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Archive for Online Marketing for Small Business

Protect Your Website with BackupBuddy

Monday, April 8th, 2013

Your website is an essential component of your small business marketing system. It is the foundation of your Total Online Presence and chances are you have invested significant time and resources creating and maintaining it. Are you protecting that investment with regular backups? More importantly, if you had to, could you restore your website quickly using those backups?

If the answer is “no” or “I’m not sure”, take a look at BackupBuddy from iThemes. . I’ve been using BackupBuddy for several years and it is easily the most important tool in my website development toolbox.

BackupBuddy 3.3 was recently released and contains a number of improvements to help insure you not only get a solid backup every time, but that you can can back up and running quickly if you ever need to restore your site.

One of the new features of the latest version is ability to cancel a backup. BackupBuddy gives you the ability to control many aspects of your backup – if you forgot to change a setting (i.e. exclude a directory) you can cancel the backup, change your settings, and restart your backup.

One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that are available to add functionality to your site. Unfortunately, the code in those plugins will sometimes cause conflicts with other plugins. Depending on the number of plugins your site uses, tracking down these conflicts can be tedious. BackupBuddy’s Server Information page now lists your site’s active WordPress plugins and helps point out any known problems with these plugins.

BackupBuddy allows you to create scheduled backups. It used to be a common practice to create a manual backup first, to test all of the configuration settings (i.e. offsite storage). Once you were confident, you would then duplicate those settings in a scheduled backup. BackupBuddy now allows you to manually run a scheduled backup. This allows you to create your scheduled backup up and then test them by hovering a schedule on the Scheduling page and selecting “Run Now”.

Have you ever looked at a list of backup files and wondered what information each file contained? Each backup could contain a different version of WordPress, could have been created with a different version of BackupBuddy, or could be a different type of backup (full vs. database). You can now select “View Details” on the backup page to quickly access the information about each of your backup files.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to restore a backup that is incomplete or corrupted. The new version of BackupBuddy performs a file integrity scan to further insure that you have a good backup should you ever need it.

If you have never had to perform a site restore from a backup file before, the process can be a little intimidating. ImportBuddy (the “restore” half of BackupBuddy) includes a quick-reference to help you solve potential problems (due to server issues or settings/configuration) and some simple solutions.

ImportBuddy also includes error-catching and problem logging to help you or your website support team quickly identify and resolve any issues with restoring your site.

Those are just the highlights of the updates contained in BackupBuddy 3.3. I can’t recommend BackupBuddy highly enough, it has saved me countless hours as a developer moving sites from one host to another. I’ve also used it to help several clients whose sites had been hacked get back up and running in under an hour.

P.S. If you are enrolled in one of our managed website programs, your site is already being protected by BackupBuddy.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business, Small Business Marketing

Tags : website, wordpress

Get a Head Start with Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

Getting started with Google Analytics can be challenging. The tool contains so many reports, filters, and ability for customizations that it can be overwhelming to figure out where to look first. There is a definite learning curve for moving from looking at data to drawing insights that will help you make business decisions.

Google is helping to shorten that learning curve with their Google Analytics Solution Gallery. This solution gallery contains Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports that you can quickly import into your own analytics account.

The tool helps you find the right component to answer the business question you want to address. Here is a snapshot of the dropdowns you can use to filter and find the the metrics that matter to you (click the image to see a larger version):

The Analytics Solution dropdown allows you to narrow down your choices to the available Dashboard, Custom Report, or Advanced Segment categories.

Use the Business Objective dropdown to indicate the type of website you have – Publisher, E-commerce, Branding, Lead Generation or Support.

The Marketing Function filter helps you select tools to help you answer questions about SEO, Social Sharing, Engagement, PPC, Acquisition, Mobile, and Site Optimization.

As you change the dropdowns, the page will display the different tools available in the area below, along with a description of each tool. For example, here is an image of the custom reports for e-commerce that are related to acquisition:

To add one of these solutions to your Google Analytics account:

Make sure you are logged into your GA account
Click on the download link under the description of the solution you want to add to your account
Accept the solution into your account and indicate which Web Profile you want to apply it to.

