Detroit SEO Web Design

iContact Email Marketing Review

Jared Pomranky — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:42:42 +0000

iContact is a great single opt-in email marketing service that I’ve used myself and with clients successfully. While I do use Aweber in certain situations (more for your Internet marketing lists), iContact is a good choice to use with many small businesses because they allow you to upload your list without first checking it. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t allow spam, but many of my clients have lists of their clients that they send emails out to and would like to continue that in a more structured environment, iContact allows for that. Given my use with many clients and myself, here is my iContact review.

iContact Sign-up and Registration

Overall sign-up is very easy with iContact. As Net Profit Marketing is a partner with iContact, you can visit our iContact Registration page for a free 15 day trial (no credit card needed). The sign-up is as simple as filling out a little information about yourself, confirming your email, then getting instant access.

iContact Setup

Overall the setup is pretty simple. You have to add information to your Campaign, which lists information about who you’re marketing to with the list for your own notes and public information like your address, which has to be listed for ICANN spam regulations. After that you can edit your Contact List, which is a container for all of your contacts. The information here is simply setting a couple of default values for the List name and the List description. After that you’re ready to create a message. While there are more things you can setup, this is all that’s needed to send out a message.

Create A Message In iContact

I’ve found the message editor in iContact to be a great asset to their service. You can select a template to start with, which is helpful if you just want something simple to start with. When you’re in the actual message editor you can select the regular editor, which makes it easy to work on your newsletter, add images, and enter/format text or you can opt for the HTML view to really dig into the details. My favorite feature of the message editor is the “Copy Text” function to create your text email. It basically takes all of your text from the HTML portion to create the text version of your email, which saves considerable time!

Add Contacts to iContact

There are several ways to add contacts to your list from importing a spreadsheet of contacts, adding them via the control panel or having people sign-up via an online sign-up form.

Import Spreadsheet – To import a spreadsheet all you need are your contacts in a spreadsheet with their name and email address. They make it easy by showing you the first couple of rows of the data and having you map the spreadsheet fields to the iContact fields.
Control Panel – You can also add contacts in one by one (usually best if you only have a couple) with an online form in your control panel.
Online Sign-Up Form – This is the big one. You can easily setup forms on your website that allows people to automatically sign-up for your newsletter. The form designer and form options are easy to setup and they offer two easy ways to add the form to your website: 1) Just add 1 line of Javascript code for the whole form 2) Add the HTML code for the form to allow for more customization.

iContact Deliverability

Deliverability is a large part of email marketing. Your newsletter needs to make it in the inbox and not get caught in the spam filter. iContact’s reputation and white listing with major ISPs (Internet Service Providers) helps them keep over a 99% deliverability rate.

Room for Improvement

There are two areas that I find need improvement in iContact. Now take these with a grain of salt as I am a power user of the services but I find that the reporting and the RSS to Email capabilities are lacking. I would like to see the ability for more statistics via the reporting function so we can break down and target people based on their past performance (opens, clicks, etc). I would also like to see more features for the RSS to Email so I can automatically setup and parse my blog posts to be sent via email.

Overall I would say that iContact is a great choice for small businesses and large businesses. Go over and try a free 15 day trial of iContact and see for yourself.

Jared Pomranky

Aweber Single Opt-In and List Migration

Jared Pomranky — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:16:20 +0000

I’ve had a lot of questions lately about Aweber email marketing and whether you can have an Aweber single opt-in list or whether it just has to be the classic double opt-in list that has made them famous. I’ve also had questions about list migration to Aweber. They are a little more strict on migrating lists, which is why I recommend them for email marketers as it keeps their overall emails sent out with a less chance of being marked as spam. If you’re not familiar with Aweber, you can read my Aweber review.

Aweber Single Opt-In List

Aweber is most known for their double opt-in list and it’s truly what I recommend when using them but you can use Aweber with a single opt-in list. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read my post on single opt-in vs. double opt-in email marketing. In order to setup a single opt-in list you need to create your list with the general settings and then turn off “Confirmed Opt-In Status” under My Lists -> List Settings -> Confirmed Opt-In.

Aweber List Migration

You can migrate your list to Aweber but it has to meet strict criteria. Basically they want to ensure that you have an actual list of people that want to be on your list as opposed to just a list of email addresses. When requesting a migration they ask for the following:

1) What is your website URL, where a web form can be located?

