog post in August on how Cuil is re-emerging as a real-time search engine offering a number of new features.  The problem is that even with the focus on real-time search, they are a little too late.  With real-time search engines like Twitter Search, OneRiot and Tweetmeme, who have already gained market share and offer better user experience, Cuil is just a day late and a dollar short.

Personally, I have done a number of searches in various industries and have seen a number of sites that have no business being ranked on the first page.  It should be interesting to see if Cuil can regain momentum in 2010 with their real-time strategy.

Create a Marketing Timeline

Have a plan.  Start by laying out a detailed strategy for at least the first two quarters of the year.  This way you can begin to budget and allocate internal resources needed to make the strategy successful.

Keep What Has Been Working

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  Keep doing what has been working in the past.  You may be able to make a few minor adjustments to make those marketing tactics even better.

Test a Different Marketing Approach

If every year you decide to do the exact same marketing, you will never really know if other types of marketing are more successful.  Marketing tactics have changed drastically compared to 30 years ago…even 5 years ago.  Don’t be afraid to try different things.  Even if your marketing budget is small, do the research, understand where your target market is communicating, and find a new way to reach out to them.

Here are a few things you can try:

• Sponsor an industry newsletter
• Write a guest blog post for a well respected, high traffic blog
• Host/Sponsor a local meet-up in your area
• Invite clients and potential clients to your office for a Free Seminar
• Create a great piece of content that you can give away on your site (white papers, free tools, etc.)
• Test different discounts, special offers, promotions

Monitor, Analyze, Adjust…Repeat

In any marketing campaign it is important to be able to measure its success.  In order to do that, you need to define what you consider a conversion.  Is it a download? A contact form submission? A phone call?  For traditional media it can be a bit harder, especially for radio, TV, and billboard advertising.  But for the Internet everything is trackable!

Make sure you have a good analytics program to track what people are doing on your site.  You may want to invest in a phone tracking solution, so you can track calls that originate from your website.

Once you have a significant amount of data, it is important to analyze it by seeing which campaigns were more successful.  If certain marketing programs are generating more business and a better ROI, start allocating more budget towards those campaigns.  For the campaigns that did not return a positive ROI, you could try tweaking things like messaging, offers, keywords, etc.  Sometimes a simple tweak can bring back a big return.

Marketing Trends for the Upcoming Year

Forrester Research reported that Internet Marketing spending will increase another 13% in 2010.  More and more companies are starting to shift their advertising dollars from traditional media methods to things like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, video creation, e-mail marketing and mobile marketing.

We are really starting to see a major shift in how companies are marketing their products and services.  With social communication tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; companies are able to track and monitor the progress of their Internet marketing campaigns unlike traditional marketing.  In this down economy, business owners are being smarter with their advertising dollars.  Make sure you do the same and invest is marketing programs that are well-researched, targeted and measurable.

So…have you planned your 2010 marketing strategy?

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is simply when a visitor enters your site and does not go to any other page on your site. This data can help you identify certain pages that need improvement. For example, if you have 10 service pages on your site and 3 out of the 10 have an extremely high bounce rate compared to the rest, it may mean that you need to add/change content, replace images, or add an offer/call to action. If your bounce rate is not design related, it may be that you are driving the wrong type of traffic to the site. Organically, if you are optimizing your site for the wrong keywords/phrases you could be driving irrelevant traffic to your site. On the paid side of things, if you are bidding on the wrong keywords or that the keywords are too broad you may have to bid on more targeted keywords.

Time On Site

The time on site indicator is very closely related to bounce rate. It is one of the best ways to see how engaged your visitors are on your site. If you notice that visitors are leaving within 30 seconds, you may not have content that is not compelling enough for a user to stay. Usually if your time on site is low, you will notice a higher bounce rate. Like bounce rate, if you drive the wrong type of traffic to the site you may have a low bounce rate.

Unique Visitors

Depending on the type of site you have, you may want to know how many new visitors you have compared to returning visitors. If you are managing a content-based site like a blog, forum, or wiki, you may want to take notice of visitors who return to your site. However, if you are a business trying to gain market share in your industry you may want to see what percentage of new users are visiting the site.

