PharmiMike

As a digital marketer, you will end up with logins and passwords for a lot of sites!! You may think at the time that you will remember that you used the cats maiden name for your password, but believe me, you wont. So, have a system. I use a spreadsheet that I constantly refer to. Simple but effective. 

You will find that an increasing number of sites use OpenID logins, which essentially allow you to login to multiple sites by sharing information. Twitter does this, blogger and numerous others. The frustrating thing is Google’s openID is not the same or compatible with Yahoo’s etc etc. Yawn.

This is pretty important! but very simple. Its also only a very small step in a long journey! 

Simply go here  and enter the URL of your site.

Submit your site to google

But before you do that there are a number of checks you should do :

• Do you have a basic sitemap (a simple navigation method) ?
• Is your website search engine friendly?
• Do you have a Robots.txt file?
• Do you have a sitemap.xml file?

Its vitally important that you know which bits of your digital marketing campaigns are reaping rewards, therefore you need to track things. Luckily, if you are using Google Analytics for your website analytics package (and you should be), then you can do this.

The answer my friend is in Google UTM codes. Urchin Tracking Monitor codes to you and me (geeklink).. essentially by adding a simple bit on the end of any link back to your website, you can track which campaign was the source. Its up to you to define your campaigns.

For example:

http://www.pharmimike.com/?utm_source=s_site&utm_medium=Mailshot&utm_campaign=New-Product-launch

Useful tool here: Google Analytic UTM URL Builder.

Google’s Own Tool here:

From this extra information Google Analytics can log the campaigns, and you can see which one is working and which one is not.

For example, I use UTM codes on the end of links within Job adverts I place in a number of LinkedIn groups. A different code for each group. That way I can see which groups give me good return on my time investment. If I relied solely on the normal stats, I’d simply get a load of clicks logged from LinkedIn without knowing which group they came from .

The only disadvantage you may notice is the resulting length of the URL, which is no good for Twitter for example, so its worth using a URL shortener such as Ti.ny or Bit.ly

A useful tool for this is a plugin for Firefox called snip-n-tag. as this adds the codes for you and generates a short URL with the result.

Its a good idea to keep track of the codes you use in a spreadsheet or database, otherwise you will soon lose track. Log the date used and the code in your spreadsheet, and you can review your analytics logs with this in mind to made informed decisions about your campaign success rate.

This might sound obvious, but before you undertake ANY marketing, you need to define who it is you are targeting. That might be geographically, demographically, what sector etc. 

PharmiWeb.com currently has a two target audiences:

1. Potential candidates
2. Potential clients

Of course these are split into different segments, by country, by candidate job type (sales, clinical etc), but once you have defined them, you can start to figure out where they hang out…

If you want to submit your site to BING, there are a few steps to go through.

How to Submit to site to Bing

1. Go to this URL if you want to submit your website to Bing. You will need to sign in with your Windows Live ID to access the webmaster center.

2. Enter the website URL and also sitemap URL (Good idea to have one!).

3. Next step is to verify your website and this can be done either with XML verification or HTML meta tag verification. You can get more details from the help center.

4. Once your website is validated, you will see details like number of URLs indexed, any issues etc.

Bing also has a tool for AdCentre keyword Suggestions, but it crashed when I tried to install it. so I’ll try again later.

You will also need to do a similar thing with Google and Yahoo.

It seems to have some cool features, but not sure if its of any direct use for publishing news releases. I’ll certainly use if for a while and see how I get on. You can see my attempts at http://pharmiweb.newsvine.com

I think I am getting obsessed with RSS feeds. However it occurs to me that you cant do much digital marketing with them. And feed reading is much easier now it is build into most new browsers. (Safari, Opera and Chrome are all good!)

Why use RSS?

What’s Going On
How can you find out what’s going on in your field? Well, I use an RSS reader (actually I use the build in reader in the Opera Browser) to display feeds from a range of sites. that way I can scan down and see what’s new. It certainly saves opening a dozen or more websites. I read feeds for most of the major pharmaco’s PR(where they have them), and a selection of other sites. (reuters, bbc health, Department of Health etc.)

Tell The world
If you have content of your own, make sure its available in RSS! and make sure as many variations as possible are on RSS. Better still, allow your users to define their own feeds. For example, candidates who save a job search on PharmiWeb.com have the ability to read their job alerts as an RSS feed.

This blog has an RSS feed, and so you can subscribe to it and find out when I update it without checking back every day!

Keeping Control of your own RSS feeds
One thing I’ve had problems with is keeping track of the feeds that I generate. Enter Feedburner. Feedburner is one of Google’s goodies that allows you to log and track your feeds, so you can see how many subscribers you have and also modify elements of the feed without going back to your website developers. I’ll do more on Feedburner later, because there are some cool features, but essentially you can add your feed to feedburner and it creates a new XML/RSS feed which you can modify, log, publicise, etc etc. Well worth doing.

I originally planned to run my blog on Blogger, but to be honest, after playing with it for a short time, I realised how limiting it was, so I deciced to grab the PharmiMike domain, and set up a WordPress site. As I have a fasthosts account, the whole process took me 15 minutes – cool!

Now I have a lot more scope and flexibility to include pages and content that I want, rather than relying on blogger’s limited set.