Some may say that blogging is passé, a precursor of Tweets and Facebook Updates. But for many businesses blogging still makes a whole lot of sense. A blog allows you to add fresh content to your site on a regular basis; it is a reason for people to come back to your website and, also not unimportant to most: Google loves fresh content.

So what should you write about?

Many websites could benefit from a blog section. If your website has a Content management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla then it is easy enough to add a “blog”, “news” or “articles” section to it. These hybrid sites can work really well, because you have a section with new content as well as the more beefed up content pages that will help you convert the visitor into a customer. Website visitors looking for your product or service will have questions. Going through your content they will get even more questions. The more (potential) questions you answer on your website, the higher the conversions will be. So be sure to link your blog posts back to your Frequently Asked Questions page, your About Us page or Product/Service descriptions.

How to write your blog posts?

First of all: determine the topic of your post(s). Even though people refer to blogs as “online journals” you should not treat it as a medium to just record whatever comes into your mind. You want to stay on topic – and work towards a conclusion. Then: you want to grab people’s attention, so you will want to start with a compelling headline. Because you know that the headline is almost certainly going to be read, and it will be the deciding factor whether people keep on reading the rest of the article or ignore it. Try to make the headline beneficial (“What’s In It For Me?), teasing, intriguing or unusual. The post itself should have the reader in mind: how can you add value? As soon as people start to think “so what?” you have lost them… And try to wrap the article up with some sort of conclusion or “next step” that hopefully spurs visitors to action. It can be as simple as asking people to check out a previous post, come back for a future post, subscribe to your newsletter or check out your Facebook page.

Blogs allow you to build a relationship with your target audience as well as the search engines – now how powerful is that?

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Have you ever searched online for your name or the name of your company? And if you have, what did you find? Did you only see positive reviews or are there also one or more web sites that speak negatively about you? And if you saw negative reviews (or worse) – do you know what to do about them?

In comes Reputation Management. First of all: knowledge is power. Just like you should look at your website’s visitor statistics from time to time to optimize your website, you should monitor your online reputation (or have it monitored for you) in order to optimize your online reputation. Just imagine a scenario where the top results in Google are all from web pages that have negative reviews about your company! This may not even have anything to do with the level of service you are providing, or the products you are offering. You may be falsely accused, or being smeared online by competitors or people who may, for whatever reason, feel wronged by you. Reading all this negative feedback, (potential) customers or clients might shy away from ever doing business with your company again.

And negative comments online are not the only thing you should watch for. . What about outdated information that is very persistent and takes up valuable time from your staff to explain. For instance “this phone number no longer belongs to company so-and-so” – or ”we have not carried that product since 2008”. Would you not want to try and fix that?

The first thing you need to do is finding out what information about your company is out there, and then respond accordingly – fast! Try to fix errors, respond to questions and negative feedback by engaging in a conversation with your target audience, or try to push negative reviews off the first page in Google with targeted Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

There are a lot of tools available to manage your reputation online yourself. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself or simply don’t have the time, you can hire a company to do this for you. But it is clear that you should monitor your company and brand online; your reputation is at stake!

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

The search engine world keeps changing and changing. Compare a Google search results page from a few years ago with what we see today. Gone are the days of a simple and rigidly organized results page. A Google search results page today shows things like videos, press releases, topical Twitter streams and a map with localized search results. All these changes were made by the search engines in order to provide Internet users with more relevant search results.

And the behaviour of these Internet users keeps changing over time. Web 2.0 sites like Twitter became the news besides reporting it (remember Egypt, or Iran?), and have become an online barometer of what’s happening in the world. So the search engines started to inject Twitter feeds and other web 2.0 properties into the search results.

Another trend worth mentioning (again) is Local Search. People are searching for anything online these days – I read somewhere that 20-30% of all searches have local content. Google is reporting that 33% of mobile searches (on a cell phone) have local intend, and Bing even reports a 53% local mobile search share. Local is the new global… And “Local” these days can be found… online!

