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Google Docs Intro by Barry Welford

2011-03-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

What Google Docs provides

Basically Google Docs provides a cloud-computing version of almost all the software programs that are available in the Microsoft Office suite of programs. For example, the following are the main files that can be created:

Document = Word
Spreadsheet = Excel
Presentation = PowerPoint

You can also make drawings and can store most files including images and PDF files.

All these files are stored in what are called collections, which is really a tagging system. That means that a given file can be found in a number of different collections if that is helpful. What can be done in Google Docs is expanding all the time. All files are searchable using the power and rapidity of Google Search, which is an additional advantage of working within Google Docs.

It should be noted that because this software is operating via cloud-computing, the functionality may be slightly reduced versus software, which is operating on a desktop PC. However for the vast majority of applications this is not a limitation.

If you wish to check through the official Google Tour for Google Docs, then you can start here.

You can use Google Docs in a variety of ways and these will be explored in the next three sections.

Google Docs just for you

Even if you alone will be working with the files you create in Google Docs, you will find this can increase your productivity and ease of working. Here are just some of the benefits

Your files are held on the Google servers thus limiting the storage requirements on your own computer.
You can access the files from anywhere using any computer that has a browser and an Internet connection.
Files are automatically stored from time to time and there is no risk of losing unstored work you have done. If you need to access this, there is a full revision history and you can always return to a prior revision if you wish.

Sharing Google Docs output with non-Docs users

With the spam-filtering software now used by many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), sending files as e-mail attachments can be hazardous. If you have very large files to send, these may be blocked or alternatively may take a long time to download.

An alternative way is to send a link to the Google Doc you have created. The recipient, even if they do not have a Google account, can use the link to view the Google Doc. They can then download the Google Doc if they wish and usually have a choice of the type of file which is useful to them.

For some types of document, you can even convert the Google Doc to a web page, which the viewer can then see in their browser.

Collaborating with other Docs users

The advantages of Google Docs to an individual worker, who may share files with others, are such that many will already be convinced this cloud computing is their preferred way of working.

If you are collaborating with other people who have Google accounts (in other words a Gmail address), then Google Docs improves the effectiveness of online collaboration by an order of magnitude.

As opposed to sending out files as attachments to e-mails, all can be viewing exactly the same file, which may be continually upgraded as viewers suggest improvements. Collaborators can also highlight certain passages where they may have concerns or can add comments to the document. These can even develop into online discussions as those involved exchange views on points that may need amendments.

The following video on Google Docs in Plain English is a good introduction to these features.

2011-03-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Deals on Facebook – A Competitor to GroupOn

Posted by Lisa Braziel

A few months ago, Facebook launched its first iteration of dealsthat could be unlocked by a user checking in to Facebook Places. On Tuesday, they began expanded their deals offering to provide Facebook fans with location-based deals, very similar to GroupOn or Living Social.

If you are like me, you are rushing to figure out how you and your brand can get involved with these new Facebook Deals. The following are my 3 main questions and answers to this new service offering.

Is it Open to Everyone?

Currently there is no self-serve method of creating Deals. Similar to how GroupOnand LivingSocial got started, Facebook is launching in the following test cities first: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco.

This being said, businesses can still submit a form if they are interested. By asking businesses to enter their Facebook page URL, this will also allow Facebook to screen which businesses get contacted first.

What does it cost?

According to InsideFacebook.com, “Facebook says its initial tests of Deals will be free for businesses to offer, but we expect it to begin charging businesses a percentage of user spend in exchange for the distribution.”

One option is for Facebook to charge the same 30% it is charging developers for Facebook Credits, or could follow the 50% model of GroupOn. We’ll have to wait and see.

Why is it a big “Deal”?

The biggest reason why this is a such a big deal is quite simply the news feed inclusions. By simply subscribing to deals (even though they aren’t in my area yet), a news feed inclusion like the one below is generated.

Although I’ve yet to see a newsfeed inclusion for specific deals, if Facebook gives preference to deal updates – this could mean greatly increasing the potential for brands to be discovered and for the deals to be redeemed. It also gives Facebook an immediate advantage over its competitors.

What are your first impressions of these new deals? Please share in the comments below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 8:30 am and is filed under Social. You canleave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa Braziel outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

Four Vital DIY Mobile Marketing Tips for Small Business

2011-03-23T09:26:00.001-07:00

March 23rd, 2011 by Rene LeMerle

Okay, let’s start with the obvious – “the mobile market is booming.”

So if everyone knows that the mobile market is booming, then the question is “What have you done to take your marketing mobile?”

The answer for most small businesses is “nothing”?

So with a huge opportunity available through mobile marketing for small businesses, here’s 4 essential ways to capitalise in the boom.

1. Mobile Friendly Version of Your Website

Navigating the web is obviously more difficult from a mobile device, especially via smart phones. The first step in mobilising your marketing is developing a mobile version of your website.

For some of you, the cost involved in developing a mobile specific version of your website might not make sense. In such cases, there’s online tools to help you mobilise your web presence for free:

2. Localised Search Engine Marketing
Search engines provide some great ways to leverage the growth in mobile. The likes of Google were onto the mobile wave, well before most of us. Here’s some of the ways to use SEM to mobilise your small business marketing.

Google Places & Geo Services

Mobile devices are one of the core drivers in the growth of local search. With more and more people searching on the go, it’s vital that you claim and optimize the local/maps listings that search engines offer such as your Google Places listing.

The main search engines are also releasing several geo driven services which compliment their local listings (e.g. Google Hotpot). Ensure you optimize your business through these services, as the benefits will filter through to your local listings.

Search Engine Advertising – Mobile Targeting

Most of the major search engines now offer mobile targeting in their advertising programs. So now you can set up specific campaigns targeting mobile users.

Google AdWords Management

When you’re setting up “mobile” focused campaigns, remember to think of the context when developing things like keyword focus or ads (e.g. ads for mobile campaigns will probably be more successful with phone numbers in the ad text).

3. Location Based Apps (Geo Apps)
The location based app market is also booming thanks to the number of smart phones on the market. If done cleverly, these geo apps and tools can be great marketing tools. Some of the mainstream geo apps worth exploring include:

There’s plenty of niche based geo apps that might work more effectively for your industry e.g. (Urban Spoon for restaurants.)

4. Apps for Your Business
Developing more interactive apps specific to your business, while generally more expensive, can be a very effective marketing tool if done well.

Generally I would recommend taking your app ideas to a seasoned app developer as they can be quite complex to create, especially the more involved ones. But if you feel you have a bit of tech know-how, then here’s some resources for the DIY app developers out there.

There’s plenty more App builders out there, so if you use one that you think is worth a mention, share it via our comments below.

Of course there are other ways to promote your business on mobiles (e.g. SMS marketing), but the one’s above are probably the easiest for small businesses to explore.

If you’ve tackled mobile marketing for your business, we’d love to hear how it’s worked and what you’ve done.

Comments

About the Author: Rene is the marketing manager of ineedhits.com - a global search engine marketing company. He also leads the marketing for Gooruze.com - a web 2.0 style community for online and digital marketers. Rene has been in the industry since 1997 with much of that time spent helping businesses embrace the best of the internet and digital world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 at 8:30 am.

Website Redesign - Best Practices for Web Redesign

2011-03-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

Website Redesign - Best Practices for Web Redesign
Posted by Ben Kemp
Website redesign should take careful account of the current status of the existing website. Rather than just rush headlong into the web redesign and rebuild process, an assessment of the good and bad elements of the original site should be made.

Include consideration of SEO aspects. All to often, the website makeover results in a dramatic downturn in search engine rankings! Don’t underestimate the value of the existing indexed pages… or the benefits of current organic SERPs.

Run the rebuild idea past an SEO consultant…

The Risks to Current Rankings

Be aware that existing search engine rankings can all too easily go down the toilet! Why? Well, thats the consequence of not planning and executing strategies to cover the threats.

Page Redirection

Without a trail of breadcrumbs to find out where the old content went, all search engines are left bewildered and floundering in a sea of 404 Page Not Found errors.

Top-Ranking Pages - should be identified, preserved and enhanced
301 Redirects - rerouting old page URLs to the corresponding new page names. If thats not done, all indexed and well-ranked internal pages will suddenly generate 404 Page Not Found errors, and will eventually be purged from all search engines indexes! All internal Page Rank will be lost, as will all client’s Bookmarked page links… All “deep links” t ointernal content will be lost…
Optimised On-Page Content - moving previously optimised “good page content” to the corresponding new pages
Image Alt text - copying the old text to the replacement images
Meta-tags - copying titles, description and keywords to the corresponding new pages
Sitemaps - provision and listing of XML or HTML Sitemaps
If you fail to do this, Google’s search engine spiders and bots will be forced to start from zero! If they are forced to reassess the intent and purpose of the site, and you’ve not preserved the good elements, a drop in rankings is inevitable.

Rebranding

I don’t have a problem with branding per se. However, whilst branding consultants have great expertise in their sphere of interest, they usually have minimal understanding of the issues inherent in attaining top search engine rankings.

Branding consultants have no respect for your 10 year old domain… Any recommendation to drop your aged / mature domain name in favour of a new “trendy” business name is a severe risk to your online presence.

Domain Redirection makes it possible to redirect all traffic to the old domain to the new domain. You can couple that with individual page redirection… However, that still leaves you with all your old links pointing to a ‘dead’ domain and at risk of removal.

Don’t “misunderestimate” the value of an aged domain with lots of links!

As an example, I just reviewed a rebuild proposal that involved moving from a 1999 registered domain with 2900+ incoming links (including 100+ links from domains with a +7 PR! Their destination was a 2008-registered domain with 35 links…

The Rebuilders

Ok, so you’re going to rebuild a mature site that’s generating business, but needs a more modern look and feel. Make sure you choose a designer / developer who comprehends the importance of the old content, and understands the SEO aspects. Make sure the fundamental SEO elements are included in the design architecture. I repeatedly see website design output from designers that amazes me, with examples such as;

An SEO module was loaded but not activated - so zero meta-tag content on any page!
A WordPress CMS with the Admin / Privacy settings set to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors“
JavaScript main menus that SE’s cannot penetrate, meaning no internal pages indexed!
Flash main menu that SE’s cannot penetrate, meaning no internal pages indexed!
Splash / Intro pages with 1 link to te home page only, and Flash content - meaning zero Home page content!
No sitemaps, just to make it even more difficult to find internal content!
If you are deliberately setting out to kill off a website, these are very effective ways of doing so…

There’s a lesson here! If you are going to rebuild your website yourself, or pay someone else to do it, you’d best ensure that the person responsible for the changes has a plan that includes at least the basics! Failing to plan is planning to fail ,as these examples clearly show!

Do You Need Google?

Whilst there are people out there who say that you don’t, you may rest assured that they are, in the main, not knowledgable on the subject.

Unless (or until) you are a household brand name, you are going to need search engines to deliver potential clients to you. To get an increasing flow of visitors from search engines, you’ll have to play by their rules, not yours…

Whenever you cannot change the global reality to fit your own perception, you must adapt… or you’ll simply be irrelevant!

New Site SEO Requirements

For maximum SEO benefits, there are some overall goals to aim for…

Search Engine Friendly URLs - Page File Names should be explicit, and keyword-rich, independent of Titles or Headings
Off-Page Titles: independent and unique page Titles are essential. Dynamic, with manual over-ride will work fine.
Description Tag: independent and unique page Descriptions are essential. Dynamic with manual over-ride is ok
Keyword Tag: independent and unique page Keywords – dynamic with manual over-ride is ok
Image File Names: imported image file names should be preserved, allowing keyword-rich image names.
Image ALT Text: dynamic based on file name with manual over-ride is ok. Keyword rich image file names are important supporting elements of page content.
Menu Item Names - controllable, independent of page Headings, with manual set hyperlink titles
Page Headings - formatted in H1, H2, H3 HTML tags, independent of menu name
Make sure that the BASIC files are in place;

Robots.txt: with a link to the XML sitemap
Sitemap: XML, plus HTML
Custom 404 Error Page: standard page template, full menu etc
Make sure that the BASIC Hosting issues are sorted;

www vs. non-www: always use full canonical domain name, and prevent duplicate content being indexed
Hosting: correct country TLD – or correct country hosting
Site Architecture Issues in Detail
Search Engine Friendly URLs:

URL’s should include a relevant keyword phrase specific to every page generated!
Avoid capitalisation AND spaces in file names, use hyphens to separate words instead.
Search Engines can now cope with URL’s with multiple iterations of ?, & and = in them, but they are incomprehensible to HUMANS!

Explicit Image File Names:

Use keyword-rich explicit Image file names e.g.;

http://www.mysite.com/images/new-zealand-rugby-tours-hdr-4.jpg
http://www.mysite.com/images/school-rugby-tours-nz.jpg
Image URL’s should include relevant keywords specific to every page generated!

Both Google and Yahoo have specific image functions that can generate a lot of traffic if images are properly named and tagged (ALT tags)
Avoid capitalisation AND spaces in file names, use hyphens to separate words instead.
Image Alt Tags:

Use Image Alt Tags on every image – a short keyword-rich, relevant sentence that describes the content of the page / image is what’s needed.

