I’m sitting here in the Toyota service department waiting room.  I don’t want to be here but my dog ate my seat belt – really.  I didn’t think you could eat through seat belts but I was wrong.

So what better time to talk about Internet marketing?  Truth is, many organizations today are tapping into this new marketing channel.  One big piece of advice handed out to CIO’s and CMO’s this year is to hire social media experts.  The thing about social media, as a small business, is just to “do it.”  My partner taught me this.  She took Sica Wealth Management and with the extraordinary contribution of Jeff Sica, turned the firm and Jeff into a marketing phenom. 

Here is what she did in a nutshell:

1.  Collect and build a list of email addresses of clients and potential clients.  Put a form on your website using email services like Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Vertical Response, AWeber, to name a few.  Offer something special in return for their email address.  Put the form on your Facebook fan page too, apps are available to help you do this.  You can also add email addresses to your list manually.

2. Send promos and/or intriguing or educational content to your email list frequently.  I think daily is too much but that may be just me.  Shoot for at least weekly.

3.  Set up a Facebook Fan Page.  This was not intuitive for me at first.   A business fan page is created from a personal profile and you have to have a profile in order to create the page.  To get started once you’ve created your own profile and/or while logged in, go to http://www.facebook.com/Pages.   What you post as a business will only post to your business wall and to your business fans.  You can add additional admins so you’re not the only one.  Check out our fan page at http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/WebWorks-Now-Inc/117486874940578?sk=app_203579956319170  Yes, we don’t have too many fans.  So “like” us and become a fan!

4.   Set up a Twitter account.  Even if you don’t have time for Facebook, Twitter’s easy and fast.  You’re only allowed 140 characters a post so you won’t be compelled to write a book.  And it’s very straight forward, just set up an account for your business at http://www.twitter.com.

5.  Create a blog.  Blogs allow you to write promotional content and archive it for easy retrieval.  It can be entertaining, educational, promotional or just plain mind-dumping expression.  The point is that it can connect you to your customers.  Let your clients and prospects know about your recent writings through an email blast, a Facebook post, a Twitter post and for optimal search engine results, display the latest post on the home page of your website.  Your web developer can do this for you.

You can manually write to all your social media outlets or you can automate the process.  I’ll explain how in a later post. 

7. Be sure to make it easy to ”sign up”, share or subscribe to your email, blog, Facebook or Twitter list. 

That’s it.  Plenty to get you started on your foray into social media.  The goal is to communicate and establish a connection with your clients and prospects.  A little effort and you will be who they call and refer their friends to when the subject of your product comes up.  Just “Do It”!

After images, videos can be a tricky subject for new WordPress users.  I think the easiest way to handle videos in your posts is to use YouTube and their embedded code.  To add a video, first upload your video to YouTube. Then…

1. If you bring up your video on YouTube, there is a button labeled “embed” just underneath the video. Click on the button.

2. Clicking the embed button will open up a box with html code and a number of options the most important of which is the size of your video.  In the light blue box, enter the width of your post area in WordPress.  Usually it’s about 500 px.  If you don’t know, you can always come back and do it again, so don’t worry about guessing.

3.  When you enter a special size, it automatically changes the html code in the box above.  If you’re leaving it at the default 560px, no changes are made.  Highlight all of the code and right click -> copy.

4.  In WordPress, on the “Add New Post” page, make sure the post body block is set to “HTML” and paste your code into the post area.  Be careful to not toggle back to “Visual” until you have saved your changes.  For some strange reason, the code will disappear.  Also, the video may end up at the top of your post.  If you feel comfortable with the HTML, just move it around to the appropriate location and save it.  If you don’t feel comfortable, you can cut and paste in Visual mode after you’ve initially saved it.

Hope this helps!

When I build a blog for someone there always comes the time when they actually have to start using it. And it’s not always completely intuitive. Here’s a quick answer to one of the first questions…

How do I add images to my posts?

I’m going to assume you’re on the Add New Post or Edit Post page. When you get to the place in your post where you’d like to place an image, click on the first icon following Upload/Insert, hovering over it should say “Add an Image”.

