Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3

Sun Tzu said: “One whose upper and lower ranks are of the same desires will be victorious.”

I’m going to stretch on this one a bit. I’ll replace “upper” with “inner” and “lower” with “outer.” Small businesses don’t have huge organizational hierarchies, so the metaphor doesn’t translate directly, but there is a strong parallel if you look at it a bit differently.

Your “inner” ranks, the way I’m defining it here, consist of the people who have strong a vested personal self-interest in the success of your business. That would be you, the business owner, of course – as well as your business partners and any investors you might have. I’ll also include high-end clientele who invest heavily in your services and could not easily switch to someone else. Your “outer” ranks consist of the people who are slightly affected by your success or failure, but who don’t really have much skin in the game. Employees and contractors who work for you would fall into this category, as well as most customers, referral partners and other business owners in your community.

Armies throughout have risen and fallen because of loyalty – or lack thereof.

How does this apply to internet marketing? Like any other kind of marketing, you’re more likely to be successful if you focus your efforts on creating as many strategic allies as possible. An example of how this applies in the online world is link-building. Ordinary marketers will attempt to boost their search engine rankings by posting large numbers of comments on blog posts. Link spam is not going to win you any allies. It will more likely annoy other web site owners. On the other hand, if you start following a few other web sites consistently and adding value to the conversation, you’ll build a positive relationship with the owners of those sites. Better yet, if you start linking to their blogs from your blog when it’s relevant to do so, you’ll help bring some good traffic to their sites.

This is just one example of how you can build loyalty over time by consistently looking to give value first. If you look for other opportunities to do this as often as possible, you’ll start to build relationships in your home town and other cities as well. You never know where this might lead.

This ties into what we’re going to talk about next week – building a competitive advantage by preparing yourself to seize opportunities where your competitor is unprepared.

Week 1 – Week 2

“One who knows when he can fight, and when he cannot fight, will be victorious.”

(Read last week’s post here).

The above statement is a central theme throughout Sun Tzu’s great work. Since my first reading of The Art of War, this single statement has most frequently echoed through my mind. I believe that this single point is so crucial that everything else in the entire book ties directly back to it. Sun Tzu paints a picture of warfare as an exercise in mental diligence. The general fights an inner war, and the outer war is a reflection of it. When the general possesses an unwavering certainty that victory is inevitable, the war is already won before the first shot has been fired.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about internet marketing, it’s that the landscape is littered with tempting shiny objects. If your opponent in the game of marketing is your competitor and you expend your limited marketing budget on a questionable strategy, you will have handed over the victory. How can you be certain of your objective before launching an internet marketing campaign, even if you have no experience in this area? For example, suppose you’re debating between hiring someone to execute a Facebook campaign or buy some pay-per-click ads? At the same time, someone else tells you that Foursquare is all the rage these days, or that your best option is to hire someone to build you a mobile app. In the face of total ignorance about all of the marketing tools at your disposal, how can you decide where to deploy the limited funds that you have?

The question to ask is this: of what objective can you be absolutely certain?

One way to think about the problem: how much time, money, and energy can you afford to spend on a campaign that generates no revenue? Before you say “zero,” think of what else you could gain from the effort that would make your investment worthwhile even in the worst-case scenario. Suppose you decide to try a 90-day e-mail marketing campaign. What data or intelligence can you be certain that you will gather from executing the campaign, whether the plan to generate revenue works or not?

Like it or not, marketing can be like going to a casino. There is a science to it, but it takes a while to learn. At first, you need to decide on a maximum amount and consider it tuition for your education. To pick a good number, you’ll need to learn to apply Sun Tzu’s principle of large and small numbers. We’ll talk about that next week.

The Art of War, an ancient military classic by Sun Tzu, is a must-read for anyone in marketing. Over the next 6 weeks, we’ll take a look at how to apply Sun Tzu’s concepts to internet marketing.

Disclaimer: I have read a couple of different translations of The Art of War, so my notes may be based on inconsistent verbiage. I don’t see this as an issue.

If you consider the world of internet marketing from a “battlefield” perspective the way Sun Tzu teaches, it’s important to remember a key underlying principle:  Warfare is essentially deception.

As the great teacher said himself:

“…when strong, we must appear weak; when active, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

I don’t believe in adversarial competition, but let’s try replacing the word “enemy” with “competitor.”

The object of the game of internet marketing is to cause your company’s marketing message to be repeated in front of your potential customer enough times to motivate them to do business with you. Your competitor’s goal is to get there first. Since multiple businesses are most likely attempting to reach your customer with a marketing message at the same time, we’ll define the battlefield as your customer’s attention. During any given moment, your customer can only pay attention to one thing. You will fight many battles for any one customer’s attention.

You can’t count on any single prospect for all of your revenue. Therefore, you will be fighting many battles to win the attention of many people. One other monkey wrench complicates the situation further: getting someone’s attention only matters if they have the authority to make a buying decision and the timing is right.

The battlefield of internet marketing is a complicated landscape. How do you get your message in front of the right person at the right time, and deliver it in such a way so as to ensure that your message, not your competitor’s message, is the one that wins the heart of your customer? Most marketers attempt a heavy-handed brute-force solution to this problem: throw as much mud at the wall as possible and see what sticks. Some try a little of one thing and a little of another. Others just guess and pick marketing tools at random.

Sun Tzu, unlike most internet marketers, advocated a strategic approach. Sun’s text covers five major aspects of planning campaigns. The rest of this series will take a look at each in detail.

Google recently announced its release of the “Google +1” feature that will allow users to vote a page up or down. The feature is similar to the “like” button on Facebook. From a user’s perspective, it’s basically just one more button to click. Why is Google duplicating the “like” button instead of just harvesting as much data from the one that’s already there? Your guess is as good as mine – but I’d wager they don’t have sufficient control over Facebook’s mechanism since they can’t see everything Facebook can see.

Does any of this mean that your SEO strategy needs to change? Not really.

The bottom line is that search engine results are becoming more democratic over time. If anything, web site owners will need to employ less strategy to be successful. SEO is really about common sense more than anything else. It’s about asking the real question: “If I were looking for a web site like the one I’m trying to promote and genuinely interested in what it has to offer, what words would I type into the search engines?” Asking that question consistently removes the need for strategy.

The nice thing about social search is the fact that you can’t “game” it. Traditional SEO developed somewhat of a stigma because there have been a number of tricks that an unscrupulous webmaster could use to ratchet a web site to the top of the SERP’s with unnatural speed. Social search is just one mechanism that Google is using to make that harder to do (and easier to red-flag).

It’ll be interesting to see if this “+1″ button catches on. The burning question: will people actually click it?

I thought of an idea that I was afraid to say out loud a couple of months ago. Now that another blog has mentioned it, I feel a little safer – or a little less worried that someone unscrupulous enough to do this wouldn’t have thought of it already.

What if a black hat SEO company decided to post 5,000 junk blogs all linking back to its competitor - or worse, it’s competitor’s client? It wouldn’t be hard to pull off, and I’m not sure that Google would have any way to tell the difference.

As a defense strategy, the blog post above recommends setting up Google Alerts (which I urge you to do if you haven’t cone it already) and a link monitoring tool such as Majestic SEO. We use Majestic and have found it to be a handy tool.

I’ll add two tips of my own:

1. Set up a TweetBeep account to monitor tweets containing your company’s name.
2. Consider adding Keyword Spy to your arsenal. This will help you quickly determine if a competitor is running a PPC ad campaign by targeting your company’s name. This is a common tactic, but there’s a particularly nasty variation called “PPC cloaking,” whereby a black hat SEO sets up a fake landing page with your name on it and uses PPC to direct your customers to their page instead of yours…giving them the false impression that YOUR web site just infected them with a Trojan Horse and stole their credit card number.

While Google and company are doing everything in their power to combat black hat SEO, it’s ultimately up to you to watch your  back.

Leave a comment here if you have any other tips on this subject.

In the wake of the Farmer Update, there has been a lot of positive buzz in the SEO world. I’ve been spending a lot of time reading SEO blogs, and I thought I’d pass along some of the better posts.

This type of content creation strategy is starting to grow on me. What’s the point of restating a blog post that someone else has already written? It seems easier just to link to it. “Curation” seems to be the new buzzword for this one. Anyhow, if you’re even the slightest bit interested in improving your web site’s search engine rankings, you will definitely find all of these posts useful.

Note: some of these posts were sourced from DIYSEO.

“What Keywords Do I Rank For?” (SEOMoz)

An excellent explanation of some common misconceptions about SEO and the omnipotence that many often falsely attribute to Google. Full post.

“A Google Penalty for NoFollow Links?” (SEOChat)

A brief look at the issue of “do-follow” vs. “no-follow” from the webmaster’s perspective, with some insight from Google’s Matt Cutts. Full post.

“SEO Lessons Learned from JC Penny’s Mistakes” (Search Marketing Insider)

Great post-mortem on the J.C. Penney incident, including some valuable insights that might prevent your business from landing in the same position. Full post.

