Jul 05 2010
Kaizen Marketing can now help you set up your own MagNet Store for either your own products OR someone elses. In fact, you can post this very sample store on your own site or Facebook page and get a % of sales. Your own customers and fans can easily post YOUR store on THEIR pages to help YOU sell. You decide how much you will share with your sellers. Can you see the potential here? Contact us for more information.
May 24 2010
The inspiration for the name of this business, Kaizen is a concept introduced to the Japanese by American Edward Deming, perhaps responsible for their long run of automotive success. Why? Because they focused on small incremental changes over time. Literally, Kaizen is two characters: 1) Change and 2) For the better.
Making a series of small changes, consistently over time, is the one, sure-fire, guaranteed way to insure your business success.
A new idea, a small change to your website, a minor tweak to your ad campaign, or a larger shift in strategy. With accurate testing and tracking, you know exactly what works and, between 2 options, what works BETTER.
Always try to beat your own control for the best ad, the best web page option, the best subject line in an email. Forget about what you LIKE or THINK is better. Tracking tells you what actually IS better, in terms of results.
Unlike traditional guesswork advertising, modern internet advertising is both an art and a science, hence our Kaizen tagline – The Art and Science of Continuous Improvement.
Check out this new short video video from my teacher and the smartest business strategist I know, Paul Lemberg. All about making “kaizen” tweaks to your business.
Small Changes = Big Profits >>
Also, check this on the concept of Kaizen – from Wikipedia
Kaizen (Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better”) refers to a philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management. It has been applied in healthcare, government, banking, and many other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain.[1] By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality management teachers who visited the country. It has since spread throughout the world.[2]
Apr 25 2010
The front page of Google, the top 10 sites showing (sometimes out of Millions) on Google search results page, is perhaps the most valuable bit of online “real estate”. Below are the basic elements required for getting your chosen keyword term to rank in the top 10. An easy to rank term with few competing sites (usually few searches too but not always) may require very little effort. The more competitive the term, the more work will be required on all levels.
These are all considered “white hat” and long term practices not likely to get the famous “Google slap” as will so many flavor-of-the-month “black hat”, spammy techniques. Taking time for good keyword research is key to know what terms are getting searched and not overly competitive. Having the keyword in your domain name does not hurt, but is not necessary. If you can, save the file name to include the keyword. On most blog sites like Word Press, that means changing the “permlalink” to include the post title, which will have the keyword.
Quality content is keyword focused, not only on primary keyword but themed or related keywords as well. Use software tool such as webcontentstudio.com to help write good themed content. A 500-700 word article is ideal, with primary keyword in title, meta tags, body copy and related keywords throughout. An occurrence of a related keyword every 5-10 words seems to be most effective. Can outsource this to trained writers (we got em for $100 per article)
Most blog software like Word Press will automatically ping your post when you publish but if not use pingomatic.com. Immediately, also use socialmarker.com or similar (or outsourcers) to bookmark your article using the top social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Propeller and others. This should take you 15-20 minutes using the socialmarker tool, or you can outsource it. There is some controversy over whether these links are “followed” and counted by Google, but I have seen first hand my rankings improve with this step alone. Just do it!
Step 3 – Article MarketingCan simply post copies of exact same article to the scores of article directory sites, including the mammoth ezinearticles.com, with a link to your page in the resource box. The incoming links will be valuable but if exactly same content, both pages will not be ranked. Better yet, have the article rewritten to be unique (change by at least 50%) while preserving the themed content in step 1. For just $70 per article, Kaizen Marketing will do a high quality rewrite of your content and submit (via outsourers) to 100 article directory sites for good backlinks AND possibly multiple rankings – front page results for more than one site.
In addition to article sites, you should get as many high authority Web 2.0 sites to link to you as possible, including sites like Youtube, Facebook, WordPress, PRlog, eHow, Blogspot and others where you can create and save content, including links. Also, many forum type sites allow user profile pages with links that are followed by Google. Do this yourself or outsource to someone well trained in these methods (Kaizen Marketing of course!) For just $100, we will build 30 high quality links to your specific keyword focused page. For the current top web properties to get links FROM, download the free rank decoding engine. While the sites are not the highest authority, I have seen improvements using this handy link network service: Textlinks.com – the free trial gives you 25 links you can keep.
A front page google ranking is not hard for some terms just using a well optimized page, with quality themed content. For most worth having, you will also need to include a link building campaign, using the keyword in your anchor text links. Kaizen Marketing can help you get there. Contact us for a free site evaluation and specific suggestions to increase your success, and get more targeted traffic to your web site.
Mar 23 2010
Dynamic keyword insertion, also known as DKI, allows you to specify if you would like the search query to be shown in the ad text for keywords that match your ads. For example, if someone is searching for Blue Widgets, the ad will show in bold in the ad title the word, Blue Widgets. Because the searcher has found exactly what they were looking for, this helps increase an ad’s click through rate.
[If the landing page they are sent to ALSO includes this phrase, both the searcher AND Google are happy and Google will reward you with a higher quality score, which lowers your costs per click. You can do this manually (long, tedious, boring) or set up also dynamically. For more on that see Dynamic Landing Pages. ]
The usual bit of coding is {KeyWord:Default_text} where Default is what will show if your keyword is too long to fit in the short adwords title space.
But what if you want the ad title to show as BLUE Widgets or blue widgets or Blue Widets (my personal favorite)? Maybe you want it in initial caps if it is in the title but lower case in the body of the ad.
Here are some advanced techniques on how the capitalization works with DKI:
Want a PPC expert to help? A well designed campaign can save you a bundle if you are spending money on adwords. See Google Adwords PPC services.
Feb 23 2010
More and more, popular icons for the top social media sites are showing up under such standards as the search site box. And Facebook widgets are ever more common that allow you to become a fan of a brand or business directly from your website. Suddenly, everyone is talking about social marketing. Is it a fad? Is it hype? Is it worth the trouble? I’m going to tell you right now why it IS important and why your business may depend on getting it right. See also: Fantastic Fan Pages
With nearly 400 Million active users, Facebook is now the size of the country of Germany, and adding over 1/2 Million new users per day! Twitter is not as big but is also growing fast. The phenomenal growth of these online giants ultimately reflects our compelling desire to connect with each other around common interests. AND it presents a whole new paradigm for communicating and selling online.
The old distinctions of B to B and B to Consumers are not as meaningful anymore as everyone from the janitor on up to the CEO is on Facebook, swapping news and stories with friends. Ultimately, people do not buy from companies, they buy from people and social media can put a more informal, hip and personal face on an otherwise impersonal company.
As successful online marketers such as Frank Kern and Jeff Walker have discovered and proven with testing, folks hate to be sold to, but they love to buy from a trusted friend or advisor. I would add that they especially hate to be sold to by a huge, faceless, impersonal corporation, who doesn’t understand them or give a hoot about them. But give them true value for free via social media and other forms of direct communication, building both trust AND desire, and they will LOVE to buy from you.
This is the true value of social media for your online presence. In an era of greater transparency and authenticity, social media is rapidly delivering a new standard of interacting more person to person, even if it’s just one person in your company who is chosen to be the active “face” in that realm. If you update a blog regularly, you can auto update both Facebook and Twitter from your blog posts, so it doen’t have to take a bunch of time. Don Crowther, social media guru, says a highly effective social media strategy can take just 20 minutes a day. NOTE: And you cannot, must not sell directly or blatantly spam your follows, or they will unfollow you quickly.
Getting started and doing it right does take some work, especially to standardize your brand across the big 3 social media sites – your face or brand needs to be consistent on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and each site requires a bit of customization to achieve this.
Also, Facebook especially can do all sorts of cool tricks with their version of HTML called FBML, including a custom landing page for non-fans with your email opt-in form embedded.
See also Fantastic Facebook Pages for more on our Facebook Page design services.
WE CAN HELP! Kaizen Marketing social media services start at just $500 for a fully customized social media presence. Contact us to get started right away. Social media is important partly because it can help you present a human face to human buyers of your product or service to help you sell MORE of your product or service.
See also Facebook Ads – the new kid on the block is a serious competitor to Google adwords and can target demographics in ways Google cannot touch. Wanna show ads only to middle aged men in California whose favorite book is “Think and Grow Rich”? For just 50 cents per click? You can now do it. Within a few hours.
Call for a free consultation at 805-403-1128
Of course, I just also added this post to my Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin streams with one click using a handy service called Yoono – I recommend it. Use it to quickly send shortened URL sites with your comments to your friends.
In this example, Twitter and Facebook links hold an honored spot next to Authorize.Net.
The recent $Million Video Boss launch by Andy Jenkins sold out in just a few hours thanks to his engaging videos, which produced more than 3000 comments on the launch blog. Click below for a free PDF case study showing how Andy did it and how you can also use these key elements in your own marketing.
SEO News From Google From Twitter
