Web Design, Development & Online Marketing - Serving the Central and North Texas Markets

If you haven't had a chance yet to learn about WSI's amazing Online Business console, WSI EFusion, I suggest you take a look at a quick demo here.

WSI EFusion is an amazing platform to enhance any online business and help you keep track of your leads, manage your own website, create custom modules, and much much more to help increase your internet marketing strategy.

July 2011 Enhancements

Modules within Modules

WSI EFusion has many different modules built-in including Blogs, Photo Galleries, Webforms, Custom Web App modules, and many others. Now we are bringing the ability to include a module within a different module. IE. the ability to include a photo gallery within a blog post, or insert ANY module into a Web App. This will allow for extreme customization of the tools built into WSI EFusion. We have also include a Module Manager into the WYZYWYG for easy access to add in modules.

Device Specific Templates

We continue to help enhance the ability to provide the best access to your website no matter what device your site is being viewed on whether it's a desktop/laptop, smart phone, or a tablet. WSI EFusion now includes a two extra versions of every sitewide template, one for smart phones and one for tablets. When EFusion detects what device you are on, you have the ability to have a mobile version of your site and tablet version of your site to direct them too. This will greatly enhance the user experience of your website.

SEO Friendly URLs for Web Apps

One of the most powerful tools of WSI EFusion is the ability to create your own custom web app. Web Apps are extremely powerful and let you create custom modules for your website with no additional programming charges. We are now excited to say that WSI EFusion has the ability to have a custom SEO friendly URL. For instance: http://www.yoursite.com/webapp-name/webapp-item-name This will let you have complete control of the URL. Let's say you use a Web App for a real estate website for homes located in Dallas Texas. Your Web App for each home can now be http://www.yoursite.com/Dallas-Texas/Homes-In-Plano and this can be modified however you see fit!

July 2011 release

The new update will be taking place on July 6th, 2011 at 11:00AM CST. The deployment time will take a few hours, but there will be no major disruptions to service during this time.

We'll keep you posted!

Consumer behavior is changing and social media enables companies to keep right up-to-date with their clients' requirements as well as allow satisfied clients to spread the word about their products and services. Social media advertising can be a great asset in the business world for lead generation, brand recognition and real time market research, but it is important that your campaigns are run in an effective manner. Knowing and understanding how these techniques augment communication and provide new ways to build trust in your products and services by enhancing your online reputation is critical to your social media success. In our upcoming webinar "Integrate Social Media with Your Sales Process: 6 Steps to Fill Up Your Sales Funnel" will cover the following topics:

• How social media is enhancing the process of relationship selling

• Why it is important to embrace social techniques to enhance your sales process

• Six steps that should be employed to create an effective online sales process that will convert browsers into buyers

These six steps should be employed to create an effective online sales process that will convert browsers into buyers. Registration details are below:

Topic: Integrate Social Media with Your Sales Process: 6 Steps to Fill Up Your Sales Funnel
Date: Thursday, July 7, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/453756160

Understanding Social Media strategy is important but if you don’t know where to apply this understanding then it won’t be useful to your company. There are tons of Social Media Networking sites available for any and everyone to join and it can be over whelming when trying to figure out which ones are applicable to you.

Focus.com created a list of the top 50 social sites every business needs to have a presence on. In this post we only list the first 3 in each category.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Reddit: Upload stories and articles on reddit to drive traffic to your site or blog. Submit items often so that you'll gain a more loyal following and increase your presence on the site.
Digg: Digg has a huge following online because of its optimum usability. Visitors can submit and browse articles in categories like technology, business, entertainment, sports and more.
Del.icio.us: Social bookmark your way to better business with sites like del.icio.us, which invite users to organize and publicize interesting items through tagging and networking.

Professional-Networking Sites
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular networking site where alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online.
Ecademy: Ecademy prides itself on "connecting business people" through its online network, blog and message-board chats, as well as its premier BlackStar membership program, which awards exclusive benefits.
Focus: Focus is a business destination where business professionals can help each other with their purchase and other business decisions by accessing research and peer expertise. Most importantly, Focus provides open, quality information for all businesses that is freely available, easily accessible, and community powered

General Social Media Sites
Wikipedia: Besides creating your own business reference page on Wikipedia, you can connect with other users on Wikipedia's Community Portal and at the village pump, where you'll find conscientious professionals enthusiastic about news, business, research and more.
Newsvine: Feature top employees by uploading their articles, studies or other news-related items to this site. A free account will also get you your own column and access to the Newsvine community.
43 Things: This site bills itself as "the world's most popular online goal setting community." By publicizing your company's goals and ambitions, you'll gain a following of customers, investors and promoters who cheer you on as you achieve success.

