вторник, 25 декабря 2012 г.
Wednesday, the 20th of December
Tuesday, the 18th of December - SEO LOGIC!
18.12.2012
Slogan of the day: SEO LOGIC!
- Today, after few hours of working on a new, additional keyword
list, where I staked all the words we used in our recent (this fall) marketing,
I realized, finally how our new keyword list should look and what needs to be
done for it to look this way. I was written on the wall all the time, but only
now I did realize the logic behind it. Ah, sweet logic. Without you nothing in
this miserable world would be consistent and clear. You give me the opportunity
to see through the garbage and find out the escape route from any mind-boggling
labyrinth. Thank you for clearing my thoughts from the mist of ignorance one
more time...
- Anyway, back to my discovery. I understand that in order to
optimize keyword efficiency and website traffic one should not use as many
keywords for a single page as possible (ok, that was obvious). Actually, one
single word with some of its variants to broaden the possibilities would be
more than enough! And every page and subpage should have its own unique keyword
that could describe its specific place and role in your overall brand
structure. If we assume that your website structure already reflects precisely
enough you real company / brand structure, than every page in this structure
would accordingly, reflect every specific aspect of your company / brand, then,
by adjusting appropriate keyword to every one of them you will cover all your
specific keywords AND all your specific products / services / brands / news /
etc. Isn't it brilliant when you look at it that way? Instead of main page-centered
structure your website will gain sort of web-open structure, where it will
"breathe with all its skin"
and start gaining traffic from all possible pages equally. You will also
make your site much more client-friendly: instead of aiming aimlessly through
the labyrinth of your website, frustrated and disappointed, they will gain
comfortable access to the exact page they need in no time. I'm finally fascinated
about my SEO work - now, when I managed to understand its logic and see its
true aim and purpose.
Monday, the 17th of December - Worst-First
17.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Worst-first
- I dedicated all my day to keyword search, analysis and
sorting. First, I made a table with all our website pages and categorized them
(main, product, education, services, etc.). I was not sure what to do with all
additional pages, like "contacts", "our recent clients",
etc. (whether they require keyword attachment or not?) so I hid them and
concentrated on four main pages: Home, Product overview, Services overview and
Education overview.
- It became obvious almost instantly that my recent keyword
list (that I made a month ago) was rubbish. Great that I never send it to
anybody, actually. Back then, I was trying really hard, but was not realizing
the basic keyword search mechanics and marketing direction in which we are
going to push our website. This is not to say that now I realize it completely,
but some important things, that was missed then, now finally are getting to my
head:
- We
need 5-10 (at the very most) keywords per page.
- These
keywords have to be unique and reflect fully page's contents (text).
- If
keywords and page contents does not match - then it is spam.
- Words
must be very specific, and when I say that I mean VERY specific (this requirement
ensures that we do not frustrate our visitors who are misguided to the main
page through a very specific query, or vice versa);
- We
need to put heavy accent on some words that describe things we are doing GOOD
and do not push things that we do, but are not very good at).
- Words
must correlate with our current marketing course
- Apart
of all above, every word should be also analyzed carefully through the google
analytics keyword tool and SEO rank checker (thankfully I've already managed to
handle these tools pretty ok, so that was not a big problem).
пятница, 14 декабря 2012 г.
Friday, the 14th of December - SEO!
14.12.2012
Slogan of the day: SEO
- Or products and services on LinkedIn company page are
getting more and more
"impressions". According to LinkedIn, impression defines as "the
number of times recommendations for this product have been viewed organically
on LinkedIn". That means that the products & services pages I wrote
(well, copy-paste from our site, actually) are actually being visited and
gaining some popularity. I don't know if 7 impressions in 2 days is a big
number or not, but, nevertheless, it's always pleasant to see your work actually
brings some results.
- Back to keywords, now for good. My boss told me that I
should prepare complete SEO for our new website before the year ends, utilizing
keywords from the list I made earlier. I've already read SEO-tipping article,
where the question of keyword-per-page quantity is risen and
analyzed. As always, when it comes to SEO there is no strict and define theory,
rather countless practices and "micro-theories" based on these
practices. Even SEO themselves confess, that there is nothing certain in their
work, and the key thing you have to remember is that nothing is certain and
reliable enough, experiment and innovation is everything and there is nothing more
true than your own experience.
