Thanks everyone for following me thus far even though I haven’t given this blog much attention. Part of that has been a focus on getting my Master’s Degree in Internet Marketing (finished that in July), getting certifications from Google (Analytics & Display Advertising), getting a business off the ground and some other “things”. Part of it has been my indecisiveness in terms of what I should focus this blog on. On the one hand, I’m a geek, love technology, have have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, many years experience in IT including functioning as a CIO. On the other, I’m really passionate about and knowledgeable about marketing, now have a Master’s degree in Internet Marketing, work for one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, and have been told that I “get” business. I had been debating on the best niche that will offer true value for my subscribers and had a hard time deciding. Should I focus on technology? Marketing in general? Internet Marketing? Network Marketing? Business? Bringing big business to small business? I couldn’t decide.

I finally decided! I have to thank Scott Brinker and his site ChiefMarTec for helping me make that decision. There IS indeed a hybrid marketing technology (or marketing technologist) role emerging and that PRECISELY describes who I am and what I’m going to focus on in this blog. I’m also intrigued by the role of Chief Marketing Technologist and wouldn’t be surprised if I find myself venturing to go perform that role for a powerhouse (yeah…attempting to change the future of mankind – dang me!). So, with that said, you’re going to see this blog fully active and thriving and I DO want to hear your comments, feedback, requests, etc. Let me know what type of information you want to hear more about. Now, time to get to work…

I just ran across the video as part of my Internet PR advancement (I’ve been reading and learning like a machine lately on this topic) and I’d like to get people’s thoughts on it.  Sometimes bold works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Considering Heinekin’s ‘made to entertain’ proposition, do you think this “stunt” was effective?

I’ve been hearing a lot of people lately ask each other, “Are you REALLY making money in social media?”, “CAN you make money in social media?”, and my personal favorite: “How do you measure your social media efforts / ROI / etc.?”

First of all, the QUICK answer….yes I AM making money in social media and there are LOTS of people doing the same and plenty of people making a LOT of money in social media. How? Well, that’s a separate post (actually, book/course or series of coaching sessions). But, the question remains:

How do you MEASURE these efforts?

Really, there are a lot of potential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we could investigate. So as to simplify this discussion, let’s speak simply of monthly net revenue. In other words, how much money do you yield at the end of the month after all the expenses are accounted for.

So, we’re going to look at two main factors (again to simplify things):

• gross revenue
• total expenses

The above two would have to use the same time frame (monthly of course). Grabbing the above, we yield:



gross revenue – total expenses = net income

That’s it! Well….you’re saying….Aaron, isn’t there more to it? Actually, it depends on your needs. I could answer, “Why? Does there HAVE to be?” For me in some cases, that won’t suffice.

Why not?

Well, first of all, we greatly simplified our measures. Secondly, what if there were expenses that extend beyond this time frame tied to the same income (do we count it? Most wouldn’t, but you could)? What if there is income BEYOND this period? This is often referred to as customer lifetime value. In the above case, we didn’t account for the fact that the time spent once may actually pay for itself for days, months, or years to come, no? There are a LOT of other smaller factors that we could account for.

But…here is MY suggestion

If – and only if – you’ve already applied, studied, learned from, made improvements, studied, learned, from, etc. That cycle…you’ve reiterated it a few times….at THAT point, then maybe you want to complicate things a bit then and add on further KPIs (and if so, drop me a line or give me a call at 505-500-GROW and we can strategize how to do that).

But, for now….

Let’s forget about all that and figure out HOW to measure your gross revenue and total expenses in social media. For the sake of simplicity (boy, we’ve talked simplicity like 3 times now and I’ve just gotten more complicated each time, haven’t I?), let’s just use ONE social media channel…Twitter. Why Twitter? Why not…it’s hot and it’s growing like crazy and everyone’s talking about it so why not.

Let’s first look at expenses. To do so, figure out how much money goes into it (time spent on a consistent basis, any graphics work, etc.) You may want to divy certain tasks (such as a blog post that makes it to Twitter) up to the various channels through which partake. For example, you say 10% of your blog post expense is allocated towards Twitter gain (or perhaps all social media in general – provided that you don’t consider blogging part of the social media sphere – I’ve heard most people include it but some do not).

So, in this example, let’s say you spend $1,000 monthly and 10% goes towards the Twitter channel. So, you’re spending $100 on Twitter in just Blog posts. Now, after adding in all the other expenses (ask yourself where else you’re promoting Twitter and factor that in also), including, of course, the time spent sending Tweets, responding to Direct Messages, etc. Let’s say you’re spending $500 on Twitter monthly. Now, switching gears….

