This isn’t exactly new, but it’s new to me so I figured I would share it with you. Tungle.me has a free tool that allows the public access to see when your calendar is open, and requst a meeting. It’s a great tool for folks that can be difficult to track down.  It’s great for me simply because I’m often on the phone when another call comes through.  I include a link to my Tungle.me account in my email signature file so anyone can easily request a meeting with me (usually a phone call) at a time that is (almost) guaranteed to work for me.

Here’s how it works:  Set up a free account with Tungle.me.  Give them access to your Google calendar (or Outlook if that’s your thing).  Tell Tungle the regular hours that you set up appointments.  For me that’s Tues to Friday 9am to 5pm (doesn’t everybody avoid meetings on Monday?).  Tungle then shows the public the hours that you are free for meetings.  When visitors request a meeting Tungle.me sends an email letting you know.  If you accept, it notifies the person requesting the meeting and automatically ads it to your calendar.  Cool! 

If you’d like to schedule a free consultation about online marketing, please hit my contact page and click the link that says “schedule an appointment online.”

Your domain name (yourcompany.com) is a very important part of your company’s over-all branding. Many companies invest a significant amount of resources making sure that their target market knows how to get to their website and can email their staff both of which require a domain name. Think of all the advertising, collateral materials, and even letterhead and business cards that all have your company’s domain name on it. At least these are directly under your control and you could change them if you had to. Things like links to your website that are all over the Internet and email addresses for your staff that are in address books all over the world are totally outside of your control and you couldn’t change the domain names there even if you wanted to. Soooo….. think about how bad it would be to lose your domain name. That’s not just a little bad. That’s very bad. So with that in mind it’s important to protect that name. Here are a couple steps you should take to do so:

- Make sure you actually own your domain name. A couple times in the last month I’ve run into folks who had a phonebook company or unscrupulous web developer register their domain name for them, and it turned out that these vendors registered the names in their own company names instead of the business owner’s name. This is totally unacceptable and if it’s the case for your domain name you need to contact this vendor and have them put the domain name under your ownership immediately.

- Set your domain name to auto-renew. Domain names are purchased from registrars like Network Solutions or Godaddy (to name a few). They have an option that will allow them to automatically renew the name when it’s about to expire on your credit card. Take advantage of this option so you won’t lose your name accidentally.

- Don’t trust the auto-renew feature. I’ve seen times when the credit card on file has expired and an email notice about the impending loss of the domain name has gotten caught in a spam filter. Mark your calendar for a month before your domain name is going to expire and manually go to the registrar and renew the name.

- Watch out for “domain slamming.” Like “phone slamming” in the 90’s “domain slamming” is an unscrupulous practice in which an unethical company sends you something that looks like a bill for your domain name saying it’s about to expire. If you pay the “bill” what you are actually doing is switching registrars.

- Consider buying similar domain names to your own (or other common names for your organization) to make sure they are not used for a purpose you wouldn’t approve of. I was recently told of an organization that is local to me that had a domain name that is very similar to their business name registered by a group that opposes them politically. The end result will be an expensive legal battle that they will most likely lose.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions about this article. I’d be happy to help you any way I can.

I’m often asked by potential clients about the cost of operating a website.  Here’s the spiel that I’ve come up with that (in my opinion) is comprehensive:

1. Domain name – approx $10/year
   You pay this to a domain registrar (like godaddy.com) to have the right to use a name like:  yourcompany.com.
2. Website Hosting – approx $20/month
   This service makes your website available to users all over the Internet.
3. Initial Website Development (custom, professional) – $1,000 to $100,000 and up
   Generally speaking this is what you pay a web developer to build the website itself.  Personally I recommend that you find a developer that will give you a hard quote for this service rather than merely an estimate.
4. Maintenance  – variable
   For a custom site, maintenance costs are usually limited to irregular changes, like an address or staff change or the addition of a new service.  Some websites can go quite a while without any changes and some have a steady stream of updates that need to be made. 
5. Promotion – variable
   Most sites should have an ongoing campaign to drive traffic.  We’ve worked with clients who have been perfectly satisfied with a $20/month budget, and alternatively we have had single clients for whome we’ve managed $1,000/day budgets.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to run through this list to see how it would specifically apply to you.

Studies show that the vast majority of all web users arrive at any particular website through the use of a search engine. That being said, the inner-workings of search engines are very complex and busy business people can have difficulty finding the time to get up to speed on how to use search engines to their advantage. The purpose of this article is to give an executive summary of how search engines operate and how to get a website to appear in search results.

Dissecting the Search Results Page

There are two different ways that a website can appear on search engine results:

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) results appear in the sponsored results area which is generally on the very top and along the right side of the results page. Advertisers pay to have their links appear in that area through a bidding process.
2. Natural results appear in the main content area of the results page. Results in this area are determined by the search engine’s proprietary formula and cannot be purchased by advertisers.

I should also take this time to state that almost all search engine traffic comes through Google and Yahoo!. For 95% of websites in existence those are the only two search engines that matter right now.

How does Pay Per Click work?

