Online Marketing
Top 10 Plugins For Wordpress Blogs
One of the great benefits of running Wordpress is the ability to add in plugins. For those of you unfamiliar to the concept of plugins, they are essentially applications that run in conjunction with Wordpress to perform some kind of function. I currently utilize a wide variety of plugins, but some of my favorite plugins are:
- Akismet - Great built in plugin that controls all of your comment spam.
- All in One Adsense and YPN - Plugin that automatically inserts Adsense and YPN ads into your posts.
- All in One SEO Pack - Automatically creates meta description, meta keywords, etc.
- Contact Form II - Easily allows you to create contact forms to add to your pages and posts.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Automatically redirects Wordpress feeds to Feedburner feeds for tracking.
- Google Analyticator - Adds your Google Analytics account to all posts. Also tracks outgoing links, etc.
- Google XML Sitemaps - Creates an XML sitemap that alerts Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.
- Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Update your Wordpress to the newest version automatically.
- Wordpress Database Backup - Emails you a backup of your Wordpress database whenever you prefer.
- WP Super Cache - Fast caching module for Wordpress. Make your blog Digg proof.
What additional plug in make your top 10 list?
Utilizing Adwords To Take Advantage of Metrolink Situation
On Friday a Metrolink train crashed in Los Angeles killing 25 people. This was the deadliest train crash in over 25 years. Almost immediately after this occurred lawyers started buying up keywords such as ‘metrolink crash’ advertising their services. While the practice is fairly common to take advantage of breaking news to buy traffic this seems a little shady. The lawyers who we saw engaging in this include:
- Larry H Parker
- Seeg Miller Johnson
- Get a Referral
- Eisenburg
I completely understand that everyone needs to make a living, but I can’t believe that this is great for your brand as a lawyer to be seen as an ambulence chaser, and possibly the companies or agencies running SEM for these lawyers are simply looking for leads. Has anyone else seen this kind of activity taking place?
Top 5 Tips To Increase Email Marketing Open Rates
Email Marketing is still a widely used online marketing tactic, and can successfully be blasted out to your mailing lists to promote services, announce coupons, communicate your brand, launch new products and services, etc. As email open rates continue to decline here are some tips to increase your open rate. In the near future we’ll look at increasing CTR once you’ve had them actually open the email.
Headline
- Create a sense of urgency
- Play on curiosity
- Add in controversial headline
- Should be 35 characters or less
- Personalize the subject line
From Address
- Try changing the from name
- Try changing the from email address
Testing
- Create email accounts at all major email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.)
- Test to see if any of our email is going into spam
- If so we’ll need to get on a clean domain to send them out
- Test with and without images as some email software is blocking based upon images
Day of the Week Average Open Rate
- Sunday 41.1%
- Saturday 36.7%
- Wednesday 34.0%
- Friday 32.8%
- Tuesday 29.6%
- Thursday 24.6%
- Monday 23.2%
Time of Day and Format
- 8:00AM EST had the highest open rate
- 66% send as plain text (0.46% undeliverable rate)
- 24% send mime format/HTML (0.56% undeliverable rate)
- 10% send HTML only (1.09% undeliverable rate)
Whats With The Intense Apple Fascination?
Today at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event Steve Jobs made a couple announcements:
- He isn’t dead
- Apple iTunes 8 is coming out with minimal new features
- iPhone/iPod Touch 2.1 software update will be available Friday
- New iPod Nanos are soon available with three new colors
As a 3G iPhone user I’m looking forward to 2.1 just with the hope that it will fix my iPhone so that I can finally use apps that I’ve downloaded and paid for. Beyond that, and for my own selfish need of wanting my iPhone to work the announcements made today were minimal at best. You wouldn’t get that impression though if you looked at Techmeme, Digg, and other sites. I took a few screenshots of sites to see the press that Apple is getting. Here is techmeme.com:
Sorry, it wouldn’t fit on one page. Even on my 1650×1080 20″ Mac monitor Apple dominated all stories above the fold, and even stretched below it. In the end Apple stories related to todays ‘announcement’ accounted for approximately 60% or more of techmeme’s entire homepage. The second image shows everything below the fold:
When I went over to Digg the homepage had at least three Apple stories. While Kevin Rose had accurately predicted most of today’s proceedings, and while not all of the stories were positive towards Apple they once again dominated the homepage of Digg.
Now I’m not anti-Apple, but has anyone seen a company dominate the news as much as Apple does? Whatever they announce is immediately picked up by CNN, MSNBC, etc. I get it, they dominate the MP3 market, and have cool ads, along with a phone that everyone wants. Does that mean Apple deserves all of this essentially free press? Ohh well, I guess it lets them concentrate on paying for those nifty takeover ads on cnn.com and others:
What does everyone else think? Please feel free to share your comments.
Fix For Google Chrome: The application failed to initialize properly (0xC0000005).
