Marketing
The Digg Effect
I have written in the past about how to use StumbleUpon to promote. Shortly after I wrote that article, I got over 10,000 page views to one of my articles on PC Mechanic in one day. Just to one article. Since then, I have hit a few other little “sweet spots” with StumbleUpon and gotten good traffic. Not as big as that 10,000 visitor spike, but still nice. So, StumbleUpon has proven itself to me as a very viable way to bring traffic to your site.
Yesterday, I posted an article over at PC Mechanic entitled “Can Linux Replace Windows?“. It made it’s way onto Digg. I had nothing to do with that. On the 10,000 page view one, I did seed StumbleUpon myself with the article. With Digg, somebody else did it. Well, this one did good as well, and Digg is about to surpass StumbleUpon in terms of the volume of traffic brought to a single article on the site in one day.
Yesterday, Digg brought in 4,620 page views to that article. Today, so far, I’ve had 4,970. That number is sure to be higher by the end of the day. So, all in all, Digg is outperforming StumbleUpon.
No doubt that the subject matter plays a large role in this. What I’m finding from that post and other I wrote on the subject is that people REALLY take their operating systems seriously. And Linux-users are particularly defensive about professing how perfect Linux is and how crappy Windows is. So, I’ve had over 50 comments on that post – some agreeing with me and many giving me a hard time. It’s OK, I can take it. 
One thing I have noticed is that Digg users are not as likely to surf around as StumbleUpon users. Most Digg users come, read, and bolt. And that article is currently seeing a 95% bounce rate. Last month, StumbleUpon gave me a bounce rate about half that. So, Digg users are much more fickle.
Digg is good for a nice spike, but I know that it isn’t going to be a long lasting one.
TubeMogul Offering Video Posting to Multiple Sites
Anybody in the online video arena probably posts to multiple video websites. Or tries to. The problem is that it is usually a pretty arduous affair to get this done. You have to have profiles on each video site and then individually post to each one.
To get the most bang out of your online videos, you really do want to post to multiple sites. YouTube is the big elephant in the room and will probably bring you the most viewership. But, there are many other quality video services out there, including:
By having your videos out there on many sites, you cast a wider net and catch a wider audience. And that can, in turn, lead to more traffic driven to your site.
Well, TubeMogul is now offering the ability to use their site to post to all of these sites from one central location. I have been using TubeMogul for a few weeks anyway in order to track viewership trends of my videos on Youtube and a few competitors. It’s quite nice, giving me graphs of my video views on Youtube.
Last night, I used their new upload service for the first time. It worked like a champ. It will also securely save your log-in information to each video site so you do not have to re-enter it (yes, you still need profiles on each of the video sites). My only complaint about it is that I think they should have a separate page for entering the video site profiles. As it is now, you have to upload your video first then you get the various logins as part of the launch process. It would be nice if they separated it out. It’s a bit clunky at the moment.
Chris Pirillo, who has been doing a lot of video work lately, was using Video Post Robot to post his videos to multiple sites. Video Post Robot, though, has a big long sales page that does look a bit spammy if you ask me. Heyspread.com is another one that has been brought to my attention. I have not yet tried HeySpread, but it does catch me a bit off guard that you’re uploading your video right on the front page with no profile and no security. I’d rather see the necessity to log into a profile before posting videos. But, I’d be interested in some feedback from anybody who has used HeySpread. I had heard through the rumor mill that Pirillo’s guys were using Heyspread and liked it better than Video Post Robot, but I don’t know.
TubeMogul could perhaps be a big player on the scene. Call it instinct, but I tend to trust sites that have a good design and look like they have some form of organization behind them. TubeMogul at least has that feel to me. I have no idea – maybe it is run by one guy in his bedroom. Either way, for now I am using TubeMogul. It’s a good service and I hope it only improves.
