2) Misconfigured technology and campaigns cost you substantial opportunities. Just yesterday I was reviewing a client’s site and found that they had incorrectly modified the SEO plugin on all their blogs (9 different networked WordPress blogs), pulling in the same title tag instead the targeted title tag for each individual post. This was a huge lost opportunity and I’m unsure how long this had been set-up incorrectly. I fixed it immediately, made an annotation in Google Analytics noting when the change was made and opened a discussion on how we could help them with more technical internet marketing management. (Right now we just update code and perform general site maintenance).

3) Having real experience at your side is essential to not waste money and to avoid bad results. If you are hiring or outsourcing your internet marketing, make sure you’re not using someone just getting started, selling “flavor of the month” internet marketing tactics. An experienced professional management team will have a solid background of direct experience (with testimonials), makes recommendations on long standing strategies that work, and will provide fresh ideas to maintain a competitive advantage.

4) Someone to keep up with all the moving parts and to keep on schedule. Strategy, graphic design, content creation, programming, implementation, reporting, and continuous improvement, are all major components of successful internet marketing campaigns. Within those major components are many more tasks that are best managed and completed by an experienced team who knows how to get them all done on time.

5) Efficient use of your marketing budget to get the most out of your investment. Experienced technical internet marketing management teams have already overcome many of the challenges that businesses face when deploying campaigns. Do-it-yourself attempts and inexperienced technicians will waste your money and time, all while delivering less than effective campaign results.

6) Getting a fresh perspective on your current efforts. Some business owners are doing their own marketing and have had some successful results. However, many times I see that either their ambition to optimize marketing campaigns is waning or they’re stuck within the methods that they’ve been using over time and haven’t looked (or don’t trust) newer methods of marketing. Unsure of how internet marketing will work for them, they let the status quo lead and business stream stay as is and often get to a point where they are struggling to grow their business any further.

7) Having someone to be accountable. It’s easy to lose sight of working on your business, like developing new marketing campaigns and not having anyone truly accountable (because it isn’t a priority). When you spend money to hire someone to manage your internet marketing, you’ve hired an accountable party and you’ve made it a priority. The combination of the two will lead to a deeper commitment to this essential business practice.

We hope these 7 reasons help you realize the great need for hiring an experienced internet marketing management firm. If you want to discuss further, contact Michael Shearer at michael@netexperienced.com or call him at (720) 257-9520.

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Note: the following only works if you have a logged in Chrome account, not just using Chrome as a browser without logging in.

1) Use Google Chrome on your computer and add the Chrome for Mobile add-on, found here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-to-mobile/idknbmbdnapjicclomlijcgfpikmndhd?hl=en

2) Install the Chrome for iPad app and sign into your Chrome account. Make sure you allow for notifications. Notifications will allow for the pages/PDFs to open up in Chrome when you send them.

3) Open Chrome on your iPad and make sure that “Chrome to Mobile” is turned on.

4) Click on the little mobile icon to the right of our URL bar and a little dialog box will open up asking you to send to your device.

Chrome will receive and open the file on your iPad (this does work on first generation iPads)

5) If you want, you can touch the top of the screen on the PDF being viewed in Chrome and select “Open in”…iBooks (or any other app you have for viewing PDFs on your iPad.

This was a very useful discovery for me so that if I’m reading something and need to run all of a sudden I can quickly send to my iPad to more easily finish reading.

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Personally, I was trying to figure out exactly how RegEx worked for my needs, but there are also some cut and paste solutions as well for use in Google Analytics, like this:

Go to your Traffic Sources->Sources->Search->Organic report and run an advanced settings search. (Click advanced link next to search bar atop the table). Run an include query on keywords, selecting Matching RegExp in the drop down and enter: ^([^ ]+ ){3,8}[^ ]+$ into the form field at the end of the query. Click apply.

This query will show you long tail keywords of 4 to 9 characters of length. Useful for assessing long tail traffic and potential content ideas.

I have a full ebook downloaded to my iPad that I plan on reading to understand RegEx in more depth as it pertains to Google Analytics.

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I found 3 exceptional tools that I intend to integrate in my SEO work, which include Screaming Frog SEO Spider (site structure analysis), Advanced Web Ranking (rank analysis and more) and ahrefs (inbound link analysis).

