Archive for the ‘Website Marketing’ Category

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Fun and useful Wordpress plugins for your blog

Monday, January 18th, 2010

As Wordpress blogs gain in popularity, the extensive list of plugins continues to grow. Here are a few Wordpress plugins that can be great additions to your blog.

1. WPtouch iPhone theme plugin: Are you unhappy with the way that your Wordpress blog looks on your iPhone, Droid or Blackberry? This plugin allows you to view your site on your mobile device using an alternate iPhone style theme. This theme also allows the user to switch to your regular theme if they choose.

Download it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/

2. Sexy comments plugin: According to the description, this plugin allows you to “sexify your comments” section of your blog, including optional avatars, an Ajax comment preview and CSS override. There are lots of customization options and this plugin will save some coding time.

Download it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexy-comments/

3. My Page Order plugin: If you are not a PHP coder or don’t want to mess with the actual theme code, use this plugin to set the display order of your pages with a drag and drop interface. It’s easy to use and again, saves some coding time.

Download it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/

4. Google Analyticator plugin: This plugin allows you to easily implement your Google Analytics code to your blog, adding the necessary Javascript to the pages. It also allows you to pull basic stats through your Wordpress admin.

Download it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/

5. Broken Link Checker plugin: If you are not regularly checking your blog analytics, be sure to download this plugin. It will alert you to any broken pages or images on your blog. No one enjoys the dreaded 404 error.

Download it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

These are just a few of the nearly 8,000 plugins available. To shop the full list, visit the Wordpress plugin directory.

Angie Commorato is a indianapolis based web consultant and web designer and owner of a&g Digital Consulting, LLC.

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Promote Your Existing Business Commercials on the Web

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Check your stack of CDs on your desk. Do you have any disk laying around with TV commercials, infomercials or other business videos that you have produced for your company? If so, they could be bringing in more traffic to your website through online video promotion and marketing.

1. Get Your Money’s Worth for Your Video Production: If you have already paid to have a commercial produced for television, ask your media company for a web-ready version of your video. You can not only upload your video to YouTube to promote, but you can also add the video to your company’s website, business blog or email marketing campaigns.

2. Invite Your Existing or Potential Customers to Watch Your Commercials: If you are currently collecting opt-in emails from your website or have opt-in emails from your existing customers, send an email, inviting them to watch your commercials. You can either direct them to your uploaded clip on YouTube or to the media section of your website for added exposure. If you are not using email marketing, contact us to find out how you can send email marketing messages to thousand for customers for less a penny an email.

3. Use YouTube to Save Bandwidth on Your Website Hosting Account: Every time a website visitor views one of your videos on your website, you are going to be using bandwidth from your monthly website hosting allowance. However, if you were to add your clip to YouTube and embed the clip in to your website, you will be using Youtube’s bandwidth. This is a great option for small businesses who may not have unlimited bandwidth available.

3. Always Tag Your Video Posts on YouTube: When you upload a video to YouTube, you will see a field for tags. These tags are very important because they help visitors to the site find your video clip. Try to think about what your customers would search to find you and don’t forget to separate them with a comma. We recently posted some clips for a jewelry store in Logansport, Indiana, which is a smaller town. Here is an example of the tags that we used on their clip:

Tags:
Arnold’s Jewelry and Gifts, Arnold’s Jewelry, Logansport Indiana, Rochester Indiana, Rochester jewelry store, Logansport Jewelry Store, Indiana Jewelry Store

To view their clip, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ATRrjnKOM

4. Use a Press Release to Promote Your Video: If your company video is something that is particularly newsworthy, consider writing and releasing a press release with a link to your online video clip. Search for press release sites that will allow you to post your press release for free to gain added exposure. Keep the search engines in mind when writing the press release and incorporate pertinent keyword phrases for your business and products or services.

5. As Always, Post A Link to Your Video on Your Social Networking Sites: Add a link to your online commercial on any of your company’s social networking accounts including your Facebook business page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile and other accounts that you may have.

For more information about how to promote your videos on the web, online video production or how to set up an email marketing campaign, contact Angie Commorato at www.ConsultAGC.com.

Angie Commorato, an Indianapolis web designer and online marketing consultant, is the owner of a&g Digital Consulting, LLC. She offers website marketing consulting and web design solutions for Indiana businesses, as well as businesses across the United States.