- Such a strange experience: making graphics through code! I
was asked to make some changes in our upcoming email campaign email design. As
always, it proved to be a puzzling but interesting task, requiring some logic
as well as mathematical imagination and spatial sense. At first it was really
difficult to understand, how to manage tables columns and rows properly, but
once I captured the basic inclusion logic, it all became easier and clear.
- Glassdoor website (the one that I found a negative review
of our company couple of months ago) is now displayed on the first Google
search page when our company name is queried. It's with my positive feedback -
that's good, I guess. One marketing platform I found and developed by myself
adds popularity to our company. That gives me a reason to think that my idea to
exploit social networks and especially - ones dedicated to employees, was successful.
четверг, 13 декабря 2012 г.
Wednesday, the 12th of December - Supercritical CO2 Cycle!
12.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Supercritical CO2 Cycle
- New stage of online publishing: my boss suddenly realized,
that we actually can submit both press releases and news to some of this online
publishing services, and guess what - since our trainings can be basically
classified as events, he ordered me to submit all of our next year trainings to
all possible websites. I'm not sure if the plan is going to work, but I'll try
to do what I can.
- Major work today: I need to write new email that would
advertize our upcoming webinar and design it in html. Then schedule it and send
to all our customers and friends. Pretty usual routine, but I find myself
having hard times with writing those dame marketing texts. Last time I did one
was almost a month ago, or even more. I forgot everything I knew, and it was
not too much, actually. So right now, writing this text I'm trying to refresh
my writing skills, rise my intellectual tone and warm up my brain muscles.
- I had a conversation with one of our head engineers today,
regarding Supercritical CO2 Cycle Webinar that we are going to host next month.
But first, a little explanation. My boss was dissatisfied with my email draft
because I used unchecked information from the internet on it. So I was told to
go and talk to the engineer about our topic to get more specific technical
information. That's all. A brief story, actually. But that's just the
beginning. The engineer I talked to was a very nice, smart, polite and overall
interesting person. He's aged, but full of life, very joyful, light-minded and
responsive. He gave me a whole brief lecture about Supercritical CO2 Cycle
technology, which is, I have to admit, a very inspiring and amazing
technological marvel. First, it utilizes suprcritical CO2 work fluid - which
has density tens of thousands times higher than usual gas or fluid, and yet
also appears as semi-fluid, semi-gas sort of material that even the best
scientific minds have not studied well yet. Thanks to this unique working fluid
properties Supercritical CO2 Cycle (S-CO2) turbine requires less space, and
when I say less I mean LESS - it's almost nothing compared to regular nuclear
steam turbines (which are huge). Less in size means less manufacturing cost and
more energy production (with performance index 40% higher). I know it sounds
like I'm trying to sell out some brand new high-tech trinkets, but when I heard
all this from a person really competent in this field, it really amazed me.
Practically its a technology from future that, if properly studied and
performed, could dramatically change worlds energy producing business. And we
are in the middle of this, preparing the webinar and studying it, and spreading
the word about it to the people worldwide! I'm really looking forward to help
with this new webinar's organization. Hell, I should even ask if I could help
with the presentation design - after all, I'm familiar with Prezi and can do
some pro-presentation magic if asked!
Tuesday, the 11th of December - Letter of Disgrace
11.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Letter of Disgrace
- Finally, the day has come. My patience (as well as my boss)
has finally ended. We need answers, and we need the now! I was out of my best
to write this very polite, diplomatic but also straight and intimidating peace
of resentment:
"Please
Deal With Press Release Publishing Delay!
Dear
editors of [lazy publishing company name]!
Three
days ago (Friday, the 7th of December) I submitted our corporate press release
entitled "blablablba", but since then it was not published yet.
Please inform me if possible about the delay reason and the approximate time of
press release publishing, since this press release distribution is of critical
importance to our company.
Thank
you for your help and understanding!
Best
regards,
Valery
Petrov"
and send it to the delaying press release publishing
websites. Now waiting for their pardons and deepest regrets. Shame on them!
