iWebEarth

by Sage Lewis

You always think these kind of things won’t happen to you. Social media can effect any kind of business: big, small, corporate, artistic. Look what has happened to Skylight Opera Theater. They are getting schooled in the powers of social media… big time!

Check out our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

In today’s business environment, a website is absolutely necessary. It provides an avenue for people to find you and find out more about you as they sit in the comfort of their homes, while waiting in line at the grocery store, sit on the commuter train, or wherever. Unfortunately too many business take the wrong approach to how they build and market their websites.

Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.

The website is just another something the business must have in order to do business, but it never fully succeeds in being a tool that works for them to generate business.

Online marketing is different from off-line marketing, primarily in that you have to promote the very tool you use as a promotion for your business. With radio and TV you don’t have to go out of your way to get people to listen. You run the ads and people do or don’t. Websites must first be optimized in order to help improve traffic and visibility before they can be used as a business generating tool.

No wonder businesses pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (phone book, magazines, radio, etc.,) which often produces significantly less return on the investment dollar. When it comes to properly planning and executing the development and promotion of their website, well, it’s a bit more complicated.

Make Your Website Promote YOU.

With some exceptions, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective for your target audience. With that said, there are specific components that almost every website needs in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Home Page

The home page is the online “face” of your company. It may not be the entry door for every visitor, but it is your front door and you need to make sure that you have it right. The home page should provide an all-encompassing view of what you do or offer while helping to establish trust with the new and repeat visitor.

To be effective, your home page must accomplish several things:

Establish your brand: Your home page sets the tone of the visitor’s expectation. Everything from brand identity to confirmation that you can provide what they need must be established here.

Display your offerings: Visitors need to be provided a quick overview of the products, services and information they can expect to find as they dig deeper into the site.

Generate interest: The home page must do more than just provide information of what you offer; it must generate interest in those offerings. It must create a desire within your visitors to click further into the site to find out more and see how they will be benefited by your products or services.

Convey trust: Your home page can often be the first impression you give your visitors, therefore it must be able to establish an element of trust. If you come across as a slick used-car salesman, or a less-than-professional hobby site, your visitors will bolt.

About Us Page

Why do visitors go to the About Us page? Its a good question that is often ignored when web developers fill the content of these pages. Too many sites simply do not provide enough–or the right–information on this page.

The About Us page should be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you’ve been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc.,) mission statement, bios of the executive staff. The information you provide on the About Us page is designed to help your visitors feel comfortable doing business with your business.

Contact Us Page

Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it’s still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. It may seem odd, but many people looking for your contact info will ignore the information on whatever page they are viewing, looking instead for the link that reads “Contact Us.”

Your Contact Us page should provide several different ways of contacting you including email, phone, and a web form. You should also include a physical address and possibly even a map. This is also a good place to display hours of operation.

Product & Service Pages

If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it’s likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.

Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you’re selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it’s laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.

Site Navigation

Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website’s performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.

Be consistent: Don’t confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area. Be consistent in it’s look and placement. There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.

Be obvious: Make sure it is impossible for your visitors to get lost on your website. You want them to know where they are at all times and how to navigate back to the current and other main sections. Make good use of breadcrumb links as this provides your visitors a great visual indicator as well as easy navigation.

Be helpful: Large websites with many pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. It is essential that visitors don’t have to “hunt” for what they want. This can be accomplished by providing clear section headings in your main navigation. You can also assist the visitors by including a site map that can be easily accessed and a properly function site search box.

Putting the Pieces Together

A website is far more than the sum of its parts. While all the components mentioned above are necessary to have a working site, when implemented properly each component compliments the others.

A website, like any ad made for radio, TV or newspaper, it must effectively do the job it was built for: selling. Building a website is necessary for online success, but you have to go beyond the build. Websites must be promoted effectively in order to get the visitors you need, but once there the site must then be able to do its job selling. Too often we promote the site but fail to get the site to promote the products and services we want people to buy. Before you promote your site, make sure your site promotes you.

Check out our small business news site.

When you’re running a blog with affiliate links, one of the key factors that can increase your conversions, help you make more sales, and ultimately put more money in your pocket, is to have ads that are targeted to match the content. In this tutorial I’ll be showing you some tactics on how you can improve this targeting using tags.

In a previous post I spoke about integrating advertising into your blog, if you haven’t read that post it might be worth going back and checking it out as we’re going to be building on that post. The instructions here show you how to get things done in the Thesis framework. Of course you can adapt it to any blog, it’s just easier with thesis!