That’s it, you should now have the tool in your GA account ready to use.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business, Technology

Tags : google analytics

How To Calculate the Value of a Website Conversion

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

Identifying the monetary value of your website visitors is an important step to evaluating and improving the effectiveness of your online presence. Creating goals and assigning values to those goals is how you connect the resources you put into creating your total online presence to your business goals. In the last post we touched briefly on assigning values to your goal conversions, this post provides some additional ideas on how to go about calculating your goal values.

You don’t have to sell products and services directly on your website in order to track the value of goal conversions on your website. Most professional service providers and B2B companies have several “mini conversions” that their customers complete before making a purchase – downloading brochures, attending webinars, scheduling a free consultation, etc. Since we don’t have a sale price to use for these conversions, we just need to calculate a value for the goal.

The “ideal” method for calculating the monetary value of a goal conversion on your website is to divide the lifetime value of your typical customer by the number of goal conversions it takes to land a new customer. For example lets say that:

1 out of every 800 people who download an eBook from your website ends up becoming a customer
The lifetime value of that customer is $5,000

The value you would assign to the goal conversion of an eBook being downloaded would be $5,000/800 = $6.25

Now, as a small business owner, you may not have been collecting the data you need for this “ideal” calculation. Should you wait until you have the data before calculating values for your goals? No. There are many ways you can calculate the monetary values you assign to your goals. My recommendation is to assign a value, start tracking your data, and refine your estimates as you learn more from the data you collect.

If you don’t know the LTV of a customer you can use your average sale amount or the price of your typical sale. If you have a wide range of products and services, you may (over time) tie the value of the sale to the goal that is converted. For example, people who sign up for your webinar may typically purchase a $99 dollar workbook while those who request a free consultation may typically purchase a $10,000 coaching engagement. In this example, tying the value to the specific goal conversion will give you a better measure than using an average sale.

If you don’t know the percentage of visitors who become customers, you can find a starting point by Googling “average conversion rate by industry”. You will find conversion rates ranging from 2% to 10% and higher.

For many small business owners, it is easier to skip the formal calculation and assign a starting value based on experience and/or gut feel. You could assign a value based upon:

Prices you have paid for purchasing mailing lists
Prices you have paid for pay per click advertising
Price you would be willing to pay for a qualified visitor

Don’t worry about assigning the perfect value to your goal conversion; assign a value, start measuring, and build the habit of reviewing the data, adjusting your estimates, and continuing to improve.

If you don’t have any data to begin with, start by assigning one value to your goal or goals. As you continue your reviewing and planning processes you can begin to refine your goals and goal values based on product types, traffic sources, keywords, and other factors.

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Categories : Lead Generation, Online Marketing for Small Business

Tags : google analytics

Using Google Analytics Goals to Measure Results on Your Website

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

This post is the third in a series of post about using Google Analytics to measure and improve the effectiveness of your online presence. In the first post we talked about improving the visibility of your website in order to reach more potential customers. The second post discussed how to measure visitor behavior once they reached your website. Today’s post covers metrics that help you measure business results or conversions that take place on your website by using Google Analytics Goals.

This category of metrics helps you answer the answer questions like:

What is the bottom line of all the activity related to my online presence?
Is my online presence helping my business? Is it contributing to my bottom line?

Goals or Conversions

Google Analytics allows you to define a set of criteria for goal, which is simply an action that a website visitor can perform that you have identified as being important to your bottom line. Completed actions are measured in terms of goal completions or conversions. Assigning monetary values to your goals (more below) helps you focus on the goals that provide the greatest contribution to your bottom line.

Metrics in this category begin with goal completions and then look to determine where your visitors who completed goals came from in order to help you improve your conversion rates. Here are some common metrics to pay attention to in this category:

Goal Completions – are how you tie all of the efforts you put into attracting, engaging, and educating visitors to your business goals. The most obvious conversion is when a visitor is converted into a customer by making a purchase on your website. Google Analytics (as well as other analytics tools) allows you to assign a monetary value to your goal completion, allowing you to express conversions in both instances and values ( 3 conversions valued at $1,200).

Goals can capture much more than just sales; you can create goals for any action you would like your web visitors to complete. You may want to set goals for white paper downloads or requests for additional information. If your sales process includes a free consultation, you would certainly want to set that up as a goal.

I also recommend that you assign a value to each of your goals. So if I know that 1 in 5 people that fill out a form on my website end up buying my service that costs $100, then I may assign a value of $20 to that goal. I’ll cover others ways to assign values to goals in a future post.

