I don’t care whether you have an Internet Marketing budget, whether you SEO’d your site, or your brand is so well-known you don’t need to make any effort to get customers. If you have not done proper keyword research (that would probably be 99% of Israeli companies), then you may be missing one of the easiest entry points to more profits. Read more »

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is understandably a hot topic for anyone that is involved in marketing their company, product or service online. After all, with so many potential customers relying on Google, Yahoo and other leading search engines for finding what they need online, if your company or product are not in the top results, you are missing out on a tremendous potential customer pool. So why am I cautioning against the Israeli obsession with SEO? Read more »

Sometimes, we feel like we are providing therapy to our clients — and thus sprouted the idea of offering Internet Marketing Therapy. So many times marketing managers or marcom directors, particularly in Israel, come to us with this overwhelmed look on their faces — where should I start? SEO, PPC, corporate blogs, integrate some Web 2.0 applications .  . .? It’s understandable why they are overwhelmed. There is tremendous pressure and real need to succeed online. All of the tactics mentioned are terrific tools and everyone is talking about them. But they are just tactics - they are not strategies. Implementing a corporate blog could be a wonderful idea. But it will be much more wonderful when it is part of an overall strategy and not just a piecemeal tactic to make some noise, boost traffic a bit and show the boss that something is happening. Read more »

I really believe that there is nothing as powerful as video to deliver a message. I keep telling my clients that they have to muster the video tool of communications. But first, I need to experiment and understand the essential of this medium. Remember how Power point presentations use to be a big deal to make? Video is really so much more direct and soon to be available.  We are tottaly exposed to this language, so it’s only a matter of time until we’ll main stream it into our marketing mix.

I got some really good tips from some of you after the “humus and SSL .”  Most common feedback was “don’t worry too much about the quality, just get more clips out there. So this time I decided to go pretty far with the expertizing idea by creating a tip giving voice called “tachles” talking about the freemium business model. Now, I know there is a lot to talk about and the goal of the clip was to only touch the issue on the surface and to provoke you to talk to us if youwish to explore the freemium model further. This one was a lot of fun to make together with my daughter and friends. I have 2 more tahkles clips in the oven. Take a look at it and please send me your thoughts and feedbacks about the concept.

Dror did it. In a less than 2 weeks, bought the equipment, defined the concept and produced a great clip. This is not just Internet marketing bla bla — this is real content, a real tip about SSL that can help anyone involved in managing an Internet site. This was simply one of the issues that we hear coming up all of the time and Dror decided it is time to set people straight. The clip is quite impressive for the first time ever doing this. Check out the special effects - Dror had a a great time with it. I can only imagine how much better the quaility is going to get as we master the production side. And we have so much stuff to teach about Internet Marketing to both our Israel and International audience. This first clip is in Hebrew. Let us know if you think we should produce in English as well. For now, take a 4 minute break and watch. I think you are really going to enjoy it. The Truth About SSL

So Dror bought the digital video camera and a nice tripod and we are in the movie-making business. Well, not exactly, but we have the basics and are wasting no time in getting started. Since we want to start churning out videos that will provide valuable information to our audience and will help promote WebWhile as a company, we are not considering bringing in a professional film crew.  We envision creating one or two videos each week - doing it with a professional production company would not only be costly, it would require dedicating too much time to something that, after all, we are offering to you for free. Read more »

So if a picture is worth a thousand words how much is a video worth?  We are soon going to find out. Dror is out at the store picking up a new digital video camera with a ridiculous sized hard drive as I write these very words. After much delay, I gave in and agreed that we should get yet another electronic device that will potentially complicate our lives. The excuse is that we just can’t go on this way without making some videos for this website. We tell each and every client that they must include video on their sites to create a truly compelling visitor experience - no matter what business they are in. So it’s time the shoemaker got his own kids some shoes. So to all of our fans out there - get prepared to start to get to know us a whole lot better. Think I can convince Dror to only film me on my “good hair” days?

If you manage a website or are somehow involved in online marketing, so there is no doubt you know what keywords are. But the mistake that many people make is to be obsessed with a few or even several keywords and then to believe that they need to focus on getting ranked for just those keywords. For example, a company in the bicycle business may focus on getting ranked for a highly competitive term like “bicycle”. They may believe that appearing in the top results of the search engines for “bicycle” is their best opportunity to bring traffic to their site and convert visits to sales. However, they may are very mistaken! First of all, they will need to make a tremendous effort to achieve high ranking for such a competitive term - over 45 million results in Google. Second, I am not so sure that most people who search for “bicycle” are ready to purchase. Such a generic search is just as likely to be about research.

More and more, potential visitors are using keyword phrases to search — to the point that the average search today is about 4 words! So start thinking in terms of phrases, not words.

Now there are 2 key things for the bicycle shop to consider if they are serious about their efforts to gain sales through organic search. Read more »

Sales Message, Layout, Design, User Experience, Search Engine Visibility, Credibility . . . All of these elements and more must be taken into consideration when building your online presence! But it is very rare, even on today’s “mature” Internet, to find many sites that even begin to approach succeeding to reach this balance. And you may be surprised that i am saying this but, it actually is due to a lack of trying. That’s right — all those marketing directors, Marcom experts, VPs of Business Development . . . None of them are even trying to reach this balance because they simply are not aware of how important it is for their businesses. They still don’t recognize the value and the importance of establishing the right online position for their organizations. But that is good news — because it’s not because it is too hard to achieve this balance. It merely involves getting focused and making the effort. And anyone reading this has the ability to get there.

When clients come to us about “SEO” I find that many of these companies are not there yet. They want to be number 1 on Google and to see their site traffic skyrocket. But often they forget about the basics – about building a compelling experience for their visitors, about ensuring that they capture some footprint and about using their Internet presence to truly conduct business. Recently, we had a client who launched a beautiful site a few months ago and was disappointed that he did not get inundated with new leads. People told him, “ You need to SEO your site.” He ended up calling us, among many other vendors. But before we jumped into the optimization, we explained that we must first look under the hood and find out what is going on - on his site, in his business, in his market and among his competitors. We looked at his overall goals and at the opportunities that exist for expanding his business internationally via a strong online position.  Now, his CMS is being overhauled to align with his needs, his target audience is being well defined to ensure the site provides them with a compelling experience and his site will be positioned to maximize exposure to relevant traffic. Further, we opened this non-hi-tech business man’s eyes to the realm of opportunities for his traditional brick and mortar business on the Internet.
When I see what goes on with many SEO companies, I am reminded of a bad experience I had in a home renovation Read more »