Why you ask?

The average return on investment for an email campaign is roughly $44.00 for every $1 spent!! That’s 20x better than direct mailers!  And a little more than double internet marketing’s $19.00 for every $1 spent.

DON’T . . .

. . . send out a plain text newsletter. Instead, send out a professional looking newsletter branded to your business. Professional newsletters are opened 8x’s more than plain text newsletters.

. . . send a generic email. Instead, personalize the email to the person who will be opening it. Their name in the greeting,  your signature at the bottom and content that is relevant to THEM. A great example, if you just bought a new car, you wouldn’t want the car maker to send you a newsletter with discounts on new cars, would you? NO, you’d want them sending you info on service specials or safety stats, maybe even an add on if you are into modifying cars.

. . . miss an oportunity to grow your list. Instead, build your email list every chance you get, on the phone; on your email signature; on your website – EVERY PAGE; through your social media channels; on your newsletter( if the content is good, people WILL FORWARD); in your actual ’brick and mortar’  establishment (if you have customers there)

. . . expect people to sign up for your newsletter for the sake of signing up. Instead, give something of value away for when someone signs up – coupons, free downloadable report, ebook, etc. and if you can show them what they are going to get from your newsletter, show them a sample.

. . . SPAM, it’s easy to buy a list of email addresses and send your newsletter off this way, but the fact is, you won’t get much business this way. Instead grow your list organically, as I mentioned above, there are lots of ways to grow your list. If you are just starting out send it to friends and family, if they like it they will send it on.

. . . SELL, SELL, SELL. I know it sounds backwards, but people want to build trust with you before they buy, if you are always trying to sell them something they are going to get tired and end their subscription. Instead, provide content that it relevant to them, human interest stories, YOUR story, show your expertise, show them your excitement for what you  are doing. And as a side note, add A product or service.

. . . make your newsletter 3 pages long. Instead, short snippets of information, people read 25% slower on the internet than on paper. BE KIND.

. . . use a black background and orange font. Instead, use something that won’t kill your reader’s eyes, they’ll thank  you for it and you’ll keep your readership growing.

. . . write staunchy and stiff. Instead, write like you are having a conversation with us and through in your humor once in a while, it’s much more interesting!

There are LOTS of companies out there to choose from when starting a campaign, make sure to do your research and find a provider that will help you through it, give you statistics regarding open rates, clickthroughs,  and options for background designs. If you need help, we would be happy to help you get started. Contact us today!

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Further, you might have some really great ideas to add. Jump right in!

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

1. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
2. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
3. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
5. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
6. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
7. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
8. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
9. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
10. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

1. You don’t have to read every tweet.
2. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
3. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
4. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
5. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
7. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
8. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
9. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
10. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

1. Twitter takes up time.
2. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
3. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
4. There are other ways to do this.
5. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
6. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
7. Twitter is just for technonerds.
8. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
9. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
10. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

1. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
2. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
3. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
4. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
5. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
6. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
7. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
8. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
9. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
10. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

What else would you add? How are you using Twitter for your business?

Eight of 10 people go online when looking for products and services, according to the latest studies from Marketing Sherpa. If you haven’t figured it out already, building your web presence should be your primary marketing focus in the months to come.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of putting your website higher in search engine results so that your business is in front of targeted potential customers who are looking for what you offer. SEO will continue to head the list of online marketing strategies in 2010.

Some of the new and interesting aspects include personalization and greater relevance. That means that as you develop your SEO strategy, dedicate some of your resources to developing content that targets niche audiences. If you are a wine company for example, consider having content devoted solely to wine tasting.

Fresh Content
You’ll also want to keep your web content fresh and up-to-date since search engines will begin factoring publication dates, geo-locations and social media content into their relevancy algorithms. This is also why it’s such a great idea to incorporate a blog into your business website. Blogs are an easy way for you to update your website and keep search engines coming back looking for fresh content. It’s no longer sufficient to just maintain your website and social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You should be updating the content as often as possible—keeping it fresh for search engines—as well as be promoting the profiles via blogging and e-mail newsletters, YouTube, and other social media resources. Creating a cross-promoting strategy with all these tools will go a long way.