Its essential to reinforce relevant keywords in every area of the page – Image ALT tags are an important location to insert one or more exact match search phrases.

Site Maps are Essential:

Sitemaps help shorten the “levels” to the main content – the Products. In many Shops, the nested Categories drive the real content down far deeper than 3 levels from Home. Anything lower than 3 levels in the internal link hierarchy appears far less valuable to SE’s - and rarely gets a Top 30 ranking in the SERPs!

Both forms of sitemaps are essential;

An accessible HTML version, with links to it from Home page.
Plus an XML version that should be linked from the robots.txt page (and submitted to both Google and Yahoo for indexing)
For example; in very large osCommerce sites its possible to dramatically increase the number of indexed pages on Google by using the All_Products modification as a site map, and placing the A-Z links it generates on the footer of every page.

Custom 404 Error Page

Add a Custom 404 Error Page: According to a recent poll, only 23% of visitors that encounter a 404 page make a second attempt to find the missing page. That means 77% of visitors that encounter a 404 error will immediately leave your website! Creation of an effective Custom 404 Page, you can actually increase visitor retention by ensuring they find what they need.

JavaScript & Flash Disasters

Keep the use of JavaScript and Flash throughout the site to a minimum. Whilst everything contained within is not actually processed, the SE’s are thought to assess the ratio of code to content, demoting pages with excessive code!

The Search Engines don’t much like JavaScript (or Flash or FRAMES) – so minimize its use.
It is better if external JavaScript (and CSS) files are “called” or “included” and the minimum amount of code is embedded in the pages.
NEVER use JavaScript or Flash for the Main Menus!!!
Like it or not, Google cannot “see” anything contained in either JavaScript or Flash. If you use either mechanism for your main menu system, you are consigning the site to relative oblivion.

robots.txt File

Make sure there is a robots.txt file on the site, because search engine spiders look for it! In there you can specify which, if any, directories or files are NOT to be indexed. In the majority of cases, you allow all spiders access to everything. If the file is missing, the requests for it generate 404 Page Not Found errors – and you should always try to minimise these errors.

The robots.txt file should also include a link to your sitemap e.g.;

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

On-Page Content:

Pages need text content. Without it, there is nothing for a search engine to work with as it attempts to establish what the website is about. If you seriously expect a page to rank in the Top 10 for a competitive keyword search phrases, the minimum amount of content you should aim for is in the order of 800-1000 words of content. Previously, lesser volumes may have sufficed, but Google’s quest to provide the most relevant pages for any given search has uped the stakes a little.

Does it seem logical that a page with 400 words of good content is likely to outweigh a page with 1000 words of good content…

That content should be original, well-written, interesting, engaging, thought-provoking and/or provocative. It must be focused toward the specific keyword search phrase you are planning to rank well for… The content should include 1 or more images to add interest, with relevant keywords in the Alt text.

There must be some form of “Call to Action” where you specify WHAT it is that you want visitors to do, and How/Where to do it.

Page Headings:
This is the most (SEO) important “On-Page” location to specify to the search engines what the page is about… It is important to both load your Headings with main keyword phrase/s, most important at the beginning and to ensure that all are in H1 / H2 / H3 format.

First Paragraphs:
This is the 2nd most (SEO) important “On-Page” location to specify to the search engines what the page content is about… ….

It is important to place primary keyword phrases at the start of the first paragraph, and to highlight them in bold if possible.
It is important to include text anchor links on main internal pages. Links TO these anchors (bookmarks) should be provided on Home page and sub-pages, to pages below, and at the same level.
Text Anchors / Bookmarks / Hyperlinks
Place some keyword-rich anchor text links to internal pages from within body text, because this helps set keyword relationships to those pages. Adding anchors on internal pages, and links TO those anchors, also raises keyword count of both pages.

Linking to anchors on internal pages from Home page raises the perceived importance of those internal pages, and provides additional pathways for search engine spiders to find and index them.

Navigation / Main Menu
This should be CSS / DHTML text-based to gain maximum traction
NOT JavaScript / Flash because these cannot be accessed by Search Engines
Page Rank is passed downwards through the site via accessible internal links
The keywords in internal links are also what SE’s will associate with the internal pages
If possible, allow addition of hyperlink titles to the links – dynamic, based on the internal page’s 1st heading is not as good as the ability to manually add titles to menu item names. Hyperlink titles in the menu, and in the text anchors (above) can significant increase keyword count on a page, as well as reinforcing what the page (that the link leads to) is about.

Off-Page Content

The page Title tag is the single most important on-site element! There are also other opportunities for increasing the density of key words and phrases - some are listed below;

Title – The No.1 On-site Element

The maximum recommended length is 8-10 words, or 70 characters. Full manual control is important. In a CMS or ecommerce scenario, if all that can be offered is dynamic, it should be orderd as follows; Product Name + Category + Tagline :: maximum 70 characters. Do NOT use stop words, or irrelevant words.

The best Title tag is one that is unique and strictly relevant to each individual page, and this is crucial to attaining top search engine rankings.

Meta-tags

Items such as Titles, Descriptions, Keywords are essential off-page elements which significantly influence the search engine’s appraisal of your site, and have an impact on whether searchers actually click on the search results link and come thru to your site. USE THEM, WISELY!

In a CMS / Shopping site, especially if very large, it is probably best to have a dual-action system. E.g. populate the Title / Description / Keywords meta-tags automatically from page content by default, but allow manual override as / if required.

Description
Unique Description meta-tags must be provided on all pages. The maximum recommended length for a Description is 200 characters (Google will display 150 only, but other SE’s will show 200).

Manual control is best if possible. If dynamically generated then an output string like this is best; Product Name + Category Name + 1st Paragraph of Product Description :: maximum 200 characters

It is extremely important to search engine rankings that a carefully crafted Description, unique to every page, be provided. This helps the search engines to properly categorise the site. A well crafted description will also be used verbatim in most search engine results displayed to searchers, meaning you can control what is shown to searchers in SERPs.

And, of course, the Description should in fact describe the page its on.

The Problem: when descriptions are not supplied, the search engines will do their best to generate one from existing content, which can often look like rubbish, or be duplicated on all pages.

Where a “generic” description is provided, all the pages look the same in the search results. Your Descriptions are meant to help “sell” the product…

Keywords
Unique Keyword meta-tags must be provided on all pages! Manually controled if possible. If dynamically generated, an output string like this is best; Product Name + Category Name + 1st Paragraph :: maximum 250 characters

NB: strip out special characters – e.g. & : ; etc, and its not essential to place commas between words.)

NB: This tag is not heavily relied on by most search engines. However, it is a useful discipline to insert the targeted keyword phrases for the page into the tag - as a reminder, if nothing else. However, the terms must focus on the page content, not simply be stuffed full of vaguely related words.

Every page set to target a specific relevant set of keywords / phrases!

Links

You need to be careful about Links – simplified, it now works this way…

A link to your site from another site is a vote for you and is added to your total vote count.
A link from you to another site is a vote BY your, and is DEDUCTED from your total vote count
Reciprocal links are neutral…

Outward links BLEED away your Page Rank….
Outward links to inappropriate sites WILL hurt your rankings.
Sculpting outward links so they don’t count as a vote outwards is done by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the links. Wholesale use of nofollow is unwise… its unnatural, and potentially, you may be penalised for it. Its introduction was to cover “untrusted” links only.

Domain Names

There are a variety of Domain-related issues that impact on your search engine rankings.

Use relevant / specific keywords in the Domain Name, but not excessively so. Two or three keywords is regarded as sufficient…
Separate them by HYPHENS because it helps make sense to viewers!
E.g.;

http://www.newzealandrugbytours.com/ vs.

http://www.new-zealand-rugby-tours.com/

Country Code vs. .Com

A dot.com site must be hosted in the targeted country.
A .com.au or .co.nz site can be hosted anywhere and Google will associate it with the specific country
Hosting

An aspect overlooked by many site owners is the importance of the Domain Name “Country Code” to your site rankings, traffic and consequent success.

The problem here is the “decentralisation” of search - the way in which the major search engines have split their indexes up into country-specific search opportunities. Google (and other SE’s) know where you are, or where you should be associated with, by either the Country Code (.Co.NZ) or the IP address allocated to your site. IP addresses are allocated in numeric blocks or ranges, by country.

Web Redesign Summary

The examples shown illustrate that its not the tools, its the quality of workmanship that makes the difference.

If you’re a website designer, you owe it to your clients to ensure you do more good than harm! If your stupidity causes the newly rebuilt website to vanish off Google’s radar screen, it does not matter one iota if the site looks stunning! Page redirection is such a fundamental requirement, its verging on criminal negligence to overlook it! Not using freely available, fully automated WordPress sitemap and meta-tags generation tools is quite unprofessional. It confirms the designer’s incompetence, so by all means, add your name to the footer credits to let the world know who to avoid!

Of course, if your underlying objective is to keep people like me in business, feel free to ignore all my well-intended advice…

Comments

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 8:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Ben Kemp is the author of "The SEO Guy's Blog" : SEO comments, hints on successful web site design for effective search engine optimisation. Plus, life as a Road Warrior... living in The Land of Smiles! How it feels to be an alien, living in Thailand, immersed in a new culture and language.

Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans

2011-02-23T11:07:00.001-08:00

http://www.smallwebbusiness.com/smallwebbusiness-90-20110223WhyYourePissingOffHalfYourFacebookFans.html

By Jay Baer
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-02-23

Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard.

It's not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in business to make money for them, not necessarily for us. Those are just the operational challenges.

The bigger gauntlet for marketers on Facebook is sociological.

Specifically, nobody knows what the hell Facebook is for.

New research from ExactTarget and CoTweet (clients) called "The Social Break-up" studied why consumers turn their backs on social and email connections with brands. (see previous posts about this research and customer burnout here)

A Downright Scary WTF?

Within the findings is this frightening nugget:

51% of consumers expect the company to send them marketing messages after "liking" the brand on Facebook
40% of consumers do not expect the company to send them marketing messages after "liking" the brand on Facebook
9% aren't sure what to expect

Whoa. Even consumers who have purposefully and pointedly said "we're on your team" by clicking "like" aren't clear on the ground rules of the subsequent relationship.

Imagine if that uncertainty pervaded other elements of business. Imagine that customers weren't sure if you would answer when they called you. Of if they ordered something on your website, if you would ship it out.

No wonder real Facebook success (not just fan amalgamation) is hard to come by - there aren't any codified mutual expectations.

Age and Gender Influence Your Acceptance of Facebook Promotions

Whether or not Facebook is an acceptable vehicle for company promotion is influenced to some degree by gender and age:

Consumers 24 years of age and younger are less likely (40%) to expect promotions; while consumers 35 and older are more likely (55%) to expect them.

If your company's audience skews younger, be cautious about promoting heavily via Facebook.

Regardless of age, 44% of men expect Facebook messages from brands to be promotional; 55% of women share that expectation.

If your company's audience skews heavily male, be cautious about promoting excessively via Facebook.

Set Fan Expectations From the First Click

This uncertainly about what Facebook is for, and the consequences of "like" are an issue. Here's my idea for solving it.

On your custom Facebook landing tab (Here's a post on 5 ways to make one), instead of just selling the "like" to people who are not yet fans, also use that real estate to explain precisely what people should expect from your Facebook page. Special offers? Customer stories? Inside information about the company?

It's been a long-standing tenet of email marketing that subscription rates increase when you supply a link to a sample email. This is because it gives potential subscribers a clue as to what they can expect to receive. Makes sense, right?

Is it time to extend that best practice to Facebook? What other ways can we reduce Facebook uncertainty?

Top 7 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes and How to Correct Them by Herman Drost

2011-02-16T11:41:00.000-08:00

Many website owners have unrealistic expectations when it comes to optimizing their site for the search engines when they speak with an SEO consultant. They think their site will immediately appear on the first page for a general keyword. For example if I do a Google search for “web design” it currently says there are 583,000,000 results. That means you have 583,000,000 websites competing for that phrase. It would take an extremely long time to rank on the first page.

Top 7 SEO Mistakes and how to correct them

1. Using incorrect keywords

Some SEO companies promise they’ll get top rankings for your website in Google and other search engines. This can be very easy if no one ever searches on that keyword because there’s little or no competition. You may receive first page rankings but see no increase in traffic. Only target keywords people are searching on. An easy way to verify this is to enter your main keyword in the Google Keyword Research Tool and view how many searches it receives. If there are no global monthly searches it means no one is searching on that keyword (no demand).

2. Selecting very competitive keywords

If your keyword is too competitive you’ll waste time and effort trying to obtain good rankings for it. Select keywords that receive a high number of searches and have little competition. Select an alternative keyword phrase if there are too many competing websites. It’s best to focus on “long tail” keywords first. These are phrases which have low search volume and few competitors. Concentrate on these first then go after the more popular terms later.

