Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Monday, December 17, 2012
The First Two Marketing Tools Every Business Needs
No matter whether you are a one man shop or a startup with major financial backing hiring a hundred employees, the first two marketing items your business needs are a website and business cards.Why a website? In this uber digital age, every business has to depend on their website to tell their story. Even back just less than 10 years ago, if you needed a plumber, you would pull out your phone book and “let your fingers do the walking”. When you found the listing for the local plumber, you gave him a call. But in today’s world, most of us “have an app for that”. So, in today’s digital age, you also have to be sure you’re using the correct content to drive your site to the top of the search engines.
Also at the top of your needs list, business cards are the most inexpensive and highly used face of your business. They give everyone you meet a quick snap shot of your company. With a catchy logo and unique design, you can make a lasting impression that will drive business your way. So, if you’re just starting out or trying to decide where best to put your marketing dollars, make sure you have done these two things well.
For help with a website or the right business cards for you, or to answer any questions you may have, don’t hesitate to contact us!!
Email us at Marketing@NEX21.com
Social Media Place is a division of NEX21 Media, LLC. NEX21 Media is a proud member of the Birmingham Business Alliance, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce, Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Shelby County Chamber of Commerce, and The Better Business Bureau.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Trade Show Blues
1. Have a good giveaway, one that stands out and is useful in the time period we’re living in.
2. If it’s an all day show, make a schedule for another co-worker to join you, BUT REMEMBER to bring someone energetic with a friendly personality. You don’t want to scare the people away.
3. Bring good brochures & literature, but not too large & oversized; remember people are receiving things at every booth and you don’t want to make it any more difficult to carry with your items, which may end up in the trash.
4. Supply candy or treats as an attention grabber to get them to stop by your booth.
5. Arrive early to get a chance to walk around and meet all the other exhibitors and possibly get their business cards.
6. Make sure when signing up for a booth try to get one closest toward the front. Being in the back can cause the prospect to miss your booth, become distracted by all the other viewers, or become too tired and give up by the time he gets to you.
7. If you’ve found a good prospect at your booth, get their information and follow-up with them later. Remember you may just have another good prospect waiting and you don’t want to miss them by sharing your entire business model with the other person. You have to be polite but expedient with your encounters.
Social Media Place is a division of NEX21 Media, LLC. NEX21 Media is a proud member of the Birmingham Business Alliance, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce, Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Shelby County Chamber of Commerce, and The Better Business Bureau.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Liberty Park Pumpkin Patch a Huge Success!
The Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce
Liberty Park Business District hosted The Annual Liberty Park Pumpkin
Patch near the Shops of Prominence in Vestavia Hills, AL. With the help
of the community, businesses, and volunteers, double the funds were
raised for The American Red Cross this year.The purpose of the event is to help the area businesses increase traffic and customer awareness for the shops in the Liberty Park area, by providing fun, food, and entertainment for the entire family.
We look forward to continuing this annual event and making it better and better each year.
Furthermore, we were able to bring our community together for a fun, windy fall day!
Again, we thank everyone for their support!
Social Media Place is a division of NEX21 Media, LLC. NEX21 Media is a proud member of the Birmingham Business Alliance, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce, Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Shelby County Chamber of Commerce, and The Better Business Bureau.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
What Can Google Analytics do for You?
GA's approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. GA analysis can identify poorly performing page with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.
Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. (source Wikipedia)
Here are 4 tips to remember when getting started: (source toprankblog.com by eprokop 1)
1. Filter Irrelevant Traffic:
Throw out the ad and keep the good…Some good filters to start with are:
* Traffic from your company’s internal IP addresses.
* Remote employee IP addresses.
* External consultants or venders, such as outsourced web development or marketing teams.
* Your home IP address if you plan on checking your website from home.
2.Set Up Goal Tracking:
This is very important part of planning your website, whether your website’s goals are to sell products, answer customer service inquiries, capture leads, or get visitors to view certain pages, the goals for your website should reflect your overall business goals. Measuring your site’s performance in regards to goal completions is the most important application of web analytics, so it’s essential that you setup goals as early as possible.