How I Converted a Non-Blog Site to Wordpress
This post may have a few follow-ups – because it is a big subject. However, I just last night launched PC Mechanic as a Wordpress -powered website. Easy right? Not so much. PC Mechanic is not really a blog. In fact, it doesn’t even resemble a blog. WebbyOnline (this site) is also Wordpress powered, but it has the classic blog look and feel. It took some doing to get PC Mechanic to be powered by Wordpress. It’s taken me a few days of pretty solid work to get the job done, and I still have some things to test and fine-tune. But, its never easy switching publishing platforms on a site with over 1,000 articles and large amounts of existing traffic.
Wordpress Versus Other CMSes
Well, a pretty obvious question: Why go through all this work? PC Mechanic was being powered by Miraserver. Miraserver is my own creation and it has been a great platform for PCMech. Moving away from my own product wasn’t a light decision, and it in no way is because Miraserver is not a capable product. However, there is a big difference between a blog and a traditional CMS. Yes, Wordpress can be used as a traditional CMS (which is the point of this article), however blogs have certain things that “normal” websites don’t. Blogs, by design, are built around community interaction. RSS feeds. Pinging. Plus the fact that blogs are LOVED by search engines (namely Google) – especially if updated often.
So, why did I convert to Wordpress?
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Youtube Offers Custom Player and Other Goodies
I was over on Pirillo’s blog and I saw a quick mention of a new video player by Youtube. I logged into my account and, sure enough, they’re announcing a few interesting items. You Youtube’ers will like this.
Custom Player
You can now create a custom Youtube video player. You can give it a custom color scheme. You can also choose between two different styles – one which flashes thumbnails of your other videos along the bottom of the player. The other provides a playlist to the right of your player. Very slick, if you ask me. Unfortunately, they don’t give you free reign. You cannot fine-tune the color scheme using your own color codes. But, this is still a very nice offering.
Select Your Thumbnail
Now instead of Youtube automatically taking the half-way mark of your video and making that the thumbnail for it, they now give you a choice of 3 different points on the video and you can choose the thumbnail you want. Well, 3 options is always better than one.
Youtube Mobile
I’m not sure if this is new or not, but I just ran across it. Apparently you can now access Youtube on your cell phone using Youtube mobile. Now, it won’t work on all mobile phones. You obviously need a phone with internet access. And even then, you need to be using a carrier that will allow it. As you might guess, streaming video isn’t exactly bandwidth friendly, so some phone carriers aren’t friendly for it.
When I went to try it on my Palm Treo, I first got a warning from Youtube saying that it is bandwidth intensive and that I should get an unlimited data plan before using it. Great how Google is looking out for my phone bill. When I tried to play a video, I got greeted by an “Unspecified Error”. How detailed. So, it doesn’t really work on my phone very well. I don’t know whether to blame Youtube, Microsoft (my phone uses Windows Mobile) or Alltel.
YouTube is Where It’s At
The other video sites are important, too, but not to the degree of Youtube. If you are not uploading your videos to Youtube, it is to your own detriment. That is if viewers are your goal.
Summary and an Offer of Help
This is the sixth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
OK, the last five posts have walked you through the basics of getting your business website off the ground. I decided to write this series for one primary reason: I saw a need for it. I have seen a lot of business sites that are wastes of time. And at the same time, I have seen that there seems to be a sense of misunderstanding and confusion on how to get the ball rolling. To so many small business owners, the idea of running a website seems daunting. You are very busy and don’t really have the time to deal with all that geek talk out there on how to do it. So, you do the best you can with the knowledge you have and hope for the best. The end result is that you have a business site up there that is underperforming. It might bring in the occasional lead, but nothing like what you had in mind.
And the worse part is that it is easy to get lost in all the chatter. There are a lot of blogs like WebbyOnline that talk about how to promote your online business or make money on the net. However, at least in my opinion, it’s not often that somebody just sits down and lays out the basics. Instead they talk about the latest and greatest, and what’s new – leaving in the dust the majority of small business owners that just want a site that works without spending their entire lives making it happen.
