Content Management Systems

by John Eberhard

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system that allows you to log in online, and through an online interface, make changes to your web site. Using a Content Management System you can add pages, make text changes or add pictures to existing pages, change your navigation structure, or make other changes as needed.

Having a CMS is becoming more desirable for web site owners, so they don’t have to learn to use a web development tool like Dreamweaver, and also so they don’t have to depend on a web designer every time they want to make a minor change to the site, such as updating dates or other information.

I’ll admit that earlier on I pooh-poohed Content Management Systems, as some of the early ones I had contact with were difficult to use and very limiting in terms of what you could do. But the field has evolved and the solutions out there today have gotten much better.

There are three CMS’s that are considered the top ones: Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress. Each system is good and very usable and which one you choose depends on which one you are familiar with.

I started designing blogs using Wordpress, which is considered the gold standard for blogging systems. Then I started seeing more and more sites being designed using Wordpress as a CMS. This allows the web site owner to log in and make any changes to their site using the Wordpress interface. So in cases where a client wants a CMS, I am now building sites using Wordpress.

Wordpress has a number of advantages. First of all, anyone who has done any blogging using a Wordpress system is already familiar with how to make changes using the Wordpress interface.

Secondly, Wordpress has a large number of special features called “plugins,” that add different functionality to your web site. Here is a short list of some of the types of plugins you can choose for a Wordpress site:

1. Photo galleries and slideshows
2. A plugin to make search engine optimization easy
3. Put up a poll on your site
4. Music players
5. Video players
6. Web statistics
7. Interaction with social media sites
8. A special plugin called “Buddypress” which makes your site into a social networking site like Facebook
9. And many more

We can deliver a site to a client using any one of the above CMS’s, but I recommend Wordpress for overall ease of use.

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Reaching Out to Local People with Social Media

by John Eberhard

One of the liabilities of many website marketing activities is that they are national or international in scope. This is great if you are selling, or can sell, your products or services internationally. But not so great if you are a local business servicing only a certain metro area or a smaller section of a metro area.

Pay per click advertising is great for hitting a specific local area. But SEO actions, link building, press releases, and blogging will all tend to draw people from all over.

Social media can be used effectively to target a specific geographical area. The biggest social media sites right now are Facebook and Twitter.

With Twitter, you can follow a strategy to build up a bunch of followers in one geographical area. I use a program called Tweet Adder to add followers. It gives you the option to follow people in a certain city or within a certain number of miles from a certain city. You can keep doing that, and a certain percentage of them will follow you back. By doing this you can build up a large number of followers, all in your local area.

With Facebook it is a little more tricky. I have long followed a strategy of proposing to be Facebook friends with people who have 20 or more friends in common. Recently I switched this to 25 or more friends in common.

So if you are a local business, start out by befriending actual friends of yours in your local city. Then you will need to look at their friend lists and go to the person’s profile and see if they live in your city. If so, and if they have a certain number of friends in common, propose being a Facebook friend. It’s an added step (seeing if they live in your city), but by doing this and being fairly aggressive with it, you can build up a large local Facebook friends list.

What to Post

So after you have a large local friends/followers list on Facebook and Twitter, then what? What do you communicate to those people?

Well Twitter allows you up to 140 characters in your “status updates.” Facebook allows 420 characters. So you have to write something short and to the point. Facebook also allows you to post photos and videos.

A strategy that I have found very workable is to start posting one or more posts per day, saying what I am doing with my website marketing business. Like “I am designing a new web site for veterinarian,” or “I just closed a new account for search engine optimization,” or “I am doing weekly pay per click advertising reports for clients.”

This may sound trite or dumb or boring. And maybe it is. But it is amazing that this does create an awareness out there of who I am and what I do. I have seen friends at social functions who have commented that I must be doing really well with my business because they see all this stuff I am posting on Facebook. That is exactly the impression I am working to create – and it’s true to boot. And I get regular reaches and closed business from social media.

