Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about online marketing knows traffic is worthless if you can't deliver compelling copy. Good copy earns search rankings. Good copy earns links. Good copy convinces visitors to stop shopping and start buying. Unfortunately, good copy isn't easy to write. That's why the Eisenberg brothers have put together a fantastic list of more than one hundred copywriting articles divided by topic and spread out over two lengthy posts.

The first post covers topics like writing headlines, customer-focused copy, building trust, blogging, finding copywriters and more. The second post dives into word choice, formatting, personas, branding and quite a few other topics.

It's not the type of resource you can read through in an afternoon, but it's certainly one worth bookmarking and working through as you have some free time.

(Hat tip to John Jantsch)

The great thing about the Internet in 2007 is the ability to integrate several different types of media into your site. Faster internet connections, cheap bandwidth and free third party multimedia hosting services have made it easy for even the smallest of small businesses to work multi-media into their sites. Since it's well known that different people absorb information in different ways, smart small businesses are looking at the best ways to leverage social media and Web 2.0 technologies to better serve their customers.

Scott Baradell has a nice post over at Marketing Profs today exploring the best ways to integrate video into your site. Scott's article is targeted at public relations types, but his concepts apply to general small business marketing as well.

Take a look at the factoids he's put together:

• Most Web users watch online video today. In fact, 1 in 5 say they stream video every day. (Source: Pew Internet)
• Americans don?t get their news from static print sources anymore. Only 13 percent say they get their news from newspapers and magazines, compared to 40 percent who use the Internet and 32 percent who watch TV. (Source: Zogby)
• The media has a high demand for video content. Use of video by newspaper Web sites is expected to double over the next 12 months. (Source: Borrell Associates)

I'm not surprised to read any of those facts, but they do serve as reinforcement that well-integrated multi-media can only improve the usability and stickiness of your site. Heck, the new iPhones tout the fact that they have YouTube capabilities built right in. If that doesn't tell you the techies are interested in video, I don't know what would.

What do I Gain From Adding Multi-Media

There are quite a few benefits to adding audio, video and images to your site.

• Increased Search Presence - With universal search growing in popularity, things like video clips hosted on YouTube give you yet another chance to get your brand into the search results.


• Stronger Sales Pitch - Sometimes, you really need video to share the full experience of using your products. Why simply tell them about the wonders of your latest widget when you can show them?


• Portability - When you use sites like YouTube and Flickr to host your multimedia, you make it easy for bloggers to pick them up and share them with their own readers.


• You Spark Conversation - YouTube and Flickr, the two most popular sites for hosting your media both have strong communities and community features surrounding them. You can subscribe to a user's feed and you can comment on their work. Small businesses who tend to these community features build up a more loyal following and gain valuable input from those who comment. Plus, if you serve up enough interesting content, folks are likely to sign-up to get notifications when you upload new things. These services basically act as another feed outlet for your work.

It Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune

When small businesses hear "multimedia" they tend to think "I can't afford that." Not true. Multimedia creation is pretty cheap nowadays. A simple microphone and a free program like Audacity can have you putting together a podcast in no time. Digital cameras are now quite affordable and many will also shoot several minutes of video. With free software from Picasa to manage your photos and your videos, it's easy to get them optimized and uploaded to sites like Flickr and YouTube.

It Doesn't Have to be Fancy

While you certainly don't want to put up blurry pictures or shaky video footage, you also don't need to invest in a professional production company to get something of value. Millions of site owners around the world are now leveraging sites like Flickr, YouTube and Yelp for little more than the cost of their time. Upload photos of your storefront to local search engines, join a relevant Flickr group and add to the conversation, upload video clips of people using your products to YouTube. Then make sure to stick around and take part in the conversation.

Once you discover the potential, you'll be hooked.

Social media is about the hottest topic there is right now in the online marketing world. Search marketers and traditional marketers are both obsessed with finding ways to drive interest and traffic using this new medium. But how many of them are actually investing in social media marketing and how many are simply offering up half hearted efforts? Drew McLellan posts today to ask if social media marketing is still more hype than reality.

Drew points to a new survey from Coremetrics that shows a mismatch between supposed interest levels and marketing investment. The survey reveals 78% of marketers feel social media marketing will give them a leg up on their competitors. But Drew writes:

They talk a good game, but they're not really putting their money where their mouth is. Just 7.7 percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.

