One great thing about working with a software companies is that I get to use their products and call it “work.” muvee is a great company that we work with. With their software, you more or less just dump in some photos and videos, pick a style and music and hit “go.”

For me, despite my intentions to take the time to create fancy videos/slideshows, I never actually seem to get around to it. See below for a fun project I put together in minutes on the weekend as part of my “work” for them.

Another thing I like about this video is the technology at play. I left my SLR at home on this vacation, so the images and video you see are from my iPhone, a FlipCam and the GoPro that a friend brought along.

The muvee video is below and the vacation video slideshow is hosted on YouTube.

Video marketing: how to get more views for your YouTube videos
Use video marketing to get more customers by getting more visitors to your YouTube videos. How? Watch this YouTube video by  Fletcher Prince, which ranks #10 for YouTube video views.

How to create compelling calls to action
Calls to action help generate leads (and paying customers) should be used in each and every one of your marketing tactics: emails, social media updates, press releases, trade shows… Here are some good tips on how to create compelling calls to action.

Do you page titles encourage clicks?
Your page titles can deliver traffic to your site. Apparently, any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or “lead”) and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content. Here’s a short primer on the art and science of creating compelling page titles.

Is my site doomed because I won’t go social?
Some sites for some reasons do not want to get involved in adding social features to their site, such as adding rich snippets, authorship markup, Facebook and Twitter buttons and maybe more importantly to Google, Google+ buttons and profiles. Will a site suffer in the long term if they refuse to adapt to the new social space? This web forum has an interesting discussion on the subject.

5 rules to turn your local business into a ‘Social’ business
Make your business interesting enough, and people want to talk about it and share ‘stories’ of your business with their friends and colleagues. That’s the goal, but it can be difficult to achieve. Learn more about ‘Social PR’, how people, not newspapers or local radio stations, are now responsible for promoting and marketing your business.

JumpStartWeb compiles a weekly collection of marketing links for local business covering video marketing and other topics.

Mobile SEO growing in importance as web economy set to double by 2016
A recent sudy indicates that by 2016, there will be 3 billion Internet users around the world, and the global Internet economy will reach $4.2 trillion. Mobile devices such as smart phones will account for about 80% of all broadband connections. From an SEO perspective, this means that all businesses need to get to work optimising their sites for mobile users.

Bonus link: U.S. Mobile Ad Spending Forecast to Exceed $2.6 Billion in 2012

6 Different Emails Every Marketer Should Consider Sending
Should you nurture your subscribers with weekly newsletters? Are dedicated sends better at optimizing your sales and marketing funnel? What about email digests? These are all valid questions that marketing professionals should consider when selecting the right format to meet their email marketing goals. This blog post discusses the different types of email marketing communication and their respective advantages and disadvantages.

Valentine’s Day 2012 Ideas for Marketers
For marketers looking to take advantage of the holiday, Google and Microsoft adCenter have provided several ideas based on what users are already searching for. Learn more about the top products on Valentine’s Day, and an optimization checklist for your campaign. Click here to read more.

Five marketing questions to ask to grow your business in 2012
Asking yourself key marketing questions can help decide what programs and strategies worked, what didn’t, and what changes you need to make in 2012. Here are five questions to ask.

Why, and how, you should collect customer data
It’s argued that a customer database and purchase history is a must-have for every small business. It’s well-known that it is a lot more effective to sell to the customers you already have than to find new ones. But if you don’t know who they are, how to reach them or what they have already bought and like, you will just have to wait. – and hope. And that’s no way to grow a business. Not only will leveraging customer info support sales every day of the year, but your customer database will be a valuable asset when you sell your business. Read more here.

JumpStartWeb publishes Monday Marketing Madness each week to discuss mobile SEO and other online marketing topics.

12 critical elements every homepage must have
In order for a homepage to work, it needs to meet its purpose and contain key elements that attract traffic, educate your visitors, and convert browsers into buyers – the typical internet marketing best practices. Here’s a neat infographic that explains the 12 critical elements every homepage must have. Bonus link: 5 signs of a great user experience

3 keys to online retail in 2012: doing more with less
The American National Retail Federation released its numbers projecting US retail sales should rise 3.4 percent this year, down from an increase of 4.7 percent in 2011. According to some, this doesn’t mean 2012 will be a lost cause in the US; by focusing in three key areas – evaluation, improvement, and testing – retailers can not only survive, but grow their businesses in the coming year. Read more here. Bonus link: The Ecommerce Revolution Is All About You

How to increase clicks on your tweets
Using Twitter to build community and engage with customers can be a lot of work , and one of the most gratifying measures of social media success is when people are actually clicking on the links you send out via Twitter, either to interesting content you’ve found, or back to your site (where these visitors from Twitter can hopefully be converted into paying customers!). Here are some great tips on how to increase clicks on your tweets.

