Presentation I gave to a group of seniors in the Internet Marketing 450 class at Washington State University.

1. Marketing 450
Guest Speaker

2. Hi, I’m Nathan Smith. I work at
as a designer + front-end dev.

3. My knowledge of
Internet marketing
is purely accidental

4. I code, design, and write

5. But not trained in web-dev, either
BA in Social Sciences Master of Divinity
Washington State University Asbury Theological Seminary

6. I did learn two things
– Be culturally sensitive
– Consider your audience

7. Use appropriate lingo
Oriental > Asian American
Theodicy > Problem of evil

8. Be succinct.
Users will make an assessment of
your site in fractions of a second.

9. Give me locational hints
to help me understand
where I’ve teleported

10. Home page is rarely
the point of entry
example.com/news/local/city/man-bites-dog.html

11. Niche ads generate
better click-through

12. SEO: Use Semantic HTML
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6>
<ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
<table> <thead> <tbody> <th> <td> <a>
<title> <meta> <link> <strong> <em> <p>
(to name a few)

13. SEO: Meta + Link Tags
Tells search engines to crawl site:
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
— Also, make sure to have example.com/robots.txt
Displayed in search results, if unique:
<meta name="description" content="..." />
Not as important, but use anyways:
<meta name="keywords" content="..." />
Prevent duplicate content penalty:
<link rel="canonical" href="..." />

16. Faces of Internet Marketing
– Niche entrepreneur
– Social media expert
– Design/Dev agency
– SEO consultancy

17. Niche Entrepreneur
MICHAEL MISTRETTA
site – FusionAds.net
Entrepreneur. Founded Fusion Ads, a niche
advertising network. What makes his story
even more inspiring is that he started this
business while he was still in high school.

18. Social Media Expert
GIOVANNI GALLUCCI
site – Gallucci.net
Self-described “carnival barker” for hire.
Has spearheaded numerous online hype
campaigns. He also offers social media
marketing training for businesses.
#1 result on Google for social media expert

19. Design/Dev Agency
TOM MCCRACKEN
site – LevelTenDesign.com
Founded LevelTen Interactive, an agency
focused on designing and developing sites
for clients using the Drupal CMS. SEO is a
byproduct of good content and code.

20. SEO Consultant
BEN FINKLEA
site – Volacci.com
Founded the SEO firm Volacci, with a
specific focus on Drupal optimization.
Notable clients include Acquia.com which
raised $15 million venture capital funding.

21. Beware the backlash of gimmicks
See also – http://mashable.com/2009/06/10/iphone-squarespace/ | http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=1283

22. Tale of two sites: Both page-rank 6
www.sonspring.com www.960.gs
page count: 300+ page count: 2
age: 6 years age: 1 year

23. Research before buying domain name
Godbit means a small piece of something
good in Norwegian, especially in reference
to food. – Jørgen Arnor Gårdsø Lom

24. Which CMS should I use?
wordpress.org textpattern.com drupal.org
SIMPLE FLEXIBLE ROBUST

25. Questions?
Keep in touch:
– http://twitter.com/nathansmith
– http://slideshare.net/nathansmith
– http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan