Upgrade Your Backend – I’m currently working with a non-profit that’s using version 2.6.1 of WordPress (latest version is 3.3.2). Sure, it still works and gets the job done, but the old version lacks a lot of the capabilities found in the latest version, such as social sharing, SEO plugins, and fresh design themes. By upgrading your backend, whatever that might be, your website will be able to do all that it should in 2012.

Use Social Media – With over 700 million on Facebook alone, your customers are definitely on social media. If you don’t have a social media presence, and if you don’t showcase that presence on your website, to allow visitors to connect with your brand, then you are behind on the times. And by social media presence, we mean an active engagement with followers and timely responses to comments.

Update/Rewrite Your Content – Nothing screams 1998 more than web content that promotes events that are already over, products/services that don’t exist, or discusses topics that are yesterday’s news. Make sure to update your website content with your website itself, as well as create new content to reflect what’s going on today.

Consider SEO – Nowadays, people find your website through search engines. If your website isn’t set up to be found online, then it minus well be long gone like the 20^th century. If your website cannot be found online, then your website isn’t doing anything to help to grow your business. Consider SEO to be more than just your on-page content, but also the page titles, urls, meta descriptions and the alt text of photos. All that optimization wasn’t around in 1998, but it’s vital today in making your website findable online.Overall, a website isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it type of project. If you set it and forgot about is in 2002, or earlier, then it’s time to bring it back out and add a few years to its life. No one wants to interact with a website that’s old-fashioned and outdated. It’s not necessarily about being shiny and new. It’s about keeping up with a rapidly changing online world.

This is where web designers, social media gurus, and copywriters come in. Most people wouldn’t hesitate to hire a web designer. After all, building a web page is a specific skill that requires knowledge of programs. A social media guru? Sure. After all, it’s so new that not very many people know what they’re doing, and most people realize pretty quickly what a time-consuming task keeping up with it can be.

Copywriting, though, is one of those skills that often goes unappreciated. Why would you hire someone to write when you can do it yourself? But just like with the other skilled professions, there’s a big difference between good copy written by a professional and someone just putting their thoughts down.

But also just like with web designers, you have to be specific with your copywriter to get what you want out of them. If a web designer showed you something you didn’t like, hopefully you wouldn’t just say “It stinks.” Imagine trying to answer that note. Instead, you’d mention not liking the color, wanting a bigger font, or wishing the menus were dropdown instead of popup.

So, what does this mean in terms of guiding your writer toward the web copy you want?

Have a mission statement. A good mission statement will often say a lot about the nature of your business and even the tone you want to convey. If you don’t have one, a good copywriter may even be able to help you to draft it.

Answer their questions. If you’ve hired someone who knows what they are doing, one of the first things they will do is ask you questions about your business. What’s your goal? Who’s your audience? What do you do? What do you want to convey? Some of these things you might not have even thought about, but it’s important that you be as clear and specific as possible or you might not get what you want.

Have conversations. When people are unhappy with copy, one of the main reasons is often that it doesn’t sound like them or doesn’t get the specific wording right. You might not even know exactly what isn’t working, but it isn’t what you want. The best way to alleviate this problem is to actually speak with your writer. And this doesn’t necessarily have to involve giving them directions. Just talking about your vision for your company and how you feel about it can let them get a sense of your voice – and sometimes allow them to take the words right out of your mouth!

Don’t contradict yourself. When trying to give a writer direction, it’s not uncommon to suggest several sites and ask them to “match them.” Unfortunately, this can be quite confusing if those sites have tones and styles that don’t match. Think about what you’re actually giving them before you do it, and if one site reads like a sales pitch while the other is very dry, saying you want something in the middle will do a lot to alleviate their confusion.

Make your notes specific. Okay, you don’t like the draft you were given. Most copywriters are used to this being a process and willing to go through several rounds of notes, if necessary. Don’t just tell them you don’t like it, tell them why – this part was trying too hard to be funny. This section is dry, or long, or boring. Remember those websites you referenced? Maybe the writer “matched” the wrong parts. Look at them again and pull out specific sections you like and dislike as examples.