After doing some research it looks like the issue I mentioned previously is caused by Symantec Endpoint Protection. While there is currently no official fix from Google there are three known ways that you can solve this problem. None of which is a great solution, but until Google and Symantec can come up with a solution, these three should resolve the issue:
Option #1
1) Back up the registry on an affected system.
2) Open the registry on the Agent system by entering regedit from a run prompt.
3) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysPlant.
4) Open the Start DWORD.
5) Change the value to 4 to disable the drivers.
6) Reboot the system to commit the changes.
Option #2
1) Navigate to Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs for XP or Programs and Features for Vista.
2) Scroll down to Symantec Endpoint Protection and hit Change or Modify.
3) Choose Modify from the Symantec menu.
4) Uninstall Application and Device Control from the menu.
5) Restart your computer.
6) Attempt to reinstall Google Chrome.
Option #3
1) Go to the following website and look at the latest registry files to download to automate this process for you. The fix has been mentioned in a few message boards as successfully working for those of you who don’t want to mess with Option #1 or Option #2.
If anyone has any additional methods to resolve this issue please let me know and I will update this post.
Google Chrome Crashes and Burns
While I have had my issues with Google on a few occassions I was optimistic to try out Google Chrome as I mentioned yesterday. I waited till about noon and fired up VMWare Fusion at work on my MacBook Pro and installed Chrome without issue on Windows XP. It seemed to work ok, although the initial reviewson Chrome left much to be desired, and at least left Firefox the speed king. I thought I would give it a shot when I got home from work and the gym so I fired up my trusty Dell desktop and Windows Vista and installed it. The machine itself is about a year and a half old with a Duo 2 processor and 2 gigs of RAM on the 32 bit version of Vista. After installation I’m immediately greeted with:
Wow that’s not good. What happened? I read Matt Cutt’s blog entry today, which in part touted how stable it was, and not full of bugs. Part of his self Q&A mentioned:
Q: This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
A: No, I don’t really think so. Google determined one million pages that users are likely to surf to. Then a piece of software known as “ChromeBot” ran a torture test by loading those one million pages that we crawled for every new build of Google Chrome. This is a smart testing methodology because this real-world torture test quickly highlighted which bugs were most important to fix and helped determine priorities for the most important bugs. So Google Chrome has already been automatically “fuzz tested” on tons of web pages. Google Chrome is very robust against anything the web can throw at it. If I had to guess where the browser might crash, it would be because we haven’t seen Google Chrome run across all the weird, wild hardware that runs Windows. But I’ve been using Google Chrome for months with essentially no crashes; it’s been rock-solid for me.
Now I wasn’t expecting a rock solid piece of software, but at least the ability to launch the browser, and navigate to a website I thought was within reach. I understand that testing one million pages is quite a feat, but ensuring that the application can be installed on a run of the mill Dell computer with Vista might be helpful as well. Clicking “Ok’ on the error message just left me with the following:
I appreciate the humor that Google put on the sad face, but all it did was leave me frustrated. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem, either did un-installing and reinstalling. After I sent a message to Google letting them know about the problem I haven’t found much about the problem online so far. So here I sit eager to play around with Google’s first attempt at a web browser, but unable to do so because of error messages and sad faces that leave me reminisicent of the days of the sad Mac icon:
Has anyone else had any issues with Google Chrome, either during installation or while utilizing the browser? Update: This issue has been somewhat resolved and you can read about it here.
Google Chrome
Today Google announced that their new web browser, ‘Chrome’ will be available for download tomorrow. The download location is available at this location. Surprisingly enough Mozilla says that they are not concerned, but when Google funds 90% of your company I guess you have to say that. What is left to be determined is how this will play into market share. Currently in the web analytics profiles that I administrate Internet Explorer is dominant, and Firefox only plays a minor role. For those of you who have more tech savvy sites obviously you’ll see Firefox higher. Here at Sonicko Firefox had a 57% share of browsers for the month of August, far higher than the normal 8-12% that most sites see. If anyone has any initial reviews of Chrome please feel free to post them.
Target Pays $6 Million To Settle For No Alt Tags
Yesterday Target settled a lawsuit brought on by the NFB (National Federation of the Blind) for $6 million. At the heart of the case was that Target.com did not employ the use of alt tags on their images for blind users screen readers to render them. Alt tags are simple additions of a description to a photo that is displayed on your website. They are used in conjunction with a successful SEO strategy, but they are also helpful for those visitors who utilize screen readers or other accessibility based software.
Even if there were other factors at play $6 million for not doing something as simple as adding alt tags to your images is pretty hefty. Why Target didn’t have their webmaster or someone in marketing develop a script that automatically tags the images with ‘Picture’ or ‘Photo’ just to be simple is beyond my comprehension. It would have taken five minutes at most. Anyone have any additional insight into this case?
Importance of Search Engine Results Position
Whether you are relying upon SEO, SEM, or a combination of both to achieve targeted traffic from search engine results pages you probably know that achieving a position within the top three results is critical. All too often I hear, “I need to be #1 in Google for X term” without having any science associated with it, but as you can see in the image below from Enquiro Research which conducted eye tracking studies for visitors almost all visible eye movement is focused on the top five results.
