by Carla Alvarez | May 13, 2009 | Internet Tips, Marketing Tips
While most of the U.S. and worldwide economy was taking a nose dive at the end of 2008, one industry in particular saw an increase . . . online advertising. This is particularly significant as typically advertising expenditures decrease when the economy contracts.
The Internet Advertising Bureau released their Internet Advertising Report for 2008 in March. Online advertising was up 10.6 percent in 2008 with $23.4 billion in revenue over $21.2 billion in 2007. While many industries were paralyzed in the last quarter of 2008, online advertising increased 4.5% with total revenues of $6.1 billion, a 2.6% increase over 2007 fourth quarter revenues of $5.9 billion and a 4.5% increase over the third quarter of 2008 revenues of $5.8 billion.
“We are seeing an ongoing secular shift from traditional to online media as marketers recognize that ad
dollars invested in interactive media are effective at influencing consumers and delivering measurable
results. In this uncertain economy, where marketers know they need to do more with less, interactive
advertising provides the tools for them to build deep, engaging relationships with consumers—the
experience marketers gain from this will deliver dividends especially after the economy turns around.”
—Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB
Search advertising garnered the majority of the advertising revenue at 48 percent, followed by display advertising with 21 percent. Fifty-seven percent of ad revenues were paid on a performance basis (pay per click, pay per action, etc.), 39 percent were purchased on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Marketing
One thing that I’ve noticed in my business recently is that many of my clients may be currently experiencing a slump in business, but they are taking advantage of the lull in activity to refocus and fine tune their marketing efforts. Over the past few months, I’ve completed web site redesigns, cleaned up and optimized web sites, created complete direct mail campaigns for 2009 and designed digital presentations and media kits. Rather than allowing their business to spiral downward, business owners and managers are being coming more creative and aggressive about how they go after business.
This mindset is reflected in the year end online advertising revenue numbers for 2008. While print and traditional media advertising revenue may be down, businesses are increasingly turning to online advertising for several key reasons:
- Ease of Use: While sophisticated advertising models are available, even the smallest business can set up a Google Adwords account and start advertising online in five minutes.
- Highly Targeted: Rather than paying for exposure you don’t need, online advertising allows you to specifically target your desired audience and reduce wasted ad expenditures.
- Measurable Results:More than any other medium, advertising online allows you to track response to a campaign and measure results.
Before You Advertise Online!
While there are wonderful marketing opportunities online, before you launch your first campaign make sure that your web site is up to speed.
If a potential customer responds to an online ad, they are going to be looking for more information about your products or services on your web site. I have seen a surprising number of businesses advertising online who either 1) don’t have a web site at all, or 2) have a site that is so bad that it will hurt their chances of winning the business rather than closing it.
A few things to consider when analyzing your web site are:
- Is your contact information readily accessible?
- Is it clear what your company does?
- Does your business web site projects accurately represent the image you would like to project for your business?
Need help bringing your web site up to speed or planning an online campaign? Contact us!
by Carla Alvarez | Apr 27, 2009 | Internet Tips, Special Offers
For those of you who use Joomla as your web site platform, Joobi (a third party Joomla application developer) is offering a 30% sale on their components until May 1st, 2009. The discount code is SPRINGY.
I’ve used YANC for years for an email newsletter component; however, there is not a version for Joomla 1.5 and doesn’t look like there is going to be. As I am in the process of migrating a Joomla 1.0.15 site to 1.5, I decided to switch to Acajoom for a newsletter system. I was so excited to see that they had a sale on components when I went to order the component.
I’m half tempted to try out their new Jstore while the sale is going on.
Looking for a developer for a new site or Joomla redesign or need a Joomla web site maintenance service?
Contact Us
by Carla Alvarez | Apr 16, 2009 | Internet Tips, Small Business, Small Business Websites
If you have a domain name that has been live on the web for any time at all, you have most likely received junk mail from one kind domain scammer or another. Whether it is renewal notices from “registrars” you’ve never heard of, internet “directory listing” services, or the countless email spams, there are a ton of them out there.
These predatory companies bank on the fact that in most businesses, the web/marketing arm of the operation is usually a separate department than accounting. They are hoping that the accounts payable person will just pay the bill as if it were an approved invoice.
The latest one that I received takes a different approach. I received a fax from Domain Registry Rights stating that the .us extension of a domain that I own the .com on was available and basically if I didn’t secure the other domain, that it could result in conflicting domain names and trademark infringement.
???
Yeah, exactly. The site for the company listed also links to the official ICANN site as its forum and quotes the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy in order to sound official. The fax actually looks like a legal document.
While it may not be technically fraud, it is using scare tactics and misleading information to get people to pay for the domain registration. These people are bottom feeders. They profit from the ignorance of others.
If I had wanted that extension, I would have registered it at the same time I registered the .com, so no, I’m not interested.
While doing a quick search on the scammers, I found numerous others who had received similar notices.
Tips for Protecting Your Domain Name
It seems like every few months I’m writing about domain names (All About Domain Names, Domain Kiting Can Cost You, and 5 Mistakes Small Businesses Make with Their Web Site). This is partly because it is so important for small businesses to keep their domain names active, and also due to the fact that there are a lot of misconceptions out there about domain registrations.
- Keep Your Domain Name Current: Every once in a while I will talk to someone that thinks that if you let a domain name expire, that it’s not that big of a deal and that you can reregister it right away. This is not the case. When a domain expires, it goes into a redemption period giving the previous owner time to reclaim it (and it will cost you extra.) After that it goes into another period of time where it is pending deletion.After all of that, it will be available for registration again and there is an entire industry devoted to snapping up expired domain names and selling them at a profit. Believe me, they have a lot more time than you do to sit and catch domains that have dropped. If you are running a business on that domain, you can’t afford to let it expire. Keep it current.
- Keep Your Contact Information Current: Your registrar will send you emails when your domains get close to their expiration date. Make sure that your contact information is current so that you receive them.
- Keep Your Domain Name Safe: Also, keep your domain names locked so that unauthorized changes can’t be made to your domains.
- Your Domain Name Registrations are Valuable: Treat your domain registrations the same as you would the documentation for any other valuable asset like the title to your house or car. Print out copies of your registration. Keep a hard copy of the information for your registrar account, including the user name and password. If you didn’t keep your contact information with the registrar current and you forget your log in information, it can be a real hassle to get back into your account.
- Manage Your Domains Well: If you are reading all of this and are thinking that you don’t want to mess with it, assign someone to manage it for you. Godaddy and other large registrars offer the option to assign account managers to all of your domains or only those in certain groups. Have one person in your company be the point person for the domain registrations. If there is no one in your company to handle it, develop a relationship with your web maintenance or development company to keep your domains up-to-date.
by Carla Alvarez | Mar 27, 2009 | Internet Tips, Marketing Tips
I’ve been so busy the past few months with client projects and organizing Picnic on the Park that my poor blog has been severely neglected.
Lucky for me, my daughter decided to help me out.
A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter was sitting at my computer and said, “Mom, I’m writing a story about our family.”
“That’s great babe,” I replied.
She showed me what she was writing (which I thought was in Word) with all her pictures and the story. She loves to write. In kindergarten, they started writing daily journal entries. She can’t wait until 4th grade because they get to do a writing test for TAKS.
She is also very computer savvy. She send emails to family, creates videos (she has one about chickens that is a classic), creates drawings in Illustrator, and has been bugging me to create a web site for her.
However I was still surprised when I looked on my site feeds and saw a new post titled, “Family.”
She wasn’t writing her story in Word. Oh no. It was in Windows Live Writer. Not only did she find the program and create a post, but she also published it . . . to my business web site.
Blogging: The Easy Way to Publish and Promote
The moral of the story is if you have been holding off starting a blog because you think it is too difficult . . . don’t. My third grade daughter posted her first blog post all on her own.
The maxim for ranking well in the search engines is “content is king” and keeping that content fresh and updated is often a struggle for businesses. Writing may be fun for elementary students, but it can be intimidating for those of us who remember the research papers and reports of our college years.
Unlike writing a formal article or report, blogging is more about creating a conversation with your reader. It is developing an online personality so that site visitors and potential customers can get a sense of your company and how you do business.
Blogging Platforms
Rather than having to create a new page for every post, blogs run on database driven platform that dynamically create a new page based on the information you submit. Unless you are planning on getting into web development, you don’t need to know the technical aspects of it. For the user, it is as simple as filling in the form fields and hitting “publish.” Below is a screenshot of my WordPress admin panel as I was writing this post.
Hosted vs. Self Hosted
With a hosted blogging platform, a user signs up for an account and the service hosts and maintains its. The most popular of the hosted platforms are Blogger, Live Journal, and WordPress. All three offer free accounts. WordPress.com also has fee based premium services. Another fee based hosted platform is Typepad.
A self hosted blogging platform is one, as the term would suggest, installed on your own hosting. There are a wide range of options for self-hosted platforms: WordPress (Open Source), Moveable Type (free and fee based licensing), Joomla (Open Source), Drupal (Open Source), TextPattern (Open Source), and Expression Engine (fee based licensing) to name a few.
If you are starting a personal blog and just want to get your feet wet, going with a free hosted platform is a good choice. Blogger is my recommendation for people wanting free, simple, and easy.
However if you are starting a blog for your business, it is always best to go with a self-hosted platform on your own domain. The platforms I use most frequently are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, it just depends on the client need, budget, and what else they want to do with the site besides blogging.
Events to Treasure is an example of a business site on WordPress that provides basic company information as well as a blog section.
The Kingwood Connection runs on Joomla with categorized news sections and user blogs among other features.
1st Bling is a baby product review blog running on WordPress MU.
How your blog looks is limited only by time and imagination.
Getting Started Blogging
- Will it be personal or professional.
- Define your topic.
- Choose a platform.
- Start writing.
It is as simple as that. Once you get a few posts under your belt, there are other considerations such as building a reader base, promoting your site through feeds and social networking sites, and search engine optimization, etc.
Don’t worry about that when you are just starting out. Find your own rhythm in your writing and get comfortable with blogging before you worry about the other aspects.
Blogging Resources
A great resource for beginning bloggers is Problogger by Darren Rowse. The book is a compilation of tips from Darren’s blog by the same name, Problogger.net.
Other sites that I follow on blogging are:
Blog Training from Legacy Marketing Services
Update 2014: As more and more people began to switch their business web sites over to content management platforms, a situation that I repeatedly ran into was one where a business owner had paid for a web site but then they didn’t know what to do with it next. This was especially true for those based on Joomla and WordPress as the development costs are relatively lower than other platforms and it was more likely that the business owner was managing the site themselves rather than paying for marketing company to do so or having an inhouse staff member that was solely dedicated to managing the site.
Because of this, and because of the needs of our own clients, we have developed a training site, Marketing Savvy, with video tutorials and instructions on how to manage and make the most of your web site and social media accounts. The tutorials are from a small business perspective.
Visit Marketing Savvy
Blog Development Services
If your business requires something more than a free hosted blog with a generic template, contact us for a consultation on the right solution for you. Legacy Marketing offers new blog development, theme conversions, and blog integration into your existing site.
by Carla Alvarez | Aug 11, 2008 | Internet Tips, Small Business Tips, Small Business Websites
You know your web site needs help when someone enters your business name and city and you don’t come up in the first page of Google results.
Having a professional looking web site for your business is important. When a prospective customer does preliminary research, your web site is usually the first impression of your company and the service you provide.
Having a properly constructed web site is important as well. Everyone gets caught up in the design, but the code underneath is just as important to the effectiveness of your web site as the way it looks.
I offer niche article advertising opportunities on a local web site that I publish. As a result, I spend a lot of time contacting businesses that are in the particular niche that I happen to be focusing on at the time.
In the process of researching a particular industry, I saw a Google Ad for a business in the niche. It was obvious why they were running an Adwords campaign because they would never be found otherwise.
Their entire site was just images. Not just mostly images . . . all images. There was not one thing on any of the pages that would tell the search engine what the site was about.