Once in a great while, you might find a copywriter who just “gets” you and requires no back and forth. If so, hang on to them! That situation, however, is not common – at least not at first. The more you work together to understand each other, the better the copy will be.

Times have changed a lot, but in fact, the change has been gradual. The overall shift we’ve seen has been clear. Every time Google releases an update to its algorithm, it makes it harder for an individual to force a site to rank in the search engine. Google is focusing on users, and their ultimate goal is to make an unoptimizable search engine – a search engine that no one can manipulate.

The gradual change is really just a limitation on technology – how good are the algorithms, and what ranking factors can Google track? Ten years ago, Google built their index around the idea that sites were high-quality if other high-quality sites linked to them. Even though this was revolutionary, this is a very simple algorithm to develop. The same algorithm is used to rate the quality of academic journal articles – articles that are cited more widely are more important to the field. Unfortunately for Google, this algorithm is easily manipulated in two ways. First, search engine optimization experts can collude to link between sites that already have high PageRanks, meaning the sites that got promoted were sites that were purposefully linked to. Second, the algorithm used summation, rather than averages, so having 1,000 or 10,000 links from sites like EzineArticles would create a massive increase in search engine rankings. This is also easy for search engine marketers to manipulate!

The goal of promoting sites with a better user experience meant Google needed to find other metrics to judge the quality of a site, rather than its content or who links to it, metrics like social signals from Facebook and Twitter, how many unique users are commenting on your articles, whether you’re considered an authority in the field, the length of your articles, and how likely users are to back out of your site after landing on it and look for another result. Any of these things provide a more real indication of your site’s quality than how many links point to it from article marketing sites.

As time goes on, especially in 2013, these signals are going to be more important, and signals like backlinks are going to continue to lose their value. It won’t be gradual – one day, Google will release a new algorithm update, and if you’re relying on backlinks from article marketing sites to promote your content, your organic traffic will drop by 20% or more. On the next update, you’ll lose another 20%.

Our next scheduled article will talk about the changes you need to make to your article marketing strategy to avoid these penalties. Stay tuned.

In a lot of ways, using social media – like Facebook, Twitter, or even a company blog – is a far more cost-effective way for companies to reach their audience than traditional media, but too many dive right in without knowing what they are doing. Very quickly, they learn that there’s a lot more to social media than they thought. There are a number of dos and don’ts to interacting through the various platforms, and maintaining things like blog entries, tweets, friend and follower lists, and comments can be incredibly time-consuming.

That’s why many organizations end up hiring a social media manager. This is a relatively new position, but one that’s growing quickly in popularity. Essentially, a social media manager is a person who understands the various platforms and knows how to effectively manage all of that time-consuming stuff listed above.

Driving yourself crazy going to 20 different social networks every day? A good social media manager knows how to consolidate your online presence and handle everything from a single master source. Using a Facebook Profile instead of a Facebook Store for your company page? A good social media manager will fix this.

You may wonder if the “gain” you get from your social media presence is worth the cost of a full-time employee – or even a dedicated group of individuals – but consider the facts:

• While only 14 percent of people trust ads, 73 percent trust recommendations from their peers like they get through social media “likes”
• A positive Facebook friend referral makes 68 percent of people more likely to buy something
• 84 percent of businesses have described their own social media presence as “average”
• 28 percent of businesses say that social media has directly led to an increase in sales

But since everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, your social media has to be clear and well thought out for you to stand out from the pack. This means keeping up with new trends and responding to everything in a timely (read: instantaneous) fashion. If you find that you can’t take the time to adequately do this yourself, hiring an experienced social media manager with knowledge of the platforms best suited to your business on a full-time, part-time, or even contract basis might be an enormous help.

One of the most risk-free ways to drive traffic is email marketing. Though other technologies are advancing at a fast pace, having an email marketing list is a slower, more gradual, but more permanent progression toward better traffic.

To start filling your email marketing lists with subscribers, you need an opportunity to capture their emails through techniques industry experts refer to as “lead generation.” We’re going to recommend one technique that everyone uses to capture emails, because it’s easy to set up and works well, and two more techniques you may never have thought of.

