to everyone that is on my Tip of the Week list.  Benchmark has now sent out 2 unauthorized emails to mt entire list – causing confusion, frustration, and spam!

When my list service company that allowed me to send Video emails quit working (poor upgrade) I moved to Benchmark for providing my video email list management.  After spending over 6 hours setting up the program – importing my list, purging names I knew were not valid, changing emails I knew had been updated, adding last names etc. – they decided to send out a Welcome email that I set up to be sent ONLY when a new person gets added through my website form.  They sent it out to my entire list instead!

If that was not annoying enough for both myself and the people that received the email  they then shut down my account.  All that time wasted!  When I called Monday morning to  find out why they did that I was told the “confused” me with someone else and did not mean to close my account.

I had already moved to MailChimp (free account for email list management) and redid all the work from the previous day.  I requested the Benchmark account be closed – and they complied and refunded my money.

Jump forward a week – yesterday they sent out an unaltered template (which I never even set up) to my entire list AGAIN.  To my HORROR they spammed my list again with absolute garbage.

I AM SO SORRY THEY ARE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT

I went back  into my supposedly closed account and removed everyone from the account.  It should not happen again (now the list is empty).

It is never my intention to spam anybody.

Lesson Learned

Do not rely on a company to do what they say they are going to do – always double check when it involves your clients.

Mobile friendly sites also need to be optimized just like traditional websites.  Keywords and content play a large role in mobile website optimization just like they do in regular websites.

What is the difference?

People using mobile devices often times search with shorter keyword phrases, and they do not want to look through the entire site to get to the right answer or to find the information.

There is a thing called a mobile sitemap.  This is a tool that will get your website listed in the Mobile Search Engines (yes mobile devices access a different search index).  You must get your mobile website into the mobile indexes – and a mobile sitemap is the easiest way to do so.  It is important to only include the pages that are included in your mobile website.

For a tool to create your mobile sitemap use MadSubmitter (free tool).  Simply fill out the form and the tool will scan your website for mobile friendly pages.  The drawback is that you will have to manually update this sitemap when new information is published.  If you are using WordPress you are in luck.  There is a Mobile Sitemap plugin that will automatically keep your sitemap up to date when you publish new content.  It is a “set it and leave it” plugin – my favorite.  Got to love WordPress!

In today’s market having a website that performs well on a smart phone is essential for your business.  You might be surprised how many people are accessing your website via some kind of mobile device.  I was!  To find out look at your website analytics.  If you are using Google they have added a mobile section.  If not just check the browser usage – you should see the mobile browsers separated out from desktop browsers.

This is a growing market that will not go away – business owners need to have mobile friendly websites.

What is Mobile Friendly?

If your website is hard to read on a mobile device, if the menu is hard to navigate, if it uses flash, if the photos are too large to load, if your site does not load at all – it is not mobile friendly.  You can take it one step farther – if your site is the same on a desktop as on a mobile device it is not mobile friendly.

What needs to be on a Mobile Website?

Let your website analytics help you.  Take a look and see what pages mobile users are visiting.  Make these pages prominent on your mobile version.  Think about what  people using your site on a phone are looking for – are they wanting your phone number, address, map to your location?  Are they looking for a coupon, restaurant menu, or other benefit of your business?

Give them what they want and take the unvisited pages away.  It will clean up your site and greatly improve the experience of your visitor.  I know I have visited some websites on my phone and just gave up because the site was so slow or the menu was  not usable.  They lost my business that day.

Is your site usable on a mobile device?

If not you need to get that fixed this year – plug the hole in your funnel now not later.

I had an interesting and frustrating event happen over the weekend.  I registered for a new email management system that would allow me to send video emails easily.  I spent about 6 hours setting up my imported list, adding missing content to the list, creating a Newsletter template, and creating my first autoresponder message for new people added through the web form.

The next morning I logged on to create an email set to go out on Monday and WHAM…My account had been terminated.

What happened?  All that time and effort wasted…to say I was unhappy was an understatement.

Guess what I did on Sunday?

I redid everything I had done the day before in MailChimp.  MailChimp now allows for YouTube videos to be embedded into email Newletters.

This morning (Monday) I contacted to original company to request a refund and find out what happened.  I assumed someone had reported my account as spam (the company sent out the autoresponder meant for the web form registrations to my entire list…not what I had planned).  They said there was no complaints but that the account was suspended for content.

WHAT…There was no questionable content in my email.  Come to find out they got my account confused with someone else and was sorry for the inconvenience.  UNBELIEVABLE!

They could have called…they could have emailed…they could have done a number of things.  They chose to terminate me for someones else’s indiscretions.

They lost a paying customer.

Had they handled it differently by not making me redo everything with another company they might have been able to salvage the business relationship.

Customer service cannot be automated…it just can’t.  Period.

Treat your customers right and they will treat you right.