YouTube: Use analytics to build an audience
In terms of volume, YouTube is the second largest search in the world, and is a great way to promote your business, become recognized as a trusted expert in your field, and generally build community. But there are few rules for businesses to actually use this powerful marketing channel effectively. Luckily, YouTube offers plenty of detailed advice, including how to use analytics to build an audience.

What is Pinterest? And why is it important for retailers?
Pinterest is a website that allows users to “pin” things online; users can follow friends on Pinterest and “repin” things that they have already pinned on your Pinterest boards or browse a live feed of items that are being pinned by strangers. And now Pinterest has becomes the top traffic driver for retailers (inforgraphic)

Bonus marketing links:

• Projecting 2012 Google mobile revenues: $4 or $6 billion?
• 7 Mobile Marketing Ideas for Budget-Conscious Super Bowl Marketers
• Study: Reviews & Images Drive Clicks In Mobile
• Answers to 43 Questions About Search, Social, Content, Conversions and More

JumpStartWeb is a Victoria internet marketing company

Usability vs. search engine optimization
Many people believe that SEO is simply optimizing a website for search engines. In reality, SEO is optimizing a website for people who use search engines.  Likewise, many people believe that website usability is simply making a website easy to use. Easy to use for whom? The developers? Website owners? Web searchers? SEO professionals? Check out the fundamental building blocks of web usability to help become more visible to search engines, and hopefully help get more customers. Read more here.

5 tactics to get more customers
Keeping the funnel full is a challenge facing every local business. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, the company that fills its funnel full of opportunities is the one that manages its lead generation strategies most effectively. Here are 5 tactics to get more customers.

Improving the online customer’s journey from click to payment
A 2010 Forrester survey found that 88 per cent of online shoppers abandon their shopping baskets.  This doesn’t have to be so - here are a few steps that can help cut the number of shoppers who abandon their carts and convert them to paying customers.

Most people rely on search engines to find local businesses
60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses other thanrestaurants and bars. When they do,  47% say they rely most on the internet, including 36% on search engines, and  16% specialty websites. Read more here.

How to find your social media stride
What steps should a social media maven take in order to avoid running out of steam? These five steps can help you put things into perspective:

7 ways to use social media for instant feedback
Another use for social media: collecting critical feedback that advances your business objectives quickly. Here are some of the ways you can leverage social networks beyond your typical posts and updates. Read more here.

21 tactics to increase blog traffic
It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic, and more traffic means – ideally – more customers. Here are 21 tactics that can help everyone from independent folks, to those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies increase traffic: read more here.

JumpStartWeb publishes Monday Marketing Madness each week on search engine optimization and other topics.

I noticed today that MailChimp offers a QR code to link to a mobile version of your subscribe form.

Pretty cool if you’re at a trade show and want to promote newsletter signups in an actionable manner – just put the large version of the QR code on your signage and you’re good to go.

I’m sure there’s a million other applications for it as well.

Best of all, the novelty factor of QR codes should help maximize signups.

Try it out with our own newsletter signup QR code for our monthly Online Marketing Insights (I was able to scan it right off the screen):

Just getting started with Google Analytics? You’ve come to the right place!

Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google, can be confusing when you first dive in.

Fortunately, once you get familiar with the basic terms, it becomes easy to use and opens whole new worlds of insight regarding your web traffic.

In this first post, we’re going to start at the start and have a look at the Standard Reporting Audience Overview (or “Visitors Overview” as it’s often called). This is the first screen you generally see when you log in and looks like what you see below:

So… what are we looking at?

• The date range is shown in the top right and can be changed to any range you like by clicking on the drop-down arrow.
• The line graph you see represents the number of visits by day and can be changed to include other metrics (although we’ll leave that for another post).
• The Pie Chart at the bottom right shows the proportion of New Visitors (people who Google has not tracked as having previously visited your site) versus Returning Visitors, who as the name suggests, are visitors that Google has tracked as having visited your site previously.
  Note that your Returning Visitor stats are likely under-reported in practical terms as visitors who come to your site from multiple different computers or browsers will be shown as New Visitors.

