Queen Bee Marketing’s Blog About Marketing, SEO, and Design.

Since we are off for the next two days, and many people have already cut out of work early today (we’ll be leaving around 2pm this afternoon), it’s been pretty quiet around the office and we started doing a little Turkey Day research online. We found a ton of interesting stuff and figured we would share a few:

Each year the president pardons two turkeys from the Thanksgiving dinner.

Change things up this year with some slider stuffing from White Castles.

Some interesting Thanksgiving facts.

Mix up your traditional turkey recipe with Orange Roasted Turkey.

Here is a long list of Thanksgiving Poems.

No list would be complete without some Turkey cooking techniques.

Adam Sandler’s classic Turkey song from SNL.

Some Thanksgiving horror stories.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Web site.

A Thanksgiving guest liability and indemnification contract.

Before getting started in any new market online, it’s necessary to do some research. Many times, people will skip this research phase because they don’t know where to start. It isn’t very difficult to do some basic research once you know how to begin. Here is a 5 step outline of what you need to know to move into a new market.

1. Keyword Brainstorming - Start writing down any possible keywords you feel people might use in the search engines to find your site. Write down everything you think of, even if it’s a stretch. Ask your friends and family what they would type in to find your product. You won’t think of everything on your own.

2. Search - Go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN and type in the keywords you just wrote down to start to look at your competition.

3. Review the Search Engine Results - Look at the number of sites each keyword returns, the relevance of the top results, and the Pay Per Click (PPC) popularity they have. You may also check Google Trends to get a better idea of keyword popularity. All of these factors will give you valuable information on which keywords others are targeting and receiving search traffic from.

4. Identify Top Keywords - Using the data you gathered from the search engines, choose your top keywords that you want to target on your site and in your online marketing campaigns.

5. Analyze Top Results - Using your narrowed keyword list, analyze the top search results’ Web sites for those keywords. A few factors to take into consideration include: site design, search engine optimization, usability, and page popularity (inbound links).

Now that you know more about your competition, you can develop an effective and successful strategy.

You’ve all heard the saying that “It is better to give, than to receive.” I firmly believe that if you give of yourself you will get more in return.

I like Mexican food and and will stop by my local Chipotle for lunch on a regular basis. They always have a fishbowl there for people to drop business cards into for a free meal and it’s always full. I am happy to say that they do indeed provide free meals to people that drop their card in the fishbowl. About 2 weeks ago, I got an email from my local Chipotle at 86th and College Park telling me that they had drawn my card out of the bowl and that I could schedule a lunch or dinner for between 15-20 people! So, I called up some family and friends and we met for a great little dinner this week. On a more national level, Taco Bell recently promoted it’s “steal a base, steal a taco” idea to the U.S. (I like this example because it’s about Mexican food again).

These are both very specific examples, but I’m sure you’ve been to a fair, trade show, sporting event, or any number of other public events where a business is handing out free stuff. Ok, so a little taco may only cost them $.20 each, but if you end up giving away 500,000 of them… it comes out to a $100,000.00 price tag (I have no idea what the actual operating cost of a taco is for them, or how many they actually gave away). But the question becomes: Why would they do that?

The biggest reason is the belief they will get business in return. So they give away a $.20 taco, the average consumer is likely to walk out the door having spent 5-10$ after getting their free taco. About half of the family and friends that dined at Chipotle with me this week had never eaten there before. I know they enjoyed the meal and I’m sure some will return in the future and others may even become regular customers.

While the motive may normally be to generate further income, I am happy that several charities and those in need have benefited from the generosity of businesses. For example, how many of our homeless received a free taco because of this promotion? You may think that idea is a little far fetched, but you may not have seen Tom Mabe’s idea on feeding the homeless.
My point is this: If you want to increase sales and promote goodwill, practice the art of giving. Even if it doesn’t return a profit, you may help to make this a better place to live.

For many SEOs, directory submissions form a solid base of links for a Web site. Of course there are many ways to obtain inbound links, but you have the most control over directory submissions. But not all directories are worth submitting to. Some are spammy link farms that are best avoided. Here is my quick list on how I choose which directories are good enough to submit to:

1. Is it human edited? This is really important to me. If every single submission, spam or not, is accepted automatically it greatly reduces the integrity of the directory. It may take longer to get listed in a human edited directory, but it is worth it to keep out the spam.

2. Number of Inbound links. Does the directory have a substantial number of links? I like to check that both the Home page and the sub pages have some inbound, natural links.

3. PageRank on sub pages. There has been a lot of talk over some sites losing or having their PR lowered. Obviously, this is just a number, but it does indicate some level of trust with Google. Checking to make sure the internal pages of the directory have some PR lets me know the directory is trusted by Google.

4. Quality of current listings. If all of the listings in the directory are spam, I don’t bother submitting my site. It’s not a quality directory.

5. Submission Guidelines. I like to know what the submission requirements are up front. I’ve been on too many directories that don’t clearly state the cost and other guidelines before I’ve started the submission process.

6. Web site usability. If a directory has broken links, database errors, or is confusing to use, I don’t view it as a quality directory.

7. Visitor usability. I want to make sure visitors to the directory have an easy time navigating the site. We don’t just submit to directories for the link value, we also receive decent traffic from various directories. But if the directory is confusing and hard to use, we won’t get any traffic from it.

We also carefully track our directory submissions. By recording the date is was submitted, and the date it was included, it ensures we don’t double submit a site. It is also good to know how many directory links your site has, as opposed to natural links. It also helps to know how quickly a site is included in a directory for future submissions of other sites.

Last Friday the new Mac OS Leopard came out and was met with criticism from some, and praise from others. There are a few things I wish they hadn’t changed, but over all there are many new features that are useful. A few of the design related changes I’ve noticed are listed below along with my observations about them.

1. The Dock - The dock didn’t change much, but the parts that were changed, weren’t changed for the better, in my opinion. The blue orbs indicating a running program are harder to see than the previous black triangles. Also, the “ledge” that the program icons rest on now only comes up half way behind the icons instead of all the way. This reduces the amount of contrast between the icon and the background. These changes reduce the over all readability of the dock.

2. Stacks - Stacks is a new feature, and a helpful one. Stacks allows you easy access to downloads, programs, and documents. It makes navigating to these items much easier.

3. Preview - Preview works in two ways. One is Icon Preview. It displays the icon of a file as a miniature version of the real file. You can also press the spacebar while an icon is selected and it will bring up a preview window of what the file looks like. This is extremely helpful for text and PDF files. It’s no longer necessary to open a file to view its contents.

4. Spaces - Spaces allows you to have various desktops running at once. This could be good for organizing types of programs, differentiating between work and home, or just to reduce clutter. I haven’t had the need to use this yet, but I think it will be a great tool in the future.

5. Dashboard - Dashboard still works the same way, but has one new feature that I really enjoy: Web Clips. You just “clip” a portion of a Web site and it will display that part of the site on the Dashboard. I’ve been using this for Web cams. I clipped a Web cam of Waikiki, Hawaii and put it on my Dashboard. Now when I need a short break, I can check in on Waikiki beach and watch the surfers!

6. Coverflow - Coverflow is a feature I haven’t used a lot either, but I know a lot of people who think it’s great. It uses the same concept that iTunes has been using for a while, which allows you to flip through files quickly while previewing the contents.

These are the main design and usability changes that have stuck out to me. Feel free to agree or disagree, or leave your other observations in the comments!