ActiveRain Tutorials: December 2010

After watching the game the other 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 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 to convert to business.

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 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 just to make a few cents from a consumer clicking on the ad.  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 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.  Unfortunately, here on ActiveRain we cannot install this anymore due to spammers & hackers.

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.  (*Once again, this is an item I cannot install on ActiveRain.) 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 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.  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

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

The other day, I was at church and was listening to the message when the speaker mentioned that sometimes when her husband is in a hurry he only irons the front of his dress shirt.  She said he does this because since he is wearing a coat, nobody will ever see the back half, so what does it matter?  The only people who know it isn't fully ironed is he and his wife.  Unfortunately, I have seen on too many occasions that this is the same concept people place into their website for their business.

We all want the flashy designed and pretty looking site, but are not willing to put the time & effort into making the site useful.  You can have the most beautiful site in the world, but if it is missing key elements like calls to action, SEO optimization & Social integration, you in essence have spent a bunch of money for something pretty but unproductive.  In this post I am going to cover two of these three.  I will save the calls to action & sidebars for another post in the very near future.

How Social Is Your Site?

I recently wrote about making your WordPress site more social for consumers.  In that post I shared about some great plugins that are designed for WordPress Sites that allow consumers to share your content easily and quickly on social media platforms.  As you can see, currently Facebook is sending more traffic to our site than Google.  Also, you can see that Twitter has made the top five.  The reason that Tech Savvy Agent is in our top five is that I write there on a regular basis with links back to our site.  When you look at the analytics on their site, it too shows Facebook at the top of the list. Chris Smith shared with me recently that they see over 45% of their traffic from their powerful Facebook page of over 12,000 fans alone.

We are currently seeing almost 36% of our traffic on 210 just from the various social platforms we participate on.  This traffic comes not because we just broadcast our content onto Facebook & Twitter.  The traffic comes because Jason & myself engage our friends/followers on the social networks in conversations and build relationships with them.  After this trust has been established we can then share links to blog posts and sections of our site and people will click on them and visit.  Not only will they read our content, but they are also more willing to share it with their friends/followers after reading as well.  Being the complete statistics junkie I am, I did an analysis on the past 30 posts that have been written on our blog to see how much social sharing is taking place.  For the past 30 posts, on average, they have been re-tweeted 23.74 times and shared on Facebook 34.19 times.

They say the average person on Facebook as 130 friends.  That means on average my posts have a reach of nearly 4,420 people just on Facebook each time we write a blog post.  The same holds true on Twitter.  This reach is in addition to the thousands of friends/followers that we have.  By using an analytic type plugin I can watch when I send out a tweet or post on Facebook the traffic coming to my site immediately.  Usually there is a big rush all at once and a few hundred show up within 10 minutes.  If you don't have a site that allows for the installation of these type of social plugins, it might be time to consider a site like WordPress.

How Does Your Site Rank in Search Engines?

Search Engine Optimization still plays a major role in how consumers find your site.  The social platforms do a great job of directing those you are already connected with to your site, but the search engines is what can bring in those that aren't connected to your sphere.  Before the recent explosion of social media, sites would see close to 76% of their traffic come directly from search engines.  I believe that sites that are optimized properly can still see a major chunk of traffic from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  The problem however lies in what is set up on back end of your site that is never even seen by a consumer.  Each page in your site has three basic SEO components that without the proper setup you are throwing away valuable Google Juice.  One of my recent clients contacted me an asked why her static website was not showing up for anything in the search engines.  She would search and sometimes find it showing up on page 7 for a very specific term, but it was not generating any business for her.  I asked for her web address and immediately looked at the page source for the site.  Here is what search engines saw for her site:

The three main components that need to be filled out on every single page of your site and every blog post you post is the Title, Description, & Keywords.  In that order of importance too.  As you can see from the source code of her site, the first two segments were greatly overlooked. I cannot stress how extremely important these are to determining how your site ranks in the search engines.  It is imperative that you fill in these sections with keyword rich content.  This client had done a pretty decent job with keywords but their description and title was basically their name, where they are licensed and the name of the company they worked for.  Unfortunately, not many consumers search for you by your name unless you are a celebrity and those searching for a company will land at the company page 9 times out of 10.

To help solve this problem, I always install on WordPress sites I build for clients a powerful plugin called All-In-One-SEO Pack.  It works great and can really help take a page up the search engine results by giving you an easy way to add a separate Title, Description & Keywords for each individual page & post of content on your site.  Make sure that when you add content to your page to take the extra few moments to fill it out.  These simple steps can be the difference between your site ranking on page 9 for your terms or page one.  A recent SEO overhaul we did for a client took her for her main keyword which she wasn't found in the first 12 pages of Google to #4 on Page 1 in under 2 months.  Since then she has reaped the benefits of increased traffic and increased income all because we went back and fixed the title, description, and keywords on the static pages of her site.

Time to Iron The Back Half of Your Shirt

So if you have been only ironing the front side of your shirt and focusing only on the visual appeal of your site, it's time to flip the shirt over and start ironing the back half as well.  2011 is almost here and what a better time to get everything in order.  Go set up the SEO & social side of your site now and start gaining the benefits as the new year comes in.  If your current site does not permit you to add these components, it might be time for a change to a custom WordPress site that offers these types of things.  As always, if you feel this is overwhelming and need assistance, feel free to contact us, we are here to help.

photo credit: banalities

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

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:

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

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors