Online Consulting

The Best of 2010- Year in Review

Custom WordPress Sites, Facebook, Facebook For Business, How To Blog, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

As this year comes to an end I always try to reflect back and see what successes and what struggles we faced as a company and reflect as we make our preparations for the upcoming year. One of the places where I start this is by looking at my Google Analytics to see what pages, what posts were the most popular of this year. This post will share what you the visitors of 210 found important and were interested in.

Here are the top 5 most visited posts from this past year:

5. Goo.gl Changes Link Shortening

The first week of October I wrote about Goo.gl releasing a link shortener how this could be used to build QR codes, track the traffic instantly to a specific link & also share that information collaboratively with others to view. One of the links shared via goo.gl has already received over 500 clicks in the last two months from over 8 countries.

4. Using Creative Commons Photos- For FREE!

This past year I was asked over & over how to get safe and legal photos to use in your blogs. I was spending so much time teaching people how to do this that I finally made a short video and wrote a blog post on how to do this. It seems that people really wanted to know how this was done by the amount of traffic the post has received. If you are looking to get good photos for free for your posts, check this one out.

3. Facebook Page of 47,000 Gets Shut Down Over Vanity URL.

The online community really shocked me by the power they posessed when Jonathan Rivera and the Real Estate Referral Group page was shut down. The reason it was shut down was over a trademark violation in the user name he chose for the group. Even though he tried to get Facebook to change the URL he was unsuccessful and the page was then shut down. However after the post we wrote here on 210 and the one over on Tech Savvy Agent and a massive online effort by thousands, the page was reinstated & the URL was changed.

2. Custom WordPress Sites.

This was an actual page of our site and was neck and neck all year long with #1 for the most popular thing on our site. While this is not an actual blog post and is a static page, I was amazed to see the amount of traffic it has received this year. What it shows to me is that people are recognizing the importance of having a powerful website. It also shows me that you have realized the importance of your site having a solid platform like WordPress powering it with their great plugins and blogging components.

1. Google Instant and How it Will Change Your Keywords

In September of this year Google release Google Instant. The day that it was released I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on Google Instant and what I thought it meant towards search engine rankings. This post was by far the most popular one of the year receiving 2 1/2 times the traffic of any other blog post on our site. People understand that while social is important, having a good grasp on SEO is huge. It also showed me that in the upcoming year we need to do classes and posts regarding SEO. I think one of the reasons this post received so much traffic was due to the amount of people sharing the content on both Facebook & Twitter. It was shared on Twitter 66 times and Facebook an additional 41 times.

So as we make our plans for next year, be on the lookout for a post this coming week where we will share about some of the things 210 has in store for next year & also a post regarding what we see as the hottest new things for 2011 that you want to jump on before everyone else.

Thanks to everyone for an amazing 2010 and for Jason & myself we want to wish each and every one of you a Happy Holidays and an amazing new year!

4 Reasons Why You Need an About.me Page

Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

Yesterday Mashable broke the news of a new start-up company About.me being bought by AOL after only four days of going live. Since AOL bought this company, I figured there had to be some sort of value in what it offered. So, I headed over to About.me and began setting up my profile. At first I thought this was just another one of the cheesy services where you put in a few links to your stuff and added a picture and you were done.

My biggest issue with all these type of sites including this one is that I would never really use the link to direct my traffic away from my site to theirs. Why would I want to share a link over to a site I have no control over? They could place advertisements to any and everything on the blog. Also, there is no way for people to actually become a consumer of my products/services from a site like that without extra clicks over to my blog, Facebook page, etc. I think you should always be handing out a link directly to your about me page on your site if someone wants to learn more about you or your business.

So Why Have An Account Then?

Well, here’s the beauty of it. The number one reason I like having an account is that it gives you a good credible link back to your website. Remember, links help a lot in determining how a website ranks in the search engines. As more people begin setting up accounts there and it continues to age, I think the pagerank of the site will go up giving you an even more authoritative link back to you. This too can help with the rankings. Any time I can help the SEO of my site I am happy.

