Marketing Your Websites From SEO to Social Networks.
The book explains that successful marketing involves steps summed up as: attract, engage and transact. However, equally crucial to executing a successful campaign is understanding the medium, whether it’s email or FaceBook or a setting-up an affiliate program. A successful campaign will use that knowledge and measure the results.
The book is broken into nine chapters that start with an introduction to marketing and then follow with two chapters on marketing in general, “21st Century Public Relations” and “The Changing Face of Marketing.” These two are followed by “Turn Page Views into Profits” is on the importance of measuring results. At the end of these three chapters, readers will have learned a bit about marketing in general, writing press releases and doing A/B testing of websites.
These chapters are followed by ones on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and finally, on-line advertising, before a closing chapter about how a campaign will pull the lessons of all the previous chapters together. Most readers will find at least some of the material familiar. I found I was familiar with most of the SEO material given – and I found that reassuring; if they got the details right about SEO, then the rest of the content is probably equally reliable.
The social networking chapter was quite interesting in that it not only covered the major do’s and don’ts of putting your brand on the web, but there are examples of how SitePoint has used social networking websites successfully. A lot of the guidelines and examples given revolve around how to act social, yet also represent a brand professionally. Of course, Twitter is not left out, and there’s one example of how SitePoint used a give-away to boost their Twitter followers with a free e-book and how that worked. Not covered too much was the merits of social networks. For instance, in the past few months, there’s been a lot of discussion on what is the value of Twitter followers. My impression has been that most of the people using it are in their 30’s (basically Generation X) and either in marketing or web technology; Twitter has not experienced the same broad popularity in the same way that Facebook or MySpace have. So it’s worth considering if Twitter is an effective way to reach your audience, especially if you are not going after a young-ish tech-minded group.
The chapters on email marketing are similar to the section on social networking. The affiliate marketing chapter is kind of interesting, a lot of it has to do with creating your affiliate program, and while it’s not technical, it feels like there should be some more details there. Still, maybe that would be adding another chapter into its book.
Finally, the last chapter wraps up what has been covered before and talks about how a campaign will pull the lessons of all the previous chapters together. As other reviews have said, a lot of the material might feel familiar to people who have been doing this kind of work before, but it’s nicely packaged and organized, so even if the book becomes a reminder, it’s a good one. For those just getting started, Online Marketing’ is an excellent book to have on your desk.