In this third and final post on last minute Web marketing strategies for the 2010 Holiday Season, we tackle mobile.  There’s a number of ways you can position yourself for success vis-à-vis mobile devices, and because more and more people use their smart phones to locate products and services on the go it’s in your best interest to make sure your mobile strategy is in place.

1. Search, Source, Activate

The primary way shoppers use their smart phones while on-the-go is to search for a product or the location of a particular retailer, or both.  Which is why it’s critical you’re optimized for local search, particularly if you have multiple locations.  Google and Bing are emphasizing local search results and maps more than ever in search results.  Mobile users are also doing quick comparisons either of similar products or similar retailers of those products, so make sure you’re also optimized on Yelp and other review sites.  The more good reviews you can show for your products or service, the better.

2. Optimize PPC Ads to Drive Retail Traffic

Use headlines and ad copy that talk about in-store promotions.  You can also include a local phone number that folks can tap to instantly generate a phone call to a store.  Make sure whatever click-through URL you use will take folks to a light-weight, mobile-optimized landing page so that it loads fast and is easy to read.  When combined with natural search listings that highlight local, maps and reviews, a smart PPC campaign may just tip the scales in your favor.

3. Sync Online and Offline Inventory

If you offer a product or service online, make sure it’s also available in your retail store.  Folks will often look to see if you offer something online and then dash into your store to buy.  If it’s not in stock, you’ll have an irritated customer on your hands, so make sure inventory is coordinated between online and in-store locations.

4.  Mobile Coupons and Promo Codes

Use coupons and promo codes to seal the deal and get folks through your doors. Use promo codes in PPC ads.  Make a mobile coupon available on your Web site that folks can show a cashier at check-out.  Also make use of Foursquare, which offers a number of features that provide incentives for shoppers to choose your store.  And, use services like Groupon to drive coupon adoption (and viral sharing of your offers).  As we discussed before, consumers are more cost-conscious than ever and are looking for deals around every corner.

5. Make Check-out Easy (and Mobile)

If your employees have smart phones (and I’m sure most do), put a Square credit card processor on each one to enable everyone in your store to do check-outs wherever they may be helping a customer. If you’ve got the budget, you can provide an iPod Touch to each employee with a Square attached. You can also use Square on iPads.  Not only does this avoid lines at the check-out counters, it provides another level of intimacy between your shoppers and the person in your store helping them.  And because you’ll need to email receipts, you also get to collect your customers’ email addresses for future marketing uses.

Black Friday and Internet Monday are just a few days away.  By putting a few last minute touches on your Holiday 2010 marketing program, you might just make a good holiday season into a great one.  Good luck and Happy Holidays!

The October 2010 retail sales measures are in and retailers (particularly the automobile segment) had one of the best months since the Great Recession began.  As a result, analysts are bullish on the 2010 Holiday Season.

Since it would seem consumers are loosening their wallets just a little more this year, be sure you’re doing everything you can generate as much traffic to your site while ensuring you’re converting as much of that traffic as possible.

Here’s some tips for achieving both objectives:

1. Differentiation. As you build your advertising campaigns, be sure to focus on those things that make your business different – great service, convenient location, lowest prices, best quality – and then clearly state that in your ad.  If you’ve gotten an award or received an outstanding review, be sure to state that in your advertising. Find ways to stand-out from your competition and then highlight that over and over again.

2. Promotions. If there’s one trend we’re seeing across the board, it’s promotions to both entice customers to visiting a site and then to win their business in the final analysis.  Free shipping is big this year.  So are low price guarantees (“we won’t be beaten on price!”).  Still others are preserving shipping and pricing, but sweetening deals with a gift-with-purchase offer.  Bottom line: while consumers are spending a little more this year, they’re still looking for the best possible value wherever they can find it.

3. Landing Pages. One routinely neglected aspect of many marketing campaigns is the landing page associated with any given ad.  It is of vital importance that the ad that generated a click is mirrored in the landing page folks arrive at.  If an ad features a promotion or special pricing, be sure that’s highlighted in the landing page.  Make sure there’s an image of the product or service being sought.  Finally, be sure there is a clear call to action above the fold—a “buy now” or “add to cart” or “call now” button.  One final note: as people move from the landing page into the shopping cart flow, do everything possible to reduce friction along the way; make the purchasing or registration process fast and easy with as few fields or screens as possible.

4. Eggs and Baskets. Too often, busy or harried marketers will decide to put all their marketing eggs in one basket.  This is a very risky decision.  By choosing to advertise via multiple channels, there is a better likelihood of optimal performance of your marketing campaigns.  When doing search marketing, for instance, don’t limit yourself to Google alone; be sure to also use Microsoft’s adCenter (for Bing).  Look at running ads in Facebook or LinkedIn.  Tap into display ad networks.  Look at YouTube and mobile ad strategies. If you’ve built a Twitter following (and I hope you have!), be sure to activate your followers with special promotions, sales, or something to share with friends and family. It may take just a little extra effort, but it will be worth it.

5. Testing. Be sure to create multiple versions of your principal ad so you can test a variety of headlines, copy points, promotions or calls to action to determine which generates the most / best clicks in each of your ad channels.  Then, test multiple versions of the landing page for each ad campaign to test which version converts best from your best-performing ads. (Our Yield Web Marketing Suite has a Landing Page Optimizer that will help you to do this quickly and easily.)  Once you’re clear which of your ads and then which of your landing pages are leading to the best possible conversions, keep an eye on their performance in case any degradation begins to set in.

6. SEO. As you get your ad campaigns put to bed and you’re assessing test results for both your ads and your landing pages, be sure to keep an eye on SEO.  If you have a large product catalog, make sure you’re using Google Merchant and that your inventory is regularly updated.  Make good use of your blog and use photos (with correct photo tags) and video where that will help educate consumers who are doing comparison shopping (which they’re doing more and more of these days.)  Be sure to regularly assess the health of your site (you can use our free SEO Analyzer, for instance); don’t let broken links or errant title tags sink your natural rankings.  If you’re a business with one or more bricks-and-mortar locales, make sure your Google and Facebook Places pages are up-to-date.  Be sure you have a presence (and good reviews) on Yelp and Foursquare.  And do whatever you can to build quality in-bound links to your website.

7. Late-Season Shoppers. Inevitably, there will be those who wait to the last minute to do their holiday shopping.  Be sure you have a strategy in place for those people.  Know when the last day is that you can reasonably ship product in order that it is received on time.  For folks who have no hope of getting something shipped in time, provide a gift card option – you can even use online gift card generators so that the shopper can simply color-print a visually lovely version of your coupon once the sale is complete that can then be folded and slipped into a card (you can use a special code for use in online orders or a bar code for use in-store.)

In our third and final blog post for the 2010 Holiday Season, we’ll look at strategies for mobile and ways to optimize your PPC advertising to increase traffic to your site.

Although the Great Recession has officially ended, most consumers don’t yet believe it, and they certainly aren’t seeing any tangible evidence of it.  So it’s understandable that retailers are approaching this holiday season with something like fear and trepidation.  The big news from the 2009 holiday season, however, is that online did really well, and the prediction is online will grow again this year.

So it’s important for every business concerned with sales during the holiday season to leverage online in a big way.

Since it’s getting late, we’ve assembled a three-part series on things you can still do to make the holiday shopping season a big one for your business.

In part one of our series we cover some basics – things you can do this week that will ensure you’ve got a good foundation for all your online holiday promotion and sales efforts.

First: Integrate offline and online.

Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL.  This includes printed flyers, print publication ads, outdoor ads and any sponsorships of local events, charities or organizations.  If you’re into social media (and you should be), include your Facebook and Twitter URLs, too.  If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page on your website where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

Second: Join the conversation.

Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, a Google Places page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone or iPad app.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence (make sure you follow all the prompts around adding your contact lists so you develop a good list of followers or friends, also making sure to follow / friend folks in return), reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.  You’ll also help your website’s SEO prospects.

