Legacy Marketing Services

Today we had our first “Blogger’s Breakfast” here in Kingwood.  I planned on pictures, but I walked out of the house without my camera.

Since working with quite a few online publishers and bloggers locally, I thought it would be fun to have a monthly get together to exchange tips and ideas.   Before planning the event, I asked a friend of mine, Sahnya Shulterbrant, if she would be willing to cohost the event with me.  I met Sahnya when she called needing some updates and modifications to her Joomla based site. As we have a lot of similar interests, that project led to a friendship.  She and her husband, Gene, publish TexasontheGo.com which provide information and opportunities for doing business in Texas.  They were recently recognized by the City of Austin for their efforts.

Besides Sahnya and Gene, Matt Russell with MTR Financial and Ellen Delap, a professional organizer, also attended.  Both Matt and Ellen have written articles for me for the Kingwood Connection so I was familiar with their writing.  I knew that Matt had a blog, but I didn’t know that Ellen had added one to her site as well until today.

Blogging Platforms and SEO

It was interesting that we had people using each of the three main blogging platforms.  Sahnya and Gene use Joomla, Matt is on Blogger/Blogspot, and Ellen uses Wordpress.  I have sites on both Joomla and Wordpress.

One of the things we touched on is SEO optimization for blogs and/or database driven sites.  There is a widespread belief that if you use a content management system (CMS) or blogging platform that you don’t have as much control over SEO elements and are at a disadvantage.  This is just not the case.  Think about what those key SEO elements are: a unique page title, a title meta tag, a meta description, and meta keywords.    There is no reason that a database driven web site can’t populate that data, it is just that most of the time a stock install doesn’t.

The easy answer to this issue is to make sure that your platform is set up to allow you to enter that information.  Most people are familiar with the All-in-One SEO pack for Wordpress that allows you to specify the title, description and keywords on a page or post basis.  It is one of my stock plugins that I install on every single Wordpress site I develop.

Not as many people are familiar with how to do the same for Joomla.  I’m going to tell you my secret for developing search engine friendly Joomla sites . . . SEF Patch from Joomla-at-Work.com.

This component is even better than the All-in-One SEO pack for Wordpress.  Not only does it allow you to set the article title, description and keywords, but it also let’s you set the author meta tag and the robots index/follow setting for the page (you can do this with Wordpress as well, but it’s a separate plugin.)  It also adds the option in the site global configuration for the default description and keywords.

So far, all this is pretty similar to the Wordpress plugin, but here is where it starts to pull away.  If you have used a Joomla site before, you know that everything hinges around the menus.  What is displayed is determined by the menu item’s settings.  The SEF Patch ads the ability to set the meta information for any menu item, excluding an individual article link.  So if you link to a category page, normally this would have the default meta information (Wordpress does this as well,) but this component allows you to specify unique meta information including the page title.  This has a huge impact on your site’s search engine rankings.

Trust me on this.  There is quite a bit of competition for my Kingwood site, but if someone submits an article or press release to my site as well as the two other online community sites and newspaper sites, my site will rank #1 in Google for searches related to that article 75% of the time.  Most of the time with a double listing.  It just takes a site that is properly configured and some basic SEO tactics.

How much is this component?  It is ridiculously inexpensive.  There is even a free version, although you have to hack the core files to install it.   The paid version is an actual component that you install through the standard Joomla installer.  It is only € 14, so around $20 to $21 depending on what the U.S. dollar is doing.  Compare that to what you would spend on a pay per click campaign if you can’t get your sites to rank organically.

We are going to hold the Bloggers’  Breakfast the first Wednesday of each month.  So if you are in the Kingwood area, check the Facebook page for the next date.  If you’re in the Greater Houston area, we would love for you to come.  I promise we don’t bite. 

If you don’t have a blog yet and aren’t sure where to start, contact me to start your blogging journey.

One thing that I frequently spend quite a bit of time on with new clients is issues with their domain name .  If someone needs a domain name , I refer them to GoDaddy .  Sometimes if they absolutely don’t want to mess with domain registration or if I know that they won’t keep the registration current, I will manage it for them and just bill them later.

While many web developmentcompanies resell domain registration along with hosting and web design, that is just not something that I have wanted to delve into for two main reasons.  First, we are just talking about a margin of a couple of dollars a year and unless you are doing a high volume, it’s just not worth it.

The second reason, and the most important one, is that when someone buys a service through me, they expect me to be able to fix it if they have a problem.  If there is an issue with their web site, I can handle it.  If it is a problem with their hosting or email, I can make sure that it is fixed.

However if I resold domain registrations and someone let their domain name expire or had their domain unlocked and the nameservers were transferred, there is literally nothing I can do about it.  The last thing I want to do is put my company in a situation where a client has an expectation that I can fix their problem and my hands are tied.  Those couple of dollars a year (see above) just aren’t worth it.

I have written post after post about this, but I can’t say strongly enough how important it is for you to protect your business domain name .  If you had a phone number for years and it had been in all your advertising and your clients had it in their phone directories, what do you think would happen if suddenly one day that phone number started directing calls to a competitor?  What do you think that would do to your business?