Top Keywords

It is always important to see what top keywords people are using to find your site. Your keyword list can help you see what keywords you are organically showing up for in the search results. Along with top keywords, pay close attention to each keyword as it correlates with time on site. You will notice that certain keywords/phrases will bring you higher time on site, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates.

Top Content

Extremely important for e-commerce sites, monitoring your most visited pages can help generate more revenue. Analyzing to see what products people are looking for can help you determine which products to market and promote more. For blogs and content focused sites, seeing which articles or blog posts are most popular can help you figure out which content you should highlight on your site or re-purpose on other content sharing sites.

Goal Conversions

Ultimately your site conversions are what generates leads and sales. When monitoring conversion data you want to look at it from a few angles. From one side, you want to see where your conversions are coming from. Are they coming from Google? A site you are marketing on? Paid search? An email marketing campaign? From another side, you want to see what keywords people used to convert. You may see trends in certain keywords that convert better than others. Another angle to look at is geo-location. Are more people converting within your city? State? Country?

Help add to the list!

Chad OchoCinco (Bengals)
Follow Chad @OGOchoCinco

Chris Johnson (Titans)
Follow Chris @ChrisJohnson28

Ryan Grant (Packers)
Follow Ryan @RyanGrant25

Larry Fitzgerald (Cardinals)
Follow Larry @Lfitzgerald11

Roy Williams (Bengals)
Follow Roy @Datboyie

Aaron Maybin (Bills)
Follow Aaron @aaronmaybin58

Antonio Pierce (Giants)
Follow Antonio @AntonioPierce

Knowshon Moreno (Broncos)
Follow Knowshon @KnowshonMoreno

Terrell Owens (Bills)
Follow Terrell @terrellowens

Mark Sanchez (Jets)
Follow Mark @Mark_Sanchez

Matt Leinhart (Cardinals)
Follow Matt @MattLeinart

Devon Hester (Bears)
Follow Devon @D_Hest23

Matt Forte (Bears)
Follow Matt @chitownforte22

Jason Witten (Cowboys)
Follow Jason @JasonWitten

Randy Moss (Patriots)
Follow Randy @r81m

Drew Brees (Saints)
Follow Drew @DrewBrees

Maurice Jones-Drew (Jaguars)
Follow Maurice @Jones_Drew32

Andre Johnson (Texans)
Follow Andre @johnson80

Reggie Bush (Saints)
Follow Reggie @reggie_bush

Darren McFadden (Raiders)
Follow Darren @dmfadden20

Shawne Merriman (Chargers)
Follow Shawne @shawnemerriman

Along with this new policy, the NFL has a current policy in place that bans cell phones, PDA’s, and computers on the sidelines, in the locker rooms, and coach’s booths/press box.  This new policy applies to all players, coaches, officials, and football operations personnel.

“League policy allows for the use of social media or networking sites (including Twitter and Facebook) by players, coaches and football operations personnel up to 90 minutes before kickoff and after the game following media interviews.”  (Source: Associated Press)

For those that  follow Twitter and the NFL knows that Chad OchoCinco is no stranger to tweeting his mind.  A few weeks ago, Chad announced that he will be tweeting during the Bengals games.  Regardless of the new NFL social media policy, number 85 said that he will not stop tweeting.

Furthermore the league states:

“Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms. Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game. While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization’s game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts.”  (Source: Associated Press)

With not only NFL players joining the Twitter scene, but MLB, NHL, and NBA players getting involved, it is only a matter of time until the other sports organizations start implementing their own social media policies.  Sites like Twitter and Facebook have also been helping by cracking down on users who pose as a professional athlete by creating a profile using their name, team, or jersey number.  These impostors have been gaining thousands of fans this way and have been leveraging players fame to promote products or companies.

The first improvement that Google has made to their local business center is the dashboard.   You are able to manage all of your local business listings, straight from your main LBC dashboard.  This is particularly useful if you are a internet marketing firm or a company with multiple locations.

The second improvement that Google has made for their LBC is the ability to monitor local listing performance, by incorporating analytics on each listing.  You can see the number of impressions and actions your listing has.  A action is defined by a key action on your listing like “Clicks for more info on Maps”, “Clicks for Driving Directions”, and “Clicks to your website”.

