Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Stuff and a question

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The stuff is just that — some interesting stuff I have been saving to post on, and haven’t had time to blog much lately. I should probably do a link blog, to make it easier to publish these links. Maybe later this summer when I have a minute to breathe.   

From Shel Holtz, two posts about RSS: a plain English guide to RSS and RS huh?

A guest post on Pro-Blogger by Toby Bloomberg on how blogs must earn their keep. (And an aside, it was great to meet Toby and a bunch of other folk at the marketing wonk after yesterday’s AMA blog seminar in Boston)

The question is about SEO techniques. I am revamping two, possibly three client websites (cross fingers), to make them SELL not just TELL, and I am curious about some SEO "things."  I am NOT an SEO expert and my clients know that. But I have had a lot of online marketing experience, which does qualify me to some degree to know what’s what. So here’s my question:

I believe that a well written website that sells not tells should do well in search engines. Yes, you should make the effort to understand the right keywords to incorporate in the copy, and there is no harm in submitting to the engines and the like, but that done: If your website sells your products AND you have a robust marketing program that drives qualified prospects to your site, what happens with the engines is additive, not the baseline of your marketing success. Agree? Disagree? What am I missing?  Bob Bly had a related question on his blog not long ago, but I don’t know that we reached closure 🙂 .

Been to Texas…

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Posting has been light for the past week as I have once again gone "off grid." This time, we went to Austin, Texas for a family friend’s Bar Mitzvah, and then took a couple of extra days to take our 5-year old son to SeaWorld San Antonio.

I brought the laptop in case something came up, but resisted the temptation to go online. 🙂  I do promise to get back into a regular posting schedule but in the meantime, should you be planning a trip to Austin/San Antonio, here are some of our highlights from this most recent trip.

Austin: The Texas State History Museum and Zilker Park / Barton Springs. Hotel: Mansion at Judges’ Hill

San Antonio: At SeaWorld, if you can, Dine with Shamu. It gets you quite close to the whales for an extended period of time, but warning: it is NOT the show with all the feats of daring, so make sure you see the regular Shamu show as well. And touristy though it may be, you have to eat at a place on the Riverwalk at least once. People watching at its finest. Hotel: Marriott Riverwalk.

That’s it for the travelogue. We will return to our regular marketing topics later this week.

And I will leave you with a quote from Davy Crockett. After losing re-election to the Congress in his native Tennessee, the 50-year old Crockett said:

"Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas."

Hot Topics: Full RSS feeds, how often to blog

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Shel Holtz on posting full RSS feeds. There has been a lot of back and forth on this for the past few weeks. Shel’s argument for full feeds pretty much sums up all the "pro" opinions I’ve read. Needless to say, I agree — if you are reading my blog in an RSS aggregator, you get a full feed. And if I’ve written long, as I sometimes do, there is a warning at the top of the post. My feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t have the time 🙂

Amy Gahran over at Contentious had two good posts about daily blogging (not) — I’m linking to the second as it has a link to the first within it. She makes some very good points about why it isn’t necessarily wise to post every day or multiple times in a day. Underlying thesis is that the quality of writing is more important than frequency of posting.

I agree. If you are writing original content, versus a link blog, it is far better to be good than to be often. If you can do both, more power to you. I aim to get one original post per week, and supplement with short posts (like this one).

Of course, in the end, it is YOUR blog, so do what you like 🙂

A word from Tom Lehrer

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One of the funniest folksingers I have ever heard is Tom Lehrer. His humour really transcended generations. I remember in the mid 70s, my brother and I (kids), my mother and my grandfather (adults) could all sit and laugh with Tom’s music. How many OTHER things could you say that those 3 generations agreed on in the 1970s?
Anyway, today as I reload music on my iPod (GRR), I ran across some Quotes of the Day from Tom Lehrer, and felt compelled to share.
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!" and
"I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up."

If you’ve never heard anything by Tom Lehrer, I urge you to start today.

Summertime blues

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It is hot… damn hot … here in Massachusetts.  I cannot wait for the hardwood pollen season to end so I can go out of my house again for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Random rant on: We all know it is possible to simultaneously love and hate a tech gadget. Today it is my iPod that I despise. Why? Because through an initial operator error (mine) followed by what I will call bad software design, the laptop (empty library) wiped out about 20 hours of music on my iPod. Including four CDs which I just can’t find, and rather than tear my house apart, I just re-ordered. Which means of course I will find them the day after the Amazon order arrives… All compounded by the fact that I have first generation iPod with the crappy battery, and all Apple offered in the class action settlement was $50, which could not be used at iTunes. Hmm.  Anyway, suffice it to say that my iPod no longer automatically synchronizes.

So should I just scrap it, use the $50 bucks toward a new player for my music and just use the old one for podcasts? Advice most welcome.

Two quick items, and more later:

Check out Bob Bly’s blog– great question about whether the Internet has killed writing and reduced literacy.

And as always, don’t miss the Revenue Roundtable. Jill Konrath is lead poster this week.

UPDATE: Well, okay, Apple is on my s*** list this week, but here’s the latest. First, I have 2 CDs that for some reason my CD drive can’t read, but my husband’s can. Bizarre-o, but you know that’s where I am with this these days. So I go to the Apple iTunes store just to see if they have these 2 disks — maybe it will be easier to just buy the damn things again than deal with all this crap. So, I need to update my info in the Apple records, and (caps intentional) THEY REJECT MY VALID AREA CODE FOR MY CELL PHONE NUMBER BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATCH MY HOME PHONE NUMBER. So I type in the same area code as my home phone, which is wrong, and they accept it. Whoa Nelly. This is not good practice, people. Somebody needs to fix an algorithm….