- A very interesting and odd observation I made recently: it
seems that two entirely different pr online services, http://www.prurgent.com
and http://www.top-best-news.com have the exact same editorial stuff! Even the
contact pages of these different websites are very similar! And the addresses
are exactly the same! And yet - they're not referencing to one another in any
way! Another internet mystery? Whatever the reason though, both of these gemini
-websites has delayed our press release publishing and will receive my letter
of reproach.
- Ok, I'm not entirely correct regarding the previous
statement. There is a link to the top-best-news that appear right after you
submit a press release to the PRurgent. So they are kinda self promoting that
way, I guess.
Monday, the 10th of December
10.12.2012
- They decided not to use "+600 years of collective
experience" paragraph anymore. It was our CEO's recent innovation - eccentric
textual gesture to both surprise, empathize and (probably) cheer up our clients
and customers. It is still out there - on all our major websites and press
releases, emails and LinkedIn groups, but my boss today told me that I
shouldn't use it anymore. Whatever the reason of its departure, I will inevitably
miss this idiotic but unusual line. Farewell, little abomination of marketing
ignorance, you filled my heart with joy and my throat with laughter not know
how oft... Rot now, on the graveyard of miserable ideas, along with the
marketing calendar, sandy hurricane victims and all the others.
- Finally something new: today I started updating our
LikedIn company page with new group description, keywords, products &
services pages, etc. It's actually kinda interesting. I've read a few articles concerning
this theme:
http://learn.linkedin.com/downloads/LinkedIn-Products-and-Services-Guide-01-2012.pdf
http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/linkedin-superguidetutorials-tips-and-tool/
and found out some useful tips in it. My boss suggested that
we should advertise our EVERY engineering service aspect separately, be very
specific to cover as many keywords from our list, as possible. I also think
that it was a rehearsal of a kind - maybe testing our new keywords and website
structure blending together, I don't know. Anyway, as for me it was only
partially a good idea, because of two reasons: first, now our products &
services page looks too cluttered (instead of two blank as it was before), and
second - It requires me to do a lot of copy-pasting kinda boring and stupid job
that I hate. It also increases my chances of making some typos, and, consequently
- my bosses time required to check them. So in the end, he's making only worth
for himself. Hah, thinking about it actually makes me happier...
- It appears that my keyword list is actually not as perfect
as I used to think. Lots of very crucial words are missing, and some of them
barely makes any sense. I guess this is the foreseen consequence of the fact
that no one had never actually spared a time to check it carefully. There's a
good side too - only I know about it's handicapity, so I can perform actions required
to fix it.
четверг, 6 декабря 2012 г.
Tthursday, the 6th of December - Press release publishing
06.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Press release publishing
- Back
to my old boring duties: publications of press releases to the numerous
websites and all other stuff. Also now I decided to take this old burden a little more seriously. I'm not
going to quit and will get this press release published on EVERY website on my
list no matter what cost. If it will require me to e-mail editors to death with
publishing requests - than be it. I've just finished new "your website gives
me an error, could you help?" e-mail form, next step will be writing the
"why the fcuk have you not published our press release yet?!" form
for those, who will not take their publishing business as seriously as I'm
taking mine now.
-
Proved to be an interesting research article about free online press release
services:
http://www.vitispr.com/blog/free-press-release-sites/
- Three
more highly recommended press-release publishing services were added to my publication
list:
http://www.openpr.com
http://www.prfire.co.uk
http://www.onlineprnews.com
All of
them proved to be very convenient, fast and well-designed services. The last
one has a particularly interesting feature: you can choose up to 7 different
industry categories to specify your release theme! It's a very high number
compared to the other s\websites, where the average is 2 or 3 categories.
среда, 5 декабря 2012 г.
Wednesday, the 5th of December - Mission accomplished
05.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Mission accomplished
- Notable Skype dialog we had today, me and my boss (before
i was asked to change "Final Product configuration" section name to
"Mission accomplished". I thought to do it my way):
I: I
changed "mission accomplished" to "objectives achieved"
Boss:
NO
B:
change it please
I: ok,
I'm changing
I: it
just sounded like some political slogan to me
B: that's
the point. We just had elections. Mental associations with positive outcome.