Goal Completions from Calls to Action – helps you identify what content on your site prompted a visitor to take action. Example calls to action may include prompts to download a white paper, register for an event, or a request for a free quote or consultation.

Goal Completions from Referrals – help you identify the links on other websites that bring you traffic that converts. Use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of your link building efforts as well as banner advertising.

Goal Completions Assisted by Social Media – are your social media properties sending you traffic that converts? Use this metric to determine the number and value of conversions from your social media activities.

Return on SEO Spend – are you spending money, either internally or with a consultant, for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? If so, one of the tools you can use to evaluate whether you are getting your money’s worth is the return on SEO spend metric, which is the monetary value of your SEO goals completed divided by the cost of your SEO campaign.

Begin With the End (Goals) in Mind

If you are building a new website, or considering redesigning your existing site, it is a good idea to start with your goals in mind first and then work backwards to help determine the best way to optimize (and test) your website for goal conversions.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business

Tags : google analytics

Using Google Analytics to Determine What Visitors Do On Your Website

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Monday, March 4th, 2013

In my last post I outlined some of the metrics you can use to measure and improve the reach and visibility of your website. Once your get people to find you in the search results and click through to visit your website, it is helpful to know what visitors actually do once they get there. That is where our next set of metrics come in.

Action or engagement metrics help us measure and understand:

What visitors actually do on your website
The actions or behaviors that are most helpful in meeting your business goals
What changes to the website actually prompt more of those desirable actions (and which changes were detrimental to meeting those goals)

In other words, action metrics help you determine which of your reach strategies are working (delivering the right kind of traffic) best and which need to be adjusted (or dropped). Here are some common metrics you can use to measure, evaluate, and improve engagement on your site:

Returning vs. New Visitors – This metric is sometimes referred to as Visitor Loyalty. We all want to attract new visitors to our websites, but returning visitors often return because they are interested in the information we provide about our products, services, and the business problems that we solve.

Page Views per Visit – can give you an indication of how well your website is engaging visitors. Do they stick around and explore the information on your site? Or do they quickly leave after viewing the first page they land on? Look at this metric combined with time on site and bounce rate to identify patterns in how visitors behave once they reach your site.

Time on Site – tells you the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site. Use this metric in combination with others to spot trends in how visitors use your website. For example, so certain keywords attract traffic with higher time on site metrics than others? Do those who spend more time on your site tend to visit specific pages on your site?

Bounce Rate – a “bounce” is defined as someone who visits a page on your website, and then leaves your website without visiting any of the other pages on your site. Bounce rate, along with pages per visit and time on site, can be an indication of how well your content matches visitors search intent.

Comments and Interactions – as blogging and social media play a bigger part in our total online presence, comments and interactions can be a good indication of how well we are engaging our community and providing content that they are interest in.

Site Search – tells you exactly what visitors are looking for once they reach your website. Don’t overlook this goldmine of information that will help you convert more visitors into leads by providing the information they need to feel comfortable in order to move to the next step in their buying process.

There are other important actions that visitors can take on your website such as filling out forms, downloading resources, or contacting you via your contact form. We’ll discuss those in the next post about goals and conversions.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business

Tags : google analytics

Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website Visibility

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

As discussed in the Total Online Presence eBook , one of the keys to marketing your business online is to use metrics or analytics to measure your progress and the success of your online campaigns. The course provides a nice list of tools you can use to capture and report analytics. Because these tools provide such a large amount of data, business owners often have questions about which metrics they should focus on. In the next few posts, I will outline some of the more common metrics these tools provide along with some advice as to how and when you may want to use them.

I find it helpful to group analytics into 3 main buckets based on the type of information they provide and the types of questions they help me answer:

Visibility or Reach – How easy is it for prospects matching your ideal customer profile to find your website?
Actions or Engagement - What do visitors actually do once they reach your website
Conversions or Results – How are my online marketing efforts contributing to my business goals

This post will address the first group, Visibility/Reach. I’ll address the other two in future posts. Below are some common metrics you can use to evaluate the reach of your online efforts. This list is not exhaustive, please add your favorites to the comments below.

