Mid Columbia Webs » Marketing

5 Ways to Encourage People to Share Your Content

Michelle — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:58:21 +0000

WordPress shortcode: Display a thumbnail of any website
Published: August 8, 2011
Source: WpRecipes.com
The first step is to create the shortcode. To do so, simply paste the code below into your functions.php file. function wpr_snap($atts, $content = null) { extract(shortcode_atts(array( snap = http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/, url = http://www.catswhocode.com, alt = My image, w = 400, // width h = 300 // height ), $atts)); $img = img src= . $snap . . urlencode($url) . ?w= . $w . h= . $h . alt= . $alt . /; return $img; } add_shortcode(snap, wpr_snap);...
Plugin by C. Murray Consulting

Local Businesses need to Blog

Online reviews, do you take them seriously?

Michelle — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:20:42 +0000

Web based review sites and smart phones are providing local small businesses with incredible opportunities to make a huge impact on their businesses.

Online reviews are simply a fact of life nowdays. Even small communities’ businesses are being reviewed online. With smartphones, the reviews can now take place instantaneously, via many apps designed to allow access to review sites, including Yelp’s iphone app. According to Yelp:

- Just over 1 in 4 searches on Yelp are performed from our popular iPhone application.
- Even more thrilling: every five seconds someone uses the Yelp app to call a local business.

If you believe you can dismiss these reviews, take note. According to Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey from last year, “ninety percent of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.”

You can reasonably assume people will ask their family and friends first for a recommendation but if none are familiar with your business people are highly likely to base their decision to visit your business based upon online reviews. If you have consistently negative reviews, you can be pretty certain they will decide to go to elsewhere.

What are people saying about your business online?

No business will receive all glowing reviews. In fact, people are more likely to trust the reviews they find online if there are some negative reviews.

However, it is important to pay attention to all the reviews, even the negative ones. Is there a consistent theme with the negative reviews? Are people commenting frequently about poor service, a poor product, bad business practices? You need to take these reviews seriously and look at them objectively. Is there something you can do to improve the experience of your customer?

Use online reviews to find ways to improve your services, business processes and products. Ignoring the bad reviews will not make them go way, in fact you can assume you will loose business if all people use to make a decision to go to your business is the reviews they are finding online.

Find out how Mid Columbia Webs can help you optimize your web presence to take advantage of these online review sites, contact us for a free consult to learn more!

What changes (if any) have you made to your business based upon online reviews? Please comment below and share your experience.

Website Traffic – Who’s Visiting Your Site?

Michelle — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:26:07 +0000

photo credit: kevinmarsh

In order to measure website traffic you need have a web analytics software installed. What is web analytics? According to wikipedia:

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.^[1]

There are a number of free and paid options out there and I’ll list a few below but Mashable as a fairly comprehensive list. I do not recommend using any software which provides a visible visitor counter on your site. These statistics do not increase traffic to your site and make your website look outdated.

Depending on your needs, you can either track your traffic in real-time or a delayed statistics. You can use more than one option in conjunction as each provides different levels of data.

A couple which I found interesting based on Mashable’s post are:

1. VisitStats – provides real time website tracking, web monitoring software to alert you if your website goes down, touch mapping, and a tool for identifying your visitors by website, email, etc. Looks as though there is a free and paid version

2. Clicky – another offering real time analytics and has an iphone version

3. Woopra – real time analytics which I have used. User-friendly and has a wordpress plugin to allow you to easily integrate it with your wordpress site. I’ve had a couple of issues with it not displaying my current visitors stats within my website but I can view these stats when logged into my woopra account. I am not big on tracking my real time data so have not taken the time to find out why I’m having a problem.

4. Google Analytics – Google analytics is a very popular choice for the simply reason it’s FREE and provides good data. All you need is a google account in order to start using it. The easiest way to get google analytics on your site is to sign up for your google account, go through the steps of setting up google analytics and send the generated code to your web developer. If you have good technical skills you can certainly insert the code yourself, but if you are running a site with standard html pages, the code will have to be added to each page to monitor your site correctly.

You can get a general idea of how your site is performing by looking at the data in any analytics program but to really understand the data it’s important to educate yourself. I will be purchasing Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity based on the recommendation of a colleague.

Without analytics it is impossible to know how effective not only your website is but your marketing efforts to drive traffic to your site. There is certainly much more to understand when tracking performance but utilizing and understanding web analytics is a first step.

Do I Need an Email Newsletter Service on my Blog or Website?

Do I Need an Email Newsletter Service on my Blog or Website?

Michelle — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:55:36 +0000

One of the very best kept secrets to an effective small business blog or website is an email newsletter. Your readers (prospects and customers) subscribe to receive emails from your in the form of a newsletter or promotional marketing emails.

You’ll want to offer your customers something of value in each newsletter or promotional email you send out. You could also offer your readers something for free in exchange for signing up to your email newsletter. A free report or a coupon always go over well. If you can offer your readers a small gift, you will get more signups on your email newsletter list.

There are two basic types of email services you can get, one is just an email newsletter service and the other has the additional functionality of an autoresponder. If you just need to send out a basic email to one list, once a week or once a month, a email newsletter service will work perfectly for you. Mid Columbia Webs recommends Mad Mimi, it is super easy to use and your just fill out your form and send out the newsletter.

If you need to have a few different lists – one for clients and suppliers, or clients and prospects, or keep your clients of each product or service separately, you may want to go with a more advanced option. Mid Columbia Webs recommends Aweber for the client who needs multiple lists. You can house as many lists as you need and can really drill down to which type of customer is on each list.

An additional benefit to Aweber is that you can set up an autoresponder. You set up a series of messages to go out to people on your list, and whenever anyone new joins your list, they are automatically queued receive the messages on the chosen dates.

An example of an autoresponder is if you want to educate your clients about your company. you set up the messages ahead of time, and when someone signs up, on Day 1 they get your welcome message, on Day 2 they get a message telling them about your company. On Day 4 they get a list of all of your services. On Day 6 they get a link to your blog. On Day 7 they get an email asking them if they have any questions.

You can use an email autoresponder or newsletter service in many ways, and Mid Columbia Webs can help you set up your mailing list on your small business website or blog.

Not utilizing an email newsletter service, is a common small business mistake, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to reach more people and retain the readers you already have. Don’t wait one minute longer!

P.S. Call or email Mid Columbia Webs today so that we can get working on your small business website and/or blog with email newsletter service.

photo credit: pbyrne