Below is a sample email from our “30 Tips in 30 Days” email series. If you would like to signup for the free email series you can do so here.

Topics to be covered today …
1. Audience definition

A while ago I was starting a marketing campaign for a client and
after a nice long chat about goals the question comes up ..
“So who is our target market”?

The client answers, “Everybody that has a business”.

WRONG! Defining your audience is a crucial step in marketing
(online and offline) and unfortunately, this is a step that most
people never go through. They assume their market is everyone and
they move forward without any precision in their campaigns. Lack
of precision WILL result in lack of conversion.

Your audience is going to determine
– your keywords
– where you go to market your product/service
– how you position your product/service
– the product/services that are complimentary to yours
– and so on

SO .. The more information you have about your audience the better
off you will be able to address them and the problems/issues that
they may be facing.

Things to look at when determining your target market are …
– Geographics (location, climate, pace of life, etc)
– Demographics (age, religion, income, education, marital status, etc)
– Psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, emotions)
– Technographics (technologies used, etc)

Audience Definition Example:
BAD :: All Businesses

OK :: Small to medium businesses based in California with annual
revenues in excess of $1M

BETTER :: Woman-owned businesses in the pet food industry, based in
California with annual revenues > $1M. Organization size
less than 10 people experiencing rapid growth over the
past three years.

Can you tell the difference? When your target market is sufficiently
defined you should be able to picture them in your head. Once you
have this level of understanding of your audience – your keywords
will get better because you can craft them to appeal to a specific
trait. With better keywords you will get more targeted traffic and
with more targeted traffic – your conversion rates will be higher.

Sound simple? It can be if you practice.

I almost forgot – it is OK to have more than one target market as
well. You just want to run through the audience profile for each one.

The daily take …
1. Audience definition will help you precisely target your market(s)
2. 4 areas to look at when defining your market
(Geographics, Demographics, Psychographics, Technographics)
3. When properly defined you should be able to see a mental image of
your customer
4. It is OK to have more than one target market

Coming Up … What’s up ROI? Calculating Return on Investment.

Below is a sample email from our “30 Tips in 30 Days” email series. If you would like to signup for the free email series you can do so here.

Topics to be covered today …
1. Search Engine Optimization vs. Search Engine Marketing
2. Two categories of SEO
3. Why is SEO important

OK .. here we go. What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is actually a subset of a larger
marketing effort called Search Engine Marketing. To give you a
better idea as to how this all works, let’s start there.

Search Engine Marketing includes all marketing efforts that are tied
to, you guessed it, search engines with the goal of increasing
search engine rankings. Increased search engine rankings lead to
increased search engine exposure and since 86% of all traffic online
comes from search engines in one form or another*, this is where we
want to be.

Search Engine Marketing can include:
– SEO (search engine optimization)
– PPC (pay pe click advertising)
– online display advertising
– article marketing
– PR
– etc.

We could easily write a post or three on each of these topics but we
want you to get back to work at some point in time so we will save
these other topics for another day.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of improving your
website to gain higher visibility in the search engines. SEO can be
broken up into two main categories:
On-Page and Off-Page optimization.

On-Page optimization includes all of the changes that you can
actually make to the pages on your site to make it more meaningful
for search engines
– page title tags
– meta descriptions
– keyword rich content
– alt and title tags on images
– internal page linking
– sitemaps
– etc.

Off-Page optimization includes all of the tasks and improvements
that happen on other sites.
– inbound links (links from other sites back to yours)
– local business listings
– reviews on review sites like Yelp, etc.
– directory listings
– etc.

Both On-Page and Off-Page optimizations are needed if you want to
boost your website’s organic search rankings. As we dive deeper into
this email series we will be talking about some of these topics in
much more detail.

The daily take …
1. SEO is only a part of a larger online marketing campaign called
Search Engine Marketing
2. SEO can be broken up into two main categories – On-Page and
Off-Page optimizations
3. SEO is important because it helps you gain ORGANIC (non-paid)
rankings in the search engines. Without this you have to pay for
it.

Coming Up … Market Research: Who is your target market really?

Source: Website Usage, Brand Effectiveness and Consumer Perception
Statistics, February 20, 2010

With the rapid growth of the internet also comes the “snake oil” salesmen who guarantee 1st page results for keywords, tons of traffic and in general things that are well beyond their control.

Have you ever wondered why so many people can make those claims when there are a limited number of spots on the Google.com search results page? Me too.

We will not be making those statements. What we will do, however, is share with you what does work… properly formatted and optimized content. The tips are sent you via email every day for a month and are organized in such a way that you can follow along with your own site and spend 10-20 minutes a day making constant improvements. If you stick with us until the end – at 10 minutes per day you will have spent 6 hours optimizing your website. The topics we will cover are categorized as follows:

 

Name:

Email:

 

* We respect your email privacy

Working with Mike and his team at Black Dog Studios to redesign our website was a great experience. Black Dog Studios took our tired, old website and gave it a fresh, new, compelling look that is easy to navigate and understand. The staff was highly professional, patient and responsive. Their sense of visual elements is remarkable. But we are also grateful for the guidance regarding the technical and practical side of the site. We could not be more pleased with the final outcome of our new website. The animals thank you!

Happy Tails Pet Sanctuary

According to research from Webvisible and Nielsen, 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet for information about local companies. A full 82% of these visitors use search engines as their primary method of finding the information.

What does this mean to you? It means that there are a lot of new customers looking for your products and services online everyday and if you aren’t spending time on your local search engine campaigns, you are missing out.

Join Us for our FREE 30 Tips in 30 Days daily email tip. Every day for the next 30 days we will send you a small tip to help you with your local SEO efforts. Don’t worry – your trust is important to us and we will not breech that by giving your email to anyone.