Just previously I found out that one of the Obama's
reelection slogans was "Mission Accomplished". Interesting marketing
move - to correlate big national election emotional lift with own brand via
usage of similar political slogans and rhetorics.
- Little off-topic, but nevertheless. It
appears that there is actually a story with this slogan. It was used by G. W.
Bush in 2003 in some military-related campaign, and later was re-utilized (in a
different context) by Obama in his recent reelection. Now we are re-utilizing
it for our product description. Quite a popular slogan, it seems.
вторник, 4 декабря 2012 г.
Tuesday, the 4th of December
04.12.2012
- Quite interesting, yet extremely bad timed task: I was
supposed to show somehow (graphically, less words - better) on the brochure the
consequence of actions performed by our engineers. Firstly they created
thousands of designs, then gave these designs to the calculating program, then
the calculating program selected five most suitable of them, and then our engineers
tested these five variants very carefully and precisely to find the best one of
them. I tried to avoid pointing and directional arrows as much as i could. In
my stylish and complex design they would look out of place. So, after some
thinking and experimenting, I decided to create a tube-like shape, that would
be connected to the points of the bottom list like if they were water pump
nozzles. Like if the these tasks "flow" through the bulletpoints in
the list and then formed consequence of containers of blue color containing
illustrations and comments to the actions performed. I was rather enthusiastic
about the idea, but its incarnation, due to a lack of time and effort, did not
satisfy me. Anyway, my boss found this variant too "crowded" and it
was rejected anyway. I'll save these design concept for better times.понедельник, 3 декабря 2012 г.
Monday, the 3d of December
03.12.2012
Slogan of the day: Sharing the final design!
- Working through the last week was hell. I haven't even had the time to write anything in my blog - and that's just not right! So, since I'm finally done with the bloody commercial brochure of our new product (the one I started over a week ago!), I decided to share it final and approved design with you. Yes you! Consider yourself extraordinarily lucky.
 |
| Te First Page - with logo banner on top and a box for additional informaation on the right |
 |
The
Second Page - with additional bottom banner for
Corporate information, blue box for final product
"niceand sexy" image and some space for general
info and QR Code (of course!) in between |
White spaces are designated for pictures, diagrams, photos, etc. The main idea behind this design was to create somewhat website-looking pages, with banners, menus and submenus. This method of data organization came to me rather spontaneously, intuitively - I guess I just used to see something similar every day in the web.
- If you are interested in using my design,
please write a comment or email me, so I can share its PSD originals for your convenience.
26 - 30th of November - Crazy Week!
26.11.2012
- Ordering layers and folders in photoshop is essential - I
understand it after encountering one commercial design that one of my
colleagues did. It was a mess and I spent a lot of time just figuring out what
layer matches what part of the image. There were no names, no grouping or
ordering. So the first thing I did was renaming layers and placing them in a
more convenient order (I found spatially-parallel order, where layer icons
vertical hierarchy is alike "real" layers vertical arrangement the
most convenient). Then I made several groups and subgroups (too many is bad -
easy to lose yourself in) and arranged according layers to them. Now I can work
with it without puzzling on layers location.
28.11.2012
- Design is all in the details. Keeping your fonts the same
size no matter what, ordering all contents in straight lines, cleaning pixels
here and there for the image to look more clear, clearing space and making all
the details look unified - that's the key. Even our lame corporate flyer design
started to look much better after I polished it for several hours, fixing all
the mistakes my mysterious predecessor left behind.
- I was always thinking of designing in photoshop as about the
graphical artistic experience, but now, after spending a week working on
brochure design, I'm starting to reconsider my views. It seems as for me more
like a kinesthetic and constructive-gaming experience, alike to my childhood
plays with construction kit and differently colored blocks. Definig lines and
curves, designating all sort of objects around them, making symmetrical or asymmetrical
constructions, polishing the details so that the final result will look and
feel perfectly. It's like building a pyramid, every single part of which must
be fitted tightly to another.
29.11.2012
- Converting GMT to EST time format. All-knowing internet
tells me with the voice of ChristinaC:
To convert GMT time to EST time, you simply subtract five hours from the GMT
time. For example, if it is 8 pm GMT time, it will be 3 pm EST time.
