VM(doh)

Say No to SOPA/PROTECT-IP

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:26:00 +0000

H.R. 3261 (Stop Online Piracy Act) and S. 968 (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) are absolutely bad for online freedom. I normal restrain my political postings to my other blog, but I believe that this is important and relevant to the target audience of this website enough so that I believe that I should post something here, too.

Under these proposed laws, rights-holders would be able to shut down access to a website by merely alleging that the website contains or helps locate stuff that they own the rights to, even if the allegedly infringing content is posted by third parties. This would effectively shut down forums, bulletin boards, IRC servers, news aggregators, and sites that you use every day like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

And that's just where it starts. If a website is "capable of" or "seems to encourage" copyright infringement, it can be blocked at the request of the copyright holder alleging the offense. It wouldn't be a stretch for any competent lawyer to argue that my post about the recent Chanel case in United States District Court in Nevada "seems to encourage" copyright infringement by way of stating my opinion that such decision is putting us on a slippery slope. It wouldn't be a stretch for any competent lawyer to argue that your website is "capable of" copyright infringement by merely having a means for user-generated content such as having a commenting system turned on.

What these proposed laws effectively do is erect a Great Content Filter of the United States of America, with Hollywood, media firms, and others with deep pockets getting to choose what you get to see on the Internet.

And no, this is not a "partisan" effort in Congress to pass what ultimately amounts to destroying free speech on the Internet in the United States. These bills have the support of both major parties. This issue really is an issue of the People versus the Republican/Democrat tag-team.

I strongly encourage you to contact your Representatives and Senators and let them know that a vote for SOPA or PROTECT-IP is a vote to destroy part of the essential fabric of this great nation. Some of them might actually still represent your best interests.

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Drupal 7 WYSIWYG - as a FEATURE

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:06:43 +0000

Every Drupal developer knows that there many configuration settings that are similar between the sites that they build, whether it's a personal preference or a trend among clients. And every developer that has been around Drupal more than a few minutes knows about the Features module.

Well on Tuesday, I was at the stage of configuring the WYSIWYG for a new client's hopefully-soon-to-launch website. And I honestly dreaded the step of configuring the WYSIWYG. Yes, I could do it pretty consistently in my sleep by now, but doing the same thing over and over feels so tedious. And it really sucks when you go through that routine, think you did everything right, and then get a call about an issue months later that has to do with that one overlooked checkbox or missed keystroke.

So I thought I'd search for that WYSIWYG issue where they were working on Features support. It had not really gotten anywhere the last time I had looked at it, so I had decided just to wait until it made it into a release. And guess what? There was a working patch that had been committed to -dev just days earlier!

A lot of people said the patch worked just fine against the current stable release (2.1), so I decided to just go ahead and apply the patch. I think I can count on my fingers (and maybe toes) how many times I've been more excited to see something just plain work!

So if you go ahead and apply that patch, you can now export most (or all, depending on what other modules you use and their support) of your WYSIWYG configuration as a Feature. And that means that those dozens of checkboxes and textareas can automatically be configured with one click.

For those who haven't worked with Features, here's a quick lesson:

Install and configure your modules as desired.
Make sure the Features module is installed.
Go to admin/structure/features
Click Create Feature
Fill out the form as necessary.
Click Download Feature. You'll download a module that now goes in the sites/*/modules folder and contains the dependencies list and all of the configuration that was exportable.
To enable your new Feature, go to admin/structure/features. It should be in the list. Check the box and wait.
Make sure no one is looking and do your happy dance.

One nice thing about the Features module is that it automatically detects the dependencies required for your feature. That means that, in the case of exporting a fully configured WYSIWYG, you'll just have to select "WYSIWYG profiles: wysiwyg" under "Edit Components" and then check the boxes for the profiles that you want to export. It will detect what modules are necessary for that configuration, and them to the .info file as a dependency, and (if the module has exportables) put the configuration into code.

If you want to see what my WYSIWYG feature is like, feel free to get it from GitHub. Note: You will need to get the CKEditor library separately and install it to sites/*/libraries.

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Using Git to Manage Custom Themes on Aegir Hosted Sites

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:05:44 +0000

A some already know, I have chosen to start hosting Drupal installs for clients. At some point (hopefully soon), I'd like to open this service up to the public. But that's not what you came here to read about.

One of the reasons I decided to start offering hosting to clients is manageability. Previously, I only offered service contracts to maintain the client's Drupal installation (generally limited to security updates and necessary bugfixes). However, that was starting to seem like an unsustainable way to do business. Yes, it's profitable, but it's not as efficient as it could be. The lack of efficiency is especially apparent on cheap shared hosts where Drush and other shell scripts are not an option.

Then I read about Aegir.

Aegir is a Drupal hosting platform. Basically, it's a killer front end for Drush. (Okay, it's a little more than that, but you can read about it at the Aegir website.) A few clicks and you can have a new site deployed. When it comes time to upgrade modules, you can easily clone the live site to the new test platform, and when you know it works you can easily migrate the site to the platform with all of your updates applied. Basically, it makes Drupal life a lot easier.

I had been using it for quite a while to quickly get dev sites up and running on my dev server, and then it occurred to me that it might make for a better approach to managing sites for my clients. This is especially true for those who want more than just a standard brochure site, as it helps to have your Drupal site on a server that is tuned for Drupal sites. And usually, it's not very long after beginning to use Drupal that clients want additional complex features.

What I had been doing was just a straight upload of the theme or modules, and then a quick chown -R. Since it was a local server not accessible (directly at least) by the outside world, I didn't really spend much time implementing things the secure way. I would upload snapshots of each dev site to a public server for the client to review.

But since I decided to use Aegir for hosting, I thought it'd be a good idea to start the dev sites on a public-facing Aegir server. But since this server would be public-facing, that meant I had to do things right. I decided to use Git repos in the site directory for each site so that I could just push changes straight to the server.

Sounds easy enough at first. I had used Git for local version control for a while, but had never really used it. I found that it wasn't as simple as a push. I needed a way to checkout the code from the repository so that I would have a working theme or module. I ended up reading about Git hooks, and I think I'm in love.

So here's how you do it...

First, if you've got a public-facing server, you want to limit foreign access to it as much as possible. In my case, only one real user and the aegir system user can access the server via SSH. Even then, passwords aren't allowed. So that means that an authorized key is the only login method allowed.

Since I already had a public key on the server for my user, I just copied it from my user to the aegir user.

cp /home/myuser/.ssh/authorized_keys /var/aegir/.ssh
sudo chown aegir:aegir /var/aegir/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo chmod 600 /var/aegir/.ssh/authorized_keys

And then I gave aegir a shell. (Yes, I know that backs away from absolute best practices a little bit, but the benefits far outweigh the risks in this case in my opinion.)

sudo chsh /bin/sh aegir

(Do the rest on the server as the aegir user.) I created a Git repository to push to on the server.

cd /var/aegir/git-incoming/client-name
mkdir project.git
cd project.git
git init --bare

Next, I enabled Git in the theme project directory on my local machine.

cd /home/myuser/Projects/Current/Client/themes/project
git init

And I added the remote repository.

git remote add dev ssh://aegir@dev.example.com/var/aegir/git-incoming/client-name/project.git

Now here's where reading about Git hooks came in handy. I could just push my changes here, ssh as the aegir system user (authorized key, remember?), and manually checkout the current code to the proper directory in sites/client.example.com/, and waste time and keystrokes. But here, Git's post-receive hook comes in handy.

In /var/aegir/git-incoming/client/project.git/hooks/post-receive on the server, add the following code (assuming that "project" is a theme):

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/aegir/clients/client-user/client.example.com/themes/project git checkout -f

And from the local machine, clone the master branch.

git push dev +master:refs/heads/master

And now when I run git push dev, the changes are automatically reflected in that site's themes folder. And usually on the dev site, I have the Devel module running with caches being cleared on every page load, so I get to see the changes immediately.

This has made my development life a lot easier - I hope it does the same for yours!

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Replacing Drupal 7 Menu Links With Images

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:24:08 +0000

I recently worked on a project where the main menu items were to be displayed as images. Of course, stylish menu items are usually displayed using text that's been styled with Cufón (or a similar solution) and using CSS sprites for the background. But in this case, there wasn't text.

Now, I could have worked on updating the Imagemenu module to work with Drupal 7, but there just wasn't enough time in the budget. So instead, I decided to use a hook in template.php to get the job done for me.

function yourtheme_menu_link__main_menu(array $variables) {
$element = $variables['element'];
$sub_menu = '';
$name = strtolower(strip_tags($element['#title']));
// Clean up the name
if (strpos($name, ':')) {
$name = substr($name, 0, strpos($name, ':'));
}
$pattern = '/[^a-z]+/';
$name = preg_replace($pattern, '', $name);
// Add our classes
$element['#attributes']['class'][] = 'menu-' . $element['#original_link']['mlid'] . ' ' . $name;
// Ensure that our tag WON'T be filtered
$element['#localized_options']['html'] = TRUE;
// And build our link, where image is located at yourtheme/images/menu/name.png
$output = l('', $element['#href'], $element['#localized_options']);

return '
' . $output . "

\n";
}

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Effective Websites

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:44:13 +0000

Your business has a website, or you may still be in the planning stages. An important question needs to be asked: How can you tell if your website can deliver a positive return on your investment?

This class by Brian Altenhofel will show you what you need to know about websites. You'll learn important information about design and usability considerations. With this information, you'll be able to know that your website will attract AND retain customers.

The class runs from 1-4PM on Wednesday, September 28. Cost is $35.

To enroll, contact Western Technology Center at (580) 774-0224.

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My Thoughts on Google+

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:57:34 +0000

It's been a little over a month since Google+ launched, and I've been using it quite a bit during that time. I thought I'd offer my thoughts on the new social media site from Google.

The Bad: Invite-Only

I just want to get this part out of the way first. For a social network to thrive, people need to be able to freely use it and their connections need to be able to freely join. The invite-only atmosphere continues to turn off many new users simply because Google+ is useless without people you know on it.

Most of the people in my Circles on Google+ are tech-oriented. That's not because I want to limit my Circles to that — it's because my real-world friends and family aren't there mostly because of the invite-only nature of the network right now. I understand that Google is still testing new features (such as business profiles) and testing is a lot easier with a limited set of users, but this approach is generating a lot of negative press.

And yes, I know Gmail was invite-only in the beginning. In fact, I vividly remember anxiously waiting for my friends to get another invite or two allocated to them so that I could get that coveted @gmail.com email address. But email and social meda are two very different animals, and an invite-only system works in social media only if you'red trying to create an aura of complete exclusivity and peer-based vetting.

Circles Rock!

I admit it took me a few minutes to figure out how Circles work on Google+, but I must admit that I love it. Yes, Facebook has had lists that act as a filtering system for quite a long time, but they weren't intuitive to use and are difficult to figure out.

In Google+, you add people to your network by adding them to Circles. But rather than being a two-way connection like Facebook where both users must consent, it's a one-way connection like Twitter. In essence, you're saying that you want to hear what that person has to say when you add them to a Circle. And yes, when you add someone to a Circle you are also sharing with them, but they have to go to their "Incoming" stream to seee your stuff.

It's easy to move people around in Circles, but the best part is being able to easily place them in multiple circles. For example, if you're working on a project and members of that project are on Google+, you can create a temporary Circle that includes only those project member and share stuff about that project with only those members. It can also make it easier to start a Huddle with them.

Huddles are Fun!

Huddles are a great way to communicate instantly as a group, especially using the mobile apps. Huddles also work with Circles, so you can add people to a huddle based on what Circles they are in.

And you can get a really large group chat going with Huddles. You can invite all of your connections, those people in the Huddle can invite their connections, and so on. Next thing you know, you've got many people chatting together that may have otherwise never been connected. Sometimes, that can result in interesting ideas.

What I Think About G+...

Some people think Google+ is going to be "The Facebook Killer", while others think that Google+ will be gone next week. In my opinion, I think that Google+ will attract many enterprise users that also use Facebook. I say that because I believe that Google+ will eventually be integrated with most of the rest of Google's product line, including (most importantly) Google Apps. Many businesses and organizations are already using Google Apps, and Google+ will make it easier to share stuff from Google Apps with the people that need to see that stuff.

Will Google+ eat away some of Facebook's market share? Yes. But I'm fairly certain they will be able to coexist.

Feel free to add me on Google+! Also, let me know in the comments what you think.

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12 Drupal 7 Modules That You Absolutely MUST Have

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:00:21 +0000

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Yeah, this type of post is so over done. I know. But after doing a couple of Drupal 7 sites (and working on a couple of SaaS solutions that I may be offering later this year), I feel like I need to offer my opinion on what D7 modules you absolutely must have on your website.

Absolute Essentials

First up, we've got the absolute essential contributed modules that you must install. While you can build a Drupal website without these modules, you're really hindering yourself without using these.

Views, CTools, and Panels - Not a single website should go without these three modules. Okay, you can easily get by without Panels. But Panels is so cool it's addicting! These modules help you build custom displays of data without requiring you to write any code (except in certain unique and arguably rare circumstances). And with Panels, you can do quite a bit of the layout work for your website in the Panels UI.
Token - While most of the Token module has been moved into core, there's still a few things that aren't. One of these important things is the UI. The Token module lets you use "tokens" to access and assemble certain data, and many other modules make heavy use of (if not depend on) this module.
Google Analytics - What good is your website if you can't see how it's being used or how people are getting to it? Sure, you could just hardcode the snippet that Google gives you into your theme, but that's not the Drupal way. By using the Google Analytics module, you can also choose what user roles are tracked, as well as a few other options. No website should go without Google Analytics.

Search Engine Optimization

So you've got great content, but what good is it if it can't be found? Using these modules, you can make it easier for search engines to index your website (and index it the way you want it indexed).

Page Title - The Page Title module gives you greater control over what title is displayed in the <title> tag. You might be wondering why you would want this... After all, you're already giving a title to all of the nodes you create. For quite a while, that's what I thought, but then I put some content on a site where the best title for the user wasn't necessarily the best title to feed search engines or display in the title bar. Now, I'm not talking about a poorly-formed keyword-laden title that makes no sense — I'm talking about a title where likely search terms appear early enough to show up bold in search results. You'll realize at some point that you might need to tailor your page titles a little bit, and this module will help you do this.
Pathauto - Even if you don't install any other contributed modules on your website, make sure you install Pathauto. Pathauto allows you to have node aliases set according to a pattern of your choice. Want blog posts to show up at /blog/title-of-post or /blog/yyyy/mm/dd/title? Pathauto uses tokens to allow you to set that option. Every time you create a piece of content, an alias will automatically be created conforming to what you've told Pathauto you want.
Global Redirect - If you're using aliases, you should really be using Global Redirect. By default, a node's "normal" path of /node/123 is still accessible if it is assigned an alias of /title-of-page. What happens here is search engines and users now see two unique pages for the same piece of content. Search engines tend to penalize you for this duplicate content. What Global Redirect does is set up 301 redirects from the /node/123 url to the alias for that node. This is an absolute must-have module if you're using aliases!
XML Sitemap - Want to make it easy for search engines to index your content? Install this module. This module allows Drupal to automatically create an up-to-date sitemap.xml for your website that you can submit to search engines. These sitemaps help crawlers know what content you have on your website, and this can be a really big help when starting out. The best part about this module is that you can control what gets added to the sitemap. For example, a common exclusion from the sitemap might be the nodes used for the photos in a photo gallery when all you're doing on the site is displaying the image in a modal window. In that instance, you may not want the search engines to index a node that is likely not formatted properly for viewing.

Content Management

Who is going to be the person running the website? In most cases, the answer is "someone who doesn't know HTML." And even if the answer in your case is "a web programming ninja", that ninja probably doesn't want to write code just to edit content on the website. Either way, the following modules are absolutely essential to a happy content management experience.

WYSIWYG - One of the most popular criticisms of Drupal is that it doesn't come with a WYSIWYG editor installed by default. When you go to create content in Drupal, you're greeted by a text box that only recognizes line breaks. In my opinion, though, that's a good thing about Drupal. By design, this allows you to choose what editor (if any) you want to use. The WYSIWYG module allows you to install many different editors, and you can even assign different editors to different input filters. My personal preference is CKEditor, by the way.
Insert - I guess you could use a module like IMCE to allow users to insert images or video into the content they create, but that approach often results in a clumsy mess and doesn't take advantage of D7's Field API. With the Insert module, you can add an image field to your content types. That image field is able to take advantage of D7's Image manipulation tools (formerly known as the contributed module ImageCache). What the Insert module allows you to do is insert the images you upload through the field directly into the node body where your cursor currently is. It will even use your image manipulation presets! But what really rounds it out is the next module...
Image Resize Filter - We all know that presets don't always fit into your content. You could just create an image of the "right" dimensions on your computer and upload and display it as-is, but why not let Drupal do the work for you? Image Resize Filter makes this easy, especially if you're using the Insert module. What this module allows you to do is directly resize the image by dragging the frame of the image to the desired size. But instead of just changing the display dimensions, it also saves a new image resized to those exact dimensions! I must say that I have fallen in love with this module since I've started using it on new client websites.

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Moving Menu Link ID to
Tag in Drupal 6

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:48:43 +0000

If there is a shortcoming in Drupal, its the way the menu system is handled. In this particular case, its that custom ID's for links added via the Menu Attributes module are added to the anchor tag and not the list item tag. While this is great for theming that particular link, it can cause difficulties when using most jQuery scripts to modify the display of your menus since the <li> tags won't have any identification.

It's pretty simple to fix this by overriding theme_menu_item() in your theme's template.php file using the code below. Of course, replace "yourtheme" with your theme's name.

Of course, preg_match can be adjusted to move the class, title, or other attributes from the <a> tag if necessary. Personally, I'm surprised I hadn't run into a need for this sooner, but generally the default menu display or using the Superfish module has been good enough for me. However, this really came in handy for making the tabbed navigation work on the Cordell Package Store website.

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Cordell Package Store

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:09:50 +0000

I designed this website in Gimp and developed it in Drupal 6 for Cordell Package Store. Cordell Package Store is located on the east side of Cordell, Oklahoma, at Main and Crider.

I found this website to be a test of my CSS skills. From the beginning, I didn't want it to look like "just another Drupal website." And considering comments I have received from third parties, I would say that I did a decent job at not making it "look Drupal" in the traditional sense. That said, after finalizing the design it was a learning experience to figure out to make it work as a Drupal theme.

From the beginning, the client wanted a "rustic" feel and also like the idea of the website being the pages of a book. I figured the most fitting navigation would be tabs on either side. Normally, most developers would do these tabs as images. However, I decided I'd see what I could do with CSS. Both sets of tabs are your standard unordered lists normally used for navigation on websites - there's just a lot of CSS (including DirectX filters for Internet Explorer) to make them work.

The other design element that I am very proud of is the product photos that you see across the background. It's another unordered list generated by a Views Display pulling 6 random products from the galleries. While it was fun getting it positioned with the rest of the website still functioning correctly (because it was thought of near the end of the project to help fill out larger screens), I really enjoyed working with rotations to make them look like they were randomly placed there.

The main purpose of the website is to have a presence online and give a taste of what this beer, wine, and liquor store in Cordell has to offer. That's why it contains many of your standard Drupal CCK + ImageCache + Views photo galleries. Nearly every image you see on the website has been processed through ImageCache.

One other feature this website has is the Drupal for Facebook module. Through this module, the website is serving a simple Views Display to a tab on Cordell Package Store's Facebook page. This tab shows a slideshow of all of the specials going on at the current time.

This was a very fun project to work on. I knew it was going to be a test of my skills, and I personally think that I passed. One important thing that I've learned from it is that you can make a Drupal site that doesn't look like Drupal.

Drupal Websites

My First Date With CiviCRM

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:43:27 +0000

I've recently took on a website development project related to politics. Currently, the website does not use a CMS and is very difficult to manage. My goal is to move it to Drupal within the next couple of months.

So far, I've learned a couple of things with the development version on my dev server. The first has to do with CiviCRM.

On the surface, CiviCRM looks to be very powerful. And upon initial installation, it feels like running a 358 cubic inch V8 with a well tuned 850cfm Q-Jet. But after messing with it for a while to get my bearings and start setting it up for the needs of this particular client, I realized that it also has straight exhaust through tuned headers, a supercharger, Powerglide transmission, cop suspension, Goodyear Eagles... It's like driving one of those cars that your buddy has where he tells the passenger in the front seat that they can keep the $100 bill if they can reach up and grab it off the dash when he hits the gas...

I'm definitely looking forward to getting to know CiviCRM a lot more intimately. It looks like she might take me places I could never dream of going without her...

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Using sed to Add Google Analytics Code to Many Files at Once

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:00:00 +0000

I recently volunteered on a project that involves bringing a website into the modern world. Apparently, the previous webmaster(s) used a mix of MS-Word and either hand-coding or Dreamweaver (and maybe even FrontPage) to manage the website.

Eventually, I will be moving this website to Drupal. But for now, the main goal is to get up-to-date and useful information on the website. Most of the information available was at least a year old, and some of the information was more than 4 years old.

The website consists of a few hundred pages all in a single folder. Now, I know that the easy thing to do would be to just focus on the migration and nuke the current site, but that's obviously not the best practice. What I normally do is add Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to determine what search engines are seeing and how people are currently using the site. With hundreds of individual pages, manually copying the code was out of the question.

The first step I took was copying the Google Analytics code into its own individual file.

So the first trick I tried was setting a custom mime-type in cPanel so that any PHP added to the HTML files would be processed. This would make it a simple substitution adding an include_once() for the new ga.js file with sed. But for some reason, browsers seemed like they couldn't decide whether to download or render a page. I didn't really feel like troubleshooting it, so I decided to go another sed route.

So for my next trick, I wanted to use sed to insert the contents of the ga.js file before the </body> tag. It's a two step process to do this.

First, you have to make sure that the </body> tag is on its own line. Some files had it by itself, and others had </body></html>. This was easy to do with the following command:

sed -i 's/<\/body>/\&/' *.html

Now what that does is tell sed to find the </body> tag, add a new line after it, and then overwrite the .html file with the new contents. Pretty simple, huh?

The next one took a little bit of playing around to get to work right, but after I got it figured out it worked like a charm:

sed -i -e '/<\/body>/{r ga.js' -e N -e '}' *.html

What this does is tell sed to find the </body> tag and insert the contents of the ga.js file before the </body> tag. The jewel of this line is the N command. What happens can be best explained by Bruce Barnett's tutorial on sed. But in short, rather than having the contents of the file appended after the </body> tag, the contents are appended before.

If this project had required this to be done in many different folders, then I would have done a little more work and written a script. I guess I'll do that when I have a project that needs it, but this method worked just fine on this particular project.

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Succeed on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:38:12 +0000

When it comes to internet marketing, Facebook is easy. The key is keeping people interested enough in your Page to actually see your Page. But how do you go about doing that?

One of the best ways to get people to interact more with your Page is to ask your fans questions. There are now two ways to do this.

The first (and most proven) way is to ask a question in your status updates. Just make sure that your questions fit within your industry so that your best prospects are the ones who reply. For example, if you run a car dealership, ask your fans what they think about a particular new model or perhaps a limited edition color. If you're a real estate agent, you could ask about a unique feature of one of the properties you have for sale (without revealing directly that you have that property for sale until later).

A new way to ask a question is through Facebook's new Questions feature. This allows you to set up a question with multiple answers. You can even choose to let people add their own answers. What happens when people answer your question is it shows up in their friends' news feeds. Those friends can also answer the question. It is unclear, though, how much this influences your visibiity to fans, but it does offer another avenue to gain fans and encourage interaction.

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Fun Projects in the Pipeline

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:38:50 +0000

You might have noticed that the blog has been a little thin recently. There for a while, I was doing 4-5 posts per week, which was great. However, now I'm down to 1 per week and you might be thinking "what gives?". It's pretty simple: I've been quite busy recently.

Last month, I launched the Stay True Tattoo website. This month, I have two great clients and I think you will enjoy their websites upon completion.

But what's kept me really busy is putting together a Drupal-based project management and billing application. Hopefully, I'll have that available in the next couple of months. Stay tuned!

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Google Launches +1 Button "Experiment"

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:03:06 +0000

Google has finally played a decent hand in its social media endeavors. Google announced the "+1" button, which is similar to Facebook's "Like" button. This gives users the ability to cast a vote of confidence that will appears on search engine results pages. Try it out, now!

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Credibility Comes With a Personal Touch

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:28:10 +0000

There's a new study out that looked for a link between credibility and personal posts in social media. In this study, a special Twitter feed was set up for three groups of students to follow under the impression that it was their professor. One group got all personal tweets, another got all academic tweets, and the third group got a mix.

The students were asked to rate the credibility of the professor. Students following the feed containing personal tweets ranked the professor's credibility the highest. The mixed feed didn't fare much better than the academic feed.

What this study shows is that professionals on Twitter need to play in the grey area near the line between business and personal. Social media postings that sound like they are written by an actual person have more impact than those that are just business.

Personally, I pay more attention to tweets and Facebook posts that come from people who add a healthy dose of their personal details to their feeds without going to far. It let's me know that you're real, but I really don't want to know what got caught on video when you were blackout drunk last night.

Add a personal touch to your social media efforts. Your followers and fans will appreciate it.

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Promoting Old Blog Content

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:38:25 +0000

You've got a blog for your business or non-profit organization and have written some great content, but it seems that some posts are not performing near as well as you thought they would. What can you do to expose those posts to a new audience?

It's a pretty obvious answer: promote them. But how can you effectively promote old content? The two best ways to promote your old content is internal interlinking and social media.

First, let's discuss internal interlinking of blog posts. This is a technique that is very effective as it promotes older posts to readers who are already likely to be interested. By linking to your older blog posts in this manner, you have the ability to promote those older posts to both new readers and seasoned readers who might have missed your previous post.

An added bonus of internal interlinking is passing fresh link juice to older posts. You might have made an awesome post six months ago that is still relevant today, but it didn't go very far because you only had 30 or so readers. Now you have 2,000 readers and you put a supporting link in a new blog post to direct readers to your old post. With this larger base of followers, it's more likely that some natural external links will be generated to your new blog post. Some of the link juice will also pass on through to your old post improving it's ability to rank in search engines. You might even see some readers link to your old blog post, helping it rank better even more.

The other option is promotion through social media such as Facebook or Twitter. This works because not everyone is online when you post a link to your blog post on your social media profiles. It's easy for your great content to get lost in the noise.

By promoting your post again on social media, you're able to reach another set of potential readers. It would also be a good idea to pay attention to what seems to be trending on social media and promote an old blog post that might be relevant to those trending topics.

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Is SEO Right for Your Business?

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:23:42 +0000

It seems that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the buzz over the last few years, and for good reasons. However, not all businesses need SEO services for their website. But how do you know if you need SEO?

There are a couple of things you need to consider about your website prior to contracting with anyone for SEO services. The first is whether your website is really a way that converting customers find you. That may sound counter-intuitive as SEO is supposed to help people find you online.

But think about your industry. Are people going to be looking for you on Google, or are they going to make their decision based solely on referals? True, at least some SEO work might be needed to show up in local searches, but for some industries and professions this is merely a list of businesses to research for further background information. SEO will likely mean very little if you offer a specialized product or service aimed at a specific industry.

The other thing you need to consider is your budget. SEO work can get expensive fast. While good SEO can be more beneficial in the long run, it's often cost prohibitive for small businesses, especially fresh startups. You need to know how essential SEO is to your marketing plan.

So what if SEO is too expensive, but you still expect much of your business to come from search engines? Another option that is generally less expensive in the short term is pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising such as Google AdWords. This is where you create ads that are targeted at certain search queries. Your ads generally appear at the top of search results for some users depending on various factors about your ad.

Through PPC advertising, you essentially buy targeted exposure. This can greatly help startups as well as established businesses who can't afford full SEO services as these ads can be fairly inexpensive if done well. Quite often you'll appear at or near the top of search results, and a well-written ad will likely result in a pre-qualified click to your website.