The metrics shown on the left side of the interface are defined as follows:

• In “#### people visited this site, “people” refers to Unique Visitors (below).
• Visits refers to the total number of visits to your site. Many visitors will come to your site more than once, which is why Visits is virtually always significantly higher than Unique Visitors.
• Unique Visitors refers to the total number of visitors from the same computer/browser. For instance, if you had 400 Visits from 200 Unique Visitors, this means that your Unique Visitors visited the site an average of 2 times each.
• Pageviews refers to the number of individual pages that were viewed during your date range.
• Page/Visit, as the name implies, is an average of how many pages were viewed on each visit to the site.
• Avg. Time on Site is the amount of time (in minutes) that were spent per visit to your site. In this example, visitors spent an average of 1 minute and 59 seconds on the site.
• Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who landed on a single page on your site and left the site without navigating to a second page. In general, bounces are considered “bad” although in some cases (i.e. if someone is looking for your phone number and finds it on the first page), it isn’t necessarily a negative thing.
• % New Visits refers to the percentage of visits where the visitors where not tracked as having previously visited the sites.

Upon reviewing these stats a lot of folks wonder what their stats “should” be. My typical answer is “there is no right number as every business is different.” What I usually recommend is that folks look at which stats they can work on improving and try to bump up the numbers in those areas. For instance, if you improve your site to make it more “sticky,” you’ll hope to see a corresponding increase in the Pages/Visit.

There are any number of examples like this but we’ll save them for future posts!

In our next post we’ll have a look at the Traffic Sources Overview page (which is possibly the most important section of all!).

In a presentation last night at the Vancouver Island Tech Park I waxed rhapsodic about Bit.ly and harped on the importance of tracking.

After uploading my presentation deck to SlideShare (which I used today for the first time and is a great service too), I created a bit.ly link of the SlideShare presentation link so I could track the number of clicks on the link.

I hate to admit this, but after sending the link out to attendees, I found myself repeatedly clicking the refresh button in Chrome and was delighted to see the number keep going up each time.

Wanting to dig a little deeper I clicked into the “info page” for the link, and noticed a QR code for the link right there on the page.

I had seen the QR code there before, but had never actually given it any thought. This time, however, I took a moment to hold my iPhone up to my screen and scan it with my QR code reader. Lo and behold, not only did it go straight to the SlideShare.net page with my presentation, but the presentation actually rendered very well and looks great on my iPhone.

I invite you to check it out for yourself by scanning the QR code I’ve included right here: 

It still amazes me the functionality that is delivered through FREE apps and sites these days. QR codes within seconds plus automatic tracking of QR scans of the code – seems to good to be true!

If you haven’t already, you should explore both services yourself:

bitly.com
slideshare.net

BTW – for those who find the deck interesting, we had such a great response last night that we’re considering running the seminar again in February.

What is “Search, plus Your World”
Last week, Google once again made a major adjustment to its search feature by launching “Search Plus Your World”. It’s a feature that integrates activity from Google+, its new social network, into everyday search results. What this means for your business is that it may be a good idea to be on Google+! Read more here Bonus link: What the merging of Google+ and Google Search means to SEO Yet another bonus link: Google “Search Plus” impact on Local: limited so far

4 tips to keep your website ahead of the curve in 2012
2012 is heralding a new wave of innovative web technologies and design, and a page that stays in step with these trends is bound to pique interest and lower your bounce rate. Here are 4 tips to keep your website ahead of the curve in 2012

10 awesome online contests
Contest can be a great way to generate interest in and excitement for your business, but how to design and execute? Here are 10 awesome online contests that provide insights into effective techniques for building community. Bonus link: How to Create a Viral Sweepstakes With Social Media

6 Mobile Search Optimization Trends For 2012
The  the introduction of a smartphone Googlebot? Mobile Visual Search Optimization? Social Local Mobile Marketing? What do these terms mean and how will they affect your business in the coming year? Find out here by reading about 6 Mobile Search Optimization Trends For 2012.

5 Awesome Landing Page Lessons From Real Life Examples
“Landing pages” (specific webpages on your site visitors reach after searching for key terms; you always want visitors to complete a specific action on these landing pages such as clicking a link to buy something) can be difficult to design, which is a bit of a tragedy, since landing pages are used to create customers! Find out what works by reading about 5 Awesome Landing Page Lessons From Real Life Examples Bonus link: the psychology of SEO Yet another bonus link: Website usability checklist

10 Extraordinary Examples of Effective Link Bait
Creating “link bait”, or online content that people love to share all over the internet, is great: your business’ website gets recognition and lots of traffic, and you’re also creating valuable content that actually solves problems (or perhaps simply makes people laugh). However, creating link bait isn’t easy. For some pointers, check out 10 Extraordinary Examples of Effective Link Bait

JumpStartWeb is a Victoria online marketing agency that helps local businesses reach more customers.