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Kitchener and Waterloo insurance brokers Staebler Insurance were so pleased Facebook game we made for them last year, they’ve
Google has recently announced the release of the online version of PageSpeed, the Firefox extension that analyzes the performance of a web page. There is already a much better tool, called GTMetrix, that was already doing a great job, as well as YSlow Firefox extension from Yahoo.
Some PageSpeed metrics
WordPress blogs:
- John Chow’s blog – 81%
- Shoe Money – 77%
- SEOBook Blog – 68%
- Mashable – 65%
- SEOMoz Blog – 63%
- Finch Sells – 60%
Forums:
- Digital Point – 81%
- Warrior Forum – 67%
General service sites:
- Facebook – 99%
- SourceForge – 92%
- Digg – 82%
These are some random picks from my bookmarks – some noteworthy WordPress blogs and some popular forums in the industry. I left out the dime-a-dozen blogs on purpose, the self-appointed specialists that will “teach” you how to make piles of money with their $19.95 ebooks, as well as websites that have no connection with the online industry.
What do these metrics mean?
I’m mainly writing this for newcomers. It’s usually not enough to put up a WordPress blog on your hosting account, pick a good-looking theme and get on with installing some essential plugins. You will also have to work quite a bit on the technical side. If your blog loads in two minutes because you have 150 articles on the front page you will lose all of your visitors.
How can you speed up the page loads?
It’s mostly some common sense configurations that will make the difference.
- 10 articles or less per page. Unless you write really short articles (100-150 words on average), or you use a magazine-like template where headlines and short excerpts are published on the front page, don’t go for more than 10 articles per page. You can change this setting under your Dashboard > Settings > Reading.
- Split your articles if you write long posts. If your story is longer than 6-700 words, or it uses lots of images and/or embedded content, always insert the More tag.
- Optimize your images. There is no reason why you would post a full-resolution image taken with your 12 megapixel camera that’s a bit over two megabytes – first and foremost it would go beyond the edges of your screen. Resize all your images before uploading (or use the built-in WordPress features to do it). Images shouldn’t be larger than 50-60 kilobytes.
If your site must handle large traffic volumes (i.e. in the range of 100,000 hits a day or more), here is a good article on the WordPress Codex site: High Traffic Tips For WordPress.
If you are just starting with email marketing and have no addresses in your email list, or too few to start a campaign that will be worth your while, yet you feel like buying leads from a third party provider doesn’t suit you either, building the list from scratch is your best call. However, you’ll find that you will need significantly different approach for B2B and B2C customers.
Business-to-Business tactics
Use customer details acquired by your offline sales team. If you aren’t already doing it, have your sales force get your customers’ email addresses. Returning clients will be the first to give their email addresses without asking any questions – they will understand you need it to improve communication and keep in touch with them easier.
Collect relevant information about your business customers such as: number of employees, main areas of activity and annual revenues. You will need this to segment your list and send in relevant offers. A company with 200 employees and a state-wide network of copy shops won’t be interested in your latest $300 inkjet multifunctional device, whereas a lawyer’s office with three employees will have no use for a $60,000 printing equipment that can print and bind thirty 200-page books per hour.
Telemarketing can be a great way of getting business leads. Get a list of companies from your local Chamber of Commerce, have your sales crew call them up to introduce your company and ask for contact email addresses without any further sales pitches. More companies than you would believe are going to agree to receive emails from you.
Business-to-Customer tactics
End-users are harder to convince into handing over their email addresses. They usually take all promotions with a grain of salt and you will have to convince them you aren’t going to spam them or sell their addresses. Incentives are a great way of having them join your mailing list. A free ebook, a chance to win a prize or premium content delivered only by email are good tactics.
Viral marketing can also get you quite a lot of B2C email leads. Offer your existing newsletter members the possibility to spread the word – a way to forward your content to their friends or social media group. Make sure you get their friends’ permissions before emailing them though – a recommendation cannot be considered an agreement to receive emails from you. Of course, you need to make the content interesting and unique enough to want to be shared, a viral campaign isn’t easy to pull off.
