Website Design

I was talking this morning with a client who had gotten some contradictory advice from a competitor concerning what’s good and what’s bad when it comes to SEO.   It’s funny.  There is no single answer as to what’s right and what’s wrong.  Talk to ten SEO experts and you’ll probably get 10 different opinions.   In fact, every year, there’s a survey of some of the biggest names in the SEO industry where they rank what they believe are the most important factors determining a websites ranking on Google.  I’m always surprised at how little continuity there is in their answers. The survey even ranks the answers based on how many people agreed on a specific point.  Even these gurus don’t know for sure.  But, how can you know when the target is always moving?  You can’t…until Google publishes their algorithm.  There is evidence that they favor certain criteria when ranking a site, but there’s no one that can tell you for certain, unless you can get a job at Google.

So how do we rank our clients’ sites if we don’t know what the important criteria are?  It’s been a 10-year experiment.  Every year we get closer to knowing the answers.  Unfortunately, as soon as we think we’ve got it all figured out, Google shakes things up and introduces a new algorithm so they can stay one step ahead.   Their past updates have been designed to provide the most relevant results, and to keep people from cheating their way into the listings.  Right now, Google is going through one of those once-every-couple-years-updates.  It’s called Google Caffeine.  It’s designed to provide better results based on real-time indexing.  That means that Google is hoping to add your site updates the second you upload them.  Sounds great, right?  Yeah, unless the shift means that your site is dropping in their results.  It’s happening to millions of sites right now.  And it’s potentially changing on a daily basis.  One day you may see your site ranked at the top of their results, and then the next day, it may be on page 8.

No doubt it can be frustrating…especially for us, as we’re trying to figure out how to deal with the ever-changing results.  For the time being, just hang in there.  We have to wait for the dust to settle and once it does, we’ll get after it again and begin the rigorous testing that follows every big update.

Are you tired of telling people to visit your landing page for your next teleseminar because the web page address is so horrendously long?  Is it something like http://www.clicks.aweber/user/afes?=lafuygjn52jksdkjlh3425njkjh5?  Wouldn’t it be nice to tell people to go to snipurl.com/teleseminar?

If you’ve seen shortened URLs but haven’t yet used them yourself, here’s a great site to get started.

No you don’t need to install anything.  Just set up an account in about 30 seconds.  You just paste in your long URL in the “create snips” tab.  Then put in a word in the “nickname” field.  If you enter your company name as the nickname, your final snipped URL will be snipurl.com/yourcompanyname.  However, once you use a word, you can’t use it again so don’t use up your company name on a test.   Save that nickname for something that you’ll use again and again.  That way you can tell people to visit the snipped URL for years to come, rather than wasting your best nicknames on a one-time event.

Then in the future,  you can look at the “manage snips” tab and see how many people clicked on your links.  It’s a great way to test response rates and test different messages to increase click through rates and increase website traffic.   I hope that helps.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we take things for granted when it comes to technology? Think back to 2004. If you were like most people this was the first time you heard the word “blog.” This was the year that blogs exploded into the mainstream and US dictionary publishers awarded “blog” as the word of the year. Fast forward six years and there are millions of blogs online. If your company doesn’t have a blog chances are either considering it or wondering if it is something you should add to your site. While a company blog isn’t right for every company, here are the top two reasons you should consider blogging:

1. Blogs Give Your Company a Human Voice
Many businesses embrace blogs because it gives their website a way to be less corporate. There are so many lifeless (and well designed!) corporate websites out there that are damaging because they don’t feel authentic to customers. Sure it may match your expensive corporate identity, but when was the last time it was updated? How many customers really connect to the corporate jargon and marketing lingo? Blogs are an easy way to let your company put down its guard and connect with real people. I bet there is someone in your organization that would love to have the assignment of being your company’s official blogger. Find that person and let them go crazy with it.

2. Blogs Help Search Engine Visibility
The side benefit of blogging is that it gives Google a reason to visit your site regularly. Blogging regularly gives your site a reputation with search engines for delivering consistently new and relevant information. As a result your site will get spidered more often and your search rankings will increase.

When done right a blog can be a valuable addition to your site. When done wrong there is a chance that blogging might actually hurt your website. Next week I will talk about some of those things. For more information about blogging, be sure to sign up for our free report about blogging.

I was born and raised in Colorado so I have many fond memories of Estes Park.  I went to summer camp up there and now we have relatives that live up by the YMCA.  So when we were asked to help out with the Lodging Association’s website, we were excited.  Here’s a post that we just did to help drive some traffic for the phrase Lodging Estes Park.

I had one other thought this morning about affiliate programs while I was eating breakfast.  They require 3 conversion steps while other product sales only require 2.  That may not seem like a big deal but let’s look at an example and I think you’ll see the problem.

Example 1: You sell a product on your site.

Let’s assume you get a 1% conversion rate at each point during the sales process.  In this scenario we’ll use pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to the site.  Your ad shows to 10,000 people.  At a 1% conversion rate, 100 people click on your advertisement. If your site has a 1% conversion rate you’ll sell 1 product.

Impressions to sales ratio: 10,000 to 1

Example 2: You promote an affiliate partner’s product.

In this scenario, your has to show to 1,000,000 people.  Why?  Because you have to fill the sales funnel with a lot more names because there’s an additional conversion point in this sales model.  So you show your ad to 1 million people.  At a 1% conversion rate, you get 10,000 people to click through to your site.  If your site still converts 1% of all people, 100 people will click through to your affiliate partner’s site.  Of those 100 people, 1 is likely to buy the product if they have a 1% sales conversion rate on their site.