In terms of the marketing hourglass, Reach is about getting people to Know about you. Metrics in this category help us answer questions about the visibility of a website and the traffic it receives. Here are some of the more common metrics in the visibility category:

Crawability – refers to the ability of search engines to find and crawl your website. Items in this category typically focus on the technical issues that may be blocking search engines from some or all of your content. These are the items you will typically see in a website audit, particularly in “free” audits that are used as lead generation tools. Typical issues and or metrics in this category include:

Number of pages being blocked by your robots.txt file
Number of pages generating 404 Page Not Found errors
Number of pages generating other server errors
Number of pages that are being blocked by the noindex meta attribute
Number of pages that have redirects (or use the wrong type of redirect)

URLs Indexed – gives you an indication of the number of pages from your website that are included in the search engine’s index. This metric is commonly used to help determine if all or most of your pages are being indexed. It can also be used to help you spot duplicate content issues. If the number of URLs indexed is greater than the pages on your site, you may have duplicate content issues. Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress often generate archive pages; this could be one reason why your URLs indexed number is greater than the number of pages shown in your CMS.

NAP Citations – or Name, Address, Phone citations play an important role in local search. Chances are NAP citations already exist for your business – even if you didn’t create them. You should search, claim, and verify the accuracy of these citations for your business. I’ll cover this in greater detail in a future post, but for now you can learn more and get started by visiting GetListed.org.

Geographic Reach – metrics let you know the location of your website visitors. Depending on your business goals, you may want to focus on narrowing your reach (or increasing your percentage of local visitors) or expanding it. Business with an international focus can use these metrics to help determine if goal conversions are being hurt due to language and/or cultural barriers.

Keywords – and phrases are how visitors find us in the search engines. Keyword metrics help us identify phrases that are relevant to our business and actually used by the people searching for the products and services that we sell. If we are drawing a lot of traffic to our website but are not converting those visitors into leads, then we may want to examine and re-evaluate the keywords we are targeting in our SEO efforts.

Deep Links – refer to links from other websites that link to a page on your website – other than the homepage. Search engines try to evaluate the relevance of links. Since home pages tend to be more general in nature, links to inside pages are seen as linking to more specific information and therefore deemed to be more relevant (assuming quality content on the inside page). Having links to specific inside pages increases the chances of that page being found by people searching for the type of content on that page.

Referring Domains – the greater the number of reputable sites linking to your website, the higher the search engines value the quality of your website content – meaning you have a better chance of ranking well in the search results.

SERP Ranking – is the position your website page appears on a Search Engine Result Page. This is probably the metric most small business owners are familiar with. You probably receive several spam messages a day from people promising to get you a #1 SERP ranking. However, SERP rankings are becoming increasingly less useful due to the influence of personalization, location, search history, and social media activity on search results. Small business owners should begin moving away from relying on ranking results and focus more on keywords that lead to results – such as conversions.

Average Rank / Keyword Position – your Google Webmaster tools will show you an average keyword position in the SERP results for keywords bringing traffic to your website. See the note above about SERP rankings.

Brand vs Non-Branded Organic Keyword Traffic – “branded” keywords refer to keyword phrases that include your name, your company name, the names of the brands you sell, etc. People who search using your branded keywords already know about you and your brand. They are typically people who are in the latter stages of their buying process, or searching for information not related to a purchasing decision.

Non-branded traffic is typically visitors who are searching for information about something they want or a problem they need to solve. They may not have heard of you yet, or they may not have known you provide a solution to that particular problem. These folks are more likely to become new customers.

Separating branded from non-branded traffic can help you evaluate how well “strangers” can find you.

Click Through Rate on SERPs – being listed by the search engines is one thing, but if people don’t click through to your site you have no chance to convert them into leads. You can also use this metric to identify content with favorable click through rates and creating more content that is relevant and interesting to your prospects.

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Categories : Marketing Tools and Software, Online Marketing for Small Business

Speed Up Your Website and Improve Your Rankings

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

No one likes to wait for a slow web page to load. And since Google likes to focus on pleasing their customers (searchers), the speed of your website can effect your ability to rank well in search results.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free web page analysis service that can help you identify your slow loading pages and provide you with recommendations on how to speed it up. You can access the service through the PageSpeed Insights page or you can install the Google Chrome and Firefox browser extension.

Getting started is easy – simply enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze and click “Analyze”. In this post, I’m using the popular TechCrunch home page as an example. Here is the summary page that comes up after clicking Analyze:

(click on the image for a larger version)

The first item you see is an overall score – 91 out of 100 in this case. This reflects how much faster the page “could be”, so this page is fairly well optimized.