2) If you do not have a website, please describe the nature of your business.

3) How did you previously manage your mailing list (third party service, via a personal email account, etc.)?

Once you can sufficiently explain to Aweber that you do have permission to market to these email addresses, they will let you upload them to your account. If you’re with another list provider, they will do a web conference with you to confirm that you do have the list you say you have. If you have your new Aweber list setup as a single opt-in, your list will be added. If you have the new list setup as a double opt-in list, your subscribers will have to confirm their subscription to your new list.

Aweber is a great email marketing service that is very flexible and offers a lot of features. While they are more strict about uploading lists of contacts, it’s for the overall good of their service by keeping out the spammers.

Let me know if you have any more questions about Aweber or any email marketing.

Jared Pomranky

Current Facebook Fan Page Changes Affecting You

Jared Pomranky — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:30:09 +0000

This is a quick update about some news I received yesterday from Facebook on my Fan page. There are changes being pushed out to all fan pages on August 23 that could really change the design of your custom tabs. While many people using Fan pages don’t have custom tabs, there is a growing number of businesses that are taking advantage of FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to create custom landing and content tabs on their fan page.

The changes are as follows:

Fan Page Boxes

Facebook is removing Boxes from its feature set including on profiles and pages. I see this as just clearing up some real estate and not a real loss for anyone. Good move.

Fan Page Application Tab Width

The width of tabs is currently changing from 760px to 520px; a significant drop. While any dynamic width elements like paragraphs will just resize, what you have to watch out for are the fixed width elements like Image headers and tables with fixed widths. These must be updated by August 23rd in order to keep your visitors seeing what you want them to see. The good thing is that Facebook is allowing Administrators of fan pages to view the fan page in the 520px width so you can see the changes.

If you visit my Detroit SEO & Web Design Fan Page, you can see the welcome tab as it currently stands and you can see what it looks like after with the image below. While I only have a fixed width header, many of my clients have fixed width bodies, which complete cuts out their sidebar, not good.

As you can see the change is that they’re going to display the main fan page sidebar throughout each tab. The good thing is that it removes the need to put an image of the company or person in the sidebar of each page. The bad thing is that there’s still a need for more contact information or a newsletter sign-up form so we will still need to have a sidebar on the tabs. We will just have to make it as narrow as possible so it doesn’t take away from the main page.

I think the changes are coming to create continuity throughout the fan page with the sidebar and also for better mobile support. 520px is a lot easier to handle on your phone than 760px. You can view the official announcement at Facebook Fan Page Changes Announcement.

What do you think?

Jared Pomranky

Facebook Fan Pages for Business

Jared Pomranky — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:32:11 +0000

Facebook fan pages have long been a great lead generator for business but I feel now more than ever, it’s becoming a necessity. Facebook has overtaken Google as the most visited website, they have over 500,000,000 users and they are growing every day. (reference Facebook Statistics). What this means is that your clients and your potential clients are embracing Facebook, which is changing their whole perception on how they interact with products and services on the Internet. You can’t take that ad that worked in the yellow pages or for direct mail, slap it on a website, and start counting your sales. Relationship marketing is here.

A fan page with Facebook is much more interactive, informative, and much less in your face than traditional media. It’s permission marketing at its best because it also utilizes relationships to increase your exposure and allow others to suggest the page to their friends. You have the potential to grow your fans and the reach of your product or service exponentially. You must provide good information, however, and not be seen as trying to sell people. If you’re trying to sell with marketing pitches, you will not get anywhere. If you provide good tips, good information, and ask good questions, you will have an interactive Facebook fan page that will make your company more money.

Setting up a fan page is easy. You can go to any fan page like the Detroit SEO & Web Design fan page, scroll down all the way on the left sidebar, click on “Create a page for my business”. You can pick out a name and create your page but I wouldn’t be so hasty. There are a lot of considerations, however, before creating your page.

Fan Page Name

Your fan page should be easily recognizable by your clients or potential client interested in your product and it should also include good keywords. Be careful with keywords, however. If you are too general (i.e. “Real Estate”), Facebook can make your page a community page and you lose all control. Also, if you stuff too many keywords into your page name, it’s going to look like spam and no one will click on it.