* Sales
* Feed subscriptions
* Call back requests
* Lead captures
3. Set Up Custom Alerts
Custom alerts allow you to rest easy between analytics sessions by alerting you to significant changes in important site metrics. Some good custom alerts to start with are:
* Big fluctuations in traffic (both positive and negative).
* High bounce rate.
* Changes in Adwords spend (for linked accounts).
4. Create Custom Dashboards:
Custom dashboards are great time savers because they put your most important analytics data front and center. Although you may to take some to get used to using analytics before putting together your first set of custom dashboards that way you will have a better idea of which combinations of metrics will be most useful to have at a glance.
You can create up to 20 custom dashboards per profile, so don’t limit yourself. You will find that certain combinations of data naturally make sense to be reviewed together. Some examples are:
* Traffic: total, sources (organic, paid, referral), and top keywords.
* Goal tracking: sales, subscriptions, downloads, comments, etc.
* Visitor behavior: page views, bounce rate, new vs. returning, and time on site.
For help with setting up your Google Analytics or just to answer questions you may have don’t hesitate to contact us!!
Contact us at marketing@NEX21.com, or NEX21 Media.
Social Media Place is a division of NEX21 Media, LLC. NEX21 Media is a proud member of the Birmingham Business Alliance, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce, Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Shelby County Chamber of Commerce, and The Better Business Bureau.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords…Are you A Successful Blogger?
Recently I was given this assignment to write blogs and at
first I thought, “how am I going to do that?”
I’m not a writer. I don’t know
the first thing about blogs. So, then I
did what I always do when given an assignment; I turned to the internet and did
some research. I discovered that
evidently I am not the only person facing this dilemma; there are literally
hundreds of sites with advice on how to write your blog. I was given the advice to write about my own
experiences and I thought, “now who would want to read that?”
Many
sites I have read recommend keeping your blog short
(fewer than 250 words) and to make it amusing to keep your audience
engaged. Evidently, we have all developed ADD. You would think one was
writing a script for a
movie in reading some of this advice. It’s overwhelming!! But, it seems
like if you just try to clear
your head and write what you know (in our case a few things about
Marketing) or
what you’re passionate about (e.g., your dog, your model train
collection, or
your kids), then before you know it you’re a successful blogger.
We are always here to
help you with any Marketing needs you may have for your business or non-profit.
Email
us at Marketing@NEX21.com
Social Media Place is a division of NEX21 Media, LLC. NEX21 Media is a proud member of the Birmingham Business Alliance, Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce, Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Shelby County Chamber of Commerce, and The Better Business Bureau.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for the "Do-It-Yourselfers"
1. Add Google Analytics to each page
Be careful, you can really get overwhelmed with all of the website tracking variables in the application. Just for basic use though, it is pretty simple to understand. The program will show you number of website visits, website pages visited, how long a viewer stayed on a particular web page, and many other things, such as keyword usage, Search Engine sources used, etc.
2. Reduce Code Jibberish
Google stays on the prowl for relevant and unique website content. JavaScript and CSS in the HTML code make it harder for them to find it. All scripts and CSS files should be added as external files to reduce the time it takes for search engine spiders to find the actual content as well as reducing the code-to-content ratio. Remember that excessive code not only slows the page’s loading time, but it also increases the possibility of coding errors that, whilst they may have no direct impact on the site’s SEO, may still cause difficulty for the search engine spiders. This is more for you to insure your developer understands or if you are tackling building a site yourself.
3. Add a blog
Adding a blog to any site gives your clients the opportunity to add fresh content easily and regularly. Search engines love fresh content and if you encourage your client to update the blog on at least a weekly basis, or hopefully even more regularly, you will be giving them a distinct SEO advantage. You can explain to your client that blogs naturally attract search engine traffic and they can take advantage of this by not only adding content as often as possible, but to allow visitors to ask questions or leave comments.