For instance, videos that appear on your website but nowhere else online will fail to reach a large portion of your target audience. Web users have a tendency to search one centralized site, such as YouTube, for any content on a given topic. If your video doesn’t appear on YouTube, then for that viewer it may as well not exist. The same thing can be said about your website. If a potential customer performs a search query on Google and your website doesn’t show up, then your company might as well not exist to that potential customer.

Learn the SEO Basics
You owe it to yourself and your business to learn the basics of SEO. This allows you to communicate with your SEO provider or employee performing the SEO. It also helps to ensure you are protecting yourself against the numerous SEO related scams that are in the marketplace today.

So what are some things you can do on your own? Keyword research for one! SEO is a delicate marketing platform that’s easy to lose track of … and ultimately fail with. Your campaign must start with the right keyword focus in mind—this is of paramount importance. Most business owners believe they know those keywords they want to rank well for them. For example, if you sell promotional products and someone Googles the keywords “promotional items,” your company will rank high on the results list. However, you should be considering elements outside of your industry knowledge. Ranking well for a keyword that no one searches for will do nothing for you. That’s why it’s crucial to find the right keywords. And you might have to keep playing with them based on your initial results.

How to Develop Keywords
First and foremost, you want to make sure people are going online and searching for your products or services. So, how much search volume is there for your ideal keywords? You can help identify search volumes by utilizing Google’s Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Though these search volume numbers are not 100 percent accurate, they will point you in the right direction and provide a decent baseline for your campaign.

Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords that are relevant to your business and offer high enough search volumes, you’ll need to delve deeper into your research. Perform a Google search for your list of keywords. You can see how many results there are for each keyword at the top right of the search results page. The lower that number is, the lower your competition will be.

This is a very simplified measuring stick for you to use as a baseline. This step in your SEO campaign is all too important. I would always suggest you have a professional consultation with an SEO expert that has access to much more robust reporting tools.

Once you have your keywords, it’s what you do with them that makes the difference. You need to have content on your website that is targeted to those keywords. Search engines like Google are successful because their results are relevant to the user’s query. Therefore, they are looking to see what your website is about before giving the results. If you’re targeting a keyword such as “Antique dorm furniture,” then you want this keyword phrase to be a topic of your web page’s content.

Link Building
Another important element of your SEO campaign is link building. This is essentially when another website links to yours. Search engines calculate how many websites link to you when they’re giving their results.

Think of each link pointing at your website as a vote. In general, the more “votes” you get, the higher your search engine rankings will be. This is easier said than done, but you can start by requesting links back from friends, family and other business associate websites. Not only might potential customers come across those links, but you’re building up search engine credibility at the same time.

Converting Visitors
We discussed having content relevant to your keywords. While your content needs to relate to the search query, it also should answer two very important questions:

• What do you do?

• Why should I choose you to do it instead of your competition?

This is part of another online marketing consideration called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO. Improving your website’s conversion rate can net you the money you were previously leaving on the table. If you get 100 visitors to your website every day and are converting 1 percent of them, then you have one new customer.

However, if you did nothing else to increase traffic to your website but focus on better conversion, that alone could increase your revenues greatly. In fact, just by improving your conversion rate to 3 percent, you have three times as many customers through your website. That’s without increasing the traffic. Now, imagine a better converting website that’s also attaining more targeted traffic. Nice.

Using your advertising dollars effectively means putting them toward the venues that will produce the most return on your investment. When done correctly, SEO has proven to be a platform in which businesses can generate long-term ROI.

Justin McGill is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS, a local web-marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization with a focus on converting visitors into clients. In the late 1990s, McGill developed a fascination with web design and what became known as SEO. In early 2008, he invested his wealth of technical knowledge in founding a full-service internet marketing company. More: 1-877-736-5673; www.SEORCHERS.com.