- A little time passed before I realized that converting GMT
to EST time format for brouchure was not very effective. As I understand now, these
two formats were chosen intentionally for different time zones / countries. For
example, 8 AM GMT is 3 AM EST, which is not a very convenient time for America,
but suit well for England and Europe.
- Finally I get my hands to some juicy data from our
engineers team! It was always right under my hand, actually - on the head
engineers computer network share. But from where could I know? Now I know what
dwarfs from Dwarf Fortress experience when they enter a strange mood and lacks required
materials, but then, just a few seconds before madness take over, finally achieves
them through some elvish / human caravan or fellow dfarfs aid. Fascinating
feeling - finally, some real work and no more roundabouts!
30.11.2012
- Once again, QR code seems to be of use: now i insisted for
it to be present on our commercial flyers and product brochure. I'm sure that
everyone including engineers and businessman on events as big as our company
participates in all have iPhones, iPads or some other QR-reading app of some
sort. In future, when all people on earth will have their Smartphones embedded
in their eyes, I believe QR codes will become a of the normal form of advertising
and even communication in general. It's as easy as it can be - literally, what
you see is what you get. No more boring reading - you scan, program decode
information for you and voila - you find yourself on the page you need, with
the product you wanted, etc.
пятница, 23 ноября 2012 г.
Friday, the 23d of November
23.11.2012
Slogan of the day: Pixel Art
- Yesterday I sent my super-trooper design to my boss, and
now get the feedback. Not the one I was expecting - no enthusiasm or exaltation
- but I'm not the one who will complain of the lack of appreciation. Anyway,
some of his critics hit in the vulnerable spots: the overall look of my
yesterday variant was a little busy and the color scheme was a little out of
nowhere and disoriented. So today i played with different colors, font sizes
and styles, etc. I also started the second page, but due to my inattention some
of the results were lost and I was not able to finish it before the end of the
day. That would be a matter of concern if my boss was paying some attention to
my progress. But he wasn't - so I took myself easy and polished fist page design
as well as I could, to the point where I zoomed to it on a maximum and hunted
all unnecessary pixels I could find. Pixel Art is a very interesting practice, I
must say. There is a sort of feeling like you are solving some mathematical theorem
or constructing a building from square standartisized blocks. The feel of
completeness, integrity and wholeness - like completing a line of blocks in
Tetris - overcomes me every time I make a line of color look smooth by adding
or erasing some little pixels to it.
- My Indian colleague asked me on Skype, why
Christmas is in Jan for us, when the rest of the world celebrates it on 25th
Dec? I was very touched by this question, because it offered me an opportunity to
share some knowledge of my cultural tradition with a person of the entirely
different ethnic region, sharing different point of view. I explained her, that
it is because some of the countries that belong to the eastern orthodox
Christian tradition (Russia, Ukraine, Bielarus, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro,
Serbia, etc. are amongst them) Christmas is marked by the old Julian calendar,
and December 25 on the Julian calendar corresponds to January 7 on the internationally
used Gregorian calendar. Conversing with her was really enjoyable.
Thursday, the 22nd of November
22.11.2012
Slogan of the day: Designing is inserting logic into space
- Designing the brochure take all day. Thankfully there were
no other tasks or concerns I should deal with, so I was left alone with my
thoughts and photoshop layers. After I came up with background design this Tuesday
I thought that putting all the contents into it would be disgustingly easy. I
was wrong - when it came to putting the contents (texts, pictures, etc.) I
realized that finding the logic for its organization IS the main task of this
work. At first, too saturated colors of a background distracted me. I was
fruitlessly trying to somehow put text and contents inside those two blue
twists, and could not make them look organically. I was thinking that the background
is my main organizing structure, a carcass of a sort, when in fact it was just
an unostentatious visual tone, like a kind of jazz melody that you hear while
sitting in a bar or restaurant and having a conversation with a friend. The
main focus must be on the conversation, since it is the reason that motivated
you to visit a bar in the first place, jazz melody in the background is just
comforting you unconsciously, making your stay here more pleasant and leasurous.
