Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing has 17 chapters filled with examples, screenshots, code snippets, real world examples and how-to information. Here’s a list of Chapters with handy links to chapter summaries and some resources and links compiled for easy use.

CHAPTER ONE: General Strategy

Chapter Summary >>

Chapter Case Study: Arts Engagement Exchange >>

CHAPTER TWO: On-Site Strategy

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CHAPTER THREE: Off-Site Strategy

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CHAPTER FOUR: Content

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CHAPTER FIVE: Design

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Chapter Case Study: Court Theatre website >>

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CHAPTER SIX: Content Management Systems

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CHAPTER SEVEN: Development

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CHAPTER EIGHT: Blogs

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Chapter Case Study: Intercultural Talk >>

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CHAPTER NINE: Really Simple Syndication

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CHAPTER TEN: E-mail Marketing

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: Social Media Overview

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CHAPTER TWELVE: Social Media Optimization

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Web Video

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Video Sharing and Distribution

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Measurement

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Bringing it all Together

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Mobile

This is an e-chapter that will be available for book purchasers.

Chapter Eleven provides a social media overview.

Major social media sites include:

Facebook.com

MySpace.com

Twitter

How much does Facebook owe you? Check out the site Viral Loop, where you can see how your Facebook interaction measures up. It’s created by a collaboration between Adam L. Penenberg, author of the book Viral Loop, and StudioE9.

More niche social sites are trending, plus the ability and ease of creating your own social sites is growing through tools such as:

Ning

WordPress MU with BuddyPress

SocialEngine

Pligg

GroupSite

GoingOn

DIY social media tools, video and photo sharing, microblogging, mobile social and more are covered in this chapter in more detail.

Chapter Ten examines email marketing, an oldie but a goodie. Email marketing continues to be on the rise and a successful marketing tool, especially when used in conjunction with newer technologies.

There are many email marketing tools available and here are some of the recommended sites:

My Emma

Mail Chimp

Constant Contact

Patron Mail

iContact

StreamSend

JangoMail

Subscriber Mail

Elizabeth Handlin, CEO of Ultimate Resumes, is profiled as a case study on email marketing and its success in this chapter.

Chapter Nine explores RSS, Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way to aggregate your content across multiple sites and devices.

For background on RSS and how it has grown in use over time, the history of RSS feeds can be seen at http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss_history.asp.

Syndic8.com is a site that indexes RSS feeds, a resource to get a feel for how much data is really out there.

Media RSS feeds are covered, with code examples, in depth in this chapter. An mRSS feed can be submitted to Google via Google Webmaster Tools.

Chapter Eight covers blogs including blogging tools, approach, and setting up a blog.

Blog site resources covered in this chapter include:

MovableType

WordPress.com

WordPress.org

Tumblr

Squarespace

Bloggingbasics101.org is a good starting place for blogging overviews.

InterculturalTalk.org and its creator, Deanna Shoss, are featured as a case study in this chapter on the business success of good blogging.

Chapter Six provides a wealth of information on Content Management Systems.

Some of the recommended and profiled CMS options from the chapter include:

WordPress, which is available in both paid and free options:

WordPress.org

WordPress.com

Movable Type

Drupal

Expression Engine

Squarespace

Tumblr

Joomla

Pixelsilk

A comprehensive list of CMS options is available at this Wikipedia entry. Warning, it is not for the acronym phobic.

Chapter Five is all about good design, and all the elements that go into creating it. These are many of the sites featured as screenshots in this chapter as examples along the design process.

Famouscookies.com is a example of tasty, good design.

DCATheater.org uses a fixed with layout in their web design.

Panda.org uses a fluid layout.

View an example of an elastic layout at Mike Cherim’s submission to CSS Zen Garden.

Designinfluences.com includes templates for creating fluid grid-based CSS layouts.

TheMainBlue.com uses an adaptive fluid layout.

Navigation is a crucial part of good design and user ability. Jiri Tvrdek’s portfolio site is featured as site navigation that is well designed and intuitive.

Typography plays a big role in design and functionality. The Ernest Hemingway Collection site is a great example of web typography.

The site for Court Theatre is the case study in this chapter on design and bringing all the components together into one project.

Chapter Four discusses the importance of creating quality and engaging content, and how to help people find it. Here are a few highlighted tools and site resources.

Google Webmaster Central is an easy-to-use resource to improve traffic and help Google’s interpretation of your site so that it’s easier to find all around.

Keywords and how to best use them and not overdo them is discussed in this chapter. Once you have your strategy in place, WordTracker offers a subscription service and also this free keyword tool to help you along.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Another free keyword tool is the Google Search-Based keyword tool where you can check suggested keywords and search terms.

Google Trends is a very handy free tool used to compare the most popular search terms by global Google users.

http://www.google.com/trends

Chapter Three of Return on Engagement focuses on Off-Site Strategy. Below are many of the links to sites discussed in this chapter to help you find your way around the tools for digital marketing.

A great place to start is this article, ”Marketing Tactics vs. Social Media Strategy,” by Liana Evans.

Online directories are covered by category in this chapter. Here are a few highlights.

Blog Directories offer blog search and listings, categorized by topic, and in many cases are free. A few include:

Blogcatalog.com

Bloggingfusion.com

Business Directories can help customers find you through listings and online promotional tools. Two of the most popular are:

Yelp

Merchant Circle

Industry Directories allow searching and listing by industry category and can be targeted to local levels also.

Hoovers.com

Yahoo! Directory

Google Directory

Article Directories exist in the thousands. You can submit content for traffic driving, and also use these sites as great resources for content. Here are a few starters:

FindArticles.com

Buzzle.com

GoArticles.com

DMOZ, The Open Directory Project is a manually edited list (by actual humans) of sites and businesses.