Three: Test, test, test your infrastructure.

In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.  This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your website and holiday campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

Four: Look at last year’s performance.

Check your weblogs or Google Analytics to see where your peak days online were during the last holiday season:

• What sources were the best generators of your traffic last year?
• Look at which pages got the most traffic.
• Note which promotions worked, on which days and why.
• If you had already integrated a blog and other social media components during the last holiday season, understand which of these seem to drive the most traffic and conversions.
• Look at the keywords people most often used to get to your site via both organic and paid search sources.
• Evaluate your landing page performance—see which of your landing pages produced the best conversions. If possible, look at how the traffic to that page got there and learn from that click behavior: what inspired the click; which source generated the click; did a promotion or pricing strategy have any impact.

Learn well from the past and repeat what worked this holiday season.

Five: Implement efficiency measures for the management of your efforts.

Technology is a beautiful thing and many of the marketing, promotion and sales tasks that make up your online holiday effort can be made more efficient and effective with automation.  Businesses are able to reduce labor cost, increase sales, and improve overall operational performance using Web applications like ours and many others.  Don’t let aversion to technology or Web-based applications keep you from trying tools and solutions that can potentially make the difference between an okay holiday season and a blow-out one.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.

How to Blog for Maximum SEO Benefit

Valuable and unique content is a critical element for SEO success.  Putting together a targeted blog plan now can help you be at the top of the natural search results in the upcoming holiday season.

1) Keyword Research

It’s common to think about keywords for Pay-Per-Click Advertising and SEO, but keywords are often an afterthought when it comes to blogging.  In order for blogging to achieve SEO success, it is vital to start with a keyword strategy.

Start by thinking about the products that you want in the lead for traffic and sales in the upcoming holiday.  We’ll use an example of a retailer who sells grill accessories: Grill Mitts, Grill Lights.

The next step is to generate a list of keywords for how people are going to be gift shopping for these items.  Whom will they be looking for gift ideas for?   What type of person is it for?  What problem does it solve?   If you get stuck you can always check out question sites, or read reviews on product pages to get ideas for the most favorite uses and solved needs.  Continuing on our example: Gifts for dad, Gifts for grill man, Grilling accessory gifts, Gifts for men who love to entertain, Lighting up grill space, Handling hot grill pans.

For other great ideas on generating keywords, check out the keyword tools list here: .

2) Blog Plan

The next step is to create a plan around blogging for sufficient coverage and awareness.  Your blog plan should include:

How will you provide sufficient coverage for each keyword? We recommend 2-5 blog posts for each of the keywords that you identified in the first step.  You can use different format and content approaches for each such as lists, guides, how-to’s, humorous slants, or consolidated summaries of all the reviews available.

How frequently you should blog? You can back into this answer by the volume of keywords and the number of posts necessary to cover the keywords.  We find that blogging a minimum once per day is a good start.

Who will be writing the blogs? Get everyone at the company involved, or try outsourcing if you can’t meet the demands internally.  There are some interesting outsourcing options out there such as TextBroker.

How will you promote the blog posts? After you’ve spent the time putting together your amazing blog content, it’s important to get the word out. Some options include:

• Push blog entries via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Push your blog articles to social bookmarking sites such as Digg.
• Syndicate your articles to other related industry sites.
• Post your blog entry to relevant questions on answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups.
• Comment on other related blog posts with a link back to your blog.
• List your content on Craigslist with the relevant product.
• Run a long-tail pay per click campaign.
• Include links to blog posts in the Site Links of your other PPC campaigns.
• Make your blog posts easily sharable and encourage people to share.
• Include coupon codes or discount offers in your blog posts to encourage sharing.

How will you keep your blog content fresh? Allow others to comment on your posts and you can also add updates to the blog article based on feedback received or new information.

3) Blog Content Optimization for SEO

The content on the blog article itself will need to be constructed in such a way that it yields you the best possible SEO results:

Blog Title. Include your target keywords into the title of the blog post.