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Essential Steps to Web Traffic to Your Business
This is the fifth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
Yesterday I discussed the most important aspect there is in terms of online promotion of your business website – communication. I also mentioned the importance of content on your business site and that a blog is an ideal publishing medium to get that done. That’s the theory behind it all, however when you get specific in terms of the internet, there are obviously a ton of more specific ideas for promotion that one can use. All of these mediums all only serve to increase the communication and the reality. In effect, you’re doing the same thing at all times. You just might use a variety of mediums to get the job done. Let’s look at some of them.
Search Engines
No doubt that search engines are very likely to be the #1 source of web traffic to your business website. In order to get into the search engines, you need to have something there for them to index. That’s where your content comes in (again, I can’t overemphasize the content). Search engines (especially Google) love blogs, especially when they are updated often. So, post as often as you can. And make the posts meaningful using keywords that people are likely to use when searching for solutions. Make sure to use those keywords in your title as well as in your content. The TITLE tags and the HEADER tags in your page are very important in terms of how your site is going to get indexed in the search engines. For example, if you run a local car repair business, you know that visitors from other areas of the country are not very likely to make you any money. So, you want your site’s TITLE and HEADER keywords to reflect the kinds of keywords that will bring in your target market. Let’s say your car shop is located in Tampa, FL. People looking for car shops in Tampa on the internet are most likely going to enter something like “car shops in Tampa”. It is very important, then, that you put the city into your site’s title and in keywords, along with other suitable keywords. If you do that, your car shop is very likely to appear in front of the sites of other car shops in Tampa which forgot to put the word “Tampa” in their site’s title.
On a related note, I usually do not recommend anybody hire one of these catch-all search engine submission services. Some of them are legit and will do good work, but the majority of them (in my opinion) are total wastes of time and will just take your money. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another great example of the 80/20 rule. Most of the optimizations needed to get decent search engine rankings can be done easily, and it will get you 80% of the way for 20% of the effort. The SEO pros (if they are real pros, that is) can do that other, more arcane, part of SEO and perhaps really get you higher in the search rankings. But, the simple fact is that the basic principles of SEO are anything but rocket science and I just don’t think you need to hire somebody specifically for search engine submissions. The really good ones will actually work with you to optimize your site. If all they do is advertise submitting your site into hundreds of search engines for a one-time fee, chances are they are just using some search engine submission software to mass submit your site. It isn’t targeted at all, and most cases you have little to no way to verify that anything was really done.
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How To Draw in Visitors and Make Them Like You
This is the fourth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
At this point, I am going to assume that you have a business website that is online already. I am hoping that you have considered the topics I have talked about in the prior posts of this series in terms of designing your site around a single goal and getting your sales funnel set up. Doing it this way, your site can actually serve a purpose for your business rather than simply being out there as another one of millions of useless business sites.
Now that you have a site online, you want traffic. To do that, you need to promote. It used to be said that if you put it up there, people will come. That is not true. If you simply put the site online and cross your fingers, you’ll die waiting for the traffic to come. It would be like building a road out in the middle of the woods with no entrance or exit. It’s just there. Nobody is going to know it’s there.
The thing to think about here is what is likely going to draw in a prospect? Is a casual web surfer likely going to come to your site just to read about you and see your mug shot? Probably not. They have no REALITY with you and simply don’t care whether you live or die. That sounds brutal, but it’s true. The average web surfer has an incredibly short attention span and is borderline bored. Your job is to provide something on your site that they will care about and then convert them into a person that DOES have some reality with you.
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Getting Your Business Website Online
This is the third of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
OK, now you have a grand plan in place for using your business website to actually bring in business. Now you need to actually get the site online. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the site needs to be specifically set up in order to achieve your goal – a new prospect entering into your sales funnel. If the site simply consists of the usual corporate-speak, it isn’t going to work. Today’s internet reader is practically immune to that stuff.
