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May 09

Marketing Sherpa Conference in New York

It’s a traveling week for me again. I flew in to New York on Sunday night with Neal Bergstrom, the President of LDSMedia, and we’ll be heading out Wednesday morning. From there I’m heading to a Corporate Alliance Summit in Park City until Friday. The Conference has been very interesting so far, it’s on Subscription and EMarketing for Content sites which covers almost all the websites we own.

There were a lot of great ideas presented at the conference today, there are a few that were so good I’ve been architecting them into the Knowledge Manager so we’ll be able to use them by default whenever we need to. While working on this, it has highligted for me once again what a powerful competive advantage we’ve created by investing in building a modular content system that has centralized code and module management. Adding these features and several others into the Knowledge Manager will allow us to have a really powerful marketing system ‘out of the box’. We’ll soon be able to apply all of these concepts to any of our sites at the same time.

Here are some of the ideas I’ve been working with:

1) Call Center based Keyword Tracking: This is mostly applicable to our subscription sites, but a system was decribed today that allowed a company to track their phone conversion rates by providing a dynamic phone number based on the keyword that they searched for and were referred by. The KM will need to have access to a database of phone numbers related to keywords. It will look up the phone number for the keyword and display that number to the user. This will actually need a second integration piece with our Asterisk phone server system in order to track what calls came in on what number. It will also require another interface for our keyword marketers – they’ll need to be able to tell us what keywords we are running campaigns on. We’ll have a generic number displayed for all referalls that aren’t based on a keyword. This will give us the ability to generate reports showing us what keywords are having the highest phone conversion rates.

2) A/B Page Testing: This will allow us to create two pages that are slightly different, whether it’s the wording or the layout or something else, and track which ones have a higher conversion rate or click through rate, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish on that page. This will actually be fairly easy to implement in the KM, the more involved part will be putting together methods of tracking and reporting which page performed better. In the discussion today about this, it was pointed out that an important feature of this is using cookies to ensure that people see the same page (whether A or B) on each subsequent visit, otherwise the site will seem very sporadic.

3) Another interesting idea today was selling sponsorships on certain pages. I think this would be most applicable on WorldHistory.com or SECDataMine. In order to do this, and some of the other plans I have for the KM, we will need to build a way to create landing pages for specific keywords in the KM. For example, we frequently get searches for the Statue of Liberty on WorldHistory.com and the page people are taken to shows about 450 results in our search engine. To make the site more valuable to the searcher though, we should build a very informative page for ‘Statue of Liberty’ that would read more like a book report or educational article. It would be full of links to pages on and OFF of worldhistory, would have several pictures of the statue and other information. It would also show the search results so people could just browse those if they needed to. But, by doing this, we would hopefully provide the searcher with all the information they needed in one place. By examining the server logs, we would also be able to figure out which search results people had clicked on after performing that search so that we made sure we included that information in our article(s) on the landing page. We could then sell ‘sponsorships’ for that page, perhaps to a company that sold Statue of Liberty replicas or something.

So, those were the main takeaways I got out of the conference today. More to come tomorrow, actually, a lot more should come tomorrow. There are some sessions I’m pretty excited about.

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