Same was with the visual design of the brochure: to really have the needed
effect my super-awesome design must stay almost invisible, only making view
sliding more comfortable and pleasant.
вторник, 20 ноября 2012 г.
Tuesday, the 20th of November
20.11.2012
Slogan of the day: "A brochure is a microcosm of your business" (from http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional)
 |
| Fig. 1 |
- Brochure-making job appeared to be a very pleasant kind of work to do - all thanks to my practice in poster design during my student days (I was designing film posters, to be particular), and my overall Photoshop experience. The idea for the background design haunted came to my head yesterday: instead of boring horizontal heading lines, no gradient and little to no composition, i decided to apply more elegant, soft curved (since our company is dealing with rotary equipment I thought it was logical) and gradient design. My first design came out of tried to expand its basic elements (that is - two curves forming a circle) to the brochure as a whole. The result was not quite as good as I've expected (fig. 1)
 |
| Fig. 2 |
Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this: Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this (fig. 2)
The big deciding point was the image of the propeller in the
center. Firs of all, appropriate image was selected and carefully converted.
Originally it was a photo of some computer cooler:
but I contured it, filled selection with monotone color and slightly changed blades shape. This clip-art-like image has been just as abstract and non-distractive (perfect for a background) as I wanted it to be. But the problem occurred when it was put into my brochure background. Originally I wanted the propeller to look slightly like the Turbine gemedesign company logo:
 |
| Fig. 4 |
 |
| Fig. 5 |
I reduced opacity almost to a minimum - the less distractive
it looks, the better. My Beloved said, that with the propeller left untouched
the whole picture resembles an eye. It was totally unexpected and spontaneous
surrealistic side effect of my design decisions, but I found it really creative
and stylish. So I stuck with it and that's what I came up with as a result (fig. 5).
- Trying to find the most appropriate font for the brouchure
I stumbled upon this article: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional,
which I found very interesting. It is a careful and pretty thorough
popular-science research, which goes in a very deep detail about a particularly
design-related question: what fonts are better - serifed or non-serifed?
Amongst all the "5 easy steps to do design" and "Follow our
out-of-nowhere rules to be an absolute design guru" articles that floods
the web, this one stands out and should be definitely read by those, who are interested
in serious design study.
пятница, 16 ноября 2012 г.
Friday, 16th of November
16.11.2012
Slogan of the day: scavenging on Sandy's victims
- The fact that in Anglo-Saxon tradition calendar week
starts with Sunday is somewhat frustrating. My Indian colleague requested me to
send her full calendar of Ukrainian holidays.
- We decided to center our next-conference-invitation e-mail
around that hole Sandy thing, and I was said to write the appropriate text.
Doing a little research i discovered some interesting facts: like how actually
big (in terms of casualties) was this hurricane after all (it was pretty big,
also number of victims - 199 - was never near to that of Katrine in New
Orlean), and how it was mysteriously connected to Obama's reelection on the
second term of presidency (New-Jersey
governor, Romney's big supporter, turned
to Obama after the disaster).
- I used SemRush just once, and now it's everywhere - every
contextual generated on-site commercial is about registering pro or guru
account.
- After all, it's a question of taste and our self
confidence. Some % of viewers will be in favor, some % will think that we are
cashing in. You either love it, or hate it - that's a very bold strategy, but seeing
how they all wanted "something new", "something that will stand
out", then why the hell not to try? After all, it's not like we try to use
the grief of hundreds of people as a marketing tool to attract customers -
maybe we do really aware and do really care? Maybe we don't care about our
income (well, obviously we do, but that's not the point) and charity to those
who are in need is our only goal? Why there is always someone in need, why didn't
you support them before? I'll tell you - 'cause we were blind before Sandy came
and were not even realizing how greedy and selfish we were. We were blind in
the same way as New Jersey governor Chris Christie was blind and supported
Romney before Sandy struck. It's our duty, our call now to realize how wrong we
were and try to somehow change the situation for better. And that is the only
reason why we are offering you to pre-order our next year training courses and
by doing this donate some money to Sandy victims rehabilitation.
