do it yourself Archives by Mark Murnahan

DIY Marketing: Who is Huffing Detergent at Ichabod LaundraBar?

Ichabod Laundry Marketing Hair and Drool

I don’t mind do-it-yourself (DIY) marketing efforts when the do-it-yourselfer is earnestly trying to make an impact. I sincerely try to help them with good tips and ideas. Let’s face it, though, it is easy to laugh at the majority of novice marketing efforts.

I can drone on about terrible marketing, but so much of it has already been said. I mean, I already tried to warn people with “7 Reasons Your Marketing Sucks“, and there are many really useful articles in my blog archive.

For some people, there is simply little future of a marketing career. Reading about it, talking about it, Facebooking about it, tweeting about it, and trying their very best will simply reflect the long-standing rules of survival of the fittest.

These are the creators of marketing efforts that make room for a new spot on Darwin’s evolutionary chart. You can call me a jerk for pointing them out, but pointing out weakness and explaining a better way ultimately serves a greater purpose. Besides just that, the marketing hall of shame is often good for a laugh. I find a lot of laughable examples online, and I will share some of them again, in case you missed these earlier articles. Each of them make good points about bad marketing.

Bloomingdale’s department stores: Will Bloomingdale’s Sue Over Meta Tags and a Link?
NASCAR race teams: NASCAR Start and Park Sponsorship is Marketing Absurdity
Fisker Automotive: Fisker Automotive Fisker Karma vs. Social Media Karma
The Wizard: Hiring SEO Tip: The Wizard Mutual Fund Management Cannot Bullshit Me!
Ray Skillman: Ray Skillman, Indianapolis Car Dealer Review: Bad Social Media and SEO
Suture Express: Suture Express Executives Scramble to Fix Lies
US Airways: Is US Airways Listening to Social Media? Are You Listening?.

Today, I submit Ichabod LaundraBar.

I respect the value of polarizing an audience and not trying to make everybody happy, but apparently some people think it means to just randomly turn away business without forethought or purpose.

Enter a Dog Infested “Ichabod LaundraBar”

What do you picture when you think about your laundry? Maybe a summer breeze blowing as your clothes hang on the line at the edge of a grassy meadow? Maybe nicely folded fluffy towels dropping one upon another in a perfectly lit studio re-enactment of your laundry day bliss? I guess some laundry detergent corporations try to promote that, but let’s use some brain cells, and let’s begin today!

Those paint a beautiful picture, but can you imagine all of those nasty bugs you will find in your pockets and the airborne dirt and pollen making your shirts look like crap? As for the glamor of those fluffy towels, if that looks so compelling, I welcome you to come and fold my laundry.

Let me tell you, we have a laundry company in my town that can take those bugs and airborne filth to a whole new level! They can make the vision of clean and fluffy towels and turn them into sour and musty rags that you found crumpled up behind a washing machine.

Branding Tip: Public Does Not See it Like You Do!

Really? Can the marketing of a company truly make that significant of a difference in consumer impression? Yes, my friends, it can … and it hit me with a nasty whiff of mildew and dog poo just moments ago when I witnessed the profile photo of a laundry bar Facebook Page that I would describe as a really nasty looking mouth-breathing hell hound.

Let me skip back a step. Have you heard of a laundry bar? It is the kind of place where college students can mingle in their worst laundry day attire, but they don’t mind, because they can also buy a cheap beer! I am sure that some of us who were around before the laundry bar concept can remember setting aside a cool pair of acid washed jeans and a nice Guess shirt before heading off for our laundry day humility, but there is no need for that today. At a laundry bar, the otherwise scrutinizing eyes of those sexy people around you will be blurred with suds of another sort. Beer!

What I just cannot wrap my mind around is how a dog logically fits into that picture. If it requires a story of how that dog safely landed an airliner full of laundry executives and saved hundreds of lives after the pilot died from ring around the collar, just to understand it, then it is not good branding.

Would You Market a Laundry Bar Like This?