#1 – In Your Website Sidebar
The tried and true place for your email capture funnel, placing a “Sign Up Here For X” promises visitors value for signing up to your email list. Now, the value you have to offer depends on how likely your customers are to enter their email. You have to offer enough so that customers simply can’t say no to giving away their privacy. How much you need to offer depends on your brand loyalty and community engagement. Companies who are trusted, especially those who put out great content, like Advertising Age or Wired, don’t need to offer much value other than an email sign up form. Many customers seek the email sign up form out in order to get new content updates via email. A new company, or one that received lots of first-time traffic, should develop a more compelling reason for users to give away their email. A free ebook is popular, but cliche, and unless the ebook can be presented as a must have, finding another value-add will be more successful for you.

#2 – On Micro-Niche Domains
Setting up a micro-niche dedicated to driving traffic to a lead generation email capture box is a great way to get targeted leads. We use sites like www.PinterestCenter.com to collect leads interested in our Pinterest marketing services. Because these are separate from our main site, we don’t negatively impact our primary brand with posting multiple email capture funnels, a sure sign that a site is built only for advertising purposes.

#3 – From Your Offline Customers!
You can collect emails from any customer you’ve done business with recently and include them in your mailings without violating SPAM laws. You can pass email list sign up sheets out at events, conferences, and trade shows. When done right, you can collect a few hundred emails a day.

1. Long Blocks to Text – Boring! First, no one is going to read all that. Second, by putting so much on one page, you miss out on segmenting that information on several web pages (which means more web pages for Google and more chances to be found). Third, web visitors don’t like to scroll. Keep each web page to a single idea. If a web page contains more than one topic, then split it up.

2. Too Many Images – One or two images at the most. Anything more than that puts your website at risk of being too slow, and visitors will abandon your site. Research by Amazon.com found that a 0.1 second increase in site speed leads to a 1% increase in e-commerce sales. If you have e-commerce capabilities on your site, then keep the images to a minimum.

3. Bad Navigation – When asked what they wanted from a website, 76% of consumers said they want a website that makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for. If your navigation bar is poorly arranged, too small to read, too big to fit one line, or anything else that isn’t easy or convenient, then it needs to be fixed. A quick way to make this easier is to include a search bar on your site.

4. Background Music – Never, ever cool. NO ONE wants background music because the last thing people want, is surprise music blasting through their computer speaker.

5. Animated GIFs – Just don’t. It’s so 1998.

6. No Way to Get in Touch – A contact form is not good enough, as it doesn’t provide the usability you need with web visitors and contact information. At the very least, you ought to have the actual contact info, such as your address and a phone number, just in case someone needs to get in touch with you right away. If you want to retrieve information about your web visitors, then use landing pages instead of a simply contact form.

7. Questionable Color Choices – It’s tempting to get creating in web design, but color choice isn’t one of those places. If the color scheme doesn’t contrast enough, or there’s simply too much color going on, then you’ll turn off web visitors instead of impress them. Stick with two or three colors that are able to contrast so your text is readable, but also complement each other so your website presents a clean, unified brand to the world.

8. Using Comic Sans, or a Mix of Fonts – Type in “Comic Sans font” into Google, and the number one result is a website called bancomicsans.com. It’s just not a professional font. The only thing worse than using only Comic Sans is to use several different fonts. Talk about tacky.

9. Overloading on the Social Share Buttons – Yes, social media is popular and pervasive, but most people only know a few social media sites. There’s no need to have a button to each of your 20 social media accounts, as most people will recognize Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, and that’s it. Putting so many will only clutter your website, slow down your load time, and overwhelm visitors.

10. Thinking a Web Redesign Will Solve All Your Problems – Many think that by changing the “look and feel” of their website, it will all of a suddenly start attracting tons of visitors and generating tons of leads. Yes, your web design needs to be functionally and pleasing on the eye, but aesthetics doesn’t make any difference in the ROI of your website in terms of its marketing strategy. If you’re redesigning your website for the sake of needing something new, then it’s not worth the endeavor.