You can clearly see that eye tracking is focused on the upper left hand corner of the search engine results page, with minimal eye movement down towards the bottom of the page. There is also very little eye movement in the lower right corner of the page, typically where position 5+ SEM ads are placed. Enquiro’s visual eye tracking study is solidified when you look at the CTR (click through rate) associated with results in major search engine results pages. Pete at Searchlight Digital provided the following SERP Click Through Rates recently:
Rank Clicks Click % Delta #n-1 Delta #1 1 8220278 42.30% n/a n/a 2 2316738 11.92% -71.82% -71.82% 3 1640751 8.44% -29.18% -80.04% 4 1171642 6.03% -28.59% -85.75% 5 943667 4.86% -19.46% -88.52% 6 774718 3.99% -17.90% -90.58% 7 655914 3.37% -15.34% -92.02% 8 579206 2.98% -11.69% -92.95% 9 549196 2.83% -5.18% -93.32% 10 577325 2.97% 5.12% -92.98% 11 127688 0.66% -77.88% -98.45% 12 108555 0.56% -14.98% -98.68% 13 101802 0.52% -6.22% -98.76% 14 94221 0.48% -7.45% -98.85% 15 91020 0.47% -3.40% -98.89% 16 75006 0.39% -17.59% -99.09% 17 70054 0.36% -6.60% -99.15% 18 65832 0.34% -6.03% -99.20% 19 62141 0.32% -5.61% -99.24% 20 58384 0.30% -6.05% -99.29% 21 55471 0.29% -4.99% -99.33% 31 23041 0.12% -58.46% -99.72% 41 14024 0.07% -39.13% -99.83
Pete followed up the data with the following analysis: “As you can see, the number one position receives just over 42% of all clicks. Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).”
What this clearly shows is that eye tracking and CTR clearly favors being within the top five results. What this doesn’t necessarily show is that being #1 is always better than being #2 or #3. Sure, you need traffic, but that doesn’t always show a correlation. For those of you who are using Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords you can see a Keyword Position report like the one shown below:
The default as you can see in the picture is to show ‘Visits’. Now while visits is important we already know that being in the top five positions will result in more traffic than being in position 26. What we’re concerned about is how this relates to the conversion rate and associated monetary gain on our website. For that we can still use the Keyword Positions report, but change the breakdown to focus on conversion metrics like the image below demonstrates:
What this image demonstrates is how through the Keyword Position report you can see from which position your conversions came from. Keep in mind that just because one has a 15% conversion rate and another has 5% doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better off bidding for position A or B if you’re running SEM through Adwords. Ensure that your data is statistically significant by using a conversion confidence calcualatorand then you can feel confident that the correlations and sub relations that you’re making actually make sense. In theory the beauty of this is that you could potentially pay less to run in position three that converts at a higher rate than paying more to be in position one. Hopefully this helps with your position strategies. Does anyone have any related stories about correlations between position and conversion rate?
Rule #1: Figure Out Why You’re Doing Something
One thing that has amazed me for years is how projects get green-lit either from committees, management, or individuals without figuring out WHY they are doing a project and having clear goals associated with them. Being in the agency world we often receive RFPs that detail out what they WANT to happen, but not WHY this needs to occur. Consider the following WANT’s:
- I WANT a new website (WHY? To sell more products? To obtain more leads? To generate more traffic?)
- I WANT a new search tool (WHY? Do you want to lower repeat searches? Get better results?)
- I WANT to do SEM (WHY? To lower your CPA compared to display? To compliment words you can’t obtain through SEO right now?)
- I WANT to be #1 in Google for X Term (WHY? Is this term a ‘money’ term that you know through SEM? Have you done keyword research?)
Now, let me be clear and say that I am for one not against any WANT. I would simply recommend that you associate clear, and hopefully measurable goals associated with your project. You want to implement a new shopping cart? Sure, let’s implement it and put as a goal to reduce shopping cart abandonment from the current 75% to industry average for your vertical of say 50%. I will go out on a limb here and say that obtaining support from committees, management, or individuals will be substantially easier in the future if you can go back to them with the original target goal, and show how much quantifiable improvement was made.
The easy answer of doing something because: A. Someone else is doing it B. It just looks cool or C. I read about this and want to beat my competitor to it all sound like somewhat reasonable answers but remember to think clearly and logically when planning a project out. Google wasn’t the first search engine; looking ‘cool’ by itself doesn’t always have a calculated ROI; and just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean that you should to. ‘Everyone’ used to have all Flash websites with catchy techno music playing and a Winamp style EQ display too, but it didn’t mean that it made business sense to do it either.
Be strategic in your thinking, clearly define WHY you WANT to accomplish this project, assign measurable goals to the project, and establish reporting before, during, and after the project to show the change that occurred by accomplishing the project.
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