More online marketing advice for success in a recession Posted by Rachelle Money on 04 November 2008

Ken McCarthy made his debut on the last Wordtracker newsletter with an article on the rules of online marketing at a time of recession. He organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on web commerce back in 1994 and has since helped entrepreneurs harness the power of the web.

Our readers responded warmly to McCarthy's advice.

Toddie Downs said it was a “great article”. “This is one of the first I've read that advises facing today's market realities and forging on using an approach that acknowledges that businesses are wanting to cut costs and need more value for their dollars.”

The article seems to have built confidence with our readers and offered a more positive spin on what is seen as a terribly negative economic climate.

Michael pitched in on the comments section by saying that going through a “bad spell” can actually bring renewed focus to a business.

He said: “A lot of this advice is sound even outside a crisis. It took a bad spell for me to realize some very glaring problems I was having with pricing, for example. The liquidity was masking the issue, as there was money coming and going out. It's also a good time to look at how much time is spent in various tasks, and make choices there too.”

Tony Sun made an excellent point when he alluded to the fact that if businesses cannot respond to the bad times, how can they be prepared for the good? “If we don't optimize our business now, we cannot possibly be ready when there is an up-turn,” he said. He added:” We would like to see even more articles on how to optimize in the present economy.” We will do our best, Tony.

Mark Nunney contributed another sterling article on why SEO for profit must target groups of keywords.

Nunney's articles seem to really get our readers thinking and asking questions, which we love to see. Kathryn Lagden was first off the mark by asking; “How do you measure effectiveness of your keyword niche? I'm wondering if there are any tools to look at where your particular keyword niche is in the search engine results.”

Mark Nunney responded: “Your analytics tool can measure each keyword niche’s visitors’ pages/visit, average time on site, bounce rate and whatever measures of response you configure it for. And of course the number of visitors, as you mention. You can also measure ranking by taking some sample keywords from your niche and tracking your sites rankings for them.”

David thought Nunney had a “really great concept – a ratio of visits to actual keywords” but hypothesized, “I think more of a focus such as higher ratio leads to this or a low ratio means a lot of long tail keywords.”

Nunney put his advice to good use again by suggesting to David he use [Wordtracker]{/) to find the length of the tail - the potential size of each keyword niche.

He went on to explain: “Your site stats tell you how profitable that niche is for your site and how successful you currently are. The more successful you currently are (in a niche) the easier more success will be (in that same niche).

“I think we could work out some fancy formulas to interpret the visits:keywords ratio but it would need to take account of the size of a niche’s long tail.

“Whether at site or niche level, in general, a high visits:keywords ratio indicates an unexploited niche.”