3. Selecting keywords with no commercial value

Keywords with a high search volume are not necessarily the best keywords to use if they have no commercial value. They may receive thousands of searches but if no one buys as a result of finding your site through those keywords you won’t profit.

Look at how many ads are displayed on the right side of the Google’s result pages for your keyword. If they are full of ads you know advertisers are willing to pay to display ads targeting that keyword. If there are no or a few ads displayed your keyword has no or little commercial value.

4. Improper website optimization

In order for search engines to find your site your main keywords should be included in the meta tags, file names, heading tags, image tags, navigation links, anchor text (hyperlinked text) and web copy. If your website primarily consists of flash pages it will be difficult to obtain high rankings because search engines don’t index flash pages. Make sure each web page targets a different keyword phrase.

5. Bad links

Link popularity determines how fast and and how high you rank in the search engines. The more links you have pointing to your own site and the quality of those links will drastically affect your rankings. Website owners often make the mistake of getting links from unrelated sites or participating in link farms containing low quality links. This may result in lowering your rankings. Only obtain links from sites that relate or compliment your own.

6. Getting links from one source

Search engines can see if you’re only relying on one source for obtaining backlinks and may think you’re artificially inflating your rankings through this method. Ideally they want to see sites naturally linking to yours by providing high quality content. Instead of getting all your links from only one source (e.g. one article directory) make sure you get them from a variety of sites.

7. Too many links too fast

Because people are impatient they’ll find the path of least resistance and use spammy techniques to get 1000s of links at one time. For instance, they’ll write an article then use software to produce 1000 different versions of it using slightly different text then submit those articles at the same time using submission software. Search engines will recognize this as a red flag and eventually penalize that site by removing or lowering it’s rankings.

Avoid these top 7 SEO mistakes by focusing on creating high quality content and building quality backlinks to your website. If requires consistent effort but rewards you with high rankings, traffic and sales.

****************************************** Web Site Promotion Package

Search engine optimization and submission is an absolutely essential marketing strategy to attract traffic to your site. Without people visiting your web site, no sales can be generated.

Just submitting your site will not guarantee a place in the search engines. You must first optimize your web site for the search engines before it is submitted.

This promotion package eliminates the need to learn all the strategies and the great amount of time it would take, if you would do it yourself.

Here is what you will receive in the package.

1. Search Engine Analysis, research appropriate keywords, Check Link Popularity, Link Validation, Keyword Density

2. Recommend Changes - you make the recommended changes based on the research above.(if you wish me to do it, I would need access to your host to download the web page, make the changes and republish it - extra costs involved with doing this).

3. Hand Submission to all Major Search Engines (this does not include Paid inclusions), plus 30 or more smaller search engines using submission software.

4. Generate a report of all submissions

5. Monitor Site Rankings

6. Suggest other strategies you can use to gain more traffic to your site.

Side note: Your site should be monitored on a monthly basis to stay listed and gain higher rankings. Search engines take several weeks (or months) for web sites to get listed.

Disclaimer: Although there is a chance for your site to gain the top rankings in the search engines, there is no guarantee, since search engines often change their strategies from time to time. You must stay up to date with current search engine strategies to stay listed.

Please contact me for a free quote.

Herman Drost info@isitebuild.com

How to Redirect a Website or Web Page and Preserve Its Rankings

2011-02-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

by Herman Drost

Need to redirect your old website to a new one? Need to redirect an old page to a new page? Want to transfer the rankings of your old site to your new one? Want to redirect non www pages to www pages?

These are a few of the questions website owners ask when they redesign their websites and want to preserve their rankings. For instance you have a static html site that's been redesigned into a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress and want to make sure visitors accessing the old pages in the search engines get redirected to the new pages

What is a 301 redirect?

When search engines index your web pages they store them in cache memory (data that is repeatedly required). When you change the URL of your web page or website it still remains in Google's cache. This means people searching for your site will still see your old website. To prevent this from happening you need to redirect your old web pages to the pages on your new website. This is a achieved through a 301 redirect sometimes called 301 permanent redirect.

Requirements

Filezilla (FTP software) This is free FTP software you need to transfer files from your desktop to the server. To transfer the files you simply drag files from your local (computer) window to the remote (server) window.

Apache web server 99% of web servers these days use Apache to host websites however check with your web host before implementing a 301 redirect. It won't work on a Windows server.

.htaccess file This is the text file containing your 301 redirect code which is uploaded to the root directory of the server (same location as your index.html file). If the .htaccess file is already on the server download it to your desktop then open it with Wordpad or a text editor. Avoid using MS Word...it will mess up the code.

301 redirect code This is the code to add to your .htacess file to redirect your site or pages to your new site.

Procedure

*Create a .htacess file in a text editor and save it as .htaccess.txt

*Add the 301 redirect code and save the file

*Upload the .htaccess file to the root of the server of your old site

*Test the redirect works by entering the old URL in your browser It should automatically redirect to the your new website

Sidebar: If you're redirecting non www pages to www pages upload the .htaccess to the root of the server files of your current website.

Examples

1. To 301 redirect your old website to your new website use this code:

redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

Replace example.com with the URL of your new site. This will redirect traffic from your old site to the index page of your new site. Keep in mind it won't redirect each page to it's new page.

2. To 301 redirect a single page use this code:

redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

Replace oldpage.html with the URL of your old page and replace newpage.html with the new page you want to redirect to.

3. To 301 redirect a folder to another folder use this code:

redirect 301 /folder/ http://www.mysite.com/folder/

Multiple folders (subdirectories)

redirect 301 /subdirectory/subdirectory/ http://www.mysite.com/subdirectory/subdirectory/

Keep this code all on one line in your .htaccess file.

4. To 301 redirect non www pages to www pages use this code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace mysite with your own website URL. Test if the redirect works by entering mysite.com, http://mysite.com in your browser. It should redirect all pages to the www version.

5. To premanently redirect an old domain to new domain use this code:

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace newdomain.com with the URL of your new domain.

6. To redirect .htm pages to .php pages use this code:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule (.*).htm$/$1.php

Make sure you have mod_rewrite enabled on your server.

7. To redirect any index.html pages to your home page use this code:

# index.html to / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

You will have multiple home pages if your navigation menu contains mutiple index.html pages. This confuses the search engines because they'll be dividing your traffic between 2 types of home pages e.g. index.html and http://www.yourdomain.com. Use the code above to redirect all index.html pages to the home page. Replace index.html with index.php if your site contains php pages.

Test your 301 redirect works

Type the URL of your old website into your browser address bar. it should immediately redirect to the new website. Also check that your non www pages redirect to www pages. Use this 301 redirect checker to make sure your redirects were sucessful.

http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/

Tips

When redirecting the files of an old domain or website to a new domain or new website maintain the registration and hosting account of the old domain. This gives search engines time to index and update the backlinks of your new site. Terminate your old website only when there are no traces of it in the search engines. This will take a few weeks or months.

Notify your link partners of the domain name change as soon as possible. After you terminate your old domain any search engine benefits you've built up through your old links will be gone unless you've implemented the 301 redirect. When obtaining new backlinks make sure they point to your new domain.

Create a 404 error page in case you used the incorrect code in your .htaccess file.

Read "How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page to Stop Losing Visitors" http://www.drostdesigns.com/how-to-create-a-custom-404-error-page/

Avoid using 301 redirects to redirect multiple domain names to your main website. Search engines will rank websites if they are a good resource for their visitors.

Logo Design 101: Six Tips For Creating Iconic Logos

2011-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Logo design is undoubtedly one of most challenging aspects of graphic design. It may seem easy at first glance but successful logos tend to have several characteristics in common. Those features are:

simplicity
uniqueness
relevance
memorable
focus
tradition (or not following trends).

Here’s a brief overview of each of these characteristics with a well known brand examples to illustrate the point.

1. Keep it simple. A frequent mistake made by new designers is to over-complicate, or over-design. Simplicity is a good thing and when in comes to design, less is definitely more.

2. Make it unique. In a world full of swooshes, arcs, leaves and other logo clichés, this is easier said than done. The Nike logo is a tick or correct mark yet is instantly recognizable and unique.

3. Keep it relevant. When you’re designing a logo, think about the appropriateness of the symbol or typefaces you use. For example, a skull and crossbones will not work for a wedding planning business. The Lego logo uses bright primary colors and a child-friendly font – perfect for its intended audience.

4. Make it memorable. Your logo design is a visual representation of what the company stands for. The logo will often only receive a quick look, so it needs to make a fast impression.

5. Keep the focus and use one idea to make the design special. The Fed Ex logo features an arrow between the letters E and X, representing the idea of moving parcels from place to another.

6. Aim for longevity. While many logos will be updated over their lifetime, its probably not a bad idea to design something which will not look dated after a year. Avoid “trendy” fonts and symbolism. The Coca-Cola logo is among the most recognized logos and brands in the world. The logo’s distinctive cursive script has not changed dramatically over its long lifetime.

These are, of course guidelines and pointers. All rules are made to be broken but it helps if you know the rules before breaking them. What other rules or guidelines would you add to this list?

Achieving Good Legibility and Readability on the Web

2011-02-16T11:09:00.000-08:00

Continuing straight on from my previous post, this article will examine legibility and readability more closely by exploring the elementary typographic factors that affect them.

Typography gained its prominence in the print world. As such, the basics of good legibility and readability are well understood, but on a digital medium, we need to take a few additional considerations into account.

Typeface

As previously outlined, typefaces have a significant impact on the text they set. Selecting a good and applicable typeface that honors the copy, and caters for its requirements (e.g. if you know you’ll be setting mathematical symbols, ensure the typeface has glyphs for them) is paramount.

Chances are, you’re setting larger blocks of text. You’ll want to pick a good text font — one that’s designed for setting lengthier blocks of text. The best way to test a typeface as a text face is to set a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum in the basic Roman, at size 12px to 14px with a leading of 1 to 1.5 (see § Leading below), and see how it reads. Text faces can be either serif (e.g. Georgia) or sanserif (e.g. Arial).

Typefaces are declared in CSS with the font-family property and take descriptive values — either a generic family or specific font family. For example, here’s a transitional serif font stack:

p {     font-family:         Baskerville,         Times         'Times New Roman'         serif;     }

Sizing

When setting type, select a comfortable size: 14 pixels and up is a good rule of thumb for most screen text fonts. Not many of us have 20 – 20 vision, so better to display your text a tad large than too small.

Note: JavaScript-powered text sizing widgets ≠ accessibility.

Don’t size text arbitrarily; try to stick to a scale:

The “classical scale”.

Another scale.

A scale based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Type is best sized relatively, using ems. An em is the distance that’s horizontally equivalent to the type size in points (e.g. 1em of 12pt type is 12pt; 1em of 16pt type is 16pt). We set font size in CSS using the font-sizeproperty:

p { font-size: 1.2em; }

Remember that font sizes are inherited within the DOM by children from their parent elements. This can make em sizing calculations for nested elements difficult. A good idea is to size everything in pixels first, and then convert the measurements over to ems. Pixels are easy to work with, but fall short as a fixed unit — particularly when you’re scaling a website (see § Measure below).

To calculate the desired value in ems, find the value of 1 pixel in ems, then multiply by the desired font size (in pixels):

1 ÷ parent font-size × desired pixel value = em value

For example, if the parent font size (as defined by, say, the body element) is 16 pixels, but we’d like to size a paragraph — which is a child of the body element — at 12 pixels, we calculate: 1 ÷ 16 × 12, which gives us 0.75em.

The 62.5% trick

There is a neat trick to simplifying these calculations. Consider the following CSS:

p { font-size: 80%; } blockquote { font-size: 80%; }

That styles this markup:

This is a short paragraph, followed by a quote:
      Block quotes are blocks of quoted material, and can hold a        range of things, including paragraphs, lists, and even        headings of course.

80% of 16px is 12.8px, so p and blockquote elements will be that size, but what happens when we put a p element inside a blockquote element? The parent (blockquote) is 12.8px so the p will be rendered at 80% of that: 10.42px.

Guh! This has the potential to be quite confusing. Richard Rutter developed a neat trick to simplify the sizing calculations of nested elements. Consider:

Browsers have a common default size of 16px for text.
Set the body to a font-size of 62.5%, resetting everything to 10px.

From this point, the calculations are similar for _direct descendants_ of the body, for example, 12px = 1.2em; 8px = 0.8em; and so forth. Deeper nested elements are (still) relative, of course.

Measure

The measure is the line length. It’s important to keep lines at a comfortable length: not too long, and not too short.

The eye has difficulty going to the next line when measures are too long. A grand and almost infamous example of a website that could do better in this regard is Wikipedia, where the measure is relative to the length of the browser window; expand the window to full-screen on a widescreen monitor and notice how suddenly, where there was a comfortable 40 characters per line, you’ll have measures of 100 characters or more.

Conversely, ensure lines aren’t so short that the eye has to drop a line every few words. There are some publication styles where short measures are popular — for example, periodicals — but copy that’s set so short elsewhere begins to look cheap, as if, once read, it could be thrown away just like a newspaper.

