Last year, my pro-bono client, PuRR Project, asked me to design a calendar to sell for the benefit of raising dollars for the cats & the no-kill shelter they so wonderfully run. I had never done a calendar before but I am a designer after all ain’t I? So I can do anything…. I just hadn’t realized just how much work this would entail. What I thought would take me 2 weeks quickly turned into a 2 month project. Given, I am a perfectionist but aren’t all designers?

So first we had a meeting to decide on the format; Will it be folded? Will it be individual pages with a spiral? What is the finished size after cutting? etc… I say this because obviously, you need to know what space you will have to work with, how large your picture will be, in what format (vertical or horizontal), will there be text (in this case there had to be to tell the story of each month’s cat, are the date small or in larger squares to allow for notes? etc…

I personally wanted to go for something more fresh & different but the team decided we’d go with a standard 12 x 12 inch, folded calendar with large date boxes to allow people to add their personal notes in.

So now I knew we’d need very large high quality images that could be printed in 10″ x 8″ and that also implied a horizontal format for the images. Then we wrote out our call for people to send us pictures of their PuRR Project adopted cats.

The selection process wasn’t easy. Some of the images we received would have been outstanding had it not been for their low resolution (which meant I could NOT blow them into a 10 x 8″) and others were high resolution enough but just plain blurry or grainy… This is, of course understandable, as the common folk doesn’t necessarily know what resolution is needed for print or just aren’t really good photographers plus adding to that the fact that animals, especially cats, can be very difficult to take pictures of in the first place… then you have composition, lighting etc… In the end, this is where I spent most of my time; countless hours of photoshopping images to remove hairy arms from the image, adjusting lighting & color tones and in some cases, completely redefining the background the cat was in. One particular case, December, took me over 36 hrs alone because it’s a full creation from top to bottom. See, we were short one pic so I went to the house of a PuRR cat in foster care, shot pictures the cat on a terrace and then transposed the one I selected over my made up Christmas background. Some will say it’s cheating but really it isn’t so much when you consider the point of this calendar. First it is a PuRR cat, and in the end, the point was to sell calendars to make money for the shelter & cats still residing in it… so all is forgiven in this case. I will say though, that for all the pics sent by people who had adopted a PuRR cat, I was extremely diligent in altering the pics as little as I could to keep them as true to the original as was possible but still end up with an image that would be very pleasing to everyone.

Cover

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

About PuRR Project

Back Cover

Back Cover

Deciding on the theme

The theme is a general concept that includes the style, colors, fonts etc…
I decided to use a glazed glass theme for this calendar design. In order to achieve this, most of this calendar uses transparency & multiple layers on many different levels. The colors are varied yet soft as is the typography I used. I went for classy rather than bold.

Sorting the images for each month

That wasn’t too bad. Some months, such as February (Valentines), March (Easter), December (Christmas) are fairly easy in the sense that you’ll try to pick an image that gives a sense of what you’d like to portray, then make use of color to bring the rest home.

I chose this image for the cover because it was a large, clear image with the right composition and color tones. Since this image was of fairly good quality all that was needed was adjustments of levels and a slight increase in saturation as I had to lighten the image a bit and color fades during that process. It was just a perfect cover from the moment I received it in my inbox… so that choice was easy.

Then we went by elimination to fill in the other months.

Customizing the dates & Holidays

Here I suppose I could have made my life easier by using pre-made templates but I wanted something unique and went, instead, with a full custom grid I had to create from scratch.
Again, this seems easier than it actually is; well not that it’s hard but it’s very time consuming. Each month needs to be correct (easy to make stupid mistakes here), the spacing needs to be even, your numbers, though small and stylized need to be easily readable, the holidays (in this case Canadian, American & Mexican) also need to be exact, the moon phases as well… it’s just a lot of detail one can easily get wrong… it does get confusing.

Because ours was a full 12″ x 24″ folded into a 12″ x 12″ calendar, you also have to take into consideration the thickness of the paper you’ll print it on because as you get to the most outer pages, the fold gets relatively thicker and you need to accommodate for that extra thickness in the design as well.

Once all your individual full 12 x 24″ pages are designed, you need to re-assemble them in back-to-back reversed sets so that once printed and assembled, you have the right months to go with the correct images & have them face the right way. This is easy for designers but can easily get very confusing for a non-designer attempting this for the first time.

All in all, this was a very fun project that we are repeating again this year. But now that I’ve done one, I expect this one will be a bit easier… at least I hope lol.

As stated in PuRR Project’s newsletter of April:

“Last year’s calendar was our first and it was a great success and raised a lot of pesos as a result. It was beautiful and will be hard to top….but we’re gonna’ try!”

Indeed we will…

It’s widely believed that viruses only aim to destroy the data on your computer or worse yet corrupt it or delete it. That is a fallacy of great proportions and a very dangerous one.

Allow me to open a window for you into what real hackers really do, how they do it and why.

First, all hackers hack for different reasons; some hack for the hell of it, some for profit, some to get even or hurt someone, a company or government they are against, but many hack to get in to your system and control it for when they’ll need it later for a bigger attack on a bigger fish. This is the one I want to bring your attention to because this is how this latest attack is happening, through hundreds of thousands of individual machines all over the world.

The aim is to hack into enough WordPress installations (those mainly still using admin as username – which is a terrible practice – and common passwords) and gain administrator privileges to run operations from behind the installation of your WordPress website and finally gain control of the hosting to create yet an even bigger botnet of such power that it can bring the internet world to a screeching halt all over the world at once. Did I confuse you?

Ok, let’s start from the beginning…

The reason behind many viruses…

isn’t to destroy your data at all, it’s to install hidden programs that are run by hackers from their own lair without you even knowing about it. They sit at home, and through the programs they installed on your computer with the virus, they control many things on your computer and mainly, these are hidden programs that you don’t know are running and that usually have something to do with connecting to the internet as they use these programs to make your computer do things on the web you don’t know you are doing.

Why install hidden programs?

Once these programs are installed on what the hacker deems a sufficient amount of computers for his given task, he is ready for a larger scale attack on a bigger fish. For instance, they will call upon hundreds of individual computers (yours and others), that happen to be online at the time, for which they have control of and make them all go visit a certain web page all at once and repeatedly. This is what we call a DDoS attack.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.