- Anyway, Sandy variant was rejected. Someone thought that
it was too risky, and no one wanted to take those risks. Shame, 'cause i worked
really hard to write this little hypocritical e-mail. It was my little
masterpiece - but who cares if our possible financial stability is on stake?
четверг, 15 ноября 2012 г.
Thursday, 15th of November
15.11.2012
Slogan of the day: SEMRush
- Some tips about marketing graphical design that proved to
be useful:
- Use only pictures that are absolutely 100% legal. That means - are in corporate property of your company / drawn by yourself
- Make all text fonts similar. Avoid "cluttering" fonts, such as Times New Roman, and use only 1-2 text styles (one small and one big, or one bold and one italic, etc.)
- Be more soft in your marketing messages. Words like "buy", "purchase", "now", etc. are too strong to your potential clients tender years. Better replace them with "leverage", "try", "today".
- Be logical. Both graphical and textual parts of the advertisement should should be connected to each other and have some sort of narrative structure or logic. For example, if text is "having problems with X?" then it will be more convenient if the supporting image will be a graphical illustration of the problem, or an image of person having trouble with X. Also if the "catch" is "having trouble with X?" then at the end of your little advertising narrative should be some kind of answer or hint, that could show potential customers that the decision is your product. For example: "Then use Y!" or "Then contact with us and we will help you!".
- There this web service called SEMRush that is said to be
highly accurate in website researches. I checked it and was not disappointed -
by the entering of competitors domain and clicking "search" it gave
me a lot of very useful data, like competitors keywords, traffic, trend
statistic, etc. It was actually promising until I found out that only 20% of acquired
info are available for free. In order to get the whole pie and to be able to
export the results to excel I need to pay 400$+ something to them monthly.
Considering my bosses miserliness I will probably never get my hands to this
data, without which my masterpiece keyword-research would not be completed...
- SemRush was useful in two ways: first, it allowed me to
include in the list some of the competitors traffic-generating keywords that I've
overlooked before. Second, it did provide some data about exactly how much
traffic (in %) some of these keywords are generating. Some of the data that
SEMRush offers, though, proved to be incorrect (Google rank of competitors
websites was a complete mismatch to Rank Check results, which i tend to trust
more), so it's a questionable data resource anyway.
- Today I've received e-mail from Jesus Christ. Some antisemitic,
fanatical and intolerable fundamentalist Jesus Christ. I think I'll keep it for
history (and for possible miracle proof).
- EMERGENCY TASK: I was told to make an email invitation to
the next big exhibition-symposium that we are taking part in. Once again, the
seemingly easy task proved to be a little challenge. Since our popularity and
sailings are dropping, my boss decided to refuse our old safe and plain
"come visit our booth" strategy, and wrote an "attack"
text, that was sharp and tended to "hurt the nerve". We chat a little
and decided to include three points in our invitation e-mail:
- Sharp and edgy problems that, according to my boss, every project manager is facing
- Our solutions to these problems and some fake numbers from the last exhibition invitation
- Promise to donate 10% of our income to the victims of Sandy superstorm, if our clients will preorder our services for the next year (this branched from my idea to somehow tailor the disaster to our marketing strategy)
среда, 14 ноября 2012 г.
Wednesday, 14th of November
14.11.2012
Slogan of the day: Shortening the list
- Checking google rank on different keywords proved to be a
very effective and fruitful tactic: not only does it reveal your/competitors
website position in the most influential website top, but it also allows you to
get new insights about who your competitors are, how many of them are there and
what are their strategies. Since I've started this seemingly endless activity
over a week ago, I have broadened our competitors list and discovering potential
customers all the time. A week ago this list featured only ten names and URLs,
now it's more than 20 of them, and more potentially coming.
- Shortening the list is hard, but absolutely necessary
work. The main criteria for me is word overlapping: for example, if there are some
overlapping words, like "zzz" and "the zzz" or
"zzzs", than the last two of them will be deleted. That works with
one exception: if google ranking / annual visits columns show different numbers
for the seemingly overlapping words I save them both. For example, if for
"zzz" word we have #1 google ranking and one hundred visitors a year,
and for "zzz of yyy" our ranking is #10, but our competitors ranking
is high, I will probably leave both words as they are for further, even more
precise consideration. I will do so because apparently "zzz" and
"zzz of yyy" matches for two different users request's. Users looking
for "zzz" will most likely to find us, and that is good, but we must
not forget - somewhere out there there are also users looking for "zzz of
yyy", and we will lose them if not enough attention will be paid for the
appropriate word. Sure, their numbers are much less than of "zzz"
looking users, but they are, and that is the thing that matters most.