The next section, Suggestions Summary, displays a prioritized list of, you guessed it, suggestions for improving the pages speed. Details about the suggestion can be found by clicking on a hyperlink in the summary section, or in the list that appears in the left hand column.

The default suggestions are geared for a desktop searchers experience. You can also get suggestions for mobile search by clicking on the button at the top right corner of the page:

So what does all of this mean for the small business owner?

Keep in mind that this is a tool for developers, so don’t feel bad if the suggestions sound like Greek. Share this tool with your website developer and review the high priority suggestions first. Remember that your overall score gives you an indication of how much faster your page could be. While you would certainly want to improve on a 50 out of 100 score, it may not make sense (depending on your business) to spend a lot of money trying to improve a 93 out of 100 score.

If you don’t have a web developer to help you or if you have questions about items on your analysis page, feel free to contact me.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business, Uncategorized

Tracking The Results of Your Facebook Ads

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

Facebook recently announced the global launch (top advertisers have been able to do this for a while) of a new conversion measurement and optimization system for direct response marketers. This new system allows you to measure actions users take related to your ads, such as registrations and shopping cart checkouts.

Small business marketers can now also use optimized CPM (OCPM) to deliver ads to people who are most likely to convert on their websites. Beta tests have shown that when conversion measurement is used with optimized CPM, ads reduced the cost per conversion by 40 percent when compared to CPC ads using the same budget.

This means you can now measure how well your Facebook Ads and sponsored stories are driving specific actions on your website. This information will not only help you understand how your ads are performing but should also help you improve the performance of future campaigns.

Conversion measurement is currently available in power editor, the ads manager, and to API partners. Here’s how to get started:

Click on the conversion tracking tab in power editor in Chrome (www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/) or on the conversion tracking link on the left hand nav in ads manager (www.facebook.com/ads/manage)
Create your conversion tracking pixel(s) and implement it on your conversion page(s)
Once the pixel has been placed on your website, create ads and select “track conversions on my website for this ad”
Set a budget and choose optimized CPM to deliver the ad to people most likely to convert

When you create ads linking to your site, you will see an option called “Conversion Tracking” in the “Campaign, Pricing and Schedule” section of the ad tool. Clicking “Create Tracking Pixels” will take you to another page where you can create, name, and assign a category to a conversion pixel. Facebook then will generate a piece of code that you will need to put on the page of their site you wish to track.

You can review your conversion reports in the ads manager.

You can find more information about Facebook’s conversion tracking here.

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business

Tags : facebook

Facebook Limits Amount of Text in Cover Photos

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

You may not have noticed it, but on January 15 Facebook changed their policy for Cover Photos for Pages. Under the new policy, you are not allowed to have cover photos that have text on more than 20% of the image area.

That’s 20% of the image area (not a specific number of words or characters). Cover photos are 851 x 315 = 268,065 square pixels. 20% of that is 53,613 square pixels. Text can appear anywhere, but typical text blocks sizes might include:

450 x 119 pixel area in the top left corner of the cover photo
640 x 83.77 pixel area in the bottom right corner of the cover photo
232 x 231 pixel “square” block area

Depending on the font size you use, many small business may be limited to displaying their business name and/or their tagline under these new rules.

Facebook is reportedly developing a tool to measure the amount of text that they will use themselves and share with users and advertisers to help measure compliance with this rule.

Just for review, here are Facebook Rules for Timeline Cover Photos:

1. All Cover Photos are Public and should be 851pixels wide x 315pixels high.

2. Covers CANNOT be Deceptive, Misleading, or Infringe on anyone else’s copyright, if they are you may find it disappears.

3. You may NOT encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines.

4. Cover Photos MUST NOT Include;

Images with more than 20% text
Price or Purchase Information, such as “40% off” or “Download it on yourwebsite.com”
Contact Information such as a Website Address, Email, Mailing Address, or Information that should go in your Page’s “About” section.
Calls to action, including references to Facebook features or actions, such as “Like” or “Share” or an Arrow Pointing from the Cover Photo to any of these features or Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.

You can read the full set of guidelines here – https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

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Categories : Online Marketing for Small Business

Tags : facebook, social media marketing