Don’t Row Backward

by
Rowing in opposite directions.
Rowing in opposite directions.

Hypothetically, let’s say you’re the average business owner working to generate interest online. You’ve been blogging, you have a business website, and you have social media accounts. This is a very common business model online. And it can work really well. But not when you’re rowing backward.

When you set up the social media accounts, your expectations for social media were high! You wanted everyone to friend/follow/fan/like you. So you added links to your social media accounts to all of your sites. Cute sparkly, noticeable links and you encouraged people to follow you.

And maybe that’s where you left it. Or maybe you do a lot of tweeting, posting to Facebook, etc, and you’re engaging people in social relationships. But probably, you are also wondering why this isn’t resulting in more customers.
That’s because you’re routing customers further away from you, not toward you.

Read more

What Does Too Much SEO Look Like?

by

There is such a thing as too much SEO, and this article covers my personal pet peeves – no one wants to visit sites with this particular problem: When Websites Don’t Provide What The Say They Will – By Jill Whalen Also covered, pages that technically drone on about the subject but don’t answer the …

Read more

Actual Steps for Online Stores to Advertising with Google Product Search Listings

by

Note – if any of the below seems like too much work, I’ll happily do it for you. That’s my job.
1. Make sure your shopping cart is generating a good Google Product Feed.
I can’t provide detailed instructions without knowing which cart you use. Most of the better carts include the Google product feed without additional cost.
By “good” I mean that the feed will be your ad copy, so look it over. Make sure that your ads do a good job getting people to understand what the product is in detail, and provide selling points. They should do that in any case, as these product listings pull from the same data your customers see when they’re thisclose to buying.

Read more

Email Open Rates — Quick Study

by

I was recently asked to review best practices for open rates and provide that research to a client.  I figured we could all benefit from what I found out by studying not only historical data for high-traffic clients but online research as well. 1. What Device are they opening the email with? Many people now …

Read more

Why Code Validity?

by

Nearly every single time I recommend cleaning up the code on a website, the response I get back is: “But Why? I hear it doesn’t matter.”

My question is, where did you hear this? From someone who writes sloppy code, perhaps?

It is easier to write invalid code – that’s all it has going for it. The average WYSIWYG editor makes such websites at a mile a minute.  (What You See Is What You Get – Programs like Dreamweaver, which are used to build websites visually but do not require that you look at the code to do so.)  Even if they are invalid in code, these sites look pretty and that is all that usually matters to people.  Standards seem pesky to deal with when you can build a site which gives every appearance (visually) of being fine, despite the messy code.

Read more

How to Squeeze Value out of Twitter

by

Twitter is only powerful if you don’t waste a lot of time there. Let me amend that.

Twitter is a great tool for managing existing customer relationships. Spend as much time there as you want if you’re using it to manage an existing field of active Twitter users who are your customers already. As far as cold contact, Twitter is a good (not great) tool for marketing, so long as you don’t spend a lot of time on it.

Read more

Four Local Marketing Misconceptions

by

I run into clients who won’t build up their local search presence, despite that they offer a local service or sell products locally. Here is what they often say to me.
1. I need to have my website up first.
Variations on this theme; My website’s too general for me to be in local search. My website needs to be fixed up first. I’m not sure what to do first… shouldn’t I have a website first? But I don’t need a website, I get customers without one. Et cetera.
You don’t need a website to be in local search.

Read more