In my opinion, they should be running some A/B comparison testing across various demographics between items such as follows:

A.) “Laundry Sucks: You may as well have a beer and shoot some pool.”

B.) “Hot Guys Do Laundry: This is where the ladies come to watch them do it!”

Then they could measure which ad achieved the greater response rate, and among which test demographic. Then they could begin to build a customer model to help guide their other marketing efforts more efficiently. No, that probably sounds too scientifickey and complex. That kind of thing is surely only useful for big Fortune 500 companies, right? That is not for this company, so they roll with the ghetto dog theme, instead.

I’m talking about a laundry bar. Better yet, a laundry bar across the street from a university. There is surely a better way to reach potential customers!

Finding your way in marketing and knowing how to rally the customers takes more than a quick moment at the computer. It should involve a lot of steps, including data collection, forecasting, psychographic modeling, and a lot more. The best results come with big portions of marketing talent and creativity.

Maybe they think their best target demographic places little value on cleanliness, or is at least very relaxed about it. Maybe they just didn’t think about it at all. As long as that is the case, they will probably do better to stick with the party crowd, and de-emphasize promoting their full-service laundry.

Ichabod LaundraBar Marketing Department Brilliance

This brings me to a point of how DIY marketing can take a huge fundamental turn toward failure. Many companies will see themselves in a totally blurred way. They think they know how others view their brand, but they screw it all up in their creatively destructive ways. In this case, it is a traditionally sacred space of college students … a laundry bar. They are pushing for a broadened market that has some money to spend. So, they seek busy people like me to drop off my clothes to be laundered, and then pick them up later. That is great, but we have about a squillion places in town that offer laundry services. This is the only one that gives me the strong impression that my laundry may come back with more filth than when I dropped it off.

Ichabod LaundraBar Wants to Wash Your Clothes ... Woof!

I may be the minority here. I have not done the market research for this company, and I don’t know them at all. I am just an outside observer, just like anybody else who encounters them. However, it seems pretty clear to me that a smiling bartender serving a box of detergent and a mug of beer is a whole lot more appealing than promoting clean laundry with a hairy, drooling, mouth-breathing hell hound. To me, that is extremely repulsive, regardless of how cuddly, loving, sweet smelling, clean, and obedient that dog is … it is a DOG! Even to dog lovers, it still surely feels a lot less clean than their own dog’s slobber, hair, dander, and poo.

In my opinion, putting a big hairy slobbering dog on a Facebook Page promoting clean laundry makes about as much sense as a Doberman having a love affair with a Chihuahua. It not only paints a picture of absurdity, it cannot be a very productive relationship.

A Better Approach to Facebook Marketing
I wrote a nice four step plan for Facebook marketing. It covered the steps of creating a Facebook Page, customer modeling, promoting, and growing awesomeness. It does not include random placement of dog photos. Here you go:

Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness

Effective DIY Marketing Requires Thinking Before Doing!

Why do companies still try to do their own marketing without at least thinking before they click? I may never understand it, but I welcome even the worst marketers to subscribe and learn, before they end up with people who are not as nice as me to explain things. People may call me a bastard, a jerk, a prick, or an ass for pointing things out this way. What they will likely never notice is that my saying it is a whole lot kinder than the way others point it out. They don’t say a word about it, and they simply take their money somewhere else. In this case, somewhere more hygienic.

People who believe that simply putting their company name on Facebook is a good idea, without any marketing strategy that is defined beyond “tell more people” or “make more money” are exactly why I very seldom work with small companies. Far too many small companies are doomed to remain small, simply because they are too impatient, apathetic, or their thinking is otherwise crippled.

OK, dog lovers … go ahead and tell me how brilliant it is and why you think the dog is so damn adorable. Your comments are welcome.

UPDATE: I heard form the owner of Ichabod LaundraBar and had a nice chat. She let me know that the dog is not a resident of the laundry bar, but just a mascot.