In a typical DDoS attack, a hacker (or, if you prefer, cracker) begins by exploiting a vulnerability in one computer system and making it the DDoS master. It is from the master system that the intruder identifies and communicates with other systems that can be compromised. The intruder loads cracking tools available on the Internet on multiple — sometimes thousands of — compromised systems. With a single command, the intruder instructs the controlled machines to launch one of many flood attacks against a specified target. The inundation of packets to the target causes a denial of service.

Why is this latest attack scarier than your run-of-the-mill DDoS attack?

One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the hackers/crackers may be using relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet on very powerful servers (such as hosting servers) in preparation for a future, much larger and more damaging attack. These larger server machines can cause much more damage in a DDoS attack because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic.

You’re starting to see the picture aren’t you?

So now, why is it important to have a good anti-virus, keeping both the program & virus definitions up to date, scanning your computers regularly and immediately if you suspect an infection at all? You guessed it… because an infection on your computer can generate much more damage to many others all over the world which ultimately can bring the internet down all together, or be used to attack anyone or anything on the web. You think I’m exaggerating? I wish I was, and the proof is right there online for anyone wishing to see it. In my last post I provided recent numbers coming from Sucuri, a trusted and renowned online security organization but let me insert a quote from Sean Valant at HostGator, a fairly big hosting company, though not the one I use:

“As I type these words, there is an on-going and highly-distributed, global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence,” wrote HostGator’s Sean Valant.” This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack.”

So why are you aiding and abetting hackers? If we all kept our computers clean, we’d make their jobs very difficult, even nearly impossible, at least on this type of scale.

But that’s not all, we just discussed personal & business computers but let’s not forget websites. An infected website can look and run just like a clean one with the difference that it may infect the computers of people visiting your website and do so without the visitor’s knowledge, especially if he is not running a good anti-virus or isn’t up to date with it. So now let’s see about how you can keep your website clean. I personally use Avast Home Edition for my personal computers, the free version, and have been for years and I’m happy with it.

I have a website, how do I know if it’s infected?

If you’re a website developer, I shouldn’t have to answer this question.

If you’re just a regular person running your own website, I strongly suggest you consult with someone who knows about securing websites, scanning them for malware code and cleaning it up because I’m afraid this is probably beyond your scope of knowledge and deleting a single line of code on a website can significantly alter the site, even render it useless. So it’s just not worth the risk.

Because the current ongoing attack is aimed specifically at WordPress users the world over, here’s a bit of info that may help you:

I have a WordPress site, what should I do?

First and foremost, if you don’t handle your website but hire someone to do it, inform them and send them the links to both my related blog posts so they can have a look to see if you’ve been hit:
First: Brute Force Hacking of WordPress
The one you’re reading now: What is hacking and why you need to keep your computer and websites clean

If you handle your websites yourself, then here are some basic recommendations that will help get you started. We are available to those who need more help and you can simply email us.

First of all, administrators should change their passwords to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website. These requirements are fairly typical of a secure password: upper and lowercase letters, at least eight characters long, and including “special” characters (^%$#&@*). Users can also restrict access to wp-admin so that it is only reachable from specific IP addresses.

Also, WordPress users can take advantage of a third-party plugin like WordFence or Bullet Proof Security, which can restrict and block IP’s when there’s repeated erroneous login attempts & many more security features and can also be customized.

Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, suggests site administrators chose a username that is something other than “admin”. In addition, he urged WordPress.com-hosted blogs to turn on two-factor authentication, and to verify that the site is running the latest version of WordPress. “Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem,” Mullenweg wrote.

Daniel Cid, chief technology officer of Sucuri Security, a company that helps site owners prevent and recover from security breaches, said his team isn’t seeing infected sites being used to attack others; according to Cid, most of the password brute-forcing is being conducted by desktop systems under the attackers’ control.

“We saw a big increase in the number of brute force attacks (almost tripled) since previous month’s average,” Cid wrote in an instant message interview. “However, at least from our data, they are not re-using the compromised sites to build a botnet to scan others. I assume that is speculation. On the sites we looked [at] that were hacked, the attackers injected backdoors and malware on them,” including the Blackhole Exploit Kit. Cid also shared a copy of the username/password list that the attackers have been using for the brute-forcing.

“The brute force attacks do not seem to be coming from servers, but from desktops,” Cid said. “However, this is still very early, since they are injecting backdoors (a variation of the Filesman backdoor) they can later use the sites to inject malware or even create a botnet and brute force other sites.”

According to Sucuri, WordPress administrators who have been hacked should strongly consider taking the following steps to evict the intruders and infections:

• Log in to the administrative panel and remove any unfamiliar admin users.
• Change all passwords for all admin users (and make sure all legitimate accounts are protected with strong passwords this time).
• Update the secret keys inside WordPress (otherwise any rogue admin user can remain logged in).

These are just a few suggestions, and online security is more important now than ever… keep yourself informed and happy surfing.

I don’t blog very often because mostly, I’m too busy building great sites for my clients and two, I don’t blog for the sake of blogging. If I have something that I believe is of true interest, then I post.

This is one such occasion. Big news hit the internet on April 12th, 2013, at least for those following current events that matter to web developers & their clients.

Massive brute force hacking attacks on WordPress sites around the globe have been the talk of the day. They are becoming more and more frequent and last night’s attacks have hit many site owners & developers in a hard way.

But before I give you details on what occurred, there’s a topic I’ve been meaning to discuss here. Something I’m seeing more of every day and that is very closely related to security & websites.

I consider myself a fairly good website developer & designer. I do much more for my clients than most and I don’t charge more for it because I believe you should deliver a great product and offer yet a greater service. In other words, I wear many hats for my clients; graphic design & styling customization, always using the latest technologies of the day (which means constantly keeping up with changes on the web), SEO of course, cross browser & cross platform consistency, in some cases even photography services or video production & editing, social media integration, translation in 3 language options, marketing tips etc… and most importantly, SECURITY. Most of the items on that list are specialties and often, someone does only one of those; I do them all and I believe I do them fairly well. But if my client’s needs exceed my capabilities, I will be honest and send them to a professional of that field.

And here it is, my biggest pet peeve! Seems to me that lately, more and more people think they’re website developers/designers now. They go around telling anyone and everyone who will listen how great they are at building websites. That in and of itself wouldn’t be so frustrating if it wasn’t coming out of the mouth of people who have just discovered WordPress or some other magical website building “thing of the day”. As if, being able to populate content in WordPress makes you a web developer or designer now.