Measures are set in CSS with the width property. Ideally, set the design or total page width in ems, and columns in percentages, such that columns, the grid, and the entire page design scale proportionately. For example:

body {     font-size: 62.5%;     width: 96em;    margin: 0 auto 0 auto;     }     div#content {         width: 75%;         float: left;         }     div#sidebar {         width: 25%;         float: right;         }

In this example we’ve used the 62.5% trick to reset the base font size to 10 pixels in the body and defined a total design width of 960 pixels which is centered. Meanwhile, we’ve defined two div elements: one as a sidebar with a width of 240 pixels (25% of 960 = 240 pixels) and the other as a content container with width of 720 pixels (75% of 960 = 720 pixels). This design scales perfectly, even when only text-only zoom is available.

Leading

It’s important to provide ample space between lines so that the eye can read along and travel between lines with comfort and ease. A good rule is to give copy with short measures less leading, and longer measures more leading.

Leading is controlled in CSS using the line-height property. You can use it to set unit-less number values (e.g. 1.5), whereby it acts as a multiplier of the font size:

p { line-height: 1.5; }

This means the leading will be one and a half times the size of the font-size. Unit-less values are easier to keep track of, and to work with when setting leading for descendent elements. They also scale nicely.

Alignment

Alignment refers to the placement and arrangement of text. When setting blocks of copy, align text to the left margin or “gutter”, and don’t be afraid of having a ragged edge (i.e. “left-aligned”, “flush-left”, or “ragged-right”). Justification is great if there is a sufficient measure to cater for the adjustment of the word-spacing and, ideally, if automatic hyphenation is accessible. Avoid justification in narrow columns of text.

Alignment is controlled in CSS using the text-align property, and takes descriptive values, for example:

body { text-align: left; }     div#content p { text-align: justify; }     div#content p.verse { text-align: center; }

The culmination (contrast)

Legible and readable text has a high contrast with its surroundings without becoming an eye-sore. Good contrast is achieved by setting text with the above factors in mind, and by considering the color of the type and the background it’s placed on. A good guiding principle is dark text on a light background, or visa versa. Avoid clashing colous or a barely visible grey on a white background.

In CSS, the text color is controlled by the color property, while the background is controlled by the background-color property and takes numerical and descriptive values. Here’s an example:

div#content p {     color: #111;     background-color: white;     }

Pay attention to contrasts when working with light text on a dark background. Dark text on a light background generally has a higher contrast than light text on a dark background. Thus, when light text rests on a dark background check its contrast — increase leading and decrease font-weight as applicable.

div#footer p {     color: white;     background-color: #333;     line-height: 1.8;     font-weight: lighter;     }

Closing

That’s it. Applying these principles should provide your text with the elementary typographic goodness, as well as better legibility and readability.

Important SEO Mistakes You Can Fix Instantly

2011-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.devwebpro.com/important-seo-mistakes-you-can-fix-instantly/

When it comes to optimizing your web site for the search engines, search engine optimization, there are a lot of things that you can do that will hurt your search engine rankings. Many of these items are easily corrected, and some are not.

In fact, there are literally hundreds of different factors that come into play when it comes to search engine optimization. And add in new technologies and web sites such as social media web sites and there are even more search engine optimization factors. That said, let’s focus on some of the bigger search engine optimization mistakes that I run across every day when I am reviewing and auditing web sites for search engine optimization.

It only took a few minutes of brainstorming for me to come up with this list of search engine optimization mistakes. There are quite a bit more SEO mistakes on my search engine optimization audit list. Of course your web site may not suffer some of these search engine optimization maladies. But it is good to go through this SEO checklist of mistakes just to make sure.

Your website was entirely built in Flash.
One way to tell is to go to your web site’s home page. When you click a link or visit a web page on your web site, does the URL change? If you click a link and it goes to another page, such as domain.com/page.html then most likely your web site is not totally built in Flash. Flash can be embedded into html pages, so you may be okay–just make sure that you have other content on your web pages (lots of text) so that the search engines can read what your web page is about: search engines generally do not index and read Flash.

Duplicate Content
Having the same text or content on more than one web page is not recommended. The search engines only like to index one version: and they will typically not index multiple copies of the same text. So, if you have all sorts of duplicate content on your web site, it’s not likely going to be indexed and therefore your website is not going to rank as well as it could in the search engines. Duplicate content could be on your web site, but you could also be using content (text) from other web sites. In ecommerce situations, frequently web sites will use the default product descriptions from the manufacturers. That is not recommended, as several different web sites may be using the same content. Your content must be unique. In the hotel industry, it is common for a hotel description to be used more than once. Again, that is not recommended. Your best bet is to hire a writer to write unique content (or rewrite the content).

Not linking to your real home page
One common mistake I see over and over again is that a web site will not link to its real home page. Your web site’s real home page is at http://www.domain.com/ and not at http://www.domain.com/index.html. Index.html is actually a duplicate copy: and other web sites don’t link to http://www.domain.com/index.html they will link to http://www.domain.com/ (without the index.html). So, you need to be consistent–always link to the main version of your home page.

Splash Page as your home page
Splash pages are not recommended, in any situation. Splash pages don’t generally contain text content. Your web site is not a movie, and it does not need “opening credits”. Make your home page the best most important page on your web site. After all, other web sites link to it.

Not having Unique Title Tags
Every web page on your web site is unique. Make it that way. Your title tag describes what is on your web page and what people will find when they visit that web page. The title tag is used as part of the actual search result, so make sure that people will find the information they need and want to click from the search result to your web page.

Not having unique Meta Description tags
Just like the meta description tag, it must uniquely describe the content on the web page. Just like the title tag, the meta description is often used in the actual search result. Make it good enough for people to want to click on into your web site from a search result.

Not properly adding alt tags to images

Alt tags describe the content of images. Not only for accessibility purposes, the search engines use these as part of the search engine ranking factors. Make sure that every image on your web site has a proper alt tag.

No Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file will keep the search engines (most of them) out of certain parts of your web site. There is no reason for certain directories on your web site to be crawled. This is also helpful to keep the search engines from indexing certain duplicate copies of your web pages, such as the “print version” of a web page that may be a duplicate. The robots.txt file should also contain other information, like the location of the sitemap.xml file.

No sitemap file
If you particularly have a large web site or your web site frequently adds content then you should have a sitemap.xml file. It’s not required, but is helpful.

Not updating your website
Web sites, just like a loaf of bread, get stale if they aren’t updated on a regular basis. Your business is fluid, something is always happening, so your web site should reflect that. Even if you decide not to have a blog or other fluid content on your web site, you should at least publish a press release once a month. This will add content to your web site, and keeping it fresh (link to your latest press releases on the home page of your web site) will ultimately help search engine rankings.

Not getting new links to your website
Your web site should be getting at least a few new links every month. Even if you don’t actively seek these out, you should be getting more links, and even distributing a press release will help.

Improper use of internal anchor text
You have control of how you link to other web pages. The anchor text (the clickable link text) should accurately describe the content of the page that you’ll get to when you click a link. Don’t use “click here” and other nonsense anchor text in your links. If you are linking to the privacy policy page, then use the anchor text “privacy policy”.

No breadcrumb trail
A breadcrumb trail can add more links to your web site, especially if you are in a situation where your navigation is in images (they are image links).

Linking out to too many websites
Don’t make your web site what is called a “link farm”. Be careful who you link to, you are the “company you keep”. Link out to spam web sites and your web site could be considered to be spam. Too many outgoing links is tougher to maintain over time, as many web sites go down, are bought, or just don’t exist anymore. The should be more incoming links to your web pages than outgoing links on pages.

Not linking to trusted, authority websites
Your web site should link out to trusted, authority-type web sites in your niche or topic.

Keyword stuffing

If a keyword is not on your web page in the body copy, it should not appear in your title tag, meta description tag, or meta keywords tags. Don’t put keywords anywhere on your web page just to get search engine rankings. Create web pages for the website vistors, many people will not like your web page if you mention a keyword over and over and over again. It just doesn’t “read right”.

When linking to other pages on your website, some links redirect to other URLs.
You have control over all the internal links on your web site. If you move a page or remove a web page, you also need to fix the links on your web site that linked to that page.

No proper 404 errors on your website
If someone (or a search engine) requests a page that does not exist, your web site should deliver a proper 404 error.

Changing the entire site structure and not redirecting pages
If you update or redesign your web site, it is preferable to use the same URLs on pages. Sometimes that is not the case, especially when you switch to another content management system. If a page changes, then you need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect to the new location.

Not viewing your 404 errors in your website stats
Don’t just rely on your web site stats if you are using a JavaScript-based web analytics package. There may be a lot of traffic going to a web page that doesn’t exist: or some other web site may be linking to a web page on your site that does not exist. You can easily recover that traffic or redirect that traffic to the proper page if you view your 404 errors. The only way to do that is to analyze your web site’s log files.

Not viewing your redirect errors in your website stats
Just like I mentioned with the 404 errors, your log files will give you information about your redirects. Analyze your log files and you’ll get a lot of good information that you can use to view redirects. Make sure they are set up properly and redirecting properly.

Not promoting your blog posts
Every blog post should be promoted on the social media web sites soon after they are posted. Getting links to your blog posts is a critical part of search engine optimization.

Not optimizing your blog properly
WordPress, for example, usually generates a lot of duplicate content out-of-the-box when it is installed. It’s important to optimize your blog posts (title tag, URLs, meta tags, etc.) and even the overall blog template (or theme) to make sure that each blog post can rank well in the search engines.

Not having search engine friendly URLs
Don’t use parameters in your URLs. Your URLs should accurately describe the content of the web page. Your privacy policy page should be privacypolicy.html or domain.com/privacy-policy/ rather than domain.com/125.html.

Owning multiple domain names and they all are mirrors of your main website.

You have one main web site. Pick one domain name and set up a 301 Permanent Redirect from ALL the others to your main web site’s home page.

These are only a few of the hundreds of common search engine optimization mistakes that I see every day over and over again. I perform a lot of search engine optimization audits on a regular basis, and I typically find myself cleaning up after poor web design, poor internal linking structures, and what I would call “typical” search engine optimization mistakes. Hopefully by viewing this list you have been able to find at least a few SEO mistakes that you can fix.

Comments

8 Tools For Easily Creating a Mobile Version of Your Website

2011-01-15T00:13:00.001-08:00

http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/create-mobile-site-tools/

As an entrepreneur, you’re most likely always on the lookout for new developments. Perhaps your customers are reporting that your site needs a mobile version so that they can visit it while they’re on the go, or maybe you recently saw a competitor’s site through your mobile device; it looked slick, and now you’re feeling outclassed.

The mobile web is burgeoning. Usage of iOS, the operating system for Apple mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, almost doubled in just seven months (from March 2010 to October 2010), according to Netmarketshare. This is an indicator of just how many people are browsing websites, more and more, through their mobile devices instead of their computers.

Small businesses should be on top of this trend. To help out, we’ve compiled a list of easy-to-use tools for creating mobile sites. The tools in this list were purposely chosen for ease of use — that is, they’re all aimed at site owners who don’t have any web development/coding experience. They’re perfect solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses because of their cost effectiveness (and most are even free).

How These Tools Work

Most of the tools below have graphical user interfaces and copy-and-paste code blocks that can be installed on your site quite easily. If you can install a tool like Google Analytics on your site yourself, you’ll be able to use these tools.

These tools work by detecting the user agent of your site visitors, which is just fancy talk for finding out whether a visitor is using a regular web browser or a mobile web browser. If the user agent is a mobile browser, users are redirected to your website’s mobile version. The common practice is to assign the mobile version of your site with a sub-domain as such m.yourwebsite.com. In this manner, your site traffic is forked into two segments, giving all of your site visitors an optimal browsing experience.

1. Mobify

Mobify allows you to create a mobile version of your website through an intuitive and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). Setup is a breeze, and you can have your very own mobile site in minutes.

If you run an e-commerce store, even better! Mobify has the Mobile Commerce platform that’s geared specifically toward e-stores for the mobile web.

Mobify runs on a freemium model, but its free version is very generous and includes the option for a custom domain (such as m.yourwebsite.com). The paid plans start at $249 per month and include features such as the removal of the Mobify logo on your mobile site, mobile analytics for reporting site traffic stats, and so on.

2. Wirenode

Companies such as Ford, Nokia and Reebok use Wirenode, a mobile website generator that has helped more than 50,000 websites create mobile-device-friendly versions of their sites.

Its free plan has a user-friendly editor for designing your mobile site, free hosting for up to three mobile sites, website statistics reporting, and more. The paid plans start at 15 Euros per month (about $19.80 USD), with upgrades such as support for custom domains and the removal of Wirenode advertisements.

3. Mippin Mobilizer

If you’re strapped for time, Mippin Mobilizer is a no-frills tool that will take you minutes to use. All you have to do is enter your site’s RSS feed URL, configure some options, sign up for an account, install some code on your site, and you’re done! As you set up your mobile site, it has a live preview on the right-hand-side so that you can see the progression of your site’s design as you configure it.

