ReitherCo was started in early 2007, with a single client, and a lot of ideas. Formed as solo consultant, the company has grown to include both part-and full-time staff and a network of preferred providers and contractors. Service offerings have expanded to include project management, affiliate program management, website design, graphic design, search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), and even hosted exchange e-mail service.

As the company continues to grow, and as our thoughts are always on marketing, we realize that the name that was appropriate when the company was a solo consultancy becomes less appropriate as the company grows and service offerings expand. ReitherCo, while unique and without implicit meaning (both good things), is not terribly easy to remember, pronounce, or spell - all important factors in word of mouth advertising. So, we’ve chosen a simple name that we believe is all those things: R3R. Here are some of the reasons we chose R3R as the new company name: >> Finish Reading This Post…

In the April 2008 Issue of the Harvard Business Review, Magid Abraham of comScore wrote an article titled “The Off-Line Impact of Online Ads.” In it, Abraham states that for all the measurability and trackability offered by online advertising, the numbers often “don’t tell the whole story.” The surprising news that his firm often finds that “online campaigns increase sales more at advertisers’ retail cash registers than on their websites.”

Even thought the imagery of “cash registers” brings a retail storefront to mind, but the report is based on over the experience of over 2 million consumers who use the comScore software. The report aggregates results from 18 studies in the finance, travel, telecommunications, and retail sectors. In one case a retailer whose majority of sales came from it’s brick-and-mortar store locations saw a greater increase in sales from off-line buyers who were exposed to online advertising than from online buyers exposed to online advertising.

This is promising news for those of us in the online marketing arena. Your online advertising statistics, as positive as they may be, may be leaving out the best part!

Some of the more popular posts on this blog lately are regarding virtual assistant (VA) firm reviews. They’re getting more and more views each day. But after being contacted by Chinese outsourcing firm BPOvia, and then today by another firm in India called Arctern I’m starting to think that a big chunk of the individuals reading these posts are actually from other outsourcing and VA firms, as opposed to people shopping for VA services.

As the solo-entrepreneur and small business market grows, so does the small business task outsourcing (and VA) market. And right now it seems like the VA market might be outpacing their customer base. That could mean that prices stand to go down (right now VA firms in China and India quote between $7.50 and $15.00 per hour). But it could also mean that every guy and gal with a computer and an internet connection can claim to be a “VA firm.” I just got a cryptic voicemail message from the firm I mentioned above - Arctern. I think they were asking if I wanted to give their services a trial run, but the caller’s accent was so thick I can’t be sure. Plus I can’t find any legitimate reviews of their service online.

So, unless you want to be a pioneer in the VA firms you deal with, be careful…especially if you’re looking to trust your VA with sensitive data and/or passwords. There are some reputable firms out there, but even the biggest ones, like Brickwork, still have a few kinks to work out of their process. Anyway, I’ll continue to post my reviews about the VA firms I work with; what’s your experience been?

You might think that any book on internet marketing or performance marketing would be out of date by the time it was printed. And where a particular technology (say Ebay or Google AdWords) is concerned, that might be true. But internet marketing is still marketing - and regardless of the technologies, the fundamentals of marketing - even on the internet - remain largely unchanged from the dot com boom days. Here are a few internet marketing books that have stood the test of time in many ways: >> Finish Reading This Post…

Do you try to keep all your socks in one drawer…or all your canned food in one pantry? Seems normal to me, because that’s the way I do it. I kind of treat my domains like socks and canned food - I keep them all registered in one place (at one registrar). Otherwise, not only do the domains get to be hard to keep track of, but you have to remember login/passwords at more than one registrar, you have to learn how to navigate each registrar’s website, etc. That means when I buy a domain from someone who has it registered elsewhere, to move that domain to my registrar of choice, I have to do a transfer. A lot of people do this. Seems to me this process should be pretty easy. I mean, it usually is…

1. get an ‘authorization code’ from the registrar where the domain is currently registered
2. initiate and authorize the transfer at the “destination” registrar (where the domain will end up)
3. wait a bit until the transfer is complete; receive an e-mail notification when the process is done

I say “usually” because last week I was involved in two domain transfers. One for a client; one for myself. Both domains were being transferred to the same registrar - I was transferring a domain for a client, from one of his accounts with Register.com to another account with GoDaddy.com. I was also transferring a domain I had just purchased from the previous owner’s account with DomainDiscover.com to my own GoDaddy.com account. You’d think my transfer would be more convoluted than my client’s - I mean my domain was changing ownership - but no. His transfer has been a pain in the arse. How could that be, you say?

