Analytics

One of the most important things I learned in my internet marketing practice is that you must be able to track the traffic to your website in order to keep track of how your efforts are going.  The way we practiced this was by using Google Analytics.  I was able to find out that the majority of my site traffic was the result of organic google search results.  This was interesting because we tried to drive more traffic to our websites by practicing internet marketing using Google AdWords although somehow more traffic came from my organic placement in google search results pages. This evidently means that my keyword usage or ad bids were not managed correctly for my AdWords campaign while my search engine optimization for certain pages was effective.

Strategic Internet Marketing

This class MKTG 470 taught by Theresa B. Clarke was one of the most valuable I have taken in my college career.  While it’s hard to say exactly which element of this class was the most important, I think it is the practical hands on application of all the internet marketing skills learned.  Being able to practice and learn how all of these tools from Google AdWords and Analytics to using Godaddy.com, learning about the value of SEO vs. PPC.  These are concepts that could be taught in a conceptual or textbook type of way and I would have probably received a better grade in this class. Instead we got hands on experience and practice with all of these tools and got the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and understand the real world application of how these skills and tools fit together.  This type of experience, while difficult, was invaluable in my opinion.

My future in Internet Marketing

Moving forward it will be interesting to see which skills from this class I will end up using in my future career.  I enjoy the webpage development and customization part of this experience more than PPC or SEO marketing elements because it allows me to use my creative side more than the true marketing aspects of internet marketing.  I have already started working on the webpage of my current employer by developing a mobile friendly platform that would allow tenants easy access to the pages most frequented from cell phones.  I guess it is safe to say that only time will tell but given the experience I got from this class, I am confident practicing all areas of internet marketing.

Everyone in our class has been trying to optimize one of our webpages for the phrase “love JMU”. One thing I have noticed is that I am not very good at it. After all of my efforts, my webpage is not even in the top 20 search pages while other students have made it organically onto the first page of search results.

My efforts included using love JMU 3 times in the body of my webpage and titling the page link as lovejmu.  In addition I used love JMU as the description and keyword for the whole page in the SEO plugin for wordpress and as a description for my photo on that page.  It is kind of frustrating because while searching for my page I came across other students in my class whose websites appeared multiple times in the first 20 search pages. I guess I must be missing something in my optimization strategy, I’m just not exactly sure what that may be.

Crawler FX was not impressed with my performance either because for the keyword “love JMU” my webpage only received a grade of 22 out of 100 which is in the poor range of their scale.  I have learned a lot about search engine optimization even in my failure, most importantly I have learned exactly how painstaking the whole process is.  I now fully understand and respect the work of SEO specialists although I think I have learned that it is not my forte.

Last Thursday (03/29/12) we had a guest speaker come to my Internet Marketing class to speak with us.  Our guest speaker was Lindsay Crone, a Creative Director for The Search Agency and recent JMU marketing grad.  Lindsay was a great speaker, she gave us her career history along with things she had learned both personally and professionally along the way.  She gave all sorts of advise on everything from managing your own fears and expectations to making yourself a more marketable candidate for job interviews.

Lindsay had taken MKTG 470 while at James Madison University but she was impressed at the level of experience we now get.  When she took this class they did not have to opportunity to run Google AdWords campaigns which is an incredibly valuable skill to have.  As my classmates and I reach the end of our college careers and start looking forward to our professional careers, it was good to hear the insights of someone who has recently been through this transition.

Last Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day. The first three things that come to mind for most Americans on this day are the color green, drinking, and the Irish.  It’s amazing how huge this day has become from a marketing standpoint. You see green everything, green bagels, green cream cheese, green beer.  I even went to McDonald’s only to find out, to my distaste, that heinz had made green ketchup for this holiest of days.  What is this infatuation with green.  The only correlation between green and St. Patrick is the fact that he was a missionary and bishop in Ireland.  It is said that he used the 3 leaf clover to explain the holy trinity to his audiences.

To me it seems as though this saint has become the patron saint of drinking in excess.  Its hard to figure out exactly how, but I’ve been trying to figure it out and here is my thought.  We have taken the patron saint of Ireland’s day and made it to be a celebration of Ireland rather than St. Patrick himself.  So we look at Ireland and in stereotypical fashion attribute it to the old “drinking and fighting Irish” idea.

I am all for St. Patricks Day and most of the festivities but it is interesting to see how a saint’s day, that very little is actually known about other than him living in the 5th century, has turned into such anIrish heritage, green everything, and pub crawling celebration.

Today we had a new assignment to explore Twitter. Having never really used Twitter it was a little confusing and I will admit it took me a while to understand. I started “following” people and looking at the way their tweets were formatted and then I started to figure it out.

One attribute I am impressed by is the “#” tag. This symbol make it easy to track topics of interest. I have been confused as to why that symbol has been showing up more and more in television commercials (for example “#basketballneverstops” at the end of a Nike ad campaign during the NBA lockout) but now it all makes sense. When someone uses that tag it essentially creates a network for the topic.  This provides a way to track how many people and who is mentioning certain topics which is an incredibly valuable tool for companies and marketers.

I like what I see so far from Twitter but I’m sure it will take a little longer before I completely get the hang of it. Follow and see how my tweets progress @Mark_Millie.

I’ve been exploring new theme options for this blog over the last week and I think I’ve finally found one that I’m going to stick with.  The final theme is..(sound the drumroll).. Mantra 1.7.4 by Cryout Creations. After looking at so many different options I realized the feature that was most valuable to me in choosing my new theme, Customization. I came to the conclusion that I want to be able to change the “look” of my blog at any given time and in any given way.

The Mantra theme by Cryout Creations gives me the tools to do just that! I can tweak everything from the font size, color, header picture, background color or picture, and any combination of these options and many more.  Prior to this theme change I was using Delicious by StudioPress, which was a good for a beginner on WordPress. The only issue I had with the Delicious theme was with uploading a custom favicon for my page.  Once I switched to Mantra it was very easy, which is just another perk of the theme change.  I’ll continue to post about Mantra as I figure out new tricks that may help other Mantra users.