However, if increased Internet exposure is not part of your marketing plan, then you're probably better of putting SEO and PPC marketing on the back burner and concentrating on your offline marketing efforts.

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Use Boost for a Better Performing Drupal Website

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:12:01 +0000

You've finally gotten your Drupal website to the point where you feel like it is ready to go, but during final testing it seems painfully slow. With page loading speed a factor in customer retention (as well as search engine rankings), you need your pages to load as swiftly as possible.

You've used CSS sprites every place you can so that the user only has to download a few images instead of a few dozen. You've got Drupal's core caching system turned on. You've got Drupal set to aggregate CSS and JavaScript files. You've even tweaked Views' caching settings. But you're still not where you want to be.

Your website needs the Boost module. Actually, nearly every Drupal website should really be running this module. It takes a little bit to set up, but it is definitely worth it (especially on shared hosting).

What the boost module does is eliminate the need for Apache to hit your MySQL database for every visit. It's a simple concept, really. For content that doesn't doesn't pertain to authenticated users and is an HTTP GET, Boost completely bypasses Drupal and MySQL.

Boost creates static copies of each page of your website and stores them in a cache folder on your webserver. When an anonymous user visits your website, the URL is aliased to the cached version of the page. These cached versions are built when you create or edit a node or when cron runs. This way, Drupal doesn't have to build the page upon request and the only thing that you've got left to do is image optimization.

So if your website is aimed toward anonymous users, install Boost and make their experience better.

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How to Get Your Business Found Online

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:17:40 +0000

Does your business have a website, but it just doesn't seem like anybody is finding it? Do you want to know what you can do to get your website to show up in search engines?

Fewer people are using phonebooks to find local businesses. When someone wants to buy something that you offer, they are most likely to hit up search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find what they are looking for. Even their GPS navigation system looks for you on the web if they want to know about nearby restaurants. If you can't be found there, it's almost like you don't even exist.

Join me and I will show you the steps you can take to get your business found online. Much of this class will revolve around increasing your exposure in local searches, but what you will learn will also help your national exposure, too.

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"How to Get Your Business Found Online" is a three hour class offered on Wednesday, March 9th from 1PM to 4PM. Cost is $35.

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Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Into Search Results

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:10:54 +0000

Having a presence on Facebook is now more important than ever! Bing has begun integrating what your friends on Facebook like into their search results. Unlike Google's integration with social media, it doesn't seem to impact your ranking on Bing. However, it does add votes of confidence enticing more users to click the link in the search results.

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Stay True Tattoo

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:03:18 +0000

I developed this website in Drupal 6 for Stay True Tattoo in Oklahoma City. Stay True Tattoo is a shop located on 23rd Street near Classen. They do excellent work, and I in fact got my most recent tattoo from Mike Thurman at Stay True Tattoo.

This website was a fun one to develop. In the tattoo industry (or any industry, for that matter), it's often much easier to upload photos to a single place and not worry about it. Uploading the same photos to Facebook, your website, and elsewhere can be rather time consuming. From the get-go, I wanted to make this easier on the guys at Stay True Tattoo to maintain their gallery of work on the website.

Seeing that they already managed their albums on Facebook quite well and that it is easy for them to upload a photo from their smartphone directly to Facebook, I thought it would be an excellent idea to take advantage of Facebook's Open Graph API. The artist portfolios on the website are pulled directly from the photo albums on their Facebook page.

The custom module I had to write for this is rather simple. Through a set of loops, it checks for existing albums and photos on Facebook. When it finds an album, it creates a node for the album (if it doesn't already exist) and proceeds to process the photos contained therein. As it finds more photos in the album that haven't been imported previously, it downloads the photo from Facebook via cURL and creates a new node. I'm sure my ISP enjoyed my testing sessions where I was downloading 150+ images over and over again for hours on end. This is currently set up to run about every hour.

The Views module is then used to create the portfolios. Because the module imports every album (Wall Photos, Profile Photos, photos from a convention, etc.), I had to come up with a reasonably easy method to decide what albums should be shown as portfolios. In this case, Views checks to see if the "Artist Photo" field on the album is empty. If the field contains data, then the album is considered an artist portfolio and displayed as such.

All images (except those appearing in a modal window) are processed through ImageCache. After the image is imported from Facebook, Drupal automatically generates the images required in various places upon first request. This includes cropping, resizing, and applying the overlay that you see on thumbnails. Without this feature, creating and maintaining these photo galleries would be a rather tedious and time consuming process.

All in all, this was a fun project. I look forward to doing a similar project in the future!

Drupal Websites

Are You Abusing Social Media?

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Image: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As I've said many times before, social media for business is about building a relationship with your customers through social media. I also advise small businesses to post regular updates to their Facebook Page. But sometimes, some businesses go overboard with these updates.

Facebook

According to "The Social Breakup", Facebook users claim they are becoming more selective about what brands they choose to "like" as they are slowly learning that "liking" a brand means that they subscribe to that brand's feed. Get this: 49% of Facebook users surveyed did not understand that basic fact.

So why do fans "unlike" a brand's Facebook Page? The top plurality (44%) claim that the business was posting too much. I can't stress enough how much this means for small businesses that they need to strike a healthy balance between posting enough engaging content to keep their EdgeRank high with their fans, and not posting so much that their fans start getting annoyed. Furthermore, 43% said that they were getting tired of being marketed to.

Funnily enough, both the idea that posts were too promotional and not enough deals were posted each accounted for 24% of users' reasons to unlike a Facebook Page.

Twitter

What about Twitter? While Twitter has a rather polarizing effect (half the people who create an account actively use it, the other half never touch it again), the results were quite similar. The #2 and #3 reasons to stop following a brand on Twitter were the same as the #2 and #1 on Facebook, respectively. For the most part, brands are committing the same sins in both places: posting too much, and marketing too much.

The leading reason while people stop following brands on Twitter, though, is that the content apparently became repetitive or boring. I can totally understand that, especially with so many people and businesses abusing the auto-tweet features of some applications. It seems that many accounts have a loop of certain content flowing to stay visible in people's feeds while they only make 2 or 3 "real" posts per day. And there also seems to be a network of individuals in every industry that constantly retweet each other's links even if they never bothered to determine if the content of those links was truly link-worthy.

What Should I Learn From This?

It all boils down to something rather simple: people are on social media to socialize, not to read advertisements. Use social media to build a relationship with your customers. As with any relationship, you're going to need to offer a sufficient amount of something (in this case, deals) in return. And finally, don't assume that you're the only company they care about or that they want to know your every thought.

If you get the chance, I encourage you to look through that report linked above. It's 20 easy-to-read pages, and you can just skim over the infographics if you're pressed for time.

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Staying Connected on LinkedIn

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:17:43 +0000

Facebook is geared more toward networking with friends and family. If you want to network with professionals, including many great connections at Fortune 100 companies, then you need to be on LinkedIn.

A LinkedIn profile is becoming indispensible in the modern job market. Some employers might look at your profile as an extension of your résumé. Others might even recruit you for employment through the site. Either way, LinkedIn is a great avenue for self-marketing.

Join me and I will show you what you need to know on building a great LinkedIn profile, as well as what you can do to better promote yourself through LinkedIn. (Note: This class will be aimed at personal profiles.)

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"Staying Connected on LinkedIn" is a three hour class offered on Wednesday, February 23rd from 1PM to 4PM. Cost is $25.

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New Facebook Page Layout Rolling Out

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:29:45 +0000

Well, Facebook's making more changes. The most recent? The layout of Pages is changing to match that of the profiles. If you've merged your Facebook Page with your Facebook Place, then you already have a good idea of the layout.

I got prompted just a few minutes ago to take the tour. Here's a preview for you.

My favorite: NOTIFICATIONS for Pages!

If you want to see it in action, check out my Facebook page. Let me know what you think about these changes!

Right now, the upgrade is optional. However, all Facebook Pages will be upgraded March 1, 2011, whether they like it or not.

By the way, Facebook now let's you use Facebook as your Page, meaning you can post anywhere on Facebook on behalf of your Page rather than yourself. This can be very useful. :-)

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How to Stay Safe and Employable Online

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Are you currently searching for a job? Are your applications seemingly being turned down for no obvious reason? Do you wonder if your employer might be able to see evidence of the crazy stuff you did while you were trashed last weekend?

More and more employers are using the Internet to conduct a quick background check on potential hires. Rather than limiting their background check to the traditional criminal history record, they are using the Internet to find out more about the real you. Some employers will even randomly check their current employees' search results and social media profiles, sometimes resulting in the loss of opportunity or perhaps a job.

The Internet never forgets.

Join me, and I will show you what you can do to control who sees what about you on the Internet. Most of this class will revolve around social media (Facebook in particular), but I'll also show you some basic steps to take care of negative Google search results about you.

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"How to Stay Safe and Employable Online" is a three hour class offered on Wednesday, February 9th from 6PM to 9PM. Cost is $25.

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Blogging Your Business to Success

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:27:35 +0000

Does your small business have a website? Do you want to know how you can better use that presence to attract more customers?

Whether you already have a website or are just now considering whether or not blogging would help your business, this class is for you! I will show you the how to make the most of using a blog for your business, including how to establish yourself as a thought leader and how to drive new customers for your business with great content.

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"Blogging Your Business to Success" is a three hour class offered on Wednesday, February 9th from 1PM to 4PM. Cost is $35.

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The Meta Keywords Tag is NOT Dead

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:21:21 +0000

If you look around the Internet for very long for information about search engine optimization and meta tags, you'll find that the vast majority of results will say that you should forego using the "keywords" tag. The reasoning given is that the majority of search engines ignore it.

And that's true, the majority of search engines do ignore the meta keywords tag. But what about other websites such as directories? It seems to me that what people forget about when discussing meta tags is how other websites make use of those tags.

There are some directories on the web that categorize websites based on what is in the keywords tag in addition to the content of the website. By not including putting at least a few keywords in the appropriate meta tag, your website might be missing out on some traffic from people who are actively searching for your product.

Additionally, the keywords tag can help your website if you're using a light on-site search engine or a CMS that makes use of the keywords tag in indexing content. The keywords tag can be used as another pointer that a particular piece of content might be what your users are looking for, especially if you put a couple of common misspellings in there.

So don't ignore the meta keywords tag, but don't abuse it either. I'd say treat it as a tagging system of sorts and limit its use to 5-10 truly relevant keywords.

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Building and Managing Customers on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 19:20:22 +0000

Has your small business considered using Facebook to build a better relationship with your customers? Are you unsure of what you need to do to make the most of a presence on Facebook?

Whether you already have a Facebook page or are just now considering whether or not this would be a good opportunity for your business, this class is for you! I will show you the ins and outs of what Facebook offers for your business, including advertising and incentives for your customers to tell their friends about you.

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"Building and Managing Customers on Facebook" is a three hour class offered on January 26th from 1PM to 4PM. Cost is $35.

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Book Review: Foundation Drupal 7

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:05:13 +0000

I admit, I'm not much of a reader. Well, I take that back. I'm not much of a book reader. The super-dry stuff that people automatically hate like laws and the court cases that interpret them are pretty enjoyable for me. In fact, there's some cool little gems in a lot of them, especially when you come across a certain Supreme Court Justice that has no problem making sarcastic remarks in response to a lawyer's oral argument.

Now in learning how to do stuff, I'm one of those that learns by doing and through trial and error. But with Drupal 7, I decided I might try to read a couple of books on it to see what I had missed.

So I picked up two books from Amazon: Foundation Drupal 7 and Pro Drupal 7 Development . I'll review the former in this post because I am just starting to read the latter.

Foundation Drupal 7 is obviously intended for beginners. So if you're someone who already has one or two Drupal websites under your belt, much of the content will likely be stuff that you already know. However, it's very good to review what you think you know because you might find a few gems that you don't know.

The book starts with introducing you to what Drupal is and how to find and set up a web host to support Drupal. What I found here that helps me is a different approach to introducing someone to Drupal. As I said in my post about my goals and resolutions for this year, I'm a geeky introvert. My social skills lack quite a bit, and I find myself stumbling over expaining technical things to non-technical people sometimes. What the introduction in this book showed me was a much later starting point to introducing Drupal to someone who has never heard of it.

Next, the book gets into setting up a basic Drupal website. Of course 99% of this was stuff I already knew, but there were a few hidden gems that helped me in two ways. First, there were a couple of modules mentioned that I hadn't found before that, after setting them up on a development version of a Drupal 7 site I am currently working on, I don't think I will go without on future websites. Second, I found better ways to provide documentation for clients managing a Drupal website. On my first couple of websites, I admittedly did the bad practice of training without providing documentation. Now, I provide detailed documentation tailored to that specific website. But the book showed me a couple of things that I had taken for granted and a couple more things that I needed to improve my wording on (you know, translate better).

The final three chapters contain information that nearly everyone using Drupal will directly benefit from.

Then in chapter 10, the book gets into going live with a new Drupal website. Basically, it describes the development and launch process I already use in a bit more detail. But I recommend to anyone doing their first couple of Drupal websites to read chapter 10 at least twice.

Chapter 11 introduces the new Update Manager, which currently has limited functionality. One of the biggest complaints about Drupal has been the lack of an automatic update. Drupal 7 is almost there, and Drupal 8 will likely have it. But the chapter also goes into detail on the normal way to update a Drupal website over SSH and how to properly create a staging or testing site to make sure the updates won't break your production site.

If you're in the Drupal business, then chapter 12 is a must read. Chapter 12 goes over things that will not only help you make the best decisions for your clients, but will also help you better inform your clients.

Finally, the Appendices at the end go over a few things that will help anyone involved with a Drupal website. Appendix A covers some much needed information about search engine optimization. This is obviously limited to the stuff that the web developer should be doing and not what your copy editor should do. It goes over some modules that help Drupal do all of this for you.

Appendix B provides an introduction to Drush. Drush is a command line tool that helps you manage your Drupal websites. If you enjoy using the command line to do your tasks (as I do... who really needs cPanel?), you'll be head over heels for Drush. This is very strongly recommended for anyone who manages more than a few Drupal websites.

Appendix C gives you a list of modules that the author prefers for various tasks, while Appendix D shows you some common recipes that you will likely use in Views. The more experienced Drupal developers will skim over this, but I recommend that beginners read this thoroughly. These two appendices are also a very good reason to keep the book on your bookshelf.

Overall, I give Foundation Drupal 7 a 4-star rating. The loss of one star was due to some editing errors, particularly with captions on screenshots. For example, figures 11-8, 11-11, and 11-12 all have the same caption while clearly doing different things. Better attention to detail would have gotten that elusive fifth star.

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Resolutions and Goals for 2011

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:26:17 +0000

The beginning of a fresh new year. This is a time where many review the goals and resolutions they set for themselves last year, note their success or failure, and set new goals and resolutions.

2010 In Review

While I don't recall my resolutions for 2010 (as most people forget them by January 2nd), I did have two goals. I met one successfully, while I came up short on the other.

My first goal in 2010 was to start freelancing full-time. That was actually quite the easy goal to meet as it mostly required picking a day and turning in my letter of resignation with a month's notice. At the time, I worked as a computer technician for Western Technology Center. The fiscal year ended June 30, so I decided I would start freelancing full-time beginning July 1.

My second goal was to get my freelancing income to the same level that my salary was by the end of the year. Unfortunately, I came up short in reaching that goal. However, as you'll see outlined in my goals for 2011, I remain optimistic.

2011 Resolutions

I have made three resolutions for 2011, and they all have something to do with improving my health.

The first will likely be the hardest. I will give up McDonald's in 2011. It's one of those things where I know the food is very bad for my health (especially my order), yet I really like it. In both Clinton and Weatherford where the sales tax is 9.5%, my order of a large 10-piece nugget meal with two plain McDoubles runs $9.08. This means that I have positioned myself to save ~$45 per month and ~$545 over the course of the year.

The second will be hard, but with recent changes to the only item on the menu that I like will be easier than the McDonald's resolution. No more Quiznos in 2011. I used to love the Baja Chicken, and a large Baja with a large drink comes to $10.27. However, last year they took the cilantro, which slightly changed the taste. Now, they switched from red onions to yellow onions which have a distinctive change in flavor when toasted. In short, I've tried the "new Baja" twice and am no longer satisfied. This will save me ~$51 per month and ~$616 over the course of the year.

Finally, we come to the easy one. I say it's easy because I've already gotten myself into the habit over the last couple of months. I will workout consistently throughout 2011. And, for the most part, I have been doing just the during the last couple of months. It seems my motivation was moving to a 4-day strength training workout rather than sticking to 3 on weights and 2 on the elliptical. I'm someone that needs to feel like they are accomplishing something to stay motivated, and lifting weights four days a week has definitely helped. I've noticed when I was in much better shape and as I get into better shape that my asthma is more under control than it is right now. If I can get back to where I was before I left stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, then I should be able to save between $700 and $1,000 in medication. Yes, that $125 per year gym membership will definitely pay for itself.

My Goals for 2011

As I said previously, I am remaining optimistic for 2011 even though 2010 didn't turn out how I planned. I have set for myself a few goals that won't necessarily all be met, a fact which I accept. But nonetheless, I will work as hard as I can to reach those goals.

The first goal is to increase my local exposure through networking. I'm pretty good at networking online, but the face-to-face stuff sometimes hangs me up, especially a first encounter. I believe my lack of face-to-face networking is what directly caused me to not reach my goal of replacing my salary in 2010. My target market is still local small businesses, and I have come to accept that face-to-face networking is an absolute necessity and I must work to overcome the anxieties associated with it. In short, I'm an introvert trying to network.

To reach this goal, I plan on attending local Chamber of Commerce events and eventually joining the Chamber once the cash-flow allows. Specifically, I have chosen to get involved with the Cordell Chamber of Commerce. Two factors came into play in making this choice.

First, I still closely associate myself with my hometown and stay somewhat involved in the community. It's within 10 miles of my home, so it's not like I'm going out of my way. Even though the much larger town of Clinton is only a 5 minute drive away, I still try to shop in Cordell as much as I can and do the audio engineering work at my church. While the prices in Clinton and especially Weatherford may be lower for the same goods, those towns are in a different county than me. County services are funded mostly through sales taxes, so I try to contribute a little to the pool that directly benefits me and support my target market.

The second factor in choosing to get involved with the Cordell Chamber is that I am already at least at the acquantance level with many of the members. When you're in a small town of under 3,000 people, it's kind of hard not to know nearly everybody at least on some level. This is especially true if you spent all of your K-12 years in that same public school with a total student population of 750 or so. I feel like already knowing some people on a certain level will help me to improve my networking skills much better than diving straight into a room full of strangers.

My second goal is to launch 15 new websites. I believe this goal will be easy to reach once I get better at face-to-face networking. If I reach this goal, then I should be getting close to replacing my income that I had at my previous job. I really think that I will surpass this goal, but I figured I should set this one low enough that I have at least a realistic measure of some success in 2011.

Finally, I have set an ultimate goal of a gross income of $50,000 in 2011. I know that this goal will be difficult to reach on billable hours alone at my rates, but I think it is both optimistic and realistic. In order to reach this goal, I will have to implement some alternative revenue streams.

In reading this blog, you may have noticed that I have already started pursuing alternative revenue streams, specifically in affiliate programs. Even if they didn't have an affiliate program, I would recommend those services. But I've decided that I will join affiliate programs this year for products and services that I use and highly recommend. I'll continue to recommend products and services that don't have programs, but I figure I should join a program if they offer it and get at least some return on the word of mouth advertising. (By the way, if you enter VMDOH2011BA as the coupon code on HostGator, you can get the first month of either the Hatchling or Baby plans for a penny. Yes, that's $0.01!)

Another passive alternative revenue stream I am pursuing is Google Adsense advertising. No, you won't see it on this website. However, I do run another Libertarian-oriented blog, and I am expecting the revenue from those ads to continue to climb in 2011.

I am also in the process of completing an e-book that I plan to release in March. I'm going to take a note out of Radiohead's and Trent Reznor's playbook and release it as a name-your-price download. While I expect some to download it for free, it would be pirated for free anyway, so why not offer that as a legitimate option?

As part of the plan to reach my goal of $50,000 this year, I have also decided that I will take whatever down time I have to try to develop some of these passive alternative revenue streams. I have a super secret list of niches that I have researched and think I can fill if the opportunity arises, and I plan to be very aggressive about it.

So there you have it. My list of goals, resolutions, and the associated plans for 2011. By posting this here, I think I will be able to review every now and then and keep myself accountable. This also means that I am obliged to submit a report at the end of the year on where I failed and why.

To a properous 2011!

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Dominate Local Search Results in Your Small Town

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:38:22 +0000

Many small businesses in small towns don't quite grasp how much return on investment an online presence will actually provide. Because their main target customers are the kind that walk through the door, they might see a website or other online presence as something extra and unnecessary.

However, with more and more people using navigation aids such as Google Maps on their smartphones, checking Yelp or Foursquare for places to shop and eat in the neighborhood, and relying less and less looking for attractive storefronts, an online presence can help your small business attract the tourists passing through your small town.

The first thing you should do is claim your page on Google Places. This allows you to control the information provided through one of the top sources of local search. When someone searches a map on Google, Place pages are often the first thing that comes up. This can be very important if someone is in your local downtown and searches for "diner" or "hometown cooking" on their phone, as those results with the closest proximity to their GPS location will likely be the most prominent.

Secondly, you should claim your page on review sites such as Yelp. You should be proactive in asking your customers to submit a review to these websites. The most likely reviews you will receive without asking are negative, so you want to counter those with real reviews that paint you in a positive light. Don't go and create multiple accounts just to review yourself; those websites catch onto that quite easily and will likely penalize you for it.

You should also get involved in social media. Location-based services such as Facebook Places and Foursquare not only serve to market to tourists, but they can also have a positive impact with your local audience by helping you seem like a "popular" destination for many people's social circles.

Finally, you will want to keep your address and phone number formats consistent across all of your online presences, including your website. Your address and phone number is how the search engines tie your presences together as referencing a single business or location. This way, each of your presences counts as a vote of sorts and helps you to move up higher in local search results.

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What To Do If Your Website Suddenly Goes Down

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

If you have had a website on the web for any reasonable period of time, you have probably experienced what many refer to as "downtime". You might be reviewing your website or adding content, and suddenly your website just seems to disappear. Or maybe you've received a phone call because one of your ads directed people to your website for a "special deal", but people couldn't access your site.

Here are some quick tips to help you get through what might seem like the end of the world (in that moment).

Don't Panic

This should be a given, but I couldn't tell you how many people I've seen get near-hysterical because something didn't work as expected for more than one try. Those who work or have worked in IT know exactly what I mean, especially when dealing with users' email access. You can give multiple warnings in advance that there will be 3-5 minutes of downtime at a specific time because the Exchange server is due for a reboot, and yet you will get phone calls within 30 seconds the server going down that sound something like "OMG I CANNOT GET TO MY EMAIL! HELP! HELP!"

The same thing tends to happen with websites. Even the slightest hiccup seems to cause people to panic like Y2K nuked Lotus Notes again. And by hiccup, I mean they don't get the desired result on the first try.

Try Again

The first thing you should do is try accessing your website again. Give it 1-2 minutes and refresh your browser (generally the F5 key, but there is usually a "refresh" button somewhere conspicuous). The reason to try again is that it's not uncommon for your server to have a slight hiccup, especially under abnormally heavy load. This is especially true if you recently put something on your website that went totally viral.

If this works, then your website just had a hiccup and nothing is wrong. However, if this starts to become a regular occurrence, you might want to consider upgrading your hosting plan or moving to a better host.

Check From Another Location

If at first you don't succeed, try again elsewhere. The point of this step is to eliminate your computer or Internet connection as the actual source of the problem.

If you have multiple computers in your office, try accessing the website from another computer. Sometimes, your computer itself may have it's own problem that suddenly causes you to lose access to specific websites. If the other computer accesses it just fine, try one more time on yours after a quick reboot. If your computer is still unable to access your website, then a call to your favorite IT buddy is in order. If your computer can access it, then the problem might be gone.

If you still access your website from any computer in your office, then you need to see if it can be accessed from elsewhere. The easiest thing to do might be to call a friend that works someplace else as long as they don't share the same Internet connection. Just ask them if they can take a few seconds to pull up your website. If it works for them and not for you, then the problem likely lies with your Internet connection. If it doesn't work for them, then it likely lies with your host.

If you have a smartphone with Internet access, you can also try accessing your website with your phone. Just be sure it is not connected to your office's wireless network — you want it to use the cellular network. By using the cellular network, you're almost guaranteed to be accessing your website from a separate location.

One final option is to check your website through a proxy such as Tor. I'm not going to go into detail on this part, but you can basically eliminate issues with your Internet service provider by checking through a proxy. In short, if you can't access it via proxy, it's likely down. If you can, then you need to call your Internet service provider because the problem is obviously not with your computer and most likely not with your host.

Call Your Website Hosting Provider

Only after exhausting the options above should you call your website hosting provider. Their hold times likely suck, and you'll probably spend less time going through the steps above than you'll spend waiting on hold only to be told that the problem isn't theirs. Either way, most reputable hosts are well aware of most issues shortly after they occur and typically have them fixed within 15-20 minutes.

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Move Up Faster In Google Local Search

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:30:17 +0000

With nearly every search on Google having some localization tied to it, it's extremely important that your business ranks highly on Google for those local searches of your products or services.

One major factor that Google considers in local search is the number and quality of your "citations" across the Internet. A citation is where your business information appears. At the bare minimum, you should get your business listed with consistent information across various trusted Google sources as well as directories important to your specific niche.

However, getting your business listed in various trusted sources across the Internet is much like link-building. Not only should you get yourself listed in the same places as your competitors, but you should also find those places that your competitors are missing. You get bonus points if you can make it somewhat exclusive.

An interesting idea is to work up some kind of partnership with a business in an unrelated industry where you might find customers. For example, a hotel would want a relationship with a local arena or convention center, and a restaurant or bar would want a relationship with the hotel. Basically, what it boils down to is networking.

What this does is give you exclusive (or nearly exclusive) sources that Google can use to show that you are indeed a legitimate business and count as a vote that you might just be what the searcher is looking for in the area. There may also be some influence through Google's personalized search feature if, for example, a recent search was for information for a particular hotel and your next search is for a nearby place to eat.

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$win = 'Gist for Gmail';

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote about a new app I had found that seemed pretty promising for staying connected with your clients. @GregAtGist noticed my post and asked me if I had tried one of their plugins for Firefox or Chrome for Gmail. At that point, I hadn't.

Well, I've been using the plugin over the weekend, and I'm really liking it. It does everything that the video says pretty well. It's great to be able to open up an email and immediately see updates that your contacts involved in a conversation have put on their social networks.

You can also make notes about those contacts much easier than you can through Gmail. This makes it simple to keep track of where you were at in whatever process you are in with your client. However, Gist doesn't seem to import existing notes from Google Contacts, so those notes that you took before are somewhat useless through Gist. I don't know if that is an issue on Google's end or Gist's end, but it sure would be nice to have those imported.

Having all this information available at your fingertips is awesome! Gist for Gmail greatly reduces the need to remember how to connect with a client and puts your notes about them right in front of you.

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Google Instant Previews - No Flash?

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:25:07 +0000

You've probably seen Google Instant Previews on your searches. These show up when you click the magnifying glass next to a search result and show you a preview of where the link will take you. According to Google, 1 in 20 searchers are more likely to be satisified with the results they click.

However, it seems that it doesn't display Flash or Silverlight content. This means that websites that don't provide an alternate image for browsers that don't have the plugin installed don't get a preview.

This is another reason why your website developer should provide alternatives to any elements that require third-party plugins.

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Finding Your Customers on Social Media Using Gist

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:44:45 +0000

You've been including social media in your marketing plan for a while now. You just know that your customers are using social media, but you can't seem to connect with them. You have a database full of contacts, but you don't know how to leverage that.