- Keyword list optimization continues, as I specify groups
in the following way: now group name consists of Topic (this is usually name of
specific area that is in our technical competition) and, through a hyphen -
Website Section (or sections - since some of the words with broader meaning
fits to several sections) that keyword fits the most.
вторник, 13 ноября 2012 г.
Tuesday, the 13th of November
13.11.2012
- Started the day with adjusting new keywords (found
yesterday through Google Analytics) that our visitors use to my keyword list.
Now it features more than 350+ words. Too big - so after acquiring some
additional data (year global searches, time per visit, our/competitors rank) I'll
clean it up and try to make shorter.
- Note on Year visits statistic: useful factor, but somewhat
imprecise. Since the google rank changes pretty rapidly and depends on many
different factors (media coverage, season events, etc.), and number of visits assumably
depends strongly on google rank factor, high/low Year visits number does not necessarily
mean that particular keyword is efficient or not. Much precise would be to show
the 12 month changing curve or diagram, that could illustrate changes in
keyword popularity depending on year period. But that would make my already
enormous table even bigger, so I'll reserve this idea for some other time.
Example to illustrate my words: key word "zzz" generated
20 visits to our website this year. That would probably mean that we have
pretty good google rank of this word, right? Wrong! According to Ranck Check we
are not even in the top 100 with this word. But how is it possible?! My
suggestion is that a few months ago we actually had a good rank position with
this word (probably due to some advertising campaign or new published press
release, etc.) but then the wind changed and we lost this rank, but traffic,
generated with "zzz" word were nevertheless calculated by Google. So I
think I'll try to be as careful as possible with this parameters
and will not rely on them too much.
- Seemingly simple task - to design a flyer for a magazine,
that would advertise some of our products - turned out to be not so simple. The
images I selected for this flyer was good, but they were not OUR'S. I was not allowed to use them because of possible copyright-violation.
My boss said that he could buy pictures of similar products from iSharephoto,
if I could find and identify them with the help of the engineer. iSharephoto
proved to be pretty misery - there were only two more-or-less appropriate photos,
and even they did not feature the product we needed to advertise, clear enough. Then I spent some hours digging in my predecessor's work
files and finally finished with some crappy, low dimension and scetchy
pictures. But these pictures were OUR'S - that meant no one will have to worry
about it's legalness. I did what I could to make it look like something
presentable and ended up with nothing-special-but-not-that-bad picture. It's
pity, that due to such limited resources aesthetic values of the end product
have to suffer...
понедельник, 12 ноября 2012 г.
Monday, the 12th of Nowember
12.11.2012
Slogan of the day: Eureka!
- Todays top priority: to calculate annual (or yearly?)
visits to our website through the keywords from the list I already have
- After literally hours of fruitless research I was almost
done, ready to surrender and get what is coming. I read a ton of articles on
the subject, even posted a question in Google+ - nothing. It's like it was some
sort of conspiracy - everybody, every stinking SEO guru was avoiding this theme
like it was nothing at all. And i was asking for such a small thing! How to
know a year keyword traffic for website - that's all! Thankfully, salvation
came in the shape of my beloved one with her angelic voice and tendering laugh.
I raised my eyes above, to admire her divine beauty, and suddenly noticed a
single dialogue bar in Google Analytics. It asked me to choose the date range -
and when i choose "from November 2011 to November 2012" it finally
gave me the results. Sweet, precious results that i was dreaming about for god
knows how long. And that was it, actually. Thank you, my Dear!
P.S.: I do realize
that it was incredibly stupid of me not to notice one of the main features of
the web service I was using. I am deeply ashamed of my stupidity and hope that
such a misunderstanding will never occur again.
- EMERGENCY TASK: my boss called me and asked to design new
look for some magazine advertisement about retrofitting and ORC.
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