Offline meetings can also be a great way to get qualified leads. Schedule a public presentation of your product and have everyone confirm attendance by email. Advertise it around local social circles, as well as printed media. Follow up with a thank you note to all attendants and request permission to email them further offers – the majority will likely agree.
Are there any other tactics you have tried or any experiences you would like to share? Hit the Comment form below.
Welcome to the third part of our series on good and not-so-good link building methods. If you missed the previous episodes, I suggest you catch up here:
- Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
- Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions
In this article I will discuss the pros and cons of social bookmarking and forum posting as means of obtaining inbound links.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking used to work like a charm back in 2008 when you would have got an instant and major boost in SERPs only from a handful of submissions to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit. However, with the increased popularity of open sourced scripts like Pligg, Scuttle or Drigg, everyone can build a social bookmarking profile these days, so their usefulness has faded somewhat. Social bookmarking is still a great way of getting fairly strong backlinks, as well as some targeted traffic.
- Difficulty: easy to medium. Submitting to the popular social bookmarking sites isn’t rocket science – you have to sign up, confirm your email address, plug in your site details and hit submit. However, once you decide to scale up your link building campaign, you will find that getting a larger list of quality sites isn’t as easy as it seems.
- Time consumed: Little if you only plan on submitting to a handful of sites, but can get quite time consuming once you scale up.
- Quality: medium to high. If your site is interesting and worth spreading around, a lot of people will link to it and the viral effect will kick in. If your story gets enough votes and you get on the front page of popular social bookmarking sites you can expect more traffic than your server can handle (unless your hosted with us!).
To have a better chance at getting your link spidered fast, use a custom tag on low popularity social bookmarking sites (something like your company name). If you submit a handful of quality stories, there is a chance that your tag may get featured on the front page, so all your links will be one link away from the site’s index.
Forum posting
A lot of forums allow you to post clickable links in your signature. This method can be extremely tiresome, since you would actually need to get involved in the community and post insightful messages. Don’t do it unless you really enjoy being a member in that forum.
- Difficulty: hard. Once you join a new forum, you will need to spend some time to learn what the community is about, what their standards are and how the posting etiquette works.
- Time consumed: a lot.
- Quality: low. For every post you make, you will get a link that is going to be on a page with lots of outbound links (assuming all other forum members have links in their signature), so the juice passed to your page can get quite insignificant.
As a final piece of advice: if you consider outsourcing your forum posting tasks, keep in mind that once the job is done and you have paid your freelancer he or she might change the signature to point to another client’s site. That’s one of the reasons why Google doesn’t think very high of forum links: they are not permanent, and they are artificial. Google usually looks for links that you did not initiate yourself directly above others.
This concludes our third part. Stay tuned for more tips.
The previous two parts of the Usability for newbie designers tutorial can be found here:
In this article I will talk about how to design links wisely and in such a manner that your visitors don’t get confused.
Stay with the trend
Don’t be overly innovative with your link stylesheet properties. Links should be blue (unless the color hurts your overall scheme) and underlining is a must. A very common practice is to have them do something (change color or get underlined) when you hover them. All these will help your visitors easily identify links and treat them as such. On the flip side, don’t stylize your non-linking text in such a way that it may be confused for a link. Underlined key phrases are a major no-no. Sidebar links should be clearly identifiable. Here is an example of a good practice on a recent CNN.com article:
You can easily spot the in-text link and the sidebar, right? Thought it could be improved by underlining the links.
Spacing
Make sure you use generous spacing between your links so that your visitors don’t accidentally click on the wrong one. Here’s a sample from eBay.com with plenty of space between the page numbers:
New tab or same window?