This strategy will work equally well for a local dance studio, a photographer, a wedding band, or a home improvement company. Social media can help you reach your local market.

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Handling Low Impressions in Pay Per Click Advertising

by John Eberhard

So you’ve gotten an account started on Google AdWords and gotten some ads set up, and people are starting to come to your web site.

One of the problems that can occur sometimes with a new pay per click ad campaign is that you will put up your new campaign, and the impressions will be really low. Remember that the impressions are the number of times your text ad appeared in front of someone. This is the beginning of the cycle.

If you don’t have good impressions, you will not have good results overall. Realize that you need thousands of impressions to get a certain percentage that will click through on your ad and then a certain percentage of those that will then become conversions.

There are six possible reasons for very low impressions:

1. You have chosen some really low traffic keywords, or you have only chosen a small handful of keywords, not enough to get good impressions.

The solution for this is to add more keywords. Just make sure your keywords are relevant to the subject of your ads. Google has a keyword suggestion tool that works quite well, suggesting keywords that are similar to the ones you already have in that campaign.

2. The keywords are not displaying because the bid is not high enough to put your ad on the first page.

The easy solution is to raise the bid for those keywords, or raise the overall default bid for that ad group. But the judgment here is how high do you have to raise the bid? If Google is telling you that you have to raise the bid to $25.00 to be on page one, and your default bid for that ad group is $3.50, then maybe you don’t want to use that keyword. Unless you really have to have that keyword, find others that have traffic but are less expensive.

3. The keywords are not displaying because your quality score is too low.

Google has what they call a “quality score” for a given campaign, text ad or keyword. If your keywords have a low quality score, this usually means that the system cannot actually find that keyword anywhere in your text ad or on your landing page. You can handle this by adding new text ads that contain the keyword, and adding the keyword to your landing page.

4. You have a really low daily budget so the ads can’t display very long.

If this is the problem then you need to raise the budget. For example, if your daily budget is $5.00 and the bids are $2.00, your ads are only going to be on for a short time.

5. Your text ads are disapproved.

This is something you have to check on when you put up a new ad group or new text ads. It may sound stupid but if you don’t check on your new ad group and/or new text ads a few days after putting them up, you won’t know or notice if your ads are disapproved. Google sometimes will disapprove your ads. If they are disapproved, you have to figure out why and fix them. One reason text ads get disapproved is if you are using a trademarked name in the ad. If this happens go to Google and enter one of your top keywords and see how other advertisers are wording their ads. You may be able to come up with a way that does not technically use the trademark, such as putting a dash in the name or something.

6. You are targeting too small an area with geo-targeting.

Geo-targeting is where you select the geographical area in which your ads will be displayed, such as in the metro Los Angeles area, in the state of CA, in several states, in the whole US, etc. As a business you want to use this tool to limit where your ads appear, because if you are a local business, you don’t want to be paying for people to click on your ads in Peoria if you only service Glendale. BUT, you always want to select the largest possible area with geo-targeting that is appropriate for your business. You may have a business that only services one small geographical area. But whatever the case, you want the geo-targeting to be set for the largest possible area that is appropriate for your business. If your impressions are really low and the geo-targeting is set for a really small area, you might want to consider increasing or broadening the area.

Good luck with your pay per click ad campaigns.

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Pay Per Click Advertising Definitions

by John Eberhard

One of the difficulties you can run into when trying to set up or manage a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Ad Center, is the definitions of words. If you don’t understand the words it will be hard making sense of what the report is telling you.

Here are some definitions for terms you will run into when trying to set up or manage a pay per click advertising campaign with Google.

1. Search: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the search network. This is basically the main Google page where people enter search terms, plus some other search engine sites that Google has partnered with. See also “Content” below.