So what does that mean for you? Well, you probably want to found where people are searching. Apart from making your own website found, you will want to make sure that people can find you in other online hotspots. Examples include local online directories (do a search to locate the ones relevant in your area) and the online directory of your Chamber of Commerce. These Chamber Directory sites get a lot of direct traffic (not search engine related) because people know that they are filled to the brim with local business information. I am a Director for the Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce, so I’ll use their website (www.cwchamber.ca) as an example. Look for the Business Directory link in the orange navigation bar. The Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce website allows you to enter your own elevator speech – or more! Just click on the Member Login link on the Chamber website (top right corner), enter your user name and password (ask Chamber staff for your login information if you have misplaced it) and you can start writing your online brochure. You can also upload your logo. Chamber staff will be more than happy to assist you with this. The listing in this Directory is a privilege for Chamber members only, of course, but with Local Search exploding the listing on the Chamber’s website alone will be worth the admission!

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Facebook keeps on growing and many businesses have started using Facebook to promote their products, services and businesses. But some have taken a risky approach to this, often without knowing it: they have created a Facebook profile page for their business…

You will know of some businesses that have done this; just check your Facebook wall and look for one of your friends who “is now friends with”… a business or organization. Problem with this is that profile pages are only meant for an individual person, according to Facebook’s Terms Of Service. So you are not allowed to create a (second) profile page for marketing purposes, whether it is under an alias or business name – both are not a real person. And Facebook has started to crack down on profile pages that are not in line with their Terms Of Service, and has started removing them. In other words: you could lose your business’ profile page if you continue to run it.

So what are you to do? Businesses and organizations should create a Page instead; also known as a Facebook Fanpage. But what about all the work that you have put into your business’ profile page? You may have collected a nice group of friends for your business that you can communicate with on Facebook. It may very well have turned into the lifeline of your business… you don’t want to throw that out the window!

Luckily Facebook recognizes that and offers a tool to help you migrate your friends over to your new Facebook Page, and converts them into “likes”. This means that people who “like” you will receive your updates on their Facebook wall, just like your friends do. You can find more information about migrating your profile picture and friends over to a Facebook Fan Page on https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate. Just be aware that only the profile picture will be moved over, and your business’ friends will be converted into likes – nothing else will be moved over. So before you begin your migration you should save all other information from your profile page (conversations, media, etc.). More about downloading your profile information can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18830.

So switching from a business’ Facebook profile page (with friends) to a Facebook Fan Page (with likes) is the way to go. You will not risk losing your account altogether if Facebook gets to your account during their clean-up actions. And you can broaden your reach; a profile page “only” allows for 5,000 friends, but you r Page can have millions of likes (fans)!

Added benefit is that a Fan Page can be “pimped”: you can add all kinds of great features that can help you market your business. This includes featuring videos, email opt-in boxes or all kinds of branded content. Or: providing “hidden” content (like a video or a report) that only appears after people have liked you (a way to gain more likes); a similar tactic has been around for years to get people to opt-in to email newsletters in exchange for a free goodie. You can basically turn your Facebook Fan Page into a full-fledged website!

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Google has gotten a lot smarter and helpful the past 12-24 months – and much of those adjustments are geared towards one very important trend:

Research has shown that around 70% of household users perform some kind of search for a local product or service on a daily basis.

Google now serves up contextual recommendations based on the searcher’s physical location, most searched for (related) phrases or even personal browsing habits. And you have probably also noticed all those Google Maps and Places listings. If Google thinks that a search is locally oriented, and so many of the searches are these days, then they will return localized search results. Yes, your company can be on the first page of Google too when your prospects are searching for your type of product or service. Perhaps even multiple times – both in the Google places/Maps results and in the regular search results… Unless you are paying for Google AdWords, of course – then you can even show up 3 times! And you know what – you may even show up more times than that. It all depends on how much effort you put into it!

But the fact remains: if your business is not listed on the first or second page of the search results, your
(future) customers may never find you. Why is this important? Online advertising is only going to increase and will soon replace printed phone directory listings that cost thousands of dollars per year. People are searching for anything online these days, or on their mobile (smart) phone.

Why don’t you check your online visibility by searching for your products or services in Google? Does your website and/or company come up? Or do you only see competitors? Improving your visibility on the first pages of Google is a very powerful lead generation approach – make it work for you.

So what can you do to improve your chances of being found? Claiming your Google Places page is a good first step, and if there’s too much competition for your particular product or service you may want to spend some time optimizing your listing. A lot of improvements you can do yourself, or you can find somebody to do most of the work for you.

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Contact us about our local search optimization services.

