This is a post from SuperBloggingTips.com, a make money online blog.
Photo credits: chefranden.
Every blogger wants to be productive. If you have a blog, I’m sure you want to get things done without wasting time and have plenty of profits and benefits from the effort you put in. But sometimes we can find it hard to […]
So, here it is almost the end of January. How are y’all doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? Still going strong? Or have you found yourself starting to “backslide” just a little bit?
You know, it’s hard to create new (good) habits or to break old (bad) ones. It’s tempting to sink back into the same old way of doing things.
You may be asking yourself: what has this got to do with search marketing?
Well, I don’t know about y’all, but at least some of my resolutions this year involve small business marketing. I’ve got big plans for 2008!
But I know from experience — it’s easy to start out with plenty of enthusiasm and great intentions. And it’s equally easy to lose momentum, get sidetracked and find yourself at the end of the year not much better off than you were at the beginning, with no real idea of how it all happened. (Just for the record, that would describe many of the years of my life from 2007 on back.)
So here’s my Three-Step Program for 2008, and the tools I’m trying this year to try to help me stay on pace. Maybe some of these will be helpful for you, too.
The first tool is Backpack. I used to get frustrated because I’d continually come up with great ideas for products, services, articles, blog posts, even whole websites, only to have them disappear from my brain before I got the chance to work on them. I started last year using a voice recorder to try to capture more of these ideas before they fade away, but I still need somewhere to organize them for easy retrieval.
With Backpack, I’ve created a page for each website, business idea or project. On those pages, I can set up lists, write notes and attach picture galleries and “writeboards,” (free-standing documents that can be exported to text or HTML format). I can see in one handy place all the random thoughts and “in progress” ideas I have going at any given time.
A basic account at Backpack is free (can’t beat that price!) and includes five pages. For myself, I opted for a paid account, so I get 25 pages, enough to keep track of every project I’ve got going at the moment, plus up to 500 MB of file storage and a Backpack Calendar. Other paid options are available with up to 1,000 pages and 3 GB of file storage, for the overachievers among us.
Okay, so the plans are taken care of. But, as the saying goes, nothing happens until something moves. Plans without actions aren’t going to get me very far.
However, one big problem for me is getting sidetracked. With all the things going on in my life personally and professionally, it’s way too easy for me to go off on tangents. It’s not so much a lack of action as it is a lack of focused action.
I start off with intentions of exercising every day or posting to my personal blog at least three times a week or sending off a certain number of link requests each week. Next thing I know, even though I’ve been busy every day, I haven’t even looked at my site’s link profile in weeks, it’s been six months since my last blog post and my exercise videos are buried under an inch-thick layer of dust. (I had intended to dust once a week, too… oh, well!)
With Joe’s Goals, though, I can see at a glance just how well I’ve done in keeping up with the activities I’ve identified as “core” to my plans.
I set up tracking for each major recurring task I want to keep up with this year. I can’t “accidentally” let a blog slide for weeks without posting. Every time I check my Goals page, I can see at a glance how long it’s been since my last post or since the last time I got my flabby self in gear and hauled out that exercise video.
Like Backpack, the basic version of Joe’s Goals is free. If you want a version without ads, you can subscribe. Also like Backpack, the price seems very reasonable.
Things like Backpack and Joe’s Goals only work if you log in to the sites, though. For the third step in my Three-Step Program I wanted something more proactive. Enter MemoToMe.
MemoToMe will e-mail me at regular intervals (which I specify) to remind me about things I need to do. It reminds me periodically to write articles, work on websites, post to blogs, ask for links… whatever I have it set up to do.
Like the other services, it has a basic service available free, and it’s just about as simple as you can get. You select a username and password, enter your contact information, and set up your reminders.
Then, however often you specify, you’ll get an email reminder. The easy way — set one up to remind you to check Joe’s Goals and review your progress.
Did you set yourself any business goals for 2008? How’s your progress so far? Do you think any of these tools could be helpful? Any other tools, techniques or tips you’ve found helpful for keeping up motivation and momentum? (Hey, I can use all the help I can get!)
Who does Google trust? Who do they love to get data from about your local hospitality business?