I’d post a link, but I didn’t bookmark it and I can’t find it.
Web Site Structure Matters
If you’re sitting there wondering, “So what?” Search engines crawl text. An image to a search engine is like a painting to a blind person . . . completely irrelevant.
So remember, if it is information that you want someone to find, don’t create a pretty graphic and put it up on your web site . . . put the text up and use CSS to make it look pretty.
If your web site is not getting the results that you think you should be getting, here is a little exercise that I want you to try. In your browser, go to View => Source (Page Source for Firefox). Look through the page that comes up and see if it is easy for you to tell what your site is about.
If not, then it might be a good ideal to do a web site overhaul.
by Carla Alvarez | May 27, 2008 | Internet Tips, Small Business, Small Business Tips, Small Business Websites
This is part three of our Web Site Basics for Business Owners series.
In the last article in the series, “Web Site Basics for Business Owners,” we talked about how the different components of a web site work together. This week we are going to go into domain names in more depth.
What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is how people find your web site on the internet. The domain name system (DNS) is managed by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Among other responsibilities, ICANN determines which extensions will be available for registration (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and accredits private companies known as registrars to manage the actual domain registrations.
How to Get a Domain Name
There are thousands of sites out there that offer domain registrations. I use www.GoDaddy.com. They have great prices, awesome customer service (you can actually get someone on the phone without getting lost in a phone system purgatory), and have great tools in their account management.
I don’t use any of their other services; however, all of my domains get registered through them. If you need to find a domain.
One thing to remember is that you are paying to register to use the domain name and the registration has to be kept current.
Choosing Your Domain
Now there is an art to finding a good domain name, and I’ll cover several techniques in a later post in this series. For right now, here are a few basics to remember.
- Shorter is better.
- The .com extension is preferable.
- Avoid hyphens in the domain when possible.
There is an entire industry devoted to buying and selling domain names, yes people actually make a living from it. The Art of Money blog has four in-depth articles on choosing domain names. If you are just picking out your first domain name for your business, just follow those three tips above and you’ll be okay.
The Domain I Want is Registered
Finding a good domain name can be a challenge. Not only are there millions of businesses operating on the web, but there are domain speculators, or “domainers” that register domains to hold. If you search for a domain name and it shows that it is registered, you can take it a couple of steps further if you really want that domain.
First go to the domain to see if there is a site already active on the domain. If there is and it looks like it is an ongoing concern, you’ll probably have to move to your second choice of domain.
If it looks like a hobby site that hasn’t been updated in a few years, proceed to step two. If it is a site that only has advertising on it, it is likely that it is being held by a domain investor.
Next, check the WHOIS registry to see who has the domain. If you go through Godaddy, there is a “click here for info” link that will show you who owns it.
After finding the owner information, if you are still interested in the domain name you can send them an email to ask if they would be interested in selling.
Private Registrations: Many times people will pay for a private registration for their domain because they don’t want their contact information to be public. In that case, you have to send an email to the proxy email listed, which will then be forwarded to the owner.
Expired Registrations: Every once in awhile you will come across a registry that is in a redemption, or “pending deletion” period. Once a domain expires, there is a certain period of time in which the previous registrant can renew and redeem the domain. Basically, the domain is in limbo until it is out of the redemption stage.
What to Do Next
Once you have secured your domain, the next step is to point it somewhere by setting the nameservers. The DNS, or domain nameservers, tell the internet which server to route your visitors to when they access your domain name.
When you get web hosting for your site, your hosting company will give you a set of nameservers, which will look like ns1.myhostingservice.com and ns2.myhostingservice.com. You just go back to the domain management area of your registrar and enter the nameservers for the domain. It will take anywhere from a few hours to two days for the domain to point to the site on your new hosting.
If you aren’t ready to point the domain to your actual site, the registrar will normally have a “parked” page display when the domain name is accessed. Often registrars will offer a one page site included with the registration.
If this is an option, be sure to customize the page with your company information until you can get your actual site up. Include your company name, contact information, and a short description of the services that you offer.