As a website owner or webmaster you are probably looking for more traffic all the time. A few of the tried and true options to find new prospects are PPC and SEO. Now, you may wonder what these acronyms stand for, and which is better?

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and both have their place in your online marketing arsenal.

Pay-Per-Click means that you have to pay for all of your traffic. You will probably have heard of the main player in this arena, Google AdWords, but there are plenty of other PPC providers out there. A rising star in the PPC world is Facebook, and its targeting possibilities are great indeed – although a recent survey found that 30% of Chief Marketing Officers found that their ROI (Return On Investment) from Facebook ads (so far) was average at best. But you know what – numbers never tell the whole story… Were the expectations too high, perhaps? Or were the results disappointing because the campaigns were poorly executed? You will have to monitor your campaigns and see whether these targeted visitors are indeed converting into sales, for instance, as the Social Media visitors’ intent may be quite different from that of regular search engine users.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a way to gain visibility in the normal (free) search engine results. This can be done by optimizing your website, and building links to improve your online reputation and relevancy. As the word “optimization” in SEO indicates, there are a lot of ways to optimize your link-building efforts to improve the results.

So what are some of the Pros and Cons of each?

• PPC:
  Almost immediate traffic, lots of (often very) specific targeting options, more control over your traffic – you can control where, how and when the ads are being shown. You can influence the visitor’s expectations and direct them to your desired destination page
  But:
  you have to pay for each and every visitor, and once you stop paying your traffic will dry up – 100% of it. And: there is no perceived “authority” linked to paid listings, and many people ignore ads altogether. On top of that: with increasing competition, the cost per click is rising.
• SEO:
  This is a long-term approach – you are optimizing your site and its online environment. Top normal, organic listings are being perceived as authority links and will bring you instant credibility. On the flip side: if you are NOT found for certain search phrases, people will start to think less of you (“maybe they are not as much of an expert as I thought!”)

By focusing on PPC and SEO you can get the best of both worlds. Make sure you track the results, so you can learn from one campaign to improve the other.

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Are you using Email Marketing to close the deal? You should!

All too many website owners don’t realize how low the true value of their website visitors is. Looking at your website statistics program you should look at your number of Unique Visitors with mixed feelings. Because how beneficial is a Unique Visitor really? Certainly, some of them may come back (a Repeat Visitor!), others may even contact you (yay!) but all too many will never return! Let me repeat that: they will never come back. This may be quite disturbing realization for a lot of you. Especially if you have been paying attention at Marketing or Sales seminars, where they say you have to “touch” a prospect 6 to 7 times before they actually become a client (buy from you).

You need to beef up your online marketing strategy; build those 6-7 contacts into your communication process. A few tools that allow you to contact a prospect more than once are: blogging (people can subscribe to your RSS feed), SMS marketing, Twittering (Tweeting), setting up a Facebook Page – and Email Marketing.

Using a professional Email provider like AWeber or MailChimp is highly recommended. The fact that the bulk emails are being sent from a vetted email server will increase the percentage of emails being accepted by receiving email servers (the “delivery rate”).

How to get subscribers? First of all: you have to make sure that you have permission to send emails to your subscribers. The fact that you collected emails on a Tradeshow a few years ago does not constitute “permission”. You can of course contact them and convince them to sign up for your emails. Your current customers should be asked to join as well; they can learn more about your products and services so you can perhaps increase your value per customer. And you should add an opt-in box on your website, of course, to increase readership. Offer people an incentive for signing up (like a free report or video) and explain what people can expect from your emails. Note that I say “emails”, not “email newsletters”. Some people think they have to write a lot of articles for their email subscribers but that doesn’t have to be the case. All you have to do is provide value in whatever shape or form (even when it’s just an introduction into your new blog post!) and people will be happy to receive your email updates. Happy subscribers mean a bigger chance that after a while they realize what you can do for them, they trust you and want to do business with you. Your contact finally converts! And what good is a website without conversions…

Get Started Today For Only $1! - AWeber Communications

(Yes, these links to Aweber are affiliate links. We do get a commission if you decide to use their email services. But we stand behind this service, and use it ourselves.)

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

You might not expect to hear this from someone who promotes websites in the search engines for his clients, but Search Engine Optimization is not always the recommended course of action. I don’t mean to say that it is never necessary; it is just not the magic bullet that many people make it out to be. So allow me to explain.