With the new, expanded, 10-listing One Box now showing at the top of Universal
search for so many local searches, and with number of reviews being given a prominent place in this
new One Box, hotel and restaurant owners need to get those reviews pouring in if they want to
win a spot in the A-J Top 10. It could mean the difference between a full house and ghostly silence in
your place of business.
Today, I sat down and looked at approximately 1000 reviews listed in Google Maps for hospitality
industry businesses. The following is the list of sources I found Google currently pulling this data from,
in addition to their own Google Reviews source. If you’re trying to finesse reviews from your
hotel or restaurant’s patrons, the majority of the following 34 sources accept public reviews:
10best.com
Aol.com
ChefMoz.org
Citysearch.com
Dine.com
DiningGuide.com
Dinnerbroker.com
Frommers.com
Gayot.com
Giatamedia.com
Greenopia.com
Holidaycheck.com
Holidaycheck.de
Holidaycheck.es
Holidaycheck.fr
Holidaycheck.it
Holidaycheck.nl
Holidaycheck.pl
Holidaycheck.ru
Hotelchatter.com
HotelGuide.com
Hotelguide.net
Insiderpages.com
Menupages.com
Mytravelguide.com
Priceline.com
RestaurantRow.com
Travelocity.com
Travelpost.com
Tripadvisor.com
Virtualtourist.com
Yahoo.com
Yelp.com
Zagat.com
A Couple Of Things To Take Note Of
Tripadvisor.com is powerful. The number of reviews coming from this source is substantial. So long as Google and Tripadvisor maintain amicable relations, this is going to be a great place to send your customers. Chances are, they may already have heard
of Tripadvisor.
As Yelp, Insiderpages and Citysearch have just made a miraculous reappearance in Maps results, you can expect
to see tons of reviews coming from these extremely popular sources.
For hotels, motels, inns and B&Bs catering to an international audience, pay special attention to
the many national extensions of Holidaycheck.com. If Spanish, Dutch or Polish is the native tongue
of your valued guests, they may feel much more comfortable leaving a review if they can do it
in their own idiom on one of these Holidaycheck sites. There are likely further extensions in addition
to the ones I came across in my 1000 reviews.
The Climate Keeps Changing In Google Review Land
Since November, local-oriented SEOs had been trying to understand why Yelp, Insiderpages and Citysearch
had suddenly dropped out of sight in Google Maps, adversely affecting the standings of countless local
businesses. Just last week, this data reappeared, apparently due to a bug. The lesson here is that reviews from
outside sources that count big for you today may be gone tomorrow, affecting your Google Local rankings.
Naturally, this would lead a hospitality business owner to believe that the safest bet will be to
send patrons directly to Google’s own review feature. You can pretty much count on the fact that
Google will always trust Google. But, it’s important for me to add here that, whether owing to a
bug in the Maps system or because Google is trying not to annoy its partners, Google is not counting
its own reviews in the top level interface of the new 10-listing One Box, nor the upper layers of
Maps. One has to click in deeper to the expanded popup of information within Maps to see the reviews coming
directly from Google being included. What this means, right now, is that if you have 10 reviews
from Google Reviews, and your competitor has 10 reviews coming from Tripadvisor, only your competitor’s
reviews will show as a number in the new expanded One Box, potentially swaying clickthrough rates. Whether
it affects your A-J ranking, I have yet to determine.
My advice would be not to put all of your white, ovoid objects into one wicker receptacle (sorry, I
just thought you might be getting a headache over the eggs-in-one-basket advice). If your business is
considering printing magnets, thank you cards or some other type of promotional materials in order
to encourage user reviews, it might be wise to include a small selection of potential review
sites so that your reviews are coming from an array of sources. That way, no change in Google’s
partnerships will have the power to kill your local rankings.
Still Feeling Fear Of UGC?
User Generated Content has the potential of being a bane or blessing for the hotel or restaurant owner.