When designing/redesigning a website, keep it simple, and keep the web visitor in mind. Web design is all about the aesthetics of not only your site, but your company and brand. It’s not a place to get experimental, or to impress by being flashy. Avoid these 10 mistakes (or fix them if you’ve made them), and then you’ll impress.

While it is true that you need to have a presence online, and important that you don’t put it off for too long, many people seem to panic and ignore the second word in “web strategy.” Simply throwing things at the wall can be even worse than having nothing, and with that in mind, I’d like to detail the 6 most common mistakes I see small businesses making online.

Going optimization crazy. You have a website, but no one is coming. What to do? One potentially helpful route is to add SEO to your content. Search engines like Google can tell you which words people search for most when looking for content like yours. Following logic, adding those words should increase the number of people who see your site… and adding lots of those words should make it jump up astronomically, right? Well, maybe at first, but doing SEO well is an art, and not too many people are going to stick around if “Highland Heights attorney” appears on every line of text. It’s bad writing, and people will tune out quickly.

SPAMming. Most people know what SPAM is in the email sense of the word. Unfortunately, too many businesses don’t seem to understand that constantly marketing via their Twitter and Facebook pages is basically the same thing. This is a tough one, because obviously as a business you joined social networking sites to advertise and raise brand awareness, but if you do it too much, you’ll annoy your followers and lose people. You need to think of social media as a way to connect with customers first, and as an advertising method second.

Dropping the ball. The problem with setting up things that require constant content and maintenance is that you have to maintain them and provide constant content. You can’t have a website and not answer the email you receive, and it’s just as bad of an idea to start blogging, Tweeting, or posting Facebook messages on your pages and then stop because you’ve lost interest or the time to do it.

Blinging out your site. Unless you are a graphic designer or in some similar visual medium, no one is going to care that your site has bleeding-edge design tools that make it look amazing… for the top-of-the-line computers that can actually load it. As a business, you want to maximize the number of people who can access your site and have the design serve as the delivery box for the content. To continue the analogy, you don’t want that box to be dinged up or to be mismatched with the actual content – which is the actual reason people will stick around.

Overreaching. With all of the many tools at your disposal for fairly low cost, it can be tempting to want to make a splash online in some way. Just be careful how you do it. If advertising suddenly nets you more clients than you can handle, or a sale causes a run on a product you make, you might end up having to deal with angry customers or a huge profit loss. Think hard before overstepping your bounds.

Plants and silencing. The nature of the internet is that you can get an immediate reaction to anything that you do. When response is positive, this can be a great boost for business. But when it’s negative, business can decline – or at least we fear that it will, which makes us panic. Some businesses have tried to shut off commenting instead of proactively responding to negative remarks. Others even employ “plants” to make positive comments and reviews. Neither one of these strategies is a good idea. People generally don’t like to feel like they’ve been silenced; let them vent and try to answer their concerns as best you can. And never – ever – employ plants. Most people can spot them a mile away, and it makes you look desperate and silly.

To start, we recommend taking a look at some other brands and how they’ve built their own brand image through Pinterest. Some of our favorites are:

The Travel Channel: http://www.pinterest.com/travelchannel/

A clearly natural fit for Pinterest, the Travel Channel posts pictures of animals around the world, beaches, pictures of city skylines, and other images that fit their tableau of creating highly-sharable images of places and things that people aspire to visit or see.

Whole Foods: http://www.pinterest.com/wholefoods/

The Whole Foods brand is known for bringing together both the green and organic trends, with boards featuring Fair Trade products, cage-free eggs, grass fed cattle, and recycling efforts, and higher-end indulgences, like organic ice cream and dark chocolate.

Martha Stewart: http://www.pinterest.com/marthastewart/

Another Pinterest natural, Martha Stewart’s brand pins recipes, craft ideas, gift ideas, and features seasonal holiday boards.

The key to creating your own brand tableau on Pinterest is to develop two or three characteristics of your brand that individuals identify with and create boards for these topics. Then, pin and repin a combination of items that suit this brand identity. To be successful, you can’t survive only pinning your own content. You need to be active socially, liking and repinning other content, so that people who share your interests will see you repinning their items and follow your boards.