4. Onbile

Onbile promises that you can have a mobile version of your site in five minutes or less. It delivers this promise by giving you an intuitive user interface for constructing your mobile site and a custom-generated script to paste into your index page so that when mobile device users visit your site, they are redirected to the mobile version. You can select one of 13 customizable templates as a starting point for your mobile site design.

5. Winksite

If you’re interested in creating an online community based around your mobile site, check out Winksite, a web app for building a mobile community for your website.

It even generates your very own QR code, a two-dimensional code readable by mobile devices with QR scanners and used to automatically pull up text, photos, videos, music and URLs. There are many ways to use QR codes for small business marketing. You can print your QR code on your business card, print ads and other branding materials, and when mobile users want to visit your mobile site, they just need to use their mobile device cameras to scan the QR code.

If you would like to generate a QR code without having to use Winksite, check out this free web-based tool calledQR-Code Generator.

6. MobilePress

Do you use the WordPress publishing platform for your website? If so, you’re in luck because there’s a bevy of plug-and-play WordPress plugins for automatically generating a mobile version of your website. One such plugin is MobilePress, a free WordPress plugin for creating a mobile theme for your WordPress-powered site. Another WordPress plugin to consider is WordPress Mobile Edition.

7. iWebKit

iWebKit is a simple framework for creating your own iPhone/iPod touch apps. It can be used to create an app likeMashable‘s iPhone app, for example.

Though iWebKit can be used by anyone, even without knowledge of HTML, it isn’t as user-friendly as the other tools mentioned above and requires that you download and install the app as well as read the user manual. But for a small time investment (no cash needed, the iWebKit framework is free), you can have your very own iPhone app just like the big kids.

8. MoFuse

MoFuse is loaded with a large set of features for building and managing your mobile site. It’s aimed at agencies, news media, and small- and medium-sized businesses. Prices range from $7.95 to $199 per month and include features such as site analytics reporting, support for more than 5,000 different mobile devices, customer support, a QR code manager, and more.

Bonus: Resources for Testing and Evaluation

Once you use one of the tools above and have your very own mobile version of your main site, it’s a good practice to ensure that everything’s in order. Here are additional tools and resources for testing and evaluating your new mobile website.

mobiReady – This tool will test your site for dotMobi compliance and W3C mobileOK compliance, sets of mobile website standards that ensure an optimal and accessible mobile-site user experience. It also looks for errors and gives you a user-friendly report of any errors discovered. It’s easy to use — just plug in the URL of your mobile site.
W3C mobileOK Checker – W3C has an official tool for checking a mobile site’s “mobile-friendliness”.
iPad Peek – Don’t have an iPad? That’s quite alright, you can still see how your mobile site looks through the popular Apple mobile device using this tool that emulates what people see on the iPad.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 – W3C, the standards body for many of the web’s technologies (such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript), has a document that outlines mobile web best practices. This is aimed at web developers and can be a pretty dry read, but it’s worth a few moments to read and look over it.

10 Predictions for Web Development in 2011

2011-01-14T23:47:00.000-08:00

10 Predictions for Web Development in 2011

Monday, December 27, 2011 11:52 AM

http://mashable.com/2010/12/27/web-development-predictions/

As a class, developers have had a fantastic year in 2010.We've made headlines, grabbed the limelight, been vilified and glorified beyond all reason and gotten paid pretty nicely along the way. And the bubble of consumer web apps just continues to swell, so there are no signs (yet) that 2011 will bring anything short of grandeur for the web and mobile development communities.Looking ahead to what the coming year might hold, there are a few sure bets and a few speculations we'd like to offer. Some are, as noted, almost certainly bound to come true. Others are more along the lines of hopes and prayers than hard-and-fast predictions we'd stake money on.With that in mind, here are 10 things we think the world of hacking will hold in 2011.

1. There Will Be a Need to Understand and Optimize for All Form Factors

Even the most brainless of "social media gurus" could tell you this one. With the surging popularity and newfound accessibility and affordability of smartphones -- thanks in large part to the growth of the Android platform -- we've had to optimize for the mobile web and learn about mobile applications a lot in the past year in particular.Now, as tablets begin to creep into the market, we're having to craft new experiences for those, as well. We're constantly forced to consider form factor when creating new sites and apps. Will it run Flash? What about screen resolution? Font size?Almost every developer worth his or her salt will have to become increasingly adept at developing for the myriad form factors set to dominate the gadget market in 2011.

2. There Will Be Breakout, Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools

With all the mobile growth that's been occurring, especially given the current state of the iOS/Android market shares, the time has never been riper for a great mobile framework, SDK or IDE to enter the arena.Hopefully, sometime in 2011, we'll see a new group of flexible and robust tools that can facilitate app development for any number of operating systems -- including tablet-specific or forked OSes. We're talking more than WYSIWYG, DIY app-builders and more than iPhone-to-Android porting tools; we want to see serious, mobile-centric power tools in 2011.

3. Investment in Cloud-Based, Collaborative Development Tools

We've seen some interesting starts in community-based, online coding. There are a few collaborative code editing apps, some of them with real-time capabilities.We're looking forward to seeing more and better apps for cloud-based, collaborative coding in 2011 -- something like a better Wave, created specifically with hackers in mind. This will allow for better and faster work to be generated by an increasingly decentralized hacker community. It'll also pave the way for improved on-the-job learning and open-source hacking.

4. WYSIWYG Tools Get Better and Grow

While WYSIWYG tools of the past -- and, who are we kidding, the present -- often lead to spaghetti code of the ugliest variety, we just keep seeing more and more of them.We're going out on a limb and predicting (or hoping) that WYSIWYG and split-screen (WYSIWYG and code) developer tools become more sophisticated. Whether they get better or not, they're definitely going to continue to proliferate, especially for the novice coder and the DIY non-coder markets. Still, we're being told the code on the other side of the GUIs is getting better all the time.Who knows? 2011 could be the year WYSIWYGs stop sucking.

5. We'll Keep Building "Touchable," App-like UIs

All that stuff we said earlier about form factors kind of applies here, too, but in reverse. Your sites will have to look better on mobile devices and tablets, yes; but also, they'll continue to natively look and feel more like mobile and tablet apps.Some folks, a couple of Mashable staffers included, aren't happy about the app-itization of the entire Internet. Call us old-fashioned, but we like our websites to be websites and our mobile apps to be mobile apps.The average consumer, however, seems to delight in the shiny, touchable, magazine-like interfaces taking over the iPad and similar devices. Expect to be asked to make more and more app-like sites in 2011.

6. There Will Be a Higher Standard for Web and Mobile Security

The past year has been a bit of a horror show when it comes to web security. There have been a handful of high-profile hacks that exposed user data to the world; there was also much confusion on the user's side of the screen as to how security works on a personal level.We predict -- nay, we dream -- that in 2011, developers of consumer-facing apps will be extra careful with things like data encryption, user privacy controls and other security issues.

7. Third-Party App Development Will Plateau

Building a Facebook app or a Twitter app was all the rage in 2009, but something shifted in 2010, right around the time of Twitter's Chirp developer conference: Developers found out that building on someone else's platform was a good way to set yourself up for failure, especially when the platform decides to shift direction, change its APIs, acquire a competitor, or simply change its terms of use.We predict that developing these kinds of apps will plateau and even taper off in 2011. The web is glutted with third-party social media tools; many devs are beginning to realize there's more money and more interesting challenges elsewhere. In the end, social networks will be more interesting to advertisers large and small than to independent and third-party developers.

8. Ruby Will Get Some Cool Optimizations and Tools

We've seen lots of cool tricks and optimization tweaks around Python and PHP; 2011, however, will be the year for better Ruby tools.The Ruby language is becoming extremely popular in developing consumer-facing web apps, and we're sure to see some big-name companies release open-source tools and even improvements to the Ruby core -- think along the lines of what Facebook did last year with HipHop or Google's Unladen Swallow project.

9. NoSQL Technologies Will Stake Their Ground

We've seen and heard interesting things from the NoSQL corners of the web this year... and by "interesting," we don't necessarily mean "good."NoSQL technologies have had some high-profile hiccups this year (remember thatMongoDB/Foursquare disaster?), but we've been assured that what doesn't kill NoSQL only makes it stronger and more stable.That being said, we're not predicting the demise of MySQL any time soon. As one astute Twitter friendwrote, "Relational databases have their place, as do NoSQL solutions. To blindly choose one over the other is shortsighted."

10. Open-Source Software Will See Unprecedented Growth

Open-sourcing interesting or unused tech is a trend we like to see from companies like Google and Facebook. In fact, we hope to see even more open-source contributions from proprietary software giants in 2011.It's not just the big players who are writing great open-source code. We know a lot of web startups are working on internal tools that'll also be open-sourced in 2011. There are more youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) joining the ranks of hackers every year; many of them are being encouraged by sites like this one to make valuable contributions to the open-source community.We predict more awesome open-source software than ever in 2011. Will it be a victory byStallman's standards? Probably not, as it won't be exclusive of proprietary software creation, sale and licensing. But the trend toward more FOSS is a good one, and one that we'll continue to report on in the year to come.

4 Predictions for Web Design in 2011

2011-01-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

4 Predictions for Web Design in 2011

15 days ago by Jacob Gube

Jacob Gube is the founder/chief editor of Six Revisions, a popular web development and design site, and the deputy editor of Design Instruct, a web magazine for designers. He has more than seven years of experience as a professional web developer and has written abook on JavaScript. Connect with him via Twitter.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a web designer; but being a member of this fast-paced, persistently metamorphic profession, I’ll probably end up saying this at the end of every year until I retire.

But with the web design industry abuzz with new specifications likeHTML5 and CSS3, and cutting-edge frontiers like the mobile web, I can’t help but wonder what the future will look like in the new year. Here are four predictions for the future of web design.

1. Mobile Web Goes Mainstream

The mobile web has been the dominant subject in web design for the past 2+ years. A quick peek at Dribbble, a social media site where designers share their projects, will show you that many of us are working on mobile device apps and interfaces.

However, it’s still safe to say that most websites have given little to no attention to their mobile web presence. Most of the innovative mobile device web designs we’re seeing are on big, industry-leading, tech-centric sites such as Amazon.com, Google, and Digg, or niche sites targeted toward web designers (such as A List Apart).

Where we’re not seeing mobile web design implementations are in run-of-the-mill company and corporate sites. Small- and medium-sized businesses, Fortune 500 companies, and government websites are sadly falling behind instead of in line.

However, companies are beginning to see the rewards of meeting the needs of mobile device users. In the years to come, there will be a significant shift in attention toward the mobile web presence in all websites.

There are already several mobile web tools you can use for creating a mobile web version of your site; it’s time companies seriously look into implementing these cost-effective and relatively simple solutions as either a stop-gap solution or a permanent one.

2. Web Design as a Profession Will Become Specialized

Web designers are increasingly contending with many roles and tasks. What used to be just HTML, CSS and designing static brochure sites for the desktop has extended to designing web-enabled solutions for mobile devices, web apps, rich Internet application (RIA) interfaces, content management systems (CMS) and much more.

We’re tasked with making harmonious designs that carry a website’s brand across all platforms and situations — designs that establish the company’s brand whether it’s being viewed in a 28-inch desktop monitor or anAndroid smartphone.

This leads to two things. Job security is one, but the other is the need to distribute these tasks so that we can specialize and excel in one specific area.

In the future, there will be greater stratification of the role of web designer. Right now, web app designers, mobile app designers and traditional website designers are clustered under the umbrella title of “web designer.”

Just as the profession of being a doctor and the field of medicine are branched out into sub-fields such as oncology, dentistry and neurology, we may see a similar division in the field of web design. I can see specializations such as mobile web designer, content management system designer (with further sub-specializations such as WordPress theme designer or Drupal theme designer), and RIA interface designer becoming a reality and being in demand as we move forward.

3. Simpler Aesthetics for Websites

There’s been a sweeping trend in the way new websites are being visually designed. Web designers are forgoing complex visuals and overdone design techniques, opting instead for clean and simple web designs with a high attention to detail, a greater emphasis on typography — with the help of web fonts and the upcoming open web font format (WOFF) specifications — and stronger interaction design for richer and more captivating user experiences.

Not only that, but simpler aesthetics means lighter web pages, which translates to a better experience on mobile devices where Internet connectivity is lower in speed and less reliable when compared to the traditional broadband connection, and where screen sizes are too small to fit excessive design elements. This web design trend of “less is more” seems like it will extend, if not dominate, the aesthetic tastes of web designers in the near future.

4. Web Design Will Replace Print Design (Even More)

Print designers are typically tasked with brand identity design, such as logo design, letterheads, business cards and other print materials.

However, companies are seeing the great opportunities and effectiveness of business networking online. Businesses are a lot more concerned about their brand’s visibility on the web. Business cards are being replaced by social networking profiles on Twitter and Facebook. Newsletters, brochures and company letterheads sent out by snail mail are being dismissed for HTML e-mails and e-newsletters.

We’ll be witnessing design budgets earmarked toward traditionally print-based branding materials shift toward web design solutions such as Twitter profile page designs, Facebook fan page designs and HTML e-mail and e-newsletter template designs.

http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/web-design-predictions/

Marketing Trends To Watch in 2011

2010-12-21T12:38:00.001-08:00

Posted by Jen Williams
Marketing trends change with the industry on a semi-regular basis. Depending on what’s technologically new or improved, marketing tactics adjust with those changes and affect the way businesses interact.

Harris Interactive, an information gathering group for surveys, polls and web marketing analysis applications, recently conducted an in-depth study that gave the following:

87% of online adults use social media
17% of adults ages 18-34 use social media 6-10 hours per week
22% use social media <1 hour per week>
With the landscape of social media quickly changing, the trends to watch in 2011 are an indication of the direction that it is headed.

The 4 major trends include:

1. Direct Marketing
Once considered a defunct mode of marketing, it is set to make a big comeback. Establishing and following up on leads the old-fashioned way but by using newer methods (email, social networking, etc.) is going to change the face of this familiar friend.

2. Tracking Social Metrics
Since businesses need to know if their methods are working, there will be more concentration on utilizing tools and analytical data to determine the success in these areas. Companies are becoming more concerned with how well their efforts are working getting quality results rather than simply performing an application for the sake of it.

3. Shifting Marketing Strategies
Businesses will begin focusing more on the social impact of their businesses. There will be more tactical to strategic marketing methods so as to concentrate more on measuring social media and marketing. With this will come a likely increase in developing customer care teams that focus solely on social networking tasks.

4. Video Marketing
The concept of video marketing will make its debut. Video marketing is believed to be a huge SEO marketing tactic, therefore platforms like YouTube, Flickr and other video or image social sites will get more attention as a marketing method.

About the Author: Jen Williams is a guest author for Pronet Advertising.

8 Tips for Embrace Change in Social Media

2010-12-21T07:06:00.000-08:00

by Susanne Vara

1. Know that EVERYONE is not Engaging in Social Media. It is our world but it is a small majority of the people. I know it seems crazy but not all of your customers or potential customers are tweeting, liking or connecting. Social media is a medium just like tv, radio, print and an open door of a brick and mortar shop.

2. Listen. Listening in social media is almost an over used term but yet there is so much to listen to as we continue to grow in this community. Listening is learning and learning for a business is a constant. With social media there are more channels to pay attention to but there are so many more listening stations afforded that we employ to make listening easier.

3. Create One Message. Social media is still advertising as much as people do not want to admit it. You are there representing a company, your own company or as an individual. The one message gets you noticed. Yes your profile as does mine mentions other interests but we talk to them about the interest which is one part of us which is still one message. A little guilt by association which is good as it focuses in on the one message.

4. Create Conversations. This seems hard but it is so easy. We all look to talk to the leader and forget about the other people who are there. The leader is leading, no doubt about that, but they are still learning and accepting this change of being involved in social media. But, the leader is wanting to have us talk to each other to generate new thoughts and show them their works create conversation.

5. Overcome Fear. The fear of posting is what prohibits us from accepting change and embracing social media. Oh no, so many will see what PI am saying or we question is this the right thing to say? I talk with clients and colleagues about this frequently. My response is always be you. We like you. When you try and be someone else, you are always you at some point, if you try and emulate someone else, we know. In social media we feel we have to conform to the group but in real life do we always do this? No, we don’t.

6. Leave Your Ego at the Door. As much as fear comes into play so does ego. Get a little boost in traffic, responses, or comments and whoa, we see expert coming. It is funny as with social media we see expert, guru, ninja, etc but yet with a heart surgeon we see credentials. There is no ego, just performance. In social media change is almost everyday with new technology or something new to learn but yet we see experts. How can you be an expert on something without performing?

7. Social Media is Not a Strategy. Social media is a medium and not a strategy. It is a part of an overall marketing plan that is a part of the strategy but it is not a strategy by itself. This is a big part of embracing the change of social media. Social media is a different means of advertising just as TV was when commercials hit the airwaves. People talked then and with social media they are still talking but this time they can talk to the brand.

8. Be Responsive. This is big. Responsive is more than thanking for a retweet, responding to an update, responding to a comment. Embracing the change that social media affords us is taking the time to see if the person who retweeted our article has a blog that we may enjoy, see what they are tweeting to see if we should follow them, responding with a comment to someone else whom has commented in addition to or in replace of commenting to the author (and of course seeing if they have blog too).

Embracing change is more than finding more time to be apart of something that you are unsure of. It encompasses overcoming fear which leads to being responsive but yet a leader in creating the conversation. Physical fear is real and sometimes emotional fear is real too but emotional fear is so many times driven by the failure or unsure voice within us. Social media is change as we are all still learning from each other. It is a new way to market that is so incredibly powerful when we stop chasing and be there with giving more than we get. Accept the change and learn from it to grow you and also your business. We all do well when we talk to others as we see a new perspective.

http://socialmediatoday.com/suzannevara/209650/8-tips-embracing-change-social-media

The Lonely Information Architect

2010-12-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's easier to do everything yourself instead of collaborating, isn't it? If you're an information architect, there are some compelling reasons to call all the shots:

The project starts with you, so you get to make all the initial decisions yourself. No one else on the project has that liberty.
You have firm start and end dates, after which you can move on to other work. Think of all the projects you could get through!
Everyone is looking to you as the specialist, which means you should be able to come up with the right answers and not involve others. Plus, you save your co-workers time by not involving them in all the initial project meetings.

But wait, isn't this sounding a little too good to be true? Or maybe you're thinking it seems pretty risky! You'd be right in either case.

The fallout from making IA decisions in a vacuum can be further reaching than you might suspect. The truth is that collaboration, solicited or not, is bound to happen once your work is sent to design. Quality designers won't just regurgitate your wireframes, they'll interpret them; furthermore, in the process of explaining your wireframes to the designer you'll no doubt come up with new ideas or improvements.

Now you're in a tricky situation, because changing an approved wireframe increases scope creep, and moving forward with the already approved wireframes would lead to what you now realize is a subpar solution. It will be a stressful moment for the whole team, but not as stressful as it happening during development.

That's just one example of a whole host of issues that can crop up later in a project when there's tunnel vision early on. Let's look at some ways to prevent this and ensure you have great products.

Share Discovery Information

After the first few stakeholder and customer interviews, take the time to run some thoughts by your team. Their questions will help you identify holes in your own understanding, and shape your ongoing research. Different members can be involved at different levels, but everyone from the content strategist to the developer needs to understand the whys behind the project before they start their work.

Talk It Through

Contact a few colleagues who are either on your project or in your field, and meet with them as you work through interface and experience decisions. Remember: your job is not to have all the answers, but to ask the right questions. The answers to those questions lead you to the right solutions. As you explain a crippling problem to a colleague, you might just have an “Aha!” moment that gets you past your block.

Practice Makes Perfect

Consider making your big reveal before you actually make your big reveal. Practicing for your stuffed animals is handy, but presenting to your team is even better. Concepts or explanations that sound great in your head may be less eloquent coming out of your mouth. If you thought through the big picture and philosophy that has driven your decisions, your presentation will be compelling and make sense. If you are unprepared or your decisions are haphazard, you'll end up dragging your client and team through a mire of tedious details until their eyes cross. You might even resort to convoluted industry lingo! If you've collaborated all along, by the time your actual presentation comes around any member of your team should be able to give it (but you still need to!).

All these generous people lend you their time and brain power, so make sure you return the favor. The client will sense the consistency and unity of your team, and their testimonial will show it.

You can leave a comment on the blog entry:

The Lonely Information Architect
by Emily Smith

9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing

2010-12-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

Shane Snow of Mashable

http://mashable.com/2010/03/15/location-based-marketing/

1. Learn the Platforms

First of all, you need to understand how the technology works. Generally, people use lo-so apps on their phones to “check in” whenever they go places. Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) locate the users and determine what “venue” they might be at, giving them options to select a location or create a new listing. These “check ins” allow their friends to know where they are now, or where they frequently go. Some services allow users to leave location-based tips for friends to discover later, and several involve social competitions, or the ability to unlock digital badges, stickers, and prizes. Businesses can announce specials or promotions through these apps, so when users “check in,” they receive notifications of nearby deals.

Item one on your to-do list should be to become familiar with the prevailing platforms. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude are the most talked about in general, though others exist, and popularity varies by geography (e.g. Foursquare reigns supreme in New York City, and Loopt has a lot of clout in Silicon Valley). Other platforms to be aware of include Yelp and Facebook, which are just now dabbling in lo-so. Sign up for all of these, and download the apps to your phone if you can, so you can become familiar with how someone would use each one. Most of the networks have iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps, and all of them allow you to “check in” via desktop and mobile web browsers.

2. Determine Your Goals

Before you can optimize your business for lo-social networking, you need to step back and determine what you want to accomplish.

Are you hoping to increase foot traffic to your store?
Do you want to sell more of a particular item?
Do you want more patrons at certain times of day?
Do you want to promote a specific product?
Are you looking for new customer acquisition?
Repeat customers?

You may say, “I want all of those,” but to be effective, you need to set specific objectives. These will determine your approach to the entire process. Luckily, if you need to change things around to fit new objectives in the future, the cost of doing so is very small.

One goal that should be on every business’s list is to be easily findable on every network, which brings us to number three:

3. Establish Your Presence

Make sure that your business is listed on each network. Then make sure the address, phone, and details are correct and current. Don’t assume that users have added everything correctly. On some networks, once a venue is there, it’s stuck. Others let you edit. Don’t be afraid to contact the network itself to ask them for help if you can’t fix your venue listing. Gowalla’s Jonathan Carroll says, “We receive dozens of e-mails a day from businesses around the world asking for additions or tweaks to their Gowalla locations, and we’re happy to help out with them.”

It’s also a good idea to put up notices or stickers (on the door, order counter, or table centerpieces, for example) announcing “We’re on Foursquare” or “Find us on Yelp.” This will remind people to “check in” and spread the word about you.

4. Customize

Different networks have different options for customization, but it’s important that you do as much as you can to build out your listing. Add your website. Integrate with your other social networking accounts, like Twitter. Features are constantly being added to each network, but great customizations you can try right now include the following:

On Foursquare: Create to-do lists for users to explore around your area. And if possible, work with Foursquare to create a custom badge for your venue or event.

On Gowalla: Ask for a custom icon for your location, rather than the generic one for your category. Examples:Shake Shack, NYC, Austin Java, and Coop Ale Works.

5. Implement Compelling Promotions

Lo-social networks allow you to run promos to increase engagement and get people into your store. Foursquare’s Tristan Walker says, “Any type of in-store promotion you can conceive we want to make it so Foursquare can run it.” Many businesses offer specials like “check in 10 times and get a free appetizer” on all the major lo-so networks. Establish well-conceived promotions based on your goals, then evaluate the results. The biggest mistake you can make is to do this sloppily or half-heartedly.

Carroll cites Lift Cafe as a good example. “They offer 10% off every purchase when you check in on Gowalla, which they include in their description and also as a reminder in the success screen after check-in.”

“[What] we’ve seen across all channels again and again is that what works is a good local offer,” says Loopt CEO Sam Altman. Businesses with offers that cater to people “making that gametime decision” when they’re out and about do the best. “Offer value to the customer so it doesn’t feel like an ad,” he advises.

Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology for the Brooklyn Museum, talks about how the institution uses Foursquare to create a multi-faceted campaign and experience for museum goers.

“We knew that many people coming here wanted to know more about the local neighborhood, which is something Foursquare does well. We asked our staff for their opinion of the best stuff in the neighborhood … and left tips at all these venues for Foursquare users to find. Second, we added a promo for our mayor to reward the people who are consistently identifying themselves with us. Third, Foursquare has given us a badge which unlocks after three visits, and this helps reward our community for coming in the doors.

“All of these things together help create a total presence on the platform that works well for the Foursquare community, the Brooklyn Museum visitor, and the local merchants in our neighborhood.”"

Common promotions across various networks include the following:

Raffles (e.g. “Every person who checks in gets a chance to win an iPod.”)
Specials for the user who checks in most often. This is a staple of Foursquare promos for a lot of venues (e.g. “Top user/mayor gets the first drink free every time he/she comes in.”)
First check in specials (e.g. “Get 30% off your order when you check in for the first time.”)
Digital punch cards (e.g. “Check in 5 times, get a free coffee.”)

Tips for developing effective promotions:

Advertise particular incentives, rather than your business in general (“20% off between 2 and 4pm;” “Buy one burger, get one free;” etc.).
On platforms that allow you create your own banner ads (such as Loopt), include your address and opening hours in the ad itself, when possible.
Be creative. For example, Incase, the bag and protective case maker, recently ran a promo with Gowalla to put virtual versions of its products into the app to be collected and traded. Carroll remarks, “The result has been phenomenal: Thousands upon thousands of their virtual items have been distributed in Gowalla to an audience who could benefit from their products, but many of whom had not previously heard of Incase.”