The interactivity of the blog also adds value to the site and can also increase the likelihood of potential customers social bookmarking it and sharing it their social networks, but remember to look out for spam comments and to remove anything that looks like duplicate content. Blogs also increase the size of the website over time and this can provide a major SEO benefit in the form of an increase in website authority and a higher number of pages to leverage with internal links.
4. Make each page unique
Google ranks the relevance of each website according to the content it contains, and is always seeking relevant content not contained anywhere else on the Internet. This means that the content of every page needs to be completely different not just from any other site on the Web, but also any other page on the same site. This raises the issue of duplicate content, the dread of all site owners.
Put simply, if you publish any content that appears somewhere else on the Internet, you run the risk of being ignored by search engines because the algorithm will be looking for content that sets your site apart.
Unique content removes any such impediments from your site and your design standards will support your clients’ SEO. It is also worthwhile pointing out that wherever you include snippets of information contained on other pages within the site to tempt the visitor to follow the link, you run the risk of being penalized for duplicate content. So be careful of the wording used in the snippets so that it provides a summary without repeating any of the words actually used.
5. Use meta description tags
META Description tags are what appear in the search engine results pages – they give the web surfer an overview of what the site is about. Put your marketer’s hat on and write a description that convinces visitors to click on the result. This is your site’s first opportunity to attract visitors, so it’s vital that you give your client the best chance of standing out from the other results. Remember, Google also uses meta description tags to differentiate web pages (although not as much as title tags) so you also need to be careful to describe each page differently to avoid any duplicate content issues. Including free offers, guarantees and a phone number can improve the click through rate on your clients’ SEO ranking. Make sure to limit the description tags to 160 characters in length, including spaces.
6. Remove repetitive wording from the website layout
It’s worth repeating again that unique content is vital to the success of any site’s SEO. When designing a website layout for a client it is tempting to include information such as copyright text, contact details and maybe even company mottos on every page of the site. If there is not enough unique content on every page then you run the risk of your client’s site being penalised for duplicate content. That’s why it’s important to remove such repetitive wording from the website layout so that the true informational content of the site is not diluted in any way.
7. Add footer links to every page
Linking between web pages using plain text links, with the target SEO keywords in the anchor text, can provide a significant boost to your clients’ SEO rankings. The problem is that most good website designs use graphical, JavaScript or Flash navigation that don’t use anchor text. If this is the case, you can use footer links to link between your pages, with the keywords you want to rank for within the anchor text of the links.
8. Create a separate web page for each keyword or keyword phrase
The best way for a website to rank for a particular keyword phrase is to create a web page targeted to that phrase with the keywords in the TITLE tag, META description tags, body copy and URL. This means that it is critically important to create a separate web page for each product or service that the client sells, as well as category pages if they are needed. A dedicated page for each product or service will also ensure a good user experience as they will land directly on this page from the search engine results, making it much easier for them to buy online or submit a form for more information.
9. Use keyword rich title tags on each page
TITLE tags appear in the title bar of the browser and are one of the factors used by search engines to determine the content of your page. Rather than including the company name in the TITLE tag, use the keywords that your client wants to rank for. This will give your client a solid advantage for ranking in the search engines. Make sure to limit the TITLE tags to 60 characters in length, including spaces, so that the full text of the title tags appears in the search engine rankings and doesn’t get cut-off by Google.
By integrating all of the above suggestions into each of your website design projects, you will give your clients the best possible chance of generating sales and profits from search engine rankings.
Be careful, you can really get overwhelmed with all of the website tracking variables in the application. Just for basic use though, it is pretty simple to understand. The program will show you number of website visits, website pages visited, how long a viewer stayed on a particular web page, and many other things, such as keyword usage, Search Engine sources used, etc.
2. Reduce Code Jibberish
Google stays on the prowl for relevant and unique website content. JavaScript and CSS in the HTML code make it harder for them to find it. All scripts and CSS files should be added as external files to reduce the time it takes for search engine spiders to find the actual content as well as reducing the code-to-content ratio. Remember that excessive code not only slows the page’s loading time, but it also increases the possibility of coding errors that, whilst they may have no direct impact on the site’s SEO, may still cause difficulty for the search engine spiders. This is more for you to insure your developer understands or if you are tackling building a site yourself.
