Blogs: Use Them or Lose Them

by John Eberhard

I have written a number of articles about the benefits of blogs:

1. You write something and post to your blog regularly.
2. You have your blog set up so there are numerous links back to your main site in the sidebars. Plus you write your blog posts so that you link back to your main site within each post.
3. Every time you post something new on the blog, you go to a site called www.pingomatic.com, and use it to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines like Technorati.com. This causes them to include your new blog post in their search engines right away.
4. The combination of posting regularly, i.e. once a week, plus pinging the blog search engines, drives significant traffic to your blog, which in turn drives traffic to your web site. I have two blogs for my marketing business and month to month the blogs routinely are the #1 or #2 driver of traffic to my web site, running neck and neck with Google.

So this is all nice and wonderful. But a major breakdown occurs here if you do not post something to the blog regularly. Ideally this is once a week or more. If you post something to the blog once a week or more, you will start to really drive traffic and you will develop fans who follow what you write.

Unfortunately I have set up blogs for some clients who have then posted one or two things on it and then forgotten the blog for months (you know who you are). This defeats the purpose of a blog and is really a waste of a valuable resource for driving traffic to a web site.

So here are some tips on generating content for that blog on a regular basis:

1. I find that in my work with clients, something that happens with a client over the course of each week will often be a good topic for a blog and newsletter article.
2. A blog post can be anything from a long article (300-700 words), to a short comment on something (100-200 words).
3. If you find a video on YouTube or somewhere else that would be of interest to readers of your blog, then post the video on your blog. On YouTube, to the right of the video you can find the HTML code. When you go to post to your blog, select HTML editing, then paste that code there, and the video player will appear right in your blog. If you want to post a comment about the video, type your comment in using the text editor, then switch over to the HTML editor and paste in the code from YouTube.
4. You can post links to interesting articles elsewhere on the web, that relate to your blog topic. However, I will say that I see some other people doing this, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s all they ever do. My reaction is “Don’t you ever write any content yourself?” So this is good to do, but don’t make that the only thing you do.
5. You can do a Google search related to your topic and see what other items come up, or go to other web sites related to your topic, and get ideas for articles or shorter posts. You can also go to article directories like www.goarticles.com and search for articles related to your topic. But don’t steal an article or plagiarize it. Just use these for ideas.

Use these tips to write some new content for your blog regularly, at least once or twice a month, preferable once a week or more. The more often you post things to your (pinging each time), the more traffic you will drive to your blog and site.

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The October 15 Great California Shakeout Earthquake Drill a Great Success

Julian Construction Gives a Shout Out for the Shakeout and its Organizing Force, The Earthquake Country Alliance

Founder of Julian Construction (www.julianconstruction.com), Julian De La Torre, applauds the Great California Shakeout – the largest earthquake drill in US history. “More than 6.8 million people participated in the first statewide earthquake preparedness drill – that’s spectacular.” De La Torre said. “You really have to stand in awe of what the Earthquake Country Alliance has done in California, a state where it can often be a problem getting three people doing the same thing at the same time.”

For Julian Construction, every day is an earthquake preparedness day. Inspection of home foundations for their capacity to withstand earthquakes is one of primary parts of their business. “For all the success we had this year, it goes without saying that there are a lot more people in California than 6.8 million. So we are looking for even greater participation next year – Oct 21, 2010 is the next Great California Shakeout drill.” Julian said.

But there is no need for homeowners and renters to wait a year to prepare. Julian Construction recommends two websites that provide information on do-it-yourself preparedness inspections - Emergency Survival Program’s ‘Is Your Place Safe’ (http://www.scec.org/education/public/espfocus/May_06.pdf) and Earthquake Country Alliance’s Dare to Prepare website http://www.earthquakecountry.info/daretoprepare/secure_your_building.html).

Julian Construction offers free home foundation inspections for those who need or want their years of expertise. “Getting your home foundation inspected is the best thing you can do to ensure your home will be as ready as possible for the next earthquake. We also provide 0% financing for those who need to finance their any needed repair or retrofit.” Julian noted.

Julian De La Torre has been doing earthquake retrofitting since the early 1990s and has personally worked on over 6,600 homes in Southern California. With this unmatched experience in the substructure areas of a home, Julian formed Julian Construction in 2001 with the goal of making safer homes, apartments and commercial properties throughout Southern California. His partner Shawn Kyles has inspected over 15,000 structures, working with both engineering firms and local departments of building and safety, and is an expert in foundation repair and house bolting. Julian Construction owns its own company and is built on a “no middlemen” model - no salesmen, no subcontractors. When you work with Julian Construction you get the principals of the company and workers of Julian Construction under your home.  The result is the highest quality work at affordable prices. They can be contacted by phone at 323 733-3377, by fax at 323 733-4477 or via their website, www.julianconstruction.com.

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Aero & Marine Tax Professionals to Present “Plane Dollars and Sense” Aviation Seminar

Presentation to Take Place at Jet Center Medford in Medford, OR on October 29

MEDFORD, OR: Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, (http://www.aeromarinetaxpros.com) the pre-eminent experts in helping purchasers of aircraft and vessels to avoid paying sales and use tax in California, will be presenting a complimentary aviation seminar entitled “Plane Dollars and Sense”, at Jet Center Medford, on October 29 from 11am to 4pm.