6. Engage With Your Customers

It would be a mistake to use Twitter as a one-way corporate megaphone, never interacting with your audience. That’s a quick route to an audience of zero. One of the most effective uses of social media is personal engagement and relationship building with your audience. The same goes for lo-so networks.

7. Track Everything

Foursquare just released a slick analytics dashboard for venues to track their stats. Other networks have metrics you can view as well, and they’ll certainly be releasing better and better tools. From data you can study online to qualitative observations at your own store, it’s important to keep track of everything so you can learn what promotions work with your audience. Be aware, though, that your ROI may not be directly measurable, and aside from increased sales, you’re working for brand exposure and increased awareness of your business.

8. Be Prepared to Adapt

Location-based social network technology may be the newest and grooviest incarnation of social media, but it certainly won’t be the last. And in a year it won’t look exactly like it does today. Be prepared to adapt your methods when features change, as new tools emerge, and as you review your own promotional results. Again, keep your objectives in mind, and be ready to keep up with new technology.

9. Avoid Common Pitfalls

In talking with representatives from the major lo-so networks, several common mistakes came up. Here are a few things you should try to avoid:

Don’t leave fake reviews or tips. They’re easy to spot, and you’ll lose all on- and off-line credibility immediately when people catch on.
Don’t throw up poorly designed ads. “A badly designed banner ad performs so much worse than … a good one,” Altman says. “It’s an insane difference.”
Don’t forget to monitor activity. Carroll points out, “Chances are if someone has a gripe or praise with their check-in, it’s a real-time thing: The patron is probably still there … so the business has a chance to make the experience even better.”

Ten Online Project Management Mistakes to Avoid

2010-12-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

Mistake #10: Export data from the old system and re-import it directly into the new one, then expect everything to magically improve.
Instead, clean house (project-wise and process-wise) during implementation. Get rid of old or unnecessary project data. Delete superfluous steps from project templates. Audit, then put in place best-processes -- now is the time to make a change if change is needed!

Mistake #9: Don't bother loading project data into the system before asking for product feedback.
Instead, make sure there's no "blank page" problem during team intros. In other words, people should see project data that they relate to when they first log in. It sets them up to be able to visualize using the tool every day for their own work, and to ask the most important questions about features they need or want.

Mistake #8: Instill a fear of "messing things up" in team members.
Instead, to help team members get the most out of any new tool, nominate a “tool guru” who is tasked with learning the ins and outs of the system. Then “how-to?”questions can be answered internally, speeding up the learning curve for the rest of the team. Encourage trial-and-error learning. Let people click around and see what the tool can do. If they hit a roadblock, they can ping the tool guru, or browse the support section. Be proactive, for example don't wait until everyone has free time to attend a training session before giving them access – it will only slow down adoption.

Mistake # 7: Leave existing processes and workflow status quo as is.
Instead, take this opportunity to define up front who has permission to perform different actions in the tool. Audit old (or create new) processes to answer questions such as: Who will add/create new projects and tasks? Who will prioritize within the greater plan? Also, consider having weekly meetings to go over priorities. Use a projector for large meetings to facilitate discussions and dialogue through the tool.

Mistake #6: Trust no one.
Instead, promote values of openness, transparency, communication, and most important of all, ownership. If a project team is the "family," then the project software is "home." Healthy families communicate, share the same dinner table, pick up after themselves, and leave generous numbers of post-it notes for each other. The same holds true for project teams. The more they collaborate, update, and respect each other's priorities, the more effective and efficient they, and their managers, become.

Mistake #5: Rely on the software to solve resource management problems.
Instead, accept that offline process for resource management and allocation must still take place. At its core, project management is a social problem, not a technical one. In a team with shared resources, the tool can't make those critical decisions. However, a great project management tool can facilitate discussions and more informed decisions about priorities and work assignments.

Mistake #4: Use other or complimentary systems the “same old way.”
Instead, leverage the full feature-set (at no extra cost!) to eliminate (or reduce) the need to spend time in other tools. For example, if the new project management tool includes a micro-blogging feature, try to encourage team members to use that in lieu of email. Or, get rid of that old time tracking system and use the one that comes with the new project management software. Ditto for document sharing, wikis, bug trackers, client extranets, and more. Besides cutting costs, it will keep team members engaged in the tool, ensuring the most accurate project information at any given time.

Mistake #3: Find one way to use project management software and stick with it.
Instead, think of the rollout as an "Agile implementation" that gets better over time. This is especially true if moving from a more lightweight tool like Basecamp or Excel to a purpose-built project management application such as LiquidPlanner. Experiment with structure and process, and then identify areas for optimization.

Mistake #2: Copy and paste data from the new project management software into a Microsoft Word team meeting agenda.
Instead, display project software on a projector in meetings so everyone's on the same page. Not only does it reinforce the idea that the newly created, “shared workspace” is the central place to go for project information, but it allows updates and decisions to be made in real time.

Mistake #1: Let team members make updates "if they feel like it."
Instead, hold each person accountable for making frequent updates to their tasks. Let's face it – businesses move forward only when projects get done. Think the CIO will accept having out of date financial information? Not gonna happen. Team productivity is directly proportionate to revenue opportunities. Make sure everyone understands that having reliable project data is critical to running the business. At the same time, offer support and guidance on the fastest and easiest way to make updates.

From ITBusinessEdge
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/show.aspx?c=85702

7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategis

2010-12-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

The role of social media is expanding rapidly and many organizations of all types are trying to stay afloat amidst the changes. Meanwhile, a small group of innovators pulls the industry onward.

In the past few years, the social media marketing role has become increasingly present, leading the way to more strategic social media programs. Enter the social media strategist.

Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm, recently spoke at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit about the career path of the corporate social strategist, touching on current responsibilities and challenges, as well as the future of the role. His presentation was based on months of research funded by Altimeter, in which 140 enterprise-class social strategists across various industries were interviewed. Other online sources, such as LinkedIn and blogs, were consulted to gather job descriptions, profile work histories and catalog the ebb and flow of new hires in the social media space.

Owyang presented seven key tips for building a successful social media program and focused on how social media strategists can facilitate those successes. Read his tips below and add your thoughts in the comments.

1. Be Proactive, Not Reactive

Owyang pointed to a funny, but oh-so-true anecdote that happened while he was collecting research for this study. While interviewing a social media strategist, the phone conversation was stopped abruptly as the strategist confessed, “Jeremiah, I’ve gotta go. There are two people standing in front of my office demanding Facebook Pages.” If they didn’t get the Pages, they were going to build them on their own.

While it’s somewhat hilarious to imagine two professionals camping in front of their colleague’s office until they get their doggone Facebook Pages, it’s equally as sad to realize that these instances actually happen in the corporate world. If this is happening in your organization, take a step back, look at the chaos, take a deep breath and then do something about it.

“A proactive mindset is required,” Owyang said. “You cannot wait for the company to catch up to you. You have to go to the business units and tell them what is required [to participate in your company's social media program] before they ask you for a Facebook Page. Make a list of requirements: dialogue, ready for conversations 24/7, ongoing commitment, two-way communications. Make it clear what’s expected, before they ask you.”

Being proactive and having guidelines will help alleviate stressful moments like the one described above, where being reactive is usually status quo.

2. Be a Program Manager, Not Evangelist

As social media programs become more sophisticated, Owyang believes that employees currently in the social media evangelist roles will move on to “the next thing,” evangelizing new technologies. But with an ongoing need for social media programming, a new role for social media program managers will emerge.

“Quickly switch hats,” Owyang advises social media strategists who want to stay relevant to businesses that have evolving needs. “It’s time to take off the evangelism hat and put on the program manager hat. A new skill set is going to be required, and a program manager is responsible for resources, timelines, Gantt charts, ROI models, analytics, data modeling, resource management, project management. It’s a very different skill set than the evangelist role that we’ve seen before.”

3. Educate Your Business Units

“Educate your business units ahead of time, and give them the information that they need,” said Owyang.

He is an advocate of testing employees to measure digital and social media proficiencies, pointing to Intel’s Digital IQ test as a great example of aptitude measurement. “You can take this online test before you participate in social media and become certified in that particular program,” he said. “That’s one of the more advanced programs that we’ve seen.”

In its official Social Media Guidelines, Intel clearly defines Digital IQ training as a responsibility for all employees taking part in social media on behalf of the company.

It’s important to not only lay down guidelines, but to also provide training for employees who want to learn more and get involved in the social media program.

4. Organize for Success

Five ways companies organize their social media teams

During his presentation, Owyang presented five models in which companies organize their social media teams — decentralized, centralized, hub and spoke, dandelion and holistic, as pictured and described above. He highly recommends that social media programs be organized in hub and spoke or dandelion models in order to scale.

In the hub and spoke model, there’s typically a cross-functional team that’s serving multiple business units, with the strategists at the center of the formation — 41% of the organizations that Owyang interviewed fell under this category.

Within large companies with multiple brands or units, such as Microsoft or HP, the dandelion (or “multiple hub and spoke”) model is common, where multiple social media strategists lead individual business areas or brands across the company.

There are three steps necessary in order to reach a hub and spoke or dandelion organization, according to Owyang:

“Set up governance: policies, legal, some executive buy-in.”
“Roll out processes: who does what, where, when and how — a triage system. How does information flow through your company? Publish that diagram on the Internet.”
“Launch an ongoing education program.”

“If you do those three things in that order, it’s very likely your company will form in hub and spoke with you in the hub,” stated Owyang.

5. Be an Enabler

It is unrealistic to think that one strategist can stay at the center of every social media effort or that he or she could even hire enough community managers to stay on top of an entire enterprise’s social activity. In light of that reality, Owyang believes that it is crucial for social media strategists to slip into the mindset of an enabler. He explains:

“Remember, social media does not scale. You cannot manage every social media program, campaign or effort. You now have to become an enabler to teach the business units to do it on their own — that’s the only way you’re going to be able to scale anyway. You become an internal consultant, an internal resource to help the entire business.”

6. Deploy Scalable Social Media Programs

Communities, advocacy programs, social media management systems (like CoTweet and HootSuite), and Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) — the practice of connecting social networks to your existing CRM system — are all worthwhile social media efforts, according to Owyang, because they are scalable.

“Dialogue does not scale,” Owyang reiterated multiple times. “One-to-one communications does not scale… You can’t possibly do it. What scales? Community programs — getting your customers to do the work for you. Advocacy programs — Microsoft MVP, Intel Insiders, SAP Mentors, Oracle Aces, Walmart Moms — those are advocacy programs, when you take your best customers and you give them a platform and let them do the work for you, and you don’t pay them. Those are scalable programs.”

While it’s important to set up channels for communication with customers, make sure your programs can expand as the company and community grow.

7. Transcend Marketing

The report found that 71% of social media programs fall under the domain of marketing or corporate communications. In order to make an impact, though, Owyang says that social media programs must transcend marketing. Strategists should take note and act accordingly.

“Over time, think about how you can be more than ‘marketing,’” suggests Owyang. “Think about how you can apply [social media] to support and service and the physical, real-world customer experience — and improve products and experiences.”

5 Tips for Working With Outsourced Designers

2010-11-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

by Prasad Thammineni

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/11/5-tips-for-working-with-outsourced-designers.html

Your small business relies on a professional and consistent look and feel. But how do you achieve this when you don’t have the resources to have an in-house marketing design team? Print design, Web design and advertising copy – all of this can be quite complicated. Outsourced designers are a great way to bring in design expertise when you need it… but managing creative professionals has its own set of unique challenges.

Here are 5 tips for working with outside designers:

1) Provide context.

Help your designer understand what your business does. Explain the goal that you are trying to accomplish with the design work. Realize that the designer does not have the same view into your business that you do. By providing context around what it is that you do and what you are trying to accomplish, you not only help the designer create better work but also help focus his or her creativity on the problem at hand.

2) Use a style guide.

It is smart to have a style guide created so that all of your collateral materials will be consistent and professional looking. A style guide is a set of standards for design of your company’s materials/documents/manuals. For a small business, a simple style guide should have the preferred primary typeface/headline/header font and secondary typeface/body text font, primary and secondary colors and general rules for on-page spacing. The goal of the style guide is that if someone sees your company’s mailing and then visits your website, they should naturally understand that they’ve come to the same company’s home page.

3) Use examples.

Provide examples of both designs you like and designs you do not. A good set of examples is a great starting point for your designer. You should not only have examples, but have specific reasons why you like or dislike them. Opinions/reasons will help the designer focus on using the elements that you like best and keep him or her from wasting time recreating elements you didn’t consider important.

4) Sketch and scan.

Another great way to share your ideas with the designer is to sketch the design on a piece of paper and scan it to share it with the designer. The goal is not to pretend to be Michelangelo, but instead to get your basic layout ideas across. Do not spend a lot of time with this, but instead just scratch out something as a jumping-off point from which the designer can begin to create something appropriate for your needs.

5) Keep in touch.

Have a regular schedule for when you and the designer will check in with each other. You’ll want to update the designer on any changes that might impact the design and promptly provide feedback to them as needed. Prompt and decisive feedback is crucial to a good relationship with a designer.