There are arguments for both alternatives. As a rule, always open external links in new tabs, unless you specifically want your users to leave your site completely (which might be the case for a squeeze or landing page meant only to capture a lead then forward to the final URL). PDF’s are best shown in new tabs (use PDF files with diligence though, Dave has a good take on this)
Indicate what you are linking to
I don’t advocate preview thumbnails, I find them extremely annoying as they clog up the browser on slower computers. If you are linking directly to resource-consuming content like non-embedded videos, MP3’s or PDF’s you should indicate it clearly with an icon placed before the link. Simply mentioning click here to download the report in PDF format won’t do, as some of your visitors might simply scan through the text rather than read the whole paragraph and simply miss the part where you mentioned the format.
URL shortening services
Stay away from such services, unless you have a truly valid reason to use them. A lot of people (myself included) would first hover a link to see where it points to. If you think that the remote URL is too long and it would be “nicer” if you used a 10-character one just don’t do it. I don’t like surprises, I want to know where I’m clicking to. Keep URL shortening for Twitter and services where space is limited.
Non-http links
Don’t use mailto:, ftp: or other protocols (anyone still using gopher?) inside links. Having my email client pop up when I click on a link is definitely something I don’t expect. Implement a contact form and link to it if you want to provide your visitors with means of emailing you directly.
Youtube can be a great platform for your social media strategy. It can help you raise buzz for your products or services and boost your audience. Also, like all social media platforms, it can be fun – after all, you get the chance to interact with people. Here are some steps that can help you make it happen.
Take your time to test and learn
If you have never tackled video marketing, take a bit of time to study and learn. Don’t just rush at getting thousands of subscribers – there will be plenty of time for that later on. The look and feel of your channel can be tweaked and changed without breaking the bank, so study a bit and learn what will work and what won’t for your brand and company.
Don’t over-commit
I can’t stress this enough. Just don’t. Outsource or hire someone to do the video uploads, comment moderation, network with people, ban trolls, accept or deny friend requests and what not. However, don’t just hand the job over to an intern or a random dude on Digital Point. Look for a specialist, someone who fully understands the Social Media phenomenon and can truly represent your company.
Don’t bore your audience
The same goes with all social platforms, but your Youtube subscribers need more entertainment than any other social media “junkies”. For example, it’s alright to post your latest TV commercials on your Youtube channel, but don’t also upload ten variations of the same video (“the making of”, “director’s cut”, “PG-13 version” and so on) unless each of them has a legitimate value.
Upload videos in various resolutions
People access Youtube these days from their cell phones as well as plasma TV’s. Make your videos accessible for all devices and connection types. Have 240p versions as well as 1080p. Granted it may take you some extra time to convert your video to each format, but you will gain more subscribers in the long run.
Interlink your social media platforms
Don’t let your Youtube channel just lie there. Post regular updates from your Twitter account, embed videos on your blog or other Web 2.0 properties and link your Youtube channel to your Facebook account. Cross-linking will help you maximize your reach.
Don’t forget to have some fun
It’s more than alright to post videos from your latest team building, last year’s Christmas party or just how people in your company hang out during the lunch break. Such videos will make your customers and prospects feel closer to you when they see your “human” side. You just have to make sure the videos don’t contain any content that wouldn’t line up with your corporate message.
Grow rather than launch
I do advise you against launching a blog with only one or two articles, but when it comes to videos you can advertise a somewhat “empty” channel. Web video is the only social media field where “grassroots movement” can catch on with the public. Be patient and let your audience grow naturally rather than expecting zillions of subscribers overnight.
Cloaking affiliate links is a common practice among marketers. I’ll show you the reasons and ways you can do it.
Assuming you are promoting a product sold by somesite.com, you will get an URL in the form of http://somesite.com/?affid=1234. Whenever a visitor goes to that link and purchases the product you will get a certain (financial) benefit. The problem is that if you link directly to such an URL, a lot of your visitors may just remove the ?affid=1234 part. Why? There are many possible reasons… Your visitor may think the incentive you get will be billed to them (which is false) or simply won’t want you to make any money off their purchase.
Affiliate link cloaking is a way you can disguise the remote link in such a way that it no longer looks like an affiliate URL. You would basically point your visitors to http://yoursite.com/productXYZ.html that redirects to the affiliate link. I’ll show you three ways to do it.
