Auto Tweets

by John Eberhard

I’ve been using the Tweet Adder software for some time now to add more followers for my own Twitter account and those of a number of my clients. It has an “auto tweet” function that allows you to set up messages that you want to go out to your Twitter followers on an automated basis.

Tweet Adder also allows you to set up an automated email message that goes out to people saying “Hey thanks for following me” when they follow you. I think that’s one of the worst cases of wasted bits and bytes in the history of computing so I’m not talking about that.

The feature I’m talking about allows you to set up automated messages to go out to all your Twitter followers. You can set up as many as you want, and then determine how many of them will go out per day.

I had never used this feature until a friend told me he was doing it and it was causing significant traffic to his web site. So I decided to give it a try, and I’ve been running automated tweets for my own account and five other accounts, for a couple of weeks. And I see after checking Google Analytics that it is starting to generate traffic.

On one of the accounts I’ve got around 40 auto tweets set up, and then it is set so that 20 of them show per day. So that way they cycle through every other day, not the same ones every day. You can also set the time between the messages so I set that at 15 minutes.

The question some people may ask is “Doesn’t that make it look like those messages are automated? Can’t people tell it is a bot doing it?” Well yeah, that’s possible. But I doubt that most people would be on Twitter long enough or frequently enough to notice that. Especially if you keep adding more messages over time so there is less frequent repetition of the messages.

So the next question would be, “What type of messages should I send out?” Always the helpful soul, I have come up with a list of the types of things you should send out.

1. Link to Articles: If you have a blog or information articles on your web site, then just write out the title of the article in quotes, then a link to the article. For the link use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl, because you only get 140 characters on Twitter. If you have lots of articles you have written, do one auto tweet for each.

2. Link to Free Reports or White Papers: If you have any free reports or white papers that you are offering, then say something like “Download my free white paper “Marketing with Social Media” http://goo.gl/Vqx6N”.

3. Links to Your Email Newsletter Signup: If you offer a free email newsletter, promote it via Twitter, with a little blurb explaining what the newsletter is about and a link to the signup page. Remember, only 140 characters.

4. Links to Videos: If you have some videos about your company on YouTube, write a short blurb about the video and include a link to it.

5. Products or Services: Do an auto tweet for each of your products or services. Write a short explanatory blurb about the product or service, then include a link to the page on your web site that is about that.

6. Testimonials: Do an auto tweet linking to your testimonials page.

7. Facebook: Ask your Twitter followers to be your Facebook friend or to like your fan page and include a link to your Facebook profile or fan page.

8. LinkedIn: Ask people to connect to you on LinkedIn.

9. Events: if you’re holding some special event like a seminar or webinar or something like that, do an auto tweet, but make sure to take it out of your list after the event is over.

That’s not meant to be a complete list, but it can definitely get you going. Then let the traffic begin. Good luck with your social media marketing.

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How to Increase Traffic to a Web Site

by John Eberhard

You have a web site, and you have Google Analytics running on the site, so now you know how many visitors you’re getting. And let’s say you find out that it’s not very much traffic. What do you do?

First let’s define how much is not very much traffic. This is relative, and subject to opinion. It also depends on whether the site is a specialized business to business (B2B) site or a more general business to consumer (B2C) site. But we can say without too much risk that if you’re getting less than, say, 300 visitors to your site per month, then that’s not very much.

In my earlier article, “Web Site Conversions,” I covered what to do if you find you have decent amounts of traffic coming to the site, but a low number of people filling out your forms and giving you their name and email.

This is now the other side of the coin. What do you do when you discover you’re just getting very low traffic?

I would say that web site traffic generation falls mainly into these categories:

1. Email marketing
2. Pay per click advertising
3. Social media marketing
4. Blogging
5. SEO and link building

Email Marketing

This can be a very effective way of driving traffic to a web site. The most effective method is to build up your in-house list of prospects and customers, and to mail to it regularly.

I have had some success from purchased lists or from compiling lists myself from various web sites, such as state and local associations of various professions that list the emails of their members. Of course you have to be aware of the laws regarding emailing and follow them fully.