The biggest issue seems to be lack of metrics. For some, that means lack of time to measure, for others it means lack of knowledge of WHAT to measure.

Drew's post ties in well with the discussion meme Mack Collier tagged me in this week. His post traces back to an excellent one Geoff Livingston made on The Buzz Bin.

Livington explains the reluctance of so many mainstream marketers to dive into social media by citing the push for conversation over conversion.

Geoff writes:

...there is still a very large contingent of social media types that tout conversation instead of measurement. Quite frankly, asking companies to invest tens of thousands to millions of dollars on a conversation ? while factually accurate ? flies in the face of reality. Instead of convincing them, this conversational chatter only scares companies away.

Until we can demonstrate consistent results, organizations will resist social media adoption.

He goes on to talk about how Dell has tracked negative blog posts since the infamous "Dell Hell" incident (at 49%) to the present (22%). While this is clearly a measurable (though not a direct conversion style ROI) metric, it's still hard to put a price tag on things. That leaves social media marketing as the new media version of public relations. You can track the conversation, you can track the "pick-ups," but it's awfully hard to track the direct impact on your bottom line.

I see his point. In fact, it's no secret that I feel many in the SEO world are incredibly misguided in their social media efforts. I can't count the number of times I've heard search marketers tout social media for the number of links or site visits it can drive. That's fine and dandy, but it fails to address the need to actually GAIN something tangible from a campaign.

So what do I think about social media measurement?

From my point of view as a small business social media advocate, there are two points missing from the conversation.

First, there's the idea that social media has such high costs associated with it. While it's true that a large company might pour tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into a MySpace page, production of YouTube videos or the integration of Web 2.0 technologies, small businesses tend to come at things from a completely different angle. For the most part, the small business owner measures the cost of a social media campaign in time, not in dollars.

YouTube videos can be shot with the digital camera you already own. Accounts on Facebook, Digg, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social media networking sites are free. Free blogging programs abound. For the small business owner, social media is generally about personal involvement rather than the investment of funds into creative and programming. You ARE your social media presence. You aren't hiring a firm to create one for you.

This leaves small business owners with far less need to directly measure the response to their campaigns. After all, it's always easier to justify a budget of zero.

That said, there's no arguing that time is money to the small business owner. After all, every hour spent blogging or cruising around Facebook is an hour not being spent on clients. So while costs are generally low, there is still a need to track results to make sure your time and effort is well spent.

That leads to my second point...the need to look to things beyond simple conversion rates for measurement. One of the great things about the web is the ability to track direct conversions. The data available these days are what marketers dreamed of decades ago. The ability to track a sale back to a search query, a blog post, a social media site or even a bookmark gives marketers unprecedented insight into what triggers the buyer's impulse in their target audience. It's powerful, powerful data.

On the down side, we've now become spoiled with our ability to track things. We've gotten comfortable with our metrics and we've lost the marketer's insight that allowed us to see beyond those direct conversions. This happens to us in the search world all the time. We take joy in the ability to track a conversion back to the exact search term that brought the visitor to our site, all while pushing back the knowledge that your average shopper conducts 6-8 searches before making a purchase and that 68% of shoppers will make their purchase offline. Sure, we know what phrase ultimately sends them to make the purchase, but what about all those search visits we write off for lack of conversion. Are we sure they aren't responsible for driving repeat visits and purchases down the road?

The same can be said for social media marketing. I see this new drive for metrics and note that many of the pushers are insisting we must track the direct impact of social media marketing on sales. This push ignores the idea that social media marketing builds brand, builds trust and often serves as an influencer rather than a directly trackable source. How many sales are being credited to things like bookmarks, email marketing efforts and blog posts when the reality is that social media is responsible for that bookmark, that email subscription and that editorial link on the blog?

Beyond that, I'm glad to see some talk of measurement outside of pure sales. Geoff talks about tracking the increase in positive comments about Dell and Mack talks about increasing the number of customer evangelists by blogging. I've always encouraged small business owners to look beyond sales to find the metrics they wish to measure. In fact, I wrote a two-part series for ClickTracks on how to use visitor segmentation to find value beyond pure sales.