The simple HTML redirect
This method was widely used by marketers before the spread of hosting services that allow server-side processing. You simply set up an HTML page for each product you want to promote and place this code inside the <head> tag:
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0;URL=http://somesite.com/?affid=1234” />
The URL in red is your affiliate link. The only downside of this method is that you will have oodles of HTML pages to manage if you promote lots of products. It is also inconsistent – if you promote various products on the same site that have URL’s like somesite.com/?affid=1234&prodid=5678, &prodid=8901 and so on and your affiliate ID changes you will have lots of pages to edit by hand.
The server-side redirect
Assuming you use PHP on your server, you can set up redirects with a simple line like
<?php header (“Location: http://somesite.com/?affid=1234”); ?>
The advantage over the aforementioned method is that you can build a script that dynamically queries a database and redirects the user to a given site based on a parameter. You can have yoursite.com/?redirect=1 point to somesite.com/?affid=1234 and yoursite.com/?redirect=2 point to othersite.com/?affid=xyzt.
The .htaccess redirect
If you would rather not use PHP or another server-side programming language and want to manage all your redirects unitarily without setting up individual HTML pages for each, you can simply dump all your affiliate links in your .htaccess file like in this example:
Redirect /product1 http://somesite.com/?affid=1234
Redirect /product2 http://someothersite.com/go/xyzt
Redirect /product3 http://thirdsite.com/index.php?promoterID=john
This method may come in handy if your host doesn’t support any server-side programming language (are there still any that don’t?) or if you need a quick way of deploying your links without doing any programming.
Emailing is an art. If you just started, chances are you won’t get it right on the first try. Don’t despair, If you learn from your mistakes, you will eventually succeed. Here are some tips all newbie email marketers should keep in mind.
Spell it right
Again, I don’t necessarily advocate magazine-style writing skills (even though a few interesting turns of phrase could give you a boost in clickthrough rates), but if you cen’t rite anglish then outsource your content creation to someone even remotely proficient. The majority of native English speakers are put off by confusions between your and you’re or its and it’s, so you can safely assume that your unsubscribe rates will go through the roof if your English is even worse.
KISS
No, you don’t have to kiss anybody to make your email campaign work. KISS stands for the design principle: Keep it Simple, Stupid. Don’t overemphasize your point, keep everything short and punchy. Keep paragraphs simple (1-3 phrases at most), as it makes everything easier to read. Make use of bulleted lists whenever you need to get several ideas through in a concise and easy to follow manner. Don’t use overly complicated words (e.g. don’t use “the storm abated after a few hours”, let up is more understandable by English speakers of lower proficiency levels).
Call to action
Always begin your copy with the idea that you are going to elaborate on throughout your newsletter, and wrap it up by challenging your readers to do something. Don’t just leave the end hanging in thin air, don’t let your readers wonder “I’ve read this, now what?”. If your copy is something purely informative (like an article you only distribute to your newsletter subscribers) you can simply end it up by thanking your readers for their attention and offering them an incentive to invite their friends to your mailing list. Say something along the lines of “Stay tuned for next week’s tips and tricks and don’t forget that we are donating [insert your favorite charity here] ten cents for every user you refer to our newsletter”.
Pressure and urgency
To get the best clickthrough rates, your email will have to put some sort of pressure on the reader and impose a sense of urgency. You don’t want your readers to slack off, you want them to do whatever you asked in the call to action and do it now. You can do this by putting time limits on your offers and other restrictions that will force the reader to take action immediately.
There is a never-ending debate over PPC versus SEO, and an equally growing divide between marketers who enjoy organic search and those who prefer paid results. Without taking any sides, here are the pros and cons of both ways of doing business.
What it may strike at a first glance is that SEO involves long-term planning whereas PPC is all about exploiting the moment and delivering cheaper clicks for higher return leads. SEO-ers spend lengthy hours analyzing long tail keywords and building insanely complicated linkwheels for a 20% return of investment, but build a strong link profile that may last for years. PPC marketers can get ROIs as high as 2000% off one campaign, but when their funding stops so do their profits.
The ‘right’ method is a compromise, as it often is. SEO gurus rely on (one) major search engine’s algorithms to pull in organic traffic. Should Google decide overnight that, let’s say, inbound links will no longer count and that whoever has the highest number of Twitter followers will rank first, where would a majority of them be standing? Their organic traffic would plummet, and so would their earnings. Such a drastic change is unlikely to happen, but keep in mind that it’s only one company pulling the strings and all eggs are in the same basket.
PPC marketers, on the other hand, have a plethora of traffic platforms to choose from, so their risks are spread evenly. If Adwords and Facebook close down overnight, a good PPC marketer would still have lots of services to choose from. And when their funding is drained they can always start back from scratch (you can even get a credit line if that’s what it takes).
You should also remember that SEO is a continuous process – you can’t simply assume that if you ranked #1 for your keyword you will stay there forever. Others are building links and will try to catch up, so you have to keep up the work.
The general truth you should keep in mind is that PPC is like billboard and TV advertising: it works immediately, it creates some buzz, raises some awareness and that’s it, if you don’t back it up by another media campaign. SEO, on the other hand, can equal sustainability and long-term growth if done correctly (of course, provided that Google, Yahoo and Bing don’t change their ranking algorithm drastically like in the above example).
PPC may be perfect for launching a new service, building up your social media fan base or getting more email subscribers. SEO, on the other hand, is what you should use for long-term development. Analyze them both, try to learn as much as you can and apply whichever technique fits in your particular scenario.
If you haven’t read the first part of this series, I strongly recommend you do so first and then get back to this article. The first part comes with some general guidelines you should keep in mind, while from this article on we will discuss some more specific tips. This article will be on the use of breadcrumb navigation.
What is a breadcrumb?
Breadcrumbs from a web design perspective are the series of links that tell you where you are on a page and the folder structure (i.e. Main category > Subcategory > Product name). On sites with lots of pages and a clear structure, breadcrumbs can consistently enhance the way visitors find their way around.
The term comes from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” where two little children drop breadcrumbs across a forest to trace their path back home. Just like in the tale, breadcrumbs in a web application offer users the possibility to track their path back to the point where they landed on your website.
Amazon’s take on implementing breadcrumbs is one of the most conservative yet widely used ones. The breadcrumbs are placed at the top of the page and each crumb except for the last one is clickable and points to the corresponding category.
What you can learn from this approach:
Be consistent
All crumbs should be named the same throughout all corresponding pages. Following the example above, don’t use “Computers and Accessories” on one page and “Computers & Accessories” on another. The crumb name should match the page title – you shouldn’t name your crumb “Laptops” if the name of the page is “Notebooks”.
Aid navigation, don’t replace it
The sole purpose of the breadcrumbs structure is to let your visitors know where they are and should not be a substitute for navigation. For the sake of consistency, your navigation bars should be kept intact.
Don’t link to the current page
Based on the reasons above, it goes without saying that the last crumb should not be clickable. The last item is merely an indication of where you are within the site. Don’t link to the current page, not even for on-page SEO reasons – the added benefit is insignificant compared to the usability-wise confusions it creates.
Make the last crumb stand out
Since it’s not a link, common design knowledge says the last crumb should be of a different color (see the screen shot above). Don’t even underline it, an underlined phrase usually indicates a hyperlink.
An excellent place for using breadcrumb navigation is on e-commerce sites that have a hierarchical page structure. If your service is selling a wide variety of products grouped into logical categories, such navigation is recommended. On the other hand, you shouldn’t use it on single-level sites with less than than two levels of depth. A good way to assess if your site would benefit from a breadcrumb structure is to build a sitemap or a diagram representing your structure and then analyze if breadcrumb navigation would improve the users’ ability to navigate within and between categories.