Social Bookmarking sites allow you to post links to relevant content and apply tags to your link. There are many such sites now, but a few to start with include:

Delicious

Digg

Reddit

Photo Sharing sites such as Flickr enable photo sharing with text-based metadata associated with it. Photos included in your content has great appeal, especially when you take the opportunity to associate keywords with it.

See a comparison of different photo sharing sites from author and SEO expert Chris “Silver” Smith.

The Arts Engagement Exchange is not-for-profit organization in Chicago. Established in 2006 with a grant from the Wallace Foundation to the Chicago Community Trust in partnership with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, their mission is to support the arts and cultural affairs community by fostering audience engagement. AEE asked Mightybytes to work strategically with them in building this online resource to offer knowledge-sharing, networking, expert advice, sales information, marketing tips, and other audience engagement resources. The site had the following requirements:

• Easily updatable via content management system
• Professional design that would appeal to the arts community
• Detailed community profiles
• Many avenues for collaboration: forums, blog, etc.

The goal for AEE was a robust web site that was user-friendly, had a content management system they could utilize to keep a constant stream of relevant information up-to-date and where users of the site could easily interact. The site launched successfully, with keyword-rich content we developed with them to gain the search engine rankings they needed, and ability for arts organizations to find them. It features a blog, member directory, comment and discussion areas, easily-downloadable information from past presentations and more. Having the experience and input of who their target audience is, what they needed, and the team of experts to supply the content, we could collaborate to create a strategically designed site to meet business and digital marketing needs.

Visit it at www.artsengagementexchange.org.

Mightybytes, Inc. designed the Court Theatre website and Joy Burke and Tai Palmgren, the design team discuss the project in another Return on Engagement case study. An excerpt of that case study follows:

“One of the biggest challenges of this site was handling a great amount of content and presenting it in a manner that wouldn’t overwhelm the user,” say the design team.

To achieve this they:

• compressed template files on the site using GZIP, which basically decreases the file size and therefore load time.
• designed calls-to-action using a color complementary to other site elements in order to highlight persistent “Buy Tickets” and “Donate” buttons.
• Used professional typography techniques to communicate visual hierarchy effectively.

Read more in chapter five of Return on Engagement.

Anthropology Meets Marketing

Deanna Shoss is a marketing/communications professional and is the creator and author of the blog Intercultural Talk as well Intercultural Talk, Inc., a multicultural marketing consulting business. “I wanted to explore the space between multicultural marketing, intercultural communications and social justice—as in antiracism,” she explains.

Blog and Relationship-Building

The tangible return for Intercultural Talk is measurable relationship building. For example, a company in Puerto Rico discovered her blog and invited Deanna to speak at a conference. There, she made a connection with a person from Executive Diversity Services and after several months of pursuing business together, Deanna has now become a formal associate of this company. “It now means that I can offer engagement and inclusion and diversity services for companies as large as 10,000 people via my relationship with EDS.” Further, she notes that business connections like this solidify her identity as a growing leader in intercultural communications.

Read more in Return on Engagement chapter eight.

Assessing the mediums by which you will implement and deliver your message is just as important as assessing the message itself. Chapter one of  Return on Engagement breaks down options for adopting and maintaining long-term design and technology strategies—both on your site and off—that meet marketing objectives and are flexible enough to change with an organization’s fluctuating needs over time as well.

Your website is the home base of your digital marketing, business and communications efforts and often provides a first impression of your organization to would-be customers. This chapter in Return on Engagement covers strategy-building techniques for creating and maintaining an effective site over time, including approaches for technology, content, keywords, information architecture, design, accessibility, SEO, syndication, rich media, analytics, and user-generated content.

This chapter in Return on Engagement offers a strategy roadmap for using online tools to make connections, create relationships, and drive qualified traffic to your website. Techniques for extending your site or blog’s content strategy to social media endeavors over an extended period of time are covered as well.

This chapter in Return on Engagement focuses on implementing specific techniques from your on-site strategy as they relate to site content elements, such as information architecture, keywords, written content, and creating SEO-friendly page metadata, sitemaps, and so on.

Professional, credibility-based design can foster great user experiences that engage, entertain, educate, sell, increase brand loyalty, or a combination of the above. This chapter in Return on Engagement focuses on best practices for design, usability and creating seamless user experiences through effective use of typography, color, stylesheets, navigation, forms, search, and other commonly used site features, as well as pros and cons of various common web page layouts. The chapter includes a case study of a design team that has seen success using some of these techniques as well.

Implementing a site-wide content management system will not only simplify the process of site content updates but inevitably give you control over extended functions such as forms, e-commerce, forums, blogs, and increase your search engine rankings as well. This chapter in Return on Engagement covers the ins and outs of working with various available CMS options, compares blogging systems vs. CMS, and demystifies the workflow process of configuring a CMS for your own site. This chapter will also help you decide which CMS option may be right for your site and get you started on the path of managing your own online content.

Development challenges such as security and scalability for building marketing-driven social sites and web applications are explored along with semantic markup techniques such as microformats and RDFa are covered in this chapter of Return on Engagement. The chapter also covers techniques like CSS/JavaScript optimization, progressive enhancement and other ways of tweaking your site’s code to attract both people and search engines. The pros and cons of using APIs, widgets, Facebook apps, and other data-sharing approaches are covered as well.

This chapter of Return on Engagement offers an overview of blogs, the technology behind them, how they work, how you can extend their functionality through plug- ins and extensions, and why they are important digital marketing tools. Included are instructions for setting up and configuring your own blog and a case study on a successful career-changing blog implementation.