TCwebsite » Web Knowledge

Best webmail for business… ever

TCwebsite — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 02:12:21 +0000

So you’re an Outlook, MacMail, or Entourage user and you are struggling with how to deal with email at home or when you are out of the office traveling. Yes you might have webmail tied to your hosting platform but does it have spam and virus filtering built in?

What if your hosting providers server blows up? They all do at some point due to a spam attack or other act of god. What do you do for back up? Can you get mail elsewhere? Send mail?

The answer is state of the art, reliable, professional and free. It’s called Gmail (Google’s email). Set yourself up in 3 easy steps:

If you don’t have an account do your self a favor and head on over to gmail.com and sign up.
Then tell your webmaster to mirror all your email to your Gmail account. This means every piece of mail you receive will still end up in your Outlook AND a copy will be sent to your Gmail account.
When you go home or hit the road and don’t want to lug your laptop you can access your mail from your Gmail.com account
Professional ninja technique: set up your default ‘send as’ as your main email address. So when you send an email from Gmail the recipient will see that it came from you@yourbusiness.com, NOT Gmail. You can do this under ‘Settings’ and ask your webmaster for help if needed.

So to wrap it up you can have your desktop Outlook to get all your email and have a webmail backup with spam an virus protection when you need it. In fact you might like Gmail so much you might just dump Outlook like I did :)

Feel free to comment!

SEO: Is your website blocking Google?

TCwebsite — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:47:47 +0000

(Watch the 5 min video below) The problem with many websites is that navigation buttons, images and animation are invisible to Google from a linking standpoint. In other words, if you don’t have real text links in your navigation buttons, Google will ahave trouble finding your subpages. The image links won’t work for Google. This means your potential customers can’t find your website. Watch the following video to learn how to check to see if your website is blocking Google.

Audio only:

Audio transcript:
Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, if your website has so many images or animations on it, that they are getting in the way of Google’s ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.

So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it’s all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that’s a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.

Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn’t even have that page in its database.

So, it will never show up in a search and you just won’t get found. And that’s the problem. Now, how does this work? Let’s just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.

Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can’t, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It’s actually a piece of animation. And Google can’t read animation. It doesn’t know what to do with it.

And it doesn’t crawl through it. Now, another way to do it is, let’s take a look at another image that’s linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, “Save image as,” that tells you that that’s an image.

And even though it is linked, Google can’t crawl through it. Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you really went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, and you won’t find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.

So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it’s literally blocking Google’s ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible.

It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google. And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it’s database.

And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.

And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it’s friendly to Google. Use these open source platforms like Droople, Junela or WordPress.

They are free, they are infinitely customizable, and they come with templates, and they are great. Now, I would like to sign off with a little thought provoking question. Is your website building your business? And that is it for today.

Video for your business: the power to persuade

Peter Ericson — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:26:01 +0000

(see 5 min video below) We finally put together our 1st company video promoting a unique Pay per Lead website solution. It is targeted towards commercial and residential cleaning companies that don’t have a website or have one that is ineffective. The way the program works is our company builds a website at no charge, promotes the website online, and then charges clients only when their phone rings from the website (or when they receive an email lead from the website).

Now why did we build a video to tell this story? Because video is compelling. Text and photos that describe a product or service pale in comparison to watching a movie with animation and sound. Also it is a difficult concept to explain to people (ie sell).

I previewed the video below to my Tuesday morning business group today to help educate them about what my business does. I wasn’t sure how they would react but at the end everyone asked me to forward the video to them and 2 members wanted to talk to me about new business. Not bad for a group of 20.

Your business: Think about what you sell and what story you can tell… and the secret to a good story is simply 3 things:

Problem: hook your audience with a typical customer problem that you can solve for them
Agitate: give examples of these problems to make them squirm
Solution: solve their problem and be the hero

Can you find the above three chapters in the video below?

Now at the end of the video I would love your opinion and if you know any cleaning companies in your area that have websites that suck (no pun) let me know :)

Website design: How to build a compelling home page

Peter Ericson — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:54:37 +0000

Your home page on your website is critical to the success of your website and your best stuff needs to be there. So how you build a great home page? Listen to the audio podcast to find out how to go about brainstorming and prioritizing the elements that need to be promoted 1st.

Audio transcript:
In today’s podcast we’re going to help you determine what to put on your home page. The problem is, is that the home page is the most important page in your website.