Nothing brings a warm glow to the business owner’s heart like a rave review. Conversely, nothing makes the blood pressure skyrocket like a rant about your business’ failings. Business owners can easily feel paralyzed by the
fear that a not-so-nice patron may unfairly blast them in a review. Both things are going to happen
to you, no matter how well you run your business. This is why it’s important for you to remember that
the same thing was happening before the Internet even existed. Your community’s word-of-mouth press
meant success or failure for your business. A rude waiter at a single dinner didn’t spell doom, but
a couple of food poisoning cases certainly might have. The conversation about your business is now
taking place on-line instead of in your guests’ living rooms, and the end result is one of both
greater publicity and greater accountability for the way you serve the public.
This is a good thing.
If you put your heart into caring for your guests, if you consistently offer clean, comfortable
lodgings and well-prepared meals, get ready to start hearing your praises sung in Google Maps. If
you don’t care much about your company and are putting your customers’ needs at the bottom of your list, your
business does not deserve to last. The ultimate outcome of the advent of user reviews will be
better service for paying clients. The time to start catering with abundant energy to your patrons’
needs is now.
So you’re running an AdWords campaign for your business, but you only want to target specific locations. How can you do that? Easy. You just go into your campaign settings and set the location to the area you want to target. But what options do you have? Well, Google recently updated their interface to catch up with Yahoo Search Marketing’s panama release in December 2006. This new release nicely integrates maps into the existing targeting system. In fact, the new features not only help them catch up with Yahoo!, they’ve moved them way ahead of Yahoo!.
So how granular is the targeting on Adwords?
Continent level? Country bundling is a new feature, and allows you to quickly select a group of geographically similar countries, which you can add to and subtract from as needed.
Country level? Most companies will go with the default of US, but consider your audience. If your products are targeted towards armed forces personnel you may want to add countries like Germany, Afghanistan and Iraq.
State level? Even apart from state-wide business possibilities there are interesting options here. Consider a politician aiming to influence people in certain states during the primary season.
Metro level? In the old system you had no idea whether metro level encompassed a specific suburb. Now with the map you can see for certain. (Note: The zoom capability gives you much more visibility than that in Yahoo!.)
City level? You can add as many cities as you want from to the list, not necessarily contiguous.
Radius around a point? Just don’t try to go down to a 3 mile delivery radius for your pizza place.
Custom shape? - In case you wanted to target those ‘inside the beltway’ politicians.
So what else is new? You can now exclude areas within your target. So say you want to target the entire US except for Tennessee, you just select the entire US, then select Tennessee as an exception. Here’s an example with bits of New Jersey taken out of the
Philly Metro area.
Of course, you still have all of the existing issues with geotargeting, in that the ads will be shown to users based on where their IP address resolves to, which may or may not be where they’re physically located, or based on the content of their search (if someone is in Peoria searching for Atlanta Restaurants, then it makes sense to show an ad for a restaurant that geotargets to Atlanta). However, these features do make the process of setting up geotargeting for your campaigns much easier.
Hey Yahoo!, Google’s made the move; it’s your turn to try to jump over them in this game of leapfrog.
One of the most common questions I hear from bloggers and businesses
that blog, is ‘How can I grow my blog’s traffic?’ This is a valid
question, but bloggers shouldn’t forget to focus on their blog’s
subscribers as well. Over the last year, I have seen first-hand what
can happen when you focus on growing your blog’s subscriber count.
Like most bloggers, I keep a close eye on my blog’s traffic. I launched my blog The Viral Garden back in March of 2006. In the first few months, traffic quickly grew from 0 to around 150 visitors a day on average. But in the fall and late 2006, I noticed that the growth began to slow, and by Feb. of 2007, I was only averaging around 175-200 visitors a day.
But I also noticed something else, my number of daily feed readers had caught up with my daily traffic, and by Feb. of last year, I was actually having more daily feed readers than daily visitors to my blog. This really got my attention, because I had been doing everything possible to grow my blog’s visitors, but had spent almost no time trying to grow my subscriber base. So I quickly switched gears, and over the last 11 months, I have concentrated on growing my number of subscribers. Here’s how the growth has tracked over the life of The Viral Garden:
Notice that there’s very slow and steady growth up till just after Jan. of 2007. Then around mid-Feb., growth accelerates. A couple of things happened here. First, this was when I decided to focus more on subscribers. Up till now, I had only a couple of subscriber buttons available on my blog’s sidebar, one for subscribing to my blog’s Feedburner feed, and one for subscribing via Bloglines. Both were buried about halfway down my sidebar. I moved both buttons up to the top of my sidebar, right under my pic and contact info. Then in Feb., Feedburner started tracking Google Reader in the subscriber counts, and I saw about a 30% jump from this.