Let me make this clear, the amount of knowledge in so many different fields that is required to build a good website is so huge that it really will take someone willing to learn years to fully understand & grasp. Never mind learning to code in HTML5, CSS3, php or even javascript in order to be able to build, style or configure functions to work as the client needs them, not to mention fix issues that will arise. I say “will arise” because there’s no such thing as building a site without a hitch somewhere. First there’s browsers… oh don’t get me started on IE (the garbage of the internet browsers – of course not even considering aol & the like)!!! Then there are script conflicts, there’s themes to deal with etc…

By now I guess you realize I may be a bit frustrated, and you would be right because I am. Mostly, I’m frustrated at myself for being great at what I do but a terrible sales person, which means I have trouble making people see the value of what I offer or do for them.

So what sometimes ends up happening is, they will hire someone a little bit cheaper than me to do their updating & maintenance once the site is built and running. And a few times in the last few years, I’ve been replaced by website designer wannabe’s. These people step in and ruin all your good work in a matter of weeks or months. It’s truly sad to see.

But that’s not even the worst of it and here’s where we loop back to the recent events on the web: The massive brute force attacks of WordPress worldwide.

Hacking is at an all-time high and will only get worse. Yesterday, the numbers were record breaking, spread out across the entire globe and affected just about every WordPress site on earth, and even brought some major hosting companies to their knees. The attacks were specifically aimed at wp-admin login pages and flooded them with login attempts. This extremely heavy traffic & repeated login attempts caused hosting companies to overload and service became non-existent or slowed down so much many couldn’t even see their sites or log into their WordPress accounts at all. A major traffic jam indeed. Here are sample numbers from 1 single security company of how many attempts they’ve blocked recently.. and again, that’s just ONE company! I don’t have last night’s numbers but I expect they will be outrageous. I do have their numbers dating back to Dec 2012 up to April 10th of this year.

2012/Dec: 678,519 login attempts blocked
2013/Jan: 1,252,308 login attempts blocked (40k per day)
2013/Feb: 1,034,323 login attempts blocked (36k per day)
2013/Mar: 950,389 login attempts blocked (31k per day)
2013/Apr: 774,104 for the first 10 days – 77,410 per day

It is clear that April is certainly already going to beat all previous numbers and by far! The attack of the 11th isn’t even in those numbers yet and in 10 days, April already has over 81.45% of last month’s entire total hits. Put your sunglasses on cause it’s going to be a scorching April!

Ok so now, what does this have to do with website developer wannabe’s? Ya you can see it coming can’t you? Indeed, a site I built last year that was supposedly maintained & updated by such wannabe’s got hit last night. Updates hadn’t been done, security wasn’t upgraded and became obsolete and they got hacked & now the site is infected with malicious code. Why should I care? Well first of all, I do care for all my clients, even past ones but this hurt me to the core as well because I made a major mistake too.

See, I also offer hosting at a discount for those I build sites for and once the site was done, once I was told I wouldn’t be maintaining it, I politely asked them to move the site to their own hosting as I only host sites that I personally maintain for security reasons. The site never got moved and to be nice, I didn’t insist. Bad mistake.

When you host multiple sites, it’s even more difficult to keep everything secure because now you have many doorways. You can secure & block just about all of them if you are on top of your game, keep everything up to date, have good security plugins etc… but if you have a weakness and get hit, you can almost count on the fact that someone will exploit it.. and once in, it’s hard to contain it in one place. It’s like a castle with huge rock walls, pretty good protection but once the wall has a hole in it, the wood doors to every room inside are easier to break into. So you can have a spread of the malicious code within other sites, especially if the weakness was serious enough to allow access to the root.

There are ways to avoid this possibility but they are usually a bit costlier and I have yet to see a client want to pay extra for it. No one believes me when I say security is important, no one thinks they’ll get hacked. Until they get hacked… but then it’s too late.

So here I’ve learned a very important lesson: No more Mr. nice guy… when a site is no longer under my own personal maintenance… it’s going to move out of my server. I too am a small business and if I were to pay for extra security for sites that aren’t under my control, then I’d have to inflate my service prices and that’s not fair to my other clients. So it boils down to: if you’re going to be a risk for me, you’re out.

But what you should take away from this is that indeed, hacking is truly a threat nowadays and that it really does matter who builds your site & who maintains it for you. My ex-client got lucky, I will clean up her site, for a fee of course but some won’t be so lucky and professional clean-up services are extremely expensive and not everyone can afford them. But because I am on top of things and my other sites are up to date & secured, none of my other sites were touched.

Good website developer/designer shopping & don’t forget to check credentials well… you may pay a bit more but it’s worth it.

SEO can take a lot of time and effort. What good is spending all this time and effort if you can’t see the fruits of your labor? There are many metrics you can track on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to keep your SEO plan on track and measure your success.

Traffic

Measuring overall traffic to your website from organic search is something you should look at on a weekly basis. This will help you determine if that changes you made in the previous weeks or months have started to have an impact.

Leads / ROI

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics and inbound marketing solutions like HubSpot can make it easy to see how many conversions have occurred on your website as a result of organic search traffic and keywords. These tools will also allow to you set up multiple conversion definitions (visits, leads, customer) so you can really get a sense of how much return you are getting on your SEO investment.

Indexed Pages

Measuring how many pages the search engines have indexed for your site is an easy way to measure the growth of your SEO efforts and your website. The more pages that are indexed, the easier it is to rank for more keywords. Free tools like HubSpot’s Website Grader will show you how many pages you have indexed. Measure indexed pages on a monthly basis. This number should always be going up.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are the easiest way to determine how successful you have been at off-page SEO. HubSpot’s Website Grader will provide you with the number of inbound links your website currently has. Track this metric monthly. Any growth is good unless they come from sites that have a bad reputation according to search engines.

Keywords

Keep a list of the keywords that are driving traffic to your website from organic search. On a monthly basis, dive deeper into your organic search traffic and analyze what keywords were responsible for driving the traffic. Your brand keywords are usually going to be responsible for the bulk of it. If possible, separate out brand keywords and pay close attention to the non-branded keywords that are driving traffic to your website.

Rankings

Select a list of the top 10 keywords that you want to rank for. Every month, go in and conduct a search on Google and see where you rank. Record your rank and you will be able to see if your SEO efforts have helped you improve. Make note of jumps of over five spots, because those changes are usually not the result of normal search engine updates and changes.

Now What?

By this point you should have a firm understanding of what SEO is and why every online business needs to recognize how critical it is. Developing and executing an SEO strategy can be a daunting task. However, this process is completely manageable if you dedicate adequate time and resources to it. There are several things to consider when getting started with SEO.

