May

Getting value from your business blog – tagging to drive website content

written by Scott Olson

Wondering how you can get value out of your business blog. Here is an idea that I have seen clients and other sites using with great effectiveness. Use blog post tagging to automatically populate posts to relevant pages on your website.

Do you sell into different industries? Tag posts appropriately and design your industry page to pull the appropriate posts into a featured side bar.

Posting about product updates, feedback or features? Link those posts to your product page.

Your blog can be used in so many ways to create relevancy for your prospects, partners and customers. The content you create on your blog can be some of the most valuable web content you have because of its currency and relevancy to very specific topics. Whether you use it to nurture leads with email marketing, or to drive fresh web content, look for ways to use your blog across your business goals and you will make the most of your investment in this important marketing asset.

Tags: blog, marketing strategy, social media strategy, web content
Leave a Comment » You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

17

Mar

For marketing success, ignore the many and focus on the few

written by Scott Olson

I came across a good post on Seth Godin’s blog today titled “Driveby culture and the endless search for wow.” His topic of the day was the detrimental effect of the drive by masses that drive such data as web traffic, but that build no lasting online connection or relationships.

Seth makes some good points and should make people question the metrics they use to measure marketing success like web traffic, clicks and eyeballs on the site.

“The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance and click mentality. I’m guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

This is all easy to measure. And it drives people with something to accomplish crazy, because they want visits to go up, clicks to go up, eyeballs to go up.

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?”

More than ever there is a call to action for companies and their marketing departments to build valuable, strong connections to their customers and prospects. In essence they need to move away from the sheer numbers game and focus instead on quantifying high-quality interactions and relationships they build with their audience.

Tags: content marketing, marketing strategy, startup marketing
Leave a Comment » You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

3

Mar

Web content and communications experience lends well to MindLink’s lead nurturing strategy

written by Stan Carlberg

When Scott Olson first approached me about joining MindLink Marketing, I couldn’t wait to re-team with such a innovative thinker. Scott’s vision for MindLink — and embracing lead nurturing — pushes the barriers of corporate marketing and communications as we know it. It brings together the most innovative online tools and applications to deliver relevant web content that helps our clients regularly communicate, educate and connect with their customers. While most organizations get this, many still lack the resources or expertise to do it effectively.

One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is understanding what tools to invest in that will give them the best return on their marketing investment. Even with more efficient communications and social networking applications popping up overnight, many organizations continue to stick with what worked for them in the past. Unfortunately, the ROI for a lot of traditional marketing programs continues to dwindle from 2% to 0.001% to nil. That’s a lot of time, energy and capital spent for very little return.

Today, too many marketing and sales dollars continue to be thrown into programs that result in large databases of unqualified leads and lost opportunities due to a lack of effective outreach or inadequate follow up, which brings me back to MindLink’s lead nurturing strategy. I look forward to bringing my web content and corporate communications experience on board to help our clients deliver more engaging and informational content that provides value, industry insight, a better return on their marketing investment, and ultimately creates more successful, long-term relationships with their customers. I can’t wait to get started.

Tags: corporate communications, lead nurturing, marketing strategy, online marketing, web content
Leave a Comment » You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

14

Dec

Need to build consensus on a new website? Try using Balsamiq Mockups.

written by Scott Olson

I have just recently started using Balsamiq Mockups for creating a wireframe of a website I am working on and it makes me wonder why I haven’t personally used it way before now. The snapshot in this post is just a simple example mockup that is available on the Balsamiq website, but it should give you an idea of the type of design you can create using this tool.

What was such a revelation to me was how easy it is for anyone to use. For a mere $79 for the desktop version anyone can quickly and easily begin creating mockups of website concepts that I could then quickly pass to the team I am working with for review and make modifications on the fly based on their feedback. What I want to emphasize is that this should be a tool for the non-technical team members to build and test concepts before turning it over to the technical resources to turn into a finished product. To give you an idea of how easy this is I will run you through a recent project I have been working on. (more…)

Tags: marketing strategy, product marketing
3 Comments You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

11

Dec

Five tips to plan for regular blog content

written by Scott Olson

Five tips to plan for regular blog content Well, it’s been over a week since my last post and I simply can’t believe how quickly the time goes. In the midst of a busy schedule, meetings with new clients and holiday parties the time seems to slip away and before I know it I am feeling like I have neglected my own site. This morning I am reinforcing my own rules for regular posts and thought it would be a good topic for a post.

Here is my plan for regular blog content: (more…)

Tags: blog, marketing strategy, web content
Leave a Comment » You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

3

Dec

Great interview with Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer – Lots of insights into startup success

written by Scott Olson

If you are thinking about starting a company or are fully into startup mode, it is worth you time to watch this video of Aaron Patzer where he describes the process for his success at Mint.com. This is a tremendous walkthrough of how he bootstrapped his company, planned for success and ultimately sold his company for $170 million to Intuit.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Aaron walks through his early business plan, revenue expectations, funding and ultimate acquisition with lots of numbers. I found it particularly humorous when he talked about how VCs value early stage companies; $500k for every coder/engineer, -$100k for every business person.

His instincts are on the money though. Focus on your product, building value, proving out your business model. Understand your market and you will gradually build for success. You can add sales, marketing, and executive leadership through advisors at first, consultants and part time employees next and ultimately will bring on full time executives as needed. We had a great discussion on this topic on my own site a few weeks ago in the post “Do startups need VPs?”

Hope you enjoy the video.

Tags: marketing strategy, startup marketing, startup strategy
2 Comments You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

1

Dec

PR strategies for lean startups – Interview with Ken Westin founder of GadgetTrak

written by Scott Olson

Gaining good press is an important objective for most startups. It is a good way to reach a large audience and has a credibility beyond paid advertising. That said, PR agencies can be very expensive. Most don’t like to start working with startups for anything less than $5,000 per month and usually target relationships that are north of $10,000. For early companies, this is simply out of reach.

Ken Westin, the founder of GadgetTrak, has had impressive results in getting press for his company without the aid of a PR firm. Despite being self-funded and entirely bootstrapped, Ken has managed to get his company and product featured nationally in such programs and publications as Dateline NBC, Good Morning America, CBS Evening news, Forbes, Newsweek, NY Times and others. This is an impressive list that would make any company envious.

How did he do it? Here is what Ken recommends: (more…)

Tags: entrepreneur, marketing strategy, new media PR, startup marketing
3 Comments You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

23

Nov

Would your customers be “Very disappointed” if they couldn’t use your products?

written by Scott Olson

Would your customers be "very disappointed" if they couldn't use your product? One of the things I do for my clients is help them connect to their customers, validate a market need and refine their product to meet that need. The only way to do this is by communicating with those customers, whether it is through a survey, interviews, or personal visits. I emphasized the need to communicate with your customers last week in the post “Top five benefits to startups who talk to customers.”

Today I’d like to focus in on a very specific question you should be asking your customers, “How would you feel if you could no longer use [your product name]?” This is a question that you should ask every customer according to Sean Ellis, and I agree. Sean specializes in customer development and provides similar services to what I offer some of my clients. I have found his blog to have excellent advice.

He asks that question with the following options:

How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

Very disappointed

Somewhat disappointed

Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)

N/A – I no longer use [product]

His assertion is that if 50% of your customers answer this question “Very disappointed” that you are well on your way to having a “must have” product. This is a very interesting assertion as it is a fairly simple litmus test. That said, I think Sean is right on the mark when he advocates asking these type of questions of your customers and working toward a product your customers cannot live without.