Bretts Marketing Bytes

Archive for October, 2009

Come see me! I will be part of the InfoTech Niagara  panel discussion on Nov 3 at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. See details below.

Date: Nov 3, 2009
Location: Buffalo Niagara Partnership
Time: 8am – 10am
Click here to register

Ok, you have a website, now what?

Join infoTech Niagara for a panel discussion on “Maximizing Your Web Presence.” Our panelists bring years of experience in web strategy, web design, search engine optimization, social media, web video and more.

Come learn from the experts what you can do to leverage new and existing technologies to maximize the effectiveness of your web presence.

Panelists include:

• Adrian Roselli, Senior Usability Engineer, Algonquin Studios
• Brett Burnsworth, President, Zoodle Marketing
• Jason Holler, President, Holler Media Productions
• Mike Brennan, Vice President, Noobis, Inc.

Are you impressed by someone who has 10’s of thousands of followers on Twitter? Do you wish you had that many people following your company?

According to Seth Godin, having many followers doesn’t always help with business. Check out this interesting video of Seth Godin answering the question, “Is social networking good for business.”

My opinion.

I will have to agree with Seth. If you are just trying to get as many followers as you possibly can, it is useless for your business.  On the flip side of that, if you have real relationships, whether they be on Twitter or not, that is where the true value of Social Networking comes into play. Anyone can get 10’s of thousands of follower on Twitter, it’s easy. I did an experiment and gained 200 follower in 2 days just by following other people. The bad part is those people are not my friends, and don’t give a hoot about what I have to say. Useless.

New research by Citibank reveals that social media has yet to penetrate the small business world, finding that 76% of the 500 organizations surveyed have not found social media useful in generating business.

So is Social Media good for business?

Yes if you do it correctly and not try to gain as many followers as you possible can. Let it happen organically, provide good content and you will have a much greater chance of leveraging  these tools for your business.

Okay, I know  url Canonicalization sounds really technical and confusing, but truthfully it is an easy concept to understand. Not to mention it is very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

First lets define URL Canonicalization as the process of establishing a single URL as the location of a web document. The web document being a page on your website. So what does “establishing a single URL” mean?

When it comes to SEO, search engines look at a URL with “www” in it differently than a URL that does not have “www” in it. For example, in Googles eyes, http://www.yoursite.com is a different URL than http://yoursite.com.

Why does this matter? Well mostly because of inbound links, which are very important for SEO. If you get one company who links to your site by putting in the “www” and another company who doesn’t use “www”,  your link equity will be split. Because of this you will not be driving as much link juice to your pages as you possibly could.

The idea is to generate one URL for all occasions, so no matter what they type in or link to it goes to one location. The way that you do this is  by 301 redirecting non “www” to the “www” version of the URL. Or in some cases vice versa, depending on what you want.

If your site is written in PHP you will most likely have a file called .htaccess. In this file is where you create the redirects. See below for the two scenario’s. The following code should be placed at the top of your .htaccess file. Make sure to save a copy of your current .htaccess file in the event you screw something up.

#redirect from non www to www

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

#redirect from www to non www

##www to non-www
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps you on your quest to ranking higher on the search engines.

I have a lot of companies that contact me saying that they have tried Google Adwords in the past and it hasn’t worked. My first questions to them is always…What didn’t work about them? and they say… The Adwords.

They never know what didn’t work. I am really looking for more data than just “the Adwords didn’t work”. There are many variables that go into a successful Adwords campaign and usually the reason for an unsuccessful campaign is lack of one or many of the following.

• Research – Have you done proper research to see if Adwords is right for your company. Are there people searching for your products and services? For example the term: Oxygen Absorbers Packets gets searched a significant amount of times.
• Proper setup – Because Adwords is made to be easy to get started, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get going with a campaign. But what most newbies don’t know is that there is a science behind making it work for your company. Google forgets to tell you about this and you pay as a result. So after a few months of an Adword campaign you start to really lose money.
• Choosing low cost keywords - There is a bit of a science behind this one as well, but choosing niche keywords instead of broad terms will save you money and bring in more targeted visitors. Too often I see people going after broad terms that cost a lot of money per click and getting nothing from them. Example: A broad term would be office space, niche or low cost would be Office Space for Lease WNY
• Balancing Act - Is there a good balance of how much you are paying per month for Adwords and the average sale of your product or service? If you have a product that sells for $30.00, you better make sure you are not spending a bunch of money on Adwords.
• Measurable conversion - Does your company have a measurable conversion? Meaning can you track the success of a campaign?
• Monitoring – In order for your Adwords to be successful you have to monitor them and make changes when necessary.
• Only source of income – Don’t count on Google Adwords to be your only source of income. Depending on your business, it may bring in lots of converted traffic or only bring in small amount of conversions. Go back to the research phase to figure this out.
• Budget – Start with a small budget and raise it slowly until you find out what works best.
• Landing page – Don’t use your home page. Create a specific landing page for your ads. For example this page targets Cross Border Accounting
• Leave it - If you find something that works, leave it. Replicate it again and again.

Bottom line is Google Adwords do work if you use them properly. However, the term “work” is  relative to the business you are in.  It is a questions of will they pull in a lot of new business or a little? Good luck. If you need help with Adwords Campaign management I would love to talk to you.  Leave a comment below.