Fan Page URL

Once you receive 25 fans, you can select a custom URL for your fan page (like www.Facebook.com/DetroitSEOWebDesign) by going to http://facebook.com/username, clicking on “Set a username for your Pages”, selecting the page, and typing in your custom URL to see if it’s available. I would also warn you to not be too general in this selection either. You want to make it relevant to your users or someone that is searching for your product or service. Setting the name is great for SEO but it doesn’t help if you’re too general. A bad page URL is “RealEstateInvesting”; a good page URL is “DetroitForeclosures”. Be specific!

Fan Page Welcome Tab

There is a great opportunity on your fan page to target a message specifically for visitors that don’t “Like” your page yet. You can set the home page for people that aren’t a fan of your page yet to the Welcome page. On the welcome page you can give them a quick introduction to your company, let them know why they should be a fan of your page, and how they can become a fan.

What to put on my fan page?

You don’t want to overwhelm your fans but you also don’t want to drop out of site with your fans. I suggest adding 1 good comment or piece of information each day. Make it non-sales, something related to your business, and informative. You can also ask open ended questions like “What’s your best marketing medium?” or something that’s divisive like “I think that soccer is the best sport in the world.” to spur some replies and discussion.

Overall there is no easier way to get going in relationship marketing to a huge audience than with a Facebook Fan Page. You can get your page setup pretty easily but I definitely recommend utilizing a professional for help with your page name selection and for designing your Welcome tab and other secondary tabs.

Jared Pomranky

Best Posts for Small Businesses

Jared Pomranky — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:00:34 +0000

We’ve had a lot of good posts here on Net Profit Marketing’s blog but sometimes these great posts fall off the first page. Starting with this posts, a couple of times a year we’re going to do a “Best of” blog that highlights some posts that you really need to read. This one focuses on posts that are especially important for small businesses as most of our clients are small businesses.

Read through the posts and let us know what you think. As always, we look forward to your comments.

What is the Purpose of Your Website?
If you don’t know the purpose of your website, your visitors probably don’t either. You need to have a very clear purpose to your website and a very clear direction on what you want your visitors to do. It has to be more clear than just providing information.

What is SEO?
You’ve heard about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but you’re not quite sure what it is or how it works. This post will take you through the basics of SEO and what it can do for you. This is where you get on the first page of Google.

Why You Need Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools
Do you know how many people visited your site last month, what search engine or website referred them, what keywords they searched for to find your website, and what page they arrived on? Do you know what Google thinks about your website? Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools can answer all of this for you.

Get More Traffic From Local Search Results
Would you like more traffic to your website from local search results? People are searching for your product every day online and Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) makes it easy for you to get more local search results.

Let me know what you think of the posts and of us posting the best of every 6 months or so.

Jared Pomranky

Build Your Online Niche

Jared Pomranky — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:14:32 +0000

As of 2008, Google had indexed over a trillion sites. Since then they have continued indexing more and more websites each day. There’s not an exact number right now but it’s safe to say that the Internet is enormous. When considering the vast number of pages, how are you going to stand out? It’s no longer a viable option to always go after generic search terms in order to get the most traffic. Unless you have large capital reserves that you’re going to pour into a very expensive ongoing internet marketing and SEO campaign for years, you need to find your Online Niche.

Your goal is to be a big fish in a ~~small~~ smaller pond, which usually equates to being on the first page of Google for some relevant search terms. Most people don’t look past the first page of Google with some estimates putting it at 90%. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you’re missing out on traffic. It’s much better to get 50% of 500 searches a month as opposed to getting 1% of 1,000 searches a month. Also, as you’re building your niche for your site, you’re also optimizing it for the general search terms in the long run. An optimized page for the term “Detroit Michigan Mortgage Lender” also includes the more general search terms “Michigan Mortgage Lender” and “Mortgage Lender”. My favorite online niches to build for clients are: Geographic, product/service specific, and marketing specific.

Build a Geographic Niche

While not for every business, a geographic niche is always a good way to weed out the competition. For most locations, there are strong local search numbers and optimizing your site for these local niches will give you a significant amount of traffic and leads. Some easy ways to build your local niche are to include geographic search terms on your website, build a Google Places profile (as well as Bing and Yahoo), and add your website to local search directories.

Build a Product or Service Niche

This is a great way to make your company stand out for your specialties. While you may product widgets, maybe you can brand yourself as being the best provider of widgets for small businesses or identifying a difference in your widget compared to others. In essence you’re marketing your product as more unique than just being a widget. I like branding products for small business or for solving a certain problem.