Thankfully, there are tools available just for that purpose. One I began using recently is called Gist. Gist brings all of your contacts' social media profiles to one place so you don't have to go find them.

After signing up for an account (which is free and easy), it will first ask you to add your email account. What gist will do is analyze the headers or headers and message bodies of your emails to locate contacts. I would just choose headers only, as the message bodies seem to be a little much for me.

Gist will then ask to connect to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. A nice feature is that it allows you to connect to multiple Twitter accounts, which is especially important if you manage multiple profiles for different businesses you are involved in. It also allows you to import your LinkedIn contacts, but that requires you to do an export of that data file from LinkedIn and may be too involved for some people.

Finally, Gist will ask to connect to your Google Contacts, Salesforce account (big plus for many corporate users), or upload contact data files in either CSV or VCard format.

Immediately after setting up Gist, I had the profiles for 1,122 people at 596 companies at my fingertips in one place. Additionally, Gist also has apps for the iPhone and Android phones available.

So far, I like using Gist. However, we'll see how much I actually use it over the next couple of months to see if its really something to keep around.

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Have You Checked Out the New Facebook Profiles?

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:27:04 +0000

On Sunday, Facebook rolled out a new profile layout. The best part? Users actually have the OPTION to switch to it or keep their old profile. Trust me, though, most people will want it.

It's sleek. It's sexy. And it's 99% full of win.

There's even a slight improvement for businesses who advertise on Facebook. Facebook ads are now displayed with the image beside the text rather than above. It's not really more advertising real estate, but it does make the ads a little bit more prominent. Of course, it's in the column that has the Application Requests, Suggestions, Mutual Friends and People You May Know functions, so the wider ad space may have just been a side effect. But considering this is a revenue stream for Facebook, it may have very well been the primary reason for the width adjustment.

It appears they have also added a new feature to the "Work" section of your profile that is very useful for freelancers. Some of us do use Facebook to connect with some of our business contacts, and so our Info tab may be set up like a mini-resumé. What Facebook has tried to do is allow you to add projects that you worked on at a particular place of employment. I say "tried" because it is currently not working and produces an error (which is better than yesterday where it would duplicate your employment entry). Think of it as a sort of mini-portfolio.

Another feature here that is useful for finding references or just keeping track of where you met people is the ability to list your Facebook friends that you worked with at a particular place of employment. Like any other place where you've been tagged, you can always remove yourself from a list on someone's profile.

Other than a few quirks, so far I'm liking the new Facebook profiles. If you haven't changed yours yet (there's been links in your newsfeed that says "John Doe and 7 other friends have the new profile" or something similar), go get the new Facebook profile now!

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Merge Facebook Places With Your Page

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:53:20 +0000

Many small businesses who have Facebook Pages may have noticed that the Facebook Places app generally takes users checking in via mobile apps to a different page. This can be very frustrating, especially if you have been running your Facebook Page right and creating good content. Fortunately, though, Facebook offers the ability for most business owners to merge these pages together.

First, you will need to claim your Facebook Places page. This is really quit simple: a link appears near the bottom that says "Is this your business?". Much like other applications online that involve confirming that a user is an official representative of a business, Facebook will call the phone number listed for that business and provide you with a PIN. That PIN must be entered into Facebook to verify that it is indeed a business of which you are an official representative.

Finally, if you are listed as an administrator of the Facebook Page for your business, you may be prompted to merge your newly claimed Places page with your Facebook Page. If you have only one physical location and one Page, this is highly recommended. (Currently, Facebook does not have a mechanism in place to merge multiple Places with one Page.)

By merging your Place and your Page together, you centralize the management of your presence on Facebook. This both saves you time and enhances the experience of your customers.

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Check Your Website's Layout in Other Browsers

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:24:38 +0000

If your business didn't go with a website developer who does adequate testing, you'll probably find that your website might look very different (and possibly break) in some browsers. However, there is a really cool online tool that is available for you to use free of charge.

Browsershots allows you to view your website many different versions of different web browsers on different operating systems. All you have to do is put in the address, select all the browsers that you want to test, and click Submit. After waiting a while, screenshots of your website will start rolling in. Generally, it takes from 10-30 minutes, but you might have to click the button to extend your time if one of the more popular browsers to test is taking a while.

The process is completely automated. The way it works is that users around the world install a script on their computer. What that script does is take screenshots of your website while their computer is idle.

The downside to this tool is that it is only good for checking your website's layout. It is unable to check if your drop down menus or other goodies are working correctly. However, this is a great tool to use to make sure that other people are seeing your website the way you intended.

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If You Have a Blog, Remember to Moderate Your Comments

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:29:04 +0000

One would think that this advice should be common sense, but what I have observed in following and commenting on various blogs is that many either remain unmoderated or (more often) undermoderated.

When working on an SEO campaign, I will always look and see where competitors are getting their links. Link building works on two fronts: search engine optimization and creating more paths to your website. Comment sections on blogs should be a pretty obvious target to anybody engaging in link building.

Most reputable CMS's, including Drupal, give bloggers the ability to moderate comments before or after they are posted. Most of them will also allow you to automatically add the rel="nofollow" tag to any links that you didn't post yourself. That tag makes your blog a little bit less attractive to spammers because a nofollow link will not pass link juice from your site to theirs.

Some bloggers choose to moderate every single comment that is submitted before allowing it to be posted. I can see where they are coming from, but to me that adds too much overhead and takes time away from more important tasks (like writing good content). I let all comments get posted, but I moderate them when I check my email. I'd say that 98% of the comments that get posted are legitimate, so allowing the other 2% an hour or two of exposure isn't a bad tradeoff in my opinion.

However, it is getting harder and harder to recognize spam. It is almost nearly impossible to get readers who will actually click a "Report" button. From what I've seen, comment spam has evolved from random words strung together with a link with the "proper" anchor text to something that seems to be written by a human. (In some cases, I know that some of them are written by humans).

If it doesn't look like jibberish, it might look something like "I loved this post! Here is <link> that I think you will also be interested in." You'll just have to read them to see if it is just honest linking to a related resource, or if it is bona fide spam. If it seems kind of gray, I generally edit out the sentence containing the link, but I have been known to let some that seemed honest stand.

If you decide that a blog is a good way for your business to keep fresh content on your website, remember to budget in the time necessary to provide comment moderation.

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Why You Should Choose Drupal Over Joomla

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:47:29 +0000

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about why you should choose Drupal over WordPress as a CMS for your website, especially if you want to develop your website in phases. Today, I'm going to tell you why would should choose Drupal over Joomla.

Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla are the "big 3" in the CMS world. Personally, I rank them Drupal > WordPress > Joomla, but I admit that I am a bit biased. Joomla does have quite a few shortcomings that can cause issues for you as your website grows.

The first issue that you will find with Joomla is that it uses long parameter URLs. This is very bad for search engines. It makes it difficult for the search engines to tell what "page" they are on and can also more easily cause duplicate content issues. By default, Drupal gives you the option of "dirty" or "clean" URLs depending on if your web server is set up properly (and most are). But even then, the dirty URL is something like http://www.example.com/?q=node/1 rather than http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&I....

From what I could tell on the Joomla Extensions website, your best bet to fix that is a commercial extension. But what we're talking about fixing is something that should be utterly simple to fix. On the other hand, Drupal tells you if you can use clean URLs, how to adjust your server settings so that you can use clean URLs, and then check a box. If you want to set up URL aliases such as the ones that I use, all you have to do is install one free module: Pathauto.

Out of the box, Drupal provides revision support, meaning that you can choose to create a new revision of a page when you make a change. This allows you to revert back if you make a mistake, keep an audit trail of who did what, etc. Joomla requires an addon to do this.

While Joomla comes with a WYSIWYG editor for editing content, Drupal allows you to choose exactly what editor you want to install without any additional bloat. This gives you more freedom to choose what works for you.

Finally, a big win for Drupal is granular control over user permissions. This allows you to choose what users have exactly what kind of access. This is especially useful when building community oriented sites, but can also be very handy when you have a team of individuals responsible for their own content on your website.

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Working On My First Soon-to-be Live D7 Site(s)

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 14:47:47 +0000

As I've said before, I'm excited about the Drupal 7 launch. Finally, I'm getting to work on a couple of websites that will run on D7. (Well, one absolutely will, while I'm still evaluating the other.)

I plan to launch my first D7 website around the first of the year. My wife has talked for a while about doing a cooking blog, so I feel like this is the perfect opportunity to get my head wrapped around it since there is no rush or hard deadlines.

Right now, D7 is on it's second beta cycle and getting closer to release candidate status. Based on the issues left in the queue, I decided I could be comfortable running a site with a version that isn't a final release. I don't recommend it, though, unless you really know what you are doing.

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Does Your Website Need a CMS?

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:37:05 +0000

Image by Chris Baker

Many businesses and non-profit organizations choose to redefine their marketing strategy at the beginning of a new year, and quite often this includes bringing their website up to date. Of course, one of the main things that comes up is keeping the redesign and redevelopment within a certain budget. That means a choice must be made between a static website or a content management system (CMS).

To make this easier for you to decide, I offer a few questions you should ask yourself to determine if you should use a CMS such as Drupal.

How often do you need to update your website?

If you're thinking once or twice a month (and especially if you think that would be a stretch), then a CMS might not be the right choice for you. A CMS makes it a lot easier for you to make website changes in the future, but the added cost may not be enough to justify it if you aren't making regular changes.

However, if you are planning on making regular changes, you may want to consider having your website developed with a CMS. This will likely save you future costs of website updates from developers.

Do you want a blog on your website?

Blogs are great for search engine optimization. The Googlebot loves to eat fresh content, and a blog is a great way to cook up some fresh content on a regular basis. If you want a blog on your website, then it is absolutely necessary to use a CMS.

By the way, a "blog" is not necessary a weblog any more. It is used colloquially to refer to a regular stream of fresh content from a website, including whitepapers, articles, press releases, etc. This is especially true if you accept public comments on those items (which, by the way, encourages people to come back).

Do you want to avoid paying for specific expensive software to manage your website?

A CMS allows you to manage your website through nearly any web browser from any location with internet access. Without using a CMS, you have to use software that may only be installed on one computer per license in order to more easily manage your website. This is another place where a CMS such as Drupal actually saves you money in the long run.

Do you want Average Joe to be able to make changes to your website?

Sometimes, you just can't afford to pay an independent developer or hire a new employee that possesses the technical skills to manage a static website. Even if you're only making one or two updates a month, you might wish that a secretary or administrative assistant were able to make those changes during a few minutes of their day that are free from other duties.

A CMS allows you to do this. Most have editors that make editing your website as simple as using a word processor. If your employee can use a word processor, they can open a browser window, login, and make necessary changes to your website. Most CMS's make it very difficult to actually mess up the website by just editing content.

Do you want to keep your content, but only change the design later?

A future redesign is inevitable. Admit it. Times change, and so do the trends and what people are looking for in a website. That said, it would be nice to not have to go through the hassle of migrating or recreating your content later, right?

Well, if you use a CMS such as Drupal and choose to redesign in the future, then you can save a lot of money by only changing the design (as long as you continue using the same CMS).

Conclusion

Now that you've asked yourself those questions, look at how you answered. If you answered "yes" on any of them, then it would be very wise for you to have your next website done with a CMS. If you'd like to know what I can do for you in Drupal, give me a holler.

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Is Facebook Advertising Right for Your Business?

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:00:00 +0000

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising services, Google's AdWords program seems to be the cream of the crop. After all, with AdWords you pay to display ads to people who are already looking for your product or service. To those who haven't been in internet marketing very long, it also seems to be a fairly cheap form of internet advertising. But how does it compare to Facebook?

If your business has a page on Facebook (notice I said "page", not "profile"), you can create ads that target Facebook users. Rather than targeting people as they are looking for you, you target them based on their interests and other personal information. You target who the customer is rather than what they want.

The first thing you need to keep in mind in determining if Facebook advertising is right for you is the location of your targets in the sales funnel. People who see ads on Facebook are not necessarily looking for your product or service and are therefore higher (and further away from a sale) on your sales funnel. In contrast, people exposed to your Google AdWords campaign were actively looking for your product or service and you are trying to sway their evaluation. This means that clicks from AdWords are more likely to convert into sales than clicks from Facebook.

However, even though the conversion rate from Facebook might be lower than AdWords, you also need to consider the cost per click. Thanks to popularity and competition for certain keywords on Google, you can expect to spend over 3x as much per click on an AdWords campaign. This means that a Facebook campaign is still a better investment than an AdWords campaign even if only a third of the clicks you paid for convert into sales.

If you have a Facebook Page, go ahead and mess around with creating an ad on Facebook. If you made the mistake of creating a profile, then it's time for you to create a Page and encourage your "friends" to migrate to it. There are many more opportunities available on Facebook Pages than profile, including the ability to offer sweet incentives for your fans to tell their friends about your business.

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Ranking for Local Search Is More Important Than Ever

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:24:14 +0000

If you haven't noticed when searching for stuff on Google recently, Google has made a shift in how their search results are presented. For many queries, Google now assumes that you are searching for something in your area and thus seems to be giving local results a higher ranking in search results.

So now, instead of seeing what used to be called the "7 box" for local results next to a map above general results, we now see those local results mixed in with the general results. This is actually good news for local businesses who want to rank higher for searches where the user wasn't necessarily location-specific. It makes it a little bit easier to rank on the first page which means there is even more value in local search engine optimization.

Because of this shift, it is now more important than ever for a small business to invest in local SEO. However, there are many things that a small business owner can undertake themselves to keep the cost down.

The most important thing to do is to claim your search engine pages. Specifically, these are your pages on Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local. These are the pages that the search engines tend to give the most weight to in determining your location and whether or not you are legitimate.

Next, you should claim or create your listings in respected directories across the web. Specifically, you should focus on Yelp, MerchantCircle, Local.com, Superpages, CitySearch, Urbanspoon, and other directories specific to your niche. Remember that your address and phone number need to be displayed in a consistent format across these directories, your search engine pages, and your website.

Finally, you should make sure that your website contains accessible content. Preferably, this content should be link-worthy so that it can also be used for organic link-building. Of course, make sure this content contains keywords you want to rank for in a natural manner.

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Facebook Deals Launches for Many U.S. Small Businesses

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, Facebook rolled out a new feature to compete with services such as Groupon and Foursquare: Facebook Deals.

For quite some time, you've been able to "check-in" to local businesses on Facebook on the iPhone and (recently) touch.facebook.com. Up until now, Foursquare was still being used five times as much as Facebook Places, even with Facebook's astronomically larger user base. But with the launch of Facebook Deals, that might change.

Soon, you can give your patrons an incentive to check-in to your business on Facebook. However, if you are one of 20,000 lucky small business owners on Facebook, you might see the screen below if you go to "Edit Page" and click "Deals" on the left hand side (if it's there).

And here is what mobile users will see when checking in:

This will be a very useful tool for local small businesses to get more people in the door. This gives a great reason for a user to check-in at your business, and Facebook tells all of their friends where they are at when they check-in. And when people perceive you to be a popular destination for their friends, they tend to get curious and want to check into what you have to offer!

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Maximize Your Small Business on Twitter

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:28:21 +0000

For many small businesses, Twitter seems to be more difficult to use than Facebook. For the most part, Twitter forces you to say what you need to say within 140 characters. That seems to intimidate some small business owners.

But sometimes, the best way past a road block is a few ideas to act as seeds that you can grow into what works for you. So here's some ideas for you.

The easiest to try is to offer a daily special of some sort. This can either be promoting a daily special that is available to all customers or one that is only available for those who mention that tweet. (By the way, if you want to offer it on Facebook, too, there is no need to post it in both places. Just install the Smart Twitter for Pages app to your Facebook page.)

If you want to increase the exposure of your tweets a bit, include a photo by using a Twitter image sharing service such as Twitpic. For some reason, people seem more interested to look at a photo than to act directly on a tweet or click a random link. So if you run a restaurant and have a special available to Twitter users, post a picture of that well-stacked burger.

You can also offer tips and answer questions via Twitter. This is especially helpful if it pertains to a product or service that you sell. If you're a plumber or HVAC guy, offer free tips on simple maintenance that a homeowner can do even if it means they'll likely call you less for little stuff. By offering simple tips they can act on themselves, you increase the likelihood that your name will be at the front of their mind when they have a big problem they can't handle.

I hope these quick tips have given you a starting point on how you can use Twitter for your business.

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Get Started With Reputation Management

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:03:17 +0000

How often do you Google yourself? More importantly, how often do other people Google you?

Reputation management is about controlling what shows up in the search results when someone searches for you. It's about getting content you control to dominate the first few pages of search results. This can seem like a daunting task, but in reality it's quite simple to get started. Unless the current results are dominated by negative (and perhaps false) information, there is no need in hiring one of those reputation management firms you hear about on the radio.

The easiest thing you can do is set up social media profiles. Most people make their mistake here and set up a profile on as many social networks as they can find assuming that they will rank well by default. In reality, though, you only need a few of the major networks.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are the big four that you need to set up profiles. In your vanity URL or username, use your real name. Use your address book to connect with other friends who have profiles, as these connections basically vouch for you. Fill out your profile information completely. And finally, make sure you use these profiles.

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Facebook Might Let You Change Your Page Name Soon

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:40:34 +0000

Have you thought about changing the name of your business, but dreaded losing that established base of Facebook fans? Facebook might allow you to keep your Page and change the name of it soon.

Facebook is currently rolling out a new Page Administration interface, and one new feature that makes me grin is that there is now an option to change the name of your Facebook Page.

This appears to be limited to a subset of Pages with smaller amounts of fans. Personally, I manage four Facebook Pages right now. Three of them have <100 fans and will allow me to change the name, while the one that has >300 fans will not.

Still, I think this is a much needed feature that businesses and other organizations have needed for quite some time. While not on the level of finally allowing Facebook Pages to be transferred between accounts back in June, this is certainly up there.

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5 Websites That Showcase Drupal's Flexibility and Robustness

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:13:27 +0000

Because Drupal has arguably not been nearly as well marketed as WordPress, and designers continue to flock to WordPress because the default installation with no add-ons is admittedly easier to use, examples that accurately portray what Drupal can be capable of are sometimes hard to come by.

However, here are five websites that show you a little bit of what Drupal is capable of. (And yes, I can build you a site with these features, too.)

Popular Science

Examiner.com

GRAMMY.com

The White House

Avenged Sevenfold

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Multiple Store Locations? Make a Page for Each One on Your Website

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:55:21 +0000

Many small businesses, especially in metro areas, have multiple storefront locations. When Google and other search engines crawl your website, they look for details such as addresses and use that information for their maps.

However, this doesn't work very well if your locations and franchises are hidden behind a form that you require the user to fill out. It works best if each location has their own separate page with a unique URL and is included in your sitemap.

Each of those location pages should have that particular location's address, phone number, and business hours at a minimum. Google will attempt to automatically populate a Places page for Google Maps with that information, but you should still claim those listings anyway.

Remember to keep the address and phone number formats consistent, and you'll be well on your way to having all of your locations rank well in a local search.

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Eventbrite: Each Event Share on Facebook is Worth $2.52 in Ticket Sales

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:49:44 +0000

On Thursday, Eventbrite released a report showing their findings in a study on how much each share of an event was worth on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eventbrite is an event ticket sales website that makes it easy for people to share those events with their friends on social networks.

The result:

When someone shares an event with their friends through social media, this action results in real dollars. Our most recent data shows that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ”email friends” application equals $2.34. On an aggregate level across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and our email share tool, each share equals $1.78 in ticket sales. We’re seeing this number improve every week with the most recent four-week average equaling $1.87.

Why is this? It's actually quite simple. When a person shares an event with their friends, it creates a perception among their friends that this might be "the" popular event to attend. Because of this, many of their friends click the link to the event to check it out. Since they are already perceiving the event as popular, they are already more inclined to purchase a ticket and attend the event. This rings especially true on Facebook.

Event ticketing made social through Eventbrite

This data helps to show that marketing through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is a truly viable option. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but you should at least seriously consider giving social media marketing a try.

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Drupal 7 is Almost Here!

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:24:36 +0000

Last week, Drupal 7 finally reached beta status. This means that the upgrade path is working (for the most part) and only a few critical bugs are left. I've been test driving the alphas on my dev server in my office, and I must say that I am looking forward to upgrading.

I'm seriously considering moving this website to D7 pretty soon so that it can help D7 get some real world testing. I must say that I am very excited about D7!

Those who are running on Drupal 6 do not need to upgrade, as D6 will remain supported until Drupal 8 is released. Yes, this site is running on D6, but aren't developers supposed to be running the latest version?

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How to Check If Your Website is Search Engine Friendly

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

I've seen quite a bit of this scenario being played out recently: you pay thousands of dollars for a website that looks great, but it still ranks in the search engines for little to nothing. What is wrong with your website? If this happened to me, I would feel cheated. So what can you do to make sure that this hasn't happened to you?

Make Sure Your Text is Text

This is the most common issue that I see. A person or company that has no business doing websites creates a pretty good design in the graphics design software of their choice. However, instead of using tools like cufón or @font-face to use the font they want on the website, they just use graphics.

Most commonly, this is done on navigation links that are supposed to look cool, but I have seen a few websites where ALL of the content was done using images. The worst part is that some of those are using images to display content that is written in standard fonts such as Arial.

To me, issues like this one show an extraordinary level of incompetency on the part of the developer that was hired for the project. This can definitely cause a major issue where little to none of the text that people will be searching for will be indexed by the search engines. This means that people will not be able to find your website unless you tell them where it is at. This defeats a major purpose of your website.

So how do you check for this? It's rather simple. Go to your website and try to highlight text. If you highlight a big block instead of single letters at a time, then that text is actually a useless image. If you currently have someone maintaining your website this way, fire them.

Never Use Frames

In the early days of HTML, frames were an efficient way to display websites where some content (such as the header and navigation) rarely changed from page to page while other content changed often. Rather than coding the repetitive parts of a website's design, frames made this a lot simpler.

However, with the advent of server-side scripting languages such as PHP, frames are unnecessary for this task. PHP allows a developer to "include" or "require" certain elements that are common to multiple pages. And with that, frames have (for the most part) gone the way of the dodo.

If your website is using frames, then the search engines' crawlers are unable to properly index your website. They see each of those frames as a separate page, and they don't really do a good job of following frame target designations in links. If your developer created your website in frames, fire them.

Use Tables Only When Absolutely Necessary

Another antique of HTML is tables. In the past, you had to use tables if you wanted to control your layout with more than one column. Some developers could get very creative and build some fairly complex websites with tables.

However, tables are bloated and slow. Additionally, they do not allow for conditional controls via CSS for printing, screen readers, or other accessibility tools. Two factors that are important in building search engine friendly websites are your code-to-text ratio and page load time.

Most search engines only index so much of a page before moving on, and so you want your keyword-laden content to make up the most of your page. You also want to be able to control where that content appears in the code and control how it is displayed to a web browser via CSS. With tables, your code determines where your content appears; with divs, your CSS determines where your content appears.

As for page load time, Google stated back in April that the time it takes to load a page is indeed a factor in determining rankings of search results. If your page loads quicker than the competition, you will rank higher.

The only time tables should be used is if you are displaying tabular data. To answer the question of if your website should be using tables or divs in a certain area, ask yourself the following question: "Can I display this content accurately in a spreadsheet?" If the answer is yes, then tables are appropriate for that piece of content. Otherwise, your website should be using divs.

If you view the source of your website (Tools --> View Source in IE) and find lots of <table> <tr> <td> code, you should consider whether or not you really want that developer to continue working on your website.

Use Unordered Lists for Navigation

This is another issue that I see, and usually it is accompanied by the issue with using images. Search engines like to be given clues about the hierarchy of your website. Arranging navigation links in paragraphs with <br /> tags or in tables does not convey that hierarchy accurately.

Your website developer should arrange your navigation links in unordered lists. Without CSS, these actually appear as bulleted lists, and the search engines follow them as such. If you have a five sections called A, B, C, D, and E; and C has subsections 1, 2, and 3; then the search engines will see that 1, 2, and 3 are directly related to C, but not A, B, D, or E.

The navigation at the top of this page is created with unordered lists. The text is also actual text. The image and hover effect is done with CSS, using the background attribute for the list elements. In fact, both the on-hover and off-hover images are from the same image, just different coordinates, to improve page load speed.

You can check for this just like checking for abuse of tables, but this time search for one of your navigation links. If the <a> tag is enclosed by <li> tags, then you're good. If not, consider whether or not you want to continue with that developer.

There is even more SEO work that your developer should be doing just by writing good code. If he or she can't get a grasps on these basic concepts, they don't deserve your business in the future.

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Is Your Local Business On Foursquare Yet?

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Are you a small business owner? Does your business thrive on local customers walking in the door?

If you are not on Foursquare yet, then you are missing out on the fastest growing location-based social network. Yes, Facebook has a much larger userbase, but users seem to be very slow to adopt the Facebook Places application. In fact, even though Facebook has a userbase of 500 million people compared to Foursquare's 2 million, but Foursquare is used FIVE TIMES MORE than Facebook Places.

On thing that people find that comes in handy with Foursquare is the ability to get an idea of what is available in their area, be it entertainment or good food. For example, I took a trip to the Riverwalk in San Antonio last weekend. When my wife and I were looking for places to eat on Saturday night, I pulled up Foursquare to see what others had said about the restaurants in the area.

Foursquare users are able to post tips about different venues that can provide valuable information to other users. As a small business owner, you can view these tips that have been posted and get a better idea of what people really like about your business (and what they really don't like). Sure, you could ask your patrons in person, but most people have reservations about being critical to somebody's face.

And as I've written before, Foursquare also offers some unique marketing opportunities. While using Foursquare as a marketing tool will be inherently more successful in a metro area, it doesn't hurt in a rural area to go ahead and claim your venue or at least see who has been checking in. I can tell you that I have seen it grow fairly rapidly over the last couple of months in the Clinton and Weatherford, Oklahoma areas (where I spend most of my time). When more people who know each other start participating, the title of Mayor of a venue really does turn into quite the competition.

So if you're not on Foursquare yet, get signed up NOW! Foursquare offers a great opportunity to compete against the nationally recognized brands in your local area.

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Why Buying Links Is Dumb

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:00:27 +0000

With so many people going right to Google to search for whatever they are looking for, search engine optimization has become a real hot-button topic in the online world. It seems that nearly every RFP or website spec sheet has "search engine optimization" listed as a high priority.

What happens when you start talking to someone about what you can do for them SEO-wise is one of the first questions is about how many links to can get them. What most people don't understand is that search engines (especially Google) have evolved well past where they were 8-10 years ago when more links meant higher rankings. Now, search engine optimization is about semantics and natural linking.

Yes, when you go out and buy a few hundred links your website will shoot toward the top of the search engine results pages. However, this is only temporary. Search engines pick up quite easily on the pattern of links coming into your website, and you will be penalized if they think that you bought them.

To the search engines, its one thing if you're getting dozens of relevant links from blog posts and Twitter overnight. But it's a bad thing if those links are not relevant or if they seem to be following a certain pattern. This is why it is important to focus on the content of your website and publishing something that is link-worthy so that people will naturally link to your website.

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How Social Media Helps SEO

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Most people are always looking for ways to rank better in search engines. This is especially important (and difficult) when you first launch your website. After all, more and more people turn to Google before they look any place else, and if you don't exist there then you don't exist at all.

Many businesses and organization view social media as solely a marketing tool, but that isn't the case. Social media can be used for some limited, but useful, search engine optimization.

The first thing you will notice with most social media profiles is that you can post direct links to your website. Some of these links will be "follow" links (if you're lucky), but most will be "nofollow". This is a quick way to lend some credit for search engines to your website. You can get that credit either directly through a "follow" link, or indirectly through a "nofollow" that eventually gets scraped by bots for those weird scraper websites.

While the "nofollow" link doesn't lend your website any direct credit with search engines, it does help to build brand awareness. Of course, this falls back to the basic principle of using social media as a marketing tool: exposure.