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Free Tools to Better Your Paid Search Campaigns

Monday, December 7th, 2009

As more and more businesses turn to paid search to generate cost effective leads, the resources are not always available to cover expensive software subscriptions for keyword research. This is where the free keyword and advertising tools from Google can come in handy.

Google Sets

Google Sets is a free tool which can help to expand your search phrases for your businesses. This tool allows you to enter up to five keyword phrases which pertain to your business. You can then choose a small set, which will generate 15 or fewer items, or a large set, which will provide a much more extensive list of phrases.

In my experience, you would not want to cut and paste the list of results to your pay per click campaign because the results are not always going to be exactly what you need. However, the results can help you come up with extended keywords and phrases to add to your paid search campaign.

Try it now at http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Ad Preview Tool

If you are a Google pay per click advertiser, how many times a day to you find yourself searching your keywords, just to find out who might be bidding against you? If you are monitoring your placement, as well as competitor placement, Google’s Ad Preview tool is something that you should be using. When you continuously run a search for your bidding keywords, without clicking on your ads, Google may determine your own ads are irrelevant to you and stop showing them to you.

Try it now at https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Google External Keyword Tool

I have always used Google’s External Keyword Generator when I am formulating my list of keywords and keyword phrases to target for a search engine optimization campaign, as well as my paid search campaigns. This is a scaled down version of the tool that is available to you when you log in to your Google Ad Words campaign, but if you are not a Google advertiser, you can still use the tool to not only generate ideas for your other campaigns, but also export the results in a easy to manage form. If you are a Google Ad Words advertiser, log in to your account to use their keyword generator. It is much more in depth.

Try it now at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Angie Commorato is an Indianapolis web designer and online marketing specialist and owner of Indianapolis web design and marketing company, a&g Digital Consulting, LLC.

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Consider Using a Twitter Promotion to Build Brand Awareness

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Today, many businesses are using Twitter as part of their online social networking strategy and in fact, the addition of a Twitter contest can be a great way to build brand awareness for your business. There are several different ways to run a Twitter contest.

1. Ask for Retweets: The goal of this type of contest is to ask your followers to get your message in front of as many of their Twitter followers as possible. The idea is for a company to post some type of promotional message and when a Twitter follower Retweets that message, they will be entered to win a prize. When asking followers to retweet, realize that they are going to putting this message in front of their loyal followers. Try to make the message have some sort of meaning or interest and hopefully you can get a chain reaction with the retweets.

(What is a retweet? A retweet is when you republish someone else’s tweet. The most common way to retweet, is to start your tweet with RT followed by the username of the original poster. For example, if I had a tweet under my username commorato that says “a&g Digital Consulting is the best!” and you wanted to retweet, you would tweet the following: RT @commorato a&g Digital Consulting is the best!)

2. Using Hashtags: Asking Twitter users to use hashtags is similar to asking for retweets in that your Twitter followers will be doing most of the work in the contest. If you have never used hashtags on Twitter,  a hashtag is when you use a pound sign (#) before a particular word in your Tweet. Once it the pound sign is added, it becomes a hashtag, which becomes a clickable link to all other mentions of that word. A user can click on the hashtag in someone’s twitter stream and see everything everyone else has said with that hashtag. In contest use, a company will usually allow a customer to Tweet whatever they want as long as they add a particular hastag to their post. For example, Live Nation, an online ticketing company, recently ran a contest asking their followers to post a Tweet about a recent contest, adding the #LiveNation hashtag somewhere in their post. This would enter a folllower in a contest to win free concert tickets.

3. Use Sign Up Forms: This is a new spin on the classic online contest format. In this case, you would be asking Twitter users to come to your website and sign up for the contest. This can be a great way to get more exposure for your website, especially if you can incorporate a trivia question, requiring the user to hunt around your website. For the best results, keep your entry form short and to the point and include contest terms which address how the participants personal information will be used after the conclusion of the contest.

4. Gathering More Followers: The final way to start a Twitter contest is to announce that your followers are going to be entered to win a prize once your number of followers reaches a certain level. The idea is that your followers will tell their followers to start following you to help you reach your goal and in turn, give out a prize. There are also varieties of this contest where bigger and better prizes are given as your different goals are reached.

No matter which type of Twitter contest you decide to run, expect to get your brand name in front of a lot of people in a relatively quick period of time. Aim to offer some desirable contest prizes and your name can spread very quickly across the Twitter network.


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Real Estate On the Verge

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

I don’t normally re-post other people’s articles, but I am currently working on developing a business blog and corporate identity for Knox County Realty, LLC, located in Vincennes, Indiana, and this article was fitting. I have yet to speak with a client in any industry where it doesn’t make sense to build a website for their business, but for this particular client, I can see a huge potential for online promotion. This article makes some great points about taking advantage of the current slump in the market. Prepare your real estate business now with a informative website presence and help turn your followers in to home buyers.

Real Estate on the Verge
By Michael Stark

Declining prices, a credit crisis and millions of foreclosures pushed the real estate market to the brink. Commissions are under attack. Sellers try to connect directly with buyers. Investors crave to know about deals before they hit the MLS (multiple listing service). And consumer frustration makes matters worse.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported on May 12, 2009, that first quarter sales were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.59 million homes and condos sold. The population of prospects is enormous when you add in all of those struggling to sell, buyers on the fence, approximately 1.1 million realtors, and countless lenders, escrow, insurance and home improvement contractors. The real estate vertical seems poised for a gold rush.

Current tools used for marketing this depressed market — PPC advertising, banners and even e-mail — are not working as well as in the past. There is simply too much inventory. Therefore, claiming your stake in the virgin vertical of real estate means moving your covered wagons across a great divide. This new land of opportunity is ready to settle, and it starts with forming long-term relationships with those steeped in the industry. When the housing market rebounds, this will put your business in a position to fuel the impending boom.

The first obstacle is to understand that people are not leads. Investors, sellers, realtors and lenders are real people involved in a very long business sales cycle. Enterprises that can help these individuals and businesses through the process, while serving up products and services will gain trust, respect and profit. Your site will bookmark, brand and build if you educate, enlighten and enable individuals.

OPPORTUNITIES ALONG THE WAY
Pioneers scouting the real estate territory should understand its five sub-verticals, with some sites blending two or more.

1. Sites that allow MLS search. Most agent sites provide a local service. Realtor.com is great nationally.
2. Sites that deliver blogs and news. A good blog can provide important news, featured listings or valuable resources. Curbed.com is a nice example.
3. Sites mashing up census, neighborhood and lifestyle content such as HomeFair.com.
4. Sites providing valuations and sales data, such as Zillow.com.
5. Free and paid sites that assist FSBO (for sale by owner) sellers. Free sites syndicating postings to other sites and search engines are the most popular.

To grow your prospective or existing real estate business, contact the top sites in each sub-vertical, and entice them to sell your products or services on a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or CPL (Cost Per Lead) basis. You might find that some site owners ask to be compensated for access to their database and audience.

Even more opportunities can be found by exploring the angles involved in each real estate transaction. With some creative thought and planning, the list of possibilities grow. For example:

* Buyers are interested in loans, investments strategies, foreclosures and sales data. Any one of these topics could make for a nice side blog to your website, or consultancy work.
* Sellers want tools beyond yard signs, flyers and print ads. They need websites, e-mail, SEM and SEO services, and help engaging prospects — social media strategies and video production.
* When a property doesn’t sell in a timely manner, rental options are needed. This involves prospects, community organizations, and even moving companies.
* Contractors are always needed in every real estate market to make repairs and prepare properties for selling or renting.

In the foreseeable future, times will continue to be tough for real estate buyers, sellers, realtors, lenders, contractors and insurance professionals. But now is the time to connect with this demographic. Show them how your product or service will improve their life, and you’ll discover a huge new source for customers — now and, more importantly, in the profitable times to follow.

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Don’t Let Web Analytics Intimidate Your Small Business

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

In a time of tightened budgeting and online, knowing all about your web visitors is more important than ever. Many hosting platforms offer website traffic statistics but tracking your conversions is usually not something that is offered by these applications. While there are many great statistic software applications available for purchase, I often recommend Google Analytics to many small businesses for several reasons. Google Analytics can be implemented fairly easily in to your website, by placing a chunk of code on every page of the site. After the site is confirmed, you will be able to access your site visitor information, down to the city of the visitor. The best part? Google Analytics is free.

