Tag: internet marketing

Web Site Usability

Once you have established your site on the Internet and have traffic coming to your site, what do you do? Your site must be usable.

First question to ask yourself: What do I want people to do? Put another way, the question can be “What are the expected outcomes?” It isn’t always “more sales” but that might be your answer. It might also be more newsletter subscribers or perhaps more blog comments or even more requests for information.

Once you have determined the desired outcome, you can begin to plan around it. Each page should have one desired outcome for maximum usability. The next step is then to determine how all the pages fit together into one cohesive site. For example, if you are a realtor selling homes, you probably want to move one group of people towards the buyer’s information pages and another group of people to the seller’s information. Once a prospective home seller is in the right section (the expected outcome of the home page was to move buyers to buyers’ info and sellers to sellers’ info) the goal of one page might be to request an evaluation of the home’s value. Another page might be intentioned to show ranges of prices for homes in an area and then ask them to call for a detailed analysis.

The next step, the one that is often skipped, is to test it. If you are indeed a realtor, get some sellers to go through your site while you watch. Find out if they can indeed accomplish what you want them to. Then get a buyer to go through your site. Give them a specific task to accomplish. See if they can do it. If the testing has good results, pat yourself on the back and launch. If the results aren’t so good, you probably need to go back and repeat steps 1 and 2 until you get the desired results.

Just because you “hit it” with your site and get the results you want, don’t stop looking at how you can make it even better.

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10 Key Social Media Tools for Small Business

Social Media Marketing, promoting your business through internet social media, is a good idea for any business. One of the questions I’m asked most often is “How much time does it take?” and the companion complaint I hear is “I don’t have time for that.”
My response to that is, what business is doing so well they don’t have to take time to market themselves? So, if you’ve made the decision to spend the time, here are 10 tools you will find quite helpful:

  1. Twitter: Found at twitter.com it is called a Microblogging web site. You have 140 characters per message (the message is called a tweet).  You can follow anyone and anyone can follow you. It’s a great way to connect with people in your industry, in your neighborhood, or even to see what the competition is up to.
  2. TweetDeck: Once you get into twitter, the twitter.com interface won’t be robust enough to manage the people you’re following. TweetDeck lets you categorize and segregate people you follow and makes it easy to reply, forward, or send direct messages.
  3. Facebook: Facebook.com started as a way for college students to connect but it has become big business and is a great way to connect with friends, colleagues, and potential clients. You can create a page for your business and collect “fans”. This provides a great way to communicate with “your” community.
  4. LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com started as a way to connect with others in a business environment and has rapidly begun to grow into a site that lets you form business groups and connect with people in different ways.
  5. StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon.com is a great way to track and share web sites that you come across. Instead of bookmarking them with your browser, bookmark them with StumbleUpon and you can access them from any browser. It’s unique point is being able to “stumble upon” sites that others with your interests have found.
  6. Digg: Another social bookmarking site, Digg is more focused on news kind of things but is a great way to share your sites and find out what others are “Digging”
  7. FriendFeed: Much like dogpile.com brings results from different search engines together in one interface, FriendFeed.com lets you bring all your social media sites into one feed.  You can also take your feed and import it into your accounts – I get facebook comments on my tweets because FriendFeed pulls them into my account.
  8. YouTube: I’m so keyed into the written word that I sometimes overlook the visual. But when we were not having good luck repairing my son’s iPod, he looked on YouTube and got step by step instructions. And that is why businesses can benefit – show step by step instructions on how to use your goods or services.
  9. MySpace.com: As sites like FaceBook and LinkedIn morphed to fit the changing needs of its members, myspace has grown into a “big boys” site with networking opportunities and connections similar to their more business-like counterparts.
  10. Craigslist: OK, its not really a social networking site but it is a key site to find or advertise things on and it’s pretty simple to figure out and use.
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Social Media Buzz

So you’re trying to grow your business and you keep hearing about Social Media and how you ought to be using it. But how? And how much time will it take? And what kind of results will you get?

Like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it.  But let’s back up and talk about what Social Media is.  Essentially, Social Media is all about networking but doing it online instead of face to face. With that simple definition, you can see how things like blogs and forums can be classified as Social Media. But there is a classification of web site that is dedicated to this online networking amongst which we find sites such as: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even CraigsList.

Over the next several blogs we’ll take a look at these four and how you can use them for your business. Let’s start with one of my current favorites, Facebook. With Facebook you can build and maintain your brand. One easy way to do that is to create a Facebook Page for your business.  You can invite customers and potential customers to interact with you on your page. If you have any kind of event, you can invite others to the event all right through Facebook. Just like you have a physical brand with a sign or a logo, you can foster that brand through your own page on Facebook.