For those of you who don’t know what Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is: it is a set of techniques for tweaking a website in order to improve the site’s search engine listings. The idea is that higher rankings will mean more traffic (visitors), which in turn should lead to higher profits.

But SEO is not the holy grail of website promotion. You may not necessarily WANT more visitors; what you want is more PROSPECTS. There is a subtle but very important difference between the two: relevancy. You will need to improve the quality of your website visitors more than you need to increase the quantity of your traffic.

So how do you go about doing that?

Well, for one you need to make sure you target the right keywords. Choose phrases that will most likely attract the right type of website visitor; one that is in need of your products or services and actually wants to pay for them. You probably don’t want to spend precious time and effort quoting for tire-kickers that do not have any intend to buy (from you).

After you have determined the proper phrases to go after (you can do A/B testing* on your website to validate your assumptions) you should make sure that you are being found where your prospects are searching. This can be a myriad of locations: Facebook, Twitter, a mobile (smart) phone, relevant websites, or of course the search engines.

* A/B Testing means: using a software script to rotate several (headline, image, content) options on your website and measure the conversion results.

Once you are being found you need to make sure that your website can “close the deal”. Does it provide an easy way of contacting you? Are your headlines obvious? Is navigating your website effortless? Take a good look at your website, or invite a third party to provide unbiased feedback.

And finally: capturing your prospect’s email addresses for your online newsletter (do you have one, and if not: why not?) allows you to build a relationship with your prospects beyond their initial website visit. You can showcase your company’s products, services and (very important) your skill set and personality – over and over again. You probably heard before that in sales it takes at least 6-7 contacts before people are ready to buy; a newsletter allows you to build those contact moments – and trust.

I hope that these tips will help you be more successful online, and wish you on behalf of the Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce (visit us at cwchamber.ca or facebook.com/cwchamber) a prosperous 2011!

For more information: contact your Webmaster, or contact Internet Consultant and Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce Director Nardo Kuitert at nardo@ucwebs.com or 519-787-7612.

Are you pinging?

If not, you should!

When you ping a page on your website or your RSS feed, you are telling the search engines that you have just updated your content. Google, Bing! and many other search engines really like fresh content, so a “ping-alert” will likely lead to a prompt visit from the search engine spiders – and your new or updated pages will be indexed quicker. Another benefit of pinging your website or blog is that people may find your site in one of the directories that log these RSS feeds of recently updated weblogs. Weblogs.com is such a directory.

RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. And people can subscribe to your RSS feed, so they will automatically be notified when you have written something new. In a sense it works like an email newsletter – somewhat.

Most blog software have an option to automatically ping certain ping services, but you can also ping your regular html or php pages. You can create RSS feeds from your static site at html2rss.com; signing up is required to use their services, so you will probably be added to an email list. But it’s free!

Where should you ping to? Pingomatic.com is probably the best known free pinging service. Enter the name of your blog/website, the page that you want to ping and your RSS feed (optional). Select the Common Services to ping (or check all) and press the ‘Send Pings” button. There are also Specialized Services that you can ping, but please only use these if they really apply to your blog or website. But there are many other ping services – free or paid.

If you want the search engines to have the latest of your website or blog as quickly as possible you should make sure to always ping your updates. But whatever you do, do it in moderation. Try not to ping these updates too often, or you may be seen as a spammer. Certain blog plugins allow you to control the maximum number of pings (like no more than once every 15 or 30 minutes).

So let’s get pinging!

For more information: contact your webmaster, or email Nardo Kuitert at nardo@u-cwebs.com.

Nardo Kuitert is an Internet Consultant with Fergus Website Development and Optimization firm U-C WEBS (www.u-cwebs.com). U-C WEBS also offers Internet advertising opportunities on www.ferguspages.com. (link opens in a new window)

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Friday November 12, 2011 is Random Acts of Kindness Day. Random Acts of Kindness Day is not about fundraising or giving money – just a day to celebrate simple things of kindness like buying someone a coffee, congratulating someone on a job well done, driving someone to an appointment, holding a door open or carrying someone’s groceries.

25,000 Random Act Of Kindness Day cards are available throughout Guelph and Wellington County, including the local libraries. The cards encourage the holder to perform a simple act of kindness for someone and then hand over the card so that person can “pay it forward”.

But even without a card, you can just perform ANY kind of random act of kindness – get creative!

Help making kindness a priority in (y)our community!