There is a learning curve to the program and information overload can happen if you don’t know where to focus your attention. If you want to start with a general overview of what is happening on your website, I would recommend monitoring a few specific categories.

1. Unique Visitors: I often hear businesses discussing “hits” on their websites and using that for a gauge on how they website is performing. This number can highly overestimate the popularity of your website. A hit is registered whenever one of the many files on your website is loaded. For example, a single page in your site might have 10 images, as well as 2 script files within it’s code. This page could register 12 or more hits from one single visit to the  web page. For that reason, I monitor unique visitors. This number will provide a more accurate way of monitoring the number of people who come to your site, excluding multiple visits from the same computer.

2. Referring Sources – Having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing during my career, I consider the referral data on your statistics to be very important. The referring sources will be able to tell you who is sending you traffic. This can be very valuable if you are spending company time exposing your business to the social networking marketing mediums, or more importantly, paying for display and paid search marketing.

3. Conversion – This is the most important statistic that you are going to monitor, hands down. You can drive all of the traffic in the world to your site, but if they are not turning in to a customer, then you have some work to do. Google Analytics allows you to place some code on your site at what you consider to be the point of conversion. For most businesses, this is the order confirmation page, which thanks them for placing their order. However a business’s goal may be to drive an online information request lead or to drive a phone call. In these cases, placing the code on the contact form confirmation or on the contact page itself can give you an idea of the interest in your particular conversion. Either way, if you are getting the traffic without conversions, it is time to dig deeper in to your site to find out what is happening. In these cases, bounce rates and average time spent on the site by a visitor can get you pointed in the right direction.

For more information on conversion tracking on your website, contact Angie Commorato at blog@commorato.com. Angie is an Indianapolis based web consultant and owner of the online marketing company, a&g Digital Consulting, LLC.

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Demographic Information for Social Networking & Viral Sites

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

I just finished ready a great article that breaks down the demographic information for some of the most popular social networking and viral marketing websites.

The data below was collected by Quantcast.com.

Est. US Male/Female Over W/ Kids HH Income
Montly Visits Ratio 18 Yrs 0-17 $60K +
Facebook 87.4M 54% Female 71% 48% 59%
MySpace 64.3M 57% Female 69% 56% 51%
Twitter 23.0M 55% Female 97% 39% 50%
YouTube 81.6M 50% Female 78% 43% 54%

From an online marketing prospective, the monthly traffic to these websites is staggering. YouTube.com brings in about 81.6M US visitors a month, making this a must for any businesses who are utilizing online video. YouTube is also a great way to distribute viral marketing campaigns.Facebook and MySpace are great places to promote your business and let everyone in on your local events and promotions. Facebook members who have had a pleasant experience with your businesses or have heard good things about you will gladly “become a fan” of your business, opening up a whole new level of exposure to their network connections.

In the recent month, I have had many Indianapolis based businesses who are leary of testing marketing efforts in these mediums, for fear that the sites are “for kids”. This is clearly not the case. Sure, these websites are a daily staple for teenagers and young adults, the data above clearly represents a wider age range of visitors. I think that most businesses can include social networking in to their online marketing plan, but with any types of online advertising, it is important to have the proper tracking mechanisms in place. Try some targeted advertising, tailored to the demographic of the website’s audience. Use promo codes and discount codes to help track your sales from that particular medium and like always, watch your online statistics for traffic and conversion data.

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Pennsylvania Car Dealer Uses Targeted Email Targeted to Drive Business

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

I just got done reading yet another article about a car dealer who has turned to one of the most cost-effective forms of direct response marketing: targeted email campaigns. Pennsylvania based Brown Daub, uses an in-house program to send their geotargeted emails to local, potential car buyers. The dealer was able to instantly monitor their post-campaign results, including click through rates and open rates, to determine the effectiveness of their email campaign.

According to Dianna Dilworth of DMNews.com, “The brand is working on an e-mail to go out in June that targets Pennsylvania consumers that live in towns where Dodge and Chrysler dealers have closed, to let them know that they can still have their cars maintained at Brown Daub.” This type of communication can cost a dealership around a penny or less per email, which can generate website traffic at a much lower cost than other traditional marketing mediums.