That is exactly what can happen if you let your domain name expire or lose control of your domain.

Here again are a few tips for protecting your domain name :

Keep Your Contact Information Current

The registrant information on file at your registrar should ALWAYS be kept current and make sure emails from your registrar don’t get sent to your SPAM filter.  Every registrar will send you reminder emails 60 to 90 days before the domain expires.

Keep Your Domain Locked

Your domain registrar should have a feature to “lock” your domain name to prevent transfers.  If it is unlocked and someone submits a transfer request, you will have to deny that request or it will automatically be transferred.  If you aren’t paying attention to emails related to your domain name or if your email isn’t current, you will have a big problem on your hands.

This should be a standard feature, you shouldn’t have to pay extra for it.

Keep your Domain Registration Independent from Your Hosting

You should never get into a situation where your domain registration is tied into your hosting.  Some registrars, like GoDaddy and Network Solutions, do also offer hosting; however, one isn’t conditional on the other.  For example with GoDaddy , you can register a domain, add hosting to it, and then if you later wanted to cancel the hosting you would still have the domain and be able to use it on another hosting account. (This article explains the basics of a web site and how domains, hosting, and web pages work together.)

You should be able to direct your domain name to point to any hosting service, and if you can’t then run.

I have spent hours over the past week trying to help someone who had signed up for a new hosting service with another company.  That new company not only transferred the web site files, but also their domain names to a new registrar.  Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, except for that the registrar it was transferred to is a wholesaler and the only way the site owner can manage the domain name is through the hosting AND the hosting company only allows the domain to be pointed to their own hosting service . . . essentially locking the site owner into their hosting unless they switch registrars once again.  Which brings me to the next point . . .

Plan Any Domain Registrar Changes Carefully

If you plan to switch registrars, (say for example, from DirectNic to GoDaddy ), make sure that transfer is absolutely what you want to do.  If you switch registrars or change the registrant information, you can’t switch again for 60 days.  When I bought a domain from an auction on SnapNames, I couldn’t transfer it over to my GoDaddy account for 60 days.  In the situation I mentioned above, the site owner is literally stuck on hosting where his site won’t function because the hosting service that the domain management is tied into won’t allow a change of nameservers and he can’t change to a registrar that would allow him that capability for another 60 days.

Never EVER Let Your Domain Expire

Let me repeat that.

Never, EVER let your domain expire.

This is a big, BIG deal.  Some people think that if you let your domain expire that you can just go back and reregister it.  NO.  That is not the case . . .  as in a great big NO.

If you let your domain expire, this is what happens.  Most registrars will give you a grace period, it’s different for each one, maybe 5 days to a week.  During the grace period, you may experience an interruption in your domain direction but you can renew as you normally would.However, there have been a couple of times that I have had an eye on a domain name and the registrar put it into expired status immediately.

After that grace period, it will go into a redemption period.  This time frame varies by registrar.  During the redemption period, you can still renew or “redeem” your domain name ; however, it will cost you a redemption fee in addition to your renewal fee to do so.  The amount varies by registrar, I’ve heard between $75 to $150.

After the redemption period, the domain goes into “pending delete” status.  At that point, you can’t get it back prior to the domain dropping and it will sit there until the domain is deleted from the registry record.

Once the domain registration “drops,” it will become available and there is an entire industry around picking up dropped domains.  Trust me, it is highly unlikely that you as an individual will be able to beat a domainer in reregistering a dropped domain that has any search engine credibility at all.

What will most likely happen is that the domain will be picked up by one of these companies and held.  They will either make their money back by putting up Adsense sites on the domain and getting money from the click throughs from visitors coming to find you, or they will sell the domain back to you at a premium.  At the point, you will have to pay whatever they ask to get it back.

So again . . . don’t let your domain expire.

Yes, they are cheap and because of that many people don’t place much importance on them.  However, your business’s domain name has much greater value than the $10 a year it takes to keep the registration current.  The longer you have that domain and the more prominence you build in the search engines, the greater that value becomes.

Don’t lose that value in one fell swoop over carelessness.

Many people use Microsoft Word to create content and articles, after all, it is a word processing program.

However, problems arise when they want to import that content into a web page.  If you’ve never looked at HTML source code for a site, you may not know the difference . . . but trust me . . . anything that comes out of Word is a mess when it gets to the web.

Not only does it clutter up and slow down your site with unnecessary code, but the garbage code can also break your site’s design layout.  I recently received a support request for a client because a section on her site was messed up.  The client had posted a new article, pasting the content from Word, and a mangled site was the result.  I had to go into the article itself and strip out all the Microsoft tags to get it to work.

Pasting from Word

You should never copy and paste content from Word directly into your content management system.  The WYSIWYG editors for Wordpress and most of them for Joomla have a “Paste from Word” icon feature.

1. Copy your content from Word.
2. Click the “Paste from Word” icon and a dialog box will appear.
3. Paste your content into the dialog box and hit save.

This will normally strip all the Microsoft junk code from your content.  However, some editors have configuration settings for what gets stripped and what doesn’t.  If that is the case (such as with the JCE editor for Joomla),  you may need to test the settings until you get just the right combination.

With any content management system (CMS), you platform theme is going to contain a stylesheet that specifies what each element of your site should look like, resulting in a cohesive look.  You do not want font and style tags in your content, because that will override the theme settings.

Fast and Easy with Dreamweaver

If you have a copy of Dreamweaver, my favorite way to prepare content for the web is by pasting the Word content into a blank HTML file in design view.  It usually does a pretty good job of converting the format to properly structured paragraphs.  Then I copy that and paste it directly into the WYSIWYG content editor in the CMS.

Final Tips

If you have a site with a layout that was fine but is suddenly out of whack, check first your most recently added content.  Look for any extraneous tags.  That will most likely be the culprit.

One of the web site solutions that Legacy Marketing Services offers is Business Builder web sites.  This is our option for business who want a web site, need it fast, and also want a web site that is search engine friendly.

We developed this option after working with many small businesses who went the DIY route with one of the many site builder options and were frustrated in their attempts to get the site looking the way they wanted as well as the poor search engine rankings for their keywords.

The Business Builder program is not a “DIY” route (we set it up for you), but it is a “manage it yourself” option.

Below is a video on how to edit and update a page using the system.

For our current clients, the video is also located in the Knowledge base for easy reference.

If you have a Joomla based web site, most likely you are using a WYSIWYG editor to compose and edit your articles.  My editor of choice for my own sites as well as Joomla web sites developed for clients is JCE (Joomla Content Editor.)

The two main features that I really like about it, particularly for clients editing their own sites, is the ability to upload images to the media gallery, as well as edit and rename them, right from the article screen, as well as that it allows an easy way to select articles within your site.  It really does make it that much easier for clients to manage their own sites.

One source of frustration for web masters creating pages on a content management system is that many types of code are stripped out of the article when saved to keep malicious scripts from corrupting the database. This is a necessity when multiple users are submitting content.

However, if you are the only one maintaining your site, that same protection can get really annoying depending on how stringent the editor is in restricting code.  There are workarounds with plugins, but again . . . it’s a pain.

Selective Permissions with JCE

JCE is not just a way to make your articles look pretty, it has the functionality to take your Joomla user levels to a whole different level.

A stock Joomla installation has the following users levels:

• Front End Access
  • Registered User: The first level of Joomla access.  Certain areas of the site can be restricted to registered users.
  • Author: Can submit and edit their own content.  Their submissions must be approved by a higher level user.
  • Editor: Can submit and edit their own content as well as content by other authors that has not yet been published.
  • Publisher: Can submit, edit and publish their own content as well as edit and publish any other user’s articles
• Back End Access
  • Manager: The basic level of back end administration access.  They can access the content menu of the Joomla back end and can edit, publish, and update sections and categories.
  • Administrator: In addition to the permission level that a manager has, an administrator has the ability to use most components; however, they cannot chang the site templates or the configuration of the site.
  • Super Administrator:  A Super Administrator can manage all aspects of a Joomla site

JCE ties in with the Joomla user groups by allowing you to specify which use groups can use the editor, which editor features are available to them, and what type of code can be included in the content.

Configuring JCE

There are two main locations where JCE can be configured.  The first is the configuration panel for the component.  It mainly controls how the editor is displayed and whether or not it will attempt to clean up sloppily formatted code.

In most editors, allowed tags are usually specified in the main configuration screen; however, this is not true of JCE and this is where most questions arise on how to get the editor to work the way you want it to.

The second step to configuring JCE is under the “Groups” menu option for the component.  This is where the real meat of the functionality comes into play.  Separate permission sets can be applied to different Joomla user groups.   For each user group, you can specify:

• Which components the editor is available on.
• The appearance of the editor to the user.
• Whether relative or absolute urls are used for images.
• Prohibited and allowed elements.
• Whether css, javascript, or php can be used.
• Allowed formatting elements.
• Where images are uploaded to (each group could upload to a different directory) and the file size limits.
• The composition of the editor toolbar and allowed plugins.
• What types of files can be uploaded.
• Whether they can upload files and/or create, rename and or delete files and directories.
• What type of media is supported.
• How paragraphs and line breaks are included.
• What is stripped in the “Paste from Word” option.
• The default alignment and margins for image insertion.
• Which content link types are allowed.
• Which spell check service is used.

By using group permissions for the editor, you can scale the functionality of the editor for different levels of users, as well as making life easier for your administrators and main publishers.

Legacy Marketing Services is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla Project or Open Source Matters. The Joomla logo is used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters the trademark holder in the United States and other countries.

Today’s email marketing tip comes from Tom Kulzer, CEO of Aweber.  Aweber is one of the leading email marketing subscription services, the email service of choice for the top internet marketers.

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

Did this article inspire you to add email marketing to your marketing campaign?  Try out the features and power of Aweber for only $1.    Want to plan a campaign?  Contact us for a customized marketing plan.