The transfer from Register.com was just amazingly, and unnecessarily drawn out. Somehow Register.com managed to turn a 1-day process into a 2-week process. Phenominal. Phenominally annoying. Here’s how Register.com pulled it off: >> Finish Reading This Post…

I’ve been looking all over for something I’ll call a ’business directory software solution’ (a customizable directory that I can use to organize business listings online). I’d like to integrate a business directory into an existing website, but I don’t want to build the directory software myself. But I’m surprised at how hard it is to find a good soltion for such a common need.

Adding a niche business directory to your website can be a good way to generate interest (or even revenue). For example, if you have a website about swimming pools, by adding a business directory - maybe a listing of swimming pool contractors, by county - to that site, you provide a sort of niche yellow pages to your viewers. If your site gets popular enough you may even be able to charge businesses to be listed in your niche business directory.

You can, of course, always build (or have someone build) the software for the directory you want. Or maybe you can buy a packaged solution? This is known as the “build vs. buy” conundrum. With so many technologies these days, it’s often easier to buy a good packaged solution and maybe tailor it to your needs than it is to build one from scratch. I think a business directory is probably a good candidate for the “buy” option, but I’m still looking for that slam dunk provider.

It looks like there are several options out there, but very little unbiased information about any of them…so they’ve been difficult to compare side by side. There are also a number of “link directory” software solutions, but those aren’t quite what I’m looking for - link directories are generally very basic in terms of the information they give about each listing. For example, Best of the Web (BOTW) is a link directory. Yelp and Citysearch are business directories. I’m looking to create a niche business directory, with substantial information listed about each business in the directory. >> Finish Reading This Post…

In an earlier post, I mentioned a few SEM tools that I plan to evaluate. In comparing the costs of those tools, I found that Clickable is about the most reasonably priced - they target small clients and agencies with modest budgets. So, I thought I’d start with them. But don’t get too excited about an evaluation in this post. I was totally blinded by the design of the Clickable site.

I mean, from a distance, or even in this thubmnail image, it probably looks like an attractive design. But up close, as you try to read the words or interpret the graphs on the page, you’ll find your eyes squinting and your head hurting. >> Finish Reading This Post…

Since Ad:Tech in San Francisco - where, as I said, I spent a lot of time looking for great marketing solutions for small businesses - I’ve been spending some time evaluating those solutions. One of the products I was looking for was a search engine marketing (SEM) tool to help manage accounts across Google, Yahoo, and MSN (and others). Having a central tool to manage your pay per click (PPC) campaign is great in theory, but it’s a lofty goal to provide a useful layer on top of all those ad networks, so I’m a little skeptical of the offerings…but here’s what I’ve found so far. >> Finish Reading This Post…

If you put banner advertisements on your website, one of your goals should obviously be to get visitors to click on those ads (and then depending on your agreement with the advertiser, maybe purchase something or perform some other action on the advertiser’s site). But it all starts with a click - and there are a lot of factors that can influence the rate at which visitors click your ads (called “click through rate” (CTR)). Two major factors are:

• ad relevance (how well the ad is suited to your site’s audience)
• ad placement (where the ad is located on a page)

Maximizing relevance is a real art, and comes with understanding your audience demographic. Placement, on the other hand, consists of a finite list of options. And I just saw a great example of placing ads conspicuously, but not obtrusively - on a favorite website of mine: Pandora.com

Generally, when it comes to display ads, proper placement is all about finding that balance between annoying in your face pop-ups and other floating ads (which get attention, but tend to be a nuissance) and subtle, easily overlooked ads (which don’t inhibit the user experience, but also don’t generate any revenue for you or value for the advertiser). Ads embedded in the text content of a site (in-text ads) are often considered a good balance of noticeable, but unobtrusive placement. But I’d like to nominate the “pseudo-floating” banner as an even more effective means of achieving the right balance.

Pandora.com has made excellent use of this “pseudo-floating” banner placement. The banners on their site seem to overlap the visual frames of the site - making the banners look like they’re floating (above other content) - but in this case there is no other page content behind the banner (so I call these pseudo-floating banners). I don’t have any of Pandora’s click-through numbers to back up my statement, but I think it’s brilliant.

By the way, Pandora, as a free music service, is brilliant, too. Whether you care about CTR or not, the site is worth a poke around.

It’s been estimated that 65% - 85% of small businesses in the US don’t even have a website. But those in that growing minority are increasingly looking for enterprise-level services (like e-mail marketing, website analytics, ad serving, and customer resource management (CRM)) at small business prices. The challenge is that the “best of breed” offerings are largely still only made available to medium-sized and larger companies. But the great thing about technology is that it only gets better and cheaper with time. So, small businesses are starting to see great enterprise-class offerings available at small business price points, but identifying those offerings can be tough. One of the things I do for clients is find and evaluate those “best of breed” products and services for small web businesses, and put the “winners” to use - to promote the clients’ brands online. Wading through all the merchants isn’t always easy, but working the decision of which vendor to work with can easily make or break your marketing efforts. >> Finish Reading This Post…