You wouldn't drive somewhere without directions. You wouldn't build a house without blueprints.

And you shouldn't launch a campaign to increase web traffic without a strategy. 

Without strategy, you'll keep shooting aimless messages out into the world, from which you'll get plenty of impressions and few results. But with strategy, you can integrate your marketing efforts to not only attract more web traffic – but also secure more business. 

Just ask yourself these three questions:

1. What is my goal?

What do you want your customer to do once they are on your website? It depends on your specific product or service. For instance:

• Retailer? Add to cart. 
• Manufacturer? Find a retailer. 
• Service? Call for a free estimate. 
• Nonprofit? Donate or sign up to volunteer. 

Determine your website's call to action (called the "conversion" in web talk), and ask your customers to do it. Make it a giant button on every page of the website. Make it the goal, directly or indirectly, of every marketing message you create. 

2. Who is my customer?

Marketing isn't about forcing people to buy things they don't want. It's about finding the people who need you and introducing yourself, in their language, at exactly the right time and place:

• A billboard for car air conditioning repair as they sit sweltering in rush hour traffic. 
• A plumbing business on page one of their Google search for how to fix a toilet.

Also consider the length of the buy process – how long it takes to "convert" them. If you sell clothing, the process can be as little as a few minutes, from grabbing the customer's attention with an image of a cute dress to getting them to click "Process Order." If you're a university trying to attract students, however, the process can stretch over months or even years as your customers weigh their options.

Throughout a longer buy process, find ways to stay in front of them. This might involve using softer calls to action to funnel them closer to your ultimate goal. For instance:

• Inviting them to tour the campus will guide them closer to the primary conversion of completing their application.

• Enticing them to subscribe to your blog for free advice lets you prove your knowledge and helpfulness while they decide whether or not to pay for more extensive services.

3. Who is my competition?

If you follow the tips listed above, chances are you'll already be a step ahead of your competitors. But you can go the extra mile by:

• Targeting their customers. For instance, when buying ads on search engines, add your competitor's name to your keyword list, so your business appears on the results page every time someone searches for your competitor.
• Differentiating yourself. Focus on benefits, not features – particularly the benefits you offer that your competitors don't.
• Being more attractive. Study their ads before writing your own and find ways to make yours more compelling – like by offering discounts and free trials.

Pinpointing your goal, understanding your customers and knowing your competition are the building blocks of strategy, and strategy is the backbone of any campaign. Don't leave home without it.

Continue reading: *Designing* for Website Speed
View all: "Driving More Traffic to Your Website" blog series

When it comes to increasing your site traffic, you've got to give a little to get a little. And that's where content marketing comes in. It's all about providing valuable, relevant content to people – content they want to share, content that keeps them coming back for more. Done right, it can turn prospects into loyal customers, create brand ambassadors, even do wonders for your search engine rankings.

Think it through
To provide high-quality content, you've got to have a strategy. Do you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry? Then providing a series of white papers might be the way to go. Do you want to create a community? You can host a forum for like-minded people to get connected, find expert advice and share stories. Want to raise brand awareness? Try a super-unique video series. No matter how you deliver it, your content should always be relevant – to your audience, and your business. Cat videos may be popular, but if your business has nothing to do with cats, posting cat videos will be a pretty transparent ploy for traffic. (That is, unless you've figured out a way to connect the two. And it can be done.)

Freshen up
With content marketing, it's never one and done. You have to keep a steady stream of fresh content on your site to stay relevant. It helps to create an editorial calendar so that you're prepared for a few months out, but don't plan too far ahead. Work some flexibility into the schedule so you can capitalize on trending topics. The goal of fresh content is to keep people coming back for more. The key term here is engagement – you want to create an ongoing relationship with people that goes beyond you shilling your products. Give them valuable content. Then give them some more. Rinse, repeat – you get the drill.