A particular note is the SEO Spider tool which is something I’ve been wanting for a long time and didn’t know this existed. I nearly paid someone to create something like this for me, but not even as advanced as what this tool is. One of the highlights is scraping a site and outputting each page and their respective elements like title tag, header tags, etc. into a table I can then export into a spreadsheet. This is huge for me to be able to do future SEO audits more effectively, extracting the current and creating a recommendations report.

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For example, this blog article http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/10722-eight-great-free-seo-and-google-analytics-tools has links to an excellent SEO and PPC dashboard and custom report. I’ve only imported (and tweaked) the custom report provided, but you could do the same with both custom reports and dashboards. And there are many more reports out there to be imported and tweaked to your needs without requiring a lot of time to build custom ones from scratch.

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That being said, my focus of study was brushing up and getting some new spreadsheet (mostly Excel) wizardry back under my belt. I can honestly say that one of the things that catapulted my career was my work with Excel spreadsheets and building a useful library of reports for a previous employer, including ad hoc reporting and complex dashboards.

My Excel usage has waned so I’ve gone back to some starting blocks as refreshers. I haven’t forgotten my vlookups or pivot tables, but I’ve been using spreadsheets more in my current work and wanted to brush up on some useful, repetitive key commands and formulas so that I could be more productive.

I spent some time over on the Excel Addict’s Quick Tips section to find the solution to a few issues that have come up lately. Some tricks of value that I found included:

Ctrl+[ (Shows cells referenced in a formula. Useful for finding a column or row of formulas that are supposed to be similar and seeing if there are errors)
Ctrl+` (Displays formulas in their respective cells. Good to know if the cells being referenced are the correct ones for your formula.)
http://www.theexceladdict.com/_t/t040512.htm (Tutorial on creating cumulative totals)

Some days I think I could work in Excel all day long – I love learning new functions and making tasks/calculations easier. Sometimes there is no better place to do that than Excel.

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It became clear to me that I don’t do an effective enough job of Goal Setting. In the past I have, but lately I haven’t been focused enough on my goals, but rather going through the motions each day, completing to do lists but not real goals. Sure, I could attach those to do lists to a goal like providing quality work
to clients, but I haven’t been so it doesn’t count. Additionally, that’s not a measurable goal so it wouldn’t count anyway.

So, starting today, 12/12/12, I am going to revisit my a previous system I had written about over at freelancefather.com that highlighted five things I used for better personal management, productivity and goal achievement. Here is the link to the original article: http://freelancefather.com/optimization/personal-performance-management-system/

Some changes to the system include:

• using a spreadsheet instead of fractal planner.
• reducing my optimized life spreadsheet to five items and building on it once I am actively completing those items daily
• writing out my top 3-6 daily goals the prior evening
• setting various long term goals over different time periods, e.g. 1 month, 6 months ,1 year and 5 year goals

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In fact, you’ll likely see an update to this post on Sunday instead of starting a new Daily Action Log entry.

As weak as it seems, I’ve scheduled tweets and Google+ shares b/c I am simply not consistent in those platforms yet. Additionally, I have my Daily Action Log entries queued up for reminder every night at 9pm and a weekly blog scheduled for Thursdays. And, while I’m outlining this and thinking about what else is on my content map, I’m going to go plugin scheduled events to write for 20-30 minutes on my buzz piece twice a week and set a publish by date, as well.

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Further, I’m a “tips and tricks” kinda guy and like to learn little tidbits that make the job I am already doing with Google Analytics a bit easier. So I was search for tips like this one: adding reports to existing email updates I already have programmed (and how to delete outdated GA reports being emailed to me).

What I’m finding is that these topics I’ve focused on thus far: landing page optimization, business positioning, content marketing, and web analytics are all 1) core competencies for all business and 2) are very deep topics.  I’m just scratching the surface with each and I admit there’s a daunting task ahead to revisit these daily action logs and complete the tasks that I began on those days.

I still need to:

• finish my buzz piece
• finalize a USP
• create a content map, editorial calendar and actually fill each with real content
• establish an internal web analytics implementation, best practice and optimization guide, plus commit and execute it for myself and any client that hires me for such a project

On top of that, I feel like covering a unique topic every day for the next few weeks so I have more of a complete picture of what I am trying to accomplish.  Topics (off the top of my head) still on the list include:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media
• Usability/UI/UX
• Email Marketing
• Copywriting
• Business Reporting
• Programming
• Customer Relationship Management
• Marketing Automation
• Design

…and all the sub-topics and sub-sub-topics of each of these categories and more.

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