Web Design
The design of your business website is very important. A site that looks bad or (at best) amateur is going to reflect badly on your business. A bad design says a few things to your potential customer:
- We are small time.
- We can’t afford a web designer.
Whether one would admit to it or not, a bad design will turn off customers. You take any business market and compare the effectiveness of a bad design to a professional design, and the pro design will outperform in almost all cases. This is not to say that you HAVE to go out and hire a professional designer to do your site. You don’t. But, again, it comes down to your in-house skill. If your skills in terms of graphic design or web design are not that good, you will be much better off to come up with the money and hire it done for you.
That said, web design is an important factor, not only for “curb appeal”, but in order to focus your visitor’s attention on the ultimate goal – entering the sales funnel. If you want the sales lead, for example, then your site needs to be designed such that it will almost draw the user’s eye into the big button to provide their contact info. This can be done through use of contrasting colors and through strategic placement of elements on the page. NEVER hide the goal from your visitor. If you want them to call you, your phone number should be obviously plastered on every page of your website.
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Sales Funnel – Business Website And Your Strategy
This is the second of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
Yesterday we ended off by saying that your business website needs to have a purpose. That purpose is usually going to be one of the following:
- Generate leads
- Directly sell a product (e-commerce)
Once you have decided what you want your site to do, you can move forward.
The Sales Funnel
The concept of the sales funnel is very important to the setup of your business website. That cookie cutter website I talked about yesterday suffers from a complete lack of a sales funnel. A site which is designed with a specific GOAL in mind can serve as a machine for your business, generating either sales or leads (and ultimately cash in the bank).
The sales funnel is called a “funnel” for a specific reason. Think of the funnel used to put oil in your car. No matter how sloppy you are when pouring that oil, as long as it ends up in the funnel, it will make it’s way into your engine. The funnel will focus all the oil to the single entry point into your engine. Now, take that concept to your business. You have a specific goal for your website (a sale, a lead, etc) and your site is supposed to serve as a funnel to drive all incoming traffic into your goal. That is the theory, but of course you cannot expect to funnel ALL of your traffic into your goal. Not every visitor is going to buy something. But, you will continually tweak the machine (your site) so as to increase the number of people which convert to a sale (this is your conversion rate).
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What’s the Point of Your Website?
This is the first of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed and/or bookmark this website so that you can follow the series to conclusion.
There are a lot of people out there (you may be one of them) who have a website for their business but have no real traffic to speak of. Unfortunately, a majority of business websites are in this boat. They have a few pages up there (made by the small business owner in most cases) but nobody comes by the site (except for those who are directly told to go there). Essentially, the site is not achieving anything for your business.
Sound familiar? For many of you, it probably will. What I’m going to do is walk you through the basics of how to turn your site into something. After all, you didn’t invest all that time and (potentially) money into your website just so you can tell people you have a website, did you? When you created it, you probably had grand plans of getting a decent amount of traffic and actually having the website generate business (and hence revenue) for you. The good news is that that CAN happen. Its just a matter of doing those things that are needed to make your site compete with the larger ones out there that get most of the traffic.
The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 Rule, technically known as the Pareto Principle, basically says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This principle can be applied to all kinds of different scenarios. Perhaps you generate 80% of your business revenue from 20% of your (larger) clients. Well, this rule applies to what you’re up against online. 80% of the traffic on the internet is going to be visiting about 20% of the sites that are available on the internet. Depending on your market, you can shrink that down to this: 80% of your potential market is visiting about 20% of the sites that are out there that have to do with your business.
That means that 80% of the sites for your target market are failing and competing for a small (20%) share of the market. Obviously, then, the trick is to do one of two things (or both) :
- Put your site into that 20% which are competing for the 80% of the traffic.
- Get your name in front of the eyeballs of that 80%.
To do this, we need to lay down a foundation.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
