I’m here to tell you that over the years, I’ve evolved along with our constantly changing Internet. The goal now is to have your content found everywhere your prospects spend their time online. That can be many, many places.

Let’s step back and see how Businesses want a prospect to find them.

People will search industry keyphrases to find what they need- like Las Vegas Commercial Real Estate, Las Vegas Auto Insurance or Stupid Bumper Stickers. They’ll eventually narrow down the results to businesses they’d like to deal with. When they want to go back to one of  the businesses they’ve picked, they’re going to type your company name into a Google search bar as opposed the exact url into the url address bar.

Before they click your company (which should be result #1), what else do they see? Do they see some not so flattering newspaper articles about your company? Maybe where you’ve worked previously? How about the oh-so-common Ripoff Reports that all businesses just love? Your mission, if you choose to accept it is to take control of page 1 of Google when someone enters your company (or your personal name).

You must own the first page of Google for your name

There’s no question, you want to be on the first page for your targeted keywords and phrases, but just as important is when the searcher looks up your company, or your name.

Go ahead, do a search. I’ll bet you see a lot of the results of pages of where you’ve already been. That’s because Google uses your IP address and your Google account’s past history (if you’re logged in), as well as other factors (Google +) to give you results based on your previous clicks. Here’s how to get unjaded results in your web browser:

Chrome: Wrench > New Incognito Window

Firefox: Firefox Dropdown > Start Private Browsing

Safari: Edit > Private Browsing

Internet Explorer > InPrivate Browsing

Now, do the search. Results are differnt, huh? This is a better example of what someone who doesn’t have your search habits will see.

How can you own it?

If you’ve ever looked at your Analytics, you’ll see that many people search for many different mind boggling things. Now with all the social sites, you have to incorporate into your thinking that many people spend their time on many different websites/social networks. From YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the new Google Plus.

Start a Blog? Google changes their algorithm all the time – (500+ times in the last year), but the thing that will always help is good, original, industry relevant content. You can easily contribute good content with a simple Blog on your website. I always say, Social Media starts with your Blog. Are you a resource for your industry? No? Then be one. Be the go-to-person that people automatically think of when they think of your industry. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge isn’t power. It is the use of knowledge that is power. Very easy- Post good content on your website on a consistent basis.

Get Social. There’s big controversy about Google having/not having access to Facebook and Twitter’s data, but one thing is for sure, Social Profiles show in Search. Get them. Claim your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and especially Google+ accounts. Track down profiles on Social Media sites that list your business- like Avvo which is for lawyers, doctors and dentists. These websites will find your business, have it listed and show it as unclaimed. Claim it and fill out the profile. At least you’ll have a bit of control over it.

Get your content out there. Believe it or not, people search other places than just Google. People looking for Presentations will probably look on Slideshare. Slideshare is one of the most popular places to store presentations. Anytime I speak, I always have people come to me after and ask for the slides. Get your presentations online, and once again, make sure you fill out your profile. Here’s a good example:

I always bring up a Realtor friend Dru Bloomfield.I know Dru through other connections and now keep in touch on Social Media. Dru loves taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr, which is a social media photo repository website. She had someone contact her about buying a home on a golf course in Arizona. She said, “I just uploaded pictures of that golf course to Flickr“. The prospect then said, “I know… how do you think I found you?” Fill out your profiles, include your website.

We all know people that would rather watch a quick video on a subject as opposed to reading about it. Get a YouTube video channel and ask yourself: “What would I do if I had a 24/7 cable channel?” YouTube is now serving an insane 60 hours of video uploaded per minute and 4 billion video views a day. It’s the second largest search engine (behind Google, the company who owns both). Attache a video camera and mic to your computer and record away. The videos don’t have to look professionally produced. It’ll actually be better if they’re informal as people can relate better.

Google realizes that people have different channels where they like to get their information. That’s why they use them in their search results. Make use of the profiles on these social media websites and link them up to your website. So when people find them on page 1 when searching for you… you’ll have your best foot forward.

What online channels do you like using for your business?

So you’re at the point where you see the need to update your website, but aren’t sure what to change. Here are some of the things you should explore when redesigning your website.

Break down your Analytics – Whether you use Google Analytics or another Analytics program, this information gives you a wealth of information. Some of the things you can check are

• Where are visitors spending most of their time? Do these pages have calls to action? An example would be your Blog. If people are continually going to your website to read your Blog, do you have a call to action in the sidebar? If you’re writing about Health Insurance, do people know you’ll give them a free quote (if you do)?
• Where are people leaving your website? Are they consistently leaving the site from the same pages? Do those pages need to communicate better? Are those pages directing people to other area that can give people more information?
• Services like ClickTale, track and record your visitors website movements. I’ve literally seen people watch the recording and say “It’s right there!! Click it!!” With that being said, make sure your visitors can easily find the content you want them to find.