Blog Tags. Use keywords as tags for your blog post entry.

Blog Post URL. Include your keywords in the URL itself.  Make sure to separate the words using dashes.

Blog Images. Optimize the names of any images used within your blog post with variations of your keywords.  Separate your keywords by dashes within the image name.

Blog Content.  Use secondary keywords and variations of target keywords throughout your content in a natural way.

Internal Linking. Inside your blog posts, link to previous related blog posts and product pages.  From within your website, links to your blog posts from relevant product pages, or product category pages.  Be sure that all anchor text includes keywords.

Link Building. Beyond internal links, you’ll want to get external links to your blog post.  One of the easiest things you can do here is to link out to other partner-type sites and complementary bloggers – and make sure they know about it.

Holiday shopping research will soon be in full swing, so now is the time to be getting your blog plan into place and actively producing and promoting your exceptional content for the best possible natural search traffic.

If you haven’t already begun planning for the holiday buying rush, then it’s time to get moving. In this Part Three of Prepping for Holidays, I’ll show some of the things you can do to ensure online buyers find your products and services. (In Part One I talked about aligning your online and offline strategies, and in Part Two I covered how to spruce up your virtual store-front.)

In our free e-book, The Link Economy, Matt and I talk about how successful search marketing companies develop all of the components of a search marketing campaign at one time.

What we mean by this is a savvy marketer will sit down and plan out the campaign strategy, keywords, and content (i.e. blog posts, landing pages, offers) before implementing the campaign – often months in advance.

Pre-campaign planning gives you the 30,000 foot perspective – and it allows you to see and fix any bottlenecks or problems before the campaign launches. When planning for the 2009 holiday shopping season, you’ll want to keep in mind the following search marketing best practices.

First, Find the right keywords.

We’ve covered this topic considerably in previous blog posts (see here and here).

Suffice to say, the foundation of your successful online holiday season starts with the right keywords. How do you know which keywords to use for the holiday season? You can use the tips in the two articles cited above plus these special (and guaranteed enjoyable) “holiday” keyword tips:

Read dead-tree media – If you sell consumer products to women, for example, read the gossip rags. One, you’ll learn how women talk to each other – “baby bump,” “gladiators,” and “hobo bag” are all terms women know and use in their online searches – and two, you’ll learn what the celebrities are wearing. This is important information as women often search by celebrity name plus the product – for example, “angelina jolie makeup.”

Watch TV – Watch popular shows, such as American Idol or Sunday football games. Again, pay attention to what people are wearing or talking about in the off-the-cuff commentary. Also analyze the commercials – what are the big retailers advertising and how are they doing it? Do they use URLs that take people to a specific landing page (i.e. www.domain-name.com/TV offer)? If so, test the URL and offer to see how things work – and note any roadblocks you encounter.

Do a mall stakeout – Park yourself on a bench at the mall and let the crowd flow by you. Listen to people talk on their phones and face-to-face. Look at their clothes and other items. What’s hot? What’s not? Teenage boys, for example have made Vans, a popular skateboarding shoe, a hot selling item – and in fact, “Vans skulls” (a shoe with a skull pattern) is a moderately searched keyword!

Second, develop your search campaigns around your holiday keywords.

Now sit down and plan out your PPC and SEO campaigns around these keywords. Again, we’ve written many blog posts on these topics:

Setting up PPC Campaigns

Three Big PPC Mistakes – and How to Avoid Them, Part I and Part II

Writing Effective PPC Ad Copy

Creating Keyword-Rich Content

The goal here is to develop well-thought out campaigns (re: strategic) that are targeted and optimized for what people are looking for. In your plan, note how many new pages you’ll need in terms of SEO – or if you can tweak existing pages by changing Title / meta tags, headlines or page copy. Also note any new PPC ads you’ll need plus the landing pages that go with them.

Third, plan out your blog posts in advance.

Blogs should be an important tool in your marketing strategy. One, it’s easy to create keyword-rich content “on the fly” and two, blog posts are often included in the search engine results pages within hours of being published – versus the days or even weeks it can take the Google, Yahoo or Bing crawlers to find your new “static” HTML content.

If you have a blog, develop a holiday editorial calendar and note when you’ll write posts that announce in-store events or online sales and when new products become available. Also be sure to include time for ongoing research and writing posts in response to “news.”

For example, if you’re reading a gossip rag and you see a celebrity teen boy wearing Vans with skulls – and you sell this very shoe – then you’ll want to include a picture of the celebrity in a blog post plus the fact that people can find these shoes at your store (when other retailers are sold out). You’ll want to optimize the title of your blog post with the keyword phrase plus link the keyword phrase “Vans with skulls” to your landing page where you sell this shoe.

We here at Yield Software want to see you have a hugely successful holiday season. If you have tips or suggestions for how to improve online sales, please send them to me at derek(dot)gordon(at)yieldsoftware(dot)com and I’ll feature them in future posts.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, sign up today for our Yield Web Marketing Suite. At $129 month, it’s affordable and provides lots of value – namely, it increases SEM campaign ROI and saves you a ton of time having to manually track everything. To learn more, take the software for a spin for 30 days at absolutely no cost or obligation to you via our free trial offer.

Rather than spend money in these tough times, consumers are saving it (savings accounts are the new black). Instead of resigning yourself to a red holiday season (in the bottom line sense of the word), now is the time to gear up and make the most of the holiday season.

And you can – with a few well-thought out strategies that I outline in this, Part II of Web Marketing Holiday prep. (If you missed Part I, wherein I talk about aligning online and offline strategies, you can find it here.)  This week: getting your online house in order!

First: Ensure your site is extra secure for online transactions.

I visited the website of a financial institution recently and was appalled to note that the little “lock” icon was missing from the right corner of the Web page AND the secure “https” was missing from the URL.

Even worse, this site wanted me to log-in to my account using my social security number. Bad news, people! According to SSL.com, if you’re asking for customers’ sensitive information, i.e. credit card numbers, your website should be super secured using SSL.

Having a secure website eases customers’ fears about ordering from your site – and it gives you a leg up over those clueless retailers who leave security to chance. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to educate consumers about how you’ve secured your site as many people don’t know about how online security works.

Second: Help buyers compare similar items.

In a recent trip to the mall, I was pleasantly surprised to see the parking lot full and the mall crowded with people. It’s not that people aren’t spending money – it’s that they’re comparing products and prices and often visiting two or more retailers to find the best deal. (In fact, consumer spending data shows that debit card use is up – an indication that people are using cash versus credit.)

Online retailers have a real advantage over their bricks-and-mortar colleagues because you can develop Web pages that compare your products with your competitors’ products, including features and pricing.

Such information saves consumers time and helps them making buying decisions – especially if they’re in a hurry and need to make a purchase, like now.

Third: Let consumers see if product is in stock.

One of my Yield Software co-workers visited Best Buy in her town in order to purchase one of those cool netbooks. First she had to put her name on a list to even get waited on, then when her turn came, she found out the retailer was out of stock of the netbook. Grrrrr!

So she went online to Staples and in a few clicks saw that a store near her had the netbook – and plenty of them. Thirty minutes later, she was the proud owner of one.

Again, you’re saving customers time and money – both of which are in short supply – by providing your customers with an online inventory database. Balking at the cost? Remember, consumers are buying your goods with after-tax dollars and using cash, meaning they have fewer dollars in their wallets. Your cost for creating an inventory database is a business expense on pre-tax dollars – so do it. Your bottom line will thank you.

Fourth: Make it easy to contact you and return product.

I once bought the wrong power cord for my laptop from an after-market retailer, and found out, much to my chagrin, that I had no way of contacting the online retailer in order to return it. The site lacked an email address and phone number!

You can give consumers confidence when purchasing from you by including your contact information – and return policy – prominently on your website.

Fifth: Update your homepage, product pages and your blog.