Job Sites
CareerBuilder.com: Reach millions of candidates by posting jobs on this must-visit site.
The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal: The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal attracts well-educated professionals who are at the top of their game. Post a job or search résumés here.
CollegeRecruiter.com: If your firm wants to hire promising entry-level employees, check CollegeRecuriter.com for candidates with college degrees.

Most companies know of the top three social sites Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but others can be equally, if not more effective for your business based on what you are wanting to accomplish. It’s important to know your goals of using social media for your brand before just jumping in, with that understanding you will be able to pick the right social platforms for maximum results. Still confused? Contact your WSI Consultant today to get your questions answered.

Just like everything else these days online marketing is going mobile. As smart phones become cheaper and more popular, people are finding themselves using their phones and tablets more and more to do their internet searching. Especially when searching for things locally. How many times have you needed to find a restaurant and pulled your phone out to search for directions?

Mobile Phone Usage is Exploding

According to CISCO mobile phone usage is going to DOUBLE by 2012 and TRIPLE by 2013. Sounds like a mobile marketing strategy needs to be developed now.

Have you ever Googled something on your phone and seen different search results then Googling on a PC? That's because Google knows your on a mobile device and wants to deliver the best results for you on the go. Thus they emphasize and rank higher those sites that are mobile friendly and have higher 'mobile ranking' because of Google Places, Local Reviews, etc.

A websites mobile traffic is averaging around 10%, but from personal experience I have seen mobile traffic double during holidays and high traffic times because people are using their phones while on the go as they travel. That's 20% of your traffic, or 1 out of every 5 people vising your site. You might think "Well but 4 out of 5 people still visit us on a computer, so do we really need a mobile strategy?" Remember it's 20%. If you grew your annual revenue by 20% would that be a pretty big deal? I think we all can say yes.

Creating a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Even before we get to the mobile marketing aspects of things, you first need to make sure your website is 'Mobile Friendly'. What we typically see is a 'watered down' version of a website when visiting a mobile website because people want to quickly aspect the most important things to them. This typically leans toward your contact information, directions, phone number, email address etc. People want these things fast, so when thinking about your mobile website keep in mind people will be accessing your site from a phone or tablet for fast information.

So don't use large images, videos, flash etc. Straight forward HTML and CSS can easily get people to what they are looking for on your site.

Start by creating a sitemap of your mobile site, just like you would your regular website. Except ask yourself what would I want to access on my website in 2 minutes or less if I were coming here for quick information?

Now this doesn't mean to exclude critical aspects of your website, but keep in mind your traffic is coming from a smaller screen and wanting the information more quickly.

Optimizing Your Mobile Website

Your mobile website can be optimized like any other site by using good practices of keyword friendly Meta Tags, Title Tags, and SEO friendly URLs. But more importantly to be found on a mobile search is how many LOCAL sites you are listed in. Remember, Google is ranking you based on it being a local search 99% of the time. The more prominent you are on local review sites will be a great improvement towards your mobile SEO rankings. A good place to start would be Google Places, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Four Square, etc.

Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

If you are unsure how to start your mobile marketing plan, feel free to contact us today for a free consultation review of your internet marketing strategy. You can also read our White Paper regarding mobile phone metrics here.

Marketing on Social Media sites is one of the most effective ways to market your products and services to your customers. Considering that Facebook alone has 500 million users; this should show you the importance of having a social media marketing strategy in place for your company. What may be surprising to some is that people actually enjoy interacting with companies and brands because it makes them have sense of control. If a customer can go online and comment about good or bad service (And typically bad) then they feel like they have a voice about your company's services and products.

Establishing a Goal

The first steps you should take when it comes to social media is establishing the goals for your company's online marketing strategy. Are you selling products directly to clients? Focused on managing your brand identity online? Using Social Media to reach new business? Or using Social Media to retain current business?