In a post earlier this year Patrick Gavin, spoke about how blog advertising was broken and gave some ideas on how to fix it. One of the concepts he mentioned was placing the same ad in the masthead, sidebar and at the end of the post, it’s that concept we’re going to be putting into place. The first step is cleaning up your tags, and standardizing them a bit. You don’t need to do all of your posts off the bat, but your should start with your most important and post that get the most traffic. Try to reduce the tags down to a handful of manageable concepts per post. For this tutorial I’m going to using travel as an example. For posts about locations or cities (ie Top Ten Nightclubs in Las Vegas) I’m suggest using the city name as a tag. For events such as spa visits or golf trips I’m suggesting using tags such as “day spa” or “golf”.

I like to use the Adrotate plugin for wordpress to handle my advertising, it’s pretty flexible and powerful, allows you to rotate multiple ads per group, and pass links thru a redirection script so you can track CTR and be in compliance with with any google paid linking suggestions.

First step, you are going to need to create an ad group for the masthead, sidebar, and afterpost area, in the example shown below you can see I’ve done that, in this case it’s for the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas.

If you are going to have a lot of ad groups it’s important to come up with a naming schema that’s easy to work with and use it consistently.

Next you’re going to need to put banners in each of those ad groups, in the example below I’ve put two banners in each of the ad groups (sorry impressions and CTR numbers sanitized) click to enlarge

Now that you have some tags in place and ads set up for those tags, it’s time to pull everything together.  Open up your custom_functions.php file and let’s create a function to display a masthead banner with this code:

function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}
}

Ok so what does that all mean … the function add_header_image () creates a function to display a banner, we have to call the function for it to work, but we’ll get to that in a second. The if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) says if the post has the tag “excalibur” or “Excalibur” to do what’s in the next set of brackets. I’ve found that sometimes WP isn’t case insensitive, so I put both in to be sure. The echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1); says go to ad group 37 and randomly display one of the banners from that group. As you can see from the screen shot above we have two banners in that group so we’ll display one of them. You can learn more about how to call ads from the plugin page. Ok one last step add this code into your thesis custom_functions.php file:

add_action('thesis_hook_after_title', 'add_header_image');

That uses a thesis hook to call the function add_header_image () from above right after the title. Now if you’ve got a page that has that tag, go view it and the ad should appear in the masthead. The functionality is exactly the same for the sidebar and after post, you just need to create separate functions for them calling the appropriate ad group.

Now let’s extend the programming, let’s say in addition to the Excalibur Hotel I’m going to write about the Luxor hotel too. I don’t want an ad for Excalibur on the Luxor page, what I really want is an ad for the Luxor Hotel. Here’s how you do it:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}
}

What that code does is say does the post has the tag “Excalibur” if so display the Excalibur ad, if it doesn’t see if it has the “Luxor” tag, if it does display the Luxor ad. Again you want to repeat this for the sidebar and afterpost slots.

The next problem is what if we have a post that doesn’t match either of the tags, right now we’re going to have no ads displaying. To rectify that situation you’ll need to create a default ad group with some generic industry banners. Once you do then change your code to this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

If you notice the last part is an else not an elseif. Without bogging you down with programming minutia you want the else to be last this is what it does when none of the other “if” or in programming language elseif is tests are true.

The last thing we need to think about is the order of the elseif in the code. The way this programming works is the first condition it meets will be the banner it displays. So let’s assume we have code that looks like this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('las vegas','Las Vegas'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(36,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

Let’s also assume we have a post about the Luxor hotel it has the “Luxor” tag AND it also has the “Las Vegas” tag. As the programming is currently set up it will display the Las Vegas ad group, and not display the Luxor ad group. Generally speaking as the specific, in this case Luxor ad will probably be better targeted it will have a better conversion rate, so you’ll want that ad to display. So you should change the order of the “if” statement to something like this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
} elseif (has_tag(array('las vegas','Las Vegas'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(36,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

There might be other reasons you’ll want to change the order of the “if” statements, for example one may have a significantly higher commission, so you would want that to appear first. However don’t obsess over getting the order perfect, if the programming works for most posts, but not all of them, just omit the tag that is triggering the ad you don’t want on an individual post by post basis.

One of the great things about the adrotate plugin is it has impressions and CTR built in, so  you can see if you advertising is working. If you do a really good job matching your tags to your ads you can get soem really decent CTR rates as shown below:

Where the more generic default ads will have a lower CTR

If you enjoyed this post you might want to check out some other thesis tutorials. If you’re still fighting with your blog theme and not on thesis what are you waiting for, thesis allows me to be much more productive and profitable with all my blogs.

photo credit: etohaholic

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Using Tags for Better Ad Targeting on Your Blog

Using Tags for Better Ad Targeting on Your Blog

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