Happy New Year to all readers of Business Marketing Online’s An Article A Day. We’ve gone from 0 to 250 readers in our first few months, so who knows where we’ll be this time next year? Remember, this is a completely free blog, so if you’d like to recommend it to your colleagues, please do. The link to send them is http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/get-new-articles-by-email/ - if they (or you) want to catch up on the articles which have generated the most interest, you can find them on the top right of the page at http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/

I have loads of online marketing issues I’m planning to discuss in the next few weeks, and I hope you find them useful. Of course, if you really want to swing your marketing budget behind your online efforts this year, I would recommend our Insider Programme, which will take you step by step through everything you need to know, with straightforward tips you can implement each week. At £500 a month, which also includes all the personalised advice you might need from me, it’s great value, and we already have some great endorsements from other industrial companies who joined us in the autumn. Do email me - chris@bmon.co.uk - if you’d like to meet up for a chat about it.

Here’s a very short post about another very short post. But if you’re looking for a new year’s resolution for your professional life, resolve to answer this question.

Yesterday I suggested that getting links into your site is half of the battle when it comes to search engine optimisation (”SEO”). The other half which I was alluding to is “on-page optimisation”, or having the right content presented the right way. In The four fundamentals of SEO remain as relevant as ever, the Search Engine War blog suggests that there are four elements to SEO, splitting my content half into three topics. What’s more, they suggest that these are primarily the same elements as at the start of the decade - this means if you’ve been steadily working on your website for the past few years, you should be in a great position by now. If you’re only just thinking about investing in your website’s performance, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. But we can give you a great start in 2009, as I’m sure you’re aware.

One of the most important things you can do to develop your website is to start a link-building campaign. It’s something we’re covering with appropriate significance on our Insider Programme (which you really ought to think about joining in the New Year, by the way). Links are the currency of the web, and the most essential of the two things you need to do if you’re to get to the top of the Google results. Getting links is a chore, but there are loads of good tips to be had. It’s most important, however, to understand that links are not equal, and it’s not necessarily a numbers game. This is covered by the great Eric Enge in Cost Per Link Is A Bad Metric on his Ramblings About SEO blog. Eric suggests a way you can rate those links to your site, so you can keep an eye on any linkbuilding campaign you have going. Don’t forget, more companies than ever (possibly including your competitors) are budgeting for using external link building services in 2009, and if your budget doesn’t stretch to that, you need to be sure you’re making the time to do it in-house. Do ask if you need any advice, I’m always happy to help any of my blog readers.

The Recession is Here - Time to Become an Eco-Marketer is the title of a brilliant piece on Anything Goes Marketing which is actually nothing to do with environmental issues. It’s actually to do with recycling marketing resources and minimising wasted effort. I won’t try to summarise it any further: have a read.

And Happy Christmas, by the way. I’ll be right back after this short break.

Back in 2000 I addressed a seminar of PR consultants who were discussing the “threat” from the internet. Many of them were worried that if print magazines started to die off, relationships with editors would become less important, and many companies would just start to write their own press and PR material which would find a much easier route to publication on the web. Meanwhile, online advertising looked set to boom, and advertising agencies were going to have a great time.

I argued that this wasn’t the case: the web would require much more writing to be done, and PR consultants were in an ideal position to capitalise on this. Conversely, online business-to-business advertising would lend itself to a DIY approach, and it was the advertising agencies which would start to lose their customers, with no more hugely profitable bits of film having to be made for magazine adverts (this has been such a lucrative income stream for ad agencies over the years that many continued to make film for clients long after magazines started to ask for digital files instead).

I was right in my assessment, although it took longer than I expected. Nowadays companies get nearly all of their new business through the web, and most are realising they need as much content to be written as possible to help generate this. Many industrial companies have switched a lot (sometimes all) of their advertising to online “pay per click” campaigns which they manage in-house. There’s a whole world of new technical writing and advertising management services to be offered.

So… boom time for PR consultancies, and a radical change taking place in industrial business-to-business advertising agencies? Not at all. Both have stuck their heads in the sand when it comes to the internet, and (in my opinion) thoroughly badly advised their clients as to the extent the market has changed, in order to continue going through the same old motions they’ve been going through for the past 20 or 30 years. Most traditional ad agencies have never really invested in learning about what most of them quaintly call “new media”, in part because they didn’t understand it, didn’t like change, and couldn’t see as much profit in it. Instead, they’ve allowed a number of specialist “e-marketing” or “digital” agencies to come into the market who - despite their horrible names - realise that online advertising is a lot more than being able to do the artwork for a banner ad. Can your ad agency manage an AdWords campaign for you? Why on earth not? It’s the only advertising which works for lead generation now, and we all know it.