One of the major goals of any online campaign is to drive people to your web site. Once there, no matter what reason they clicked through to your site, you have the opportunity to connect them with a service or product that meets their needs. Since we’ve begun helping our customers with social media marketing, we’ve also “practiced what we preached” and are seeing a large increase in traffic to our site which translates to more business for us. Through Facebook you can send more people to your web site, reaching an audience that might not have know of you without Facebook. And this is true even for people that are right in your area.

One of the most exciting and amazing things is how you can connect and reconnect with others on the Internet. I might want to meet your accountant, for example, but not know that she is YOUR accountant.  We could know each other for a long time and that would never come up. But on the Internet I can click on your friends and see who they are and either ask you for the introduction or just connect with them directly. To some that sounds a bit scary. But it’s not. Its how social networking works.

So get started at Facebook. Looking for someone to connect with? I’ll be your friend. Look me up at http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-DeLaet/1133345182

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3 Internet Marketing Research Tips

Frequently we have startup businesses ask us to design their web site. After we ask them a series of carefully designed questions about their target market and goals, they often ask us to hold off while they do some more market research. But market research is expensive and time consuming, right?
Wrong. Here are three simple Internet Market Research Tips that you can use to learn more about your target market and what the competition is up to:

  1. Search in Google for your top two to five key phrases and look at the top five sites in each phrase. Look at the colors, the links, the images and the content. Compare this to your colors, links images and content. Often you will find something you should add or tweak as a result. Repeat this step with live.com and yahoo.com.
  2. Find backlinks to your top three competitors (in Google, type in link:<domainname.com> and press enter). You can see who is linking to your competitor’s sites and possibly determine why. This will help you determine whether you should pursue similar links. If you have an existing site, use the Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools to get more complete results.
  3. Getting a high rank in the search engines is only one piece of the puzzle. Next you want to look at the text that goes with a high ranking. For example, a search for best web design finds the site bestwebgallery.com at or near the top. The text beneath the link says “Best Web Gallery is a showcase gallery that features all the best design Flash and CSS websites on the web”. This text isn’t visible on the page but it is in the Description MetaTag. So the text that you put in your meta-tag will help searchers determine whether they will click on your link or not. Check out your competition’s wording and make sure that description tag is GOOD.

If you want to get to grow your business, take time to research what the competition is up to. It doesn’t cost anything more than some of your time. And if you take the time, you can uncover nuggets of information that will help you grow and prosper.

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Measuring Your Statistics

I’ve always followed the concept of what gets measured is what gets done. I also follow John C. Maxwell’s leadership newsletter and this last newsletter included this quote from Albert Einstein: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

So what’s my point? The beauty of the Internet is that it is like one huge database. The problem with the Internet is that it is like one huge database. A while back I was talking with a potential client about what to measure with the statistics on his web site. He wanted to measure everything. While possible, that isn’t practical. Of what value is there in tracking, for example, how many 206 error codes you get on your site? Anybody out there know what a 206 error is? Those of you who just said yes are web techs. But for a business owner, that information isn’t a useful metric to determine the success of the site or the business.

What statistics are useful? We have five key stats we follow for our customers but what statistics are useful depends on what your goal is. Rarely do I find a customer whose goal is really to be ranked number one for a key word or key phrase. What they really want is to get more customers for their business and see having a high ranking for their key phrases as one of the means towards reaching that goal. So if you try to measure everything, you’ll likely just end up confused. Here are the five web site statistics that we recommend tracking:

  1. Number of Visits
  2. Pages Visited (in order of number of visits)
  3. Search Engine Referrals
  4. Key Phrases Searched For
  5. Backlinks

Of course, if you need assistance understanding these, EduCyber’s Search-Friendly Hosting is probably just the thing for you.

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Finding Nuggets on The Web

No, this is not about the Denver Nuggets (though they’re looking good this year). One of the nicest things about following blogs and social media is the way in which you can find useful nuggets of information. Starting out my year I have been catching up on some tweets (not using Twitter yet? – you should check it out) and some blogs and I came across these useful nuggets just today:

  • A friend sent me a link to 56 of the best tips for growing a small business on a budget. I thought “56”? I don’t have time for 56! But I opened the list and scanned down it and number 12 caught my eye. Basically he says you can either increase number of clients, increase average sale price or increase number of purchases per client. And most people spend all their time on the first which often has the smallest impact on your bottom line. So look at how you can increase the average sale price or increase the number of purchases per client.
  • I’ve been following Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound, for quite awhile now. Joan is the queen of helping people get noticed by the media. Again, not everything that comes from her pen or keyboard relates directly to me but I do get great ideas on how I can help my clients get noticed. As an Internet marketing firm, we promote our clients on the Internet and Joan Stewart excels at using tools like Twitter and Facebook to get the word out to targeted audiences such as actual reporters. One recent post was about Lynn Terry who wrote a report on how to sell information products without a web site. We of course don’t recommend that – we can build the site for you – but it was thought provoking anyway.