Paid advertising through search engines is pretty strait forward. You bid a given amount for a specified keyword or phrase. When someone searches for one of your keywords or phrases in the search engine you are advertising on, your ad is displayed. If a user clicks on your listing to visit your website, you pay the search engine your bid price. Often one can set up a campaign and start seeing results in less than a day. Google and Yahoo! have excellent budgeting tools that allow the advertiser to closely control their budget. Results (web traffic, leads, or sales) can easily be tied to your spending which makes the bean-counters in all of us happy.

How do you run a Pay Per Click campaign?

1. Set up an advertising account with Google or Yahoo!.
2. Craft a list of desired search keywords and phrases and ad copy to be displayed.
3. Determine a workable testing budget, and start bidding based on that budget.
4. Watch the campaign results and make adjustments as necessary.

How are natural results chosen?

Search engines maintain their own proprietary formula for determining the order that natural search results are displayed. The exact formulas are very closely held secrets, however there are a two factors that experts agree the formulas utilize:

A) Website Content The most important thing in getting a website to appear early in search engine results is to have quality content about the given search phrase on the website. Content quality can be determined by volume, age, the search engine’s ease in reading the content into it’s database, format, organization, etc. It’s as simple as this…if you want to have your website to show up when users search for the term “frogs”, you better have a lot of good information on your site about frogs. Search engines make money by selling adverting space. The more people find what they are looking for using a given search engine, the more they will use that engine and the more advertising the search engine can sell. Therefore if you want the search engine to choose your site to come up for “frogs” then you need to put yourself in the user’s shoes and make sure that your site is the site they would want to find when they search for “frogs”.

B) External links to your site One of the best ways for search engines to determine (in an automated format) the quality level of your content is to see how many other websites are linking to yours. All other things being the same, if your frog website has 2 websites linking to it and your competitor’s site has 200 websites linking to it, your competitor’s site will come up before yours.

How do you get your site to rank higher in natural search engine results?

Ah that the rub isn’t it? The process of working to get a website to rank higher in natural results is know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Unlike PPC, an SEO campaign is a long-term process that can take a long time to gain traction and is difficult to track spending to traffic/leads/sales. Of course, the upside is that you are not paying for traffic on an individual visitor basis. That alone usually makes it a worthwhile effort. Due to the secrecy of search engine placement formulas there are a dizzying array of opinions about how an SEO campaign should be run. That being said, at the most basic level there are two things that all successful SEO campaigns should have in common:

A) Website Content Seeing that search engines place a premium on quality content, then part of any SEO campaign should be to provide quality content. This work could include-

• rebuilding the site so it is easier for search engines to read (using more text and less images/flash animation)
• adding fresh content with search phrases strategically placed
• setting up a schedule to constantly add new quality content (blogs can be an excellent way to achieve this)

B) External links to your site Seeing that it is agreed that search engines rate the quality of your content by the quality and number of websites that link to your site, it makes sense that a thorough SEO campaign would include an effort to recruit inbound links. There are a number of different ways to go about this which could include, valid participation on other website’s blogs/forums, press releases, offline marketing campaigns, participation in community based (Web 2.0) websites, etc.

SEM Diagram

Most successful SEM campaigns will utilize both the PPC and SEO model. I need to mention that this article is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be easy for me to develop each sentence in this article into another article. I have greatly simplified many concepts here so keep that in mind before you start running too fast with that newly sharpened pair of scissors. Please contact us if you have any questions or you would like to discuss what it might entail to have BP manage your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign.

The first decision you make about your Web site is critical – the developer you choose to design and construct your Web site can make or break the project’s success.

Before you begin your search process, it’s important to understand that there are different types of developers that offer different services in different price ranges. The custom web development industry breaks down into three categories. It’s important to keep in mind that each category has it’s purpose.  I am not proposing that any one category is better than others. What’s crucial to you is to determine which category is the best fit for your company.

1. 95% of Web developers are one-person shops. While these developers offer the least expensive option, they approach projects from a single, limited, often technical perspective.
2. 2.5% are mid-sized operations, typically a team of three to 10 experts (graphic designers, programmers, copywriters, marketing professionals, etc.). Developers in this range – including Bright Productions – offer a complete panel of services, plus a marketing focus.
3. 2.5% are large-scale companies, developing six-figure projects.

Here is a checklist that can help you determine whether the developer you’re interviewing is right for your needs.

• Can the developer offer a firm quotation rather than a broad, ballpark figure? (This assumes that your Web project is already well defined.)
• Is the developer’s proposal well written, detailed, and professionally presented? Does it address all the issues in your RFP?
• Is the developer experienced? Is the firm a full-time operation with a substantial, successful track record?
• Can the developer provide referrals, references, and testimonials?
• Does the developer approach your project from a strategic marketing perspective, and not strictly from a technical point of view?
• How does the developer handle unexpected problems? Will they resolve issues no matter what happens?
• What is the developer’s process – what are they doing when you’re not looking?
• Is there a single responsible party? Someone you can contact easily and quickly; who has authority to act; who understands your issues?
• Does the developer demand payment in full up front? (50% deposit is standard in the industry.)
• Will you own your site once the final invoice is paid? Will the developer give you all the source materials and release necessary copyrights to you?
• Can the developer host your site if you so desire (one-stop-shopping)?
• Does the developer have any special expertise in search engines or online marketing?  Are they certified by Google?