I wish them the best, and I hope they will feel free to reach out for some free ideas anytime.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

SEO, Social Media, and Marketing Balls

I often try to relate concepts of SEO and social media to things that people in other industries can use. After all, who really cares about all of this, unless it can help them do whatever it is they do for a living.

If you don’t have anything to sell, you probably aren’t very concerned about your marketing. But you do have something to sell, so let me give you a hand.

My challenge is to help you translate this into earning profit for your company. In the big picture, two important questions I must address are as follows:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

One way I hope to relate this into your line of work is to use analogies. This time, I will use tennis balls, but it could really be about anything.

Now let’s look at what others competing in your industry are doing.

How Others Sell Balls With SEO and Social Media

A common approach to social media that you may see with your competitors is to create a website and then start tweeting and facebooking things like “I have balls”, “Check out my balls!” After a while, they will figure out that people get really tired of the same old balls, and nobody wants to see them anymore.

This is a common outcome when companies neglect the people they are trying to reach, and overlook creativity in their value proposition. So, it will take a different approach, and they may turn their focus to SEO. They will often fill up their blog with a whole bunch of articles about their balls and hope that will work.

The trouble here is that it will take a lot of time and effort to produce all of that blog content. They may decide to outsource it to India or The Philippines but all of the sudden find themselves sending really mixes messages. Balls are different in other countries, and a lot can be lost in translation.

This is not the path you want to take, so put this out of your mind and let’s think about a better way to move your balls.

A Better Way to Move Your Balls

My experience in SEO and social media has led me to this: I have never found an industry that, with enough dedication, cannot be made more interesting when looked at from the right perspective.

It takes some research and creativity, but every industry has something that makes it interesting. Even paper clips can be more exciting … yes, paper clips!

One of the first things to do is to carefully research who wants your balls. You want to understand them, and what they are likely to look for online. You want to reach them where they are … on their turf. Then you need to get a picture of what drives them to take a desired action. In this case, you want tennis players. More precisely, you want tennis players without balls. In order to find them, you need to think more like them, and develop a sense of what will attract them.

Sometimes you have to look outside of the tennis-related industry to find your potential customers’ other interests. I wrote about this not so long ago in an article about customer modeling titled “Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness“. It addressed how to gather information to produce a better model of your ideal customer, and it is worth a read.

Get Others to Talk About Your Balls!

Once you know more about your model customer, you need to produce information that interests them. If you consistently produce quality information about their interests, it will be much easier to keep their attention. If it is compelling enough, they will subscribe to your blog, your Twitter, your Facebook, and etcetera. Now you have an audience that wants to hear about your balls.

With an attentive audience that likes what you do, it will be a lot easier for your balls to be ranked well in search engines. This is because your attentive audience will share your information with other interested people, in the form of website links. They will tweet it, facebook it, and even blog about it. Now, unlike your competitor who talks about his balls all the time, you will have other people talking about your balls.

This is a huge reward to you, because all of those links to your interesting website are crucial to making it rank higher in search engines than the competition. You will want to be good to these people, and keep them fed with more interesting and useful information. So you add more to your blog, and it grows bigger and bigger and eventually gets even more popular.

The cycle has begun, and you are on your way to greater things. You may even decide to grow your business with bigger balls, like softballs, volleyballs, and basketballs.

Selling Balls Takes Dedication

When I claim that this all requires dedication, it means spending time researching, and doing more than just the same old thing the competition is doing.

Before you put this all to use, it is best to develop some degree of marketing talent. Since you are not in the SEO and social media marketing business by profession, I want to recommend subscribing to my blog and reviewing my blog archive to learn about other things that can help you.

I do a bang up job of ranking in search engines for things in the SEO and social media marketing industries. I am supposed to, right? That way, new people can find me.

This was not always the case. I had to work really hard to discover what people want, connect with them using social media, and produce a lot of compelling information, just like I suggested for you. It does not happen overnight, but with dedication, it does happen in time. It will be worth it.

Now, back to those two questions I mentioned earlier:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

Since you can’t just eat your balls, you are going to need to sell them to buy food!