See what keywords and phrases searches are using to find your listing.

See where people are requesting driving directions from.

Like many other social profile sites like Linkedin, Flickr, and Facebook, Google gives your listing a percentage to let you know how complete your profile is.  This entices users to create as complete of a profile as possible, by adding not only basic company information but store hours, logos, videos, credit cards accepted, etc…

Along with all of these new features they also have other neat features like adding a coupon to your local business listing, bulk uploading multiple locations at once, and a tips/resource on how to create a complete listing.

With more emphasis being placed on localized search and the fact that Google is displaying 10 local business results for most local searches, it is extremely important to make sure your listing is 100% complete and verified with not only Google, but Yahoo and MSN.  The down side is that just because you have a complete listing, doesn’t necessarily mean you will show up #1 in that list of 10 local results.  Google places a heavy importance on your proximity to the center of the city that the user is searching.  Which means if you are trying to show up for “Raleigh Plumber” and your location is in a suburb, 20 miles outside of the city, it will have a difficult time showing up for Raleigh based searches.  Nevertheless it is still important to make sure that your complete is complete!

Anyways, this inspired me to give my two cents about what I felt were some of the main factors that went into good search engine rankings.

Overall I agree with the SEOmoz report.  Here is just a high level view of the main factors I feel are the most important.

Domain Trust/Authority: The most important factor that goes into ranking sites is your domain trust.  A website that has been around for 5-10 years will almost always be seen as a more authoritative site, if compared to a brand new site.  A lot of people are under the impression that if you create a site with good architecture, unique content, some relevant links…that you will be able to surpass all of your competitors with ease.  Keep in mind that domain trust is extremely important and that just because you have SEO’ed a site, that it will not necessary rank above sites that have been building trust with search engines for years.

Link Popularity: It is one thing for you to tell the search engines that you are a credible website, it is another thing for another website to say that you are credible.  That is why inbound link acquisition is #2 on the list.  Link building does tie directly into domain authority.  Gaining links from websites that are relevant and have high domain trust will provide more value to your site, than a non-relevant directly link.

On-Page Optimization: Having good on-page optimization is still essential for ranking well in search engines.  Some elements are more important than others.  The most important aspect and has been for years is having your keywords in your title tag.  Search engines still hold the title tag as the most important, however that is not to discredit the value of good site architecture, internal linking, keyword rich urls & anchor text, etc…

Fresh Content: Just because you added a few pages of new content to the site, that doesn’t necessary increase search rankings.  Content development needs to be long term, not a one and done tactic.  Blogs, forums, discussion boards, whitepapers, social content sharing, are all great ways of generating new content on your site.  Most importantly though is that your content is newsworthy and interesting.  If you just rewrite an article someone already wrote or write a piece of content just to try and get better rankings, you will not see the results you are hoping for.  Fresh content needs to be interesting, create buzz, link worthy, and/or  provides value to a certain industry or topic.  This type of content is what search engines are looking for and will reward a site for producing this type of content.

Guide to E-Commerce: Part I

• Product Categories
• Search/Sort Functionality
• Product Photos
• Product Descriptions

Guide to E-Commerce: Part II

• Sell-ups
• Cross-sells
• Product Comparisons
• Customer Reviews/Ratings

Guide to E-Commerce: Part III

• Checkout Process
• Timely Offers/Incentives
• Seasonal Product Offerings

Guide to E-Commerce: Part IV

• E-mail Marketing
• Mobile Alerts
• Gift Cards
• Affiliate Programs

Why settle for just one way a customer can reach and purchase your products?  There are a number of ways you can increase sales and promote your products other than people finding your site on a search engine.

E-mail Marketing

Leveraging your current customer basis is essential for any e-commerce site.  A current customer has already purchased from you, understands your company/products, most likely had a positive experience, and are more likely to purchase from you again.

There are a few ways you can go about implementing an e-mail marketing strategy.