Bonus tip: Give constructive criticism.

Do not be afraid to provide criticism. The designer cannot read your mind, so you need to be honest when you do not like something. You should not feel bad delivering negative news if you can do so promptly and in a positive manner! Be polite as you state the negatives, but make sure you do state them – otherwise it will be close to impossible to get the design you want for your business.

Have you used outside designers? What have you learned from working with them? Any tips to share with the Small Business Trends audience?

Creating Effective Websites by xdude.com

2010-11-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

Creating Effective Websites
Lesson #1: Your Marketing Message
How to Excite Your Visitors

The next time you need to write something that grabs your reader’s attention and entices them to interact, follow these simple steps!

1. Know your customer Who are they? How old are they? How educated are they? What do they love? What do they hate? What is their pain? Picture them sitting across from you describing their worries. Imagine every detail – even what they look like.

The better you can imagine your prospect in your mind’s eye, the better you’ll be able to write a message that speaks directly to them.

2. Know your product or service How will your product or service take away your reader’s pain or improve their life? How does your expertise compare to that of your competition?

3. Know the benefits What can your offer do for me, right now? Can it make me rich? Can it save me time? Will it entertain me? Will it help me feel better about myself?

4. Gain their trust If you’re marketing over the Internet, you don't have the advantage of speaking face to face with your customer, so pack as much credibility into your message as possible. Offer a free trial, a money-back guarantee, include testimonials from happy customers, and consider adding a photo of yourself, or even an audio or video message.

Most importantly: speak to your visitor – in their language. Don't ramble about technical specs of your products unless that’s what they want.

5. Keep it short! People don’t read every word on every page they visit. They scan. Use headings that grab the reader’s attention and give clues about the content of the next two or three paragraphs. Make the read easy, quick and informative. Once you're done writing your copy, go back and see if you can say it all in half the words. The idea isn’t to sacrifice quality – it’s to make your message as long as it needs to be without dragging it out.

6. Key words to use: you, get, now, proven, discover, learn, benefit, complete, exclusive Words to avoid: if, but, not, should, could, maybe

7. Create a call to action with a sense of urgency Throw in something special for the first 100 buyers or make it "This month only!" Word selection is important. Don’t just say "Buy now!" Give a specific time limit. "Buy during the month of October and get [something wonderful] for free!"

Thanks for reading.

http://www.xdude.com

Fight Freelancer Loneliness!

2010-11-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Miles Burke
tribune@sitepoint.com
Editor, SitePoint Tribune

Over the last month or two, I’ve spoken to a bunch of freelancers or telecommuters about what their biggest hurdles to success are. A common one (right up there with finding clients and keeping focus) is the sense of loneliness that results from working by yourself all day.

Many of us have partners, but they may have full-time work outside the home, and then mightn’t be overly interested in how you’ve spent your day when they return. The pets don’t seem to have much to say either, when asked which design concept they prefer, or which framework you should build that site with.

Isolation really is a serious problem for many freelancers. Here are seven ways I suggest as potential solutions to combat the sense that you’re the only person left on the planet:

Join a meet-up or local group. I’ve mentioned this here before; however, it’s worth repeating that sites such as meetup.com and other organizations run chapters in your industry right across the planet. Spend some time looking for one in your area, and head along to a meeting; you may find solace in chatting to likeminded people, who are possibly in the same situation as yourself.

Start a meet-up. So you’ve looked around, but there’s no group meeting near you. Do you have many competitors in the same town or region? Collating a list of email addresses or telephone numbers, then making contact to ask if they’d be interested in meeting at a neutral venue, is a fantastic way to kick-start a new vibrant group.

Join forums. SitePoint has a lively discussion forum, and although the pariticpants aren’t face to face, there’ll likely be enough conversation and discussion to keep you from feeling too left out from the real world.

Volunteer your time. Your local sports club, scout group, or church may need volunteers, whether it be for maintaining their website, or even looking after a booth at a fair. Volunteering makes you feel good, and helps build relationships with great people.

Go and study. We all have plenty to learn; maybe you can find a nighttime course in something that appeals to you, whether it be learning Spanish or bookbinding—you’ll meet a whole roomful of people who are also interested in that topic.

Work from a café. You may not even be speaking to those around you, but taking your laptop out of your usual environment and finding a place with good coffee and wifi can re-energize you. That old saying about a change being as good as a holiday might apply for that one day you try it out!

Find a serviced office. If you can, check out serviced offices or find somewhere you can rent a desk. As well as making you feel more like part of the human race, a regular place to work outside of home will possibly make a huge difference to your productivity if you are prone to being easily sidetracked.

Best of luck with finding the solution to loneliness!

7 Things Your Blog’s Sidebar Can't Live Without

2010-10-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

by Diana Freedman

Thu, Oct 07, 2010 @ 08:45 AM

Your blog sidebar can be filled with anything you’d like, from fun and fancy widgets to ads for generating some extra income. But there are several important elements that your blog sidebar shouldn’t be without. They’ll not only help you keep readers on your site, but will help bring them back for more, or even turn them into leads.

Here are seven essential elements you should include in your blog's sidebar:

1. Option to Subscribe

Assuming you have remarkable content on your blog, which I know all you HubSpot blog readers do, your readers would be interested in coming back to your blog to read your latest posts. So make it easy for them! Add a subscribe button linking to your RSS feed URL. You can use Feedburner to create this URL from your original RSS feed URL, as Feedburner makes it easy for readers to add your feed to their RSS reader, like Google Reader. Also, make sure to include an email form field to allow users to subscribe via email, so your posts will go straight to their email inbox.

2. Category List

Often called “categories” or “topics,” this is a list that makes it easy for your readers to find content that they are interested in. Most blogging platforms automatically create this list from the categories or tags that you assign it when configuring each blog post. Try not to assign more than 1-3 categories per post, since any more would diminish the usefulness of sorting your content by category.

3. Most Popular Posts

The sidebar is a great place to display your most popular (usually meaning the most highly trafficked) blog posts. This way, readers won’t have to dig through pages and pages of content to find your most remarkable content. It will also peak people’s interests to find out why these posts are the most popular.

4. Recent Blog Posts

Including recent blog posts makes it easy for users who enter your site through a single blog post (rather than the homepage) to navigate to your most recent content. This is a great way to encourage readers to remain on the site and get additional page views.

5. Search Box

A search box makes it easy for your readers to find content based on the keyword or phrase they’re looking for. You can have this in your sidebar, but another popular option is to have the sidebar in your header (like HubSpot’s blog).

6. Social Media Connection Options

These days, RSS isn’t the only way readers keep tabs on their favorite blogs. Include links to your social media profiles, such as Facebook and Twitter, so that you can provide updates to your readers on sites that they visit each and every day. You can even add a Facebook Like Box (previously called Fan Box), so that users can “like” your fan page without having to leave your blog.

7. Calls-to-Action

Now that you have all this great content and blog traffic, you should include calls-to-action for what you want your readers to do next. This is especially useful if this blog is a business blog, as you can include CTAs leading to your landing pages and get leads. Try to make your CTAs as relevant to your blog content as possible. You’ll be able to place the most relevant CTAs within each blog post (usually at the bottom of each post) since you’ll be able to customize this space more easily.

8 Steps to Create Your Winning Social Media Strateg

2010-10-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

by Tracy Terry of Inbound Marketing University

Creating your social media strategy can be just as time consuming as creating your inbound marketing plan. It will entail lengthy research, investigative tactics, and thought. Below are some steps that you should consider when creating your social media strategy:

1. Goal. What is your goal? Is your goal to obtain brand awareness, create buzz, build your email database, generate more leads, increase your conversions, increase your web traffic, create more inbound links, or something else? Clearly establish what your goal is and then you can go about strategizing how to obtain that goal.

2. Market Analysis. You should know who your target market is and strategize about how to reach this market. Research your target market’s trends, characteristics, needs, and social activities. If you have an email database already established, you can use tools to help you find your audience, such as Facebook Friend Finder, Twitter’s follower tool, Flowtown, and Rapleaf.

3. Foundation. Lay out the foundation of your campaign. What type of message do you wish to portray about your company that will appeal to your target audience? Figure out the type of design you want to implement, color coordinating to your logo to keep in with your company branding. Define your copyrighting maximizing keyword exposure for your business.

4. Networks. Decide which social networks you are going to use actively to provide you with the maximum ROI for your goal. There are a ton of sites out there beyond Facebook and Twitter that might be best for your business. If you are in the music industry, you might be more suited toReverbnation. If you are in the meeting industry, you might be more suited for Plannermix. How many social networks do you wish be active in?

5. Content. Which content is going to be more appealing to your audience? Plan whether you are going to use personal text content, questions, trivia, photos, videos, podcasts, blogs, etc. Decide where and when you will be using each piece of content. Create an editorial calendar to help you along.

6. Integration. How will you be integrating your social media with your current marketing? It is important to maximize all media outlets to your best potential. Will you be placing your social media links on your website, in your emails and enewsletters, on your print ads, stating in your on-air advertising?

7. Management. Managing your campaign is crucial to its success. How are you going to manage the campaign? Who is going to post? Who is going to blog? Will it be one person? Will it be a collaboration of people? What bookmarking sites are you going to use? How are you going to measure your stats? Will you be posting manually or using a tool such as Hootsuite? These are important questions to ask.

8. Cost. What resources are going to be used to implement the social media strategy and how much are they going to cost you? Although social media is a free tool, there is a cost involved in hiring a professional to handle your social media strategy. This will be true whether you are handling your social media in-house our outsourcing. If you are adding social media to your current marketing plan without hiring any new employees, how much time will be involved in executing the social media strategy successfully? Will you be opting to exclude another form of media that may not be working for your company in order to include time for the social media aspects.

These are major points to consider when developing your social media marketing plan. Careful consideration should be given to each one. Taking your time and planning your strategy carefully will bring you the most success and not leave you wondering around the social media networks aimlessly with no goal and with no success.

Writing is a Challenge, not a Chore.

2010-10-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

by Miles Burke
tribune@sitepoint.com

Writing is a Challenge, not a Chore.

Ever noticed that some blogs or articles read so much better than others? Some are a chore to read, while others are a pleasure. The same applies to emails and letters.

So what's the secret to writing with impact?

Well, I like to credit my writing in the Tribune to the fantastic editors that work tirelessly behind the scenes to make my stream of words sensible; however, there are a multitude of ways to improve your writing. Here are eight of them.

I challenge you to go through your website and look at your content in light of these rules. Fixing any issues may just make a big difference to your conversion rate.

Write When the Urge Hits

If you speak to professional writers, they'll tell you that they sit down for a full day every day and write those articles. The rest of us aren't that lucky. I find that I can only really write well when I'm in the mood. Sure, I can write even when I'd rather not be; however, I'm sure it shows when it's forced.

Know when you're in the zone to write and when you're not. Choosing to write when you're up to it will improve most people's writing considerably.

Simplicity is Key

Just like a new designer who uses ten typefaces on a simple graphic, many new writers believe they need to use complex words to look smart.

All that does is make your writing hard to read. It's okay to use a thesaurus to vary your word usage, but don't forsake a good, descriptive word for a more difficult one.

Avoid Verbosity

If you can take a word out without changing the meaning of the sentence, do it. Take this sentence, for example: what unnecessary words could you possibly remove? Let's try that again now. Take this sentence, for example: what words could you remove?

Notice the difference? Brevity, especially in business communications, is like a breath of fresh air. Readers will appreciate you for it.

Write Concise Sentences

Once you've written your piece, read it aloud. You should be able to read a sentence without gasping for breath. In business writing, people prefer shorter sentences. So as well as removing unnecessary words, aim for concise writing.

Keep Paragraphs Compact

People tend to scan websites, rather than read from top to bottom like they do with a newspaper. If you're writing for the Web, limit the length of your paragraphs, and your readers will keep coming back for more.

Use an Active Voice

This is not about exercising your vocal cords. Active sentence construction uses more direct language than its passive cousin, with stronger verbs that inject energy into the action. Compare the following:

The website was built by me.
I built the website.

In the first sentence, the subject is the website, which is being acted upon; it's in the passive voice. In the second sentence, I'm the subject that performs the action. Sometimes it's a case of what needs to be emphasized, but more often the directness of active construction is preferable for clear English. Not only is the sentence now shorter, it's punchier and reads better.

Spell-check, Spell-check, and then Spell-check

There is nothing worse than seeing spelling errors in business communications. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched a presentation with errors in the slides, or lost confidence in a business because their website is littered with misspellings.

Sure, use your spell-check software, but beware of homophones, when a correctly spelled word is placed in the wrong spot; for example, two, too, and to. Read it again slowly, and even ask a colleague to read it, if that helps.

Keep on Writing

The more you write, the more you'll improve. I find that regular writing does more for me than reading books on editing and the like. Warm up by writing a short piece, and then tackle the bigger jobs. Before you know it, you'll find yourself writing better without the agony.

Best of luck adopting these rules, and embracing writing as a challenge not a chore. With a little preparation and forethought, you'll be crafting better content and correspondence in no time at all!