You get this window…

To upload from your desktop or laptop computer click on the From Computer tab:

Click the Select Files button.
Select the image you want to upload, then click open.
A window pops up that lists the details of the image.

1. Add alt text (with your keywords),
2. caption (but only if you want one), description (this is just for you),
3. the link URL (where do you want the post visitor to go if they click on the picture?)
   • none… for going nowhere when the image is clicked on
   • File URL if you want a click to open the picture itself in a window.
   • Post URL if you want the click to open the post that the image appears in.
   • Or type any URL if you want it to link to another post, blog or website.
4. Alignment _ where the picture should sit if you have text around it. This may or may not be as straight forward as it sounds. Play with it to get the effect you want.
5. Size… choose your size. Full (measured in pixels) will take up the width of your blog, especially if you have sidebars (and who doesn’t.) If you want to have different sizes than those given, go to Settings in the WordPress left menu and click on Miscellaneous. Adjust the Thumbnails to the desired height and width.

Click on “Insert into Post”

Hope this helps! Leave me a comment if you need more!

When I built my first website I new quite a bit about building websites but nothing about SEO and getting traffic. Now when I talk to clients about their first site, I know it has to be the first thing on their mind. It doesn’t have to be difficult.

Think about…

1. Who are your visitors and what are they looking for? Will they be Googling “winter clothing” or “cool winter duds”? If you can think of roughly five 2-4 word phrases that your visitors will use to find your product, service or topic on the net, that’s your start to discovering your “keywords”. Your goal is to have a great keyword phrase for each page of your site. Or at least those pages that you want “found”.

2. Once you have your list of phrases, Google them. If the search yields 5,000,000 results, you will never rank in the top 10 or even the top 100. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but you have to get results that are more in line with 10,000 or maybe 100,000 at a stretch. So refine those keyword phrases until you have ones that really are focused on your target market, your specific product or service offering, and doesn’t come back with too many search result findings. Remember, it’s better to be seen in a pool of 10,000 than be invisible in a pool of a million.

3. Got some great, focused, keyword phrases? Great. If you can incorporate the primary words into your domain name, that’s even better. Try to find a domain name that includes those key words along with your company name.

4. Now to your site. Work with your designer to put that page’s key word phrase

• in the page title (that’s the name that shows on the browser tab)
• in the page headings (the bolded words on any of your pages… these really have to be coded as headings, tell your designer)
• in the alt tags (for every picture or image on your site, there’s a name attached to it that is used for people with accessibility challenges.)
• in your file names (every page has a unique name that shows up in the address line allowing the browser to find the page); believe it or not, the search engines do look at these. Another reason to use nice permalinks for those bloggers out there.

See, that wasn’t so bad. But better to do it before you begin than to try to fix later.

OK, so you have a great website. Now what? When people type in those coveted keywords, will you rank on the first page of the top search engines? Or is it futile to even try? I’ve read literally hundreds of books, blog pieces, and articles about search engine optimization. They all say essentially the same thing. So my question is, does it work? And can a small business achieve a relatively high ranking without selling their soul?

We’re a small but growing business so I’m going to see if I can get the WebWorks Now website home page (or any page for that matter) to a page rank of 5 in a reasonable amount of time, let’s say 12 months. I’ll take you through the most commonly recommended steps. And maybe I’ll throw in some not so conventional ones as well. Here’s my tentative list.

The Steps:

• Meta what?
• Create an XML Sitemap
• Make sure your domain won’t expire within the next two years
• Create local profiles and submit to local search engines
• Find other directories that make sense for your customers or for your business
• Create press releases when you launch a new product, get a new client, or do anything worth writing about
• Get others to link to your website
• Create links of your own
• Get your company or organization on Facebook
• Get a presence on Twitter
• Use Linked In if your customers are there
• Submit to review sites
• Get a blog and get yourself out there

That’s it for now. I may revise as we go and learn more about what works and what doesn’t. Wish me luck!