Share and share alike
The sure sign of quality content? Shares. Whether it's getting posted across Facebook, distributed through email or tweeted and retweeted, content that's good enough to share will inevitably drive traffic. But don't just create the content and sit back and wait. Make it easy for visitors to your site to repost your content by adding sharing buttons. You should also develop a robust social media presence to jumpstart the process of socializing your content.

The traffic circle
In terms of driving site traffic, content marketing is closely tied to search engine optimization. That's because the more traffic you get to your website through valuable, relevant content, the higher you rank on search engine results pages. And the higher you rank, the more traffic you'll get. Content marketing: the gift that keeps on giving.

Continue reading: Why You Need a Blog if You Want More Web Traffic
View all: "Driving More Traffic to Your Website" blog series

First. Speed is the greatest Keanu Reeves movie ever.

Second. I'm not going to write about how to program a fast site. I am going to write as a designer and how to think when you are crafting that website masterpiece.

I know what you're thinking. 

"I'm the designer. I don't need to worry about speed. That's up to the programmer."

Wrong. Your design has a dramatic affect on the user experience and site performance.

The good news is that designing a super-cool, yet efficient and fast-loading site, is not that hard.

There are three rules to remember when designing speedy websites:

• Efficiency
• Simplicity
• Size

Let's break these three rules down further.

Efficiency (in general describes the extent to which time or effort is well used for the intended task or purpose.)

• Design your navigation using HTML fonts and not graphics
  This is a no-brainer. You'll want to be able to easily update navigation and add/edit pages from your CMS.
• Design as much text as possible to use HTML fonts
  Less images to load means faster load time. Use Typekit or Google Fonts for a wide variety of HTML fonts.
• Reuse design elements
  Avoid redundancy by reusing design elements throughout the site design.

Simplicity (is the state or quality of being simple)

• Don't use images for everything
  Where you can, think of how you use CSS for colors, gradients, curves, etc
• Avoid a lot of drop shadows
  Drop shadows can eat up bytes to render. You can still use them, just don't go crazy. And keep them consistent.
• Use the "Bonsai" method
  Start with a complex design and trim away elements you don't need till you're left with the perfect balance of design and function.

Size (it does matter)

• Optimize your images before uploading to a CMS 
  Don't let the CMS auto-resize your images for you, or use HTML to adjust the sizing. This can really affect the speed of a website.
• If using large images (full browser images) make them as small as possible in Photoshop. Less than 200k is a good rule of thumb.

Remember, It's really not that hard to think about speed when you are designing a website. Keep the rules above in mind as you craft your next website.

Good luck!

Continue reading: The Need for Speed
View all: "Driving More Traffic to Your Website" blog series

Blogging. All the cool businesses are doing it. Maybe you're starting to think you should get a blog too. Or maybe you think it's just a fad. Or maybe you just don't know what it's all about.

Here's what it's all about.

It's about positioning your brand as an authority, turning your customers into brand fanatics, and in measurable terms, attracting oodles of web traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the process of building a website that naturally attracts traffic from search engines (like Google, Yahoo and Bing) with or without paid ads. Think of SEO as the online equivalent of having a great location – being as visible as possible to as many people as possible.

How is blogging great for SEO?

Keyword-rich content. One of the ways search engines rank websites is by the concentration of keywords, or search terms.

• The simplistic view: If somebody types a word into Google, Google will show them the web pages that use that word the most.
• The reality: Search engines look for content that's written for humans. They punish content that's not. So if you sell luggage, and you create a web page that says nothing but "luggage luggage luggage" 500 times, you may have a higher concentration of keywords, but the search engines will see it isn't real content, and will expel you from the results.
• The solution: Write a helpful blog post related to luggage – say "10 Luggage Packing Tips to Get You Through Airport Security Faster." Even if you only use the word "luggage" five times (as it would naturally appear in a conversation about the TSA), you're more likely to get good attention from the search engines.