If you use an in-house list or purchased or compiled lists, you can email aggressively and drive traffic inexpensively.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising (PPC) through Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center or Facebook, is very effective in driving traffic to a web site. Of course it costs money, so I usually recommend it for companies that are already a going concern and can afford to put a certain amount of budget towards it. I usually recommend companies to put at least $1,000 per month into the budget.

But PPC advertising is very effective and can be set up and running in a relatively short period of time.

Social Media Marketing

Social media web sites can be used very effectively to drive traffic to your site. The two key actions are 1) build up a large list of friends/followers/connections, and 2) create an effective strategy of communicating regularly to those lists.

I have written at length elsewhere on effective social media strategies so I won’t cover them here. One important thing to know is that social media can be used to market a business, and relatively inexpensively. But it does usually involve a commitment of time, either by you or in paying someone to do it for you.

Blogging

Most people don’t realize that a blog can be used to drive traffic. I run several blogs, and write an article on marketing once a week throughout the year. That blog drives more traffic to my site than any other single source, including Google.

The key is to write something regularly (once a week or more), and ensure that a “ping” is sent to the blog search engines after every single post you make (Wordpress does this automatically). Then make sure you have items in your sidebars that link back to your main web site. The idea is that the search engines drive people to the blog, then links on the blog will send them to your main site.

SEO and Link Building

Search engine optimization (SEO) means to select keywords that have decent traffic but not much competition, then put those keywords into all the areas of your web site where it is acceptable to do so. Link building means to build up links on other web sites linking back to pages on your site. Google says that their main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to it from other sites, so this is important.

SEO and link building, both together, are perhaps the most important action in building consistent traffic to a web site. But the thing is, it takes a definite commitment and a bit of time (6 months to a year or more) to do it. And it takes a budget. We are doing this for several of our clients. But it is not necessarily something I recommend for a small business.

Summary
The primary actions to build web site traffic are:

1. Email marketing
2. Pay per click advertising
3. Social media marketing
4. Blogging
5. SEO and link building

For the small business with a limited budget, I’d recommend email marketing, social media marketing, and blogging.

For the medium sized to larger business, I’d recommend all of the above actions.

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Growing Your Email List

by John Eberhard

I started doing email marketing about 10-11 years ago. Back then, we rented a lot of email lists and were very successful with it. But the heavy proliferation of spam a few years later ruined the rented email list market, and most of the time, rented lists do not work anymore.

But what DOES work is to build up an in-house email list of customers and prospects, and send a variety of emails to them regularly. That clutter of email spam is still there, but if you build a relationship with people, you will break through that clutter and people will open and read your emails.

Building the List

Let’s start with how to build your list.

1. Contact Form: the first thing you should definitely have on your site is a contact form. It should ask minimally for the person’s name, email, and phone number, and usually include a “comments/questions” field. This is mainly for people who are interested in your product or service, and of course this is one of the most valuable reaches you will get, when someone fills out this form.

1. Newsletter Subscription: If your company does not offer an email newsletter, you should consider it. It’s a great way to build your list, and a great free offering. Of course you have to then actually create a newsletter and send it out regularly and write interesting and informative material to put in it. If you are just starting with offering an email newsletter, then you should do it monthly or quarterly.

1. Free Report: You can also create a “free report” (sometimes called a “white paper”) on some topic related to your industry. Then you offer that for free on your web site, but you make people fill out a form and give you their name and email address in order to get it. The idea is that if the report is on some topic that relates directly to the product or service that you sell, then the only people who would ask for it would likely be prospects for your company. I have used this strategy successfully with quite a few companies over the years. Of course you want to pick a topic that will be hot and will attract a lot of people to request the report. See my earlier article on this.

There are other things you could offer, such as software demos if you sell software. But the key is that you are offering several free things on your web site that will entice people to fill out that form and give you their name and email address. That way, you collect the names of people who are your prospects but who are not ready to buy something right now. If you are only offering one of the above, you should consider adding more to the mix.