Make a List of Keywords

Do some keyword research and make a list of all the keywords you would like to rank for on the search engines. Rank this list in order of priority or relevance to your business. This should be a living and breathing document that you review and update at least on a monthly basis. This will ensure you continue conducting keyword research and allow you to make note of the keywords you are already ranking for.

Build Keyword-Focused Pages

After conducting keyword research, you will have a good idea of how many specific webpages you want to create. Each webpage will need content and pictures. Also, you need to decide where these webpages will live on your website and what other pages or offers they should link to. Make a list of the assets that need to be created or gathered and devise a plan to get it done.

Set Up a Blog

As discussed previously, blogging can be an incredible way to rank for keywords and engage your website‟s users. If your business does not already have a blog, set one up and make a point to blog at least one a week. Remember, you are blogging for your audience, not the search engines. Write about things your audience and/or prospects are interested in, and they will naturally find you via the search engines. Remember that every blog post is a new webpage (a lottery ticket) for getting found on the search engines.

Create a Link-Building Plan

Link building is the primary objective of off-page SEO. Dedicate some time to brainstorm the many different ways you can go about attracting inbound links to your website. Start small – maybe share your links with other local businesses in exchange for links to their sites. Write a few blog posts and share them on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Another great way to attract inbound links is to use your blog to post articles related to current events or news. That way you increase the chances of attracting links from news outlets or industry influencers.

Stay Current on SEO News & Practices

Like the overall marketing landscape, search engines are ever-evolving. Staying on top of current trends and best practices is a hard task. The best way is to read. There are multiple online resources that make it easy for you to stay on top of SEO news and changes that may impact your website. Here are a few resources to check out and get you started:

• www.SEOMoz.com
• www.SEOBook.com
• www.SERoundTable.com
• www.SearchEngineLand.com
• inboundmarketing.com

You should now have all of the tools and understand all of the concepts you need to get started on SEO basics. Now, take your time to figure the strategy that is right for you and start optimizing!

Previous sections of this article:
Part 1 – Introduction to SEO
Part 2 – On-Page SEO
Part 3 – Off-Page SEO
Part 4 – Identifying Keywords
>Part 5 – Measuring Success

₪ How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords?

As discussed in the Long-Tail Concept & Theory section of this blog series, the key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic head terms, they are associated with more qualified traffic and users that are most likely further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process.

Relevance is the key factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Remember, the more specific you are, the better. For instance, if you own a company that installed swimming pools, which keyword do you think is more likely to attract qualified prospects for your business?

“swimming pools” vs. “fiberglass in-ground pool installation”

Obviously if someone is searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” his brain is in research mode. They are looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation – that could be you! Optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place, but there is no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer.

Another factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.”

If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages because traffic from other locations is not going to be that much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is a wise choice to create a separate webpage dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people in those locations are searching.

Figuring out where to start when it comes to keywords can seem challenging. Guessing is not a recommended practice for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business. We’ll cover these in the next few sections.

Check Your Web Analytics

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics or ReInvigorate will allow you to see what organic search keywords are already driving traffic to your website. These keywords will provide a good baseline of core keywords, and provide you with a list of keywords and performance which you can benchmark your future SEO efforts against.

Keyword Research Tools

Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great place to start. You can insert one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address, and Google will then return a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.

Another tool worth checking out is Google Insights for Search. This tool allows you to enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. You are then given results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (press coverage), where the traffic is coming from, and similar keywords.

Search for Keywords

Besides looking at your web analytics data or using a keyword research tool, there is a lot to be said for simply going on the search engines and conducting a few searches. Using the search engines can help you answer critical questions like:

• How much competition is in the space? See how many search results there are. If there are hundreds of thousands or millions of results, ask yourself if it is really worth the time and effort to play in that space.
• Where do your competitors rank? Pick a keyword you would like to optimize for and look at the top 20 results. Are you competitors anywhere to be found? Where do you rank? Are you ranking at all? This information will guide you in making a decision to carve out a niche for yourself with keywords where your competitors are not playing, or you may find a keyword you think is worth picking a battle over.
• Is Google providing other recommendations? When you type a keyword into Google, it will automatically populate the search results as you type. This feature is called Google Instant. This is Google’s attempt at trying to anticipate what you are searching for. Google is giving you results based off of previous search data. You can use this data to your advantage. Simply start typing in a keyword and see what keywords Google populates under your search result. This is a quick way to get keyword ideas.

Previous & Next sections of this article:
Part 1 – Introduction to SEO
Part 2 – On-Page SEO
Part 3 – Off-Page SEO
>Part 4 – Identifying Keywords
Part 5 – Measuring Success

Compared to on-page SEO, off-page SEO can certainly be more difficult to execute. Off-page SEO entails building relationships with other websites through the creation of attractive content, or reaching out to the people who run the websites. This process of building relationships is called link building. Who is linking to you, how they are linking to you, and how your content is shared in social networks and across the web are all factors that can have a significant impact on your ability to rank on the SERP.

Who’s Linking to You?

Do you know? As discussed in the What it Takes to Rank section of this book, you can use free tools to determine what websites are already linking to you, something the search engines are very concerned about. Although twenty inbound links from your friends’ websites may be a good start to link building, garnering one link from a major publication or educational website (with a .edu address) could be worth more than the power of those twenty links combined.

Since the Internet is essentially an inter-linking network of pages and websites that make up the World Wide Web, not every link is created equal. Links from major publications and blogs usually provide more link juice because they are visited by millions of people each day. Therefore, they have an incredible impact on the ability for webpage to go viral.

It is in a newspaper website’s very nature to link to authoritative websites that relate to current stories and trends. Therefore, these websites are most likely more valuable than others. The same goes for education websites with a .edu domain, since these are reserved for educational institutions. As such, the search engines realize that links to your website from these websites equate to you having more authority.

How are they Linking to You?

Just like when anchor text is used to link an internal webpage to another one of your webpages, the use of anchor text when another website links to you can be extremely helpful in creating relevancy to certain keywords and phrases. If you have the option, always request keyword-rich anchor text for a link that uses your domain. That said, if you have no other option, still take a link with anchor text to your domain. All link juice is good.

A common practice in linking building is link trading, or “I will put a link to your website on my website if you put a link to my mine on yours.” These types of links are referred to as reciprocal links. Since all link juice is good link juice, reciprocal links are not prohibited, but their value is certainly not as good as a one-way link to your website. There was most likely a time when reciprocal links were just as good as any other, but the search engines are always getting smarter in determining how much juice a link should receive.