I need a new website, but I don’t know which kind to choose? The designer is telling me I can have either a completely custom one-of-a-kind website or a Content Management System, but I don’t really know what they mean?

So let’s discuss this . . .

A Custom one-of-a-kind website is just that.  No one else will have the same design, layout, etc. The designer uses the HTML and CSS languages to bring your vision to life. There are no templates, no set structure or skeleton to work with, just a blank canvas and you & your designer’s imagination. If you want your website to resemble your desk, a blueprint, a spinning globe, or even a pizza box. . . you can do that. Of course it always depends on the level of expertise and knowledge your designer possesses, but truly the sky is the limit in the case of a custom website.

Yang to the Ying i.e. the negative to the positive. . . if you need to make changes, you better brush up on your foreign languages ’cause you’ll be doin’ a lot of corresponding. . . with your computer that is. You gotta know code, at the very least HTML and CSS in order to make changes and on top of that you’ll need to have a program such as dreamweaver installed on your local computer and know how to work the program or there will be no changes here. I hope you have LOTS of extra time on your hands. 

Now if you don’t need to make changes very often, this is great, especially if you host your domain with the designer. At Y Desygn if you use our hosting, we make up to 2 hours of changes each month for free.

Or you can use a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla or Wordpress.  These are theme driven or in other, less pc terms TEMPLATED. Now just because it is a template, doesn’t mean it can’t be custom. When you are looking at CMS themes, you want to look past the logos, colors, images, and text. These will all change or not depending on your preferences. What you want to focus your attention on is the structure. Kind of like when you are looking at a house. If someone else is living in the house, you look past their couch, paint on the walls (at least try), and sometimes even what’s on the floor. You envision how your stuff would look arranged in the room with the RIGHT paint color and flooring, the flow of the house. Do I like where the kitchen is situated? Do I like the open concept design? Or the bedrooms all on the second floor? This is how we need to look at the CMS, just look at the structure, will your information, pictures, colors, etc. look good in this “space”?

Yang to the Ying, in other words, the positive -  If you need to make changes on a regular basis, there is an admin panel that you can login to to add or take away content, add or take away pictures, etc. etc. You can create blog posts, you can manage comments and basically your website. You don’t need the designer’s help, unless of course you royally screw up and delete your site or some other nightmarish scenario.

Another positive of the CMS is that your blog is directly connected to your website, people don’t have to go to a different domain or subdomain to get to it, nor does the brand change from page to page, it all stays very consistent. 

This is a brief overview of the two styles of websites. Please let us know if you have any questions and we will be happy to help you figure out the right software for your next adventure!

What are people actually doing on social networks? We could probably sit and chat all day about what people are doing. No two people’s activity is going to be the same. With all the networks and their various applications; we are literally bombarded with activities, requests, and messages from these sites. I know people who sit all day and play the games on facebook, or sit and read and reply to twitter posts for hours, or send status updates about everything they do on facebook. Are these really the most effective ways to be using this medium? That’s a great question and one only you can answer for yourself. Do you have time to do these tasks? What do you want to get out of your social network? Are you using it for personal purposes, business, or both?

These social platforms can become a complete time sink or they can be the best thing that has ever happened to your business. It’s all up to you and how effective your strategy is. If you haven’t got one yet, go ahead, create an account and spend some time just cruising the networks, see what people are saying, doing, being. And then take some time to think about your business goals. How could your business goals be enhanced by using twitter? facebook? linkedin? youtube? or one of the numerous other networks out there? There are different cultures on each of these platforms and what information and how the information is presented may appeal to different groups on each of these. How can you leverage that? How can you make your message stand out? 

