Over at GetSticky I have posted 8 reasons to turn your marketing inbound in 2010.

Considering that Australian’s spend more time online than with any other media, should your organisation be marketing like its 1999 or should it be ensuring that inbound marketing is in the mix?

Tell me what you think??

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In April of this year the team at Sticky launched NLYZR, our dedicated web analytics tool, via the GetSticky inbound marketing website. It was the result of almost a year of research and development and has been a massive undertaking for the agency.

This soft launch allowed us to test the service and tools with real users, iron out the bugs and improve the delivery.

Before long we launched NLYZR.com on its own site and asked the question “How effective is your website”. It created an avalanche of traffic and submissions to the site allowing us to test and report on thousands of websites here in Australia and around the world.

Along the way we have toyed with numerous business models for NLYZR. We have been able to use NLYZR to effectively optimise small business sites like Shop Gear and very large corporate sites like Colliers International.

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I just came across this excellent piece in AdAge explaining how digital agencies should be the new advertising leaders due to their understanding of technology, speed of iteration and technology. It was written by Jacques-Herve Roubert.

Over the past 18 months, a great debate has consumed our industry: Are digital agencies poised to sit at the head of the advertising table? Depending on whom you ask and what you read, the answer seems to flip flop — with a majority of people still having reservations and making claims that digital agencies aren’t ready to lead.

So why does the debate continue? Does offline or online really matter to an oblivious consumer who’s only interested in “no-line” communications? Are we spending too much time focusing on who should lead and not enough asking: What’s next?

Ana Andjelic’s DigitalNext post, provocatively titled “Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead,” mentions several reasons why digital agencies aren’t ready to lead, one of which was their lack of experience in the business (as compared with the “decades of experience” that traditional agencies are known for). I’m sure there are instances where decades of experience can directly translate into success, but there are certainly instances (uh, Lehman Brothers?) where deep roots had no bearing on their ability to produce — and produce well. Furthermore, a certain percentage of the individuals now working and thriving in digital agencies came from traditional agencies.

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Optimise, attract and convert. If you do these three actions properly with your website then you are well on the way to business success.

• Optimise your website so that it can be found via the world’s number 1 information sources: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

• Attract motivated visitors to your site when they are ready to buy.

• Convert visitors into something more than just traffic – leads, inquiries and sales.

Its the essence of inbound marketing. It sounds simple but not many businesses are successful at combining all three.

That’s where NLYZR can help. My team and I have developed industry-leading analysis tools and processes that are allowing us to assist organisations around Australia Optimise their websites, Attract visitors and Convert traffic into sales.

And now we have revamped the NLYZR site to make it even easier for you to begin better web marketing. Please feel welcome to visit NLYZR and test your site with our Free Website Report.

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Source: Adnews 16 October 2009

There is a lack of loyalty to online news providers among Australian consumers, according to Nielsen data.

Nearly three-quarters (71%) of visitors to Fairfax Digital Media’s news sites in September 2009 also visited News Digital Media, and 69% of visitors to Ninemsn’s National Nine News website visited the news sites of Fairfax Digital Media.

More than four in five internet users (86%) consume user-generated content and of those people, 60% read blogs, up from just 48% in the previous 12 months.

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Over at GetSticky we have begun publishing listings and scores for leading websites in various different industries. The lists come from industry publication and national publications, while the web analysis is courtesy of our Web NLYZR tool.

Web NLYZR is a free report that assesses your site to report on the effectiveness of your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, SOCIAL MEDIA, TRAFFIC CONVERSION and relevant KEYWORD SEARCH RESULTS. It generates a report card which grades each aspect of your site and provides a total score out of 100. The higher your Web NLYZR score, the greater your Inbound Marketing potential.

The ever growing series of NLYZR lists can be found here.

So far we have reported on:

Australia’s top 10 Credit Unions and Building Societies

Australia’s Top 10 Accounting Firms

Leading Australian digital agencies

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Posted by Matthew Creamer at Adage.com

Internet Now Commands 24% of Ad Spending to TV’s 22%

In what’s believed to be a first for a major ad market, internet advertising has overtaken TV ad spending in the U.K.

Web advertising now accounts for almost 24% of ad spending in the U.K., compared to TV, which has a 22% share. These figures come from a biannual report from Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. and were first reported by Reuters.

But before you get too excited, consider that the U.K. TV market is a highly restricted one with a massive player that doesn’t take ads (BBC) and one that’s been particularly battered during the recession. On top of that, online spending in the U.K. has been anything but immune to the recession, with its torrid rates of growth seen as recently as early 2008 falling off dramatically.

The new order is helped by the abundance of cheap computing technology and high broadband penetration in the U.K. And it doesn’t particularly come as a surprise when you consider that the TV market is so beat up that advertisers are increasingly hanging their hopes on a relaxation of rules barring product placement in programming.

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NLYZR - How effective is your website?

Since launching NLYZR this year we have been able to generate free reports on over 1000 websites, mostly from Australia. It has given us a fascinating insight into the state of Australian web design industry.

Here are some of the statistics that have emerged after testing 1000 websites:

• Average NLYZR score = 39 /100

• Highest score = 100/100 (well-known US-based site. Several Australian sites have scored high 90′s)

• Lowest score = 2/100 (this site had been outsourced to India by an Australian web designer)

• Only 25% of sites tested have GOOD search engine optimisation. Not great SEO, just acceptable SEO.

• Approximately 42% of sites tested achieved GOOD social media scores. This may be skewed by the large number of our Twitter-savvy followers who have submitted sites to NLYZR. 42% seems a little high to us.

• 19% of sites tested received a GOOD Traffic Conversion score. It amazes us that so many businesses have sites with little or no conversion strategies in place. This appears to be a major issue in Australian websites and web design.

NLYZR has only been running a few months, so we’ll continue to report on the state of Australian websites as the year progresses.

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I don’t know how I missed this.

This morning I was searching through the comments and backlinks on our company sites when I noticed some backlinks from something called Topsy. I copied the address into my browser and low-and-behold I discovered one of the most exciting sites to hit the web in, well….a while.

Topsy is a search engine for tweets. It recognises what savvy social networkers have known for a while now – that ReTweets are the new currency of the web.

Type a term into Topsy’s simple interface and you’ll see the most popular tweets on that subject. Here’s how Michael Arrington of Techcrunch described Topsy back in late May:

The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet.

Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine.

And the results are…amazing.

I agree.

Topsy is all about context. You can find what is hot online in seconds. The fact that Topsy also rates users by Influence helps verify results. Its a very impressive approach.

Topsy can be very handy for marketers and businesses trying to get their information into the social mediasphere. It allows you to see who has been ReTweeting you, who is talking about you and the amount of influence they have. It can help for both promotion and reputation management.

As someone who spends a LOT of time on Twitter, I suggest that Topsy is a breakthrough site.

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