With a well-conceived brand identity, finding and keeping a collection of pins should be easy – just follow people with boards that represent your own brand identity and repin often from their boards. Mix this with content from your site, like post images from your blogs and your own products, and you’ll be on your way to generating referral traffic from Pinterest.

Pinterest

• Pinterest’s user adoption rate is exploding. In the past 12 months, traffic has increased by 300%, and now it is second only to Facebook in the amount of time an average user spends on the site per day.
• Over 80% of the pins on Pinterest are repins. At a similar time in Twitter’s history, about 1.5% of Tweets were Retweets. This speaks to the amazing virality of the Pinterest network.
• It’s a visual medium – and people respond more emotionally to eye-catching pictures than they do text.

Users on Pinterest have only two streams of interaction with the site, inputs from friends and other users and outputs to their own personal pinboards, or collections of images. As users find images that they like on the site, they can easily “like” or “repin” the image to one of their boards. In our experience, repins typically outnumber likes by a ratio of about 3:1. This is great for increasing the viral nature of the site and the opposite of Facebook, where likes outnumber shares by a ratio of 10:1. By pushing people to repin instead of like, Pinterest has tapped into social sharing in a way that no other social network has in the past.

Pinterest is most commonly used to collect images that people find interesting, funny, cute, useful, or simply images they want to bookmark. By allowing users to organize recipes, funny images, design ideas, wedding ideas, and fashion choices into easy-to-follow and easy-to-refer-back-to Pinboards, Pinterest creates a user experience unlike any other site. It’s a personal catalog of an individual’s own tastes and styles.

The demand for this type of service is clear. People love being individuals and sharing the things that they personally like. People love to create their own personalized Pinboards that they can refer back to when they want to remember that interesting scrapbooking idea, the recipe they saw last week, or the products they want to buy.

With user engagement metrics like this, we don’t see Pinterest being anything other than the next evolution in social media. We can look at a number of social networking sites that flopped to see why they failed. Sites like Twitter, that met with marginal success, were used initially and tapered off as information overload from useless, mundane tweets filled user boards. Some social media sites, like MySpace, offered something new initially but were later usurped by social media giant Facebook, which offered a better user experience. With the simplicity of Pinterest and the success that the site is seeing in its earliest growth phase, we can’t imagine any site doing what it does better or taking away the brand image that it has developed. It’s here to stay, and that’s why we’re releasing articles over the next week to help you understand how your brand should build a niche on Pinterest to market your products.

It’s a pragmatic assessment of targeted traffic – you want your message to reach people who have the opportunity to take advantage of it, like local customers, but it is short-sighted.

Advantages of Local Search

Evidence compiled has suggested that local search listings now serve local customers as a business’ online “anchor identity.” It’s a hub for disseminating various bits of important information about your business, like your website, telephone number, reviews, photographs, coupons, and hours of operations.

According to a 2012 study conducted by comScore, respondents have a very favorable opinion of local search results. When customers search for local business information, they viewed organic local search results to be the most relevant and most trusted results. In fact, 58% of polled users indicated that local search provided the most trustworthy results, and 61% indicated that it provided the most relevant results. By comparison, only 9% of users indicated that they found paid search results as the most trustworthy results, and only 10% indicated that they were the most relevant.

And what’s better – local search provides listings that any local business can capitalize on. National advertisers dominate paid search results, and marketing teams dominate natural search results, but local businesses can easily rank locally for their targeted keyword phrases when a city location is included as a SEO keyword term.

The typical advice for ranking locally is to create a Google Places listing for your business. It’s a free platform where you can add information your customers are seeking, like your business photos and website URL, and it tends to rank highly on the search engine result pages. You should also consider including targeted landing pages for local visitors on your website – for example, creating a website to rank for “Chicago Web Design” rather than simply “Web Design.”

Search is more specific today than it was in the past, and location and device used are major determinants of what shows up in a user’s search listings. Paid advertising and SEO traffic schemes can get companies ranking high in national algorithmic searches, but the organic local results section is still respected as relevant and trustworthy.