Bretts Marketing Bytes

Archive for August, 2009

What is a CMS (Content Management Systems)?
A CMS is a graphical user interface that allows you to add, update and delete pages on your website. The beauty of one of these systems is that it makes it easy for even a non technical person to make quick changes to their website.

In today’s day and age it is critical to have a CMS. One of the most common mistakes that companies make when they hire a web development firm to implement a CMS is that they trust their web developer too much.

Not to put web developers down, but the problem is most of them don’t keep up with SEO on a regular basis. That is why I always say SEO is a marketing function, not a development function. I can’t tell you how many times I go to work with a company and they just had their website re-designed and I say…I can’t help you unless you get this fixed. And their response is… But I just had this done; shouldn’t my web developer have told me this?

It is unfortunate because the customer has usually spent a significant amount of money on the system at this point. But more often than not, I can’t help them. So I put together this list of important elements that every CMS should contain.  If your web developer is not providing these, walk away. If they say, oh yes, we will do that; make sure you have it in writing. Below is the list.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who are going to be in the Buffalo NY area, I am speaking at a Social Media conference put on the by the  Buffalo Niagara Partnership Wednesday Aug 26th at 8am.  It should be really interesting. The event is a total of 3 hours with three very impressive speakers. See the line up below.

• Brett Burnsworth – Search Marketing
• Adrian Dayton – Twitter for business
• Bryan LeFauve – Facebook & LinkedIn

If  you would like to attend register here . You will enjoy every minute.  I hope to see you there.

If you use email marketing as a form of reaching out to your customers you must read this post. Find out if your Email marketing sucks by reading below

If your emails are:

• Longer than 2 paragraphs. (You have 8 seconds max to catch someone’s attention. Don’t blow it)
• Not formatted in an easy to read format. (I mean all bunched up together with no header text.)
• Plain text with no images.
• Boring and do not provide anything worth reading. (Of course you won’t know this, so ask someone.)
• Sent with a subject line that is not descriptive of the body of the email.
• Being sent to people who did not opt-in.
• Not segmented into different interests.
• Sent without  links back to specific articles or pages of your site.
• Sent without the ability to track and analyze results.
• Not getting above a 25% open rate.
• Not going out on a consistent basis.

If your emails meet any of the above criteria

YOUR EMAIL MARKETING SUCKS!

Change it

Google is rolling out a new “under-the-hood” search technology, codenamed “Caffeine,” that could change how your company ranks in its search results.

Matt Cutts of Google says Caffeine is not intended to combat spammers like previous updates, but simply to update the foundation of the Google search infrastructure. He also notes that this update will not make Google look any different; however it may affect search engine rankings in a minor way. Unlike other algorithm updates, Google is actually giving us a preview of what our search results will look like if affected by the update.

To find out how your search rankings will be affected by cafeine click here to see the Google sandbox.

Here is what Google says

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” two engineers wrote in the company’s official blog.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

You will begin to see these changes take place over the next few weeks or months.