Find a way to integrate your goals with your activity on your networks. Make sure you can monitor the activity your social network produces surrounding your business strategy. I like Google analytics, but there are plenty of other ways to monitor this. Do some research, listen to the conversation on the internet, ask trusted friends, or call us. We are always ready to help you put together the right strategy.

Maybe the best thing about these networks, you can put in as much time or as little time into these worlds as you want and if you make a mistake, it’s ok. You acknowledge it, re-evaluate your strategy and move forward. No one is going to hold it against you. It’s a new medium and we are all students and someday teachers. We’ll appreciate your integrity and value your connection just a bit more.

So what are you waiting for? I know you’ve got something to say! Say it, do it, be it . . . go!

So what changed? And why am I writing on perfection today? Well, what changed is that I was so stressed and so anxious that I was driving myself and everyone around me nuts. I mean absolute nuts! Through a series of serendipitous events, I went to a workshop that changed my life and has taught me how to release that intense need and pressure that I apply to myself. And the reason I am writing on this topic today is because I see so many small business owners doing exactly what I was doing to myself a short time ago.

There is a fine line between perfection and paralysis when it comes to getting yourself out there. Believe me I have dealt with my fair share as an artist and writer. I have fought many a  demon as I prepared to release my soul to the world.

As a business owner, you want the world to have a certain perception about your company and product, however, if you can’t let it go out into the world because it has to be at the highest standard, they won’t have any perception of you anyway. Not to mention the valuable time, energy, and resources you are wasting.

As a business that helps other businesses, we have seen many a client who couldn’t put their site “live” because it had to be absolutely PERFECT. Now don’t get me wrong, we strive for the highest quality in all our work, but in life, there is NO PERFECT. Especially when you are dealing with numerous browsers and varying opinions. What you see as perfect may be very different from your customer’s perfect.

So who is most important in the grand scheme of things? Your need for perfection and this pie in the sky perception you are looking for, or your customers? If you said anything else besides your customers, maybe you should rethink your whole vision. At any rate, yes it’s your customers and I can guarantee you that as a consumer myself, I do not rip apart most websites or won’t do business with a website because they had a typo or because the picture they have up is not the perfect size or shape.

Think about what is most important to your customers . . . the right information and  a site that is appealing and easy to navigate. Have you got that? Then good, get out there and start selling. The best thing about websites, they are always a work in progress and you can make changes as you go. It’s not like print materials that must be set in stone because once it’s run, that’s it, no going back.

Of course, with any “new” industry, there will be a shallow knowledge base to begin with and always the slick character out to make a buck on the backs of innocent, trusting businesses. There are two “types” of SEO, one of which is called ‘Black hat’ and the other ‘White hat’. I am sure I don’t have to tell you which one you want to avoid. But what exactly is the difference? If you don’t know much about SEO, you aren’t going to know the difference. We have been in TOO many meetings with clients who have been blindsided by one of these slick characters that promise ‘to get you on the 1st page of Google’. If you have someone making outrageous promises like this, don’t walk, RUN in the other direction! They may be able to get you on the first page of one of the big ole’ search engines, but it won’t last long and the search engines will ban your site from their pages, making it virtually IMPOSSIBLE for potential clients to find you.

In this world of instant gratification it can be VERY tempting to believe these fly-by-nights, but for the sake of your business’s growth, DON’T!!!!!! 

The following is a list with brief explanations of some techniques black hat establishments use in their campaigns, click on the titles for further explanations ~ 

Keyword stuffing -  just as the title suggests, your pages are stuffed with the keywords people search for throughout your page, this includes meta tags and ‘invisible’ text placed throughout the page.

Doorway pages- these pages, which spam the search engines with certain phrases or keywords that are likely to be searched, are only used to direct visitors  to an entirely different page and specifically for the purpose of increasing rankings. They muddy up the search results and cause LOTS of frustration!

Article Spinning- is the act of using existing articles and rewriting all or portions of them. They also involve using ‘pirated’ content from other sites.