But what most people don't think about with social media is a side-effect of having a profile on a website that already has a lot of ranking power with search engines: results page domination. What you are trying to do here is fill the first page or two of search results for your brand with either positive content or (preferably) content you control. This is also why it is very important to actually spend some time filling out the information on your social media profiles, even if they are on networks you might not use immediately.

Finally, you want to link back to the social media profiles that you are actually using from your website. Not only does this show your customers where else they can connect with you, it also serves to tell the search engines that a certain profile belongs with a certain brand and website.

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What Google Says About You

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:13:16 +0000

Have you ever taken the time to Google yourself or your business? You might be surprised what comes up.

A good goal to have for any business is to either control the first two pages, or at least have all positive results in the first couple of pages of results. The reason is that it is very unlikely that someone will go to page 3 (and really, you're lucky if they even make it to page 2).

So how do you get control over these results if you're just starting out? This is where having social media profiles can really help, even if they are not going to be a major part of your marketing strategy. Websites like Facebook and Twitter carry a considerable amount of strength in the search engines. And while the links from those websites won't provide any real benefit in improving your website's visibility in the search engines, they will help provide potential customers an avenue to your website.

If your business has a local storefront, you can help yourself even more. The same websites that carry a lot of weight in local search also tend to rank on the front page of Google in a direct search for your name. Submitting your website to these directories that influence local search is a double-win opportunity.

You should keep track of what results show up first when someone searches for you. If you want to make it a little easier, consider setting up Google Alerts to tell you when Google crawls something new about you.

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Social Media: It's All About Perception

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:27:48 +0000

If you've tried using social media as a marketing tool for your business, you've probably realized its a lot harder to make it work than it seems. Many businesses often assume that if they just have a presence, then the word-of-mouth fire will just ignite. But think about how a good fire works for a minute: you have to maintain it and keep it going.

Social media is not at all that much different from a fire. It takes work to get it started, and it takes more work to make it hot. And then it takes even more work to keep it hot. But instead of adding tinder or balancing air with the fire, you are shaping the public's perception of your business with social media.

There are two primary areas where you can use social media to influence how the public perceives you, and the priority for each of these depends on your field and goals.

First, you can use social media to project yourself as an expert in your field. This is most commonly done on Twitter and LinkedIn. To help make the public perceive you as an expert, you should be searching for questions that need answers that you can provide. Some people wrongly think that answer questions (or basically consulting) for free is a waste of time because they could be earning money during that time, but that's wrong thinking if the time is well spent. Providing clear answers to questions in your field can help you position yourself as a leader and an expert, and this could mean charging higher rates that allow you to work fewer hours and pick your clients later.

But projecting yourself as an expert is not all about answering questions. It is also about providing resources to others. You see this a lot more on Twitter than any place else in the form of a "retweet". What happens is that as you tweet links to content that is helpful to others who might be seeking your product or services, you position yourself as a resource. Sure, you're sending people to other sources of information, but it helps to attract more people that you can send to your website or blog.

The other use of social media is creating a level of perceived popularity. This is most often (and efficiently) done on Facebook. What you first have to do is drop the marketing shtick and allow some personality. Remember, people are not on Facebook to see a commercial, they are there to connect. When someone "Likes" your Facebook page, you make a connection. And when they make that connection, it shows in their newsfeed that "John Doe likes Ziggy's Widgets". If one of their 150 friends clicks the link and chooses to "Like" your page, then any friends they have in common will see "John Doe and Jane Tarzan like Ziggy's Widgets", while friends they don't have in common will see only one name. As more people connect with your business on Facebook, more people will be indirectly exposed to your presence there. The herd mentality is strong on Facebook.

Now to keep that fire going, you have to create content that keeps people coming back to your page. In short, the more a person interacts with your page, the more it shows up in their newsfeed. You need to create content that appeals to people enough to check your page regularly or (preferably) post comments and "like" content they found on your page. To find out more about how Facebook controls what shows up in a user's newsfeed, read my other post on Facebook's EdgeRank.

Social media is all about perception. The perception can be that you are an expert, or the perception can be that you are popular among someone's friends. If you can shape that perception, you can keep your social media fire going strong.

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How to Set Up Drupal 6 to Use Amazon S3 and Zencoder for Video

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:48:30 +0000

So I recently decided that I'm going to try to do at least one video tutorial per month (hopefully more, but it's a start). I decided that it might be better to use a content distribution service to host my videos, even though my server is more than capable of it. Amazon has the infrastructure already in place to provide fast access to my content and the fees are relatively low. This makes their S3 a perfect place to put those items that might cause a bandwidth and resource usage spike.

For encoding videos to Flash, I can do it on my local machine if I want to, but ffmpeg is quite a resource hog when doing conversions. My server is capable of doing it, but I didn't want to have to schedule conversions during off-peak hours. I wanted to be able to upload videos from wherever I might be, so I decided I would use an online encoding service. Zencoder is good, quick, and inexpensive, and so I went with them. (And they also have full integration with the Video module.)

I'm going to show you how to set up Drupal 6 to use both of these services with the Video module. Let me know if it seems like I left something out. I tried to take good notes along the way and take screenshots.

1. Sign Up With Amazon S3

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ and sign up for an S3 account. It's pretty straightfoward.

2. Get Access Credentials

After receiving the email, you can follow a link to where Amazon gives you the access credentials for the S3 API. You will need these later, so write them down.

3. Create a "Bucket" for Your Content

Amazon calls the storage containers in S3 "buckets". Think of these like subdomains to a website. When creating a bucket, the name must be unique. What happens is the URL to your content stored there will be something like bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/whate.ver.

You will also need to add permissions for Zencoder. The user you need to specify is aws@zencoder.com.

4. Download and Install Modules

You will need to get two modules for Drupal.

If you are doing a fresh Drupal installation, or have one of those odd sites that doesn't use CCK and Views, you will need them, too. You will also need Filefield if you don't already have it.

After extracting the tarballs into your /sites/all/modules (or replace all with your domain or default if you use those), go to admin/build/modules and enable the following:

Flowplayer API
Amazon S3 on Video
Video
Video Upload
Zencoder API on Video

5. Configure Video

Now we get to the fun stuff.

Remember that I said to write down your S3 keys or do something so you could find them later? Here's where you need them. The first thing you should do is set up Amazon S3 in the Video module.

Next, you should set what transcoder you want to use. Unless you have the resources, I recommend just using Zencoder, especially if you are on a shared server. Use a valid email addres, and your Zencoder account will be created automagically.

You will receive a link in your email to your new Zencoder account. The Pay As You Go subscription should be plenty for most people. Keep "Integration Mode" turned on until we know that everything is set up correctly.

Next, we need to choose the video player for different formats. Since Zencoder is going to return Flash videos, that's all we're going to worry about.

6. Add or Edit a Content Type for Video

Now we're getting somewhere! What you need to do now is go to admin/content/types. You can create a new content type just for video, or you can click the "manage fields" link on an existing content type to add a Video field to it. The choice is yours.

Either way, you going to add a new field of the type FILE and choose the element VIDEO.

Configure the field to your liking, but you will need to be sure to enable video conversion.

I didn't take a screenshot here, but under the General settings tab, I recommend enabling "Video Convert on Node Submit". This way, your video is queued at Zencoder for encoding as soon as possible.

7. Create a Node With Your Video

Finally, you get to make use of everything you've done so far. Go create a node like you normally do. This time, you'll see an option to upload a video.

Now, unless you use the Scheduler module to control when nodes are published, I recommend unchecking "Published" before clicking Submit. This way, you can wait until your video is actually available to publish the node. My 6 minute video on Facebook ads took about 10 minutes to complete. I believe it should still submit it if you use the Preview button, but you should still wait until the conversion process is done to actually publish the node.

So there you have it! Let me know if you have any questions or need any help.

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[VIDEO] How to Create an Ad on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:19:38 +0000

I decided to make a short video to walk you through what you will see when creating an ad for Facebook. Hopefully, this will help you decide if advertising on Facebook is right for you.

(The blurry part of the video is intentional to protect confidential information. Once I get the hang of editing videos, I'll do better to only blur the parts of the frame that need to be blurred.)

No video? Get the Windows Media Plugin

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How to Get All of Your Email in Gmail

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:04:26 +0000

I am often asked how I keep up with all of the email addresses that I have, especially on the go. It's pretty simple: I have my Gmail account set up to process all of my email. A bonus here is that Gmail's spam filter is superb, so I don't have to waste resources on my server running SpamAssassin.

I'm going to show you step by step how to do this. At first, I was going to do a screencast, but I decided that I really didn't feel like making sure that confidential information was censored out of every frame.

Let's start at the beginning.

Step 0 - Login

This should be obvious, but you really should login to Gmail. Actually, you MUST login to Gmail. I've done PC repair in the past (and still do it on the side when I have time), and I've seen some stupid stuff. I won't assume any different here. :)

Step 1 - Go to Settings

The first place you need to go in Gmail is your Settings. My mouse pointer is over it, and it is circled in red in the screenshot. You really can't miss it.

Unless your language is a RTL language, it should be in the upper right corner. If you use a RTL language, then I'm not sure because I haven't checked. If you use a script in Firefox to redo everything, then you're on your own.

Step 2 - Go to Accounts and Import

Once again, it is circled in read and has an arrow over it. You can't miss it in the screenshot.

This will likely be your third option from the left. This is where the fun stuff begins.

Step 3 - Go to Add POP3 Email Account

A little bit down the page, you will see button that says "Add POP3 Email Account". Click it.

Now you'll be able to add an email account that you want Gmail to process.

Step 4 - Enter the Email Address

This is pretty self explanatory.

Step 5 - Enter the POP3 Account Information

You should be able to get this information from your service provider. Most often, it is in their Frequently Asked Questions (if they maintain such a thing). This is the same information that you use to set up Thunderbird or Outlook.

I always leave the first option unchecked. But that is because I am never wanting to leave a copy of those emails on the server. I am usually having Gmail pull them because I get more space from Google. However, if you are in a corporate environment, you obviously should consult with your IT and/or Compliance Department(s) to be sure. (But most likely if you are in a corporate environment, sending all your email some place outside the company is a no-no and will get you fired.)

Step 6 - Decide If You Want to Send Email

I typically answer "yes" here, but this depends on what you want. 99% of you will want the convenience of sending email from Gmail.

Step 7 - Set Your Display Name

This is pretty self explanatory.

Step 8 - Enter the SMTP Account Information

Just like the POP3 information above, this should be available from your service provider. I always choose to send through my SMTP servers rather than Google. It just looks better.

And now you're done! You can now send and receive email anywhere in the world that you can access your Gmail account! Gmail allows you to do this with up to 5 email addresses.

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Erase the Line Between Online and Offline Marketing

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:00:00 +0000

You see this all the time, especially with small businesses. Online and offline marketing are treated as two distinct and separate activities when they should really be complementing each other. You'll see a commercial, ad, business card, etc. that makes little to no mention of a presence online. If they do mention anything, it's typically an email address or website URL, and that's it.

For most people, though, that's not a good enough way to get their attention. Sure, your website totally rocks, but how do you keep them coming back for more? In many industries, a website is more of an outbound marketing tool — a way to get information to the customer. You need a healthy balance of inbound marketing — where the customer asks you for more information.

Social media is a form of inbound marketing. It allows you to develop a relationship with your customer and keep them coming back to your business. So why aren't many businesses promoting these efforts on their offline marketing materials?

The thought process seems to be that a customer will find you on Facebook or Twitter themselves. Many businesses take the wrong approach of "if you build it, they will come" here. Some assume that if you make it to their website, you will automatically be inclined to follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

However, people never do what you assume they will do. What these businesses should be doing is directly promoting their Facebook and Twitter presences through their offline marketing materials. There should be no line at all here, whether solid or blurry.

So what can a business do to erase the line between online and offline marketing? There are many strategies that are simple to implement. I'll explain a few of them here.

The first thing a business should do is acknowledge their Facebook and Twitter pages on ALL of their marketing materials. This should really be done using both the URLs and icons. Recognizable icons for Facebook and Twitter attract the person's eye, and they get it in their head that you are on those social networks even if they don't read the URL. (By the way, if you have more than 25 fans on Facebook and haven't got a short URL yet, this is a BIG reason to do that!)

So now that your Facebook and Twitter pages are getting exposure on your printed marketing materials, including your business cards, what else can you do? Well, this depends on your business and industry.

If your business or organization offers computers for people to sit down at and use the Internet, say at a bank or public library, you could put up a small flyer or other printed material near the computer showing that you have a presence on various social networks. Another option might be to create a special page on your website that promotes your social network pages and set that as the homepage in each browser.

If your business offers free (or even paid) wi-fi access (like a coffee shop or bookstore) and you require users to either login or accept an agreement to use it, you could create a custom page that directly promotes your social media pages. You could also take an opportunity here to incentivize it. If your type of business thrives on reviews (like a hotel or restaurant), you could provide some encouragement by posting a direct link to your Yelp page with a good call to action.

By the way, something that will work for nearly any business (especially retail, restaurants, or other consumer oriented industries) is posting a reminder at or near the door to check-in on Foursquare. You could even sweeten the deal with an incentive like "free breadsticks when you check-in on Foursquare!"

If you actively promote your online presences through your offline marketing materials, you will be able to build better relationships with a larger pool of customers.

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Want to Develop Your Website in Phases? Choose Drupal Over WordPress

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 04:35:04 +0000

If you do a Google search for Drupal vs. WordPress, Drupal vs. Joomla, or Drupal vs. whatever-other-CMS-you-can-think-of, you'll find plenty of results that will all give you a different story. The most popular of those queries is Drupal vs. WordPress, and most of your results will come from WordPress developers. Understandably, they will contain plenty of bias leaning toward WordPress.

Naturally, as a Drupal developer, I am very biased toward Drupal. But I have very good reasons to be so.

From a developer's point of view, I'll admit that Drupal has a steeper learning curve. From a webmaster's point of view, Drupal has a clumsy administration interface out of the box (even though it actually does make logical sense). From a user's point of view, there is no difference.

However, from your accounting department's point of view, Drupal can prove to be a money saver over the long term. This is especially true if you cannot afford to implement all of the features you desire at once. Yes, WordPress has many plugins available that can make it a little bit easier along the way, but if you want true scalability then Drupal wins hands-down.

Let's consider the common scenario of a small retail store. This store has big plans of offering their merchandise for sale on their website. However, like many small retail stores, they are very strapped for cash.

In their situation, the best option would be to increase awareness in their local community first. By increasing awareness, they will likely drive up their sales. With an increase in revenue, they can devote the proper resources later to realize their plan.

So how does Drupal help here? This small retail store can have a simple website built with Drupal. Their site can easily include a blogging feature so they can keep their website updated with fresh content. With a presence on the Internet, they can begin submitting their website to Google-trusted directories so that they show up on the map — literally — when people search for them or their products.

Okay. WordPress can do that just as well. And at that point, WordPress can be much simpler (and a little cheaper) to set up. But if this is all that you are seeing, then you are losing sight of the big picture.

Our small retail store has established its presence online (consistent with its brick-and-mortar branding), began ranking highly on search engine result pages, is able to effectively promote itself through social media, and has subsequently seen an increase in revenue. They can now move on to Phase II: building their online store.

This is where Drupal really wins, in my opinion. While there are many e-commerce plugins available for WordPress, I've never come across a site where it was executed well. Most WordPress websites that I've seen that incorporate e-commerce use a separate platform for that. From your accounting department's point of view, this is not ideal because you will basically be developing two separate websites.

With Drupal's Ubercart module, your developer can put together an e-commerce solution for your website using your pre-existing infrastructure. While there will likely be some fine-tuning that needs to be done to your existing theme, you won't be having to redevelop it over again. Additionally, if you do choose to redesign your website later, you won't have to develop themes for separate applications. Again, this will probably reduce expenses here for the small retail store in our example.

There are many other scenarios like this where a Drupal website will save you money over other solutions in the long term. Drupal is a very powerful framework.

As for the "aesthetics" argument that I see come up everywhere against Drupal, that is plain hogwash. You can theme Drupal the same way you can theme WordPress. It's just that a lot of very talented designers have gravitated toward WordPress. If you want to see an example of a great design on a Drupal powered site, check out http://www.whitehouse.gov.

So go ahead, have your website built on Drupal. You will not be disappointed!

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How to Make More Sales This Holiday Season

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:45:16 +0000

ChannelAdvisor is out with a white paper on the results of their 2010 Consumer Shopping Habits Survey, and you will love the results.

The first thing that you will notice in the report is that 59% of consumers start their online shopping experience on search engines such as Google. This is why it is very important to spend the time and resources on search engine optimization for your website, especially if you engage in e-commerce. You've probably noticed that some search engines have a product search that shows you results from various online retaillers, both large and small. Good SEO will help you rank well here, too!

And while we're at it, you're probably thinking that you cannot compete with the household names such as WalMart and TigerDirect. That is simply not true! Two thirds of consumers throw brand recognition out the window and would purchase from an unknown retailer if they offer a better deal.

It doesn't matter if you are an e-commerce veteran or just getting started, remember to diversify your sales avenues. 43% of consumers say that Amazon is their first choice, while 22% hit up eBay first. This means that you can reach 65% of consumers through those two marketplaces alone! How's that for visibility?

Now here's the real kicker: 92% of consumers actively read reviews for a product. Out of that pool of consumers, 97% are influenced one way or another by the reviews. This means that product reviews can make or break you!

If you're not using social media as part of your marketing strategy, you should be. 90% of consumers are on Facebook. Facebook not only allows you to connect on a more personal level with your customers, but it also allows you to create fine-grained marketing campaigns. This is an opportunity that you should not pass up!

Finally, you need to make sure to optimize your website for mobile users. As more and more consumers are using smartphones, they also tend to browse online while waiting in long lines or shopping. And with most smartphones having the capability to scan bar codes, many consumers are actively making price comparisons online through their phone while shopping the local brick and mortar retailer. If your e-commerce website is not yet optimized for mobile browsing, you need to make that a priority prior to this holiday season!

The white paper contains more information in more detail than I covered here. It is a free download, and I encourage you to read all 10 pages of it.

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Make Your Social Media Efforts Successful for Your Business

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:23:56 +0000

While many businesses are looking at social media as a viable piece of their marketing package, it is still very common for these businesses to enter this realm without thinking about how they are going to actually implement it. Many of these businesses try to treat social media for their business the same as they treat it for their personal profiles. That will not work.

To be successful in social media, you first need to define what you want to accomplish. If you don't have a target to aim for, then how do you know that what you are doing is actually working? If you fail to define goals that you want to reach, then you will basically start shooting randomly into cyberspace with hopes that something hits.

Along with your goals, you need to define the criteria that must be met in order to determine when you have reached your goal. This will be obvious to anyone that works in marketing, but many small businesses are largely one-man shows. Take a little bit of time to think about what would be a good indicator of reaching a goal. Make sure that the criteria you are trying to meet is traced back to your social media marketing efforts. If you reach your goal, but social media didn't accomplish it, then you should either find what you need to improve your effort or drop social media from that part of your business altogether.

As you are defining the criteria to be met when you reach your goals, define subsets of criteria that must be met along the way. For example, imagine you have a product that you are wanting to heavily market over the next 6 months. You decide to implement a social media strategy into your overall plan. If you only define the criteria for the goal, you won't know for 6 months if your efforts are actually providing a return. If you define criteria that must be met along the way (and leave room for some fudging, since nothing ever goes perfectly), then you can tell one or two months in whether something needs to be adjusted or dropped before spending time and effort that isn't worth it.

Finally, make sure you have the right tools so that you can tell what efforts are paying off. Use a tool like Seesmic to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Use the Google Analytics on your website to see where those leads are coming from. Use the Google URL Builder to create links that define the sources that you control so that you can see what is really going on in Google Analytics. Use a URL shortening service such as bit.ly for posting trackable short links on Twitter and Facebook.

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Need a Job? Get LinkedIn

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

This post wraps up my series this week on why you need to get your social media profiles in order before you go job hunting. First, we talked about cleaning up Facebook. Wednesday, we talked about watching what you tweet. Today, we will make sure that you have your LinkedIn profile ready.

LinkedIn is a great network for professionals that is growing rapidly. Not only does it allow a means to maintain ties to former colleagues, it also provides an opportunity to prove your expertise.

Think of LinkedIn as your online résumé. You post your professional history and can solicit recommendations from people you have worked or done business with in the past. Depending on your industry and locale, your employer might decide to search for you here.

First, optimize your LinkedIn profile so that it works for you rather than just sitting there waiting to be read. Then you should link your profile to Twitter so that your LinkedIn status updates can match Twitter. This helps create the illusion that you are everywhere for those who only use one site or the other.

To help establish yourself as an expert in your field and gain credibility, you should participate in Groups and Answers. Just answering one question a day in a group or posed by someone in your network can help you establish yourself as a expert. One a day isn't much, but it adds up to 365.25 opportunities to build your credibility per year.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, your LinkedIn profile will rank high in search results for you. Make sure that it conveys your message exactly the way you want it.

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Need a Job? Watch What You Tweet

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Monday, I wrote about why you should make sure that your Facebook profile is presentable to a potential employer just in case he chooses to search for you online. Along those same lines, you need to make sure that your tweets on Twitter won't cause your potential new boss to change his mind.

Especially with the simplicity of tweeting from mobile devices, Twitter can be quite the convenient place to post things that should not be posted. Some people assume that only those who follow them will see their tweets and then go on a 140 character rant about their boss or a client. That kind of tweet will definitely turn almost any potential employer off.

Just like with Facebook, you should avoid posting anything hinting at your participation in illegal activity. The guy you just had an interview with doesn't want to know about your epic journey to White Castle. That guy wants to know that, while you have personality, you conduct yourself in a professional manner.

Depending on your job prospects, you might even want to refrain from using foul language in your tweets. For example, my target market is in the buckle of the Bible belt and consists largely of very conservative people. There are times where it would feel great to add a four-letter emphasis to a statement, but I would most definitely lose business in the process.

Just like Facebook, Twitter is likely to rank very highly when you search for yourself. Make sure that your tweets support you as being the candidate that your prospect wants to hire.

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Learn to Harness the Power of Social Media for Your Business!

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Are you a small business owner looking for a cost-effective way to market your business? Has your marketing budget taken a hit during the recession? Do you want to connect with your customers?

Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks effectively to promote your business can seem difficult. But when you are armed with the knowledge of how to use these new forms of media, you possess the power to harness them to your advantage.

Join me for two evenings in October! I will show you how to use social media as a highly effective business tool. You will learn the do's and don't's of social media with a focus on the two largest opportunities: Facebook and Twitter. You will learn how to build relationships with customers through social media conversations. You will learn how to market yourself via social media.

If you're worried about competing with the national brands for your local customers, this class will show you why social media gives you the advantage. If you're worried about the time investment, this class will teach you how to use social media wisely.

This class is hosted at the Weatherford Campus of Western Technology Center. Print this form or go by the campus to sign up. You can also call them at (580) 774-0224.

"Business Aspects of Social Networking" is a two-night class offered on October 26th and 28th from 6:00PM to 8:00PM. You must attend both evenings to learn all of the material. Cost is $35.

Space is very limited!

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Need a Job? Clean Up Your Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

With unemployment rates through the roof (for various reasons), it can seem like a daunting task to find a job in the current market. Want to get an advantage over the other applicants? Then you better make sure that your online profiles are clean, starting with Facebook.

Many (if not most) employers now use search engines to check on candidates for jobs. Do you wonder what they might find? Google yourself. You'll find that your social media profiles (and most likely Facebook) will appear at or near the #1 slot. (To make sure that these results aren't influenced by your activity, add "&pws=0" to the end of the URL in your address bar, without the quotes of course.)

Now, would you hire yourself based on what you see? Answer honestly.

If your profile shows you participating in illegal activities, you just lost points with your job prospect. If your profile shows pictures from that night that you thought you were the Queen of Karaoke, you just lost points with your job prospect. If you post a lot of inappropriate jokes, you just lost points with your job prospect. If your profile contains nude photos of yourself, you... well... that might depend.

To land a job in today's competitive market, you must make sure that what a potential employer finds out about you on Facebook will paint you in a favorable light. This means that you shouldn't be posting rants about your current employer if you are in the market for a new job.

If you keep your profile clean and showcase your job skills, legitimate interests (i.e. quit "liking" every funny page that comes along), writing skills (lose the l33t speak, overused acronyms, and emoticons), and career history, you will be well on your way to standing out a bit from the rest of the applicants for that job that you really want.

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Enhance Your Gmail Productivity with Multiple Inboxes

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:07:43 +0000

If you're a fan of Inbox Zero, meaning that you try to keep your inbox as clear and non-distracting as possible through the use of filters and quick archiving, you've probably run into the issue of accidentally archiving a client's email. You don't look at the folders for a while and then realize the mistake. How can you avoid this in the future?

If you use Gmail, it's pretty simple. I use Gmail for all of my email, even those messages you get from brian.altenhofel@vmdoh.com. Gmail has a nice Labs feature called Multiple Inboxes. Multiple Inboxes allows you to add up to five panes to your Gmail home page that show messages from the search string you choose. I use it to put all of my emails with my active clients on the home page just to the right of the actual inbox. This way, I can set the filter for those emails to archive on receipt, thus keeping my inbox clear of stuff that will be filed anyway, while still viewing new, very important emails as they come in.

Here's how to set it up.

Log in to Gmail (I know, this should go without saying, but I've been offering PC support to people recently).
In the upper right corner, you'll notice a little green flask. Click it.
Scroll down until you see Multiple Inboxes. Click "Enable".
Scroll either to the top or the bottom and click "Save Changes".
You should now have a Multiple Inboxes tab in your Settings.
Enter the search queries you want to show for each pane, and select where to place these "inboxes".
Click save changes.
Buy yourself a beer for lunch.

If you've never taken advantage of Gmail's search function, the queries might be confusing to you. Here are some examples:

to:someone@example.com will show messages not in your Sent or Spam folders address to someone@example.com
from:someone@example.com works much the same as above
in:all can be added to any query to search all folders
in:spam can be used to search only the spam folder
label:your-folder-name will show emails that have been filtered and archived with a particular label

You will likely want to use the last one (label) on Multiple Inboxes. When using that query, you replace all spaces and symbols with hyphens. If you are unsure of what the query is for a certain label, go to it the normal way by clicking on it. You will notice that the search box has a query added. Copy the query and paste it into Multiple Inboxes.

I hope this has been very helpful to you. I find it to be a great productivity enhancer, and I hope that you do, too.

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Managing Your Facebook Page

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

If you set up a Facebook Page for your small business or non-profit, you will eventually have fans begin posting comments to your wall posts or directly to your wall. Of course, that will only happen if you set up your Page correctly to allow fans to post such things. If you haven't, I suggest you read a little bit about how fan interaction influences EdgeRank.

At some point, someone will post something inappropriate on your page. Some people might even post criticisms of you or your organization. How are you supposed to manage this?

It's pretty simple. Encourage people to get involved in the conversation on your page. If something inappropriate comes along, deal with it swiftly and appropriately. If you're really having to actually think about this, then you are thinking about it too much.

The first thing you need to do is determine who will be posting to your Facebook page. It is important that these are people who can communicate effectively. These people will be the only voice of your business or organization.

Next, I recommend developing a flow chart to help determine how to handle certain comments posted to your page. You can feel free to leave SPAM of the chart if you wish, because I'm pretty sure everyone knows to delete that type of stuff. But what about the other comments?

If you are going to build a relationship with your customers through your Facebook page, you have to let go. Seriously. You have to let your customers feel like they are free to discuss anything about your business. However, you also need to make sure that comments posted to your page are relevant and do not hurt the innocent. This is where that flow chart comes in handy.

I recommend developing a flow chart with four categories: Appropriate, Inaccurate, High Risk, and Low Risk. The first category is pretty self explanatory. But we still want to define how to respond to Appropriate comments on your Facebook page.