Email Services

It really makes sense to set up an account with one of the online email services (like Aweber, Mailchimp, or Constant Contact) and have those people who fill out the forms on your web site dumped into an online database. It’s easier to send email to a list if it is stored in one of the online email services, and you can also set up an autoresponder to send them several emails selling your services. Plus it is automated in terms of people signing up and also unsubscribing, so you don’t have to do that manually.

I have used all these services, and Aweber and Mailchimp are the best. Constant Contact is the worst, in terms of the options it gives you.

What to Send

Now you have an email list and are gradually increasing the size of the list. So what do you send to it?

1. Email Newsletter: As discussed above, this is a good thing to send to your list.
2. Testimonials: Put together emails containing success stories from happy clients.
3. General Sales Pieces: You can put together sales emails, one apiece on all your various products or services, and including a link to where they can buy the item or get more info on it on your web site.
4. Sales or Specials: Whenever you put something on sale or have a special, you should definitely send out emails about it, probably more than once over the course of the special.
5. Announcements: If you have something to announce, such as a new product or service, send out an email on it.

Frequency

A big question is how often do you send to the list? How much is too much?

Well I definitely believe in being aggressive and sending to an email list often. You may have to experiment a bit to see what works for you, and watch how many people are unsubscribing. If you are getting a lot of people unsubscribing from the list, you may be pushing the envelope too much.

Generally I think sending email to a list between 2 and 8 times per month is acceptable. I send to my prospect and client list about 4-6 times per month. I talked to one organization recently that is sending out 5 emails per week or 20 per month. That’s a lot. But it is working for them and they don’t get too many people asking to be off the list. So you have to see what works for you.

Good luck with website marketing via your in-house email list.

Thanks to Jane Milan for the suggestion of this topic.

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Web Site Conversions

by John Eberhard

The whole idea behind website marketing of a commercial web site, meaning a web site for a business, is to get people to respond. When someone goes to a web site and responds to you in some way, we call that a “conversion.” Conversions could include:

1. Someone calling you on the phone, from the web site
2. Someone filling out a form asking for more information
3. Someone filling out a form to be on your newsletter email list
4. Someone filling out a form asking for some free item you are offering like a free report or white paper
5. Someone clicking on an email link on the site and emailing you
6. Someone buying something via a shopping cart on your site

Sometimes those things are called the “desired actions.”

Obviously we want as many people to respond and become conversions as possible. But of course not everyone is going to respond, for a variety of reasons.

So if you have a web site, and the site is set up in such a way as to allow or encourage people or ask them to respond in some way, and you’re NOT getting many or any conversions, then what do you do?

The very first thing you should do, if you are getting few or no conversions, is to find out how many people are actually coming to the web site. And this means a web statistics program or service.

There are many such web statistics services available, and most web hosting programs have a free web statistics program. But most of these are just terrible. I recommend people to use Google Analytics, which is free and is very good. You have to set up an account, then take the code they give you and put that on every page of your site. If you have a Wordpress site, you have to install a plugin that allows you to use Analytics, and then you just have to enter the account number and you’re set. I use a plugin called “Analytics WP.”

Once you are set up with Analytics, you should check the statistics once a week and see how much traffic you’re getting. If you do graphs for your business you should do a graph for web site visits weekly.

So let’s take a scenario. Let’s say you are only getting 2 conversions, meaning people responding to you, per month. Then you get Google Analytics installed on your web site and a few weeks later you see that you are only getting around 100 visits per week, or 400 per month. If you are getting 2 conversions per month with 400 visits to the site, that’s a conversion percentage of 0.5%.

Your problem in that case is simply that you are not getting enough people visiting your site. Your program then is clear: drive more traffic, via Google AdWords, sending out emails, social media, press releases, and so on. You need more traffic.

But now let’s take the other side of the coin. Same situation of 2 conversions per month, but after checking your traffic you find out you are getting 1,200 visits per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.04%.

Now you know that your web site is not set up properly to take advantage of that traffic. If you examine your site with a critical and fresh view, you will probably find one or more of the following:

a. It’s hard to buy stuff or hard to find where to do it.
b. Your newsletter signup form, if you have one, is not on the sidebar on every page (which it should be).
c. The phone number is not on every page or is hard to find
d. Your contact page is non-existent or hard to find.
e. You have no free offers to entice people to respond who maybe are not ready to buy right now.