1. Gain Feedback: You do not necessarily want to sell, sell, sell.  If all you do is fill up a users inbox with nothing but product offerings, you can almost guarantee that that user will get annoyed and unsubscribe immediately.  Try sending out a customer satisfaction survey.  This can be a great way to learn what customers think about your site, company and how you conduct business.  On a broader scale, if you listen to what customers are saying and making improvements on your products and services based on their feedback, you can bet that sales will follow.
   
2. Cross-sells: Once a customer has purchased, send out a email thanking them for their purchase and include some complimentary products that go with what they just bought.
   
3. Specials/New Product Promotions: Holiday promotion emails are a big part of a online store’s strategy.  Send out a blast to your current customers notifying them about the upcoming specials, savings, and promotions.
   

Mobile Alerts

With mobile technology really starting to develop, mobile marketing is becoming a mainstream marketing tactic.  More and more people have smart phones or blackberry’s that come with unlimited text and data transfer.  Try setting up a mobile marketing campaign and text your customers with promotions, shipping status updates, or even customer polls. MobileStorm and Broadtexter are a few companies that allow you to setup mobile marketing campaigns.

Gift Cards

Especially around the holidays, gift cards are a simple gift for anyone.  Allow users to purchase gift cards through your site.  Give multiple delivery options such as printable gift cards, physical cards, or e-mailed directly to the person.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is a huge business.  People can make a pretty good living off of selling other companies products. Create an affiliate program using Link Share or Commission Junction and allow other people to sign up for your program and sell your products.  It is like having your own salesforce promoting your products without the overhead!  Yes, they will receive a percentage of every product they sell, but a sale is a sale.  Just think about the lifetime value of a customer.

<< Guide To E-Commerce Part III

Checkout Process

When a user is ready to buy, the last thing you want to do is put up a road block and make it difficult to checkout. The hard part is getting them to buy, checking out should be a walk in the park.  Keep the buying cycle as easy as possible by keeping the steps to a minimum.

Checkout Process Quick Tips:

• Give multiple payments options
• Do not require the user to sign-in to purchase
• Do not try to add additional fees at the end of the purchase
• Give access to return policies, contact information, shipping tracking #s, privacy policies, support
• Only require information that is necessary to complete the purchase
• Send a confirmation email after purchase
  

One of the most important aspects of the checkout process is to track the abandonment rate using an analytics program like Google Analytics.  If your checkout process is flawed it will not matter what the user has done prior to checking out, they will not buy.  If you have multiple steps in the checkout process, make sure you setup your analytics to track every step.  If you have 3 steps in your process, there may be a reason why 65% of users are abandoning their cart at step 2.  Try an A/B or multivariate test to see if you can increase the percentage of checkout completions.

Timely Offers/Incentives

You would be surprised how far an offer as simple as “Free Shipping” can go.  Even if you are not giving a discount on the product itself, you can give the impression to the user that they are getting a great deal!

Timely offers can act as a great reason to speed up the buyers decision.  If you are offering a special 3 day sale, with 20% off everything in the store a user will feel the sense of urgency to purchase before the sale ends.

Cheaptickets.com does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in their buying cycle.  When you go to purchase a plane ticket, they will show “3 Seats Left” at that discounted price.  This will help the user want to buy sooner than later, to take advantage of the lower rates.

Seasonal Product Offerings

Take advantage of users searching for seasonal products, by tailoring your messaging for that holiday.

For Example:

1. Christmas: Circuit City, 12/25 — Merry Christmas! Find Santa-sized savings on TVs, cameras, GPS & more
2. Halloween: Dell, 10/27 — Un-Boolievable Savings – Up to $345 off Select Systems
3. Mothers Day: Lands’ End, 4/19 — Mother’s Day is May 11 – consider us “landsend.mom”
4. Easter: Finish Line, 3/21 — The Easter Bunny Wears Chucks—-Do You?

Seasonal Products Quick Tips:

• Bundle similar seasonal products
• Tailor the offer to a specific gender/demographic (mom, dad, children)
• Offering FREE gift wrapping
• Offer a customized message
• Offer customized engraving
• Guarantee delivery before the date of the holiday
• Have multiple timely promotions that end the day before the holiday
• Give extra savings after the holiday has past

<< Guide To E-Commerce: Part II