Just like any other aspect of SEO, throwing money at link building is bad. Paying others to link to you is strictly prohibited by the search engines. In fact, all paid links must include a tag, called a no-follow tag, which tell the search engines not to give those links credit. If you’re caught with un-tagged paid links (the linker or the linkee), your website could be suspended from the search engines or blacklisted for good.

Links to your website from advertisements are not counted as inbound links by the search engines. If they discover paid link relationships that are not classified as advertisements, you risk having your website suspended from being listed on the SERP, or even blacklisted if the instance is deemed severe enough.

If you don’t have the time to do link building, but do have some cash, there are SEO firms that you can hire to help you with this task. Some firms have questionable SEO practices at best, so it is best to do extensive research before signing any agreements or cutting a check. Here are 10 signs that an SEO firm may use bad techniques:

• Sign #1. Making Promises that are Too Good to be True
• Sign #2. Using “Black Hat” SEO Techniques
• Sign #3. Targeting the Wrong Keywords
• Sign #4. Employing Shoddy Linking Schemes
• Sign #5. Promising to List Your Site in Hundreds of Online Directories
• Sign #6. Redesigning Your Site or Creating New Pages Without 301 Redirects
• Sign #7. Focusing on Metadata Instead of On-Page SEO
• Sign #8. Creating Bad Content
• Sign #9. Driving Irrelevant Traffic
• Sign #10. Offering a One-Time Fixes with No Ongoing Maintenance

Using Social Media to Spread Content

Use of social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn has exploded over the last few years. In fact, the latest figures from ComScore suggest that 16% of all time spent online is spent on a social network. With hundreds of millions of users across these social networks sharing content they find online with their friends and followers, search engines have begun to take notice.
According to SEOMoz, the amount of social activity that a webpage has on social networks (shares, recommendations, likes, links, +1‟s, etc.) is an important factor in that page’s ability to rank on the SERP. Simply put, search engines have realized that content shared on social networks is extremely influential, and should therefore rank higher. Beyond using social networks to engage new prospects, drive leads, and build brand awareness, businesses should consider all of the SEO benefits they miss out on by not having a brand presence.

In order to capitalize on the boost to your SERP rankings from social media, you need to make your content easy to share. Implementing social network buttons across your website is the easiest way to accomplish this. Installing the buttons is easy if you use a service like AddThis, ShareThis etc.

Using Email to Spread Content

Almost any business these days uses email to nurture relationships with their current leads and customers, and utilizes promotional email blasts to attract new ones. It is no surprise that with the death of direct mail over the past few years, email marketing has exploded. It has never been easier to set up an email program, upload your leads, and send them communication. Obviously, the extreme rate at which businesses have adopted email has deteriorated its effectiveness industry-wide. There is so much noise out there that you need to make every email send count.

Just like you need to make the content on your website easy to share in social media, you need to do the same for email. Aside from having clear call-to-action in your emails to nurture your list, drive leads, and convert them to customers, you should also make it easy for your email readers to share the content with friends and post it to social networks. This will increase the reach of your website content and make it easier for you to get inbound links for SEO.

Previous & Next sections of this article:
Part 1 – Introduction to SEO
Part 2 – On-Page SEO
> Part 3 – Off-Page SEO
Part 4 – Identifying Keywords
Part 5 – Measuring Success

There are multiple elements on your website that you can control to make it easy for the search engines to index your content and understand what it is all about. Here’s what we’ll cover in Part 2 – On-Page SEO:

• Website Content
• URL Structure
• Pictures
• Title Tags & Meta Tags
• Headline Tags
• Internal Linking

Website Content

As mentioned in the Content is King section, you want to write content that your audience will find valuable and engaging. Aside from the topical nature of the content, the way you format your webpages can have an impact on how the search engine bots digest your content. Every webpage you create should have a thought-provoking headline to grab the reader’s attention, and should also include the keyword or phrase that the webpage covers. Other body formatting, such as bolding certain keywords or phrases, can help stress the importance of phrases you are optimizing for.

URL Structure

The actual structure of your website URL can have an impact on the search engines’ ability to index and understand your website’s content. Opting for a more organized URL structure will have the greatest impact. Some website creation software will insert arbitrary numbers and code in the URL. Although this may be optimal for the software, it serves no other purpose. If you can edit the URL to include the title of your webpage, you should do so. In fact, some website creation software will automatically create URLs based off of your webpage content in order to eliminate this issue.

Pictures

There is nothing worse than landing on a webpage and being faced with mountains of text. Not only are pictures a great way to break up sections of text, but they also serve as an opportunity to communicate with the search engines. Because search engines cannot tell what a picture is by scanning it, they look for clues in two places.

Every picture you upload to your website will have a file name. When the picture is inserted on your website, the picture’s file name actually lives in your website’s sources code, or HTML. Since the search engines scan your website’s code, you should use file names that describe the picture. For example, “red-tennis-shoes-velcro.jpg” is much more useful than “pic12345.jpg”.

Additionally, you can give the search engines an extra hand by including alt tags on all pictures on your website. Alt tags are short snippets of code that allow you to tag each photo on your site with a short text blurb.

Title Tags & Meta Tags

Besides an actual text headline on your page, every webpage you create has a title tag. This is the text snippet that appears in the upper left corner or on the tabs of your web browser. Also, the title tag is the blue link that the search engines show when they list your webpage on the SERP. Title tags max out at 75 characters, so choose your words wisely.

Meta tags are snippets of code you can include within your webpage’s HTML. The meta tags are usually located near the title tag code in the head of your HTML. There are two meta tags – meta description and meta keywords.

The meta description is a text snippet that describes what your specific webpage is about. Meta descriptions are usually the first place a search engine will look to find text to put under your blue link when they list your website on the SERP. If you do not have a meta description, the search engines will usually select a random piece of content from the page they are linking to. The meta description is limited to 150 characters.

Meta keywords consists of an additional text snippet in the HTML that allows you to list a few different keywords that relate to your webpage. Back in the day, search engines used this field to determine what keywords to rank your webpage for. Now, most search engines claim they do not even use meta keywords when indexing content. Some small or niche search engines may still use it though. As a best practice, it is recommended to put 5-7 keywords in the meta keywords, but don’t spend too much time thinking about it.