The second reason you should set up an account is that people will be on the site using it as a directory to find specific people as it continues to grow. By being placed in the directory, there is an option of someone finding me, and following the links over to my site. There’s a possibility that it will turn into a giant people directory to find others. Think of it as a yellow pages of online profiles.

The third reason is how easy it is to set up. You can literally set up an account here in under 3 minutes time. I took longer because I wanted to do my fourth reason which was the ability to customize. I fired up PhotoShop and began designing a fun and branded background for my page. This is huge to me as i always think it is important to keep a level of conformity in all your branding online. It took me about five minutes to design, another five to tweak and load. All together I spent about fifteen minutes setting up my new profile.

So in closing, while I don’t think this new platform is any major game changer in the social media realm, I do think it is something valuable and definitely worth the three minutes it will take you to set up. Go get yours now!

Is Your Sidebar Sending Mixed Signals?

Custom WordPress Sites, How To Blog, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

After watching the game last night between the Green Bay Packers & New England Patriots, I noticed that as the game winded down to the last minute of play, the message being sent to Green Bay’s rookie quarterback must have been mixed. He played a great game last night until the final 60 seconds. It seems as though he became completely unglued in the final 53 seconds. I think that this was caused by confusion in signals which happens when you have inexperienced people running things. As you watched the final play of the game, Matt Flynn tried to at one point call a huddle, then a timeout and then finally rushed to just get a play off that ended the game.

While part of this fault lies on the rookie QB, I think more fault should be left with his coach that had called a timeout just before that. At that point he should have given his quarterback a clear and concise game plan as to what he wanted done. If that had taken place, there would not have been so much confusion and the Packers might have won the game.

This same type of confusion takes place daily on websites across the world. Consumers visit thinking one thing to be greeted by buttons and flashy objects that simply confuse them and divert their attention. In this post I am going to give you a clear and concise road map to making your site function better.

I talked last week about ironing only the front side of your shirt and the importance of looking at more than just the visual appeal of your site. We discussed the importance of your site being shared socially easily and also having a good foundation to the search engine optimization side. I mentioned in that post there was a third element that I would cover soon regarding the calls to action on your site.

What are calls to action? They are graphics or links on your site that you wish for people to click on and use. Normally you want to set these up to drive people to specific areas of your site where they can either purchase your products or services, hire you to work with, or subscribe to your site. If they are placed in the proper segments you can help direct your traffic to the exact places you want on your site.

Sorry What Were You Saying? I’m Lost In Adwords!

Have you ever visited a site thinking it was about a specific thing, but when you start looking at the site you get confused what the site is about? I see too many sites now where the sidebars are wasted on driving the traffic you worked so hard to get to your site right back off your site to somewhere else. Here’s a screenshot from a friends comedy website:

So they worked hard getting someone to come visit their jokes and they are instantly met by Google Adwords above the post driving them to school lunch programs, nutrition schools and more. The sidebar doesn’t look much better with ads driving them to natural healing school, eating heart healthy, and other fun places. While they do receive a little bit of money from people clicking on the links, I asked them how much revenue they actually created each month. He shared it was less than $20 per month. It boggles me when someone places these types of ads on their site trying to garner riches and glory. Unless your site is seeing major traffic, you will not see big money coming from them. Instead you drive your consumers away from your product and place them off your site on others.

Confusion In Content

Back in the late 90’s 2003 MySpace was king of the customizations and abilities to add all types of fun widgets to your profile. Unfortunately those days are over. Having a giant meez dancing or taking photos is no longer a popular practice. Also, you are once again driving your consumers off to other distractions instead of your products or services. Over on the right you can see the actual sidebar of another friends website. You can see they start off with some interesting content telling us that their site has “STUFF you NEED to know if you planning to buy or sell your home.” They do warn that they has a sense of humor by saying you will be entertained while learning. But, under the brief description we have a broken widget that should be for feedburner. It has sat like this since at least May 2009.