Check your Blog comments – Blog, blog, blog… I know, I always say it. You can get a lot from reading your blog comments. Are people asking for anything specific? Blog about it! If they’re asking about it enough, write a Whitepaper about it. To get the Whitepaper, just ask for their email address.

Does your website match your business model?

If you’ve had your current website for a couple of years, there’s a good chance your business may have changed a bit. You may want to put more focus on different services than you had with your other website. Think about setting up the direction you want to send your visitors based on the percentage of each service you want. You may be a corporate tax attorney and a bankruptcy attorney, and you want to get more clients in the corporate tax arena. Take that into consideration when you redesign the website.

Technology -

• Do you have someone in the office who is in front of the computer most of the day? You may want a Click-to-chat.
• Do you have a website that is mobile specific? Mobile websites are paramount now.
• If you Blog, do you have a way for your visitors to share it with their Social Media connections?
• Do you prefer to update your website yourself? You may want your website in a CMS (Content Management System) which allows you to easliy update your website on the fly.

There are plenty of other things you can look at when redesigning your website! Have anything to add? Throw it in the comments below. As always, contact me for more information.

At Google’s latest event, we’re shown how our search habits have been changed by our mobile devices.

Google has shown what most of us have already known. We use our phones for more that just making calls. A lot more. Not even including Social Media, we search the heck out of everything, all day and all week long- on different hardware.

As you can see from Google’s graph, search on the desktop/laptop starts strong on Monday, continues throughout the week, then drops off on Friday as we leave our jobs. Search drops off even more on Saturday as we spend time with our family and friends and away from our computers.

However, when we’re away from our computers, you’ll see that we still have the need to search. We still have the need to Google something- if you’re like me, you’re searching for places to eat, directions, pulling up a search to prove to a friend that you’re right about something.

You’ll see that the mobile search graph shows not only are we still searching, but our search increases on Saturday. Time away from our home/work computer = more time on our mobile computers.

Remember, these are graphs of search, not total Internet activity- Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. This is just search!

Let’s take it down to the daily level.

From Google’s above graph, you’ll see that search peaks during the work day, then drops off slightly as the night goes on (we work later and later!). However, as seen below- when desktop search drops off, mobile search picks up.

Want to watch the whole event? Check it out:

Google sees the huge potential for mobile search. When do you do the most searching?

If you want to actively promote your business to the public, a Facebook business page is a great way to do it. Your prospects and clients are already spending time on there sharing photos of last week’s party, lol’ing with their buddies, and checking up on news from their favorite retailers and other businesses. A business page allows you to keep your message in front of your clients and prospects on a consistent basis.

Business pages are public, so you can keep the pictures of yourself by the pool on your private personal page, and allow the people who want to keep updated on your business keep informed just by clicking the “like” button on your business page.

I don’t think Facebook business pages will replace company websites. With all of the changes (which sometimes seem on a whim) to the Facebook rules, layout and privacy, I think people know that leaving their content and functionality in the hands of Facebook decision makers might not be the best idea. However, Facebook can be used as a communication channel to your followers to keep them informed and drive them to your website when they want to inquire more about what your business does and is therefore a great marketing tool.

Business pages are easy to set up. You need an email address other than the email address you have for your personal Facebook page (Facebook currently only allows one email address per account).

Once signed up, you can invite people to “like” your business page. You’ll start with a name like Facebook.com/MyBusiness/1673568487369343
Once you get 25 people to “like” your business page you can get rid of the junk on the end of the URL and get a vanity URL- so it would look like this: Facebook.com/MyBusiness. Ask your existing contacts to “like” your page so you can get your vanity URL quickly, then post it and link to it from everywhere, especially your website.

When a user “likes” your business page, they’re allowing your business updates to appear in their timeline. Please don’t abuse this privilege by spouting out the same sales pitch over and over.

Facebook has different applications that allow your Facebook business page advanced functionality. These applications allow you to:
Give your Facebook page the same branding and look, consistent with your company website.
Import your company blog from your website into your Facebook business page.
Converse with people directly on your Facebook wall page
Put videos, product demos, slides, and more, on your Facebook business page with easy to use applications.

Look at Facebook like a networking event. There are already so many people there that you can develop relationships with to help your business. Though like any networking event, you need to show interest in them as well.
I can’t repeat this enough: Social Media is a two way conversation. Respect your community of followers (and their timelines) by asking for their input on products and services. Invite conversation. Show your interested users that you’re listening to what they’re saying and then build your community.

Jakob Nielsen, the king of website usability (Crowned by Internet Magazine), has completed the study of what draws more visitors further in to your website. His conclusion:

Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.