It is the one that gives the first impression to new visitors and the official amount of time that people browse your page is 10 seconds.

That means you only have 10 seconds, maybe less to grab someone’s attention about your products or services and get them to click into a sub page for more information. Otherwise, they are going to bounce from your home page and go look at a competitor’s site.

Now yesterday I had an interesting meeting with a client who was in frenzy. He had printed out every page of his website, spread it out on his conference table and was busily crossing out photo’s and buttons and rearranging pages and marking additions and truly having a stressful time out of trying to arrange his new home page.

He was taking the spilt bucket approach. Basically he spilt all the parts of his business out on the conference room table and was trying to rearrange it like a jigsaw puzzle so it all made sense. This is very inefficient and is really not a very good way to go about trying to figure out what is going to be on your home page.

So, how do we craft a successful and compelling home page? You have to start with a clean slate. You have to forget what you have on your website now. Turn off your computer; shut your laptop down because what you have probably isn’t working.

The approach to take is to review the parts of your business first. That is, the services and products that you sell, the bits and pieces of promotional items; you want to go through the foundation of what your business is about in order to trigger priorities that will float up to the home page.

Once you review how each product or service is doing for your business, how important it is for your business, you will naturally get a sense for whether or not it belongs on the first page of your website.

Now, our client sells kiosks. He sells them to universities and hospitals, churches and they get sold for different applications. So we had a conversation about all his kiosks, all his promotions and how he goes about selling to a new customer. That started triggering ideas that would eventually make them sales into the home page.

Now, I’m going to give you a plan on how to get the right information to your home page. The first thing you want to do is get out a blank piece of paper and just write home page on the top of it. Just put it down.

The second thing you want to do is you want to go wrangle a friend or hire some marketing person to be a sounding board. What’s going to happen here is you are going to have a conversation with this person about your business. You can do it over the phone or you can do it face to face. But you want to find somebody who is good at asking questions and digging deeper into your business.

So I’m going to give you seven questions that this person that you bring in will ask you so you can sit back and answer, to think about your business and answer them as best as you can. So here we go.

Question number one– Let’s talk about the history of your business. How did you get started? What was the motivation to start? What are some of the interesting things that happen along the way?

You want to start writing this down on paper. Have the person you hired or your friend write this down. If there is something particularly interesting that would be interesting to one of your customers and it jumps out. Write that thing down on that blank piece of paper called home page.

Number two–Talk about the services and products that you sell. Write them all down and talk about each individual service; each individual product. Who you sell that service or product to and how important that service or product is to the business.

Who is the customer and why are they a customer? Why do they buy your service or product? Now if there is anything in that part of the conversation that jumps out as important write that down on that blank piece of paper that says home page. Although it’s not blank anymore.

Number three– Competitors. Talk about your competitors. What are they doing? What are they not doing? What drives you crazy about them? Why do you do a better job? Why do you do it faster or why do you do it at a better price? If there is anything in that part of the conversation that jumps out, write it down. Write it down on that piece of paper?

Number four– Do you publish any news about your business? Do you publish a paper or email newsletters? Do you send out press releases? Do you do case studies? Do you write articles? Do you have a white paper or 10 to talk about?

Do you have any video or audio? Do you put any events together on premises? Or off-premises that might be worth talking about? If there is anything that you do that mumps out as important to you, write it down on that piece of paper that says home page.

Number five– How do you communicate with your customers? Here we talk about what you do on paper to communicate, what you do on the phone in sales to communicate. How you follow up with leads.

Do you do any direct mail? Do you produce any brochures or produce any articles that you submit? If there is anything here, again, that jumps out, write it down on that piece of paper. Things that you communicate that are really important to your business might want to be on the home page.

Number six: talk about promotions. How do you promote your product and services? Do you do specials? Are you telemarketing? Do you do regular annual, seasonal, holiday promotions of any kind? And just write a long list of everything you do to promote your business.

And then choose one or two that jump out and write them down on that piece of paper that says, “Home page.”

Number seven: Here’s the last one and here’s the trick. Call outs, calls to action, I say this word, it’s marketing gig speak but what it means is, when somebody comes to your website, you want to produce something that they will look at and say, “Wow! I need that” or “I want to learn more about that.

That looks really interesting.” And that’s called a “call out” or “call to action”. It calls the visitor to click on something or to fill out a form or to pick up the phone and call you. It makes them do something.