Headline Tags

When the search engine bots scan your webpages, they look for clues to determine exactly what your webpage is about. Keywords that are treated differently than most others on the page show the search engines that they are more important than other keywords on the page. This is why the use of headline tags within your page is so important. By using various headline tags (each tag will produce a different size headline), you not only make your webpage easier to digest from a reader’s standpoint, but you will also give the search engines definitive clues as to what is important on the page.

Internal Linking

Up until this point we have only referenced inbound links, or those links coming to you website from other websites. When creating content for your website on your blog or on specific webpages, you may want to reference other pages on your website. You can reference these other pages by inserting a link to another webpage within a specific webpage’s content. The use of anchor text is recommended when linking to another webpage or even another website. When anchor text is used, it implies that the page you are linking to is about the keyword or phrase you use as your anchor. This is yet another way you can help out the search engines.

Previous & Next sections of this article:
Part 1 – Introduction to SEO
> Part 2 – On-Page SEO
Part 3 – Off-Page SEO
Part 4 – Identifying Keywords
Part 5 – Measuring Success

• Part 1: Introduction to SEO
• Part 2: On-Page SEO
• Part 3: Off-Page SEO
• Part 4: Identifying Keywords
• Part 5: Measuring Success

Part 1 – this post – will cover the following topics:

• What is SEO?
• Google Replaces the Phone Book
• How Search Engines Work
• What it Takes to Rank
• Long-Tail Concept & Theory
• Content is King
• How to Approach Your SEO Strategy

So let us begin…

Introduction to SEO

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.

SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page.

So, why is it important for your business’ website to be listed on search engines? On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second. Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service. Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your website’s ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers.

What about paid search? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines. However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads anyway.

Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone’s best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.

Google Replaces the Phone Book

Outbound marketing as we know it is dead. It used to be that a majority of a local company’s marketing budget went to yellow pages, newspaper, and radio advertisements. In order for you to get any business, you had to put your offers and advertisements in your prospect’s face. Well, not anymore. The age of the Internet has made it so that consumers are now in control.

It has never been easier for consumers to tune out the plethora of advertisements and commercials they hear each day. Since you can no longer get their attention with outbound marketing, you have to switch your approach to inbound marketing and make sure you’re easy to find when consumers are looking for you. When was the last time you used a phone book? Google is the new phone book. If your website is not indexed and optimized to show for keywords and phrases that are relevant to what you have to offer, all of that potential traffic is going to your competitors.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines have one objective – to provide you with the most relevant results possible in relation to your search query. If the search engine is successful in providing you with information that meets your needs, then you are a happy searcher. And happy searchers are more likely to come back to the same search engine time and time again because they are getting the results they need.

In order for a search engine to be able to display results when a user types in a query, they need to have an archive of available information to choose from. Every search engine has proprietary methods for gathering and prioritizing website content. Regardless of the specific tactics or methods used, this process is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter a search query.

How do they do it? Every search engine has what are referred to as bots, or crawlers, that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and following links on each webpage to other webpages. If your website has not been indexed, it is impossible for your website to appear in the search results. Unless you are running a shady online business or trying to cheat your way to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), chances are your website has already been indexed.

So, big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are constantly indexing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of webpages. How do they know what to show on the SERP when you enter a search query? The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.

• Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website’s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
• Who’s linking to you: As the search engine bots scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially, every inbound link counts as a vote for that website’s content. Also, each inbound link holds different weight. For instance, a link from a highly authoritative website like The New York Times (nytimes.com) will give a website a bigger boost than a link from a small blog site. This boost is sometimes referred to as link juice.

When a search query is entered, the search engine looks in its index for the most relevant information and displays the results on the SERP. The results are then listed in order of most relevant and authoritative.

If you conduct the same search on different search engines, chances are you will see different results on the SERP. This is because each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm that considers multiple factors in order to determine what results to show in the SERP when a search query is entered.

A few factors that a search engine algorithm may consider when deciding what information to show in the SERP include:

• Geographic location of the searcher
• Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
• Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
• Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
• Back end code or HTML of webpage
• Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)

With a 200B market cap, Google dominates the search engine market. Google became the leader by fundamentally revolutionizing the way search engines work and giving searchers better results with their advanced algorithm. With 64% market share, according to Compete, Inc., Google is still viewed as the primary innovator and master in the space.

Before the days of Google (circa 1997), search engines relied solely on indexing web page content and considering factors like keyword density in order to determine what results to put at the top of the SERP. This approach gave way to what are referred to as black-hat SEO tactics, as website engineers began intentionally stuffing their webpages with keywords so they would rank at the top of the search engines, even if their webpages were completely irrelevant to the search result.

What it Takes to Rank

It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be tricky. There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance.

Rank
Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the organic section of the SERP (don’t be confused by the paid ads at the very top), then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank is 2, and so on. As discussed previously in How Search Engines Work, your rank is an indicator of how relevant and authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered.

Tracking how your website ranks for a specific keyword over time is a good way to determine if your SEO techniques are having an impact. However, since there are so many other factors beyond your control when it comes to ranking, do not obsess over it. If your website jumps 1-5 spots from time to time, that’s to be expected. It’s when you jump 10, 20, 30 spots up in the rankings that it makes sense to pat yourself on the back.

Authority
As previously discussed in the How Search Engines Work section, search engines determine how authoritative and credible a website’s content is by calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) it has. However, the number of inbound links does not necessarily correlate with higher rankings. The search engines also look at how authoritative the websites that link to you are, what anchor text is used to link to your website, and other factors such as the age of your domain.

You can track over time how authoritative your website is by monitoring a few different metrics. There are a variety of tools to help you keep track. HubSpot offers a free tool called Website Grader that will show you how many domains are linking to your website, and also provide your website’s Moz rank. MozRank is SEOmoz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. It is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., Google’s PageRank).

Relevance
Relevance is a one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search engines will review your website’s structure, use of keywords in your URLs, page formatting (such as bolded text), and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text.

While there is no way to track how relevant your website is, there are some SEO basics you can practice to cover your bases and make sure you are giving the search engines every possible opportunity to consider your website. We’ll get to that a little later.

Search engines are extremely complex. Bottom line: the search engines are trying to think like human beings. It is very easy to get caught up in modifying your website’s content just so you rank on the search engines. When in doubt, always err on the side of providing relevant and coherent content that your website’s audience (your prospects) can digest. If you find yourself doing something solely for the search engines, you should take a moment to ask yourself why.

