Think about paper clips for a moment. They are about the most basic thing you will find in your desk drawer. When you consider your marketing, try to imagine selling paper clips. You probably do not think much about what brand you are buying when you need to replenish your paper clip supply. This is likely true of your product or service, too. Unless people have a good reason to remember you, it will be a lot harder to grow your paper clip market share and to become more prosperous.

If you challenged multiple companies with a truckload of paper clips to sell, somebody would sell out sooner than the rest. One would almost surely hit their stride and empty that truckload of paper clips before the others, and there must be a reason.

Have you been here before? I do not just mean here at my blog, but have you been faced with questions or doubts about your efforts. Maybe you question whether people understand the intent and purpose of your blog, or maybe you question the intent and purpose of the blogs you read. These are legitimate considerations for a lot of bloggers, whether producers or readers.

I am a big proponent of blogging. In fact, if you just google “reasons to blog”, you can see that I am practically a poster child for the benefits of blogging. If you need encouragement, I suggest giving my list of “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” a thorough read. If you need blogging tools, I would recommend “6 Essential Blogging Tools for Bloggers and Non-Bloggers“.

Let’s face it, great blogging is hard work. I have actually considered making a video of my steps to produce a blog article, but then I want to break my own fingers just to avoid the temptation of all the video editing on top of the other efforts.

What does it take to produce a blog article? Here is a one-sentence rundown for you: I get a bright idea, then I research, write, print, proofread, edit, print, give it to an editor, edit again, find a graphic, edit the graphic, categorize it, tag it, keyword it, write a description, produce an excerpt, record a podcast, upload podcast, tag the podcast, preview the article, edit it, preview it again, publish it, tweet it, facebook it, linkedin it, stumble it, reddit it, ping it, diigo it, mixx it delicious it, then watch my web stats and keep my fingers crossed while hoping that some people will digg it, stumble it, facebook it, and etecetera.

Do you check your statistics to see if your web traffic has moved up since you checked it an hour ago? Do you ever feel just a tinge of obsession over your Google Analytics or Clicky statistics? Do you wait impatiently for the next update of your score on Alexa, Compete, or Quantcast? Do you get frustrated when your PostRank score is a day behind and you just have to know if they actually picked up on all of your hard work?

Stop it! Just stop it!

I know how easy it is to feel better when you go and see how (or if) people are interacting with your website or your social media profiles. It is actually very important information to know. Knowing your statistics, and understanding what they mean is extremely valuable for effective online marketing. The problem arises when it is taken to a level where productivity is lost.

The Internet has changed. Wait, scratch that … the world has changed, and the people of the world are fully engrossed in “The Information Age”. Maybe it is even beyond that, and perhaps we can now effectively call this “The Static Age” because of the massive level of static we must sort through to hear or be heard. Right now, today, there are likely 42 squillion people writing about your industry on a daily basis, and unless you are the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, you will have a hard time capturing their interest.

It is time to take a closer look at an important metric of your website traffic. Who is coming to visit, and will they return? Did you do something that knocked their socks off? Did you have something to say that totally blew them away enough to subscribe and come back? Allow me to explain why this matters, and what you can do about it.

Good Bloggers Know and Care About Readership Churn

The number of bloggers in 2010 has shot the moon. If you don’t believe me, that is fine. I should not need to prove this with numbers, because you surely already know it. You probably already saw another blog (or three) in the last 1 minute and 22 seconds. The blast of information is fast, furious, and growing like a flu pandemic. Some of it is great information, but most of it will interest you as much as a knitting class interests a race car driver.

Much of the massive blast of information simply does not apply to your life. Even if it is reliably useful information, I think we can agree that a lot of what we see on the Internet is filed away in the “time wasted” category and we will not be going back to read more.

So what about you? Will you find yourself filed away in the bottom of your readers’ Internet history? If you want to avoid this, you must get a couple things straight right now. In my short list, I will include that you must be useful, pay attention to your readers, give them a great reason to come back, and do not disappoint them when and if they do.

TweetMeme is huge, and bloggers know it. It is a wildly popular way to help people share the brilliant content that you have worked so hard to produce. You will find the TweetMeme button on any popular blogs. Another thing you will often see on blogs is a row of Sociable links. In case you are not familiar, Sociable is a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to add social sharing links to a blog. I use both of these, and I like them. Kudos to Joost de Valk for creating Sociable and fav.or.it for creating TweetMeme.

Sociable is really cool, but the “Tweet This” button really left me with a need for more. By default, it did not shorten the URL, add a title, or include the “RT @murnahan” that I wanted. So, I thought it would be cool to add a TweetMeme button within my Sociable links rather than to have the extra bulk of both of them at the end of each of my articles. Including TweetMeme and Sociable together just made it look a bit nicer and it keeps all of those sharing links right there together in one place.

