Social media users love to be heard, and if you are listening they can provide a great service to your company.

Gauge User Data
By implementing a website analytics tool such as Google Analytics you can see what content most interests your users, what content they are reading, what links they used to get to your site and what they searched for to find your site. If you know your user types, referring sites and what keywords they used to find your site you can then create more favorable content. By understanding this data it should in turn give you the answer as to why other sites trust you and what related topics you should consider.

Free Focus Group
Standard focus groups are a marketer's dream, one that is often unfulfilled due to high costs. By polling your social media users you can create focus groups for free allowing you to research for product concept, price validation, location based product offers and positioning. Most social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have applications which allow you to easily create polls.

Receive Feedback
Social media is an immediate feedback loop. Give your marketplace a platform to provide feedback so you can improve your products and services to better your business. Social media also opens the door to provide immediate customer service to problems you may not otherwise been aware of. By setting up a monitoring system such as Google Analytics you can see what others are saying about you and immediately address any problems or concerns about your product.

Tis the season to pull out the pencils, calculators and spreadsheets, time to sit down and start planning out your 2010 online marketing budget. I know, I know, it's never fun and everyone is dreading it, but it's something that needs to be done.

Wondering where to start?

SEO, PPC, social media, email blasts, website updates, banner ads, links, directory submission…the list is endless when it comes to Internet marketing options. So what is right for your company? The easy answer is to spend it where you get the most return; the more difficult answer is what will bring the most return.

But, first things first, take a look at your existing website. Are there broken links, outdated information, clunky copy or poor design? If so that needs to be the first thing in your online marketing budget. There is little point in driving people to your site if your site is in need of an upgrade. Click here for a free website evaluation.

Now let’s see how much you are paying per visitor to your site (CPV). Don’t worry we’re not looking at conversion rates, after all it’s your website’s job to convert visitors, marketing’s job is to get them to your site in the first place. Review your 2009 marketing plan and see where your visitors are coming from, print ads, radio, tv, etc, and see how much you are spending marketing your site and how many visitors you are getting. Marketing dollars/Visitors=CPV.

This may be a good time to start thinking about ways to make finding your CPV easier for you next year. One simple way is to utilize specific URLs. For example if you are advertising in a magazine called Vacations Today you (or your webmaster) can set-up an invisible link directed to your home page, the URL for this link would be www.yourwebsite.com/vacationtoday, you can then take this URL and use it for advertising purposes. When looking at your site stats you will be able to see exactly how many visitors your site generated by this URL and be able to calculate your CPV easily.

Whew, now that is out of the way, let’s take a look at the second main factor in determining your online marketing budget, your Revenue per Visitor (RPV). This is easy to find, take your total sales generated from your website and divide it by the number of visitors to your site.

If your 2009 online marketing paid off you should be seeing a decrease in your CPV and an increase in your RPV. If you are that’s great, take a look at ways you can improve for 2010. If you are not seeing these results what can you do for 2010?

Test, test, test. Dip a toe into the waters to see if there is a market for your product or service online and customers who are ready to buy by setting up a low-budget Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. A few hundred dollars is all you need for this and all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) all have easy to use analytics. A PPC campaign will bring an immediate increase of traffic to your page, but be sure you are also tracking the benefits of long-term results as long-term PPC campaigns can quickly drain a budget.

For long-term results Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a good way to increase traffic and sales to your site. The higher your rankings on top search engines, the greater the traffic to your site. According to HearingReview.com “if your website doesn’t show up on page one of the search engine results page, your chances of being found are less than 2%”. Due to SEO tactics such as localized searches and targeted keywords SEO has never been better to home in on the perfect clientele for your product or service.

Another option for long-term results is Social Media Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Social Media Sites not only provide an increase of traffic to your site but also offers an extremely high Return on Investment (ROI). It is free to set up a page on most Social Media Sites, but the time it takes to maintain these sites often scares people off. This is why it is sometimes best to hire a company to perform the maintenance for you. Even with the additional costs, the ROI still remains high and it’s not just monetary. Popular contributors to Social Media Sites often build a loyal following and become industry experts which can obviously enrich your career.

So whether you are planning your 2010 budget for social media, Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click or redesign of a tired website it is never too early to plan ahead. If you would like further information on any of the ideas above please feel free to contact us at 1.800.374.7297.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion." - Wikipedia. In English please... Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website listed higher in search engines without paying for placement.

It seems that in today's world anybody with a little bit of internet knowledge thinks that they can be an SEO Specialist: insert keywords here, submit site to search engines and wa-la instant SEO. Unfortunately it's not so easy; and neither is deciphering the legitimate SEO companies from the fly-by-nighters. Avoid these 5 SEO tricks and you will be on your way to a better ranked website without risking damage to your site or your reputation.