Following the broken widget is a PayPal Verified seal which baffles me even more. Last time I checked, consumers are not using PayPal to buy or sell a home. If they were selling an online product on the site and PayPal was their preferred form of handling transactions it would make sense. They the finish off the sidebar by adding their Meez of a girl with a camera taking photos. The sidebar to this site leaves me in complete confusion as to what the site is about. Is this a product site where I can buy things, is it a photography site, or is int an entertainment site. To the average consumer, this same confusion will take place. The search engines too are completely confused which hurts your SEO.

Creating The Dummy Button- My Top 3

The top two or three things you share on your sidebar are the most important. That is what will show up on the screen above the fold to a consumer visiting your site. This is your prime real estate space and you shouldn’t fill it with jibberish that does not help your business. Here’s a great tool to see what a consumer is going to see on their computer. I use it regularly as I work on my system with a high resolution 24″ monitor that most consumers do not own. So use Google’s simple browser size tool to test what content runs above the fold at different sized screens and resolutions.

So what makes your call to actions effective? The most effective call to action buttons are going to be catchy graphics that are predominantly displayed in prime locations on your site. I nickname them dummy buttons as I feel it is pretty simple to an consumer visiting my site they know exactly where I want them to go. On 210 we have three main call to actions. The first is to subscribe via email to our blog. Some may debate why I placed this button first, but I think this is huge to growing your readership, your influence and overall business. In just over 6 months of this being installed on our blog we have over 825 people subscribed and receiving every blog post we write directly in their email.

Our second call to action button is to one of the products we sell. By viewing my Google analytics, I found out quickly that most of the consumers who come to our site are looking for information about our custom WordPress sites that we design. So, I created a quick and catchy animated gif to place on our sidebar that linked directly to that page. I also added an image to the footer of every single blog post we write that does the same type of thing. By doing this, that page that page is now receiving four times more traffic than any other page on our site except the home page.

The third call to action button we found beneficial to our business was the button to hire us to speak. Why would I add this button? The reason was simple: The more speaking gigs we get, the greater exposure we get for our business. The more exposure we receive, the more business opportunities will arise. This button is in our sidebar and also in our main navigation to our site. Since the addition of the speaking button, our speaking page has remained in the top 10 pages for traffic on our site. It has also garnered speaking engagements in large arenas like the Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Conference in Las Vegas.

The Rest Of My Sidebar

These are the buttons that consumers have to scroll down to use. They still have good value and deliver your quality business but aren’t worthy of prime placement. This is where my lead generation button is to gather email addresses for my newsletter. I haven’t really pushed much yet with growing my newsletter list and still I get 2-3 new opt-ins daily. This is followed by our chat buttons which allows consumers to see when we are online and chat with us about anything. This chat function has been great in generating business as I have sold several sites directly through chatting with a consumer and answering all their questions directly and quickly. There was no delay in filling out a contact form and waiting for me to respond. Instant gratification is huge and consumers love it.

If you notice, our Facebook Page widget is well down our page and not as important for consumers to view. Why you may ask? To me it isn’t important to push traffic on my site off to another platform where I have no control. If Facebook shuts down tomorrow and I have all my business focused there, I would be in big trouble. I do want people to know we are on Facebook and give them the option to connect, but it isn’t near as important to me as the buttons that get space above it because I already have people on my site where I ultimately want them to end up.

Lastly you will notice we display proudly our official SOB badge. This award was given to us by our good friend Liz Strauss and was an honor to receive. It brings a level of credibility to our site so it is important to share. However we don’t want to place this badge at the top of our site as it does drive our traffic away from us and over to her site. I also place at the bottom of my page the link to affiliates I am connected with. As you notice, this is at the absolute bottom of my page under even the archive section of my blog. While I am happy when someone signs up for hosting with Bluehost through my affiliate link, I am even happier when someone purchases a Custom WordPress Site, books me to speak, or signs up for personal coaching because these are the primary sources of income for my business. Affiliates can be a good auxiliary source of income, but they should not overtake your primary source of income in terms of space given on your site.

What’s Your Sidebar Saying?