If you’ve been putting off website updates — including content, navigation or back-end technologies — now is the time to draw up a to-do list.  Think about who is best able to make the changes you need, consider any budget-related impacts, and assign them their duties and deadlines.  Now is not the time to put of until tomorrow what you can get done today.  If you’ve been neglecting your blog lately, start reinvigorating it now — you’ll want to reawaken search engine crawlers to the fact that you’re regularly updating your website again.  (In the final post in this series, we’ll address these issues again as they pertain to SEO, PPC campaigns and landing pages.)

Finally: Take advantage of trends.

Eco-friendly. Organic. Green. Energy efficient. Consumers are hot for these trends and will spend hard-earned cash if they believe they’ll some positive impact in the long run (and believe me, consumers are becoming much more savvy about how their purchases affect the environment).  As I’ve already hammered-home, frugality is the order of the day and trumps all other trends (with luxury brand categories a possible notable exception), so you should also be sure you’re highlighting how it is your products and services saves money, time or other resources.  Think about two-for-one or gift-with-purchase promotions.  More than anything else, shoppers want to see value in their purchases.

Instead of offering products (such as robotic singing elves whose voices make you want to commit suicide) consider offering products such as wooly blankets made from free-range sheep. Your customers will walk away with a good conscious and they’ll stay warm over the winter to boot.

In part three of this series, I’ll cover how to prepare your landing pages, paid and natural search keywords, and PPC campaigns for the coming holiday rush. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet checked out how the Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you better manage your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, now is the time (before the holiday season rush gets underway).

Sign up for your free, no-obligation 30-day trial – and see how Yield Software can help you achieve better ROI this holiday season.

I know, I know: every day it seems you hear news about the dismal sales climate in the US. And it’s true: consumers are sitting on their wallets.

However, with a little strategic planning and creative thinking, you can help ensure that you finish the year with a bang. In this three-part series about prepping for the coming holidays, we’ll cover how you can drive traffic to your site and increase conversions.

And the first step is ensuring your holiday campaign components work – not just in driving traffic but actually work together without glitches and snafus.

Case in point: A few weeks ago I visited Williams-Sonoma at my local mall. While ringing up my purchases, the sales clerk informed me of cooking classes the store was holding – and gave me a flyer listing the class topics and dates.

Cool! I’ve always wanted to learn how to make pasta dough from scratch. However, while in-store cooking events are a great tactic for getting people into the store (and buying things), Williams-Sonoma made a big error: people interested in the classes have to call the store to RSVP. Even worse, the flyer from my store didn’t list the store’s phone number, a URL for online information or an email address.

Many Williams-Sonoma stores across the U.S. are holding these cooking classes – and a quick search showed that people are posting videos to YouTube about them and talking about the company on Twitter – yet W-S doesn’t incorporate these consumer-generated videos on its own YouTube channel or website, and it seems there are at least a couple Twitter feeds: the Santa Monica, CA store has a Twitter feed but is not following its fans; and a corporate Twitter feed that has a few hundred followers, but only follows a few dozen in return, and that has a tweet in August that obliquely refers to cooking classes in the stores this weekend (with no link to calendar listings).

It should be said that I am a HUGE fan of Williams-Sonoma (my kitchen is testimony), and so it gives me no joy to use them as an example of poor marketing integration strategies.  But by not integrating its campaign components, W-S is losing some serious buzz opportunity!

Whether you’re a pure e-tailer or a bricks and mortar business with an online presence, consider the following strategies when planning holiday campaigns:

First: Integrate offline and online – Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL. If you’re hot into social media, include your Facebook and Twitter URLs.

If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

W-S, for example, does have a Facebook Fan Page but doesn’t list events on it. On top of that, the paper flyer the store gave me lacks any contact info, making it difficult for people like me to register for the cooking classes (now I have to go online, find the store, look up the phone number and call – not convenient).

Second: Join the conversation – Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Fan Page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone app. Reserving your profiles now, even if you’re not ready to use them, is important because cyber-squatters are stealing brand names.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence, reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.

Three: Test, test, test – In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.

This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.