If you do everything just right, before you know it, people will be begging to play with your balls.

If you need more help promoting your balls, there are a lot of people in my industry who can make this happen for you.

I am always looking for people with balls. In my line of work, I encounter a lot of people every day who have no balls, and I will be happy to help you connect with them.

Balls image credit to shawnzrossi via Flickr
Old ball image credit to basykes via Flickr
Ball in mouth image credit to TCL8TO7 via Flickr
Splashing Balls image credit to ingridtaylar via Flickr
Bored ball image credit to greenkozi via Flickr
Begging image credit to sunsets_for_you via Flickr

Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference

There are good SEO (search engine optimizers) and there are bad SEO, and if you cannot tell the difference, your money and time will be wasted. I am going to give you some third party objective tools to tell the difference between good and bad SEO. These can help you to determine whether yours is working, whether you have hired it out, you are seeking to hire it out, or you are venturing into the ever-popular DIY SEO. The information I will provide in this article also includes some great SEO tools just to satisfy your curiosity. This can help, in case you wondered why there are not more people coming to your website, or to estimate how well your competition is doing. First, I want to be sure that you understand what SEO is and why good SEO is important, so I will start with that.

Why Good SEO is Important

We should first establish that it is important to be listed when somebody searches the Internet looking for what you offer. Searching the Internet is the most common way for people to find a business. If people do not find you, they will find somebody else. Obviously, they will find your competition. Count on it!

I will be really basic for a moment, in case you are totally unfamiliar with SEO. In this article, I will use the term SEO as both the field of search engine optimization (the art and science) as well as search engine optimizer (the person). In basic terms, SEO involves placing your website at the top of a list when somebody performs a search on the Internet. SEO also has a lot to do with making sure that when your link is found in a search, people will click on it, read what you have to say, and take an action such as buy what you have to sell, tell their friends, fill out a form, call you on the phone, and etcetera. These are the things that will produce more business for your company. It really involves a lot of different areas of art and science, so I want to give you some ways to measure both of these things.

Now, let us assume for a moment that good SEO actually exists. It is not a unicorn chase, and it is not some VooDoo witchcraft. Somebody actually is at the top of those searches, they are making sales, and there are reasons for it. So, let’s look at this from a standpoint that there actually is such a thing as good SEO for a moment, please? After all, we can be pretty sure that there is a reason the company at the top of a search for, let’s say, “travel” is not just a brand new company with a $400 budget and 13 incoming links to their site. No, it does not happen that way … ever.

Tools of the SEO Trade

Good SEO is not just made up of a couple of big factors. Yes, there are some big things we look at, but there really are a lot of little things that make up the big picture. Some of the factors are specifics about the website itself, such as the programming code, the servers, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, text content, link structure, keyword usage, and much more. There are a whole lot of pieces to the puzzle of the website itself that add up to make a difference. You have to get those things just right, and have every piece in place to achieve high search engine ranking for competitive search terms. That is to say, the things people actually search for when they need you. Then, there are the things that exist in the world outside of your website. These are things that a lot of website owners often feel are a bit out of their control, or really hard to improve. It is not so hard, but it does take some work. When there is work to be done, there are tools for that work. My father was a craftsman, and he always expressed the importance of using the right tool for the job. If you use the right tools, the job will always go much smoother. My father was really on to something.

Understanding SEO is Not Like Understanding “Rocket Surgery”

SEO does not require a degree in “rocket surgery” (rocket science and brain surgery). A lot of people will try to do some, if not all, of their SEO on their own, and it really can help. I respect anybody who wants to try to build their search engine optimization. Having people understand that SEO is important and that it actually works when done properly is one of the biggest hurdles in my job. In fact, I do everything in my power to be sure my clients and prospective clients understand SEO enough to help themselves. I tell them to read the “Google SEO Starter Guide“. I teach them the good reasons to blog, and I want them to have a better understanding of SEO. Most good SEO will generally try their best to be helpful, because they equate their success with the client’s success. They realize that it is a joint effort. Good SEO know that when they make clients massively successful, they have a lot easier career path. It is why people who Google the term SEO lessons find me at or very near the top. I want people to understand how and why it works. That makes my job much easier.