1. “We can successfully have your rankings increased within 48 hours!”

SEO is a time consuming process, anybody who says that you will see almost immediate results is lying to you. Any legitimate SEO Specialist will spend hours slaving over keyword research, conversion rates, traffic and ranking reports, etc. It will take days to implement SEO terms and weeks or even months to see the final effect of a higher page rank.

2. “We submit your site to 1,000s of Search Engines!”

I don't know about you, but I cannot even begin to name 10 reliable search engines, let alone 1,000's. Stick with Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formally MSN) and you will be fine, most other search engines piggy-back off these three anyways. Search engines these days don't even really need to have your site submitted, with all their spiders and robots they will pick-up a well optimized site on their own.

3. “We will get 1,000s of links to your site!”

Although this probably isn't an outright lie, it's not a safe SEO practice. Sure having a large number of links to your site is a good thing, but what you want is QUALITY links. SEO scammers will rely on "link farms" to generate links to your site and search engines don't like this, they don't like it so much it will actually decrease your ranking. Make the search engines happy and stick with a smaller number of quality links.

4. “We will optimize your site for $59.95 a month!”

I know that you've heard the old adage "you get what you pay for" and this could not be more true than in SEO land. See trick 1: Proper SEO takes time, and time takes money. Good SEO should cost you $1,000s of dollars, if you can't afford this you are better off buying a book about SEO and doing it yourself than getting scammed. And be sure before signing a contract that your SEO will be maintained after the initial optimization at no extra charge. Search engines often change algorithms, the way they rank sites, and competition for keywords and ranking can get pretty brutal in certain industries. If your SEO is not maintained, your rankings will slip.

5. “We guarantee you #1 Google ranking!”

Nobody, I repeat NOBODY, can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Don't be weary of all guarantees though, often times reputable SEO companies will offer guarantees. These guarantees, however, are usually about an increase in your page ranking and not a guaranteed placement. If you are in a competitive industry often times a first page ranking may be difficult if not impossible to obtain even with the best SEO.

Choose Your SEO Company Carefully:

Now that you are on your way to identifying and avoiding SEO tricks you will still want to check out your SEO company carefully before signing on the dotted line. Some reliable sources for research are:

·         Check with the Better Business Bureau, see if any claims have been filed against them

·         WHOIS tools (such as www.iptools.com), to find out who the domain is registered to and who the administrative/technical contacts are and if these contacts are legitimate

·         Google, type in the name of the company and scam and see if anything negative comes up

·         Also just Google the company's name, if they can't get themselves top ranking SEO how can you expect them to do it for you?

Been a few years but we finally upgraded our web servers to the latest and greatest DELL Poweredge servers. It was a major pain making sure that hundreds of websites and databases all were moved and setup correctly. Just a few tips from our experience. If you have hundreds of websites setup in IIS, you will most likely have advanced configuration for some of them like URL Scan, IIS filters, etc. So it is best you just migrate to the same OS configuration as long as you are running windows server 2003 or greater (yes we are a Microsoft shop ). We host our servers at RackSpace and highly recommend them. You pay a lot but the service is top notch.

So for our web server they recommended we use a software package called DoubleTake. It really made the process much easier. It basically is software that will mirror the entire operating system, keep track of file system changes, and finally move the configuration to the new server. The catch is the OS and server process must be of the same type. The backup of our system took over a day to complete so make sure you do this over the weekend when traffic is low. Also make sure your servers are on the same network if possible or have a very high bandwidth pipe between them using a VPN. Overall it went without a problem and there was only a minor configuration with IIS. If your servers will be assigned new IP addresses you will have to re-bind your websites with those new internal IPs. There are fast ways to do that but that is another post.

Finally our DB server was the biggest upgrade since it requires the most processing power. We have hundreds of databases and most used mssql 2000 so it was worth the upgrade. We chose to upgrade to windows server 2008 64-bit version. We also upgraded to Microsoft mssql 2008 64-bit version. This version removes the limit of roughly 3gb memory usage on the 32-bit version to terabytes. So we were able to upgrade from 4gb memory to 16gb of usable memory. This makes a huge difference. It is recommended to either know what you are doing or hire a DBA for this. The best way to do the migration is to move the .mdf and .ldf files to the new server, use scripts to attach the databases, then finally use some more scripts to move the logins and passwords. This is the quickest way to move hundreds of databases reliably. 

Our email server is managed by rackspace's own proprietary email software so that is not an issue for us. 

Hope this helps save some time for you!

Welcome to the new OpenVision blog!

Here we will discuss the latest in sc web design, web development, ecommerce internet marketing, paid advertising, and website actors and spokespersons. Learn more about our services, view our web portfolio, meet our management staff or team, or contact us.