Now, I know that eye tracking studies don’t tell you everything, but this is a good indication of what might be better. Jakob Nielsen goes on:

If your first article doesn’t interest users, you lose them by “using up” all their interest as they wade through that first topic… On corporate blogs, summaries are usually superior to full articles because they let you expose users to a broad selection of topics. Offering more topics increases the likelihood that users will find something that really interests them and thus will click through to read more. (As opposed to leaving.)

Make sure you read Jakob Nielsen’s full article which shows the actual eye tracking studies.

The other problem I always had with showing the full article on the main Blog page is the way most Content Management Systems are setup. When your website visitors want to comment on your Blog, they won’t see a comment section even after they’ve completed the whole article. To comment after they’ve completed reading your blog post, they now have to click the title to get to the page where the post is by itself with a comment form at the bottom. I’ve rarely (if ever?… hmmm) seen the comment forms reside on the main Blog page.

You main blog page should function like the front page of a newspaper (yes, I just did use a newspaper as a good website example), showing different articles and letting people decide what they want to read. People can quickly see what article interests them and delve deeper into your website. People with Blog summaries on their blog homepage will be able to have more post titles showing potentially capturing the interest of a wider variety of prospects/clients.

While SMS texting and Social Media communication are on the rise, they’re still in their infancy. What is the best way for businesses to communicate with their customers? Now, I knew Sheryl Sandberg’s eulogy was a bit early and exaggerated, but the stats for the preference of email marketing when it comes to receiving ads and coupons shocked even me.

The study I’m referring to was done by Econsultancy called “How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers“. Ecommerce is very popular, but still only accounts for 8% of retail shopping. Most of our purchases are offline, though online product research, user comments and reviews relate to offline purchases. Stefan Tornquist and Jake Hird who wrote the report go on to say:

“Winners in the equation will be those who use digital communications to best enable and influence offline purchases.”

The stats on how we the consumers, like to receive our coupons, shipping information, sales updates and more show that most people prefer email… by a landslide.

42% by email. Wow. Maybe it’s because people feel they can come back to the email marketing later when they have time to read the promotion more carefully? Possibly it’s something people want to hold on to, and Social Media communications come and go which make it more time sensitive?

Below is the breakdown by age. Email still crosses age barriers and dominates.

Even eMarketer showed Email still holds the championship belt.

How about you? How do you prefer to receive promotions and coupons from your favorite stores?

For those of you who don’t know- The Edmonton Construction Association advances the interests of the Construction Industry through effective representation and provides valued services to their members.

Many of the attendees came up to me after the seminar asked me for some of the resources I used. I’ve posted my resources in the past, like with the GSBE Blog post and I think I’m going to keep the tradition going.

So here we go: I started with the video: Social Media Revolution 2:

The different Content Management Systems I spoke of (morning session asked this) are Drupal, Joomla, WordPress (WordPress hosted) and DotNetNuke.

I spoke about the American Express Open Forum.

The catalogs where you can search all submitted blog (do a search for construction) are Technorati and Blog Catalog.

One of the biggest Social Media successes is Gary Vaynerchuck and his Wine Library TV video Blog. Very informal- which makes it successful, and fun to watch.

The Social Media program I use to update and follow all my connection status’ is Tweetdeck.

Diaspora is the “Do-it-all Open Source Social Netowork” that’s being worked on right now (this came up in the afternoon session). Here is a report on Diaspora’s progress.

To see a total Pro Blog her heart out, see Dru Bloomfield’s At Home in Scottsdale. Also see Bill Marriott’s Blog.

For the end-client, it’s so easy to keep track of the blogs they follow using Google Reader. Some more free Google tools: Google Analytics will track all the visits to your website as well as giving you a wealth of information about your visitors. For more info on that subject, check my analytics posts. Google Alerts will tell you when your search term is mentioned anywhere on the internet.

The location based Social Networking I went over was Foursquare and Gowalla. And here are a few of my blog posts on how to use them: Location Based Social Networking and Location Social Networking for Business.

My Boy-to-Man Speaking Transformation

In boxing or MMA, there are some fights where the fighter is truly tested beyond what many people- including the fighter- thought he can perform. They call that fight a Boy-to-Man fight. Evander Holyfield had his moment when he fought 15 rounds with a seasoned vet Dwight Mohammed Qawi in 1986.

This trip to Edmonton, Canada was definitely my test.

Now, even though I’ve spoken about 15 times in the past year, I still barely consider myself a professional speaker. However, this Edmonton trip was my Boy-to-Man Speaking moment.

I figured out that my new friends in Edmonton don’t gamble nearly enough as they should, since there’s only one direct flight in and out to Las Vegas a day. The flight to Edmonton was at 8:05pm. Factoring in a one hour time difference meant I would get in at about midnight, and probably to bed about 12:30am. As it turns out, the flight to Edmonton was delayed 2 hours… Oh boy. Now we’re looking at 2:30am earliest bedtime. I had to present to two groups for three hours each with a one hour break in between.