Google just announced an update to their search placement algorithm.  This update has to do with the quality of the user experience and the layout of your website.  Google’s goal is to provide the closest natch to what someone is searching for highest in the search results list.  Our goal is to be in the top 3 for our search terms.

Best User Experience – Ads above the fold?

One complaint that Google gets from searchers is that they can’t find the information on the site that Google served to them.  It is buried under a multitude of ads.  Although ads provide an income for the website owner – they do nothing to help the searcher find your information.

This update is designed to rank websites with too many ads (how is that determined?) lower than websites with no ads.  This will help to improve the user experience when they look for information.

What does this mean to you?

It means that business owners need to provide the most important information first – always keep users in mind.  Do not clutter your website with promotional AdSense, or anything else that makes it hard for the user to find your information.  Google cares – and so should we.

Most business owners think that website optimization (SEO) happens by magic on their website.  Website optimization is so much more than your website.  It includes:

• Onsite Optimization
• Off site Optimization

Website owners naturally think that the optimization performed by an expert ON their website is way more important than the off site optimization.  They are wrong.  I have seen some extremely poorly optimized site perform really well in the Search results.  The reason – Off Site optimization.

What is SEO?

Every January I sit down and go over all my clients – where did they come from, what marketing methods are working, which ones are not working, and plan out my business for the upcoming year.  My website has always been a steady 20% of my business.  It is not because of the search engine optimization I have done to my website.  It is everything else.

Just because someone contacts you from your website does not mean that it was just your website efforts that earned your placement in the search engine results.  There are many things a business owner can do to earn higher placements.  All the small things add up to better placement.  Here is a list of things I have done that helped to boost my search engine placement for my website.

Website Optimization Ideas

• Guest blog posts
• Social Media participation (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, BizNik, Google Plus)
• Fan Page for business
• YouTube and informational/educational videos
• Article databases
• Forum posting
• Testimonial writing
• Blog commenting (not comment spam)
• Press Releases
• Using SlideShare
• Creating profiles on various websites
• Directory Listings
• Social Bookmarking accounts
• Blogging
• the list goes on…

Anything you can do on other websites that points back to your website is helpful and worth the time and effort.  Over time all these various activities grow and accumulate.

SEO is not a quick fix – it is not something that can be accomplished in 1 month.  It is an ongoing project – one might say never ending.  It can reap huge rewards in the future – think of it as making deposits into a savings account that earns 20% interest.  20% of my business comes from Search Engine Optimization.

What is Website Optimization

It is:

• Increased sales
• More clients
• More phone calls
• More dollars
• More business

I get this question daily.  Google+ is NOT a social Media site – it is not going to replace Facebook.  That is not the goal with this part of Google.  Check out this article: Google + is not a social Network, but it’s not a Graveyard either

That article does a great job of explaining Google’s goals for Google+.

I feel that every business owner will need a Google+ account.  The ability to tie all the Google tools together will be a great advancement for us.  Imagine going to one place to get your email (are you still using Outlook?), get website analytics, access YouTube, Google Docs, and all the upcoming great tools they will offer.  Social Search excites me – why not make it easy for yourself.

Get your own Google+ account – then link up to me!  Dotty’s Google +

In this live workshop you will be actually creating a blog post, or web page content.  I will teach you:

• How to choose the right keywords for your topic
• Where in the post or page to use them
•  How often to use them
• The science behind Keywords and Search Engine placement

There is a specific method for creating well optimized content – it is NOT hard and I know you can learn it too.

Come to the Workshop on October 27th 2011.  You can register here.

Susan Johnston wrote an ebook called LinkedIn and Lovin’ It, and I had an opportunity to contribute to her book.  This ebook is for anyone that has questions on LinkedIn. It covers topics like:

• How to create a great Profile
• How to build your Network
• How to Maximize your LinkedIn presence
• How to use Linkedin for research
• How to use LinkedIn Companies

It is a great overview, and look for my tips on creating a great LinkedIn profile.  You can find it on Pages 19 and 20.

Get the ebook: LinkedIn and Lovin’ It then return here and leave your comments or questions.  I would love to get them answered for you!

Creating content for your website includes more than just putting words onto a page.  It is very different from creating ad copy for print advertisements or creating book copy.  Online is all about getting the right message while using the right keywords.  It is also about where the keywords are used, how often they are used, and is the text readable for a human visitor.

Content Creation Made Easy

This seems hard – but I have a very easy method for creating great Search Optimized Content – it is so easy that anybody can do it.  Once you learn this method you will no longer need to cringe when web content is mentioned, and you will not feel the need to avoid it either.
What you will learn:

• How to find the “Right” Keywords
• The Secret Format for great web copy
• Where to use the right Keywords
• How Easy it is to write great web copy

• This is a WORKSHOP
• Bring your Laptop and an idea for Content
• We will all be writing a blog post or web content during this workshop.