Build a Marketing Specific Niche

Your market may be saturated on Google, which leaves your website out for awhile but what about other avenues? Can you brand yourself socially through other online avenues? If you have a LinkedIn account and search for your name on Google, what comes up in the top 10? Unless you’re a online social guru, LinkedIn always comes up in the top 10. It’s the same with other social sites like Facebook or twitter. These sites also give you the ability to connect more with your potential clients, which is an extra added bonus. Ranking for keywords through secondary sites and connecting through a different method than other companies will help your company stand out, effectively creating your marketing niche.

While you can pick just one of these and run with it, I prefer to utilize all 3 or at least 2 of these methods. As you build yourself more of a niche, you become more of a standard for that area. You will get more search results, more traffic to your site, more leads, and ultimately more profit.

Jared Pomranky

Zoho CRM Quick Start Guide

Jared Pomranky — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:51:04 +0000

I’m going to assume that you have been able to sign-up for Zoho CRM and that you can reasonably manage through setting your default values in the “Setup” menu of Zoho. Also, for those of you that don’t know anything about Zoho CRM, view a previous post Zoho CRM for Lead Management. This guide is to give you a quick run-down of the major lead types and flow of one type of lead to another.

Zoho is broken up into 3 main categories for Lead Management: Leads, Potentials, Contacts/Accounts.

Leads

These are not existing customers. These are leads that come in from your website, by phone, referral or other marketing that are not qualified. This is where you can set your lead status, create notes on when you talked to them and details of the conversation, attach files and emails, and create tasks for follow-up or other activities. This is also where you can reassign leads to other sales people or mark a lead as dead if it’s not going anywhere. When you have a reasonable expectation that this lead can become a customer, you will “Convert” the lead to a Potential by clicking on the Convert button.

Potentials

Once you convert a Lead to a Potential (or add one in right away as a Potential), you have to set the stage of the sales process that you’re at: Prospecting, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Value Proposition, etc. By selecting the stage, a percentage is assigned to the potential that represents the probability that the sale will close and you will convert the potential into a customer. I have found the Stages to be reasonable for what I do but you can always change the stages and assign different percentages to each. You also set the Expected Revenue and the Close Month of the sale. This helps to forecast revenue using the percentage to close and the revenue. Once you close the potential, you Convert them to a Contact.

Contacts/Accounts

Accounts are your customers at a company level (i.e. Acme, Corp). Contacts are the employees that you talk to within that company. You can have many Contacts per company, which is nice for consolidating data and allowing for multiple salespeople to have their own Contacts at the same company. You won’t create a lead from your Contacts because they’re already customers but when you’re working a sale with the Contact, you can create a Potential and assign that Contact to the Potential (right on the Create Potential form).

Zoho CRM Tips

I have a couple of quick tips that you can use to make your Zoho CRM experience a little better.

On each view (Leads, Potentials, Contacts, etc.) you can click on the “View” drop-down to select or customize a different view. This is then set as default so you can easily change it to show something like all of your open leads only.
You can add custom fields and add/change values in drop-downs for every field. Go to the Setup menu item and select the type you want to edit.
You can create a web-to-lead form to automatically add leads from your website and through their API (Application Programming Interface), you can integrate it into your existing contact forms, which we have used with great success.
With the Professional edition, you can create Workflow rules that automatically assign a lead to a sales person based on a set of rules.
You can always assign a lead or other type to another sales person by going to that lead and clicking on edit Owner.

Jared Pomranky

Lead Management With Zoho CRM

Jared Pomranky — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:47:57 +0000

Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is one of the best kept secrets for small businesses. I talk to many businesses that have heard of CRM solutions like Sugar CRM or Salesforce but Zoho is growing quickly with quality products priced well below the market (or many times free). Zoho’s name originates off of a play off the term SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and that is the market they serve best.

The challenge with clients has been how to manage leads at a company that has 50 or less employees. There are many solutions available but most of them are cost prohibitive or offer services that are far too complicated for the average small business. What Zoho CRM offers is a clean layout with an easy to use interface. It’s intuitive and it’s not overly complicated. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not powerful and feature rich. The basic layout of Zoho CRM is that you have leads that come in, those leads get converted to potentials when they’re qualified, and those potentials get converted to customers. Once they’re a customer, you can have a company account for the company and contacts listed for each account. The account/contacts relationship is great for existing clients and contacts.