To offer up an example, I'll refer to The Lactivist, my hobby blog. While I do sell products via CafePress, I'd be doing a disservice to my blog if my sole metric was sales. The site is primarily content driven. The blog is the central focus of the site. Earlier this year, I began selling advertising on the site. That meant each and every visitor suddenly had a dollar value whether they made a purchase or not. In fact, when I sat down and did the math to figure out my average CPM earnings for my ads over the last few months, I can see I earn a little more than a penny per visitor.

With that knowledge, I now track a variety of things.

• Number of visitors referred from social media efforts (each visitor = one penny profit)



• Number of links generated by social media efforts (links create more visitors, visitors = profits)



• Which links send which types of visitors (understanding what types of sites send which visitor segments is invaluable to future link building efforts)



• Number of comments in response to my posts (comments = engagement, engagement = return visitors, visitors = profit)



• Which links send buyers (buyers = specific $ profits)



• Which links send shoppers (the majority of my buyers come from links posted by those who viewed my products)

Of course those are only a handful of the ways I value my social media traffic.

I'd venture a guess that any small business who values their social media traffic solely by looking at how many buyers or leads it produces is being short sighted. The online buying cycle is a complex process. People don't wake up one day, decide they want a widget, take a direct route to get to it and make an immediate purchase. Tracking our social media metrics as if they do leaves far too much value sitting out in the cold waiting to be noticed.

So how do you track your social media success? What metrics do you look at? More importantly, how do we help businesses both large and small understand how to value the success of social media efforts? I'd love to hear from everyone in the comments, but I'm going to specifically call out Wendy Piersall, Matt Bailey, Stoney deGeyter and Matt McGee.

1. Ask them to actually Read Your Story, Look at the Picture or View the Video only if you truly believe it's something that particular friend would be interested in.  Don't ask for the Digg, the Sphinn or the Fetch first.  Give them the link to the actual article, picture or video first, if there aren't social networking buttons on the site, then after they read it, give them social site's link.
   
   
2. Don't ask the same friends over, and over, and over, and over, and over .... (you get the picture) again.  Spread the love around.  Not all of your friends like the same things.  If its a cooking recipe, talk to your friends in your cooking groups or who lists cooking as their hobby or interest - don't send the article on CSS to a person on your list who only has cooking and related hobbies on their list.
   
   
3. Vary the way you ask your friends to read/view the items you share.  By this I mean, if you are comfortable just IMing them, then send a message.  If email works as a better form of communication, dash off an email.  SMS message to a phone?  That works too.  The key is to know your friends well enough to know how they like to learn about something.
   
   
4. Be careful about using "In System" announcement systems to reach out to your friends.  On Digg the system is called "Shout", other sites have other names, and what it essentially does is annoy your list of friends.  If you are "outed' for using these features, especially on Digg, they bury you quicker than you can push that "shout" button.
   
   
5. Visit your friend's pages and be proactive.  Fetch their article, Digg their page, or stumble their favorites.  Add a review or a link, in other words, be proactive about "sharing" the love, but be honest about it, and don't use it to "blackmail" your friends for Fetches, Diggs or Sphinns.

Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.

Shoppers are often hampered if they don't feel they can get a hold of a real person or are limited in their contact options. With all other areas of the site working, a bad contact us page may cause someone to think twice about purchasing with you altogether.

Accessibility

Visitors must be able to find a link to your Contact Us page easily and obviously from all pages of your site. They should not have to hunt to find your contact information.

Contact options

Provide multiple options for contacting you including phone, fax, email and web form. Live support can also be valuable. While you may want to direct the options toward what is most convenient for you, not providing a contact option most convenient for your visitors can be a mistake.

Contact points

Larger sites should provide contact information for all major departments such as customer service, tech support, inquiries, general info, memberships, job apps, billing, etc. You might even want to include contact options for specific individuals such as CEO, SFO, etc.

Map and hours

If you deal more with local business rather than national, your hours of operation should be included along with a map pinpointing your location. This certainly won't hurt national businesses either.

No advertisements

Your contact page should be free of ads, both for your own as well as other products/services. This page should maintain as limited focus as possible.

Web form

Your web contact form should require as little information as is necessary. Don?t use this as a survey. Just the bare necessities should be requested.

Your Contact Us page should not be complicated. In fact, simple is better. Provide the information that your visitors need and provide as many contact options as you can to cover your bases. This will ensure an effective contact us page that provides assurances to your visitors as they move through the conversion process.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.