One of the biggest factors of SEO is backlinks, or links that point to your site from other websites. As you surely understand by now, this is not a silver bullet, but it is a huge factor. So let’s look at link building for a moment, and how to see if you or your SEO are doing a good job.

How to Check for Backlinks (incoming links)

Since a primary factor of good SEO is backlinks, we need to know how to check for them and monitor them. When I say backlinks, I mean links coming to your website from other websites. This is the biggest factor of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and it is what will make the difference between two otherwise equal websites. One with a lot of high-quality incoming links will be ranked, while the other may be totally invisible to search engines, or somewhere between. This is so important that if you could just see me right now, I am jumping up and down and screaming.

Most SEO fail at link building. They get it totally wrong, and their link strategy fails miserably. If you want to know why, I strongly suggest reading this article: “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

I will give you some tools to check for backlinks. Each of these are useful, but for the most comprehensive look at incoming links, any SEO knows to use Yahoo Site Explorer. By default, it will show you the links for the particular page, so if you enter your website, be sure that you click the “inlinks” button and then select links to the entire site rather than just looking at the home page. After all, people link to the pages they like, and not just link to the homepage and tell people to look for it. Only television stations do that, and perhaps you have heard what kind of trouble they are in these days.

Your search for backlinks should look something like this search that shows tens of thousands of “inlinks” to my blog or like this search excluding internal links.

Another useful tool for determining incoming links and whether they are doing any good is to look at SEOmoz Linkscape. Linkscape will also show your mozRank, which is similar to Google’s PageRank but, in many people’s opinion, more useful.

It seems that most people are confused about backlinks. High-quality backlinks do not just mean any link from any website, and they do not mean just any type of link. The quality of the linking website makes a big difference in the quality of the link. Also, a link coming from a picture is not all that great, but a link from text is fantastic. Wait, but not just any text. A link that points to you with the words “pink ponies for sale” is not so great if you do not have any pink ponies to sell. You want links that are relevant to what you offer, and links that benefit your site. This is where Open Site Explorer can be handy. Open Site Explorer (another SEOmoz tool) will show you which links are valuable to you. It will tell you the actual text within the links pointing to your site (e.g. pink ponies for sale), whether they are “nofollow” links or “dofollow” links (which is another blog post), it will tell you the domains that link to you (e.g. facebook.com), and even how many domains link to them (which is also important). There is a lot more functionality to Open Site Explorer than I will go into here, so be sure to check it out. If it starts to feel like you are just tinkering with useless information, then you are getting the picture about why there are people who actually do this for a living.

Now that you know a little about checking for links, you may also like to know how to discover new ones as they arrive. For this, you can keep checking back, which I suggest anyway, but you can also set up a Google Alert to email you or monitor the RSS feed for new links coming in. That is another blog post, but what we want here are ways to decipher good SEO from bad SEO. So, let’s look at some tools that examine good or bad on-site SEO. This is to say, the things about the website itself that are working correctly, or need some tuning.

SEO Website Readiness Tools

Is the website ready for the incoming links? Let’s find out. I know that I probably spent too much of your time with that drawn out portion about incoming links. Backlinks really are very important … extremely important … but there is more. If you are still with me, I want to share some good SEO tools that will help you to uncover on-site issues that may be stumping your search engine optimization efforts. Running your website through these free SEO tools will help you find things that you can often fix quickly and relatively easily. If you test your website with these tools, and fix it as directed, your SEO will get better. If you are trying to determine a good SEO from a bad SEO, their website should be standing tall in these tests.