Now, you might have a newsletter, an email newsletter that you want them to sign up for, that’s a call to action. You might sell a practice service that you’re quoting, you’re always quoting out, and you would want perhaps to have a request for quote form on your website.

If you have a nice slick brochure that you hand out to people, well, get an email address and let them download that brochure. An interesting tit-bit here, a market research that I read recently says that 75% of people that are on the final stages of the buying process are willing to give their email address in order to download a sales brochure.

White papers, same thing, perhaps, you can capture an email address to have the visitor download a white paper. And of course, picking up the phone and emailing you.

These are calls to action and while you’re having this conversation with your friend, think about the things that you sell that might be a good call to action for that product or service or to find out more about that product or service.

Now, when you’re done, that original blank piece of paper that says “home page” is going to be filled with all sorts of things, company information, products and service information, promotional information, communication information and of course what’s you’ve written down here are the things that are really the most important to you.

You might have stars next to some of these things that says, “Geese these are really, really important.”

The idea here is you have now created a rough draft of what your home page says. You probably have too much information here to really successfully promote on a page. But this is your rough draft home page. And now the trick is to prioritize all the things that you thought were important to the business.

And I would recommend you choose one, two, three, maybe four things to talk about, about your business on the home page.

Once you start getting into 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, unless you’re CNN.com, you’re going to start confusing your customers. It can be too much to look at. So the challenge is just to pick just a few things to promote on your home page.

Now in the Kiosk Manufacture meeting that I had yesterday, what I found out is that they were setting out regular press releases. They sent out a quarterly newsletter, and that the owner was interested in publishing articles.

And so we decided, “Hey, we are going to create a news blog for the business and we are going to feed some of the news items onto the home page.” So that would become an important element to a new visitor who came who would say, “Hey, there’s a lot of great stuff happening with this company. They are staying current and there’s helpful article information there as well.”

I also found out since they sell kiosks that there’s an interactivity component of the business. He wants people to see what the kiosk can do and hey why not create a video of a screen cast of a kiosk in action.

And it’s simple, could be a screen capture of a…let’s say it’s a student on a campus, so university campus that’s using a kiosk to find out when the next bus, shuttle bus arrives, how that would happen.

Or you do screen shots and you do a voice over to capture that and you put it on. And video today is becoming more and more compelling. You will likely have a short blur about the company on your page and I recommend writing 40 to 80 words no more that describes who you are and your experience, what you sell, and what’s the benefit to the customer.

And that’s a tough one to write but it’s a very important one which should be on the home page, should be a quick read for when a visitor comes to it.

And we also figured out that their kiosks break down by application and by industry. So, we’re breaking out as whole product segment into his top categories: hospitals and universities, information or check in, survey, etc. rather than lumping all the kiosks into one big product category.

So, there it is. There is some work involved in getting your home page correct but it’s worth it. It is the most important part of your business. It’s critical to keeping people interested in what you do on your site and it really boils down into breaking down your own business and having a review with someone is the best way to do it. Break down your business into its components and when you’re discussing all the parts of your business, your priority will naturally flow to the top and you grab those, and those superior things that have gone to your home page.

And that’s how you goal a successful home page. Hope you found that helpful and that’s it for today.

Web design: 1 simple way to motivate visitors to contact you

TCwebsite — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:51:24 +0000

The problem is that most visitors are a little nervous about contacting your business from your website. Find out how to make people comfortable and boost your contact rate by over 50% with a simple addition to your website.

Audio Transcript:
Today we are going to talk about one simple way but very powerful way to get visitors to contact you on your website.

Now here’s a problem: when a visitor comes to your website, they are generally scared to connect with your business. On some level, some might be quite nervous and some might not be that scared but on some levels there’s resistance to contacting a business.

Now, a visitor might come in and check out, two, three, four, even 10 pages but when they get to your contact page and they have some choices to make to pick up the phone, or to click a link to email you, that’s where you run in to trouble.

Picking up the phone to call somebody you don’t know is naturally a little terrifying, unless, you are a professional telemarketer. That’s something that’s not going to be on the high point list for a visitor.

Even clicking an email address can be a little intimidating because if you think about it, once you click a link to email a company, you have to type in something into the subject field and you also have to type in something into the body of the message.

And you don’t really get any head start it’s just making it up on the fly and that might be a little tough for some people. Now, what’s the secret? How do you do it?

The way you have to do it, you have to have a contact form on your contact page. Contact forms are safe havens. They give people a step by step process to contact your company.

And here’s a simple and yet very powerful contact form. You ask for a name, you have a name field, you ask for the email address with an email address field, you ask for the phone number with a phone field and then, you ask for the message with the message field.

And what happens is…those are easy questions for people to answer and they are given in a structure that makes them feel comfortable. So they’ll type their name in and they’ll say, “OK, that’s done.” And they’ll type their email address in. OK, that was an easy one and then phone number, they may or may not want to give you. So make sure that the phone number field is optional.

And then once they’ve typed in a couple of things, when they get to the message box, they’ve warmed up. Their brain has warmed up to the concept of connecting with your business and they are ready to start typing. And they will fill that message box with whatever’s on their mind. And then hit the “send” button and send that message as an email to you.

Now as a trick here that’s something else that works well, you get the opportunity here to ask the person a question or two. I would try to think of one question real easy question that will help warm them up when they’re connecting with you but also might give you a good piece of information.

So, if you were an executive coach and you are in a coaching business you might ask what your current position is at your job. That might be an easy question to ask somebody and help you get started in your conversation with them.

You can also add a little check box to have visitors subscribe to your newsletter if you publish an email newsletter. That’s another good thing to do. But what I would also recommend to do is to put your telephone number and your email address link on every page of your website.

So usually it could be on a side bar, it could be on the top up in the mast head so that on every page it’s easy to pick up the phone and call you if that’s what somebody is looking for. They don’t want to dig through for this information. People are in a hurry.

Now here’s how this plays out, on our website, in our client’s site that we watch, easily 90% of all sales increase come through our contact form. Maybe 5% of leads come in through an email, in fact I haven’t seen an email come in a long time, occasionally people would pick up the phone and call if there in a hurry, but 90 to 95% of contacts come in their contact forms. So if you don’t have a contact form in your website, you need to get one on right away.

That’s it for today.

Video: Google Alerts – How to find out what’s being said about your business

Peter Ericson — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:04:04 +0000

Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

To listen via audio podcast:

Transcript:

How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?

How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.

She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?

Well, the secret here is to go to “Google alerts.” Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.

It’s really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.

So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I’ll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.

Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don’t have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.

So, let’s create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here’s my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.

Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don’t. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, “the complete website” those three words need to be in order, “the complete website” for Google to actually post an alert.

Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word “the” the word “complete, ” and the word “website” randomly streamed throughout it. And that’s not helpful to me.

So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it’s interesting for me to read what’s going on in “Facebook” and “My Space”, and “You Tube” and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.

But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.

Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are saying about your business online.

Recent domain name scam

Peter Ericson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:05:19 +0000

Many clients contact me wondering if they should purchase additional domain names.

Here is an email from a recent scam (maybe you’ve seen it):

Dear CEO,

We are Asia Domain Name Registration Limited, which is the domain name registrar centre in Hongkong. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the April 16 2008, we received an application formally. One company named ” OMS Investment Corp” applied for

The Domain Names:
wovenworkz.cn
wovenworkz.com.cn
wovenworkz.hk
wovenworkz.mobi
wovenworkz.tw
wovenworkz.jp
wovenworkz.co.kr etc…

This a purely fear based email scam and should be sent to the spam folder.

This client has the domain wovenworkz.com and it is the only domain they need at this point. The above email suggests that a third party is interested in buying these other domain names. Let them.

You might want to check out this article on purchasing multiple domain names, and when it makes sense.

How to hire an SEO expert…

Peter Ericson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:52:03 +0000

…that will get your business found in Google. In this podcast I will tell you about the 3 major areas that your search engine optimization provider must cover… and how much to expect to pay for it. Click play above to listen.

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to get found in Google, or how to hire a search engine optimization expert. This is something you probably don’t want to do yourself and you’ll want to hire out, and it’s not that expensive if you do it right. Now what is search engine optimization? It’s best to explain through an example.

Let’s say you’re a fence installer in New Hampshire and you have a website that you want to get found in Google. Well, your hope would be that a prospective customer would go to Google and type in the keywords “fence installation New Hampshire” and your website would show up, they would see it, click on it and go to your website.

If you specialize in wrought iron fences, you’d want similar results. Someone types in “wrought iron fences New Hampshire,” boom, there’s your website. Or by town, that’s very powerful too–if somebody lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, they type in “wrought iron fences Lebanon New Hampshire,” and you want your website to show up. That’s what search engine optimization is.

Now in order to hire somebody to do this work for you, it’s helpful to know what the basic procedures are for proper search engine optimization. I’m just going to share with you what we do and get great results with. The procedure we use falls into three basic steps: keyword research, keyword installation on your website, and then proving the effectiveness of the research, the data analysis.

So the first thing that has to be done is your search engine optimization expert has to research the scope of key phrases that people might use to type into Google to find your website. You should know how competitive the key phrases are, and almost more importantly, how popular the key phrases are, because you want to go after the popular keyword searches. When that research is done, you should have a pool of 100 to 300 different key phrases that people might search to find your type of business, and people search very specifically and that’s why this pool is so large.

Second thing is keyword installation. Let’s say you’ve picked 10 key phrases that are real important to your business and you’ve decided these are the ones I want to show up in. The search engine person you’ve hired needs to install those keywords on your site, and they install them in two general segments. One is visible text. The text that you read on your website needs to have those key phrases baked into them: the header text, the link text, the actual plain-copy text that’s on your website–you need to bake that in.

And a little tip here: If your search engine person is a copywriter, that’s a real plus, because you want to weave in these key phrases, but you want to make sure that the copy is still readable–that if a human comes to your site and reads the copy, it makes sense. The second thing for installation is there are hidden areas that most webmasters know about where they install these key phrases. They’re called “title tags,” “meta tags,” and those are the two biggies. There are “image tags” and there are other areas, but that’s the installation process.

The third and last thing you want to make sure your search engine optimization person does is that you want to make sure that they prove the effectiveness of the work that they’ve done. You want to see, after you’ve paid for the work and they’ve done it, that you’re ranking better on the key phrases that you chose, and there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is they should be looking at your analytics, which show you the actual visitor traffic to your website. And two, they should produce a “before and after” scenario for you.

So let’s say you have 200 key phrases that are in your pool. They should be able to give you a report that shows you all 200 key phrases and where in Google each phrase is landing. Are they on page one, are they on page two, page five, page ten? And you should look at that before the work is done and that same report should be run after the work is done, and the “after” report should show an increase in position on a lot of those key phrases. The analytics should show more traffic coming to your site, and it should show you the actual key phrases that people are typing in to get to you. So with a combination of those two reports, you should have a good sense of whether the work actually worked or not, and ultimately, your phone should be ringing.

Here are three questions to ask your would-be search engine optimization provider. One, what kind of research do you do? Listen carefully. Two, how is the installation handled? How do they actually install the key phrases? What’s their philosophy? Three, how do they prove to you that the keyword installation helped? Those are three really solid questions.

Here’s a side note. There are a few directories you might want to submit to as well, or get your search engine person to submit to. One is called Dmoz, one is Google Local Search, especially if you’re a local business, one is Yahoo Directory, and there are several others. But note that today, you’re not submitting to Google, you’re not submitting to Yahoo, you’re not paying somebody to do that for you; Google will find your site. They usually come back–every 30 days, 14 days, or two days, depending on how frequently you update your site–and Google looks for changes. And once the work is done with the optimization, Google will pick it up. Google can pick that up in a day. So just be careful of recurring fees.

Now here’s the big question: How much money do you spend on optimization? Well, optimization really falls into two categories. One is for local search, less competitive. Two is for national search, much more competitive, and you can expect to spend more. For local search, you’ll be spending well into the hundreds of dollars. You’ll probably spend between $500 and $1,000 for somebody who’s going to take you through the whole process.

And think about the payoff. How many new clients do you need to get that money back? One? If you’re a fence installer, you probably need one client. Even if you spend $1,000 on the search engine optimization, you get one new client out of that who found you online through Google, boom, and your money’s back.

Now, national search is a little trickier because it can be very competitive, usually it’s quite competitive. You’ll want to look at– and this is where your search engine provider will help you–how many other websites are competing for you. If you sell PCs and you’re going against Dell and Hewlett Packard, you have a very long fight and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars, and still might not come up where you want to be. You’ll talk about things like back links and getting into social media, writing up blogs, article marketing, Facebook, social bookmarking–there’s lots of things to do, lots of money to spend.

However, if you’re a national business and your website has never been optimized or has had very little optimization, even though you don’t end up on the first page of Google with an optimization, you will most likely still generate quite a lot more visitor traffic, and that’s where your analytics really pays off. You can see, “Gee, we have 500 visitors a month, 1,000 visitors a month coming,” and after the installation that bumps to 700, 1,400, 2,000 visitors, and you know that your money has paid off.

As always, please feel free to comment and subscribe :)

Video: How to get found in Google in 10 minutes (Local business search)

Peter Ericson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:47:44 +0000

Let’s take a look at a real search in Google: Look up a local florist say in Framingham, MA. If you typed in “Framingham florist” you would find a list of Google generated business links at the top of the first results page. If you ran a florist there you would want to make sure your business was on this list. You would also make sure that your business’s website address was included so visitors can link directly to your site. Watch the video below to find out how to get your business in Google’s Local Search in less than 10 minutes.

Why you must publish your company news on your website

TCwebsite — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:49:45 +0000

Your 2 main challenges:

Driving visitors to your website
Building trust so your visitors will connect with your company

Publishing a company newsletter accomplishes both.

Comments welcome! Hey they might even get answered :)

Transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about why you have to publish a company newsletter on your website. There are two really great reasons to do this.

One, you have to draw visitors into your website, and doing that is a web marketing challenge. Number two, once visitors get to your website you have to create trust and that trust happens over time so that visitors will reach out and eventually connect with you. And publishing your news and publishing your articles on your website and sending them out via email is the way to solve both of those challenges.

Now, let me tell you a little story. Last Monday we published at 11 o’clock at night our latest company newsletter. It had to do with a new green, carbon neutral server that we just put online for our clients and at 1:47 A.M. Google picked up the news.

The next day I woke up and found an email in my box from the communication department at Rackspace, which is the company where we host this server. A Google alert had alerted them that I had published my news and they wanted to do an interview.

So I responded back, “Sure, hey that’d be great”. And on Wednesday we had a phone interview. That phone interview is going to translate into a case study which is going to go on their website, offering my company free publicity. Now you can’t beat that. And that doesn’t happen everyday but this is what’s happening online today, and you have to take advantage of it.

I have been publishing a company newsletter on the website and pushed out via email for ten years now. And I have to tell you that it has been responsible for a steady stream of new clients. It just works.

Let’s review. If you provide good information on your news website you will build trust over time. Publish what’s happening with your products and services, publish what’s happening with your company and give good, helpful information.

You can create a tips article. If you are in the carpet cleaning business talk about stain removal, talk about chemicals, talk about green products. All these things offer limitless conversation with your customers.

Number two, Google loves news. It just loves news on your website. What happens is, as you write the text that goes on your website Google will crawl it. And the more you write the more often Google will come back to your website and read through your text.

Your text will naturally be filled with keywords that people will type in to find your site. And what will happen is, say if you were a carpet cleaning company and you were publishing news, is if someone was looking for carpet cleaning in a certain geographic area, like Boston. And maybe they were looking for something about green, toxic free cleaning products and you had written an article about that, they might actually land right on your news page. They will bypass your home page all together and after searching on Google land on your news page.

Then you have a chance of them crawling through the rest of your site to see, hey, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re writing articles on all sorts of carpet cleaning topics, and you might have yourself a new customer.

So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to talk to your webmaster about adding a regular news feed to your site. Start by publishing once a month which I know you can do, and make sure that that newsletter also gets emailed out to your list. Now you have an email list, right?

Well, that’s it for now but I promise I’ll talk about building an email list another time.

Website metrics: How to understand your website’s performance

TCwebsite — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:05:10 +0000

You must understand how your website is treating your visitors. Here is your first step to enlightenment!

If somebody asked you today how your website is performing, would you have any idea? Would it be helpful to know what is working on the site and what’s not working on the site? Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Would it be helpful to know if visitors are getting to your home page and then just going away? Or, would it be helpful to know which pages on your site were viewed the most times? In other words, which pages on your website visitors found interesting.

And the reverse: Would it be good to know which pages visitors didn’t pay attention to at all, and were maybe even getting in the way? Or how about this: Let’s say you pay your webmaster to make some changes on your website. Would it be helpful to know if those changes made a difference?

Now to run a successful website, you have to know the good and the bad. Installing website metrics onto your website is the way to do that.

And guess what? You can do it for free. My favorite tool is ‘Google Analytics’. ‘Google Analytics’ gives you a great top-level view of your information and helps you make decisions on what to do next with your website.

So here’s how to get it. Go to google.com/analytics/home. Or you can just search for ‘Google Analytics.’ You’ll get a snippet of code that you’ll hand off to your webmaster, and they will install it on all your pages, and after about a week of tracking you’ll have the answers to the questions that I posed above.

Website metrics will tell a story about your website. It will help you understand what’s going on and will give you the clues to help you make better decisions down the road, and that will help your business.

Comments?

Why have a website for your business?

TCwebsite — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:22:47 +0000

Today we’re going to talk about why a business should have a website. It sounds like a silly question but it’s really a very good one.

After 10 years of this Internet boom, 45% of businesses in the United States don’t have a website yet. I find that incredible. Fifty percent have websites that don’t do much for their business, and five percent have websites that are really performing for the business, and they’re wiping the floor with their competitors. Now let’s look at three reasons to have one; three simple reasons why every business should have a website.

First one is, Yellow Pages are dead and dying, they’re really not being used anymore. I ask people all the time, how they find things, and Google is the tool. Yellow Pages stay in the drawer and Google sits on their desktop at work, at home, and that’s how they find solutions for services, products, everything.

Number two: People judge a book by its cover, and websites are just that – it’s the new cover. So when someone goes searching for a solution for their wedding needs or for their hair, or massage needs, they want to go and do business with a place that has a good first impression at the very least. If they get to a website that looks amateurish, they’ll go away and go find some other business to work with.

Number three: Websites are like the new direct mail. Now direct mail’s great and still works, but it’s a one-way conversation. Your company sends mail out and it’s a lot of work, and it goes out to your customers and you hope for a one, two, three percent return.

Websites are a little bit different. People come in; they find you online through various sources, through other websites, business directories, through Google, on blogs, and they will link to your site. Not only do they come into your site, but you have the opportunity there to grab an email address and start a newsletter and mail out. So direct mail’s one way; websites are really a two-way communication.

Let’s talk about search a little bit. If you run a search for, let’s say your service or your product in your area – let’s say you’re looking for catering services in the Boston area or in Worcester or maybe out in the Berkshires. If you get junky results, in other words, you go to Google and you type in ‘catering Worcester’, ‘catering Worcester Massachusetts’, and the results you get just don’t look like catering companies, then you have a great opportunity there.

You really have an opportunity to get your website up to speed, get it optimized for Google, and then own that search when someone in Worcester is looking for a catering company. You’ll be there every time, and new people move to the area, they’re not connected; they’re going to go to Google to find a solution.

Now if you do a search and you get a list of your competitors, then you have some work to do. Just so you know, that’s where your customers are going, or your potential customers are going, they’re going to your competitors.

So, to wrap it up, the three reasons why you must have a website today: Number one: New people are finding your business via Google, or at least they should be. Number two: Once they find your website, they’re judging your business based on the impression they get on your website. Number three: People search and find links and get to your website, and you have the ability to promote via email, out from your website.

Questions, comments?

2 things every website must do

TCwebsite — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:50:26 +0000

I love to ask business owners how their website is doing, and I get some really nice responses. Most of the time I get, “Um, gee, I really don’t know.” And sometimes they do know and they tell me that their website’s not doing anything for them. And more than a handful of times, they tell me not to even go and look at their website because it’s too horrible.

If you think about it, most people today use Google to find things, whether they’re looking for printing services or an accountant. Maybe, they need their carpets cleaned or they want to stay in a nice bed and breakfast. Or maybe setup a corporate catering function. If they’re not already plugged into a service or a company, they use Google to find it.

And if you’re not getting any connection through your website, that means that those prospective customers are going to your competitors. That’s right; they’re going to your competitors.

Now, how do you build a successful website? There are two things you have to do. One is you have to get people to your website. And each website does draw some visitor traffic, just because of the text, the content you have on the site. And there are visitors that search by your company name to find you.

But you also need to make your website Google friendly so that when people are searching for services that you provide, they find you. Now, try to find your business in Google. It’s an interesting experience.

Second thing you have to do to build a successful website is to get a visitor to act when they land on your website: to do something; to contact you; to fill out a request for quote form; to download a brochure or a data sheet; to subscribe to your newsletter.

And each contact should offer up their email address in order to connect with you or to download that item. There are many ways to inspire a site visitor to contact your business. And you should use as many as you can.

So ask yourself, is your website building your business?

Have a random thought, comment? Ask me :)