At flyte we have a model called Holistic Web Marketing; it's a way of explaining how Web marketing helps improve your online visibility, drive qualified leads to your Web site, and convert that traffic into business. There are four pieces:
Attraction: How do you drive qualified traffic to your site?
Retention: How do you keep the lines of communication open after they leave your site?
Conversion: How do you get them to make a buying decision or move further down the sales cycle?
Measurement: How do measure your site's effectiveness and whether your Web campaigns are working?
Although businesses and organizations have different goals and purposes, most would like to achieve the following:
increase their online visibility
drive more qualified prospects to their site
convert that traffic into business or membership.
These days, almost everyone will agree that a company's Web site is the hub of their marketing; TV ads, print ads, even billboards, will include a URL to drive interested parties to for more information or to order.
While different people have different opinions of what Web marketing is, I feel there are four major components:
Attraction: How to you drive qualified prospects to visit your site
Retention: How to keep the lines of communication open after they've left your site
Conversion: How to get visitors to take a desired action on your site (buy now, picking up the phone, etc.)
Measurement: How to track your success and continually improve on your site and marketing campaigns.
There are plenty of tools at our disposal as small business owners and entrepreneurs to accomplish this, including search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging and social media to name a few.
If you'd like to learn more in a classroom setting, I'll be teaching Web Marketing for Small Business at the University of Southern Maine starting this Thursday evening from 6 - 8pm, and three additional classes after that.
Just remember to bring the teacher instructor an apple.
Nicki is flyte's search engine marketer, helping clients rank higher at the search engines and drive more qualified leads to their sites.
Besides performing keyword analyses, running link building campaigns, teaching swimming and cheer leading, she's also become a great writer. She's been sharpening her skills over at the Maine SEO blog.
The other day she wrote an article on Web marketing, and suggested that I could use it for the upcoming issue of flyte log, our monthly email newsletter. Until now, I have been writing every issue since 1997.
Maybe she thinks I've been working too hard.
In any case, it's a great article for any one who is trying to get a better understanding of Web marketing, and how a business can better promote themselves online. She talks about Web sites, blogging, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), PPC, article marketing and email marketing, and how they all can fit into a Holistic Web marketing campaign.
And she wraps it all up in a flaky pie crust. I don't exactly understand how she did it, so you'll have to read the article yourself. You may never look at pie the same way again.
If your business has products or services that require regular billing, you might want to look to PayPal to automate the billing process.
In this short video on How to Set Up Recurring Billing in PayPal, I'll show you step-by-step how to automate recurring billing, whether you want to bill once a month or twice a week, and whether you want to bill for six months, a year or forever.
Once you've set up the recurring billing PayPal will generate code you can add to a Web site, blog, or even put into an email.
What is Holistic Web Marketing? At flyte we use this model to explain our integrated approach to online success. A static Web site is no longer enough; you need a coordinated Web marketing strategy to reach the widest audience possible.
Holistic Web marketing consists of four parts:
Attraction: How to drive quality traffic to your Web site. [Tools: search engine optimization, blogging, social media]
Retention: How to keep the conversation going after they’ve left your site. [Tools: email marketing, social media]
Conversion: How to get people to make a buying decision at your site, whether it’s clicking on a “Buy Now” button, completing a contact form, or picking up the phone. [Tools: web site]
Measurement: How to analyze your traffic to make ongoing improvements to both your Web site and your Internet marketing for better results. [Tools: analytics]
We believe that you need to address and integrate all four pieces of Holistic Web Marketing for long-term success.
On Thursday, May 14th at 12pm EDT, I'll be leading a one hour Webinar (plus 30 minutes of Q&A) examining how small businesses can use the holistic Web marketing model to grow their own business. We'll look at search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, social media and your own Web site as tools to increase online visibility, drive more qualified leads to your site, and generate more online business.
The cost of the Webinar is normally $49, but if you enter coupon code "theeconomystinks" you'll save $15. That's our stimulus package to you.