I am such a fan of this product that I want to tell you this right upfront: I have not been hired by Wibiya to market for them, and I do not have anything at stake here. My reason for blogging my review of Wibiya is nothing of the sort. It is just so cool that I was compelled to give my testimonial. Now, shouldn’t we all be so fortunate to have fans who feel like that?

Wibiya is kind of a funny name, and it may not just roll off the tongue the way Twitter, Facebook, or Squidoo does. All the same, I think this is a social media service you will see in use a lot more in the future.

Website Toolbars Are Not Created Equal

I have used toolbars on various websites before, and some were pretty cool. I have even scripted my own website toolbars from scratch and made them work really nicely with social sharing links, custom URL shortener, and all of the neat stuff you can pack into the little 50-80 pixel space you would expect from a toolbar. I am kind of geeky like that. I very often choose the hard way of programming, by doing it all myself from beginning to end. That way I get the exact result I am looking for, and not include all of the extra junk that most off-the-shelf programming code will include for meeting every possible scenario on every possible type of website. As you can see at the bottom of each page on my blog, I have chosen Wibiya on this website, and for some good reasons.

I woke up to another Monday today. Monday is the day I ask myself the question again, “Are you reaching the right people?” It goes a bit deeper when I start asking “Are you reaching them with the right message?” If I can answer both of these with the affirmative, the next step is to repeat it and try to be sure the message continues to reach the right people, with the right message, and at the right time. Getting the right time means doing it again and again until their time is right. At the top of my week, I realize that it all really begins with reaching the right people.

How To Reach the Right People … The Influencers!

I think for a lot of people trying to reach a market, the question of how to reach the right people totally confounds them. It is actually a bit tricky and it takes some serious thought. It gets easier with training, experience, and research, but it is always a challenging part of marketing. Good marketing often means reaching the buyer themselves, but the best marketing often means reaching the people who influence the buyer. It is called influence marketing. Knowing who is an influencer and who is a buyer is an important step to knowing the right message to deliver. Getting it wrong means wasting a lot of time and money.

Have you ever been in a conversation and somebody used an acronym that you did not recognize? You just kind of keep it there in your head for a moment and hope they say something that will clue you in on just what the heck they were talking about when they uttered that string of letters. Then, if you cannot figure it out, you may whip out your phone and google it while nonchalantly acting like you were checking an important message. I will offer up a new acronym for skilled Internet marketers that will be more memorable and better reflect the work we do. First, I would like to explain why I think the “SEO” acronym should be laid to rest.

Exactly what is “SEO” and why in the name of all things sensible do we still use this acronym? SEO can stand for either search engine optimization (the services) or search engine optimizer (the person), but it actually encompasses a much broader spectrum of Internet marketing services and technologies. It has morphed dramatically over the years, as marketers’ understanding and use of the Internet has changed, and as many greenhorn SEO came to flood the market. The use of “SEO” became popular enough that I suppose it sounded better to a lot of people than the term “Internet Marketer” or “Profit Engineer” and so instead of SEO being considered a sub-category of Internet marketing skills, it is often used to represent the whole of Internet marketing. It became more of a meme than an actual skill set, and due to saturation of its use, the real meaning has been muted and bastardized.

I have a request that you do not be a stooge, and that you do not treat SEO and Internet marketing professionals as stooges either.

During a phone call a moment ago, I was inspired to point something out about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing that is obvious to me, but clearly some people do not already understand. This is an extremely basic SEO lesson.

I make a point of asking people who contact me for Internet marketing a very simple question as follows: “How did you find me?” Of course I already know the answer, but so many people do not realize that we can track everything online.

If you are not going to eat that Digg fame, may I have a bite?

I was feeling a bit down about Twitter yesterday after remembering those days when Twitter was the next big Digg.com-like traffic-generating left-coast geek craze. If you were there, you would know it as the days when everybody who Kevin Rose (of Digg.com) had worked so hard to encourage to get their moment of Digg fame had become Twitter-stunned. It was back when anybody who had been kicked off Digg.com professed that tweets were the new diggs, and it was time to adapt to the new rules.

What The Heck is Digg?

For my readers unfamiliar with Digg, I will explain it in simple terms. Digg.com is a massively important … no, wait … monumental piece of Internet marketing history. It is a largely bullshitopotomus platform for zit-faced Star Wars fans to gain importance by stroking each other’s ego. The primary demographic are 17 year olds pretending to be 30, and 45 year olds still wearing Scooby Doo pajamas. Digg users can be largely summed up as semi-adult with $200 per hour talent getting paid $13 per hour to submit “diggable” stuff without looking like a “business digger”. They will carefully digg a squillion things per day while they sit in their mother’s basement passing time until she kicks them out on the street to get a real job and stop playing on that damn computer.