Easy Lead Management for Business

If that sounds a little complicated for you, let’s step back. The main value added piece in Zoho CRM for your business is the lead management. You get a lead in and you manage tasks, notes, and contact information for that lead. If you do nothing else, this will greatly enhance your lead and sales process.

My favorite part about Zoho CRM is the automation. We have created a custom component that will allow any leads or forms on your website to automatically add the lead into Zoho. You will still receive an email from the contact form but all you have to do is login to Zoho to manage that lead, add notes, and create tasks for follow-up. It’s easy and it’s all centralized. Just think about the following:

You don’t have to keep all of your lead emails in your inbox
You can get rid of the sticky notes and pages detailing lead notes
You can access your lead information from any computer
You can assign leads to other salespeople
You will have a centralized location to keep your contact data

Pretty compelling reasons to try it out. It’s free for up to 3 users and only $12/user after that! Very reasonable.

Jared Pomranky

Zoho CRM Quick Start Guide

SEO Client Becomes a Google Favorite Place!

Jared Pomranky — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:44:54 +0000

We’re happy to announce that one of our clients, Display Group (a Detroit Corporate and Special Events Rental Company), has become a Google Favorite Place! What does this mean? It means that they are part of less than 1% of businesses in the U.S. to receive this distinction. That’s out of over 28,000,000 businesses! Businesses were selected for the popularity of their listing including how many times someone clicked on the listing and searched for it. You can view Display Group’s Google Places listing and view the Google Favorite Places FAQ.

While we would love to take all of the credit for Display Group’s success on Google Places, we have to admit that their great products and service to clients is the main reason they are a favorite place. We just helped people find them.

If you’re not on Google Places yet or you want to get more leads from it, read Google Places and Local Search Traffic.

Jared

What is SEO?

Jared Pomranky — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:55:47 +0000

Wikepedia defines SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as:

The process of improving ranking in search engine results

That’s a pretty simple definition but it’s very accurate. What I’m sure you’re asking, however, is what is that process? What’s involved with SEO? How do you SEO a website? The following is a quick dive into SEO and how it relates to your small business. There are essentially 3 categories to Search Engine Optimizing a website. We like to define those as Keyword Research, Web Site Optimization, and Link Building.

Keyword Research

This is the first part to optimizing your website, which most companies overlook. Research needs to be completed to find out what keywords are relevant to your company, which keywords have the highest search values, and what niche keywords with low competition and good search volume can be found. Researching keywords is done with various tools including Google AdWords keyword research tool. This tool in addition to others can be used to compile all of your keywords. There is then the arduous task of reviewing all keywords, finding related keywords, and deciding on the final keywords to focus on.

Web Site Optimization

Once you have your keywords, you can start to optimize your website. There are many aspects to optimizing your website and while not one activity will by itself significantly increase your rankings, the combination of all activities can create a dramatic effect. One thing to remember with optimization is that too much of a good thing can be bad. If you partake in “keyword stuffing” or putting as many keywords as you can into title tags, keywords, content, and everywhere else, Google and other search engines will know about it. Below is a sample of SEO activities:

Title Tag and Description Tags

The title displays at the top of your browser window but is also displayed on search engine results along with the description tag. This helps with optimization and click through rates on search engine results.

Heading Tags

These are the headings of your content and labeling them with the correct tags are critical in telling search engines the main subject of the content

Content Optimization

Adding keywords to your content (in reasonable amounts) can help increase your rankings

Search Engine Sitemap and Robots.txt

Search engine only files that tell them where to find your content and pages.

Internal Links

Proper internal ranking with proper anchor text can significantly increase the ranking of secondary pages

Optimized Navigation

Like internal links, this can significantly increase your ranking of secondary pages

URL Design

Adding keywords in the URL of your pages like naming a page /seo-services/ instead of page4.html will help make it relevant

Link Building

Once your site is optimized, it’s time to tell Google how popular it is. We do this through building “backlinks” to your site. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site and the more good links you have, the higher you will rank. We take care to create the best links back to your site. There are various ways to create backlinks like blog commenting, soliciting relevant websites, and web 2.0 links.

I would also add in that you need to be able to measure your results. Check out my post talking about Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools to see how you can do that.

View our Detroit SEO Services