If you find any or all of the above, you can make changes to the site to make it easier or more obvious for people to respond, or add some free offers if you don’t have any.

Now let’s wrap up by talking about conversion percentages. Ed Dale, well known Australian web marketing guru and organizer of the yearly 30 Day Challenge training program, says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for a web site. That means you’d get one conversion for every 200 visitors to the site. In that case he is specifically talking about online sales, which are usually going to have a lower percentage than with lead generation.

If you are doing lead generation, meaning you’re trying to get leads that a salesman will call and close, I think an acceptable conversion percentage is anywhere from 1% to 5%. If you are getting less than 1%, you need to work on the web site, making it easier to find stuff, and adding some free offers.

But I find that in most cases when I ask someone what kind of traffic they’re getting to the web site and they don’t know, then the problem is almost always really low numbers of visitors to the site. And in that case the program is to start generating more traffic, because you need thousands of visitors.

Good luck with your web site conversions.

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Why Article Marketing is Important

by John Eberhard

Article marketing means to write an article and then distribute that article around to various web sites called article directories. Article marketing is an important part of link building, which is often lumped in with the subject of search engine optimization.

My company does a lot of link building for clients. The purpose is to build up a lot of links to the client web site from other sites. The reason for this is that for Google, the number of links to a web site from other sites is their top criteria for determining the ranking of that web site. So the higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you will get from them.

I use several methods to build up links to web sites. But the most effective method I have found for building high volume links is article marketing. I use other methods to build quality links, but for quantity, it’s article marketing, hands down.

The first step is to write an article. This should be a minimum of 500 words, and should be about some topic of interest related to your product or your industry. It should not be a pitch directly about buying your products or services, but should be informational.

Aside from building links, writing and distributing articles is a way of establishing you as a reliable information source. For many companies, this is an important strategy today in making you and your company a trusted place to do business. By writing an article with relevant, correct information, you are demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about.

Once the article is written, I usually distribute it to between 50 and 100 article directories. Some of the top directories are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are several of what I consider premium article directories, including:
http://www.squidoo.com
http://knol.google.com/k
http://business.blinkweb.com/

We used to consider HubPages.com a premium article directory, but they have demonstrated that they are really anti-marketing, so we don’t bother with them anymore. Not sure why a site like that would even exist if it was anti-marketing, but there you go.

The best frequency is to write and send out an article to at least 50 article directories, at least once a month. Sending out to 100 directories is better, and sending more than one article per month is better too. We have some clients where we distribute one article per week.

By following a program of at least 100 article submissions per month, it is possible to build up links from practically none to over 2,000 links within several months.

You can check your number of links on Google by entering this in the search line:

“yourwebsite.com” -site:yourwebsite.com

I hesitate to give that because every time I do someone complains that it doesn’t work. But it does. It’s your web site address, in quotes, then a space, a dash, the word “site,” a colon, and your web address again without quotes. You enter that in the Google search field. It will then say at the top “About 27,700 results” (as it did for my web site just now). That’s the number of links.

If you do that for some of your competitor sites, that will give you an idea of how many links you will need to be able to rank well for your industry.

Good luck with link building and search engine rankings.

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Promotional Strategy When Times Are Tough

by John Eberhard

Years ago I worked for a software company as the VP Marketing. It was policy at that company that each week they would allocate 20% of the gross income for promotional expenses, things like ads, direct mail, trade show expenses, and so on. This was before the Internet and website marketing.

I was in charge of that promotional budget, so each week my staff would prepare the purchase orders and I would sort through them to select what I thought was the best way to spend that money, then I would submit those to the financial planning committee.

There was one time where the company’s income was lower than usual for several weeks. Of course every company goes through this from time to time, and of course it creates a problem for financial planning. Because the question is how do you pay all the bills, make payroll, etc.? I was on the financial planning committee then and I’ve been on it in a number of companies since then, and I can tell you it is always a challenge. But if you are a business owner, you already know that.