Responding to Appropriate comments may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to consider who is going to respond to comments. You should also consider what kind of Appropriate comments merit a response. For example, an Appropriate comment concurring with your post (i.e. "+1") doesn't merit a response from you. However, you may want to concur with someone else's post or comment, and possibly provide additional information to support that comment. It is important that you have a plan for responding to comments, even if those comments are Appropriate on every level.

Next, you need to know how you will address Inaccurate comments. These are comments that are providing misleading information. These should obviously be corrected swiftly, and most of the time these will not merit deletion. This is where you will want your Communications and/or Public Relations people to step in. (Considering who you are going to have respond to Inaccurate comments, it might be helpful to also classify media requests into this group for simplicity's sake.)

The final two categories are your Risk categories. These are comments that merit deletion. High Risk comments included violent or inappropriate comments. This category also includes allegations against your organization. These are the comments that need to be assigned to whoever handles Risk Management in your organization and may even include your Public Relations people. These comments should be dealt with swiftly, both via deletion and risk mitigation by press release (or whatever method your company prefers), because it is likely that someone read that comment before you were able to handle it.

Low Risk comments include inflammatory statements or offensive language. The comments that fit into this category typically merit deletion but no further action on your part.

So where do you classify criticism? You might not like my opinion: Appropriate. As long as the criticism does not fit into either Risk categories (especially High Risk), you should let the criticism stand. This is your opportunity to publicly address an issue. By letting criticism stand and addressing it, you can show the rest of your fans that you are willing to handle problems that may arise. You've heard the saying that goes something like "a happy customer tells one person while an unhappy customer tells ten", right? Well, it is your opportunity to show many people beyond just the unhappy customer and his peers how you will work to rectify a situation. This helps build trust with your customers and strengthens your relationship.

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LinkedIn Phishing Scam Alert

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:44:44 +0000

I have been receiving a lot of invitations to connect recently that are fake. What they all have in common (so far) is that the "connection" claims to be a Colleague at Interbrand. I also just received one today that looked like a reminder that you have many unread messages in your LinkedIn Inbox.

I personally have not clicked these because I have a habit of going directly to the website myself. I suggest that you do the same.

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August 23: You Will Lose 30% of Your Marketing Space on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:06:46 +0000

Facebook previously announced that they would be reducing the width of custom application tabs on Pages and removing the popular Boxes feature. Last week, they posted the following announcement:

Based on feedback from developers, we have committed to the following plans to ensure a smooth transition:

Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the "Boxes" tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.

Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

They had originally said the early part of 2010, but that has since passed. If you are using the Boxes feature or have a fixed-width Static FBML tab, you will need to replace those features before August 23.

So congratulations! You just lost 30% of your marketing space!

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Social Media Gives Your Local Business the Advantage

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Is your local small business trying to compete with the national big brands? It can seem daunting given their immensely larger marketing budget, but your small business can gain an advantage over the national brand by using social media.

If you read any of my writings on social media, you will find a common theme: social media is about conversation. This is where the national brands lack because of logistic impossibilities, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Sure, they have millions of fans on Facebook and hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, but they can't realistically converse with local audiences. This is where your small business can gain an advantage.

Your small business can use Facebook and Twitter to develop relationships with customers that will likely become loyal brand evangelists for you. This is especially true given the fact that many people are beginning to use Facebook and Twitter to organize local meetups.

If you're like most small businesses that cater to locals, your business relies heavily on foot traffic coming through the door. With the increased usage of smartphones and location-based social networking, you have no excuse to not claim your business listing on Foursquare. This is the network where local small businesses have a clear-cut advantage over the national brands.

Your business can offer incentives for local customers to keep coming back and build loyalty. The national brands can't effectively manage such a marketing campaign. Plus, when people just happen to be in the area and looking for your type of business, Foursquare users will often look at their Foursquare application to decide where to go. They might even look at the Tips for your business to see what others are saying.

So if you haven't started using social media for your small business, get out there and DO IT NOW! Small businesses need all the advantages they can get. Take this one.

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Why You Should NOT Create a Facebook Profile for Your Business

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:26:49 +0000

I see this more and more everyday. As businesses are getting on Facebook, they create a profile the same as they would for themselves. However, that is the wrong way to create a business presence on Facebook for many reasons.

The first and most glaring reason is that creating profiles for your business is directly against Facebook's Terms of Service. While it is rare to see a profile removed by Facebook for this violation, I have seen it happen on multiple occasions.

When you create a profile for your business, you miss out on some features that are available only to those who go the proper way of creating Facebook Pages. With a Page, you and your fans are able to suggest your business to your friends. This greatly enhances your reach and allows you to take advantage of social networking.

Having a Page also allows you to send out bulk messages via Facebook that can be used to promote a fan-only discount at your business. I recommend using this sparingly, though, as people tend to consider any unsolicited mail to be spam.

With a Facebook Page, you can also create even more closely targeted pay-per-click ads by targeting ads to people who are directly connected or connected via their friends to your Page.

Facebook Pages also come with no limit as to how many fans you have (profiles are limited to 5,000). You can also create a custom landing tab that can really make you stand out.

Facebook Pages are a much better solution for your business. They are not only more tailored to what a business needs from Facebook, but they also greatly reduce your risk of spending a large amount of time building a following only to have Facebook remove you for violating their Terms.

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Your Blog Should be Self-Hosted

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

A question I see online quite often is whether a person should use a hosted blogging platform such as WordPress.com or BlogSpot. The answer to this question is if you want your blog to help the rest of your website rank well in the search engines, then you should host your blog on your domain.

The main reason for this is that your blog is likely to be where you link-worthy content will be. (You are writing quality content and not random musings, right? What you ate for breakfast is not link-worthy.) If you blog is hosted someplace like WordPress.com, Blogger, or BlogSpot, the link juice that you want to be flowing to your website will only flow to those websites.

Yes, it's simpler at the outset to use a platform such as those mentioned above, especially if your hosting provider does not offer PHP or MySQL support. But providers lacking in those features are a rare breed that should be avoided, especially with providers such as 1&1* providing excellent service at a good price with all of those features.

I don't care if you're using Drupal or WordPress, your blog should be hosted on your own website if you want it to perform for you. You want link juice to flow to your domain, and that link juice will help the rest of your website rank better in the search engines. Why allow that link juice to be diverted elsewhere when it is quality content that you created?

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3 Quick Tips for Writing for the Web

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

If you've even surfed the Internet for just 20 minutes, you've probably come across a website that had poorly written content. What's worse is bad copy seems to be most common on websites that have a purpose of selling a product or service.

So how can you avoid such a debacle on your own website?

Write for People

This is the most common mistake you will find. People get so caught up in trying to rank well for certain keywords that they overuse them on their website. Pages with bad copy written in this manner tend to read unnaturally. It is bad to write content overladen with keywords for two reasons: you will lose visitors, and the search engines are getting smarter.

You should write your content in the same manner that you would tell it face-to-face to someone that you are trying to compel to purchase your product or service. Not only is this easier for your website visitors to read, but the search engines will be less likely to penalize you for unnatural content.

Write for Your Target Audience

I see this mainly on cutting-edge technology websites. You've probably seen it, too. Some people get so caught up in using industry buzzwords that they cloud the message they are trying to convey. Others try to use as many adjectives as possible. Both of these mistakes can seriously hurt your ability to sell your product or service to an audience even if they are already prepared to purchase your product or service.

Your visitor doesn't want to have to open up his desk reference of industry jargon to understand what you are trying to say. They also do not want to wade through confusing (and often misused) adjectives. They want to know what you're selling, why they need it, and why they need it from you.

Write for Sharing

If you're trying to figure out the balance between writing for people and writing for search engines, why not consider doing both at the same time? If you focus on writing quality content that your visitors might want to share with their friends or colleagues, then you'll be a success among people and search engines.

Link building is still a cornerstone of search engine optimization. However, natural links are what the search engines prefer to see. If your content is worth sharing, then it will be worth linking. If it's worth linking, it will likely be linked in a natural manner (such as a blog post). If it is linked in a natural manner, the search engines will also likely index it for the context of the link. This is the best of both worlds.

So get out there and examine the content on your website. Think about it from an uninformed (or maybe slightly informed) user's point of view. Find ways to make your copy better and implement them. If you need help writing good copy, then your money could be very well-spent on a freelance copywriter.

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Why Drupal Wins the SEO Battle

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

It doesn't take very long to find good examples of how well-suited Drupal is for large, complex websites. Some big names in the house include the White House and Warner Bros. Records. But while Drupal is hands-down the best option for an extensible website, how does it fare in search engine optimization?

Out of the box, Drupal will check if you can use Clean URLs and recommend adjustments to make if it finds that you can't. Clean URLs allow you to change your URL from the poor http://www.example.com/index.php?q=node/123 format to http://www.example.com/node/123. This is mostly a user experience enhancement, but search engines tend to not consider URL parameters as in the former example.

Drupal Core includes a module, Path, that allows you to change the URL of your nodes to something the search engines will love. Search engines tend to consider keywords in URLs pretty high up on their list in ranking results. By changing the URL of your node to the title or another keyword-rich phrase, your node will be more likely to rank well.

Changing URLs manually on every post, though, can get really old really fast. This is where Pathauto comes in handy. Pathauto allows you to set rules for forming search engine friendly URLs on the fly. Where WordPress generally allows one format for "permalinks", Drupal allows unique formats for each content type.

However, there will be links that somehow get made to your node/123 URL rather than your Path or Pathauto URL. The search engines will see this as duplicate content and will likely penalize you for it. So how do you fix this? The Global Redirect module creates 301 redirects from the node/123 URL to your keyword-rich URL and effectively fixes the duplicate content issue.

So what about independent page titles and metatags for each node? Most search engines highly consider the title tag of a page, and so keyword-rich (but natural) titles tend to enhance search engine ranking. But what if you want one title for your node's H1 or "official" title and another in the title tag? The Page Title module allows you to do this. As for your metatags such as description and keywords (among a plethora of other node-related information), Nodewords is an excellent module.

Finally, sitemaps tend to enable the search engines to crawl your website and index content more efficiently. By installing a sitemap on your website and submitting it to the search engines, your new content will likely show up in the engines sooner, and obscure content will be more likely to show up in results. I prefer the XML Sitemap module. It automatically regenerates the sitemap on each cron run if there have been changes to your website. This ensures that an up-to-date sitemap is always available.

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Why Your Business Should Choose Drupal

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

It's a debate that seems to never end. Drupal or WordPress? WordPress or Drupal? To me, the answer is simple: Drupal.

Don't get me wrong, WordPress works great out of the box for blogs and static websites. It has a very well refined user interface and comes complete with a WYSIWYG editor out of the box. What turns most people off from Drupal is the rather clunky interface and lack of WYSIWYG editor out of the box.

Drupal's modularity is part of what makes it such an excellent solution for a business website. If you decide to add a blog to your website, just enable the module. If you want a forum, enable the module. If you want to add e-commerce capabilities, enable the module. There is no need to redevelop your website.

Drupal offers extensive theming capability. You can theme your website as a whole or by content types, regions, blocks, or even fields. This means you can layout and style any part of your website exactly as you wish without using hacks.

With Content Construction Kit (moved to Core in Drupal 7), Drupal offers the ability to easy create content types that do exactly what you need them to do. When coupled with Views, your possibilities for creating and displaying content are endless. (By the way, Views allows you to easily manipulate what content is displayed from each content type, even based on relationships to other content types.)

Do you have multiple places on your website that you might want to display a single image? Do you want that image cropped and/or scaled depending on that location? As far as I am aware, WordPress does have a plugin that allows you to do this within posts, but Drupal does it as a completely automated process. For example, when I upload a screenshot for my portfolio, Drupal creates the images to display on that post, on the portfolio listing, and on the home page for me. While this is via the ImageCache module in Drupal 6, it has been added to Core in Drupal 7.

Do you want to be able to easily manipulate any and all menus on your website? While WordPress does offer the ability to manage your menus, many developers choose to code them directly. Drupal takes menu building completely out of the hands of the developer and only allows you to manipulate the menus through the administration interface. You can easily change what appears in each menu and where those menus appear without worrying about being at the mercy of a developer with poor habits.

Drupal is hands down the best CMS choice for small businesses, especially if they are anticipating adding additional features later to their website. If you want a starting point for a fresh Drupal installation, check out these must-have modules.

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Manage Your Reputation With Google Alerts

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

If you want to find out what people are saying about your business, Google can help. Google allows users to set up Alerts that let them know when Google finds something that matches a query that the user wants.

This help you keep track of what people say on Twitter, forums, blogs, and any place else on the Internet about your business. If it is something negative, you now know where to go to try to correct the problem.

I recommend that every business set up a Google Alert for at least their business name. If they offer a distinct product, they should set up an alert for that, too. Here's how to do it:

Go to Google Alerts
Set the search terms to your business name (if your business name has multiple words, wrap it in quotes)
Set the alert type to Everything
Depending on how popular you are, have alerts sent to you either As It Happens or Once a Day
Set the email length to Up to 50 Results
Set the delivery to your preferred location

This is a service that you definitely want a Google Account for. You won't be able to manage or modify your alerts without one.

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Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using Twitter

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

You've realized that blogging is an excellent way to enhance your website's search engine rankings, but it's not performing as you expected. What you need is traffic, and in the noise that is the Internet, traffic can be hard to come by. However, you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog (and hopefully result in some conversions). Here's how to make that happen.

Customize Your Twitter Profile

This one is pretty simple and helps to distinguish a real business or person (you) from the crowd. The first thing you need to do is replace the default profile image with either a photo of you or your logo. This is what shows up in everyone's timeline next to your tweets, so it is very important that you have something here that they can identify.

Next, Twitter gives you 160 characters to state your bio. Think of this as an "elevator speech". Tell people who are interested in your profile exactly what you do in 160 characters or less. If you're the type who has trouble with elevator speeches, this is a good place to practice.

Finally, consider customizing your Twitter background. You can add information about yourself or your business in an image here. Make sure to put the most important information on the left side because users might have a very high resolution monitor that will effectively hide anything that you try to put on the right side.

Use Twitter

Get this: a majority of people who create Twitter accounts don't return to them from one month to the next. For many, it's just not the right media. If you're not actually using Twitter, you can't gain followers who might read your blog.

So how do you gain followers? Interact. Some people recommend following as many people as possible hoping that they will follow you back, but that doesn't yield quality followers. What you want are people who are likely to be interested in what you are selling. You can achieve this in multiple ways.

The first is to follow other Twitter users in your industry or region. If they have something that is worth sharing, then retweet it no matter how few followers you have. Some people will follow those who show up on the retweet list, and those are likely to be followers that are actually interested in what you have to say.

You can also user Twitter Search and find what people are saying about your product or service. It takes some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, it can be very rewarding. If someone has recently asked a question involving something you have expertise in, send them a reply. Don't treat it as a sale, treat it as offering friendly advice just like you would to a frequent customer.

Content is King

Just like the quality posts you are writing for your blog, "content is king" also applies to your tweets. If you want more followers to click through to your blog, you need to provide not only good content on your blog itself, but also good content in your tweets. If you provide quality content that is link worthy, you will see links come in.

Use Your Blog to Promote Twitter

Finally, this is going to sound odd, but you'll understand if you think about it: promote Twitter from your blog. That's right! Encourage readers of your blog to follow you on Twitter. Encourage readers to tweet links to your blog for their friends.

Think of this as customer retention. You might have got someone in the door with something that they wanted to see, but how do you keep them coming back later? If you encourage your readers to follow you on Twitter, they will start getting your updates through your tweets. (You are linking to your blog posts in Twitter when you add a new one, right?)

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Choose a Domain Name That Works

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

You've decided that you need a website, but you don't know what you want your domain name to be. Well, you might know what you WANT it to be, but that name might be taken. Here's a few tips that will help you choose a domain name that will help you leverage the internet.

Unique

This is first and foremost because it is likely going to be the most difficult to accomplish. Of course, the obvious is to use your business name. But what if yourbusinessname.com is already taken?

You could add a number to the end, but that will hurt you in two ways (looks like spam, and doesn't make sense to customers). If you really insist on using your business name, I suggest adding your state abbreviation to the end. However, if you read the following tips, you might be able to come up with a better solution.

Memorable

This should be obvious, but some people forget this (especially law firms, from what I've noticed). Even if people get some marketing materials with your URL printed on it or they write it down, most of them will attempt to commit it to memory. If your URL can't be committed to memory, your potential customer may commit to go somewhere else.

If you sell a single product or service, you might go for a domain name that contains the name of that product or service. This can help you both in being memorable and in search results for that particular phrase.

.com

Last, unless you are in an industry where doing otherwise is normal, try as hard as you can to get a .com domain name. As a last resort, a second choice would be a .net domain name. Most people assume that URLs end in .com, and this will make it easier for them to remember.

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Why People Can't See Your Page In Their Newsfeed

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:32:25 +0000

So you've created a Page on Facebook for your business, but it isn't really generating any activity. You might have even had a friend or two ask you how come they never see any posts. You scratch your head and ask yourself the same question.

The most likely culprit: you might not be allowing comments, likes, or your Fans to do anything on your Page. You might be treating it as a bullhorn instead of a conversation. While this isn't the only reason, the information I have to share with you applies to everyone.

EdgeRank Explained

If you've operated a website for very long, you've likely heard of PageRank — part of Google's search result ranking algorithm. Facebook also has an algorithm for deciding what appears in your newsfeed; they call it EdgeRank. Every interaction is considering an "Edge".

EdgeRank is very simple (on the surface, at least). There are three factors that go into determining each of your posts' and status updates' EdgeRank: Affinity, Weight, and Decay. These are multiplied together to determine what order it will appear in the "Top News" tab, and if it will appear in the "Recent News" tab. (Note: this also explains why certain friends start or stop showing up in your newsfeed.)

Affinity is a measure of the level of interaction you have with that profile. If a user visits your page or comments on your posts, you will have a higher affinity score. The same thing happens if you visit another person's profile or send them messages often. This is why as you stop interacting with certain people, they seem to disappear. They are still there, but their affinity score is too low to be much of a factor in helping them to achieve enough EdgeRank for your newsfeed.

Weight is a measure of the type of interactions that your posts and status updates are generating. We should consider ourselves lucky that Facebook even let us in on the basic factors of EdgeRank, but they won't go into much detail on how the Weight factor is determined. My thinking is that creation > tagging > commenting > liking. That is creating a post (such as on a person's or Page's Wall) likely increases the Weight of that particular post. If you are tagged in a post (such as a photo, video, or status update), or if you tag someone else, the Weight factor of the post will increase. Comments also contribute weight, and likes contribute a little. I base my theory on how the Weight factor works on the level of effort it takes for each interaction.

Decay is probably the most obvious to most people. Decay is a factor that effectively lowers the EdgeRank of an Edge as time passes. This is why your "Top News" tab appears to not be in any chronological order. If the Affinity and Weight factors of a post are significant enough, it may take a lot of time (relatively) for the Decay factor to drop it down in EdgeRank. This is why you can see posts at the top of your newsfeed that are two days old, and one that is a half-hour old below it, then 2 hours, then 30 seconds, etc.

So, What Can I Do to Fix This?

If your Page doesn't seem to be showing up anywhere, then the first step you can take to fix this issue is make sure that you are treating your Page as you should always treat social media: conversation. If your comments are turned off so that you can control your so-called conversation, you will fail. If you are not creating quality content, you will fail.

Encourage your friends to interact with your Page a little bit, even if it is only liking a post here or there. What will happen is their friends that they hold a high affinity score with will see that they liked your post in your newsfeed. That can lead to more likes, more comments, and more people subscribing to your updates.

Facebook's F8 presentation on this can be found about 22 minutes in to the Focus on Feed session here.

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Cool Project: codesnipp.it

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

I've followed Amber Weinberg's blog for quite a while, and she has some pretty interesting posts over there. She also gets a lot of stuff published in places like FreelanceFolder. But recently, she has talked a little bit about developing web applications.

Her first web app (according to her site) is codesnipp.it. I signed up for the invitation list when it was announced, so I've been participating a little bit in the beta. So far, it's looking very promising.

codesnipp.it is a social site for developers to post their development work, follow and share code with other devs and get coding help. I have definitely been able to find some codesnipp.its that could come in handy, and I hope that I am able to help others.

codesnipp.it has some nice features such as syntax highlighting and Twitter integration. It also has multiple categories to post your codesnipp.its in, as well as allowing you to tag them as to what they do. You can also follow other developers to see what codesnipp.its they contribute and comment on. This can be especially useful for seeing how others in your field are solving problems.

codesnipp.it is currently still in invite-only beta, but it looks very promising to me. It is definitely aimed at developers, and I think this will prove to be a very useful tool.

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Your Business Can Succeed in Blogging, Too!

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

It's pretty well known that a blog can do two things for your business. First, it provides an excellent opportunity to present fresh content on a regular basis (and just as you like fresh vegetables, search engines LOVE fresh content). Second, it provides an excellent opportunity to interact with your customers.

However, it takes a little bit of skill and determination to make the most of these opportunities. In this post, I aim to help you take the right steps to ensure successful blogging.

First and foremost, you need to remember that blogging is not about PR and marketing. Blogging, like any other form of social media, is about engaging your customers in conversation. The goal here is not to sell your latest product, but rather to keep your customers coming back for relevant information. People know a sales pitch when they see one and tend to shy away from them.

That said, it should be obvious that you need to be human. Humans are going to be reading your blog, and they expect to be engaging with a human. If you only think about the search engines, the search engines will pick up on it and penalize you for it. So stay in human form on your blog and write just as if you were speaking to someone in the same room.

Keep in mind that when you engage your customers through social media, you invite all kinds of feedback into the open world, including the negative. This is probably the #1 thing that keep businesses away from blogging (and/or any other forms of social media). Be ready to accept the negative feedback and use it to improve your business.

I know that some of you are probably saying "well, I'll just turn of the comment feature". If that is you, scroll up and read sentence 2 of paragraph 3. To prohibit your customers from participating in the conversation totally defeats the purpose of social media. Remember, social media is about conversation, and conversation is a two-way street.

So how exactly should you deal with comments on your blog? That is up to your business. Your business should put together a policy of what type of comments deserve follow-ups, what requires deletion, etc. On comments that require deletion, remember that your website is your property, and it is up to you as a business owner to choose what is or isn't allowed to be said on your property. That said, I would leave the negative comments public and follow-up to attempt to remedy the issue that was brought up. Reacting negatively to a negative action only achieves more negative results. In other words, two negatives make a bigger negative.

Finally, you should promote your blog anywhere you can. Promote it on Facebook and Twitter. Encourage readers to share your blog with their friends via tools such as AddThis. Let customers you meet face to face or over the phone know that your website has a blog. Mention your blog in your emails. The more people that you can attract to read your blog, more people will get referred by friends, and more people will convert into sales. You blog may even help establish you as an authority in your field.

I encourage any small business owner reading this to try following the advice in this post. It might be the greatest enhancement you could make to your website.

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Avoid These Costly Mistakes on Twitter

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

All too often, a business looks at Twitter as an easy way to harness the power of social media without actually taking the time to think about what is involved. Sure, it is quick, easy, and free to set up a Twitter account, but it is difficult to really make the most of it. Here are some costly mistakes that you should avoid on Twitter.

Follow Everyone (and Their Dog)

This seems to be a pretty popular mistake to make. Some people insist that you try to follow as many people as possible in hopes that they follow back. This is a mistake for two reasons: you look like a spammer, and your "audience" is probably not worth the trouble you took to "attract" them. You are much better off spending that same amount of time attracting an audience that stands to benefit from your offer.

Think about it like this. If you sell sports shoes, would you rather make a presentation to an audience of 5,000 people who are assembled to hear a series of guest speakers, or would you rather make that same presentation to an audience of 50 who are assembled just to hear YOUR presentation? I think it should be obvious which is the better choice.

Only Talk About Yourself

This goes back to what I try to drive home in nearly all of my blog posts about any form of social media. Social media is about conversation, not self-promotion. People follow others on Twitter not because they want to get bombarded with ads, but because they believe that person or business can help point them toward relevant information. You should try to engage in retweeting links that pertain to your industry or local area.

Limit your self-promotion to only when asked either by a tweet or direct message. This will also help provide context to other followers on what products and services you are offering and might even influence their purchasing decision more in your favor.

Leave Your Twitter Account Alone

Just like how important it is to keep your website content fresh and updated, it is even more important that you keep your tweets updated. Once or twice a day is probably good enough for most small businesses. Be sure to post updates to Twitter whenever you make a new post on your blog (CMS's like Drupal can do this automatically) or have any announcements to make about your business.

People are much more likely to follow a Twitter account that is active and provides relevant information. If you avoid these costly mistakes, you should be well on your way to making Twitter work for you!

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Foursquare for Non-Profits

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

About a month ago, I talked about how small businesses could make Foursquare work for them. Now I want to give a little focus to non-profit organizations who might be wondering how to use this tool in their social media arsenal.

The biggest thing that non-profits thrive on to stretch their marketing dollars is awareness. Money in many local non-profits is typically tight. The more people that they can inform per dollar, the better chance they have of surviving. Foursquare is a pretty good fit for this task because it provides a way for a non-profit to passively stretch their dollar.

The first thing a non-profit should do is either claim ownership of or add their listing. As I said in my previous post on this, you must have a personal account to do this and it is extremely quick and easy to set up. After claiming your listing, you should make sure that all of the information (including the pin on the map) is correct.

While you can apply many of the same ideas from the post about small businesses, where Foursquare excels for non-profits is its ability to be used to increase loyalty. When you have loyal patrons, they tend to spread the word faster and with more enthusiasm. This bodes very well for non-profit organizations.

Possible incentives that encourage loyalty can include the usual reward or recognition of Mayors from Foursquare, but I think offering incentives at different milestones such as 5th, 10th, or 25th check-in would be a better option, especially for foot-traffic driven non-profit organizations such as museums or zoos. This would not only encourage repeat visits, but those repeat visitors are probably going to be much more likely to bring friends along and the cycle will repeat.

Location-based social media such as Foursquare definitely seems to be taking hold. Each day, Foursquare begins to look more and more like the next Twitter (at least from my perspective). Just like small businesses, non-profit organizations should definitely plan on leveraging this new social media tool in their marketing plans.

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10+ Must-Have Drupal Modules

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

So you've decided to go out on your own and you installed Drupal in your webspace. It's running, but it seems clunky and nothing like what you imagined. It's okay, because that's normal!

Drupal is a framework. While it is true that you can run a fairly basic website, blog, or forums right out of the box, it is designed with modularity in mind. This means that to get results from Drupal, you need to install modules that are right for your website.

Every website is different, but there are a few modules that are must-haves in nearly every situation.

Content Creation and Display

Content Construction Kit (CCK) — CCK is definitely at the top of the list of must-haves. It allows you to define new content types and add custom fields to them. You can create fields for any type of content that you want to have displayed on any node. You might not realize it's true potential until you install Views, though. Nonetheless, no Drupal installation should be without CCK. (Bonus: this is included in core in the upcoming Drupal 7 release, but you still have to install it for Drupal 6.)
Views — Views is a Drupal developer's or content manager's dream come true. It gives you the ability to render nodes in any way that you see fit using data from the node tables, user tables, system tables, logs, etc. Instead of having to develop a MySQL query yourself (and hope that it is secure), Views does that for you. All you have to do is set conditions that have to be met, define what fields to pull and whether or not to display them, set up relationships between fields from different sources, etc. CCK and Views are awesome together!
Panels — I used to hate this module, until version 3 came out. Panels allows you to change the layout of your content easily without relying on the block system of Drupal. It can be a lifesaver on super-complex websites it how it seems to be able to solve even the most out-there problems you might run into.
CKEditor — This is my editor of choice, and while there ~~may be~~ are others out there, they do not exist in my world. CKEditor makes editing your website's content as easy as using a word processor, which means that your secretary who has great writing skills but a small workload can now make changes on your website or update your blog without additional training or worrying about messing up your website!
IMCE — This is a file browser and image inclusion module for CKEditor (and, I guess the other WYSIWYG editors). CKEditor and IMCE play very nicely together and there is no need for another module to bridge the two. IMCE allows you to browse the files on your server for images to include in a post and upload (and resize) new images if you need.