These are all important questions to consider when setting up your social media goals.

Don't Sell on Social Media

Most people do not want to login to Facebook or Twitter just to see blatant advertisements thrown in their face. After all it's THEIR account and they CHOOSE to follow you. The can easily choose not to.

The best approach is to interact with your fans and followers about your product and let the users take control. If you have a new widget you want to advertise, then ask people about your product. Don't just advertise it and leave it alone. The best way to approach this is by using an interactive tool such as Facebook polls to see what your customers like. For instance when you use a Facebook Poll to introduce a new product, you should create a webpage or video about your product and link to it from your Facebook Poll. This not only informs the user of your new widget, but also lets them interact back with you with opinions about it and allows for some nice feedback and data collection.

Creating Unique Content

One of the most important aspects of your social media strategy is to include content that your audience wants to see. Photos and Videos are key to achieving good results. After all, people join Facebook and Twitter to share their own photos so why not as a brand or company share yours and directly talk to your audience about your content. Never assume just because you post a comment, photo, or video that someone is goign to interact with you. Best approach is to directly interact with them by talking to your audience and asking them questions about what they like.

Building Your Online Community

What's the point of your social media strategy if no one is following you on Twitter or liking your page on Facebook? You can't just create some social media entities and hope people find you. You need to go to them.

Step 1 - Setting Up Social Media Properties

First step of course to create user accounts and pages on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

You more than likely already have traffic on your website and/or blog, so the most common sense approach is to link to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. properties from your website and blog. Easiest way to do so is add some 'icons' or 'badges' to your site and link to your social media pages. Click here to download a few we have collected. You can also include these badges and link directly in your Outlook signature.

And I highly suggest using a widget like AddThis to add sharing tools to each of your blog posts (Take a look at the bottom of this post!).

Step 2

Have your company 'follow' and 'friend' your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Start creating content on Facebook and using #hastags on Twitter. Hashtags (a 'tag' or 'topic' about your Tweets, but with a # in front) lets other users find content based upon trending topics and keywords. This will let users stumble across your content.

Social Media Strategy Webinar

Next month on July 7th 12:00PM CST, WSI will be having a free informational webinar regarding Social Media Strategies for your business and brand. Click here to contact us, or here to sign up for the free webinar.

How so-called digital marketing agencies deliver creativity but fall short on reality.

Okay, so I’m doing a little surfing to see what companies are doing marketing in some of the target industries we’re expanded into and I happen upon a couple agencies that claim strength in digital marketing.  Hmmm….really?

The guilty will remain anonymous but, in the 2 cases I’ll rant about here, this is what I find:

“Wait while our site loads, it will be worth it”.  That, by itself, is so funny I must wait.  Wait..waiting…wait….  Poof…a pretty picture and a navigation “structure” that is so confusing I’m not sure what to click to find their services.  This is an agency that is working for large retail brand of beauty products and promotes a state’s visitor and entertainment bureau among other significant sized clients. It really made my brain hurt to look at their own site. 

Another agency site that focuses on health care digital marketing opens with a Flash image rotation with one little molecule looking symbol that says “drag me” when you hover over it.  Okay, weird.  Clicking the little nodules on the symbol brings up a portion of the content on top of the big rotating picture.  Then the content comes up over the image and is in 4 columns.  You must scroll down separately for each column’s content…thus FOUR scroll bars on the one page.  I could scream… “What? Are you kidding me?”  Keep those scalpels away from me.

My thought is that these agencies sell their clients outrageously costly, yet “creative” websites that don’t deliver beyond a gee whiz impression.
I cannot believe that a true business objective was ever at the forefront when sites like these are created.  When there is frustration, there is friction in the conversion process.  Digital marketing allows such great opportunity to eliminate friction.  Why create it just to be creative?

The Most Creative Websites Lose

Some of the most creative sites do win awards for creativity from other “creative” people or organizations.  But the real award should come from a client who’s increased sales by 20% or expanded into new markets without adding resources or added valuable customer service features that reduce client turnover or doubled lead generation without increasing marketing budget…and so on.  Digital marketing should focus more on making the client a winner!

Problem Solvers Win.