So is surfing the net a mindless endeavor or a business-building activity? I say it’s great for business if you do it with a purpose.

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Growing in a Down Economy

How do you grow your business in a down economy? There are lots of cliché’s I could throw out there. But it really comes down to tuning out the naysayers and focusing on what you do best. So here’s what the technology experts at EduCyber recommend:

  1. Turn off the TV. Leave it on too long and you’ll be barraged with advice to give it up because the economy is tanking.
  2. Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Strongly related to the first tip, the point is that you still have your business. Look at ways to expand your customer base, increase sales to existing customers, or make bigger sales to new customers.
  3. Leverage your existing IT infrastructure. Sounds like big business but it isn’t. There are always efficiencies that can be gained. Take the time up front for training or learning how to best use your network and applications.  Greater efficiency equals more money for your bottom line.
  4. Look at your web site. Can  you sell more products to more people through it? Can you target your ideal client more effectively through paid advertising or paid search?
  5. Continue to invest in yourself and your company. When others see that you’re investing in yourself, they’ll know you aren’t going anywhere. This will help them make the (right) decision to do business with  you.
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Leverage Your Web Site

Tough times got you worried? Is the recession sending you into a depression? I’ve been asked quite a bit lately about how what EduCyber does can help a company through tough times.

This is undoubtedly one of the unique times when smart business owners will position their web site to capture market share and solidify their position so that when the recovery takes off, they’re in a position to benefit. So what can you do? First take a good hard look at  your web site. What is working? Do you have a strong call to action on each page? Have you updated it lately? Does it look fresh?

Take some time to go through your site yourself. If you’ve had your site for a year or more, there will undoubtedly be pages that you haven’t looked at in awhile. Make sure that any old data is removed and that you have current information about your products and services.

Then you are ready to start. Search rules. Get your site ranked for your key words now and keep them there. Doing that will pay benefits far into the future. If you carefully define the key words that you wish target, you might find that it is not as difficult as you might believe to get ranked.

Visit Google’s webmaster tools to learn how to do it yourself or contact EduCyber if you’d like assistance to start your new year at the top of the search engines. In fact you can come to our seminar on December 11th to learn how to “Start your (search) engines”.

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Build A Better Web Site

What does it take to build a better web site? Do you need to be flashier? Do you need to have bells and whistles? Should it have music playing? Do you need to cram it full of links?

No.

Actually the best web sites are often the simplest. And the simplest thing to do is help people quickly find the information or product they want so they can move on to something else. With that in mind, when we talk to folks looking for a web site, the first question we ask is “What are the goals for your site?”

More customers is NOT a good answer to that question. Convert five web site visitors to customers each month IS a good answer. With that kind of clearly defined goal you can begin to look at what is the most effective way to convert a visitor to a customer and design around that.

The second question I usually ask is “Who is your target market?” And no, everyone, is not a good answer. The more clearly you can build an image of who the target market is, the more focused your site can be. If a Tuxedo shop, for example wanted to target brides (because they make the decision on what tuxes will be used) and their mothers, that will help to dictate what colors are used (white and baby blue perhaps), what textures the site should have (lots of lace in this example) and even what kinds of lines or shapes (rounded corners will look softer and more inviting).

So if you want to build a better web site, you don’t necessarily have to go cutting edge. Just determine what you want the site to do and who you want to market to and you’ll be well on the way to building a better site.

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Searching in a Cloud

Came across a fascinating web site that I want to share with you. I have several friends who are very visual people. They love to diagram things. Several of them love to use a visual mind mapping tool that puts words all over the place – helping them to group key ideas and just see things in a more visual manner.

If that sounds like you, you need to check out Quintura. This site / application creates visual “mind map” searches. They use some pretty sophisticated algorithms to create the connections and visual creations. For example, we recently hosted the Information Product Roadtrip at EduCyber. If I do a search for information products at Quintura, I get the two words in the middle surrounded by a couple of dozen related words. Put the mouse over products and the words most closely related to it come forward and the others fade away.

If the linear fashion of most search engines just doesn’t cut it for you, try Quintura. Even if you love the way your favorite search engine works, you’ll want to give Quintura a try just to see if you get any additional insight.

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