Bretts Marketing Bytes

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.

A lot of customers who I first begin to work with get the idea that by hiring my company to do SEO work for them it is like flipping a switch and they will be ranking for highly searched keywords in a week or month or so.

Even after I make every attempt to tell them this is not the case. I don’t know how many different ways that I can say SEO doesn’t happen over night. I guess some customers just want to believe what they want to believe and they ignore what I repeat over and over. So I decided to write about it.

SEO is like growing a really nice lawn from scratch. Think about the process. First you lay the foundation soil, rake it smooth, seed it, cover with hay and water every day until it is fully grown.

This is similar to SEO. In the beginning you lay the foundation by creating the landing pages, fixing the technical issues with the site, optimize the page copy, submit  site-maps and finally link build every night.

Just like the first few weeks of watering your lawn it feels like nothing is happening. Link building is the same, you are germinating the links.  But then one day you wake up and you have a thin layer of grass or a sign that all your link building efforts are paying off.

Of course you can’t just stop watering your lawn at this point or your grass won’t grow to be full and lush. So you water it for the next few weeks, then cut it and then water it some more.

And if you want a really lush lawn you spend even more time fertilizing it and maintaining it for several months each year.

SEO is not much different. If you give up once you start seeing some results you will never have a really successful campaign. It takes time to see that first result but once you get some traction, you must nourish it and continue to build links to  help it become a healthy campaign.

In summary growing grass and SEO are really not all that different when it comes to patience, time and results. The more time and effort you put into it the better your results will be.  I hope this helps clarify the SEO process.

Keywords are at the heart of every SEO campaign. But what most people do not realize is how important their keywords choices are. Most people think that broad terms are the way to go, but niche targeted terms is where it’s at.

The idea is that niche targeted keywords will produce less traffic than broad terms, but will bring in more quality traffic, hence producing more conversions.  Below are a few examples that will help you identify niche targeted keywords.

Broad terms are for shoppers and niche terms are for buyers

1. Let’s say we have a company who makes Liquid Absorbers for Hazardous waste spills. The first broad keyword term that comes to mind is  Liquid Absorbers. This is a very broad term that could mean anything. Who knows what the searcher is looking for? A better term to target would be Hazardous waste liquid absorbers. This is a better term and will result in more conversions.
2. Let’s do another one. This time we will add a geo target. This website will help families find a nanny. The first keyword that comes to mind is the broadest term, find a nanny. But usually when someone is looking for a nanny they are in a geographic location. Let’s just say that our nanny searcher is in Boston. A better keyword to target would be find a nanny Boston. Pretty simple right?
3. Okay, one more. This time we have a website that caters to the tourist region of Niagara Falls USA.  Of course the broad term would be Niagara Falls, but a better and more niche term would be things to do in Niagara Falls. This  keyword is more relevant to the tourism industry and will produce more conversions on this site.

Summary: The whole idea is that broad keyword terms will produce a lot of traffic to your site, but niche keywords will bring in more conversions.  I hope this helps you identify the proper keywords to use in your SEO campaigns.

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