“SEO Keyword Research, Useful Both Online and Off” (Big Marketing for Small Business)

Great points about the value of keyword research as a general marketing forecast tool – not just an SEO tool, and not even just an online marketer’s tool. Full post.

“The Incredible, Remarkable, and Undeniable Power of Speed for SEO” (Search Engine Journal)

This post engages a profound and powerful discussion about five critical business-oriented metrics for a rapidly-changing market. How fast can your organization adapt to a shift in demand? This post gives you a way to assess the reality picture. Full post.

What I’m seeing as the theme: quality always mattered, but it’s getting nearly impossible to fake or “game.” Things are about to heat up.

Leave a comment here if you read any of the above posts. I would love to hear what value you gleaned from them.

In last week’s post, I mentioned that the Google Adwords Keyword Tool can help you figure out good blog post titles. Today, I’m going to go a little deeper.

If you think that starting a blog is going to win you favor with the search engines, you might be right…or you might not. Think about what the search engines get paid to do. They make money selling ads. Advertisers are willing to pay them because of their unique ability to display relevant content to their users.

The idea is simple. Help the search engines do a better job at their most profitable task, and they will reward you. This is where selecting the right keywords in your blog post title comes in. If the search engine spiders can’t figure out what your blog post is about, they’re not likely to direct anyone there.

Examples of bad blog post titles include, but are not limited to: “The Basics,” “Your First Six Months,” “My Ramblings,” and “An Interesting Idea…” (I’ve seen all of the above on real blogs).

Instead, let’s suppose you’re writing a blog post about dog grooming. Try typing the words “Dog Grooming” into the Google Adwords Tool. First of all, don’t try to be scientific here. Unless you have experience with PPC campaigns, you’re not likely to accurately forecast the amount of traffic your blog will receive. That’s not the point. The point is to put yourself in Google’s shoes for a minute.

Scan the keyword phrases that come up. For one, you’ll see that as of today’s date (February 22nd), Google reported 6,600 monthly searches for the phrase “Groom a Dog” in the United States. The relative competition indicator isn’t super-high. The phrase “dog grooming,” on the other hand, shows 201,000 U.S. searches with significantly higher relative competition. If I were writing such a blog post, I might start off my blog post title with the words “groom a dog” and see what happens.

That’s all you need to know to get started. One more thing: don’t forget to watch your stats!

Google Places and other local search tools would be absolutely fantastic if businesses had any idea how to use them correctly. Hopefully, this will start to change soon. The problem: too many businesses still think that the internet works just like the Yellow Pages on a computer screen.

Imagine, for example, a pet supply store. The assumption: if a pet supply store is ranked #1 for the keyword phrase “pet supply [insert city name],” the store will make money as a result. Not necessarily so. This assumption only holds true if the following conditions are met:

1. There are a sufficient number of users searching for those terms in that particular city
2. The users are looking to buy (not to find free information)
3. The store is selling the right products at the right prices for the internet

#3 might sound obvious, but pay attention to the last part. FOR THE INTERNET. A search engine user is not necessarily searching for the same products as a shopper in a brick-and-mortar store, and might not be willing to pay the same prices for the same things.

If you’re thoroughly confused about all of this and don’t know where to start, try playing around with the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Type in the name of the search phrase that you think you’d like people to use to find you. How many people are searching for that keyword phrase? This software tool will give you an approximation. When you have a number, ask yourself what would happen if all of these people found your web site in the search for that phrase.

More importantly, though, take a look at the other phrases that the Keyword Tool generates. You might get some completely different ideas about what keyword terms people might be using.

Don’t assume that people use search engines the way you think they should.

Depends.

If you’re asking yourself, “How do I get my web site ranked on Google,” you’re very likely asking an irrelevant question.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “People are searching on Google instead of looking in the newspaper ads or the phone book!” How could I possibly make a statement like the one I just made? Am I saying that it doesn’t matter if people can find you online? No.

I’m saying it only matters if people are actually looking for you.

Suppose you own an ice cream shop in Raleigh, North Carolina. Is it important to be ranked #1 on the search engines for the keyword phrase “Ice Cream Raleigh”? That depends on how many people consistently search for those terms every month, how many of those people searching are in the market for an ice cream sundae made at an ice cream shop (not discount bulk ice cream by the 5-gallon tub), and how many of those in the market are likely to buy from you, given the choice between you and your competitors.

Do you know how many people that is? If you don’t, you’d best get some hard numbers before spending any serious money optimizing your site.

Does this mean you should do absolutely nothing to get ranked on Google until you’re certain that the market is there? Not necessarily. It does mean, though, that until you have hard data, you should consider everything you do to be an experiment.