Long-Tail Concept & Theory

In order to get your website’s content to rank on the search engines, you need to take the path of least resistance. Although trying to rank for highly trafficked keywords and terms may seem like a logical approach, it will most likely lead to a lot of frustration and wasted resources. Also, even if you end up getting traffic from these types of keywords, chances are the quality of the traffic will be low due to disinterest in what you specifically have to offer.

Think of every search query as being like a snow flake – they are all different. There are billions more unique search queries than there are generic ones. In fact, if you were to add up all search engine traffic that comes from the most popular keywords, it would not even come close to the amount of traffic that comes from searches using those more unique queries. This is called the theory of the long-tail.

A critical component of SEO is choosing the right keywords for optimization. If you sell shoes, you may want your website to rank for “shoe store,” (a head term), but chances are you are going to have some trouble there. However, if you optimize multiple pages on your website for each specific pair of shoes that you sell, you are going to have much more success and it will be easier to rank on the SERP. A keyword like “red tennis shoes with Velcro” (a long-tail keyword or term) is a good example. Sure, the number of people that search for this keyword will be much lower than the number that search for “shoe store,” but you can almost bet that those searchers are much farther down the sales funnel and may be ready to buy.

This is why long-tail keywords are so effective. They target people who are looking to perform a specific action, like buy something, or looking for a specific piece of information, like a how-to or a service that can solve their problem. By choosing to optimize with long-tail keywords, you will find it easier to rank on the search engines, drive qualified traffic, and turn that traffic into leads and customers.

Content is King

We’ve all heard it – when it comes to SEO, content is king. Without rich content, you will find it difficult to rank for specific keywords and drive traffic to your website. Additionally, if your content does not provide value or engage users, you will be far less likely to drive leads and customers.

It is impossible to predict how people will search for content and exactly what keywords they are going to use. The only way to combat this is to generate content and lots of it. The more content and webpages you publish, the more chances you have at ranking on the search engines. Lottery tickets are a good analogy here. The more lottery tickets you have, the higher the odds are that you will win. Imagine that every webpage you create is a lottery ticket. The more webpages you have, the higher your chances are of ranking in the search engines.

As you already know, the search engines are smart. If you create multiple webpages about the same exact topic, you are wasting your time. You need to create lots of content that covers lots of topics. There are multiple ways you can use content to expand your online presence and increase your chances of ranking without being repetitive. Here are few examples:

• Homepage: Use your homepage to cover your overall value proposition and high-level messaging. If there was ever a place to optimize for more generic keywords, it is your homepage.
• Product/Service Pages: If you offer products and/or services, create a unique webpage for each one of them.
• Resource Center: Provide a webpage that offers links to other places on your website that cover education, advice, and tips.
• Blog: Blogging is an incredible way to stay current and fresh while making it easy to generate tons of content. Blogging on a regular basis (once per week is ideal) can have a dramatic impact on SEO because every blog post is a new webpage.

While conducting SEO research, you may come across articles that discuss being mindful of keyword density (how often you mention a keyword on a page). Although following an approach like this may seem technically sound, it is not recommended. Remember: do not write content for the search engines. Write content for your audience and everything else will follow. Make sure each webpage has a clear objective and remains focused on one topic, and you will do just fine.

How to Approach your SEO Strategy

When developing an SEO strategy, it is best to split your initiatives into two buckets: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO covers everything you can control on each specific webpage and across your website to make it easy for the search engines to find, index, and understand the topical nature of your content. Off-page SEO covers all aspects of SEO that happen off your website to garner quality inbound links. In Part 2, we’ll get into on-page SEO first, and then we’ll tackle off-page SEO in the next section.

Previous & Next sections of this article:
> Part 1 – Introduction to SEO
Part 2 – On-Page SEO
Part 3 – Off-Page SEO
Part 4 – Identifying Keywords
Part 5 – Measuring Success

…for lonely people that don’t have a real life
…just a fab that will pass and disappear
…not going to bring in new clients or sales
…going to make me rich
…a waste of my time…

and I could go on. I’ve heard so many opinions on social media that I could compile it in a caricature book and probably make quite a bit of money as it would be quite funny to most.

But while there’s as many opinions out there as there are people, I thought it would be interesting to sort out the facts from the myths.

Myth 1: Social Media is for lonely people without a real life
For those not really familiar with how to effectively use social media or haven’t really used it at all, it may seem like just a bunch of people telling each other what they had for lunch. But for those with a bit of experience and know-how, it can be a very profitable tool for their business.

Contests, sweepstakes and giveaways can be very effective when used in conjunction with social media. Same goes for great content. If you have a great article or video on your website that has educational and/or entertainment value and you share it with others on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, it has the potential of becoming viral and can give you the kind of valuable exposure money just can’t buy.

Myth 2: For Social Media to work, you have to be on all of them
Woah! Stop that train, I wanna get off!! It doesn’t matter if you’re on all the social media platforms available in the entire world, if you are not using them properly you might as well not be on any of them because what you’ll get in return is: NOTHING!
What is important is that you chose the ones you feel will work best for you and use them smartly and effectively.

My advice: Unless you’re an experienced and skilled marketer, focus on one social network at a time. Maximize the potential of each network, before moving onto the next one.

Myth 3: It’s easy for anyone to be successful with Social Media
Some of you are not going to like this one but let’s face it, if we’re to be honest, we have to admit that each of us have our own strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone is good at math, physics, languages etc. I’m sure you have said at least once: “That guy/woman should not be behind a wheel! He/she can’t drive to save his/her life!”

And well, it’s the same for social media. You hear day in and day out how easy it is and how successful you can be if you do this or that but not everyone has a great mental aptitude for social media, it’s just a fact. If you find yourself in that unfortunate category, think about hiring someone to work it for you. After all, you do use an accountant to keep your books, or a lawyer to solidify agreements and contracts.

Myth 4: With Social Media, I don’t need face-to-face networking
That’s just “bull droppings”. There will always be a need for face-to-face communication; its how we humans are designed, period. People will always prefer direct person-to-person communication over internet/phone or other forms of communication.

Even if online networking has many advantages, the most common of them being convenience, it will never surpass the impact of real face-to-face communication and networking.

Myth 5: With Social Media, I don’t need a Website
As I’ve already mentioned in one of my previous articles, Social Media is a marketing tool for your website, not the other way around. A good strong website always comes before social media, or at least it should. Although you can apply some branding to your social media network profiles & pages, there are always application-side limitations. Nothing can replace a good, solid website. Not yet anyways.