1. Content: On a Google AdWords report, this refers to the content network. This is where Google will put your pay per click text ads up on other sites. You see this sometimes on web sites where it says “Sponsored ads from Google” and there is a small strip of these ads. They put your ad up on a site that has elected to have Google ads displayed, and they put it up only on sites where the subject matter of your ad matches the subject matter of the site. The Content Network greatly increases the reach of your ads, but fewer people will click on your ads than with the search network. And generally the Content Network gets a lower percentage of conversions than the search network.

1. Clicks: This is the number of people who clicked on one of your ads. Also called clickthroughs.

1. Impressions: This is the number of times that your ad appeared, either when someone typed in one of your keywords on the search network, or on the content network when your ad matched the subject matter of another site.

1. CTR: Stands for Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of time that someone clicked on one of your ads (Clicks) compared to the number of times the ad appeared (Impressions). A higher clickthrough rate means your ad is more effective, so you want this to be as high as possible.

1. CPC: Cost Per Click. This is the average cost you incur each time someone clicks on one of your text ads. This is affected by how much you are bidding for the various keywords.

1. Cost: In this column we see the total amount of money spent.

1. Avg Pos: Stands for Average Position. This means how high up your ad is appearing. As there are almost always multiple advertisers, they are shown in an order, and being nearer to the top or at the top is desirable. So if you see an average position of 1.5, that shows that your ads were appearing some of the time in the #1 position and some of the time in the #2 position.

1. Conversion: In a lead generation campaign, a conversion is someone who filled out a form and became a lead. In an online sales campaign, a conversion is someone who bought the product. There is special code which you put on one of your web pages, that will then communicate back to the Google interface and tell it when a conversion has occurred. This is vital to do, and not everybody knows about this feature.

1. Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and came to the site, that then filled out the form and either became a lead or bought something.

1. Cost/Conv: This is the cost per conversion. For example, if you got 10 conversions (leads) in one week, and spent $1,000 on your clickthroughs, then your cost per lead would be $100.00 each. You want the cost per conversion to be as low as possible.

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Marketing and Message

By John Eberhard

With marketing, you are trying to get people to respond to your marketing message, either by buying your product or service right away or by expressing some interest and becoming a lead so your salesmen can sell them.

You can make the coolest website in the world, the nicest HTML emails, or the slickest looking brochure. But if you do not have the right message and offer, it will all be for naught. You will spend time, effort and money and be left with little reward.

So how do you figure out the best marketing message or offers in order to bring about an adequate or optimum return for your efforts?

The best way is to establish who your target public is that is most likely to buy your product, and then survey those people to get an idea of what motivates them and what they want.

Most companies will have a specific target public that is most likely to buy their products or services. Unless you sell cereal or shampoo, that public is not “the general public.” That public is unique in ways that separate them out from the general public, such as age, interests, or buying habits. Then you need to specifically survey those people, to get an idea of what they think and what they want.

But many companies cannot afford to do marketing surveys. So how can a small or medium sized business figure out the best marketing message?

One inexpensive way to do a type of survey that will specifically help your online marketing, is to do keyword research. This is where you make a list of keywords and then find out how many people are typing in each keyword every month, and how many websites are competing for those terms or phrases. This is an excellent tool for finding out what people are looking for online.

Another excellent tool is to put Google Analytics, a free web statistics service, on your website and use this to see what keywords people are typing in, in order to reach your website.

Another method is to put up a pay per click ad campaign on Google AdWords, create several text ads and a bunch of keywords, and see which text ads get the best response. This will cost you some money (you can control the daily budget) but you will only pay for when people click on the ads and come to your site. So unlike display advertising, where you pay whether you get any response or not, with pay per click ads, if your ad bombs, you will pay nothing or next to nothing.

There is a lot more to learn about pay per click advertising, which I cover in other articles and in my book. But the point is that you can use pay per click and these other methods as tools to find out what your public will best respond to. Then, when you find the right message, pour the coals on. In other words, place more ads with that message, put that message up on your website, and craft more and ongoing campaigns with that message. And may the leads pour in!

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