It seems like the only way you can get bailout money from the government these days is if you're "too big too fail." Where does that leave us: the small business owner, the entrepreneur, the engine of America's economic recovery?
In honor of us releasing a new ProSite theme (good work, Andy!), we've taken our already affordable ProSite package and thrown in a fully functioning, complementary-designed blog at no extra cost (normally $499).
Flyte's ProSites, affordable, pre-designed Web sites, are perfect for small businesses, entrepreneurs and professionals who are looking to get an effective, successful Web site presence up and running quickly.
Once we've received your content your site can be up in as little as five business days, for as little as $1,999.
The sites built on WordPress, the popular open-source content management system (CMS), which allows business owners to update their own Web site, add pages, upload images and embed videos without any HTML knowledge or expensive software. Any modern browser will do.
These sites are completely scalable, search engine friendly, and are built rock solid by flyte new media, the official small business Web design firm. (Official status still pending; we're just waiting for one more signature at the SBA.)
Every Web designer and Web developer I know would answer either:
Yes!
Hell, yes! or
F***, yeah!
to the previous question.
For most of us, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is the bane of our existence. You can design the most beautiful site that works well in IE7, Firefox, Safari and across operating systems and then you go and look at it in IE6 and you just want to cry.
On average, it adds 4 to 5 hours of development time or more when it comes to building a Web site, so making sure that the site looks good on IE6 is an investment in time.
Traditionally, flyte's guarantee has been that our sites look great on the two most recent versions of popular browsers across Mac & PC, and "degrade gracefully" on previous versions. After all, you can't support every version of every browser; you'd go out of business before your first site was launched. And although it's gotten better recently, Microsoft's lack of compliance with industry standards has made the average developer's life harder than it needs to be.
When I think about the hours of productivity lost because IE6 sucks so much it makes Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme pale by comparison.
OK, maybe it's not that bad, but a few extra hours on every Web site built? It just shouldn't be that way.
Unfortunately, dropping IE6 support may still be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. On flyte's Web site about 9% of our visitors are still using IE6. For one of our clients, Alaska Fly Fishing Goods, they get 13% of their visitors on IE6. For another client, St. Mary's Health Care, it's a whopping 28%!
Although those numbers will decline as IE8 adoption goes up, it's not going to change overnight. If 10% - 25% of a client's traffic is going to be delivered using IE6 it's impossible to ignore that business. You have to make sure the site "works" on IE6.
So, what can you do?
I would suggest to all Web designers and developers that we attack the problem on two fronts:
Start charging more for IE6 compliance. If IE6 is adding 4 - 5 or more hours of production work for the developer, why aren't you passing that time on to your clients? Although we haven't made any decision yet, at some point we're going to have to either stop supporting IE6 outright or giving our clients the option of buying a "premium" package that covers the additional time.
Recommend upgrading to IE8 and promoting the link. As a Mac guy I'm not thrilled with the idea of pushing IE8, and of course I'd recommend Firefox, Safari and probably even Chrome over IE8, but better 8 than 6. Tell them it's a security issue. Tell them if they stick with IE6 then the terrorists win. Tell them whatever you need to, but get people to upgrade.
If you have any suggestions, legal or otherwise, to make IE6 nothing more than a war story to tell our kids, please let me know.
I've been involved with MEBSR for several years, an organization that can best be described as a dynamic collection of forward-thinking business leaders in Maine dedicated to “doing well by doing good.”
If you're a Maine-based business and interested in triple-bottom-line success: environment, community involvement and profit, then you should get involved with MEBSR. It's the perfect network of people interested in sustainable business and green business.
The new site offers member only benefits such as unique content, membership directories, links that pass search engine juice, and discounts on upcoming events.
The site was built on Joomla, an open-source content management system that offers great scalability. Members can update their profile online as well as renew online with a credit card or PayPal.
