Tuesday, April 24, 2007
My friend Lee Lefever over at Common Craft has created a short video explaining the power of RSS.
RSS is a way to subscribe to your favourite blogs and news sites, or any site that offers RSS subscription. RSS is similiar to subscribing to an email alert or newsletter. It’s easy and you’ll love how efficiently you can keep up with what’s going on online.
Watch the video: RSS in Plain English
Monday, April 23, 2007
I read two great posts today that I’d like to share.
The first is from Build a Better Blog and the post is “Blog Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make”.
3 Mistakes and 1 Conclusion. I recommend anyone with a business blog read this post on how you can make the mistake of not setting goals, of not having control over your site and of not having metrics or understanding the metrics.
If you need help with metrics, the Underwire Newsletter from March has a post Tech 101: Reading Webstats The post is based on an earlier post by James about what is important and what is not, i.e., don’t measure “hits”.
Subscribe to Underwire News: Join here
The second great post is from Guy Kawasaki’s blog, How to Change the World. His post “The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog” offers 10 tips on the mindset of blogging, the use of email addresses and links, and how to better evangelize your blog.
Both posts are about lessons learned the hard way. And both offer solid advice.
1) Blog Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make
2) How to Evangelize a Blog
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
BC Book and Magazine Week is running an online campaign to promote BC Book and Magazine Week, which is April 21 to 28.
What are they doing that’s so great?
1. They have a fun blog with lots of great info about upcoming events.
- The blog uses photos to help promote each event. It looks like fun.
- The content is useful. Each post tells me about an event and all the details.
- The blog postings have a human voice. This doesn’t seem like marketing, spammy text. It’s a conversation.
2. They are contacting bloggers in a personal, one-to-one way.
- The email was addressed to me. Monique. My name was spelled correctly.
- The sender’s name and contact info was clearly visible. She identified herself.
- She indicated that she read my blog or found something on it directly related to why she was contacting me.
- She gave me information I’m interested in but didn’t push me to write a certain way or to post at all. How I use her info is at my discretion.
- Attached was a PDF of upcoming events. Nice and concise.
- Also attached was a nicely designed button that I could put on my website, if I wanted.
- She included the URL that I should link to. The URL is to the blog, where I can participate, where I can read more.
This is a great campaign.
It’s also well timed. Only a couple of days before the event so there’s some urgency in posting the information. I don’t have time to think, “oh, I’ll do that later,” and then forget.
Here is the web button:
The link is www.bcbookandmagazineweek.com
Here’s the post I made on my personal website, SoMisguided.com:
BC Book and Magazine Week Is April 21 to 28, 2007
As an example of a well-run blog campaign, BCBookandMagazineWeek.com is a Monique’s Pick.
Monique’s Picks are websites that deliver on their promise. They have strong design and great content, and they are good resources or example sites for subscribers to Underwire: Full-Support for Non-Techies.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Here is one simple thing that you can do to ensure your web business practices work for your customers: Pay attention to your contact form and reply when someone hits it!
Seriously, this is one of the easiest and most overlooked tactics you can employ. Robert Ouimet suggests, with some creative symbolism, that you think of your email just as you do your phone. You wouldn’t consider not answering a customer calling on the phone would you?
Robert points to the Hornstein E-Mail Survey that shows email customer service is terrible—only 33 percent of brand name companies bothered to respond in 24 hours—and getting worse.
Hornstein’s research (and common sense) says that almost everyone sends an e-mail to a company at some point and that all of us expect a response within 24 hours. In 2007 only 33% of companies responded within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.
2001: 46%
2002: 63%
2003: 59%
2004: 37%
2005: 42%
2006: 42%
2007: 33%
Remarkably, only 51% of the companies responded in any time period—down from 86% in 2002.
Now, I take the results with a grain of salt, since the whole survey is in effect a placed ad for Hornstein Associates. But at the same time the results square with my own experience.
So what’s to be done?
We often have clients approach us to do web marketing for them. Excellent, that’s what we do. We love new business. It’s our promise: we make you a web marketing genius.
They often want to do all the right things: search engine advertising, blogger outreach, email newsletters, website redevelopment, copywriting, online public relations. Awesome, those are all highly effective. We love delivering results and those are great ways to do it. But before we get to those things, let’s start with the simple things. Does your contact form work? How do you deal with email customer service?
Here are a few practical rules to implement or to compare against your own practices.
- Making contact needs to be easy and available. Make sure your contact information or a link to your contact information is on every page of your website.
- Make sure your contact information is labelled simply ‘Contact’ or ‘Contact Us’. It’s cute to say ‘Knock Us Up’ but it means different things to different folks.
- Make sure your contact page works. Can people email you? Can people call you? When was the last time you tested it?
- Set an expectation at the outset. On your contact page can customers see your available hours? Should you have a prospective response time (say, 24 hours)? Should you send an auto-response email to confirm receipt of the inquiry?
- Offer self-service alternatives—on your contact page, its thank you page if you use a form, and in any auto response you might use. Most people browsing websites are already engaged in an active pursuit of information. Make it easy for them to find what they’re seeking.
- Start an FAQ and update it with your frequently received email questions and reponses. But only if you’re frequently getting the same email inquiry. An FAQ is a frequently asked questions. It’s not a chance to pitch product benefits, unless it’s the right response to a question you’re getting over and over. (And then maybe it’s time to rethink more than just your contact form. If your benefits aren’t front and centre what is?)
Contact from your customers is an incredibly valuable feedback loop. What are you doing with that feedback?
Perhaps you’d like to tell us.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The html newsletter got a redesign this week. Of course, tweaks and bug fixes are still in progress. But if you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed.
It is great to use photos on your website. You want, however, to avoid posting large photos in their original size and using html to resize the image. Large file formats are slow to load and often look crappy when not resized properly.
Instead, you want to:
1. Resize the image using photo editing software to maintain a good, quality image. An original file size of 2 MB can be reduced to 20 KB, which is much smaller and will load faster.
2. Rename the photo using appropriate keywords for search and human recognition.
3. Add an alt tag description of the photo using appropriate keywords.
Read the full post for more information on using photos on your website.
Alexandre Brabant has redesigned his website: eMarketing101.ca
Alex is a guru when it comes to search marketing, explaining search optimization, and helping people understand how search works. eMarketing101.net is a great resource.
Read the full post on why I recommend eMarketing 101.
Is some piece of technology driving you mad? Are you a non-techie in need of support? Email me: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Your questions will be included in next month’s newsletter.
This month’s Ask for Support is an Excel tip for separating Full Name into First Name Last Name. Do you have a column that contains Full Name and you need one column with First Name and another column with Last Name?
There is a simple Excel formula to help you.
Find out how. Get the formula here.
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Microsoft Excel is that program we love and love to hate.
Exceltip.com is a good resource for tips on doing the craziest, and most useful, things in Excel.
Excel Tip: Separating first name and last name using formulas in Microsoft Excel
Let’s say you have a grid of subscribers. The first column (column A) contains the Full Name, “John Smith”, but now you need to sort by last name. How do you do it?
Cell A1 contains a name: John Smith
1. Create a new, blank column.
2. Make sure the format of the column is “general”.
3. In the new, blank column, in row 1, type this formula:
The formula for extracting the first name is: =Left(A1,Find(” “,A1))
The formula for extracting the last name is: =Mid(A1,Find(” “,A1)+1,Len(A1))
4. If the formula works, copy and paste the formula in the whole column.
Now, you want to make the new column contain the value rather than the formula.
5. Select your new column. Copy > Paste Special. Select Value. Save.
Now you can sort the column containing Last Name.
Note: Paste Special is different than Paste. Paste Special lets you define what part of the info you want pasted into the column. In this case you want the value of the formula, “Smith”, rather than the formula “=Mid(A1,Find(” “,A1)+1,Len(A1))”.
Is some piece of technology driving you mad? Are you a non-techie in need of support? Email me. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
I will answer your questions in upcoming newsletters.
It’s great to use photos on your website. You want, however, to avoid posting large photos in their original size and using html to resize the image. Large file formats are slow to load and often look crappy when not resized properly.
Quick Case Study:
Judy works for a book publisher. She writes email newsletters and helps with the website. Judy’s publisher holds a number of events: book launches, author readings and other fun activities. Judy thinks it would be great to take photos at these events and post them on the company website.
Great idea!
But Judy does not have access to software that will resize her image. Judy downloads the photos from her camera to her computer and then uploads those photos to her website. The photos are really big so she adjusts the html to display the photo at a smaller size. The html code looks like this:
... img src=“IMG20070101.jpg” width=“300” height=“200” ...
Judy’s file name is IMG20070101, it is a JPEG image, and she’s adjusted it to appear 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels high.
What you can’t see is that Judy’s image is 2 MB. That’s a huge file. It’s going to load really slowly and because the html code is forcing the photo to resize, it’s probably not going to look great.
So what should Judy have done?
Judy should use Adobe Photoshop to resize her image. She should open the file in Photoshop. See the original size (probably 3000 x 2000) and reduce the image size incrementally.
If Judy simply adjusts the image by making is 300 x 200, she’s not maintaining the quality of the photo. It will look soft or mushy. Instead Judy should reduce the image by 50% until she gets down to the desired size. She can check the quality of the image at each stage and apply Unsharp Mask if necessary. Unsharp Mask lets you sharpen blurriness in a photo.
What if Judy doesn’t want to buy Adobe Photoshop?
Judy should still resize her image using the computer rather than the html code. There are several free photo editing programs that she can try. Here are some common programs that resize and organize photos:
ImageWell (Mac)
Picasa.google.com (PC)
Picnik.com (PC or Mac)
Another tool I like is Flickr.com. Flickr lets you easily share photos online.
If Judy doesn’t need to crop her photos and she wants a fast, simple way to post photos on her website, she could let Flickr do the work.
Flickr automatically offers optional image sizes. Judy could load her photos to Flickr then pick the appropriate photo size for her website. Then she can copy and paste the Flickr html code into her website. Easy peasy.
I prefer to edit my photos using Photoshop, and I also rename them and adjust the html code so that the image is optimized for search.
If Judy followed my preferred method she would change her original code from this:
... img src=“IMG20070101.jpg” width=“300” height=“200” ...
to this:
... img src=“atwood-launch.jpg” width=“300” height=“200” alt=“Margaret Atwood book launch on January 1 at Steamworks” ...
Here’s Judy’s checklist of goodness:
1. Resize the image using photo editing software to maintain a good, quality image. The original file size of 2 MB is now reduced to 20 KB, which is much smaller and will load faster.
2. Rename the photo using appropriate keywords for search and human recognition.
3. Add an alt tag description of the photo using appropriate keywords.
Judy’s resized image with a keyword description is now going to:
1. load quickly
2. be understood and better optimized by search engines
3. be understood by Judy when she’s looking at the html code later.
There are lots of tips and tricks for preparing photos for the web. Search for “preparing photos for the web” to see more examples of how to resize and adjust photos.
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