Image Handling

ImageAPI, ImageCache, and ImageField — These three modules are absolute necessities, especially if you have an image gallery of sorts anywhere on your website. ImageAPI facilitates low-level interaction with server-side image processing tools like ImageMagick and GD2. ImageCache lets you set up preset for image manipulation (really handy if you need to display the same image in different ways in different places, but don't want to repeat the upload process over and over and over). ImageField gives you a field that is accessible in CCK and Views to upload and display your images. The gallery at Cakes by Darlene is done entirely with these three modules and CCK+Views.
Lightbox2 — If you want to display images (and other content) in a modal window, this is the module for you. Another plus for Lightbox2 is that it integrates seamlessly with the other image modules listed above and Views. While I did list this under Image Handling because that is where it will most likely be used, keep in mind you can display other content (including iframes) in a modal window using this module.

Search Engine Optimization

Pathauto — This is a module that absolutely no Drupal website should be without. Pathauto automatically creates semantic URL aliases based on tokens that you set. This is very important because it scores bonus points in Google and most other search engines when there are keywords (such as the title or type of page) in the URL they have in their index.
Global Redirect — This module helps prevent duplicate content penalties that might arise from using Pathauto. When you use Pathauto by itself, your content is also accessible at its regular url (such as example.com/node/1). Global Redirect searches to find if there was an alias created by Pathauto, and if so it creates a 301 redirect to that alias. This tells Google, other search engines, and browsers that the content has permanently moved to the URL you want it to be on.

Administration

Admin Menu — I admit it, the Drupal administration interface can be clunky and cryptic, especially to people who are not familiar with the system at all. (However, once you get used to it, its rare that it doesn't make logical sense.) By default, many configuration settings and actions are quite a few clicks away, but Admin Menu adds a nice unobtrusive drop-down menu for logged-in users that brings nearly all of these destinations to within 1-2 clicks.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and as with anything Drupal, everyone will have their own opinion. I hope this post at least gets you on the right track toward Drupal heaven and not the Drupal Asylum.

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Is Drupal Right for My Small Business?

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

This question seems to be asked a lot by small businesses who are getting a new (or possibly their first) website. And really, a lot of times "Drupal" is replaced with "WordPress" or "Joomla!" or something else in that sentence. I'm not going to get into a comparison in this post — that's for later!

Sometimes, what they are trying to verify is if their clients and/or vendors can have a secure area that they can log into for things such as project management. Or they are wanting to know if they can sell products through their website. Or they are wanting to manage a mailing list through their website. The list can go on and on. (Even politicians ask if they can track records and manage relationships with constituents and donors.)

The answer to all of the above is a resounding YES. Drupal and do all of that and more. Drupal is a framework to build a website upon. Pretty much if you need your website to do something, Drupal is flexible enough to make it easy. Unless you are planning a website that will never change in the future, Drupal is perfect for your small business.

Feel free to drop me an email via the contact page to discuss what I can make Drupal do for your small business!

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Moving? Transfer Your Website Without Affecting Rankings (Much)

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

So you've rebranded or renamed your business. You've got a long-established reputation with Google or other search engines and rank highly with your old domain. You really don't want to go through that fight again with a new domain to get to where you already are. So, how do you move to a new domain without adversely affecting your rankings?

First, you need to create a sitemap for your old domain. This makes it easier for Google and other search engines to find content on your website that may not be as well linked as other content. (This is actually a something that should be done for every website, period.)

Next, you need to create content for the new domain and take it live. This should not be copies of content that currently exists on your own domain because you do not want to be penalized for duplicate content.

After you get some content available on the new domain, make sure you register it with Google Webmaster Tools. If you hadn't already registered your old domain with Google Webmaster Tools, you'll want to do that now. This is a painless and easy process that only takes a few minutes (and should also be done for every website).

Set up 301 redirects from your old domain to your new domain. This will make users' browsers automatically change old-domain.com/widget to new-domain.com/widget and will also tell search engines that your pages have permanently been moved. If you are actually transferring content to a new server, make sure that the structure is the same so that all that changes is the domain before the first slash.

Now, submit the sitemap that you created for your old domain to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center. This is very important as it will encourage the search engines to recrawl your old domain and recognize that your content has permanently moved. When they see a 301 redirect, they will update their index so that everything now points to your new domain.

Next, fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools and submit a new sitemap for the new domain to the engines. This will tell Google that your site has indeed moved and they will crawl the new domain. The sitemap will help ensure that they do not miss any pages.

Finally, wait a couple of weeks and check the Diagnostics section in Google Webmaster Tools. Fix any errors that occur as quickly as possible. Keep monitoring this section until you are fairly certain that everything has been updated correctly in the index. Also, be sure to keep control of your old domain so that the redirects are still valid when Google crawls websites that are using old links to your site.

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3 Quick Tips for Social Media Success

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

So you've heard of success story after success story about how social media seems to be working for everyone else, but it doesn't seem to pay off for you. Here's a few quick tips to help you reach your social media goals.

Make the Right Connections

This first point is where many people get it wrong. Some people look at social media for their business as a way to reach the largest audience possible. To tell you the truth, I'd much rather reach a small, targeted audience than a huge, largely uninterested audience. If you're looking for connections that are relevant to you, check out the groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and the Twitter directory.

Show Off Your Profiles

Just like any other website, what good is a social media profile if you don't tell anyone about it? Think about some creative and easy ways to promote the fact that you have a presence in social media.

Put links to your profiles in prominent or predictable places on your website. Include the URLs on your business cards. Post the URLs in forums and groups that you participate in. Encourage customers to visit your profile and leave comments or reviews of what you provided for them.

Remember That Social Media is a Conversation

This is probably the most important tip that I can give that the majority of those who are not seeing success in social media are failing at. It is natural in business to focus on what provides the best measurable ROI in marketing efforts. We often forget that social media is not about marketing to customers, it is about conversing with customers and building a strong relationship.

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A Quick Primer on Facebook Ads

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Facebook is a great place to meet up with old friends. It is also a great place for forging relationships with your customers. But have you ever considered advertising on it?

If you've been on Facebook for any period of time, then I doubt that you've missed the ads in the right sidebar on nearly every page. You might think that, with an audience like Facebook's, it is very expensive to even consider advertising there. However, advertising on Facebook is a lot less expensive and more cost-effective than you think.

Facebook ads are bought either on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). While it is true that Facebook has tons of traffic that could potentially generate millions of clicks or impressions, it doesn't have to be like that for your ad.

When you create an ad on Facebook, you can limit who sees it based on many demographics. You can be as broad as showing it to everyone on Facebook, or you can target just the people who live in your city. You can set a specific age range, sex, marital status, and sexual orientation. You can limit your ad to people who speak your language.

You can also specify if you want to target people with certain interests (such as fitness) or employers (if they work for a large enough company).

Facebook ads are a great place to start if you want to embark on a fine-targeted advertising campaign.

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Keep Your Website From Looking Abandoned

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Face it. Most people view your website just like they view your brick and mortar store. If it looks old and abandoned, they assume that you are out of business and move on. But if it stays up-to-date and looks appealing, they assume that you are probably still in business and will likely walk on through the door.

Here are a few easy ways to maintain curb appeal on your website:

Keep a Blog

This might also be known as a News section, or you might have a section for formal news and casual tidbits. Either way, use this part of your website to generate high-quality content that your users will want to read, comment on, and share with their friends. Not only does this keep your website looking fresh, but it also provides another nearly-free avenue to drive traffic to your website that could possibly convert into more sales.

If you do keep a blog, you will want to keep it updated on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is at least once a week. People have short memories, and so if you aren't keeping your posts in front of them they will be less likely to come back. If you are in a fast-paced industry like technology, you will probably want to shoot for 4-5 posts per week at a minimum.

Delete Abandoned Areas

As your business changes, you might quit offering certain products or services. You might have found that keeping a blog or news section just wasn't for you. The last thing you want is for those areas to remain in their decayed state on your website. If you have stopped providing certain services or offering certain products, then removing them from your website will help lower the amount of time you waste fielding inquiries for such things.

Stay Updated

Finally, you need to make sure that important information such as your hours of operation, phone numbers, addresses, etc. are accurate and up to date. The last way you want to lose business is by someone wanting to get in touch with you only to find that their information was incorrect. They will move on to the next suitor.

Another thing that some visitors will check is the copyright date at the bottom of the page. It seems to provide some level of trust that if the year displayed is the current year, then the information is most likely up-to-date. You can do this manually, or I recommend using a snippet of PHP code. Just open up a code editor (or Notepad) and replace the year with <?php echo date("Y"); ?>.

Bonus Tip:

Decide how you want to list your address for each of your brick and mortar locations. When you do, make sure Google Places accepts it. Once you claim your listing there and use a certain address format, use that format ONLY and NO VARIATIONS everywhere else on the Internet when you create or claim a business listing. This is a great step toward ranking well in Google's Local Search.

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Update Your Facebook Page Through Twitter

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

If you've set up Twitter and Facebook profiles for your business and have used them for any length of time, you may be getting annoyed at the constant hassle of changing from one service to the next to post the same update or link. Why not link them together?

It is really easy to do, both the right way and the wrong way. It might be tempting to just use Twitter's Facebook app so that you can send updates to Twitter from Facebook, but this leaves an ugly fb.me short URL linking back to your Facebook page. This can get really annoying really fast.

I recommend setting yourself up to update your Facebook page from Twitter. Yeah, you're limited to only 140 characters, but at least it forces you to keep it short and sweet (the preferred way to receive information via social media). If you want to post pics to your Facebook photo album, then go ahead and do that from Facebook.

If you search Facebook's applications for Twitter, you'll come across a wide array of options. I've tried quite a few of them and have found Smart Twitter for Pages to be the best option. (You can also use Smart Twitter for your personal profile.)

Before you add Smart Twitter to your page, you need to disable any other Twitter apps you might have on your page and unlink your Facebook page from your Twitter account. Otherwise, you'll end up with a loop where your posts will show up multiple times as each app tries to sync both ways.

All you've got to do to add Smart Twitter to your page is go to their application page. On the left hand side, look for a link that says "Add to my Page" and click it. Then to set up which account Smart Twitter is associated with, go to your page and click "Edit Page" on the left hand side. Scroll down to Smart Twitter and click "Edit". There you can associate a Twitter account with your Facebook page.

Now all you have to do to update Facebook from Twitter without getting all the nasty #hashtags and @replies is just use your Twitter account like normal. However, keep in mind that you should still pay attention to both accounts for any questions or comments that you need to respond to.

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How to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Work for You

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Millions of professionals are on the social networking website LinkedIn, and you should be, too. But you shouldn't treat your LinkedIn profile as a necessary red-headed stepchild; you should treat it in such a way to help control what people find when they search for you online.

The first thing you should do is change your profile headline. Your profile headline defaults to "<your position> at <your company>" and doesn't lend itself to easily being found via Google or LinkedIn's search engine. You should change it to something more descriptive that someone would be more likely to be entering in the search box. For example, which of the following sounds better to you? "Owner at VM(doh)" or "Web developer specializing in Drupal and social media"?

Next, you should write a very descriptive summary of yourself, where you've been, and where you're going. You should also be descriptive about your specialties. Avoid the usual clichés like "thrives in a fast-paced environment" and anything that sounds spammy and you're golden. In other words, write it the same way that you would write copy for your website (or hire a copywriter to do it if necessary).

On your job description(s), treat it the same way as you treat your Summary section. This should not be a word-for-word copy of the official job description you had, but should be a detailed description that is easy and quick to read. If you had to hire a copywriter for your Summary, pay them to do this part, too.

Lastly, you need to join LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to your local area, expertise, and industry. This is because when people search for you on LinkedIn, your profile will appear higher in the search results the "closer" your connection to them is.

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Should You Abandon Internet Explorer?

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

I think we all can agree that, with Internet Explorer 9 looming on the horizon, that it is finally time to give IE6 support the axe except in certain special situations. But what about IE7 and (later) IE8 due to lack of support for CSS3?

My answer is no. Some others on the internet would argue otherwise based on skewed statistics due to the type of users their website attracts. But based on what I've seen through Google Analytics running on a variety of websites that I manage or do SEO work, I find that overall the majority of users on the internet still use Internet Explorer. The adoption ratio seems to be IE7=IE8>IE6 (with as recently as a couple of months ago IE7>IE8>IE6).

As long as Internet Explorer comes with Windows, it will be the default browser for a very large share of casual internet users. Many website target that particular set of users and should not worry too much about using CSS3 everywhere possible. However, if your website targets the tech-savvy, you should probably consider showing off some CSS3 using methods that degrade nicely for other users. If your website targets somewhere in between, then feel free to flip a coin (really).

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Slow Economy? Social Media Can Help!

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Has our current economic situation caused your business to struggle a little bit and perhaps make budget cuts in the marketing department? Are you trying to figure out how to stretch every last one of those marketing dollars? You are not alone!

Many businesses are finding it difficult to maintain their marketing efforts both to new prospects and existing customers with the downturn that most industries have experienced. However, there is an excellent tool that every small business should have in their marketing arsenal, and that is social media.

To start off with, you need to think of social media as a conversation. That is the key to a successful campaign. It is not about followers, fans, check-ins, etc. — social media is about building a relationship with your customers. Most of the leads that you generate through social media may not actually be shopping for your product or service, but they are more likely to do business with you if they feel like they have some sort of relationship with you.

When you embark on a social media campaign, you are directly helping to build buzz about your business. In this respect, social media is very much like word of mouth advertising. Your involvement in the conversations about your products or services helps you to gauge what your customers are thinking. How long does it take for you to figure your customers out through a print campaign?

However, don't think for a minute that social media campaigns are free. Sure, you can set up your Twitter account, Facebook page, etc. for free, but what about the time investment. Either you (if you are self-employed) or at least one member of your team will need to be devoting time to handle your social media relationships. This is why some mid-sized and large businesses will actually employ people just for the purpose of being their social media equivalent of a PR rep.

Remember, social media is about building a relationship with your customers through conversation. A byproduct of this is that it will also help to build up your customers' trust, respect, and loyalty.

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Fix Your Facebook Employer Links

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

A problem that I recent have had (and, by looking at their profiles, many of my friends) is that when you enter an employer on your profile, it sometimes links to one of the new Community Pages instead of their official page. This is relatively easy to fix, if you are willing to use Firefox.

Now, I don't use Firefox very often because of its bloatedness, but there are a few toolbars and addons that I like to use every now and then. One of them is the Web Developer addon.

After you install this addon, you'll notice a new toolbar. If you have no particular need for this addon, feel free to remove it later. Here's the step-by-step process of what you need to do to get that employer field to link to your employer's official page.

Go to the official Page of your employer. You should see a series of numbers in the address bar after the last "/". If you don't see the numbers, click on their link that pops up when Search tries to autocomplete. If they still don't come up, find a post by them and click their name. Copy that number.
Now, go to your profile Info tab and edit your Education and Work.
On that toolbar that you just installed, click "Forms" and then "Display Form Details". Please don't freak out here. You'll see a bunch of highlighted text and grey boxes popup all over the page.
Find the employer that you want to edit. You will see a grey box labeled something like <input name="work[employer][id][0]">. I found that sometimes just clicking in that box moves the cursor to the white one, so highlight the numbers that appear in the grey box. With your mouse button still held down, press [CTRL]+V (on PC's, I don't know the Mac shortcut) to paste the number you just copied into the grey box.
Fill out the rest of the information as you desire, and click Save Changes.

Congratulations! Your employer listing is now linked to the correct page! Shame on Facebook for messing this up.

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Fix Crawl Errors with .htaccess

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:30:00 +0000

Last week, I posted about alleviating duplicate content issues with .htaccess. Now, I want to touch on fixing errors (such as 404's) that the Googlebot finds when crawling your website.

If you don't have Google Webmaster Tools, you should. This is a basic service that EVERY webmaster should sign up for. It will give you great insights into what Google sees with your website and how it is being indexed.

In your Dashboard, you will see in the upper-right area a table titled "Crawl Errors." What you will want to focus on right now is the items that are listed as "Not Found." These are pages that no longer exist but you had links to, both on your website and from other websites, and you will want to fix these right away. Most likely, you redid your website at some point and changed the naming or hierarchal structure, and this is where we fix that.

Redirect 301 /old.html http://www.example.com/new.html

Simple enough, right? Just go through and do this for each one of those errors that shows up in Google Webmaster Tools. I've seen some websites with as many as 1,000 issues here, and some of those errors were VERY old errors. By not fixing these, you lose visitors and conversions.

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Make Foursquare Work for Your Small Business

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:24:24 +0000

So, you've finally gotten around to considering social media such as Facebook and Twitter as seats on your marketing ferris wheel, but you've noticed some Tweets that say something like "I'm at Wal-Mart" with a link to a "venue" page on some website called Foursquare.

Congratulations! You've just been introduced to the hottest social media trend of 2010! What should you be doing next?

No matter how you feel about location-based social media, Foursquare is shaping up to be the next Twitter. It caters directly to the people who like to know if their friends are in the same store as them, but more importantly it allows people to find out tips about the area they are in without really having to search.

So, what does this mean for your small business? If you have a physical business, such as a retail store, bar, theater, restaurant, etc, you should really consider using Foursquare to market your business and help foster customer loyalty.

The first thing your should do is get on Foursquare and see if your business is listed. If it is, you should claim ownership of it and Foursquare will go through a process to verify that you are, in fact, the owner. If it is not, then add it. For either of these options, you will need to already have a personal account (which is easy to set up and can integrate with Facebook and Twitter if you want).

So now that you have taken the two minutes out of your days to set up your venue page (that also ranks in search engine results, by the way), what is next? Begin interacting with your customers!

The first thing to keep in mind is that one of the main underlying functions of Foursquare is that it is a game. Users compete for "Mayorships" of businesses by checking in the most over a period of 60 days. After becoming the "Mayor" of a business, some of these users will work hard to defend that position by revisiting that business as often as they can.

There are two ways to reward visitors for their check-ins. The first is to offer a special of some sort just for checking in on Foursquare (and, depending on your business, maybe restricting that to frequency of check-ins or a certain milestone of check-ins, etc). Another I would recommend is rewarding Mayors for obtaining their status by offering them something extra special that will make them want to frequent your business just to get that item or discount (or freebie).

You might also consider giving tips about your business, such as the Special of the Day or a discount you are running only for people who mention that tip. This can entice people in the area to visit your business rather than the competitor down the street. Likewise, you might give tips about area attractions, or maybe even other non-competing businesses in your area (especially if you are in a small town).

Use Foursquare to interact with your customers. You will be able to see what they are saying about your business, which will help you improve your business. You will also build loyalty by giving them extra incentives to choose you over your competitors.

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Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties with .htaccess

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 02:00:10 +0000

On Apache webservers with mod_rewrite enabled, there is a nice little jewel that is sometimes overused and abused. The .htaccess file that you can place into individual folders to facilitate access control can also help you avoid the penalties that many search engines hand out for duplicate content.

Let's say your website is example.com and you have a product page located at http://www.example.com/product.html. You can also access this product via http://example.com/product.html. This is bad, and here is why.

Google sees www.example.com and example.com as two different websites. It therefore sees product.html as being duplicated between the two domains. Googlebot will try to figure out which one was there first and throw out what it considers to be the duplicate. Unfortunately, it won't be consistent on which domain's pages it throws out of the index.

So how do you avoid duplicate content penalties? It's as easy as adding three lines of code to your .htaccess file in your website's root folder.

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

While this isn't entirely foolproof, it should eliminate most duplicate content issues. What this does is create a 301 Redirect from example.com to http://www.example.com. A 301 Redirect tells search engines that the page has moved permanently and that they should discard anything indexed at the previous location.

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2 Easy Steps to Get Found in Google Local Search

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:08:26 +0000

If you've ever searched for something specifically in your area by including your location in the search, you've undoubtedly come across a Google Map with a list of business in your area related to your search. But how do you get on that list?

Step 1: Set up your Google Places page

Google Places (previously called Local Business Center) is a Google application that gains a bit more exposure for your business. Whether you already have a website or not, you need to set this page up.

Before you set up this page, there are two very important things to decide on how to format. The first is your address. Google recognizes "123 Anystreet Suite C" as a different location than "123 Anystreet" and "123 Anystreet Blvd". If you already have a website that has your address, then use the format that is there. If you do not have a website, now is a good time to decide how to format your address. Just remember that your address needs to read the same way everywhere you can control across the web.

Your phone number is also very important. Just like your address, you want your phone number to be uniform across the web. You also want to use your local number for that particular location. If you have multiple locations for your business, stay tuned and we'll go over that in a separate post.

Step 2: Submit or Claim Your Listings

Especially if you don't have a website, you may have noticed that a search for your business results in a list of sites that appear to scrap your information from the phonebooks. Some of these websites allow you to control that listing if you confirm that you are the owner of the business.

Now, you don't need to go to every last one of them to make your changes propagate across the web. A lot of these sites scrape their information from other sites. The following are the websites you need to claim your listing on:

On each of those websites, the free option is good enough. Some of them might call you later asking if you want to purchase a premium account, but you really don't need to. However, Google trusts these listings and many other sites scrape from them.

So there you have it - two easy steps to get your business listed on the map for Google Local Search. Of course, if you are in a competitive market you will need to do more to rank on the front page, but this should be a good start for most.

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Do You Want High Quantity or Quality of Visitors?

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:26:57 +0000

If you spend much time on the internet reading about creating a return on investment from your website, you'll find that there are basically two schools of thought on what kind of traffic your website should generate. You will find people who believe that generating a large number of visitors is the best way to gain conversions, while others believe that targeting your intended audience is the best idea. The truth is, both are correct.

Depending on your business, it might be more important to get your name and product/service in front of as many eyes as possible. This is especially true if you are in politics or a non-profit working for a cause. The idea here is that getting your number of visitors higher than your competitors will increase the amount of people who ultimately turn into a conversion.

However, a side effect of this approach is that, while your quantity of visitors goes up, your conversion rate goes down. If you're using something like Google Analytics, you'll see a high bounce rate and low conversion rate. So while it feels good to say that your website gets 10,000 unique visitors per day, if you're lucky and 10 of those convert into sales your conversion rate will still be a measly 0.001%. In any other realm of sales, that would be an unacceptable figure.

The other side of the coin is attracting a higher quality of visitors. The idea here is to attract people who are likely already planning on purchasing your product or service. Overall, this is a better investment in my opinion.

Let's say that instead of 10,000 visitors per day, your e-commerce website gets only 500. However, because your visitors were already looking for what you had for sale, you have 10 users convert into paying customers. Now, with 5% of the traffic, you're looking at a 2% conversion rate. While that is still a somewhat low number, you (in theory) increased your conversion rate 2000 times just by being more picky about who you lead to your website.

So how do you bring a larger quantity of quality visitors to your website? The most cost effective way is by employing search engine optimization (SEO). With SEO, you work to get your website to rank highly in search engines (like Google) for keywords and phrases that your target customer is likely to use. What happens is that your target customer comes to your website and gets EXACTLY what they were looking for immediately. This is a great recipe for increasing your conversion rate.

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The Phonebook Has Become Irrelevant

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 31 May 2010 19:29:47 +0000

When was the last time that you needed to find a product or service, and you looked first to the phonebook? Chances are, the first place you went was a search engine such as Google. More than likely, you didn't even bother with the phonebook because you found exactly what you needed.

If you pay attention when you search, you might realize a certain behavior. Note that this behavior is perfectly normal. If you didn't see what you needed on the first page, you entered a new query. If it wasn't in the first 3 or 4 results, you likely didn't click on it. If it was a local search (such as "wedding cakes okc"), you probably didn't click on it if it wasn't next to the map.

Your search yielded more information about local businesses providing what you need than a phonebook could short of a full-page ad. As the years go by, fewer and fewer people are looking to the phonebook for information. Previously, you only had to worry about the internet if your target audience was there. Now, nearly everyone's target audience is there.

So what do you need to do to get found online? The first thing that you need is a website so that you can control the information that shows up for your business. But that is not enough to get you to show up in the search engines.

There are two important steps you need to take to make it easier for people to find your business online. The first is search engine optimization (SEO). If you try to find SEO information online, you'll find that it seems like a bunch of black magic. The reality is that, in most circumstances, merely having your website coded well will go a long way to having your website ranked well.

But what if your industry is very competitive on the internet? Then you need to find a way to gain an edge. The best thing to do at this point would be to check the reputable scraper sites such as Merchant Circle or Local.com and claim the listing they have there. This way, you can control the information they have and make sure it is consistent with your website. The search engines trust these sites, which is why they probably already ranked highly for you. If you can leverage these sites to increase the trust of your site, your website will probably end up outranking them (and your competitors) fairly quickly.

Another step to take, if it is pertinent to your business, is to set up social media profiles and use them. The two most popular social networks right now are Twitter and Facebook. These also help to establish trust with the search engines. However, keep in mind that while the direct monetary cost is little to nothing, the time investment can be massive.

So if you don't have a website, get one now! It will be one of the best investments you can make for you business.

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Integrating Social Media Into Your Website, Part II

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 19 May 2010 00:07:52 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I covered how to get started integrating Facebook into your website. This week, we'll discuss Twitter.

The next social media service you might want to plug into is Twitter. Twitter allows for short (140 characters) updates, and is well integrated with mobile phones, desktop applications, Drupal, and even Facebook.

If you already have a personal account on Twitter, you are familiar with the process to get your business on Twitter. If you don't already have an account, just go to Twitter.com and sign up. It's that simple.

There are a few things you need to know about Twitter before you take your business there. First, people hate spam. Don't use your Twitter profile just to make a sale. Your business will not be perceived very well if you send many unsolicited @replies or direct messages, especially if they only contain links to your site. They also don't like a constant barrage of "buy my product!"

Be humans when you're on Twitter. Post about new developments in the office, or maybe even a picture of all of those boxes of a new product you just got in. You might even do Twitter exclusive promotions and coupons.

Think about the people that might follow your company on Twitter. Typically, they are either interested in you or part of your industry. For that reason, retweet or post any links that you think they might find interesting (just don't flood them with a ton of links at once).

Lastly, use the search function on Twitter to find what people are saying about your product or company. That might help to clue you in on things you need to fix or do better, as well as open up an avenue to provide direct support to a customer who might not have received support otherwise.

After you get set up on Twitter, check out the widgets that they offer. You can have your tweets streamed directly to your website, or at the very least you should add a link to your Twitter profile.

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Integrating Social Media Into Your Website, Part I

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:03:08 +0000

If there is one thing that can consistently boost traffic to good content, it is social media. Why? Because if people like something they tend to tell their friends. If you are finding it daunting to get a grasp on how to use social media to help build your business, then quit thinking about it as active or outbound marketing and realize that it should be passive and inbound - just like word of mouth advertising.

Social media comes in many different flavors, but the two most popular (right now, at least) are Facebook and Twitter. If you are just starting out in social media marketing, then I recommend you go at it one service at a time. After you feel comfortable with one service, then add another.

Since it's a pretty safe bet that you are likely to already be familiar with Facebook, I'm pretty sure that you will likely prefer to start there. Getting started on Facebook is easy, but you have to keep a few things in mind. I see people all the time create profiles for their business or organization. This is actually a big no-no in Facebook's Terms of Use, and I know of more than one person who had their account removed. So you need to get your business or organization on Facebook the right way.

To get started, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages and create a page. You'll be presented with quite a few options for how to set up your page. Keep in mind that once you create a page you cannot change its format or name, so get it right the first time. Also, unless you are the actual owner of your organization (and really, even if you are) it is HIGHLY suggested to set up a dedicated account to manage this page. (To do this, just go to create a page while not logged in.) This is because Facebook does not allow pages to ever be transferred, which means if one of your employees sets up the Facebook page and at some point they are no longer part of the company, then your Facebook page is no longer part of your company.