So now that I shared with you some advice on what types of things should and should not be in your sidebar, take a moment to look at yours. What does it say about you and your business? Are you sending mixed signals to your consumers? Are your call to action buttons clear as to what you want the consumers to do and are they driving the consumers directly to your services/products? Or are your sidebar buttons and widgets causing confusion and pushing your traffic away to other sites.

Remember, we work hard to get the traffic to our site to generate business, make it clear what you want them to do, and keep them with you not onto another site. If you need help with any of the things discussed, feel free to contact me for help.

Photo Credit: idovermani

Using Google Docs to Generate Leads

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

Google Docs are one of my favorite tools on the web and also one that I think gets overlooked by so many people. Since I no longer own a PC I don’t have access to Microsoft Word & Excel, so when I want to create documents and spreadsheets to send to someone I always use Google Docs. Another thing I love about Google Docs is the fact that you can share them with others and collaborate together. One way we collaborate in Google Docs is for our weekly radio show. Since there are four regular contributors into the show, it is a great easy way to share what topics we are going to discuss, notes on our guest speaker and so much more. It’s a great way for all of us to access the same info and share things with each other quickly.

The other big function of Google Docs that I think gets overlooked by so many is the form function. The form allows you to create a document that can be embedded into a website, blog post or just about anywhere else. It gives you the creator a simple way to collect information from readers who want to participate. For example, I recently ran a contest for a company where we wanted people to be able to register for the contest. Consumers could simply fill out the form with their name, email address and phone number.

All of the information was then stored in an excel spreadsheet that I could then use to determine winners, and also have a good set of leads to follow up on about possibly purchasing a custom WordPress Site. So you may be wondering, how do you create these forms and how can they be used for generating leads. Well, I am going to show you how to quickly and easily create a form, install it into your site and then how the answers populate. Watch the video below to see step by step how I create and implement Google Docs form builder:

Also, here is the Google Form I created in the video so you can see how one works live:

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If you have any questions/comments, feel free to leave them below.

Cyber Monday Email Marketing Blunder by AT&T

How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

This morning as I began my work week, my inbox like many others was littered with advertisements from dozens of companies making me aware of their Cyber Monday sales. One that really caught my eye was from AT&T. They are running various smart phones this Monday at various times for only one cent. I thought to myself that this was pretty cool and wanted to share this with my social media buddies. Also, as we have recently been sharing over in our photo blog, various social media marketing efforts of corporations both large and small. So, I have been scanning every piece of advertising that I come across lately,looking to see if they are integrating social media marketing into their email marketing, print & TV advertising.

As I scrolled down to the bottom of the ad for AT&T I saw buttons to share on Facebook, LinkedIn & Yahoo Buzz. Glad they have the ability for me to share on Facebook. That’s a good place to have your stuff shared as there are now over 500 million users and most people have at least 100 connections there. LinkedIn? Ok, I guess that would also be a good place to have your stuff shared since there is a good sized network there although I am not sure that the content would be relevant to what people use LinkedIn for. The third icon for Yahoo Buzz? I mean, I have heard of it, but I don’t have an account and have only ever heard one person mention it before. What blew my mind and where I think AT&T really missed the ball is that they left off a button for Twitter!

According to TechCrunch, Twitter has over 190 million users. Not adding the ability for someone to share easily on Twitter is a major marketing blunder by someone. For me, Twitter is by far my largest group of connections with 6,710 followers of my personal Twitter account @jb140. It is also by far my fastest growing group. In comparison, our Facebook Page, has only 1,390 fans. Missing twitter in an online advertisement where you are including social media platforms is a major failure in my opinion. Whoever designed this advertisement at AT&T either doesn’t understand social media fully, had a major brain fart, or just didn’t want to take the time to incorporate it into the advertisement for cyber Monday thinking it wasn’t worth the time or money to implement. The same holds true for the entire editorial staff that missed this oversight. Maybe AT&T thinks that twitter isn’t that important, but my guess is more likely one of the first three options.

So when you are setting up your next online marketing campaign to send out to thousands of people, make sure if you are including social media, to include all the major connections. For me, I would have loved to share this special on Twitter. Unfortunately this option wasn’t available easy, so I didn’t.