Link Farms- this involves a group of websites that all link back to each other, typically through automated programs to spam the search engines and raise their ranks. They are used to ‘increase the link popularity’ of a site.

These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of black hat tricks in the world of SEO. I would highly encourage you to investigate further on what NOT to do when building an effective SEO campaign. Here are some other resources you can check out -

I love wikipedia

About.com has some great information

Neil Patel of Quick Sprout has some great tips for SEO

And there are plenty more out there. If you are overwhelmed and need help with your campaign, please let us know, we are happy to get you on the right track!

 Today I thought I would throw out some questions and some resources for more information on how to write good content, stats, and useful tidbits to make your website stand out!

The following is a list of questions to consider, they are certainly not exhaustive more to get your thinking going in the right direction~

1. What problem is your product/service solving for people?

2. What makes your product/service better than the competition?

3. Who is your target audience? Who are you talking to?

4. How do they like to get their information?

5. What is your goal in terms of when clients visit your site? Buy products? Sign up for a newsletter? Subscribe to your RSS feed?

6. What features do you want? How are you going to make your site interactive for your public?

7. What is your company story? And why are you the best at what you do?

8. Not everybody likes to connect the same way, what options do you want to give your clients/customers to connect with you?

 Resources ( again not exhaustive or in any particular order, but good information that I hope you will find useful)~

Writing Web Copy That’s Easy to Scan

How Little Do Users Read?

Website Tips

Killer Web Content

Writing for the Web

Talk about a good belly laugh! This is exactly what I was getting at in my last post with how people approach their website projects, “I’ll have someone build it first and then I will start writing the content or thinking about what goes into it. ” And that may work in a limited amount of cases, but it would save you money and your designer time to have the content written and your must haves thought out and outlined beforehand.

As with just about everything in life, there is a trade-off. It’s called time or money, which one is more important to you?

If your time is more valuable, you can hire us to create a site complete with content. This way you are focusing on what you do best, your job and we will focus on what we do best, creating an aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-navigate, compelling website.  BUT, and this is a big BUT, if you hire us to create the content, you will still have to give us direction and help us to understand your market.

 If on the other hand, your money is more valuable, then I suggest sitting down and delving in . . . grab a pen and paper or your favorite word processing program and sketch out your content, what you want to convey to potential clients, images, quotes, and anything else that you have to have on your site.

Either way, the more information your designer knows about the project, the less it will cost you in both time and money and the happier you will be with the end result. In my next blog, I will provide you with some questions to consider and resources that will help guide you in building a content rich, relevant site.

I think maybe because the internet is a relatively new “space” and also because as we understand things or we deal with the same things day in and day out, we sometimes forget that others do not see things nor understand them the same way and often the little details are overlooked. So I’d like to share a sort of metaphoric story to illustrate something I see often in the design industry.

Imagine for a moment that you are wanting to build a house. Your family has grown and the space you are in is just too contricting. You and your significant other begin talking about building this house and thinking about all the various things you want in your new house and if you are like me, you sit down and start sketching out where you want the kitchen and how the master bedroom will be positioned in just such a way that the picture window will have an awesome view of [insert your perfect view here] behind your property. After you have sufficiently daydreamed about this house, you contact a few architects to find out what it will cost and so forth. After choosing the “right” fit for the job you wouldn’t just say ok make me a house and leave it up to the architect to figure out what features you absolutely can’t live without, right? Maybe some of you would, but most people would want to sit down with the architect and tell them how many bedrooms, 1 story or 2, an island in the kitchen, etc.  they want in the house. 

It works the same way for building websites. Just as your architect can create the perfect blueprint of your house with your special features, the right specs and building codes, a web designer can build your web site  to fit your style using web standards and principles of design. 

So when you meet with your web designer, make sure you have a pretty good idea of the features you’d like as well as, the content you want on the site. The more information you provide up front and the clearer you are on the direction you want to go with your web site design and it’s functionality, the easier the process will be and the better the final result.