Note, that a good SEO also knows which “rules” to break. Nobody will have this all just perfect, because sometimes you just have to break the rules to get the results you want. For example, my site will not validate as XHTML Strict, because I use Disqus commenting system, TweetMeme for people to easily share my articles on Twitter, Apture for cool content display, and I use an anchor target in some of my links so that pages open in a new window. This is OK, because I know which trade-offs are worthwhile. However, the SEO’s own website should provide a good indication of their SEO knowledge. I understand the whole excuse of “the plumber with leaky pipes” (I have been guilty, too), but this is not a good excuse! Any good SEO should be able to show some pretty impressive results with their own website. I find a lot of people trying to sell SEO services who have very few incoming links, and really rotten rankings for their targeted keywords. Try these tests to compare SEO:

HubSpot Website Grader
SEOmoz Toolbox (an assortment of good SEO tools)
W3C Markup Validation Service

Website Traffic Estimates and SEO Website Age

If you are comparing SEO, you should know a couple of key things about them. Does anybody know they exist? You can find a really quick answer to this question by checking their Alexa.com rankings and see their estimated website traffic. This only gives a reasonable estimate based on sample data, but it can definitely tell you a lot about the SEO. If they are unknown there is a reason, and there are no good excuses for it. There is also the often more definitive Quantcast, but a lot of SEO do not wish to share that much data.

I see a lot of SEO with new domain names. This is not always a red flag, but it can be a sign that they are either new, or their previous domain was banned by search engines for abuse. It happens more than you may imagine. This is not the kind of SEO you want to do business with. If they have been banned, you can bet some of their clients have been penalized as well. I said that a new domain is not always a red flag, because there are a few newer SEO who have talent, or may just be beginning their freelance career. However, if their company website is new or unranked, they better have a really good sales pitch. You can look up domain ownership with a WHOIS tool such as YourNew.com WHOIS Lookup or DomainTools.com

Content Creation is Important to Good SEO

Content creation is where many of these SEO factors come into play. A great looking website that is easily indexed by search engines is a good start. Now let us consider content production. If the website does not have good content that includes topics and keywords people search for, it will not matter. You must have something fantastic to offer once the website visitors get there. This is where a lot of the art of SEO comes into play. This is where marketing talent and creative content really make a huge difference between success or failure. How important is creativity in marketing? The easy answer is that it is absolutely critical. Great website content is what creates a desire to buy what you sell, and is also the biggest factor in that important SEO goal I wrote about above. It builds links! If people like what you have to share, and if they find your website content to be useful to them or somebody they know, they will share it. They may tweet it, digg it, stumble it, facebook it, or blog about it, and that creates links.

I explained that incoming links are the most important off-site factor in good SEO. This is an undisputed fact in my industry. Now I want to explain that you do not get those backlinks by taking a pink pony ride with one of the SEO offering to add your website to a squillion search engines and directories. No, that is not how this works. That is how the bad SEO will often try to get your money. You will get the best links with great content, and being useful to others. Even then, good SEO results only happen if you make all the other pieces fit just right.

By the way, good SEO also means they read it all the way to the bottom of the page.

Can Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization (DIY SEO) Work?

Do-it-yourself search engine optimization (DIY SEO) is possible, and may even bring you to the top of Google search listings for a few of your chosen keyword phrases. If you choose this route, be prepared to lose astonishing amounts of money due to lost opportunities. The opportunity cost of bad Internet marketing efforts will always be much higher than the cost of hiring a professional search engine optimizer.

Of course I have a stake in your choice, so this is admittedly not without bias. Just for a moment, try to give me the benefit of doubt. I am telling you this for your own good, as well as mine. Assuming that you can learn all that I know from my decade in this field, you will still have to implement it better than your competitors. While you are still learning, they are still growing their market share.

Reading a couple blog posts or reading a Wiki definition of SEO will not make up for the mastery of SEO professionals with experience and who do this for a living. If you really love to read, and you can gather enough information, particularly the right information, on this field, you will probably not need the Website you were trying to optimize, because you will likely have a very promising career as an SEO.

Author Mark Murnahan is the Chairman and CEO of YourNew.com, Inc. and provides SEO consulting services to companies and non-profit organizations. Mark Murnahan may be reached toll free at 866-A-Web-Guy (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) for consultation.