Last week I attended the “Live Landing Page Optimization” webinar presented by the American Marketing Association, with presenters Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal of Marketing Experiments. I visited with Jimmy and Aaron in December here in Chicago, and am impressed with their passion for these types of events. It has to be tiresome to continually be shown web pages and be expected to tell them “what to do to make more money.”

I can imagine that from conference to conference their presentations do not stray from the usual small, niche business owner (yes owner, not marketer) asking advise for selling more of their product. Their words are always nice but critical - almost brutal at times. But their suggestions always theme across these five points from their case study Landing Page Confusion:

5 Key Principles for Maximizing Landing Page Clarity

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Filed under: Landing Pages, SEO, Usability on March 21st, 2008 | No Comments »

Yesterday I reviewed my daily Google Alerts  and came across an interesting article featuring two of our university’s student interns. As usual, I forward useful links on to our Marketing Department (actually, my wife) and this was no exception. In fact, this article directly related to an upcoming feature of the university.

To my surprise, 4 cupcakes similar to those on the left appeared in my office. A thank you from the vice president over marketing.  Paired with a Mountain Dew, my breakfast was complete.

Seriously though, I’ll be sending all my colleagues in the Marketing/Communications a walk-through to setup their own Google Alerts. Why? Because I’m the Manager of Web Services and the SEO guy. It’s not my job, but I do love seeing what it picks up.

There are plenty of free tools out there, and Google Alerts is only the start for managing your online reputation.  It’s useful to know where  people are talking about you, but more importantly, it’s useful to know where people are talking bad about you. Finding blogs that complain about your brand or forums where opinions are less then stellar, gives the opportunity to follow up and improve those relations.

Sign-up, it’s free. It’s useful. And you never know what might show up on your desk tomorrow morning.

Filed under: Google, Marketing on March 14th, 2008 | No Comments »

Working at a university presents a plethora of stories about students, faculty, and staff. Often, the funniest stories come from those who ignore the basics. A colleague of mine at Concordia University told me about a question he asked on a Computer Science final exam.

“What are the four terms/concepts illustrated on the cover of this semester’s textbook?”

Only two students out of twenty answered it correctly (one of them being my students *bragging*). Just as important to the cover and title of your book is the table of contents. Admit it, your grade school textbook’s table of contents was ignored. So often the Heading Tags, or better yet - the table of contents, are your guides to readability and usability. Read more »

Filed under: Marketing, SEO on March 12th, 2008 | No Comments »