You must find a way to track all your revenue that is a direct result of your medium (in this case Twitter). If all that traffic goes to one place, and it’s your own, then you have several ways of doing this (such as analytics, creating unique codes for each of the links, etc.) Additionally, most of the url shortening tools out there these days provide efficient means of tracking so you can track other click throughs for affiliate products, etc. However, just tracking the click throughs is not enough. You need to track it all the way through the purchase and in most cases beyond that (remember the customer lifetime value?)? Let’s say that through affiliate sales only by clicks generating only from Twitter, you made 6 sales at $200 each, or $1200. That is your gross revenue (assuming you made no other income elsewhere – in our “simplified” example, that is it).

Now, you subtract your expenses from your revenue and voila! So, $1200 – $500 = $700. In this example, you’ve made $700 for the month on Twitter alone. Not a bad start.

Now that you’ve done that, you’re obviously going to want to look at how you can improve.

-Aaron Hillyer, M.S.

Think about how long and hard new parents ponder over the name of their first born. It can take many, many hours, days, weeks, even months and years (See Behind the name). Hell, my wife and I are probably still a couple years away and she must have asked me 20 times over the last few years, “Would you like this name for a son/daughter?”

What about the amount of time that an author spends trying to pick the title of a book? Speaking of books…why do we call a book a book? Why isn’t isn’t it a koob (see Koob) or obok (which means “next to” in Polish) instead of a book? Who cares, right? Well, actually we ALL do. You see, the word “book” is a name of the object that refers to that which we all know as a book. It’s actually a very important identifier and allows us to communicate with one another (at least English speaker to English speaker).

The name for everything is just as important as the name you give your son or daughter, the title of a book, or the term used to identify an object. That namecan actually make or break you in a lot of ways. In the world of internet marketing, you MUST treat names and titles very important. How important is it really?

Think about this example, for a moment. I start up a new business and call it “Aaron’s Antiques”. Then I go create a website and take some pictures of my store and put them on the website. Now, someone browsing the internet decides that they are looking for antiques in the same geographic area as Aaron’s Antiques. So, they pop over to their favorite search engine and search for Antiques. They find a few results that interest them but nothing that grabs their attention so they decide to pop over to eBay and I never get found.

What happened?

Well, a LOT of things probably happened and I don’t want to (in this post) get into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and techniques but here is something that likely happened: I didn’t properly name the pictures right. Remember, I said that I took some picture and uploaded them to the site? Instead of properly defining the alt tags of the image “Aaron’s Antiques” or “The best antiques shop in all of Michigan!” or something that could grab someones attention, I didn’t. So, instead of the user finding a PICTURE of my nice antique shop (that would probably solve their problem) that is right down the road from them, they didn’t. Is it that simple? Yes and No.

Yes, because you can (and should) simply add a basic attribute to all of your images for SEO purposes.  There are many great reasons for this:

1. For those browsers that can’t view images (such as the search engine crawlers)
2. It can help your search engine rankings and overall findability (post on that coming soon)
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY, it promotes accessibility for handicapped viewers that use screen reading software (all of the big name software for these purposes these days will actually read the text inside the alt attribute to the users IF it is provided). To do so, simply add alt=”whatever describes your image here” inside the img tag in your HTML. So, in the above example, I might write:

<img src=”images/image1.jpg” alt=”Antique Lover’s Paradise – The best antique store in all of Michigan” />

No, because this example only covers a small part of it. For example, why did we name the image above image1? Shouldn’t it have a more descriptive name? Absolutely! Maybe something like AaronsAntiques-FrontOfStore.jpg which is a little bit long but “could work if it had to” but I suggest something like AaronsAntiques1.jpg. In any case, why stop there? Doesn’t “Antique Lover’s Paradise” sound better than “Aaron’s Antiques”? Maybe I should reconsider the name of my company.

What about the website name (url)? What about the names (titles) of all of the individual pages? What about the names of the sections in each of them? You starting to *get it*?

A name is soooo important in so many places and in so many ways. The next time you upload something, think about it’s name. The next time you create a resume, think about the section headers (those are names right?)

If you pay attention to the names, your internet marketing efforts will certainly improve drastically, especially if you test the responses of different names. I recently had a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where I began an ad “The such and such” and I changed it to “THE such and such” (obviously, the ad didn’t say “such and such” ). The click through ratio (CTR) on that ad jumped from 2.5% to over 9%. That’s about a 350% increase JUST FOR CAPITALIZING the word THE. How much of difference can changing certain word make? It’s insane. So, don’t just think about the names and titles either. Choose your words carefully. It CAN and WILL make a difference.

Aaron Hillyer, CITRMS

Welcome everyone. I’m currently in the process of designing this site so please subscribe via RSS and/or bookmark it and check back in a few days as I will begin adding top notch content within the next couple days. I look forward to educating you and getting to know you better!

Aaron Hillyer, CITRMS