Three members from the Blue Fountain Media marketing team, Alhan Keser, Zack Sinkler, and Byrne Hobart attended the first day of the annual Search Engine Marketing Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday.
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(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.
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We only use social media as a component of larger campaigns

With all the hype surrounding social media, it’s easy to forget that the big money has been made selling social media sites, not selling things through social media. For example, over a year and a half period, Dell got 0.0011% of its sales ($1 million divided by about $90 billion) through Twitter — and all they had to do was offer extra discounts! (During that time, Twitter raised $20 million from investors — and they weren’t exactly offering discounts on their stock).

So how do we help clients use Twitter without being used by discount-hungry fans and attention-craving social media mavens?

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Website Launch: SolarTown

In this economy, one of the best investments anyone can make is in saving money. At Blue Fountain Media, we’re finding more and more ecommerce web design clients are focused on giving their customers a chance to lower their utilities bills (and do something good for the environment). SolarTown (last mentioned on the blog pre-launch) doesn’t just help visitors make smart choices about solar power — it also helps dozens of suppliers sell their products to consumers around the country.

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By building an integrated campaign that takes advantage of both

Many of our customers have learned to rely on the steady traffic growth our high-ROI SEO can bring. Others are interested in using social media marketing to increase brand awareness and really get in touch with their customers. At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t just offer best-of-breed SEO and SMM solutions — we design our campaigns to take advantage of how both kinds of marketing can work together.
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NextUp NYC Panel (not the Final Five)

Last night, the BFM marketing team (@alhankeser, @ishquez, @zacksinkler, and I) attended Mashable’s NextUp event. Here’s a great summary of the NextUp speakers.

Just in case you were there for the presentations and not the audience, here are some of the folks you could have met at Mashable’s NextUp NYC last night:

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Baratunde Thurston, a.k.a. @The_Swine_Flu (source: David Fisher)

Last night, Blue Fountain Media sent me to Ignite NYC, a festival of five-minute presentations and fifteen-second films (the bar for quality was not especially high. Highlights from the presentations included:

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(source: Matt Hamm)

Blue Fountain Media is working with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, and it has been a rewarding experience to know that we are helping them for an overall greater cause. Gift of Life is one of largest bone marrow registries in the United States. They focus on the Jewish community—finding a matching bone marrow donor is difficult, but since tissue type is genetic, a patient is most likely to find a matching donor of the same ethnic background.

The Madoff debacle affected the Gift of Life in more ways than one, and that’s where we come in. Blue Fountain Media has been doing Social Media Marketing for their bone marrow and donor campaigns.

When we started these campaigns, Gift of Life had some questions:

So how can social media help us?

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Because they work best together.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?
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Now that we are officially in a recession (and have been for over a year), it is time to start spending money wisely. The oversized marketing budgets of the past are set to be replaced by smarter investments like search engine optimization of websites coupled with social media marketing.

Here a few reasons why it makes sense to invest in your website right now:

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