Bretts Marketing Bytes

Website page copy is an important element of your website. However,  I find that most companies spend way too much time crafting their  message and way too little time focusing on what truly makes a difference to readers.

I put together a list of some important aspects of writing web page copy. Enjoy!

• Companies love to talk about themselves so naturally they ramble on and on. Don’t ramble. Keep it short and sweet.
• Your message should be about the reader not your company. People don’t really want to read about how great you think your company is. They want the WIIFM(Whats in it for me?) factor.
• You have less than 8 seconds to catch a persons attention. Make your page easy for someone to scan by using white space, heading tags, and bold fonts when necessary.
• Welcome… For some reason some organizations think that their home page should welcome their visitors. Why, it’s not a house, its a website. Give them the information that they want..Information about what you do, or your products or services.
• Thank you…Companies also feel the need to thank visitors for coming to their site. Why, is your site so bad that you have to be thankful that someone came to visit it? Okay, that might be a little harsh. But seriously, if you do this you are wasting prime real estate on your web page for more important page copy. Don’t thank people until after they have made a purchase.
• Bad grammar – It is fascinating how many companies use  grammar improperly in their page copy. You should always have someone read over what you write. Even if you are good at writing. A second eye is always a good idea.
• Make sure to use a call to action where it is  necessary. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to contact you or make a purchase.
• Use blurbs that have a read more link on your home pages. Blurbs are easy to scan.
• When writing page copy, try to identify with the reader. What are the important pieces of information that they would want to read?

I hope this was useful . Good luck and happy page copy writing.

Wordpress is a great blogging software, but one of the questions that always comes up in a lot  of my seminars is how to theme Wordpress.  My answer is usually, hire my company! ha ha.

However, there are a lot of do it your-selfer’s out there. For you guys there are ways of skinning a Wordpress blog that doesn’t require you to go into the code and spend all day making tweaks.  One of the best resources that I have found is Frugal Themes . I am a big fan of keeping the blog clean and there is no cleaner theme out there. Unfortunately this is a paid theme ($79.00), but it is well worth the money!

It provides complete customization of layout style, colors, logo, fonts and what ever else you can imagine without having to know any code.  I have to admit, even for a guy like me who doesn’t mind getting my hands dirty with code, I use this from time to time.

The other reason I thought this would be a good post is because a lot of people in my seminars are not tech savvy. Frugal Themes support and comprehensive directions are unmatched. I think most non savvy people would be able to figure this one out with a little help from the Frugal support forum.

This theme also lends itself nicely to most business people because it is very clean. If you are looking for a funky style theme, fugal themes is probably not for you.

If you do not want to pay for a theme, there are plenty of free ones available, but you will have to spend a lot of time tweaking code to get it to look like you want. I love when I find something that truly stands out from the rest and this is one of them.

Click here to check out the video on their home page to see how it works.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your theme.

Do you tweet on a regular basis? Why not get paid for it!? With Ad.ly, you can! ( I know that sounds like an infomercial, but it is true, and I just had to write about it. ) I signed up here as soon as I read about it.

This service is really easy and totally cool. Essentially all you have to do is sign up to be a publisher, and advertisers find you. They will send one tweet advertisement per day from your account. You don’t have to do anything. The best part about it is that they are expecting some large advertisers to pay out big. That means people like us get paid well for tweeting.

The best part about it is that you don’t have to have a huge following. In fact most people who have 200-500 followers will make out better than others. This is because the advertising is built on a quality score similar to other online marketing.

The quality score is based on “real followers” not bots that auto-follow. Since most of us with a lower amount of followers have real followers, we are better off.

I would recommend this to anyone. What a great idea. What’s the worst that can happen. Sign up, its free. If you don’t like it, then cancel. I signed up right away.

Click here to sign up. Good luck and I hope you make a million dollars.

Update: Another good one to join is Sponsored Tweets

Google is finally fighting the spam that has plagued the Google local channel for sometime. According to some experts, there are 5 new guidelines.

1. The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name. For example, you cannot use product descriptors such as, bulk silica gel.
2. PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
3. A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.
4. You must use a shared business email account if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
5. If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.menssilkbowties.com, a matching email address would be you@menssilkbowties.com.

If you haven’t signed up for Google Local yet, you can do so by going to the Google Local Business Center.

XML  is the format that Google, Yahoo and Bing wants us to submit our Sitemaps  to them so they can crawl the deeper pages of our blog.

Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing.  However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire blog or website.

This article is about generating an XML Sitemap for your Wordpress blog that auto generates every time you post a new article. This requires a little FTP knowledge and that is about  it.

• First of all you will need to download an XML Sitemap plugin.
• Follow the directions on how to install the plugin. Follow the configuration instructions and viola, you now have a dynamic XML  Sitemap for your Wordpress blog. Now what?
• Once you have the Sitemap ready to go, you should submit it to Google webmaster tools, Yahoo and Bing so that you can track results.

It’s really pretty easy. I absolutely love this plugin. XML Sitemaps are an absolute must for every Wordpress blogger.

Everyone is so hyped up about Facebook and Twitter for business. While these are great tools, they are often more effective when used in conjunction with a blog.

Facebook and Twitter are like a big cocktail party, while your blog is like your home. When you go to this cocktail party and meet someone, if you like them, you might invite them to your home to learn more about you. If they like you , they will hopefully do business with you, refer you to someone or subscribe to your blog.

Your blog is the place to bring people to learn more about you or your business practices.

What can a blog do that Facebook & Twitter Cannot

• Position you or your company as an expert
• Educate existing and potential customers
• Help with Search Engine Optimization
• Help your company to be more transparent
• Spread a message longer than 140 characters.
• Separate you or your company from the competition

Listen to Seth in the video above. Do it even if it is for yourself. Eventually people will start reading it.

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.