3. Add a blog
Adding a blog to any site gives your clients the opportunity to add fresh content easily and regularly. Search engines love fresh content and if you encourage your client to update the blog on at least a weekly basis, or hopefully even more regularly, you will be giving them a distinct SEO advantage. You can explain to your client that blogs naturally attract search engine traffic and they can take advantage of this by not only adding content as often as possible, but to allow visitors to ask questions or leave comments.
The interactivity of the blog also adds value to the site and can also increase the likelihood of potential customers social bookmarking it and sharing it their social networks, but remember to look out for spam comments and to remove anything that looks like duplicate content. Blogs also increase the size of the website over time and this can provide a major SEO benefit in the form of an increase in website authority and a higher number of pages to leverage with internal links.
4. Make each page unique
Google ranks the relevance of each website according to the content it contains, and is always seeking relevant content not contained anywhere else on the Internet. This means that the content of every page needs to be completely different not just from any other site on the Web, but also any other page on the same site. This raises the issue of duplicate content, the dread of all site owners.
Put simply, if you publish any content that appears somewhere else on the Internet, you run the risk of being ignored by search engines because the algorithm will be looking for content that sets your site apart.
Unique content removes any such impediments from your site and your design standards will support your clients’ SEO. It is also worthwhile pointing out that wherever you include snippets of information contained on other pages within the site to tempt the visitor to follow the link, you run the risk of being penalized for duplicate content. So be careful of the wording used in the snippets so that it provides a summary without repeating any of the words actually used.
5. Use meta description tags
META Description tags are what appear in the search engine results pages – they give the web surfer an overview of what the site is about. Put your marketer’s hat on and write a description that convinces visitors to click on the result. This is your site’s first opportunity to attract visitors, so it’s vital that you give your client the best chance of standing out from the other results. Remember, Google also uses meta description tags to differentiate web pages (although not as much as title tags) so you also need to be careful to describe each page differently to avoid any duplicate content issues. Including free offers, guarantees and a phone number can improve the click through rate on your clients’ SEO ranking. Make sure to limit the description tags to 160 characters in length, including spaces.
6. Remove repetitive wording from the website layout
It’s worth repeating again that unique content is vital to the success of any site’s SEO. When designing a website layout for a client it is tempting to include information such as copyright text, contact details and maybe even company mottos on every page of the site. If there is not enough unique content on every page then you run the risk of your client’s site being penalised for duplicate content. That’s why it’s important to remove such repetitive wording from the website layout so that the true informational content of the site is not diluted in any way.
7. Add footer links to every page
Linking between web pages using plain text links, with the target SEO keywords in the anchor text, can provide a significant boost to your clients’ SEO rankings. The problem is that most good website designs use graphical, JavaScript or Flash navigation that don’t use anchor text. If this is the case, you can use footer links to link between your pages, with the keywords you want to rank for within the anchor text of the links.
8. Create a separate web page for each keyword or keyword phrase
The best way for a website to rank for a particular keyword phrase is to create a web page targeted to that phrase with the keywords in the TITLE tag, META description tags, body copy and URL. This means that it is critically important to create a separate web page for each product or service that the client sells, as well as category pages if they are needed. A dedicated page for each product or service will also ensure a good user experience as they will land directly on this page from the search engine results, making it much easier for them to buy online or submit a form for more information.
9. Use keyword rich title tags on each page
TITLE tags appear in the title bar of the browser and are one of the factors used by search engines to determine the content of your page. Rather than including the company name in the TITLE tag, use the keywords that your client wants to rank for. This will give your client a solid advantage for ranking in the search engines. Make sure to limit the TITLE tags to 60 characters in length, including spaces, so that the full text of the title tags appears in the search engine rankings and doesn’t get cut-off by Google.
By integrating all of the above suggestions into each of your website design projects, you will give your clients the best possible chance of generating sales and profits from search engine rankings.
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