Yesterday I send out an email newsletter about content management systems (CMS) for small business. I have already received a few emails from clients and subscribers who are interested in upgrading their static Web site to a CMS.
One client with a static site was using Contribute to update their site and wondered if a CMS offered any other benefits. This led to a discussion with my friend/co-worker Dave Cousins about the myriad of benefits WordPress--a blogging/CMS platform we often use-has over Contribute. Other CMS platforms have similar benefits.
Contribute is $200 per copy. WordPress is free.
Contribute is $100 per upgrade. WordPress upgrades are free.
Contribute is for one computer. On the road? Working from home? You'll need to have your laptop with Contribute installed with you or you're out of luck. With WordPress you just need to log into your password-protected admin system from any modern browser and you're good to go. In fact, you can have multiple people updating the Web site and not have to buy multiple copies of any software.
It's easy to add pages in WordPress. Yes, you can add pages in Contribute, but it's a bear.
It's easy to update navigation in WordPress. Don't get me started on Contribute.
WordPress uses XHTML/CSS for fast-loading, bloat-free sites. Chances are if you're using Contribute, your site is a few years old and is ready for an upgrade.
Design revisions are less expensive with WordPress. Because of its extensive use of style sheets, a design update or even overhaul is significantly less labor intensive in WordPress. You only need to update the style sheets, not rebuild every page on the site.
WordPress is an online publishing platform, Contribute is an update tool. WordPress offers a site search, blogging capabilities, podcasting capabilities, RSS feeds, and unlimited plug-ins to enhance your Web site. Contribute allows you to fix typos and update your events page. In fact, it's really not fair to compare the two. But that didn't stop me.
I'm sure I'm leaving plenty of ideas out, so feel free to jump in. Or, if you think I'm wrong, let me know why Contribute trumps WordPress.
If your small business has some nice visuals (think scenic views, jewelry, art, beautiful people, etc., etc.,) and you've been looking for an interesting way to display it online, you might want to check out Animoto.
I first heard about Animoto in an article I read in Entrepreneur magazine last month and began playing around with it right away. It's addicting to say the least.
What Animoto does is create slick slide shows set to music with great transitions. While there is a free version, it just too limiting to be of any use to a business. By upgrading to a paid account you can have videos of any length, have DVD-quality images, upload your own music, and include a clickable call-to-action. (For example, a resort could end it's slide show with a "Book Your Room Now!" link to the reservations page on their site.)
Once you've established your account you can easily create a slide show by clicking on "create video" near the top of every page. After that it's a three-step process.
Images: You can upload images from your computer or another Web site like Flickr. Once they're on the Animoto site you can rearrange the order, add text, delete or even spotlight certain key photos. Once you're happy with the organization click continue.
Sound: You can choose from Animoto's royalty-free library that includes a number of genres such as hip-hop, classical, independent rock and more. You can also upload your own music, but be aware of any copyrights you might be infringing on. In other words, dropping that Zeppelin track on your slide show may get you a call from an attorney.
Once you've selected the appropriate music it's time to render your video.
Render: If you have the business account you'll be able to add a call-to-action button at the end of your video. You'll also be able to change the image pacing of your video (although just 1/2 speed or 2x speed) and choose a cover screen. Once that's done Animoto gets to work.
A few minutes later (or even a few hours, if there are a lot of photos), you'll get an email that your video is ready for viewing. This is a lower-res version. If you like what you see you can download a DVD-Quality version. If you'd like to have the Animoto engine try again you can "remix" your video.
You can choose one-click remix, which will just give you different transitions, or go back in and tweak the order of photos, text, and choose a different song.
For small businesses looking to break through the clutter and grab a visitor's attention, Animoto might be just what you need.
Below is the video I created for Portland Motor Club based on my trip to an open house they had a few weeks back.
If you can't see the movie here, check it out on YouTube. Keep in mind that the DVD-quality is somewhat diminished when rendered through YouTube's system.
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