For one, search engines are content driven and your website is the one platform where you can put all your rich content without limitations or restrictions. It is also where your Branding can really be enforced to its full potential. I cannot stress it enough, your Image Branding Matters! Think about it.

Myth 6: Blogging doesn’t work
Blogging does work. But like social media, there are ways to make blogging more efficient and ways to make blogging a waste of your time. How you go about it is up to you but here, I want to explain how social media and blogging can go hand in hand.

If you are serious about marketing and decide to use blogging as a platform, here’s how to go about it:
First, you need a plan
- what are you going to blog about?
- What value does your blog have to your current and potential customers?
- What do I want my blog to achieve?

If the answer to the last question was bring in more clients & boost sales then here’s how your social media can work to promote your blog:
- Post excerpts of blog posts on social media to drive traffic to your site.
- Promote videos that are on your site and invite them to visit your site to see more videos
- You can use auto posting systems that will automatically post your blog article on facebook, twitter etc… but be careful which system you chose, not all are good.
- Offer special promotions only to people who are fans of your social network.
- Etc.
There are tons of ways in which social media can help you promote your website or special offers. What social media is supposed to do is bring people to your site and give you the opportunity to interact with your current & potential customers. But once they have gone to your website, many will surf around a little more and may come across something else of interest.

Myth 7: It’s not possible to measure site traffic stemming from social media
A myth? Ya Betcha! For one, google analytics offers many goal customizations to do just that. Sure, you’ll have to study their tutorials to find out how it can be done, but it can. As an example, you can track which social media your visitors came from and what actions they took. You can then see which ones generated the most activity and the best results.

Myth 8: I don’t have time for Social Media
I suppose this one falls under the category of time management and discipline.
If you run a restaurant, you schedule shopping, inventory, cleaning etc into the daily schedule, yes? Same goes for running a successful social media interaction:
- Organize your system according to your needs
- Make use of available tools to make social media effective with the least amount of time invested.
- Get in and get out – once inside your social media network, it is tempting to sit and chat – do what you got to do and get out.

Myth 9: Social Media isn’t for my type of business
Hmmmm…let’s have a closer look at this one and let me ask you:
- Does your business need to generate new leads or traffic?
- Could you benefit from having more ways to build your brand?
- Would you like to strengthen your SEO efforts?
- Would it be helpful to give your customers a platform to give feedback and suggestions in real-time?

If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, social media is right for your business.

Myth 10: I created a profile but got nothing out of it
Do you know what happens if you create a profile page on a social network and don’t promote it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing will happen.

Unfortunately, far too many marketers think all they have to do is create a profile page on the various social networks and somehow people will magically appear at their doorstep – credít cards in hand pushing each other to be first in line to buy something. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.

Do you think that if you rent commercial space, staff it, put in merchandise and just sit there with your doors open, people will come running to buy? No, of course you don’t. Just apply that same logic to your website & your social media platforms. They are part of your business – sort of like side & back doors or outlets – and need to be promoted. Creating a profile is only the first step, you also need to participate.

See you on facebook or twitter or linked in… :)

Now that I’ve vented my frustration by putting it in writing, let’s get to how it should be done. But just before I start, allow me one more indulgence and let me at least tell these people that if they used BCC in the contact field to insert everyone’s email, no one would be able to see everyone else’s email address and copy it. It is not the case for TO or CC fields, only BCC hides the recipients email addresses.

Ouuuffff, deep breath…

Email Marketing done the right Way!

The Basics

₪First of all, the people whose emails you add to your Email Marketing list should have consented to receiving emails from you or your company, I think this goes without saying.

₪You should be clear as to what they can expect to receive; Information, Promotions, etc…

₪They should have some kind of idea as to the frequency of those emails, and if possible, give them options to receive them as they come, by weekly digest, monthly digest etc. (this last may not always be possible as it depends more often than not on what platform you use (Constant Contact, Icontact, Personal email or automated self hosted service platform).

₪It should be clear to them that you will not share, sell or use their emails for any other purpose. This can go in the Privacy Statement part of your website and at end of every email and perhaps in your initial email invitation for them to subscribe if you go that route.

₪You should give everyone an easy unsubscribe option on your website as well as within each email they receive from you. Their email should also either be automatically removed or you should do so promptly.

₪Your emails should contain no more than 3 different sections (themes, articles, promotions etc.) at a time. This does not include your welcome introduction.

₪Your content and/or promotions should be of value, well written and well presented always keeping your branding in mind.

*Click -> here to view & download CAN-SPAM Compliance Guide for Business pdf. This pdf comes from The Bureau of Consumer Protection-Business Center Website

Make your Email Marketing count

The Specifics

For quite some time now, I have been subscribed to HubSpot newsletters and find that what I have received from them was very much worth my while. What I’m going to share next are the highlights of a pdf that you can download -> here.

**Note: You will have to subscribe (free) to get the full version as I don’t have the rights to publish it in it’s entirety.

₪Define Your Objectives

• Do you want more leads?
• Do you want to inform and educate your audience?
• Do you want to renew relationships with existing clients?
• Do you want to introduce your offerings or enhance your brand and reputation?
• Do you want more sales?

₪Manage Your Lists

• How to Build Strong Contact Lists
• Should you buy a list?
• Co-Sponsored Email Marketing Opportunities
• Pulling Leads From Lead Directories and Databases
• Different Ways to Segment Your Lists
• Different Messaging for Clients and Prospects

₪Craft Compelling Content and Offers

• How to Create Valuable Content
• How to Craft Calls-to-Action That Generate Responses
• The Ever-Important Subject Line
• Should you use content from other resources?
• Keeping a Consistent Voice Throughout Your Email Marketing Content
• Optimizing Your Email’s Design and Layout for Maximum Results
• Creating an Editorial Calendar for Email Marketing Campaigns

₪Follow Email Marketing Best Practices

• How do you keep your email out of spam folders?
• What is the CAN-SPAM Act?
• What does opt-in mean?
• How often should you send emails?
• When is the best time and day of the week to send an email?

₪Choose a Professional Email Service Provider

• How can an email service provider help with your email marketing strategy?
• Things to Consider When Choosing an Email Service Provider

₪Measure Your Results

• Important Email Marketing Metrics
• Leveraging Your Email Metrics Across Other Marketing Initiatives
• Successful Subject Lines
• Popular Downloads
• Effective Calls-to-Action

₪Maximize Your Content

• On Your Website
• On Your Company Blog and Social Media Sites
• In Trade Magazines and Industry News Sites
• For Webinar Content

Happy Email Marketing trails…