Then in April, I noticed that Feedburner offered a form for your blog that would let visitors subscriber via email. I thought this was a great idea, and added this form to my blog’s sidebar under my subscriber buttons. In the last 9 months, I’ve gone from 0 email subscribers, to almost 100 now. Not a huge amount, but every little bit helps.
By mid 2007, I was helping a close eye on the behavior of my subscribers. I noticed that many were accessing my feed with Google Reader, NewsGator, and NetVibes. So I added subscriber buttons for these services, and also added a feed count widget that showed how many feed subscribers had accessed my blog from the previous day. The pic to the right shows what my sidebar subscriber section looks like now.
Now notice the huge spike around July of 2007. In spending time with Feedburner, I noticed that they offered a service for Blogspot blogs that would redirect all your blogs feed to the Feedburner version of your blog’s feed. Feedburner claimed that this would allow you to accurately track how many times your feed was accessed. I decided ‘Why not?’ and made the switch. I was stunned to see my subscriber count double immediately from around 600 to 1,200 daily subscribers! If you have a Blogger or Blogspot blog, you MUST do this, here’s the link that explains how.
Since then, I’ve continued to enjoy steady subscriber growth. Last July I had around 1,200 daily subscribers, yesterday my count was 2,352, which means it’s almost doubled in the last six months.
Now I should note that during this same time, my daily traffic to the blog has increased by about 75%. From what I can tell, around 5% of my visitors subscribe to my blog, so the growth of subscribers is cannibalizing blog traffic growth a bit. Since I don’t have any ads on my blog, I am ok with this. My thinking is that I want my blog’s readers to have as many options as possible for receiving my content. If they want to visit manually, they can. If they want to subscribe and access the blog’s feed via a feed reader, they can. If they want to receive email updates once a day, that option is also available.
But the bottom line is that you constantly have to monitor your blog to understand what is working well for you. I advise companies on how to improve their blogging efforts, but individuals can also benefit from not only analyzing their blogging efforts, but from also viewing their blog visitors as customers. By paying close attention to my subscribers, I discovered how and why visitors were becoming subscribers, and catered to these people. And subscriber growth of over 1000% in less than a year is the result.
Sage spotlights an article by Marketing Sherpa that reveals the results of multivariate landing page testing on SEM conversion rates. With little initial investment, companies have the potential to double their conversion rates. The artice also points out four major lessons to learn from multivariate testing, such as remembering that site redesign is crucial and to expect organizational barriers.
This week’s “In the News” video talks about advancements that companies like Southwest airlines and Ask.com are making to enhance personal touches for their uses; Southwest is adding internet access on some of their planes, and Ask is now offering customized skins on their search tools. Also, Google expands its local search results, making more options available to users but SEO harder for other sites.
Although I’m not a site designer, I do tend to tinker with my templates on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I also mess up my templates on a regular basis, too. Same goes for my entire WordPress install, although I have far fewer problems with that these days thanks to Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s book WordPress for […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “WordPress Made Easy”, url: “http://bloggingforthemoney.com/2008/01/29/wordpress-made-easy/” });
This is a post from SuperBloggingTips.com, a make money online blog.
Photo credits: psd.
All communities and forums have so much potential to help you grow your blog. Previously I discussed how you can gain traffic and make money using forums. If you post on forums that are in your niche by answering questions and helping others, […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Find Ideas for Posts by Using Forums”, url: “http://superbloggingtips.com/2008/01/find-ideas-for-posts-by-using-forums/” });
Bonus Tip*
This next strategy is not directly related to video or images but the concept is something you maybe able to apply elsewhere. I have two travel sites: BC Travel Guide (.ca) and British Columbia Tours (.com) and I am looking to rank highly for “Kelowna” or “Kelowna British Columbia.” So I created a Kelowna themed page on each site, both with keyword rich content, interlinking and images. The results are too early to tell but this allows me to test the level of authority per domain, the return per domain and the potential for having 2 sites rank highly for a few phrases.