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This is an interesting question that all businesses should ask of their potential web developer. The answer that you get will tell you two VERY important things.

1. Are they listening to me? Do they actually answer the question correctly or do they answer another question that they are thinking of such as “What will be the most difficult task?” or “What are the key graphical features of the site?”. The key phrase that we want to stress here is “most important aspect”. Some people may think we are splitting hairs here or strictly dealing with semantics but the ability for you and your website designer to communicate with each other is crucially important. If they didn’t listen to this section what else didn’t they listen to?
2. Do they understand the purpose of the site. To bring it back to terms I like to use … Do they comprehend my GOAL. The goal of a website is in essence its purpose for being. This is the foundation on which your scope will be created and site will eventually be developed. If the developer doesn’t fully understand your goal(s) for the site – it will never be a success. It can’t be.

When all is said and done don’t be afraid to ask questions. You are paying your developer good money to create your vision and realize your goals. A good developer will understand this and will not mind one bit.

A list of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) “add-ons” that will help raise your localized search rankings.

1. Local Business Listings (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
2. Use your business address, not a PO Box
3. Use your local phone number, not an 800 number
4. Add a locator map and business hours to your contact page
5. List the names of the cities that you serve
6. Include city and state in site content, titles, headers, etc.
7. Create a printable coupon to drive traffic to your location*

* 82% of local searchers follow up with an offline in-store visit or phone call. (comScore)

WordPress makes a fantastic product. It is great for when you have a relatively simple website that the client wants to control the content. I like to consider it an entry level CMS.

Anyway, as with many 3rd party applications – it often times need to be updated. This could be due to new security issues, patches to old issues or just an update in functionality. Whatever the case, you need to know what is happening before you go and update blindly.

Typically with 3rd party apps there are three main areas of concern. Each of these areas must be reviewed and taken into consideration BEFORE the upgrade is applied. If something goes wrong, you will want to have a backup plan in place. With WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and other open source CMS’s there is a 4th.

The four areas that I consider for WordPress upgrades are:
- Application Logic
- Application Display
- Data Storage
- Plugins

1. Application Logic – This one sounds the most intimidating but is actually the least of your concerns as a user. Unless otherwise specified in the uprade notes the inputs and outputs of these files are going to be the same so for you as a website owner, there will be no changes to your code necessary. The application will just be performing better or new features will be added.

2. Application Display – Most 21st century application developers have grasped the concept of separating logic and display. In WordPress, all of the display templates are stored in your “themes” directory. So, check the documentation and see what, if anything, is going to change here. This will be more of an issue of you are using a default template as opposed to a custom template. But still, check it out.

3. Data Storage – This is the “meat and potatoes” of your blog. This is what you have been working so hard to create so you had better pay attention to this. Depending on what is happening with the upgrade and how many versions you are jumping, a database modification may be required. ANYTIME you are going to modify a database, please do yourself a favor and make a complete SQL dump before you do anything. This way if something goes wrong you can get the data back immediately instead of waiting for your hosting company to pull it off of the archive disks, etc. causing hours if not days of downtime (assuming your hosting company has the backups)

4. Plugins – These are all of the extras that are added to give your blog more features and functionality – photo gallery’s, SEO plugins, social bookmarking tools, database backups, etc. Make sure you check these to see if the plugins that you are using are supported in the new version. There are many threats with plugins:
- They may not work with the new blog version
- They may work but the display/functionality may hange based on the blog upgrade.
- if you upgrade the plugin, it may update the styles/codebase which can cause more problems.
A side note – if your plugin hasn’t been updated in a year or more – you may want to look for another.

So what is a person to do? Upgrade, just be smart about it.

STEP 1: Backup your file system.
STEP 2: Backup your database.
STEP 3: Review your site real quick to refresh your mind of the look.*
STEP 4: Upgrade the blog.
STEP 5: Test the site (check posts, check display, everything).
STEP 6. Fix any issues.
STEP 7: Upgrade Plugins (one at a time)
STEP 8: Test the site (focus on plugin functionality)
STEP 9: Fix any issues and return to STEP 7
STEP 10: If all is well, write a new blog post.

* This may seem funny but as a blogger – I spend most of the time looking at my blog backend interface, not the frontend display. You want to refresh your mind so that you can see if anything goes wrong with the upgrade.

Over the past 10+ years we have been “fix-it” guys for a lot of web sites. These sites that need some repairs usually come with some pretty angry clients attached. In situations like this we really have two tasks – first we need to fix the problem and second we need to help the client understand what happened. Listen … not every web developer is a hack but there are a LOT of them out there. If you know the right questions to ask, you may just get lucky enough to avoid one of them.

The questions listed below act as a checklist. If you actually click on the links they will bring you to a deeper description of what to look for and what you should expect from a professional developer.

1. What do you think the most important aspect of my project is going to be?
2. What happens if I want to make changes during the course of the project?
3. Will I be able to make modifications to the site once it is done? What skills will be necessary?
4. Once the site is done and launched … Then what?
5. How long have you been doing this professionally?
6. What languages will you use to program my site?
7. Will you be migrating the content from my existing site?
8. Tell me about your testing procedures.
9. Who owns the site once it is completed?
10. Can you provide me with references from your last couple of projects?

As always, if you have any questions about any of the items listed above please feel free to contact me directly here.

It was a real pleasure working with you and Black Dog Studios in developing our website. We have received a great response from existing customers as well as new customers that want to work with us because the site looks so professional. Thanks again for all the hard work and making sure that the site would reflect exactly
what and who we are, a professional Leather Distributor.

Albert Liska
Euro Leather Inc.
8624 Elder Creek Rd. #200
Sacramento, CA 95828
Tel: 916-670-4700
Fax: 916-388-1400
www.euro-leatherinc.com