Spork Marketing

As an American Express card holder, I just received a stylish little package of “Online Marketing Tips” flash cards. Intrigued, I carefully reviewed each. While the information was incredibly basic, most of it was accurate and useful. Unfortunately, there are a couple of recommendations made by AMEX that I have to disagree with.

My free online marketing advice flash cards from American Express.

First, the highlights:

• AMEX did a great job of emphasizing useful website design. It’s something I’ve harped on before, but good websites aren’t necessarily flashy or pretty. In the words of AMEX “good websites are “interesting and of value to customers” and “simple to understand and easy to navigate.” Good advice.
• They also emphasized the importance of joining social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook . These sites are becoming increasingly business oriented, and for good reason - they’re a great way to network with a lot of people.
• AMEX members can save 5% on Yahoo search marketing (placing pay-per-click ads on Yahoo.com) and small business services (like web-hosting and domain registration). Not too shabby.

The low points:

• The worst piece of advice by far was the recommendation to start blogging using “sites such as Typepad and Blogspot.” Bad idea. Both of these sites suffer from tremendous amounts of spam blog posts (especially Blogspot) which devalue and undermine both systems. Conversely, self-hosted blogs deliver search engine traffic and customers directly to your website and guarantee credibility. Self-hosted blogs are the only way to go.
• The “natural” search marketing advice was very vague and not terribly useful. Granted, it’s very difficult to explain search engine marketing on a 5-by-7 flash card. The card recommends that you can optimize your website by starting “with a broad list of 50 words that describe your product or service” and then narrowing your keyword list down by being specific and using free keyword research tools. As great as it is that AMEX is trying to explain search engine optimization (SEO), I think it would have been better to direct people to read more information. After all, what decent explanation of SEO fails to include info about title tags, anchor text, directory submission, website structure, etc?

In defense of AMEX, each of the cards recommend that you visit openforum.com/onlinemarketing . There’s an “online marketing” PDF that you can download, but it’s not very good. Half of the SEO discussion is devoted to putting 10-15 keywords in your website’s META tags. Talk about bad advice. Not only are META tags 90% useless from an SEO standpoint, but they should never be flooded with 10-15 keywords. One or two META tag keywords per page is a good rule of thumb. There are some good points here and there, and considering how much it costs, it’s worth a read if you know absolutely nothing about online marketing. Still, there’s an old expression that comes to mind: “Free advice is worth the price. “