New content. Search engines love regularly updated content. An article posted this morning will get more attention than one posted a month ago. And posting one new article every Monday is better than posting 10 new articles whenever you feel like it. Keep in mind: search engines punish duplicate content. You can't just write one good article and repost it every week – you'll get ignored.

Link bait. What do search engines love most of all? Popular content. The more websites that link to you, the higher you'll be on the results page. You attract these links by writing awesome content. Don't write a post listing product features: that belongs on a product page, not a blog. But a related post, offering useful information in entertaining, bite-size chunks (like the packing tips example above) will get shared.

See the pattern yet?

Ultimately, having a blog is about helping your customers. If you make that your first priority, the traffic will naturally follow.

But remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Building a blog that stands out from all the rest takes time, research, strategy and good writing. So before you get started, make sure you do your homework, or get help from somebody who's done theirs.

Continue reading: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website: SEO
View all: "Driving More Traffic to Your Website" blog series

Millions tuned in this week to watch a new AMC series, "The Pitch," which shows the inner-workings of an advertising agency’s pitch to a potential client. The premise is simple: Two or three agencies are briefed on an advertising assignment and given a week to come back with their best ideas. The client (so far, the clients have been Subway and Waste Management) picks their favorite and awards the business to the agency.

I'm sure many that watched are wondering, "Is ‘The Pitch’ really what an advertising agency is like?"

Simple: yes and no.

There are parts of the show that hit the nail on the head, but there are other parts that made me want to cry and lie in the fetal position with an ADDY (think Oscars for ad folks) because they were so incorrect. 

Here's what is real:

• Advertising is a cut-throat business. It's tough. There's no denying it.
• A good idea is tough to come by. In the show, you see people staying up late, putting items on whiteboard and pulling out their hair. That's real. Sometimes a great idea comes out of nowhere, but it's never easy.
• There are competing personalities. Luckily, at Balcom, we don't have the extremes of last night's SK+G's co-creative directors. Like any family, there are disagreements, but we tend to work ours out like civilized human beings.
• Some agencies are stuck in the past. Take last night's The Ad Store. The creative director's idea of success was a great TV spot — not results for their clients. I thought The Ad Store's idea was better ("Trash Can." vs. "Turning Waste Into Wow.") — but they stopped at the idea. SK+G proved how they integrate into social media and thought way beyond TV.
• The actual pitches are very close to everything we've experienced at Balcom. For most new business pitches we don't create what is called "spec work" (work that is created in hopes of getting the client). However, some pitches require this we evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
• It takes a lot of people to make advertising happen. People forget how involved advertising has become — online ads, social media, media buying, production, design, copywriting, video, the list goes on and on.
• Advertising isn't as glamorous as you think. It sometimes involves traveling to non-exotic locations, sleeping in crappy hotels and working late hours.

Here’s what is wrong:

• Ad agencies rarely know who they are pitching against, let alone get the briefing at the same time. AMC is using that for tension.
• You don't need black-rimmed glasses to work in advertising.
• A week turnaround time is a crazy-quick time to come up with a campaign for any client — let alone someone like Subway or Waste Management.
• We rarely know if we won a client in the same day. It usually takes weeks of negotiating and Q&As before the agency is notified.
• Some ad agencies are slave shops where everyone works late nights and early mornings. Granted, that happens sometimes at every agency, but (at least at Balcom) we try and make this the exception instead of the norm. We never want someone to not see their kids for five nights straight because of work. That's not healthy for anyone.
• All of the agencies talk about how they want to "stand out." Obviously, no agency wants to blend in. Some agencies (mostly WDCW in the first episode) put standing out before delivering results for their clients.
• Not all creative directors are jerks. At Balcom, I've never heard someone's idea be cussed out, mocked, or ridiculed. That doesn't help anyone. We listen and if it's not the right idea, we move on. 