After creating your Facebook page, you need to make sure you get all of your information on there in the right places. Be sure to upload a photo or your logo, and feel free to use a high-resolution image. Facebook will automatically resize your image to fit. After having the basics in place, click the "Suggest to Friends" link and let your friends know that you have a page on Facebook. Some of them might even send a suggestion to their friends, or their friends might just like the link that shows up in Facebook's newsfeed that says "So-and-so likes Widgets, Inc."

If you want to build up your following pretty fast, Chris Copeland Photography had great success offering a free sitting to whoever referred the most people within a given time frame. Remember, people like freebies.

Facebook is now offering plugins for your website that help you connect to their Open Graph. You see some of these on this website. The most popular and easiest to integrate is the Like Button. What this allows to happen is when a visitor clicks it on your website, an item is generated in their news feed that says "So-and-so likes Widgets, Inc.'s article" and has a link to the page that the button appeared on.

By the way, when posting updates to your Facebook page, do it in somewhat the same manner as you would a personal profile. Be human. Nobody likes a constant sales pitch.

In a couple of weeks, I'll cover Twitter in Part II.

Full Disclosure: Chris Copeland Photography is owned and operated by a relative. I have no financial interest, direct or indirect, in his business.

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Drupal for Non-Profits

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:26:25 +0000

Many non-profits operate on slim budgets but desire a website that meets their needs while keeping costs in check. However, if you look at websites for many smaller non-profits, you'll find that they tend to be bland and not very engaging. This is exactly opposite of what a non-profit needs because non-profits rely on engaging people who share similar convictions.

So how can a non-profit operate an engaging website on a slim budget?

Drupal provides an excellent framework to build upon. It is a very well established open-source framework that has quite a large developer community. This means that most likely Drupal can be massaged to fit your every need with a little effort. Additionally, Drupal is extremely scalable, meaning that your website can grow as you grow.

An expense that causes many non-profits to shy away from engaging websites is the maintenance associated with updating content. Typically, they will either have to hire a staffer who knows XHTML, assign the website to a staffer who just happens to know XHTML (thereby taking them away from other duties that could provide a better benefit for the non-profit), or contract a web developer. Having to update a website in this manner takes more time than it needs to. With Drupal, however, if you can operate a word processor then you will have no problem updating your website. If you do a lot of print materials, it's as simple as copy and paste from the document into the Drupal editor. This saves time and resources that could be better used in other areas.

Most (if not all) non-profit operate on donations or fees. Typically, to keep track of a donation made online someone has to figure out which donation goes with who and make a record of it. However, with Drupal you can allow your donors to donate online through a system that automatically makes that association.

Your supporters can also get a membership on your website that allows you to not only interact with them in a new way, but also tailor your content to the type of member they are. You can operate an event calendar with ease that allows members to sign up (and pay) online. You can even improve your social media interaction with your members through Drupal.

With Drupal, the possibilities that non-profits face for their website are endless.

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Get More Out of Your Facebook Fan Page

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:38:59 +0000

If you're like many businesses, you probably have a fan page on Facebook. And if you're like most businesses trying to monetize each arm of your marketing program, then you're probably examining exactly what that fan page is doing for your business. Even though the direct outlay for a Facebook fan page is virtually ZERO dollars, the time investment can definitely be worth a lot.

There are a few simple steps you can take to get more out of your Facebook fan page. Some of these are simple and free, while others may cost a little bit or take some time to implement. However, when you are marketing on Facebook you are not only building recognition for your brand, but you are also talking full advantage of word-of-mouth advertising.

Get a Short URL

Last year, Facebook made a move that was great for small businesses everywhere. Previously, in order to get a shortened URL (such as facebook.com/cakesbydarlene) you had to attract over 1,000 fans. They kindly lowered that requirement to only 25 fans.

This is great for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it easier to fit that URL on a business card or flyer. Second, it allows you to better control the URL for your fan page. By controlling that URL, you can increase both the rank of your fan page and the rank of your website in Google's results.

So as soon as you reach 25 fans, go to facebook.com/username and select a "username" for your fan page.

Take Advantage of Applications

There are many applications for fan pages available on Facebook. The process is slightly more complicated to install an application for a fan page than for your profile, but some of those that are available are definitely worth using.

If you have RSS feeds on your website for a blog, job postings, Twitter, etc, then Social RSS might be worth looking into. Social RSS will take up to five feeds of your choice and post them on your Facebook fan page. Feeds are great for automatically spreading the word, and Social RSS helps you take advantage of that opportunity.

For input from your fans, check out the Polls application. A few easy steps will let you send out a question to your fans and see the results.

A must-have if you want to stand out from the crowd is Static FBML. Static FBML allows you to create a custom tab that can look very much like a website. Facebook allows you to set a tab as the landing point for non-fans, and this can be a great application to give a lasting first impression.

Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook offers multiple ways to promote your fan page and gather more fans that either are, or will likely convert into, customers. As I mentioned earlier, a short URL for your page will make it quite a bit easier to promote.

If you have a website, Facebook offers a widget that allows people to become fans with just one click of a button. This helps you to bring your website visitors to your Facebook page where you can offer them an experience tailored toward social networking.

Facebook fan pages are a great asset to have in your marketing toolkit. Like any tool, it works better for you if you know how to take advantage of it. Go get more out of your Facebook fan page today!

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Does My Organization Need a Blog?

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:30:00 +0000

Every day there are more and more blogs showing up on the internet. Blogs are quickly becoming the main source of information for many users about current events, technical help, product reviews, and maybe even your organization. So you might be asking yourself, "Do I need a blog?"

The simple answer is — it depends. Blogging isn't for everybody, and it definitely isn't for every business or organization. There are a few things that must be considered prior to adding a blog to your website.

First, evaluate the importance of online community interaction to your business or organization. While some industries will likely not see a valuable return from online interaction, many actually will. This is because a blog can help establish you as an expert in your field. And, if you consistently create great content it will help drive more traffic to your website.

You also need to figure out if you really have something to say and an audience to listen. Some industries (once again) don't lend themselves to constant discussion while others involve technology or techniques that may change rapidly. If you don't think you can generate content at least once a week (and preferably more often) to keep readers coming back, then a blog may not be for you.

To create that quality content that drives more traffic and organic backlinks to your website, you need to either be good at writing for your target audience or delegate someone to the task. A blog post can sometimes take more effort than just sitting down and hammering the keys. Many blog posts you likely read on the internet probably took in the neighborhood of a few hours to develop, draft, and revise to make it worthy to be posted. Especially if your posts will be highly technical, you need to consider the time investment of a blog.

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The Fallacy of Last Touch Attribution

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

It seems that when it comes to online marketing the buzzword today is "conversion rate optimization" (or CRO). CRO is looking at your website analytics data and determining what parts or paths of your website or online marketing campaign are leading to a conversion or sale.

However, the problem that most don't take into account is that most analytics data only shows last touch attribution. Last touch attribution is what the user did online last before buying your product or signing up for your mailing list.

Here's an example of why data which uses last touch attribution is not reliable data. Let's say you're doing a rather expensive pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Your analytics is showing that you are getting tons of hits off of those ads, but a very insignificant amount are converting into sales. Furthermore, the data shows that a lot of hits off of organic searches are converting into sales, many times from the page that the search result lands on. Therefore, your PPC campaign is not working because people are searching for your product and buying it that way, right?

Wrong. How do you know how many of those unconverted hits from your PPC campaign were the first contact that the customer made and in turn caused the eventual customer to do a search for you and your product later when they decided they wanted to buy your product from you? The answer is, you don't know that if your analytics data only features last touch attribution.

I'm a big fan of Google Analytics. It gives you access to so much data that you could spend weeks learning it and still find some new ways to analyze the data. However, it only does last touch attribution by default. You can track first touch attribution, though, by calling another piece of JavaScript and modifying your Google Analytics script. Will Critchlow at Distilled has a great how-to on first touch attribution.

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The On-Page SEO That Your Web Developer SHOULD Be Doing

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:09:50 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big topic now, and for a good reason. Often, people default to searching for you at the most popular search engines, and most of those people don't click anything past the first page of results. As the Internet continues to grow, it becomes more and more important to do everything in your power to rank high in search engine results. For that same reason, it is becoming more and more difficult.

If you look for information on search engine optimization, you find a wide range of opinions on it from being a great investment to a bunch of black magic BS. You'll probably also come across some opinions that good SEO services cost a fortune. That can be true, but most of your results will come from what is called "on-page" SEO. SEO work is quite similar to other types of work in that 10% effort will yield 90% of the results. That 10% ~~can~~ should be done by your website developer.

META Tags

I figured it would be best to get this one out of the way first. There is a lot of misinformation on the web that META tags aren't important anymore. That is simply untrue. While most META tags have lost importance to some (or all) search engines, there are three that are still considered by the almighty search engines.

META Keywords

The META Keywords tag isn't used by Google and most search engines any more because of the widespread abuse it received during the 90's. However, some search engines (including Yahoo!) still consider it when determining what keywords apply to your page. Every page should have a unique set of keywords, and keywords should not be repeated. Also, anything past the first 5-7 or so may be ignored, so keep that in mind. Still, this tag is typically the lowest ranking factor, but it's so simple to do and takes so little time that your developer should go ahead and keep this tag in there because every little bit helps.

META Description

When coming up with the description that will be shown in the search engine result pages (SERPs), many search engines use a variety of techniques including giving heavy consideration to the META Description tag. This tag should really be no longer than 155 characters and should concisely describe what the page is about. If this is an informative page (like a blog post), this should be a short summary. If this is a product page, this should give as much information (manufacturer, item, price, etc.) as you can concisely fit into 155 characters. If this sounds difficult, keep in mind that this is 15 more characters than Twitter.

META Robots

Most of the bots that crawl the Internet will take directions from the META Robots tag. You can also specify on a bot-by-bot basis by changing the tag from <meta name="robots" ... to <meta name="robot-user-agent-string" ... For a list of what user agent string goes to what bot, check out http://www.user-agents.org.

There are a few arguments you can give in the content=" " part of the META Robots tag that the search engines will follow. The table below shows who supports what.

Argument	Google	Yahoo!	Bing	Ask
noindex	x	x	x	x
nofollow	x	x	x	x
noarchive	x	x	x	x
noodp	x	x	x
noydir		x
nosnippet	x

As you can see, not all engines support all arguments, but the three main arguments you should be concerned with are supported by the four most used search engines. This is something which is very important to consider because I'm pretty sure you don't want every page to show up in the index, and you certainly don't want an internal page that is linked to from every page (such as a Terms of Service or a Privacy Policy) to outrank your homepage or your money pages in the SERPs.

If you look at the last one in the list, you'll notice that you can force Google into using your description tag. This can be good if you invested a lot into formulating the perfect description tag, but most of the time you'll want to let Google do its thing. After all, it does bold the keywords that show up in its snippet, and bold tends to attract the eyes.

Standard HTML Tags

There is quite a bit you can do with standard HTML tags that will (likely) be on every page. Optimizing standard tags can not only help your search engine ranking, but also the user experience. The more information that you can provide to the user through these tags, the happier your user will be, and it will also help the bots to identify the important information for the search engines.

TITLE Tag

This might be obvious to most, but the TITLE tag is extremely important. This tag is what determines what is show in the window or tab of the user's browser, and in some browsers it also determines the title if they choose to bookmark your page. Having the right information here can make or break the user experience AND your rankings in the search engines. This is one of those areas where you can kill two birds with one stone.

The most important thing to remember is that no two pages should have the same title. There are multiple reasons for that, including A) the user may be confused by multiple bookmarks or windows that have the same title, and B) the search engine bots might consider those pages to be duplicate and penalize one or both of them.

It is very important to included at least one keyword in your title (but don't overload it). The words in your title will typically show up in bold if they match what the user searched for, which will increase the click-through rate of your result. It will also help the user clearly tell what that bookmark or window is about.

The best practice when it comes to formatting the title is "KEYWORD < CATEGORY | WEBSITE". For example, if my website was widgets.com and I had a thingamajig for an airplane, my title would best be "Thingamajig < Airplane Parts | Widgets.com". This ensures that the important information comes before the repetitive information.

Keep in mind, though, you are basically limited to 70 characters in your title. So keep that title concise.

Heading Tags

You've seen these in many places. No, they are not meant to determine text size. Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) help to provide a hierarchical structure to the information on your page. Think of them as a kind of outline for the search engines, with H1 being the title, H2 being a chapter, H3 being a subchapter, and so forth and so on.

Image Tags

All images should have ALT text. Period. There is NO excuse not to have it. (Yes, I've gotten in a hurry before and forgotten it for a while.) ALT text provides screen readers with the information to let a blind person know what the image is about. If you provide text that is very descriptive, not only will you aid those with disabilities or relegated to a text-only browser, but you might actually rank for those images, too.

Hyperlinks

I'm sure most of who is reading this realizes that links to your website have a big effect on where it ranks. However, there are three important elements of a link that need to be considered not only for backlinks but also for internal navigation around your website.

The first is the anchor text, or the text that shows up as being the link. This little snippet of text is important because it describes what the linked page is about. This causes the link to serve two purposes: provide a vote for the destination URL and provide third-party confirmation of the destination content. This is why when you are getting backlinks to your website it is important to have at least some control over the contents of the anchor text. This also helps on the internal links by not only sharing this information with the search engines but also letting the users know what they are clicking on.

The next element that needs to be considered is the title attribute of the link. This link controls what shows up when a user hovers over the link. While it is unknown how much weight it carries with the search engines, there have been people who have been penalized for spamming the title tag.

The final link element that your web developer should be sure to take care of is the rel="nofollow" (or, if your website is set to default all links to nofollow, then rel="follow") attribute. What this does is tell the search engines whether or not they should follow the link that you gave them. In Google's case, it still follows some and counts the link as a confirmation, but does not count it as a vote. It's great for controlling whose website or which of your pages that link juice is flowing to.

301 Redirect

Something that should be done on every website and takes about five minutes to do is to set up 301 redirects for your domains. This helps keep the search engines from penalizing you for duplicate content a example.com and www.example.com. All you need is a file in the root directory of your webspace named ".htaccess" (as in DOT HTACCESS). For this to work, your host must have mod_rewrite enabled. If they don't, consider them incompetent and find a new host.

At the minimum, the following should be in that file:

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

What the above does is redirect all requests to example.com to www.example.com. This also helps keep your backlink profile uniform. That takes less than five minutes to do.

If when you got your new website you change the structure of where pages are located, you need to also add the following to your .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html

The reason to do that is so that all your old links will automatically go to your new destination. This also tells the search engines that that page that was previously indexed has been permanently moved to a new location. This should be done anytime you redevelop a website.

Robots.txt

This is kind of like the META robots tag above in that it tells most bots crawling for search engines what to do. This is great for telling the bots that no matter the circumstances they should not access certain pages to index or rank at all. This can also help if your site is set up so that certain urls are renamed to something more logical, but for some reason or another a link might appear at sometime to the unintended way to access that content. To avoid duplicate content penalties, the best thing to do is to just add a Disallow line to robots.txt. Here's an example of the syntax:

# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/subdirectory/
Disallow: /users/
Disallow: /nopeeking.html

URL Parameters and Depth

One last thing that is very important is how your URLs are formatted. If you are using an e-commerce solution, it's not uncommon to end up with URLs like http://www.example.com/index.php?category=shoes&brand=nike&itemid=1234&r... or something of that nature. However, not only do users and search engines not like that format (hard to remember for users, and sometimes the search engines will get confused and drop the parameters). A much better format would be to limit those parameters to one, so that you have no more than two.

You might run into something similar with a content management system. In that case, it's better to rewrite URLs so that they appear to be something like http://www.example.com/shoes/nike/1234. But with the vastness of the Internet, most bots will only follow links to a certain depth. You really want to limit yourself to four "subdirectories", but a good practice would be only two.

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7 Things to Consider Before Getting a New Website

Brian Altenhofel — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000

In this day and age, it seems that nearly every business has a website. It is almost unheard of anymore for an entrepreneur to start a business without considering the costs of a website and if a matching .com domain is available. However, many small business owners aren't sure of what they need to know before paying someone to develop a website for them. Many are also (justifiably) intimidated to take that leap into an online presence.

Target Audience

What group of people do you wish to look at and use your website? Depending on the demographics, these users will have different ideas of an attractive and user-friendly website. This will also depend on their experience on the web. While some “techie” users will have no problem figuring out that cool out-of-the-way navigation system you want on your site, other casual users may find themselves lost and possibly leave your homepage before venturing into the parts of the site that you wanted them to see.

A first step that you need to take in developing or redesigning your website is to consider exactly who you are targeting. This alone can have a major impact on whether you achieve the goals you set for your website.

Purpose

Next, you need to contemplate the purpose of your website. Do you intend this website to be an “online brochure” that tells visitors about your company, or do you intend this website to be a branch of your brick-and-mortar retail store? (There are also many possibilities in between.)

Scope

The scope and purpose of your website go hand in hand with each other. After deciding on the target audience and purpose of your website, you need to determine how you want to execute. The scope of your website defines how deep and how interactive your website will be for your users.

For example, you may want an e-commerce solution so that you can sell your goods online just like in your brick-and-mortar store, but you might want to expand on that idea and allow users to review items on your website or participate in a live chat with a customer service representative if needed. Both of those increase the scope of your website and will generally require more input and time to develop.

While you may have some awesome ideas for your website, the scope of your website is where the budget is usually broken. Sometimes, you might have to put off developing a sweet function in order to meet your budget, but those additions can usually be made later.

Management

Another important thing to consider is whether or not you need a content management system (CMS) to manage your website. A CMS allows you to easily edit pages and make changes to your entire website. However, developing a website for a CMS generally costs more no matter what developer or system you choose. This is why it is important to determine ahead of time if you really need it or not.

To determine if you need a CMS, go back to what you defined as the scope of your website. If your website is going to be an online brochure of sorts, you are probably better off just having the website developed without any type of CMS. If its “static” (meaning content rarely changes), you will probably incur few fees, if any, to make updates later. In fact, you can probably edit the website with an application like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.

However, if your website has a blog or fairly regular updates (such as weekly press releases), you may be better off with a CMS like Drupal. While this typically incurs a higher upfront cost, you will likely save money in the long run because you are not having to pay a fee for every update.

Hosting

Many people tend to forget about considering who is hosting their website. Depending on the purpose of your website, this can have a major impact on how it handles the traffic that is generated. For example, if your website is simple, doesn’t have a lot of multimedia, and is mostly used as an online brochure, you will probably be fine with just about any reputable host. However, if you plan to use viral marketing to drive traffic to your website, have a ton of multimedia, or even unique and interesting content, you will need to research different hosting providers to determine who will best meet your needs.

When researching providers, a few things to consider are uptime, support, and available resources. These resources include applications such as PHP and MySQL (which are required by many CMSes), memory, and network connections. You need to be certain that your website will keep running during any unforseen traffic spike.

Keep in mind that “unlimited” hosting plans are not really unlimited, and most shared hosting providers oversell their servers. The unlimited plans are banking on the fact that 99% of users use less than 1% total of the resources available. If you’ve ever tried to make a phone call during an emergency and got the dreaded “all circuits are busy” message, then you have experienced a consequence of overselling (the phone companies do it all the time, because they’d be out of business if they didn’t).

If you have multimedia, a lot of content, or expect ~1000 or so visits per month, I’d recommend that you look into a virtual private server (VPS). A VPS is like having a dedicated server, but without the cost of one. You share the resources of a single server, like shared hosting, but most guarantee you a certain share of those resources. You also have the advantage of being able to install applications and reconfigure services such as Apache and MySQL for better efficiency. (Shared hosting servers typically have a generic configuration that will work for most users, but will run into problems when any more than a few of the sites on that server generate a large spike in traffic.)

Metrics

After determining the details of your website itself, you need to consider how you will measure its success. Something that I recommend for everyone is Google Analytics. It is as simple as adding a piece of JavaScript to each of your pages. Doing this will allow you to track no only how visitors got to your website, but also how they used it (i.e. what converted to a sale). There are so many statistics available through Google Analytics that you could spend days learning it and still discover an new way to analyze your traffic. The best part is.... it’s free.

Integration

Finally, you need to consider how you plan to integrate your website into your overall marketing plan. For some, a website is just a presence on the internet that hopefully shows up when someone searches for your business. For others, a website is not only a major part of their marketing plan, but might even be the business itself. How you plan to integrate your website into your marketing plan may uncover a need to adjust the scope to allow your website to be exectuted in a manner that fits your needs perfectly.

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UPDATE: Separating Business From Pleasure on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:22:34 +0000

I previously wrote a tutorial on how to filter what content gets sent to what friends on Facebook. Since the rollout of the updated user interface on Facebook, that tutorial is deprecated.

Today, over 400 million people around the world have a Facebook profile. In the United States alone, around 85 million people have a profile. That means that in the United States over 28% of the population is on Facebook. That's about 2 out of every 7. That's a lot of people!

In this day and age, many people are realizing that the line between public and private is pretty blurred online. With an increasing trend of identity theft, many people are becoming more aware of how to protect their privacy. However, many people still don't know how to take advantage of the privacy controls that Facebook offers.

Some people choose to maintain different profiles on different social networks for either business or pleasure. The usual situation is that a business profile will be maintained on LinkedIn and a pleasure profile will be maintained on Facebook. That seems like a good idea, but what if some of your professional contacts choose to only network with Facebook out of simplicity?

If you choose to connect with professional contacts on Facebook, chances are there are some things that you do not want anyone outside of your circle of friends to see. For example, you might not want a client to see you at that last frat party, or you might not want a coworker to see pictures or videos of you that may damage your reputation in the office. You might even have some friends that you don't want to know much about you, and you might want to limit most of your profile to only those close to you.

Facebook may not seem like it offers any options to control your privacy other than Friends, Friends of Friends, Nobody, and Everyone. But it does. Facebook has a "Lists" feature that allows you to group your contacts into one or more Lists. Many people use this just to sort out the constant onslaught of Wall posts, but Lists are much more powerful than that. You can control your privacy with these Lists.

Creating Your Lists

The first step in taking control of your privacy on Facebook is to group some (or all) of your contacts into Lists. In order to do that, go to the upper right-hand corner of your profile and click the "Account" menu. In the Account menu, click "Edit Friends".

In your "Edit Friends" page, click "Create New List". You will then have a box pop up to enter a name for your new list and select friends to add to it.

After you select the friends you wish to add to your new list, click Create List and you will be taken to a page that shows only posts from those friends. You may repeat these steps to create as many lists as you wish.

Setting Up Privacy Settings

Now that you have your list(s) created, the next step is to use them to assign a privacy policy to these groups of friends. First, you need to go to your Privacy Settings.

You'll land on a page with a few links to different groups of privacy settings. To start, we'll look at your Profile Information first.

After landing on your Profile Information Privacy Settings, choose which part of your profile you want to restrict, hit the drop down, and click Custom. When you click Custom, a box will appear allowing you to enter which friends or lists you want to explicitly restrict or allow.

Afterward, in order to verify that you have set up your privacy controls correctly, Facebook allows you to view your profile in the same manner as a friend.

Photo Album Privacy

You may have noticed while adjusting your privacy settings that there is only an option listed for tagged photos and videos. However, there is also a link right under that to edit your photo album privacy settings. Be sure to hit that as well. After all, pictures are worth a thousand words and sometimes you don't want everyone to hear those words.

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Why Your Domain Name is Important

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:04:26 +0000

I'm sure if you just picked up the title in your newsreader or off of Twitter, you're probably thinking "yeah... I know that already."

You may have recently looked into launching a website for your business, but are having trouble finding a .com that matches the name of your business. That scenario is actually quite normal. There are over 120 million registered domains, half of which are dot-coms. This makes it extremely difficult to find a suitable and memorable domain name.

One thing that you have to keep in mind is that people have come to associate ".com" with business. Actually, it's pretty much a given that they will default to .com in their mind. So if you're looking to register a domain name that will stick in someone's mind, you probably should aim for the best .com you can get.

So, if your business name is taken already, how do you find a domain name that is not only fitting but memorable?

Think about your business. Think about keywords that describe your sector. Expand on those keywords, but don't think about them as you write them... just write them.

Search for your competitors' websites. Check out what their domains are. (This would also be a good time to get ideas for your website's content and design.)

Check for domain availability as you go along. Keep track of each one that is available. If a domain is already taken, consider looking up the whois information if the domain is important enough to be worth buying. Keep in mind that buying domain names that are already taken can become quite expensive.

Remember to keep the customer experience in mind. A domain name with a lot of (or really, any) hyphens can be difficult for the customer to remember. In addition, words that sound too much like other words can be very difficult to remember, and may even cause customers to be directed to websites they would rather not visit.

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Theming the Search Form in Drupal 6

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:29:11 +0000

One feature that has almost become expected on most types of websites, especially those with a large amount of content, is a simple search form. One thing that disappoints many people working with Drupal is that you either have to deal with the default search form that seems to not want to fit into any layout, or you have to install a module.

Personally, I prefer to avoid installing modules if it is something that can be integrated into the theme. Modules tend to create more data that has to be processed than is necessary. And sometimes, for strange reasons a module may not want to play well with another module.

If someone knows how to do a form with HTML, they can easily modify the search form using Drupal's theming engine.

Step 1: Open template.php

Every Drupal theme should include a template.php file in its folder. To find this file, navigate to sites/all/themes/your-theme or (if you are set up for multisite) sites/your-domain.com/themes/your-theme. Look for a file named template.php. If it is not available, then create one.

Step 2: Copy the Following Function

Here is the function that you need in that file.

function yourtheme_preprocess_search_theme_form(&$vars, $hook) {

// Modify elements of the search form
$vars['form']['search_theme_form']['#title'] = t('');

// Set a default value for the search box
$vars['form']['search_theme_form']['#value'] = t('');

// Change the size of the search box
$vars['form']['search_theme_form']['#size'] = 17;

// Change the text on the submit button
$vars['form']['submit']['#value'] = t('Search');

// Rebuild the rendered version (search form only, rest remains unchanged)
unset($vars['form']['search_theme_form']['#printed']);
$vars['search']['search_theme_form'] = drupal_render($vars['form']['search_theme_form']);

// Rebuild the rendered version (submit button, rest remains unchanged)
unset($vars['form']['submit']['#printed']);
$vars['search']['submit'] = drupal_render($vars['form']['submit']);

// Collect all form elements to make it easier to print the whole form.
$vars['search_form'] = implode($vars['search']);
}

Remember to replace "yourtheme" with the short name of your theme. This would be the same as yourtheme.info, so if that was vmdoh.info then that line would read " function vmdoh_preprocess_search_theme_form(&$vars, $hook) { ".

Step 3: Modify Form Elements

If you understand what properties a text-field accepts, you'll find this next part easy. Basically, find the lines that say $vars['form']['search_theme_form']['#title'] = t('');. Replace "#title" with the property that you are wanting to change. All of the properties that can be changed can be found at the Drupal API Reference (hat tip to Owen Barrett).

Step 4: Add the Call to page.tpl.php

More than likely (especially if you are seeing a search box with your theme), you'll already have a call to $search_box in your theme. If you don't, then all you have to do is find the place in your theme where you want a simple search form and add the following code:

<?php print $search_box; ?>

Or, if you want to do it the Drupal way...

<?php if ($search_box): ?>
<div id="search"><?php $search_box; ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>

The reason for that second method is so that you can enable and disable the search via a checkbox the theme configuration module. However, for that second method to work you need to have features[] = search in the yourtheme.info file.

And that's it! A fairly simple solution that includes one less modules and fewer calls to the database.

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Does Your Website Really Need Flash?

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:56:48 +0000

Websites everywhere on the Internet use Adobe Flash. In my opinion, it is one of the most abused technologies out there. If you surf the Internet for even a limited amount of time, you will come across websites that use Flash in completely unnecessary places, such has static headers, navigation menus, tooltips, etc. There's also websites that are entirely in Flash.