But it’s the PR consultancies - which had an even bigger opportunity - that have disappointed me the most. When I speak to companies about why they’ve been slow to invest in expanding the content on their websites, they often say “well, we leave the writing to our PR company, and their contract is just to do press releases really”. Yes, but haven’t they offered to do more? “Strangely, no.”

When you look at the news distribution lists offered by many PR consultancies, “online” is covered by sending to the Pro-Talk sites, and - er - that’s about it really. “We send to the magazines, and so that should cover their websites”. What about working on all the bloggers and other sites that take a bit of effort? A bit out of their comfort (and profitability) zone, it would appear. And let’s not get into how few PR consultancies have made the effort to learn how to manage their clients’ websites, a fantastic opportunity for them which many clients would love to have been able to have commissioned them to do.

Naturally, there are exceptions, and I’m happy to namecheck outfits such as Copylines and 4CM as PR/marketing consultancies who are making the effort to move forward and get their clients onboard with them. But quite frankly, if your PR consultancy or advertising agency is doing nothing very different from what your PR consultancy or advertising agency was doing for you back in December 1998, then it’s time to start asking some hard questions.

In marketing we can view the sales team as our customers really, and we all know how crucial it is to understand customers. The problem at many companies (especially where the sales team significantly outnumbers the marketing team) is often that the sales team shout loudly about what they want, but the marketing team “know” that the sales team doesn’t really understand the problem. Immediately you get a “them and us” situation, and I can name many companies where I’ve seen this happen. So often marketing is a gentler, more thoughtful environment, while sales is more testosterone-fuelled, and the clash is inevitable.

What both sides have to do is to swallow their pride and work together. Easier said than done? Well, in my marketing role at various online and print publications over the years, I’ve made a point of going out with the sales guys and seeing what they have to cope with. It was hard to shut up and just observe, but I did. In the first magazine I worked on, I shared an office with the sales team and I could hear them being rebuffed on the phone all day; this quickly gave me a good understanding of the objections they were coming up against, and they weren’t what I might have guessed.

This is covered in Eating Nails for Breakfast: 2 Weeks with Sales and How It Made Me a Better Marketer on The Funnelholic where the author gives you five ways to observe sales at close hand. Maybe it’s an idea for the new year.

Hands up who’s doing PPC (pay per click) advertising? You know, Google AdWords and the like? Hmm, that’s quite a lot of you. And I see a few of you, even at fairly small companies, spending as much as you ever did on print advertising - and the monthly expenditure is rising too. So perhaps we need to take stock of where we are.

In 7 Signs Your PPC Campaigns Needs Optimization on the Marketing Optimization Blog the author contends that you’re probably not doing AdWords as efficiently as you might, and I’m sure you’ll be big enough to admit that’s probably the case.

The thing about AdWords is that whilst it can be used simply to drive traffic to your website (and that’s all many people are using it for), it can also be quite an expensive way of doing that. Those fifty-pence clicks add up if you’re just sending people to your website and not taking them so a highly-targeted page, with a great call to action, that you’re measuring accurately.

On the other hand, for specific campaigns (like distributing certain catalogues and data sheets, or sending out invitations, or even generating sales calls), the combination of an AdWords campaign and a targeted landing page is dynamite. We have a number of new products coming out here at Business Marketing Online in the new year, and one of them will be just perfect for those of you who are spending money on AdWords but want to see it generate real sales leads. To find out more, send me an email - chris@bmon.co.uk - and I’ll make sure you’re one of the group who get an advanced look at what we’re doing in the spring.

I feel for the three or four companies who’ve told me recently that they’re keen on our Insider Programme and who like the idea of having my advice on tap for their website and associated activities - but who genuinely can’t find £500 a month in 2009. That’s fair enough, although I’d be interested to know what’s more important than developing your online marketing at the moment: please tell me it’s not print ads any more! Anyway, whatever the budgetary restrictions, we’re all looking for good low-cost opportunities, and there are plenty of them if you look. B2B Marketing for $100 on the B2B Lead Blog recently listed a bunch of ideas, and one or two might get you thinking. Plenty of other off-the-wall ideas come along from time to time, so keep a look out here if nowhere else.

Here’s an interesting discussion. Industrial Search Engine Marketing asks: “(is) Facebook a Viable Channel for Industrial Marketing?” and the answer is that it could well be.

Now, like me, in a business context you may well gloss over anyone talking about Facebook and social media in general, thinking that it’s of no consequence. But there’s a growing (if still small) amount of business related activity going on in Facebook, and it might well be worth some of your time, especially if you’re a regular Facebook user and know your way around. Read the article and see what you think.