Rants and Raves about the SEO, Social Media and Search Marketing World from Cincinnati, Ohio

OK so I am sure many of you have seen dozens of 2009 prediction posts, re-cap posts and what do I want for new year posts. Well here is another one, sort of.

I am sure most of you out there are like me. You either work for clients or work in-house for your employer. Either way it is a pretty darn good life as an SEO or SEM. Whether you’re doing paid or organic work, as long as your successful at what you do and your client/employer implements properly everyone should be happy. I am lucky to have that right now. I have 2-3 very strong clients I work with directly and cap my work at that. Sure I could probably take on more client, but I don’t want to. I want to maintain focus for those clients so I can see their results through. If you are a sole proprietor like myself how many clients do you manage?

In 2009 I would like to spend more time on personal projects. I have a few that have put aside for a while now and would like to get to work on. For those that work with clients and personal projects (for profit or not) how do you spend your time every week? 80/20? If you’re like me and work about 60 hours a week it is easy to spend full time hours on clients and have time left over for personal projects and I fully intend to do that this year.

Some of you may know I previously did all affiliate work back in 2002-2003. That is after I left Rawhide Search Solutions, which was a SEO company in Toledo, Ohio. Working on my own was very hard and tough. You were forced to learn fast, but it taught me a lot of what I know today and how to deliver for clients. Still I miss that passion of truly running a website on my own. Sure operating this blog is definitely rewarding, but not quite the same as operating an online retailer.

So I am curious for those of you out there that work for clients and operate your own websites, what do you sell online? In the past I have marketed everything from Adult Toys to Prescription medications. Some of the most competitive stuff ever online.

I am not going in that affiliate direction again, but would like some ideas on what market next. Most say you should follow your passion and create a business around something you love. I feel this is definitely true, but that is where I hit I wall.

Ideas?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Most people marketing, managing or running websites online that have ecommerce on them are aware of a very popular blog called “Get Elastic: The Ecommerce Blog“. If not then subscribe to it NOW. You can thank me later. Any who then had a recent called Reducing Friction in the Sales Process that you need to check out. Simply put, it kick ass.

They basically spell out a whole list of problems (they call it Examples of Friction) that websites have. The “Examples of Friction” can clearly cause issues wiht you converting your visitors. Lets list them from the post:

Home Page Friction

1. Slow loading pages
2. Difficult to find search boxes
3. Showing too many products on a single page / cluttered design

Friction in Navigation

1. Navigation in sidebars
2. Tombstone navigation

Friction in Site Search

1. Inability to handle synonyms and mispellings
2. Inability to locate non-product information

Category Page Friction

1. Too many products, not enough filter options
2. Tiny Thumbnails

Friction on Product Pages

1. Can’t find buy button (or can’t read its text)
2. Hey, did I just add to cart?
3. Irrelevant cross-sells

Friction on the Cart Summary Page

1. Continue shopping means what?

Sign Up Forms / Registration Resistance

1. Too much required information
2. Form design
3. Vague email sign-up calls-to-action

Checkout Process Friction

The number one cause of cart abandonment is “sticker shock” or the addition of unexpected taxes and fees in the checkout process. One way to avoid this is to show pre-checkout tax and shipping based on a zipcode lookup

Email Marketing Friction

1. Spammy sender name
2. When scent wears off

Your landing pages should pick up where your emails, PPC ads and banner ads leave off, using consistant imagery, messaging and pricing:

404 Not Found!

404 pages without links back to the site need no explanation.

I only outlined what was covered in the post above. In the Get Elastic post they have descriptions of each and example images/video. it is must see for sure. They also have a humorous and insightful You Tube video page describing some fo the issues we all face with websites everyday.

You Tube Elastic Path Channel

Popularity: 11% [?]

Google has released their 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. Some interesting and expected results. Google explains the following methodology:

“Fastest rising” means we looked at the most popular searches conducted for 11 months of 2008 (we compile this list by early December) and then ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2007. “Most popular” searches are ranked in order of the queries with the largest volume of searches for 2008.

In compiling the 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist, our search team studied the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed in to the Google search box. Except where noted, all of these search terms are most popular for 2008. All of the search queries we studied are anonymous — no personal information was used.

Obviously “Sarah Palin” and “Olympic” type queries leads a few of the lists. The Zeitgeist is divided into 6 different sections:

1. US Zeitgeist - Top searches in US.
2. Top of Mind - Whats on people minds as far as queries are concerned.
3. Politics - With an election year, political searches are always some of the most frequent.
4. Trendsetters - Things like Comfort Foods and DIY queries really exploded this year.
5. Showbiz - Actors, TV Shows, Movies, Lyrics and general celeb stuff
6. Sports -Team names, Olympics and mascots
7. Around the World - Most popular searches from different countries. Google does create a Zeitgeist for a lot of countries besides the US

I really wish they would assign some numeric value to each of these keywords, so we can really see the disparity between each.

I think one of the coolest links is at the bottom of the Zeitgeist that helps you find holiday gifts that are HOT searches:

Find great holiday gifts and savings with Google Product Search and Checkout

Here are the top 10 Fastest Rising Searches (Global):

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

Popularity: 15% [?]