Other notes:

• A lot of agencies declined to be on “The Pitch”. The main reason? It didn't fit within their "Process" and people would see behind the curtain. Most of the time, there is no process — it’s just another sales tool for the agency.
• The Ad Store shows how far behind they are on their Facebook page. It only has 146 likes and doesn't even have a cover photo. Any company with national exposure for an hour in prime time TV should capitalize on the opportunity.
• SK+G, on the other hand, shows how smart they are. Google "The Ad Store" and SK+G has purchased an ad in Google whenever you searched for The Ad Store. Very smart move by SK+G.
• WDCW's founder wrote an amazing post after they lost the Subway Pitch, "Being on AMC's ‘The Pitch’: When a Loss Is Not A Loss." Do yourself a favor and read it.

Overall, it’s interesting for people to see the world I live and breathe in every day. However, you need to remember that “The Pitch” is reality TV and doesn’t tell the whole story.

Most brands can’t give everyone in the world free stuff once a year like Santa, but a well thought out promotion can grab people’s attention in a similar way. Promotions trump traditional advertising by getting people involved with a brand – from sweepstakes and event sponsorships, to sampling experiences or cause-related activities. It’s the difference between getting an invitation to a party and actually being at a party.

Remember these four things as you plan your next “party."

1. Stay true to your brand personality

The best promotions seem like natural extensions of a brand. It wouldn’t make sense for Santa to wrap a promotion around MMA fights, but it made perfect sense for Pepto Bismal to partner with Nathan’s July 4th Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest and Major League Eating (MLE).

Even cause-related promotions work better if they relate more directly to what a brand stands for. Loads of Hope is a long-running Tide promotion that neatly connects the product with a bigger mission – helping disaster-ridden families by washing their clothes.

2. Play to your audience

The more you know about your audience, the better “party” you can throw for them. For example, Skinny Cow wrapped their sampling promotion for new single serve cups around the fact that most women wear the wrong bra size. Sampling was combined with a free bra fitting to create a one-of-a-kind experience.

But you don’t have to host an event to get people involved. EA Sports partnered with Doritos to generate interest in Madden NFL 11, months before the game was launched. Part of the promotion involved fans voting for the player to make the cover of the video game.

3. Promote your promotion

Don’t get so focused on the promotion that you forget to tell people about it. You can build it, but they won’t come unless you invite them. Big brands may spend more than a million dollars advertising a single promotion, but even a modest budget can get the word out by getting creative. The History Channel spent less than $250,000 to tout the premiere of Swamp People on Thursday nights with a Taste of the Bayou food truck experience in New York City. And for a fraction of that budget, The Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau supported their Getaway Giveaways promotion with email and social media to drive visitors to their new website.

With a tight budget, the key is using all the touchpoints you already control to support the promotion.

4. Build a deeper connection

Good promotions deliver a lot of measurable data – number of entries, attendance figures, units sampled, microsite traffic – and all of it should lead to goals like increased awareness, qualified lead generation or sales spikes. But great promotions build in long-term measurables, too. Things like becoming a Facebook fan, opting into an email program, or becoming part of a brand advisory group create more permanent connections between people and brands. These connections then create a community of vocal brand advocates, people who write glowing online reviews, post about the brand on social media sites and tell their friends and family about it.

In other words, great promotions create great promoters. And what brand wouldn’t want that?

See more examples of great promotions at Promo.

I love great advertising. Sometimes great ads are touching, like "Hair." Some ads get your attention, like the Ikea ad. Others, like the biker stunt, are just brilliant.

Which ad is your favorite?

When anyone thinks of baseball they inevitably think of Major League Baseball teams like the Texas Rangers, Minnesota Twins and Boston Red Sox (certain MLB teams not mentioned for good reason - you know who you are).

The MLB team logos are, of course, easily recognizable and memorable. They've been around for many generations. But, have you ever seen the logos of Minor League Baseball? You'd be surprised at how inspiring they can be. They're inventive, fun, and very well executed.

I have scoured the internet for my favorites. ENJOY my gallery of Minor League Baseball team logos!