The Aero & Marine Tax Professionals seminar will be geared to presenting information of value to aircraft owners and purchasers. The “Plane Dollars and Sense” Aviation Seminar will be presented by President and CEO Tom Alston, and Vice President Warren Alston, and will cover the following topics:

• Aircraft Financing
• The Basics of Buying, Selling and Marketing Jets
• 1031 Exchange
• Ownership Structures that Maximize Tax Benefits
• California Sales/Use Tax
• Document Program to Support Your Aviation Expenses

The seminar will be held from 11am to 4pm, and is complimentary, but seating is limited. The seminar is being hosted by Jet Center Medford and will be held at 5000 Cirrus Drive, Medford, OR 97504. Those interested in attending the seminar should RSVP to flyandsave@gmail.com.

Thomas Alston, President of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, stated “We have worked with thousands of individuals and companies purchasing aircraft, helping them to avoid paying aircraft sales tax on their purchase, and this can add up to a significant amount of money. For clients who have followed our instructions to the letter, we have a 100% success rate. We urge people who are in the process of buying an aircraft or are considering a purchase to attend this seminar and get the facts on saving money.”

Aero & Marine Tax Professionals shows purchasers how to avoid California aircraft tax and to make certain the full value of their next aircraft, vehicle or vessel goes into their pocket--not the Government's. They have successfully filed hundreds of tax returns with the California State Board of Equalization. Mr. Alston has also published many articles on sales and use tax.

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Affordable Surveys

by John Eberhard

I recently wrote an article about how important it is for businesses to conduct market research surveys of their target public now, because the so-called “recession,” whether you believe in it or not, has changed people’s attitudes about buying things.

So if you are promoting to your public the same way you have been for the last 3-5 years, you are most likely going to be missing the mark, because the public’s attitudes have changed. So your advertising message might be geared to the way their attitudes were a year or two or three ago.

Most business owners know that conducting surveys can tend to be expensive. But over the last few years I have been conducting surveys in a much more affordable fashion. Here’s how:

1. Find an email list of the right target public. By the right target public, I mean the type of person who tends to buy your products or services. If you’re a veterinarian, the target public is pet owners who live near your practice. If you are a business consultant, your target public might be small business owners. And so on. The trick is to find an email list of that public that you can buy or rent. If you are lucky you might already have a usable list. Figure that the list needs to be at least 10 to 20 times as large as the number of surveys you want to get done.

1. Write a survey that will find out things like what benefits your public think they will get from your product or service, or what problems they experience that your product or service solves. I recommend getting help in the writing of the survey from someone with a lot of experience in this area. Make sure you include questions related to their attitudes about buying your product or service in this economic climate.

1. Work out some item that you can offer to the people you will be emailing, as an incentive to get them to fill out the survey. Maybe 5-10 years ago you could just ask people to fill out the survey and you’d get lots of people doing it. But from my experience, today, you need to give the person some kind of incentive to do it. If you have some kind of desirable information product such as a report or white paper, that could work. Over the past few years I have offered a nice pen (with the logo and phone number of the company doing the survey), and I have also offered a $5 Starbucks card. Both have worked very well and I got plenty of surveys done. You can state that only the first 30 or 50 people who fill out the survey get the incentive. When you look at the fact that most phone surveys today cost $10-15 each or more, a $5 Starbucks card is a bargain.

1. Put the survey up on a web page form. Make sure you include fields for the person’s physical street address if you are offering some physical item such as a pen or Starbucks card as an incentive.

1. Create your email that you’ll be sending out to the email list. Make this an HTML email (that looks like a web page) so you can include a picture of whatever spiff you’re offering as an incentive.

1. Send out the email. Collect and tabulate your surveys. Analyze the results and find what the public’s attitudes are now. Find a way to modify your message to address their current attitudes and concerns.

Good hunting.

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How Much Traffic is Coming to Your Web Site?

By John Eberhard

One of the most important aspects of managing a web site is finding out and then monitoring regularly, how much traffic is coming to the site.

I have written some articles on Google Analytics, which is what I recommend for web statistics, because it is quite good, it is free, and most other web statistics software and services are pretty expensive. And the free ones you get with most hosting plans usually are pretty awful.

So you set up a Google Analytics account, then it will give you some HTML code which you put on every page of your site and which is invisible to users. Then it will start tracking your visitors, which pages they are viewing, where they come from, and which keywords they typed in if they found you on a search engine.

I recommend tracking how many visitors your site is getting weekly and graph this. You may wonder if the number of visitors you are getting is a good number or a bad number. This depends entirely on what type of business you have, whether it is local or national, and other factors.

Now let’s say that you are using your web site to do lead generation, i.e. getting people to fill out a form giving you their contact information so your sales guy can contact them and sell them. Now that you know how many visitors you are getting per week, you can compare that to how many leads the site is generating. This gives you a conversion percentage for your web site overall. Take the number of leads and divide this by the number of visitors, and move the decimal over two places to the right. That gives you your conversion percentage.