Brown Daub saw an 11% click through rate on their first targeted campaign and while this is a good result compared to industry standards, A/B testing on content and subject lines, as well as the tweaking of the different list segmentations can yield an increase in these results.

For more information on car dealership marketing, contact Angie Commorato at angie@consultagc.com.

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Google Adwords Lightens Up on Trademark Policy

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

For any of you resellers, retailers or affiliates who utilize Google Adwords to promote your products, things may have just got a little easier. It is now possible to use certain trademarked phrases in your ad copy, providing that you meet the new guidelines put in place by Google.

Previously, if you were a pet supply company wishing to promote Hartz flea medication, you could more than likely bid on key phrases including the word “Hartz”, but could not include that word in your actual ad.  This led to high bidding costs and low conversion and click throughs. Now, Google is allowing you to include the brand name if you follow the rules.

What does this mean for Google? Well more advertiser spend, of course, resulting in more revenue for Google. Although I have fought for this leniency in the past, I can see how this could be problematic for the owners of the brand name. More targeted competition for their brand name is going to result in higher bid costs for the corporate brand. This can lead to frustration and reduce the ability of the brand owner to brand their particular product, due to increasing conversion costs. Either way, Google comes out as the winner, that is until someone decides to bring a lawsuit against them for the lack of protection on their brand name. Either way, these new rules are now active, so take a look at your current campaigns to see if you can start targeting more efficiently.

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How to Make Your Pay Per Click Campaigns Successful

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

If you have ever felt like the sole purpose of your pay per click campaigns is contribute to the wealth of Google and Yahoo, you are not alone. Many businesses long for their website to appear at the top of the search engines and they set up a paid search campaign to make that happen. However, after their ads go live, they continue to spend money without seeing the increase in sales.  Here is some advice that I can give pertaining to these kinds of campaigns and what it takes for them to be successful. This advice is targeted toward Google Adwords.

1. Target Your Ads by Location – If you are located in Indianapolis, Indiana and sell new cars, you probably won’t want your ads showing in California. Only choose Indiana ad placement, or better yet, target the Indianapolis area only to further stretch your spend. Lets say that you offer residential moving service in the Midwest. You will want to target Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and any other states that you can serve, but you will want to deactivate all other states. Otherwise, you will be paying for customers to see your ads and you won’t be able to service them when they contact you.  I even advise customers who would like to sell within the entire United States to choose a few states to target, evaluate the results and then expand accordingly. Pay per click advertising can get very expensive and this will allow you to get better exposure for your money.

2. Adjust Your Ad Times – Google Adwords allows you to choose the days and times that your ads will display. If your customer typically want to speak to someone about your products or services, you might consider only running your ads during your business hours. I had a customer who had 90% of their website sales happen over the telephone. However, they only had phone sale staffing Monday-Friday from 10am-5pm. We were able to adjust their ads to show during the week, during those hours only. If you are a true ecommerce website which can take online orders 24/7, you can choose the days and times that you would like your ads to appear. I have seen trends within different industries to where certain days of the weeks will convert better than others. To determine which days are the best for your products, you will need to test your campaigns and adjust your targeting based on the results.

3. Have Analytics Available – It sounds so simple, but so many businesses don’t realize the importance of  being able to monitor the source of your website sales. To be able to gauge the effectiveness of your paid search ads, be sure to have some website statistics installed on your website. Google Analytics is a free statistics program that will help you analyze not only the traffic coming to your website but also the impact of your keyword ads. The analytics program will allow you to place a code throughout your website to track conversions at a keyword level. This will allow you to disable under-performing keywords and/or target more of your budget towards the better keywords.

4. Search Engine Optmization – You can always pay to be at the top of the search engines, but the ideal mix of search engine marketing lies in a little paid search and a whole lot of search engine optimization. Once your site is optimized and your website is appearing in the top results, your cost per aquisition will more than likely decrease significantly. It is important that you work with a company that has enough knowledge to get you top ten results for the major search engines. Once those results are achieved, maintain an on-going relationship with that business. Search Engine Optimization is a very reactive form of online marketing. Once you see your website sitting in a top slot in the search results, your competitors are going to take notice and do what they need to do to take back their position.

For more information regarding pay per click campaigns, contact Angie Commorato at blog@commorato.com.

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