One reason for the widespread abuse of Flash is that for many years JavaScript was not consistently implemented in many browsers (much like CSS). Until recently, you had to implement hacks in order to get your script to work as you desired in multiple browsers. Because of the way that Flash works, you did not have to worry about that.

With the availably of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery now widely available and standard, you no longer need to worry as much about adding various hacks to your code to make it work. And if you're looking to support mobile browsers (including the iPhone), using a JavaScript library like jQuery will help you achieve that goal better than Flash.

So how can you determine if you really need to use Flash on your website? Unless you are displaying complex multimedia or a truly complex animation, you're probably better off foregoing Flash and using JavaScript. Slideshows, navigation menus*, collapsible/tabbed content, and other light multimedia is usually best handled by JavaScript.

*An even better alternative for navigation menus is using some CSS tricks that will render in most browser regardless of whether or not they have Flash or JavaScript capabilities.

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Follow, Nofollow... Why Should I Care?

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:08:36 +0000

If you have had a website for any period of time, there is at least one thing that you have learned. No one knows about your website unless you get links to it (either online or offline). Links are the foundation of the Internet. Links make the Internet. If you have a website with no links pointing to it, it is like riding through the desert on a horse with no name ('cause there ain't no one for to give you a name).

Now, obviously the first way to drive traffic to your website is by letting people know that you have a website. Something that is simple that is employed by nearly everyone is printing their website address on all of their marketing materials. This method refers new, existing, and potential customers that the business has already met offline to their online presence. But what about reaching potential customers online?

Backlinks

The answer is backlinks from other websites. Backlinks are links linking back to your website from other websites. Since the advent of the search engine, backlinks have been a major metric in the importance (or apparent ranking) of a website. They've been used, abused, sculpted, and destroyed many times over.

Now it may seem that getting as many backlinks as possible from anywhere on the Internet is the fastest way to increase your search engine rankings. However, as that idea was abused during the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines improved their algorithms, it has evolved into quality backlinks. In fact, having too many spammy links or links on unrelated sites may actually cause your search engine rankings to drop.

Anchor Text

Another important part of the backlinks you receive is the actual text of the link. Between 2004 and 2007, there was a rather amusing "Googlebomb" campaign. At that time, many people got together and put links to President George W. Bush's bio on the Whitehouse website with "Miserable Failure" as the text for the link. What happened is Google's PageRank algorithm moved W's bio to the #1 spot for the search phrase "miserable failure" and, later, "failure."

As you can see from the example above, the anchor text in your backlink is very important. Anchor text is how search engines such as Google determine what the content of the linked webpage is about. Think of it as third-party verfication: Widgets Forum has a link to a blog post on Widget Co.'s website, Widget Co. has their page title and content loaded with keywords, and the search engines check to see if the text of the link matches the content of Widget Co.'s blog post or if it is something totally unrelated. This is why you see a lot of blogs and forums linking to other websites not with the websites name but rather a description of the content on the page where the link lands. (You see it most often on blogs and forums because these sites are typically more aware of search engine optimization.)

The Good, the not-so-Good, and the Ugly

Yeah, I didn't use the word "Bad" up there. That's because, for the most part, there is no such thing as a bad link. Actually a "bad link" is typically so bad that it should fall under "Ugly." So what's the difference between the good and not-so-good backlinks?

A few years ago, Google introduced a new directive for its bots to allow website administrators to control what pages are indexed. Other search engines have also started recognizing this directive. You can set link to "follow" or "nofollow" and the bots will generally follow those directions. Basically, what it means is that if the bot encounters a nofollowed link it will not proceed to the linked page.

Why is this important? Let's use Google as an example since they hold something like 80% of the search market share. Google's PageRank algorithm is what tells Google what order to list websites when you submit a search query. When a website links to another website, some "link-juice" flows to the next site based on the PageRank and how many links the linking page had. If you nofollow a link, then not only does the bot not index it but the page that is being linked to receives no link-juice. This is useful not only for keeping the right pages on your website ranked high (called PageRank sculpting) but also not feeding a site that you do not necessarily like but are linking to for reference.

So does that mean that getting nofollowed links from other websites isn't worth it? Not necessarily. You still need to generate traffic, and in early stages any relevant link will help. A nofollow link is basically a link that doesn't cast a vote for your page to the search engine. Hopefully, someone who clicks your link will eventually link to your website with a followed link. These human-created links are commonly referred to as "organic" links.

So what links are ugly for your website? Basically, a link from a completely irrelevant site, possibly with completely irrelevant anchor text, has the potential to cause the search engines to penalize your website as spam.

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Are You Ready for Facebook's Upcoming Changes?

Brian Altenhofel — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:06:10 +0000

Many businesses and individuals utilized the Pages application on Facebook. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, Facebook allows people to create Pages for their business or themselves that operate separately from the user profile. Facebook Pages are also commonly referred to as "Fan Pages" and is what the stream is referencing when it says that "John Doe became a fan of VM(doh)."

During the summer of last year, Facebook made a change that made many Page owners extremely excited: they reduced the minimum amount of fans needed to "claim" a username as a short URL from 1,000 to 25. However, one of the changes has many Page owners rightfully worried.

According to the Roadmap Profile, Facebook will be rolling out some new changes during early 2010. The major change that will affect many Pages is the change to the width of Application Tabs. Currently, an Application Tab can be up to 760 pixels wide. Facebook will be reducing that to 520 pixels. How wide is 520 pixels? Click on the Wall Tab.

Many Facebook Page owners use applications (including the Static FBML application) to create a landing tab on their Fan Pages. These are usually designed to take advantage of every pixel available. After this change is rolled out, Page owners will have 30% less space to use. Ask anyone in marketing, and they will let you know that is a HUGE reduction.

Another change that will affect many Facebook Page owners is the elimination of Boxes. That's right, Facebook is completely eliminating Boxes. For Page owners that did not want to learn FBML or have the budget to hire a developer, Boxes were seen as a way to create a custom landing tab with little effort. Many applications also use Boxes to integrate with user profiles, and these will need to be migrated to using Application Tabs.

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A Minor Flaw With Facebook's Privacy Settings

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:12:20 +0000

A couple of months ago, Facebook started rolling out a new way to manage privacy controls. For the most part, they did a really good job. However, even if you don't opt to share a photo with everyone, they still provide you with a link to give the public access.

I'm sure that for "security" reasons that the link is randomly generated. However, what happens if someone just, by coincidence, enters in the public URL for that photo that you did not want certain people, or maybe even ANYONE, to see? Or maybe that URL gets randomly generated by a third party looking for pictures? Or maybe you clicked a link that you shouldn't have and compromised your account?

Let me show you what I mean:

Upload a picture and tell Facebook to only give you access to view it.

Verify.

Find the link and copy it.

Log out and go to the public link for your supposedly private photo.

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Things to Know Before Starting a Social Media Campaign

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:41:31 +0000

If you're like more than 300 million people in this world, you've used social media in your personal life. From that experience, using social media for anything might seem easy at first. After all, it is all about having interactions online that are analogous to your daily interactions, right?

When using social media for business, it can get a little more complicated than just that. While in "real life" you can exert a large amount of control over the interactions that your clients have with you, that just isn't so in the online world. You might still be able to control the conversations a little bit, but what would social media be without being, well, social?

Why Social Media

Before you even get started with using social media as a marketing tool for your business, you need to determine why you want to use social media. You need to first decide if you have an audience on social media websites. Honestly, no matter what the industry, with how big social media has become in the last decade you likely do have an audience of some sort.

You also need to ask yourself what kind of market does social media offer. Are you in a niche market where social media may prove to be a much better avenue for marketing to certain people? Can you really take advantage of passive word-of-mouth marketing? And, as with any marketing effort, is the return on investment (ROI) really there and worth it?

What about your goals? You do have goals associated with using social media for your business, right? The real question here is what kind of social media will help achieve those goals most efficiently. There are many types of social media out there, from social networking (i.e. Facebook) to blogs to real-time updates (i.e. Twitter) to news/media sharing to... the list can go on and on. You need to to determine which of these avenues will provide the best ROI for you.

Social Media is Social

The hardest part about social media marketing for most businesses is letting go of some of the control of their brand. Social media is built around conversations. When these conversations about your brand happen, you begin to lose control of your brand. However, by participating in these conversations you can share control of your brand, and social media is all about sharing. If you are not willing to share control in the shaping of your brand, then social media is the wrong place for you to be marketing. Period.

Another difficult task involves the initial phase of a social media marketing campaign. The question is, how do you get people to interact with your business online? Once you determine how you want to get people involved, you need to ask yourself if you have the money to invest in building your social media presence.

Knowing Your Resources

By now you're probably thinking that this is all as easy as it sounds. However, there are still a few more points to consider about social media marketing and their cost factor for your business.

You need to ask yourself who will be responsible for maintaining your social media presence. As a business, participating in social media entails a lot more work than most people truly realize. It will take a rather large commitment to maintain this presence and will likely not even get off the ground unless it becomes part of someone's job.

You need to analyze how this will affect your other marketing campaigns. Chances are, you do not have unlimited resources. If you start a social media campaign, you will likely be moving resources from an under-performing campaign. If your resources are very limited, you may not even be able to afford social media marketing. If the latter is the case, then you may consider a trial run with a limited-duration campaign such as Twitter coverage for a local event or conference.

You also need to determine metrics for measuring social media success. After all, how do you know you are actually getting the ROI to justify your marketing campaign? Some of these metrics may include followers, comments, fans, or even tracking events from your social media campaigns to the point where they actually convert to a sale. If you aren't achieving success from your social media marketing, then you need to revisit why you are even using social media and examine what you might even be doing wrong.

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Merry Christmas!

Brian Altenhofel — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:27:51 +0000

Well, it's that time of year again. The time where many feel more compelled than usual to give. The time when we make our New Year resolutions (that are unlikely to be kept). And a perfect time to start fresh with marketing yourself or your business.

Many people and business start changing their marketing and promotion strategies around this time of year, and it makes absolutely perfect sense. What better way to mark a big change for you or your business than with a date that most have marked on their calendar? Plus, a lot of people take (or some even get) a lot of time off during these couple of weeks, which means more people are frequenting social sites like Facebook. That in itself makes it a perfect time for creating more community buzz about yourself.

What is VM(doh) doing to ring in the new year? Of course, there has been a special running on Twitter and Facebook page design in the spirit of the Christmas season. But I will be launching the hosting services to the public on January 1, 2010! I thought that would be a great time to have that system ready to go.

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas this holiday season. I also hope that everyone has a much better year in 2010 than they did in 2009.

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5 Effective Ways to Increase Sales Conversions From Your Website

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:50:15 +0000

People have websites for different reasons. Some have personal sites while many have a website for marketing their business. Some businesses see their website as just a presence on the Internet. Others see their site as a point of contact. And still, many see their website as a primary marketing or sales vehicle. Those who see their website as a primary marketing or sales vehicle tend to not only have a large part of their budget allocated towards their website, but they are also expecting their website to convert visitors into paying customers.

How exactly do you ensure that your website traffic converts to sales? It is not an easy task to accomplish, but by employing the right methods you can maximize conversions to sales from your website.

1. Check Your Titles

This is really a simple action that will not only aid in increasing your conversion rate, but can also have the desired side effect of increasing your rankings in the search engines. If you change the title text of the particular page that your visitors are on to something that is relevant to the content, not only will it be less confusing for your visitors but it will also reduce the likelihood that your page is penalized by the search engines for duplicate titles. I am not only referring to the tag that determines the text that appears in the title bar of your browser and determines the title of your page when it is bookmarked, but the title that is displayed within your content should also be noticeable (and, for the search engines, enclosed in H1 tags).

2. Talk About Yourself

People don't like to visit, and especially shop, websites that either seem like a front or just flat anonymous. Just having your company logo, and even address, is not enough. You need to convince the visitor that they are communicating with a real business or a real person. People prefer a personal connection; you don't like talking to a robot, do you?

3. Show That You Care

If you want a very simple way to make your visitors feel more at ease during the process of converting them to customers, draft a privacy policy that lets them know exactly how you plan to use any information you collect (both actively and passively). With the rising trend of identity theft, visitors need to be assured that their personal information is being collected, used, and transmitted in an appropriate manner. This is especially important if you are actually producing transactions on your website. In some countries and states (California, for example), it may be illegal for you to sell a product over the Internet without an adequate privacy policy in place.

4. Rethink Your Visuals

Think about how your website is designed. Are the graphics too distracting? Are the colors a bit lacking, or even eye-burning? Often, having graphics in place that don't properly support the information you are trying to convey can be quite a distraction. Colors that are hard on the eyes or lacking in contrast can cause your visitors to search for alternatives due to eye-strain.

5. Provide Interaction

Since the advent of Web 2.0, Internet users have come to expect some level of interaction on websites. Depending on the content of your website, this can include comments, reviews, live chat, forums, a blog, animations, videos, etc. Providing a way for your visitors to feel like they can interact with your will make your website feel even more personal to them. The less like a robot and more personal your website feels the more likely it is that a visitor will convert to a customer.

In closing, I believe that by employing these five methods your website will become a more effective tool for converting leads to paying customers. These methods can be successfully used on any type of website you have.

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Your E-mail Address May Be Hindering Your Business

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:48:09 +0000

You have just recently started your business website (or it may even have been online for years) and you are still using your personal e-mail address as your primary contact? I mean, you're paying for a domain name for your business or yourself — why not use an e-mail address at that domain?

If your excuse is that your host does not offer email services, then change your host ASAP because you've been had. I'm stating it point blank and simple. There is no reason that your host should not be offering a reasonable amount of space for your e-mail. If your host just doesn't offer enough space, then take advantage of a POP service that will also send e-mails as if they came from your domain, such as Google Mail. (Even though my server is my own, I have Google Mail pull all of my e-mail from all of my accounts to that one central location. I get a fairly high volume of incoming spam, but I don't go over 10-12% of my capacity there which is currently 7.4GB and growing.)

When you get an e-mail from someone either offering or inquiring about B2B services, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you see ****@yahoo.com or ****@hotmail.com? I'm sure you ask yourself if it is legitimate or not. Guess what? The same thing happens when you send out an e-mail. Another side effect of a "free" e-mail address is that it carries the social stigma that you are not serious about your business.

Just like mixing business and pleasure on Facebook, it doesn't work very well to mix business and pleasure in your inbox. It is far too easy to send personal email to a business contact, or vice-versa. I can think of quite a few instances where I've either received e-mails I shouldn't have or nearly sent an e-mail I shouldn't have in my personal accounts.

At this point, I'm sure you're starting to think about getting an e-mail address at your domain that you are using for your business website. A sure reservation to come up in your mind is that this is yet another inbox to check. However, it doesn't have to be that way! There are a few options available.

One option that might stick out is to use an offline e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. That's great and all, until you are 100 miles from your office and desparately need to double check the details in that e-mail you forgot to print. Another option might be to use simple forwarding to your personal e-mail. However, that might confuse your clients even more when they send you an e-mail at yourname@yourbiz.com and receive a reply from angel6kisses9@yahoo.com. (Okay, maybe that Yahoo! address was a bit extreme of an example but it is still just as confusing if it is yourname@yahoo.com.)

In my opinion, the best option is to use an online service like Google Mail that allows you to check your POP accounts at other domains and send e-mails that appear to originate at those domains. For example, I have Google Mail checking brian@altenhofel.com, brian.altenhofel@vmdoh.com, and brianaltenhofel@hotmail.com. If I receive an e-mail at any of those addresses, I can reply with an e-mail that is from any of those addresses. Another advantage of using their service is they have a GREAT spam filter. I was previously using a commercial spam filter (which I will not name, but I'm sure your ISP uses it) and was still having to wade through 800-1000 spam e-mails a day just to find the 60-70 that I wanted to read. Since sending everything to Google Mail, I'm down to maybe 4-5 spam e-mails showing up a day.

I should probably mention that I am NOT affiliated with Google in any way. I am just a VERY happy customer!

You might be wondering about using your ISP's domain for your e-mail address. I see that as even less professional as it doesn't go with you when you change providers in addition to the reasons above about free services.

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Do You Know Where Your Traffic is REALLY Coming From?

Brian Altenhofel — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:29:08 +0000

So you've put up a new blog post, or you have started a huge marketing blitz. Your traffic and sales are going up. That's good right? Since your shotgun promotion is working now, you want to use it on your next big sale, right? How could you possibly make it better?

Why not track your site visitors? If you implement some form of tracking on your website, you can not only track where your visitors are coming from, but also the path that ultimately converts to a sale. When done incorrectly, visitor tracking can really take up more time than it is worth. However, if you can execute visitor tracking well, you can be better informed of what online marketing and promotion methods work.

You don't have a big enough budget for a program like Omniture? No problem! Google offers a very powerful analytics tool. And the best part? It's FREE! Another good thing about it is that it is extremely easy to use.

Right out of the box, Google Analytics will provide you with a wide array of metrics showing where your users came from and what they did on your website. If you don't take a deep breath before getting started, you might fall victim to information overload.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

Like I said before, it is easy to get Google Analytics running on your website. It's as simple as copy and paste. All it requires is for you to copy a JavaScript snippet to the code of every page of your website that you want to be tracked. If you are using a content management system, there is likely a module available to make it easier to choose which content you want to be tracked. If you are using a specialty website host that allows you to edit the code of your site's layout and include JavaScript (like SmugMug), you can even add Google Analytics there.

I stated above that you will have a wide array of metrics available to you just by inserting the Google Analytics snippet on your site. In your Google Analytics account, once your site's status shows a green checkmark to say the code was found you can click "View Report" and see what data has been gathered.

By default, the Dashboard will show charts of how many visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, time on site, and new visitors. In addition to those charts, you will also see a map of where your visitors are originating, unique visitors per day, types of sources of traffic, and what content was viewed the most.

I told you you might be overwhelmed with a bit of information overload, didn't I? Don't worry, there's even more which I will get into in a later post.

Tracking the Links You Put Out

By default, Google Analytics will do a pretty good job of tracking your links that you have scattered everywhere with your marketing campaign. For some people, just knowing that the traffic came from Facebook, a particular forum, or just a regular search will be enough. However, you can make Google Analytics an even more powerful tracking tool by using another Google tool, the Google Url Builder.

If you got to this page like most people, you may have noticed a lot of &'s and ?'s in the URL. That's because I am using an URL that sends even more data to Google Analytics. Rather than just being able to see where you came from, I can note if this was from a text link, rss feed, pay-per-click ad, banner, etc. I can also note which campaign this was from, and even assign a keyword to the link. These metrics can then be tracked under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics. To me, the URL Builder is so important that it has a special place on my Favorites bar in all of my browsers.

By the way, if you are using AdWords to pay for ads on Google's search results or their content network, there is no need to use the Url Builder for those links. All you have to do is link your Analytics and AdWords accounts together and your ads will be auto-tagged, saving you a quite a bit of time.

Other Recommendations

Another tool that I absolutely adore for tracking my traffic sources is bit.ly. You may have noticed that it is the URL shortener of choice in many Twitter applications. One thing that really comes in handy about this URL shortener is that you can sign up for a free account there and track (albeit rather primitively) any URLs you shorten through their service.

Lastly, heed the following advice. Trust me. Those around you will appreciate it, as will your sanity.

DO NOT OBSESS OVER GOOGLE ANALYTICS.

While it is great that you can see where your traffic comes from and what is working for your, you don't need to check it every day. I recommend letting it run for about a month first, and then check it once or twice a week. Limit yourself to the Dashboard until you need to re-evaluate your online marketing strategy, and then delve into the other metrics offered by Google Analytics. You WILL go crazy if you try to microtrack every metric every day.

Now go find out where your traffic is really coming from and what is really working for your marketing and promotional campaign!

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Separating Business From Pleasure on Facebook

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:21:04 +0000

This version of this article is deprecated due to a new user interface rolled out by Facebook. A version that is up to date as of February 13, 2010, is available here.

Today, over 300 million people around the world have a Facebook profile. In the United States alone, around 85 million people have a profile. That means that in the United States over 28% of the population is on Facebook. That's about 2 out of every 7. That's a lot of people!

Creating Your Lists

The first step in taking control of your privacy on Facebook is to group some (or all) of your contacts into Lists. In order to do that, you need to click the "More" link on the left side of your Facebook home page. After you click that, the menu will expand and at the bottom will be a "Create new list" link. Click that.

You will then have a box pop up to enter a name for your new list and select friends to add to it.

Setting Up Privacy Settings

Now that you have your list(s) created, the next step is to use them to assign a privacy policy to these groups of friends. First, you need to go to your Profile Privacy Settings.

After landing on your Profile Privacy Settings, choose which part of your profile you want to restrict, hit the drop down, and click Customize.

Be sure to click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page. Afterward, in order to verify that you have set up your privacy controls correctly, Facebook allows you to view your profile in the same manner as a friend.

Photo Album Privacy

You may have noticed while adjusting your privacy settings that there is only an option listed for tagged photos. However, there is also a link right under that to edit your photo album privacy settings. Be sure to hit that as well. After all, pictures are worth a thousand words and sometimes you don't want everyone to hear those words.

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Four Simple Things That Can Help Your Site Rank Higher

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:12:38 +0000

Most businesses with a website are always looking for ways to increase their visibility in search engine results for particular keywords. For some, it may seem like an impossible feat to achieve Page 1 Position 1. However, it is not impossible at all. It is just rather difficult. But with the right techniques and tactics you can move your website to the first result for your keywords.

The following is a list of simple things that you can do. You wouldn't believe how often these are overlooked.

1. META Tags

While the "keyword" meta tag has lost importance with most search engines (some even to the point of not even checking it at all), the "description" tag remains a very useful tool with many search engines.

There are two ways that search engines usually decide what text to use in your listing. One way, which you have no real control over, is to take a snippet of your content that pertains to the searched keyword. The other way, which you DO have control over, is to use the contents of the "description" meta tag. Unless your tag differs substantially from your contents, most search engines will display the tag with your search result. This tag should never be overlooked and should be unique to each page.

2. Heading Tags

You know those H tags? They aren't just for sizing text. Search engines like to look for H1 tags to determine the title of the page, and h2-h6 to provide the structure of the content. If you use these tags, it is imperative that you also use CSS to style them how you want them to look.

3. Anchor Text

You might not be sure exactly what I am referring to here. Anchor text is the text that is used as the title for the link to your page by another site. Search engines give more credit to third-party verification of content, which is why link-building is important for your search engine optimization.

Think about this: which tells you more about a link? "CLICK HERE" or "leading widget manufacturer"? When trying to get links to your website, try to get descriptive anchor text. Even if it is just your company name, it is better than nothing. If it describes you, that's better. If it accurately describes the content of the target page, then you're well on your way!

4. Keyword Density

Something that you can implement when producing copy for your website is striving for good keyword density. If there are not enough keywords in your content, your page might be ignored by the search engines. However, it works the other way, too: if you have too high of a keyword density, search engines will penalize your page.

So how do you strike the right balance of keyword density on your page? SIMPLE: compose your copy in a natural manner! If your content is natural and doesn't seem spammy, then the search engines will be less likely to regard it as spam.

So there you have it, four simple things that can help your site rank higher with minimal effort. Go ahead and try these and recheck the search results page after a month or two on an important keyword for you — you will likely have moved up a bit.

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Where is My Website?

Brian Altenhofel — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:53:51 +0000

We've all been there (or will be) at some point. We launch a new website only to find weeks later that it is not showing up in search results for a very important keyword. You may be thinking, "Well, this just goes to show that you can't compete with the big fish on the Internet." You couldn't be any more wrong.

Enter the SEO. Depending on the context, "SEO" can mean "Search Engine Optimizer" or "Search Engine Optimization." Yes, this is more of that computer lingo alphabet soup. If you ask anyone on the Internet about SEO, you'll probably get a gamut of responses ranging from "pure snake oil" to "Wizards of the Internet." They are anything but the former.

One thing that is very important to grasp about the Internet is that search engines read your website much differently than humans. A search engine spider will crawl your website with complete objectivity, whereas a human will interpret your images, read between the lines, and form their own opinion.

To determine the trust or relevancy of your website, search engines will score you based on important things such as headings, keywords in content (not too dense, but enough to determine the purpose of the content), links to and from your website, descriptions of your pages, duplicate content on your website, etc. There are so many factors that go into your ranking on a search engine that not only can it be daunting and overwhelming to optimize your website for search engines yourself, but it can also be futile if not armed with the right knowledge.

This is where SEO's come in. SEO's are professionals who understand the way that search engine systems work and how to use these systems to their advantage. Unless you are in a very, very small niche market, you need search engine optimization in order to rank well and show up in the results.

SEO should not be overlooked, whether your website is well established or just recently launched. If your page does not show up within the first three pages of results, it is very likely that the potential vistor will not find your website. In fact, the overwhelming majority of search engine users don't make it past the first page before revising their query. This is why you need search engine optimization to better serve your intended audience.

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What Your Website Says About Your Business

Brian Altenhofel — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:23:09 +0000

So you have a website for yourself or your business. In some markets, you may be well ahead of your competitors. But in some markets, many of your competitors may also have their own websites. Is your website worth your investment?

A website is one of your faces, analogous to a storefront. When someone comes to your website, whether by way of search, advertisements, or pure luck, your website is your chance to make a good first impression. Your website can either show your visitors that you are modern and embracing current technology, or that you are still sitting in 1994.

Think about this: how do you judge a website's authority? My guess is that you make your first judgment based on its design. The more that we use the Internet, the more accustomed we become to seeing a certain level of quality and features. If a website seems lacking in quality, many of us move on to the next one. Sometimes a visitor will even go so far as assuming that the website may no longer be maintained if it doesn't seem to be following modern trends. Here's a thought: when was the last time you really looked at those "Updated on" timestamps on a website?

The first impression from your website can shape your visitors' perception of your credibility. It can also influence their purchasing decisions. It is just like your storefront and salesfloor: it is all about perception. If you can nudge your visitors into assigning a higher perceived value or quality of service that your competitors, you can gain an edge in the online world.

Another factor for your visitors' perception about you that you can control is the usability and accessibility of your website. If your website's navigation is not normal (according to recent trends) or intuitive, you can lose valuable visitors because people do not want to spend time to figure out how to use your website. If your visitors can't figure out pretty quickly how to get to the information they want, they will go elsewhere. Even if they spend more time searching for a website that is easy to use than they would have figuring out yours, they will likely perceive it as a victory in their quest for information.

If your website is not easy to use, you will lose visitors. If your website is not accessible by those with disabilities, you are alienating a piece of the market. These issues are like putting a pair of shoes on a shelf in the grocery department or not making your business accessible by wheelchair. You can lose valuable visitors this way.

So how can you improve on your first impression to Internet users? An effective website design should be your first step to making a lasting positive first impression. An effective website design not only applies to the visual aspects of your website, but encompasses the entirety of your website. If you can provide your users with a good experience, then you can increase your chances of website visits turning into conversions. And that means a better return on investment.

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May the Curtain Rise!

Brian Altenhofel — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:47:01 +0000

Hello and welcome to the blog of VM(doh)! What you will find here will be posts about current happenings and trends in website design, social networking, search engine optimization, what I ate for breakfast, etc. I'll try to keep this updated at least once a week for you to keep you fresh and up to speed.

I encourage you to subscribe to our feed, become our fan on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter. Why? Because we may use these channels from time to time as a means of offering special discounts to you!

I hope you choose to return, as we hope to serve you sometime in the (near) future!

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VM(doh)

Say No to SOPA/PROTECT-IP

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Drupal 7 WYSIWYG - as a FEATURE

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Using Git to Manage Custom Themes on Aegir Hosted Sites

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Replacing Drupal 7 Menu Links With Images

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My Thoughts on Google+

The Bad: Invite-Only

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Using sed to Add Google Analytics Code to Many Files at Once

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2010 In Review

2011 Resolutions

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Dominate Local Search Results in Your Small Town

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