Impressions to sales ratio: 1,000,000 to 1

You see, by adding the additional step of making people click through to the partner’s site, you increase the number of leads required by 100 times, just to make 1 sale.  So if you show your ad to 1,000,000 people, you could sell 100 products through your site, or get a commission for one product sold through another site.  That’s a huge difference in website traffic.  I’d always opt for the solution that requires less traffic.  Hope that helps.

Have you ever wondered what the most popular sites in the world are?  We all know that website traffic is the lifeblood of most businesses these days.  Now you can see who’s getting the most website traffic.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

I was asked this morning if we could embed a video in an email blast.  It’s not as simple as you’d imagine.

If you try to embed the movie, it will get caught in most spam filters or if it makes it through, it won’t play properly due to virus scans.  The best way to do it is to send a text email or rich HTML email and drive people to the site to see it.  If they click a link in your email, it can take them directly to your site and have the move begin playing.  That increases your website traffic, right?  Or if you have a rich HTML email, you can show an image that looks like a video, with a play button but it’s not the video itself.  When they click on the image, it launches their browser and plays the movie.

However, people are willing to go through those steps to watch something of value, like a video of you packed with great wisdom, but they may be a little disappointed if they are directed to a page to watch your commercial, which has relatively no take-away value in it for them.

Yesterday I was writing about the drawbacks to affiliate programs.  Today I had a couple more thoughts.  Some of the affiliate partners may not have a sophisticated application that allows you to sell the products yourself.  Most affiliates simply provide you with unique tracking URLs and they calculate your commissions based on the referrals you provided.  Others may actually provide APIs and developer keys to facilitate the sale through your site.  However, fulfilling the order may take place through the partner website.  To me, it seems very confusing from a customer standpoint if your visitors purchase through your site and are redirected to another different site to finish the transaction.  In order to coordinate multiple partnerships into one site is no easy task because every vendor does things differently.  My honest advice, if this were my business, would be to simplify it as much as possible.  Coordinating multiple vendors in one shopping cart could potentially be a very expensive and frustrating experience because no two sites are coded the same way, or even use the same language.

Let’s look at it this way…I’m guessing that you’ve made the unconscious decision to only work with vendors that have websites written in English.  Right.  It would be silly to even think about sending your customers from your site to one that is in Korean.  Well, the same can be true if your site is written in php and another one uses asp.  Getting the two to talk is a challenge.  That’s why most affiliate marketers just sell the customer enough to get them to click through to the affiliate partner’s site and cross their fingers, hoping that the transaction goes smoothly from there.  Of course, this is the drawback that I mentioned yesterday that makes me a little leery of working with affiliate partners.

Unfortunately, it’s really a double-edged sword.  You keep all the control and pay more on the front end to have the transactions on your site (provided your partners can do that) or you send your visitors to the other person’s site and hope that they have high conversions on their site.

Frankly, I’d develop a site with a great product that you either create or resell.  Then you don’t have to rely on others and you don’t have to make your site talk with theirs.  I can’t underscore what a nightmare the later route can be.  What if you spend $20,000 making your site talk with theirs, and then they go out of business?  Or what if they change their commission structure so it’s no longer profitable?  You don’t want to have too much invested in any one affiliate partner or you cannot exit the relationship.

I could go on and on, but I won’t.

Chadd

Frequently, I’m asked if I’d like to partner with our client and accept a percentage of the profits in exchange for a discount on the project.   I always consider each situation individually but one thing generally convinces me to decline the offer.  I will generally give the proposal serious consideration IF I have complete control over the sales process.  For instance, if we develop a website that sells a product on the site without client intervention, that’s appealing.  On the other hand, if we develop a site that requires customers to call in order to purchase, I usually decline.  I wonder, what happens if the customer has a rude employee who answers the phone and loses the sale?  I could have done everything in my power to deliver the potential customer to the vendor, only to lose the sale and my potential income.

Why do you tell you this?  Because affiliate programs are very similar.  If you sell a product on your site, you have complete control over your income.  If you deliver clicks to someone else’s shopping cart, you lose control over the most critical point in any sale.  The smallest details can ruin the sale at that point.  If you choose to go with the affiliate route, be sure that you know the conversion rate of your partner’s site.  If they have not tested their site and done everything in their ability to increase their conversion rates, your income will suffer, despite the fact that you may be delivering lots of website traffic to their site.

If you sell products through your site and have them drop-shipped, you control everything.  Plus, I’ve seen some affiliates who are dishonest and don’t accurately calculate your commissions. You have no way of knowing how much you’re owed.  You can only tell how many clicks you delivered to your affiliate partner.  I’ve seen affiliate sites that never earn a penny, despite delivering traffic to their partners.  Unless you have complete faith in their bookkeeping and ethics, you won’t know if you are supposed to receive a paycheck or not.  That makes business planning and cash-flow projections difficult.

I hope that helps.

Chadd

Here’s a quick practical tip to help build your website traffic: use online press release sites to quickly publish content for you. If PR sites accept your press release or article, they will distribute it for you. Be sure to include a link to your website in the release or the byline.

My favorite free PR sites are:

• 24-7pressrelease.com
• prlog.com
• pr.com
• pr-usa.net
• myPRGenie.com