The Executive Director of the company at the time had the idea that we would dramatically cut the percentage of gross income going to promo. I objected to this of course, not just because it was my personal fiefdom so to speak, but because I had observed that there was a direct proportion between the money spent and the amount of promo sent out, to the number of leads that came in, and to the sales, and to the income.

Well the ED was undeterred by my objections and we embarked on a period of six weeks where the promo allocation dropped to 6% of the gross income.

What do you think happened?

Do you think we recovered to our previous level of income?

No we did not. In fact, the gross income dropped even lower during that six week period. At the end of that period, the owner of the company stepped in and removed the Executive Director and appointed a new one. The policy of 20% to promo was reinstated, and the company slowly climbed back up to its previous level of income.

What I learned from that experience was that it is vital to maintain a promotional budget, and that it is especially important when the gross income dips below its normal level. Cutting the promo budget is not the solution when the income is down. If anything, it is more important to maintain or increase promo levels when income is down.

Over the years I worked for a number of companies in the capacity as a Director or VP of Marketing. And those companies all had different policies on how much money they put towards promo items. The software company mentioned above allocated 20%, some allocated 14%, some 10%. I’ve seen some smaller companies that put no money towards promo at all, but existed entirely on referrals and repeat business. But even those companies eventually reached a point in their expansion cycle where they had to start promoting and spending some money on promo.

So no matter what percentage of your income you are putting towards promo items, when income dips, it is vital to maintain or even increase the amount of promotional actions you are doing. It’s not easy. I’ve sat on that financial planning committee and I know it’s not easy. But it is the route to survival and expansion.

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Logistics for Re-Designing a Web Site

by John Eberhard

When you decide to have your web site re-designed, there are some logistical considerations that you should be aware of.

Keeping the Same Hosting Company

If you have a web hosting account that you are happy with, then your web designer should create a new sub-folder on your web site and put the newly designed web site there. That way you can view what he is doing by putting in your web address plus the new folder, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/new.>

In this way your web designer can build the new web site, and upload the files to the sub-folder, and you can look at it on your computer, give him edits or changes, and give him final approval before the new site is live.

Once you have a finalized design and content that you have approved, then your web designer can upload all the new files into the root folder and the new site will become live. He should also, before he uploads all the new files, download all your old files and keep them on his hard disk just in case anything goes wrong.

Switching Hosting Companies

If you are not happy with your hosting company for whatever reason, then the best thing is to have your web designer start a new hosting account and build the new site there. He will be able to give you a preview web address so you can view the new site while he is working on it.

I typically use GoDaddy and Hostgator for setting up new hosting accounts for client web sites. They are inexpensive ($5-8 per month) and I have had a good experience with both. GoDaddy’s basic hosting account is $5 per month and they have a “deluxe” hosting account for $8 per month where you can host multiple web sites for the same price.

While your web designer is working on the new site in the new hosting account, your old web site will still be live. Visitors to the site will still see your old site until you’re ready to make the switch.

Once you preview the new site and approve everything, now the switchover can occur. The way this is done is that you have to know where the web address was registered, i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc. And you have to have the login information for your account. Your account with one of the domain registrars is separate from your hosting account, though some companies like GoDaddy do both domain registration and hosting.

So once you find the domain registrar login information (I find most clients have to dig to find this) then you log into the account, and switch the DNS (domain name servers). This means that the web address, or domain, will now point to a different computer, the computer at your new hosting company that holds your new web site files.

There is a record, contained in every web server across the planet, that includes every single web address, and what computer the files for that web address are on. Let’s say your old hosting company for your www.mywidgets.com web site was located in New Jersey. That record would point to that specific computer inside the hosting company in New Jersey, and so every time someone would type in www.mywidgets.com, their computer would be directed to that computer in New Jersey and pull up the files from that computer.

So now let’s say your new hosting company is in Arizona. Once you switch the DNS, that record gets updated on every web server across the planet, and it now points to that new computer in Arizona. Now when someone types in your web address, they get directed to that computer in Arizona and the files get pulled from that computer.

When you switch the DNS, it takes about 24 hours for the records to be “propagated,” which means they get updated on every web server across the planet.

Good luck with your web site re-design.

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