I finally landed in Edmonton and got delayed (read as: “questioned for a while”) going through customs. Okay, maybe the picture to the right is a bit of an exaggeration.

Finaly, I got to sleep at about 3:10am. My alarm went off at 6am, I put on the shirt I was going to present in (the only one I had) and found out with all the traveling, the bottom button was gone. Now I’m gonna be flashing my belly button all day… great. (If anyone finds a black button at McCarran airport, please contact me).

However the funny thing was that during the seminars, I didn’t even think about the traveling or the lack of sleep. It had everything to do with the great people who turned out to see it.

With all of that craziness, I still have to say I had a great time and wouldn’t change it for the world. So I just wanted to thank them again! I hope you guys had a fun time as well! Keep in touch!

If you didn’t read my post about Location Based Networking, I’ll bring you up to date and go a bit more in depth for how business owners can benefit.

Quick recap: Location Based Social Network websites allow you to “check in” at different venues from your phone when you arrive. When you check-in, you tell all of your Social Media connections on Facebook, Twitter and the location Social Network that you’re using, what venue you’re currently at. Senseless, huh? Maybe not…

Foursquare is currently adding 10,000 new members every day. From what they tweeted the other day, that number is now at 1.7 million users.

Why does it work for businesses? People are more inclined to listen to what their friends are telling them about a restaurant, than what the restaurant’s billboard says. An “Ummm, great Steak at N9Ne steakhouse” from one of your friends works better than a billboard saying how great the restaurant’s food is.

Sounds great! How do I get my business involved?

First, go to the Foursquare business page and look up your business.

Now it’s as easy as a 2 step process:

1. Confirm your business by looking it up and clicking the “Are you the Manager of this business?”. Foursquare will then take you through the confirmation process.
2. Setup your special.

Foursquare tells you the kind of specials you, the business owner can offer:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal customer! (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days) “Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of french fries!”
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. “Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? That’s a free drink for you!”
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. “Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!”
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions
  before awarding the Special. “Show us your foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!”
• And more to come!

One of the best features of Foursquare is their Analytics for business owners. They show a lot of useful stats behind your venues’ check-ins. They break down check-ins different ways, like what time of day the most users are checking in, what gender your check-ins are, and a whole slew of other analytics.This allows you the business owner on how to focus your marketing efforts. Possibly setting up “Swarm Badges” for slow times. A

Goodie Two Shoes Mission Statement:

The Goodie Two Shoes Foundation provides disadvantaged children and children in crisis with new shoes and socks as well as other items deemed essential for good health and positive development.

They even take the personal attention given to the children a step further (see what I did there?) by measuring the child’s foot for the proper fitting shoe.

Check out Goodie Two Shoes and help out if you can.

Quick update- Nikki Berti is being acknowledged by Major League Baseball and People Magazine. They’ve teamed up to present “All-Stars Among Us,” a campaign honoring the very best of philanthropic efforts around the nation.

Make sure you vote for Nikki Berti! Go here and click Colorado Rockies. Then select Nikki Berti!

I started thinking how that can relate to websites. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference.

WIIFM

In all of sales history, WIIFM can sum up the prospects motivation. WIIFM =  What’s In It For Me? At every turn, no matter what you say or what your prospect sees, they’re asking themselves “What’s In It For Me?” Yes, we are a selfish bunch.

The question you should be asking yourself is: Does your website solve their WIIFM question?

Look at your company’s home page for 5 seconds, then look away. If you were a potential customer would you  see what you’re looking for? In other words, is it easy for a customer to see “Can this company solve my current problem”? You may love what you do, but be honest with yourself- you’re in business to make a profit. Clearly state on your Home Page what you can do for your visitors. Steer visitors to the areas that will give them more information to hire you.

Google Analytics

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Where are your visitors clicking? Do you know? In Google Analytics (I hope you have Google Analytics or another analytics program on your website by now!) you can go to Content > Site Overlay. This will tell you where your visitors are clicking on each specific page. It’ll tell you what’s most apparent and or important to them.

Ask yourself:

Is there an area you’d like to send your visitors to? If you have an area that you want your visitors to get to- is it clearly marked? Make sure that button can be easily found no matter what page they’re on.

Is there good, helpful content on your website so your prospects will return?

The latest studies show that people don’t mind clicking, just as long as they know they’re headed in the right direction. So make the path to get to their pain solving solution easy.

What pages are your visitors spending most of their time? Where do you want them to spend most of their time? Where are they leaving?

You can’t read the minds of your visitors (yet), but your Analytics numbers will give you a good picture to what’s going on on your website.

With that being said- I hope you check your numbers and stats regularly… and then make adjustments to your website. Because a bunch of the little things can add up.

What Analytics program do you use?