A good conversion percentage for a web site is anywhere between 0.5% and 2.0%. A 0.5% conversion rate means that for every 200 visitors, one person would fill out your form and become a lead. 2.0% means that for 200 visitors, 4 people would fill out a form. If it’s higher than those percentages, that’s even better. Internet marketing guru Ed Dale, who recently ran his 30 Day Challenge training program in August, says that none of his businesses have ever gotten over 0.5% as a conversion percentage, and he has made millions online. I would say that for sites where you are doing lead generation, your conversion percentage would be higher and if you are directly selling products online, you percentage would be lower.

So armed with this information, you then know what to do to improve your online leads or sales.

For instance, let’s say your site is getting about 200 visitors a week, and generating one lead per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.5% which is an acceptable percentage. But one lead per week isn’t going to make anyone rich, so you know that your correct target is to get more traffic coming to your site, by doing things like pay per click advertising, writing blog articles, or putting out press releases.

On the other hand, let’s say your site is regularly getting 5,000 visitors per week, and generating 5 leads per week. That’s a conversion percentage of only 0.1% which is pretty poor. So in that case you would know that you have to make adjustments to the web site itself in order to entice more people to fill out a form or buy something. This would usually be along the lines of making your offers more prominent or coming up with brand new offers that are more appealing to your target public.

Having these statistics and monitoring them regularly also makes it possible to make changes to your operation, either changes to the web site to increase the conversion percentage, or changes to your promotional efforts to drive more people to the site, and then see how effective they were.

So if you make some changes to the site to increase the conversion percentage, but then your conversion percentage goes down, you know right away that you have to put the site back to the way it was before (always keep the older version of a web site when you make changes).

It’s usually good to make only one change at a time, so that if statistics go up as a result, you know what change made that happen.

By monitoring these statistics you can truly manage your web site and make it more productive for your business.

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What Types of Keywords Do You Need, and What Do You Do With Them?

By John Eberhard

Some of my past articles have dealt with how to find the right keywords for a web site. This article will cover what types of keywords you need for different uses and what to do with them.

Pay Per Click Keywords

The types of keywords that one needs tend to be different for pay per click advertising (PPC) or for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

With pay per click, one usually wants to use the most general keywords he can find that are applicable and relevant to what he is advertising. For example, if you are advertising a physical therapy practice in Glendale, CA, you would use keywords like “physical therapy,” “physical therapist,” or “physical therapy practice.”

With pay per click, you would not need to use keywords, for instance, that included the name of the town, i.e. “physical therapist Glendale,” and similar variations.

I recently reviewed a pay per click account that had been set up by someone else and it was set up with all these types of keywords that included the name of the city they were in, but didn’t even include the more general versions of those keywords. I’ve even seen other companies similar to mine offering to set up PPC accounts with all these keywords using the names of the city and surrounding cities, and charging you X amount for each keyword, as if that’s some kind of great thing. It’s not.

Here’s why. Keywords that include more words, such as “physical therapist Glendale” or any other similar keyword, tend to have lower numbers of impressions, meaning that fewer people are typing them in. This type of keyword is often referred to as a “long tail keyword,” and is desirable for SEO uses, as I’ll explain in a minute.

But to set up a pay per click account using ONLY long tail keywords (especially keywords using the names of cities or other geographical areas) is a mistake. Because Google AdWords (as well as most other pay per click systems) allows you to select the geographical location of where your ads will appear. So if you’re doing business in Glendale, CA, you can set up your campaign so it only appears to people in Glendale.

So if your physical therapist in Glendale sets up his account only using keywords with the word “Glendale” in them, he will be missing the much larger group of people who will just type in “physical therapist.” So he’ll be missing out on those potential visitors. In the example of this account that I reviewed, he wasn’t even getting enough impressions to use up his relatively small budget.

That’s not to say that you can’t use keywords with the name of the city in pay per click, but you don’t need to. Using what Google calls “broad match,” you’ll get those people anyway just using the phrase “physical therapist” because it will include every search that includes those words, which would include “physical therapist Glendale.”

Keywords in SEO

The type of keywords you use in SEO, however, is totally different. Here, you want to use more long tail keywords. The reason is that short, general keywords such as “physical therapist” or “golf” or “software” are extremely competitive, because when it comes to ranking well on search engines for a given keyword, it is not limited to just your local area. It is international. So every company in the world that sells those products or services is competing for those keywords. And some have been working at ranking for those keywords for a number of years. So your likelihood of being able to rank well for one of those general keywords is close to non-existent.

So the trick with SEO is to find keywords that are longer tail, have more words in them, and which have some decent amount of traffic but not as much competition.

So in our previous example, for SEO purposes the physical therapist would want to use keyword phrases such as “physical therapist Glendale,” because he is much more likely to be able to rank well for that keyword. You don’t have to use all keywords that list names of cities in them, but in general the long tail keyword is best. You want decent number of searches per day, but not tons of competition.

Summary

It’s important to understand the processes for pay per click and search engine optimization, and understand which types of keywords work best for each.

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