Keeping a balance between creativity and results is important.  But, if you are in a profit-focused business, face it, beauty doesn’t make payroll!
Don’t get me wrong.  Creating a great visitor experience on a website does include the first impression and a look and feel that reflects the image of your target audience.  But, it is more about making it easy for your visitor to quickly see how you can solve their problem or fulfill their need and take action in the fewest clicks.

A real digital marketing agency will help you strategize how digital can further the overall marketing objectives of your business before getting creative with your website, search engine optimization, social media efforts or mobile visibility.  In addition, a real digital marketing agency will put analytics in place to ensure your business objectives are being delivered through this medium and the data is actionable to constantly improve results.  Last I checked, Google Analytics didn’t have a Key Performance Indicator called “website awards”.  LOL.

It makes me happy to know we provide real digital marketing services that deliver great results to our local, regional and national clients.    You can take that to the bank!

One of the most common mistakes we come across in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is that most sites contain only one sitemap. Your sitemap is used for search engines to identify pages across your site, which greatly enhances crawl rates and indexing of your website. The more pages you have indexed, the more likely your content is to be found in search engines. Thus why not use multiple site maps to separate out content on your site?

The Why

Now lots of people say "Oh well my site isn't large enough for multiple sitemaps." But doesn't your site have a blog? Might your blog need a separate sitemap? Or sitemap for a section of articles or resources?

One of the biggest reasons for separating these out, is so that you now exactly how many pages in each section of your site are indexed. It would of course be a lot easier if big'ol mean Google would just tell you within Webmaster Tools. But hey they're not. So it makes sense to break your site down into multiple sitemaps so you can easily see what on your website is indexing and what is not.

You can see above that by separating out the sitemaps that we know 98% of our blogs have been indexed by Google. If these weren't separated how we would know? How do you know if your blog is indexed?

The How

Creating Sitemaps is pretty easy, I recommend the XML sitemap generator over at www.xml-sitemaps.com. For simple sites I recommend at least separating out your blog separately from your main site. If you have a separate section for articles, I would do one for it as well.

For larger more complex sites, for instance an e-commerce site with hundreds of product pages, you might have a sitemap for each primary category and possibly subcategories. That's for you to decide.

The Results

With this practice, not only is it easier to analyze your websites indexing, but your website will more than likely have more indexed pages and index new pages faster.

The same holds true with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Toolbox. Each allows for submission of multiple sitemaps of your website. Note that Bing Toolbox is at least nice enough to actually show you the indexed pages in the Index > Index Explorer section, but don't expect them to automatically start indexing a separate Blog Sitemap. I recommend that you monitor this section and physically look to see what is being indexed. You can manually submit your URLs since they allow for 50 direct URL submissions a month or 10 per day.

A Facebook Static page

A Facebook Static page adds advanced functionality to your Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization. It will also allow you to create a landing page so your Fans can get a custom message from you before they can navigate through the rest of you Page. The FBML application is only for Facebook Fan Pages, not personal or group pages. You can use this application to set your company’s page apart from your competition. Adding a static page can be a do-it-yourself project if you have some knowledge of HTML.

A detailed Information page

A detailed information page is critical for the success of your company’s Fan page for obvious reasons. When people go to your page, they want to know who you are before they “like” you. It is critical that all the information be complete. A complete page includes your company logo, location and hours or operation (if applicable), a description of who you are and what you do, and other pertinent information about your company. If you are unsure what to put here, use the information from your company website so there is some consistency with your brand.

Facebook is a social platform. So, don’t forget that beyond the technical components, your focus is to engage with your fans. Post pictures, reply to comments, and stay active with them. This will help fuel the fire for your fans to stay active also, which makes a happy camp fire!

A Facebook fan page is a way for businesses to connect to current and potential customers, and engage in conversation related to your business. To set up a Fan page and get your own vanity URL like facebook.com/yourbusiness you must start the process with a standard Facebook URL until you have 25 “likes.” Once you have 25 people who “like” your page you are now eligible to create a customizable URL that fits your business. Congrats!

Getting to the 25 “likes” should take you a week or less; just email everyone in your organization and tell them to like the page. If your organization is smaller than 25 then reach out and email people in your personal network. You can invite people to “like” your page through Facebook or through your normal email client, either way let the people in your network know you have created a new page and start engaging in conversation with them.

A Fan page is great for businesses because Facebook Pages are not subject to a fan limit and can automatically accept fan requests, unlike a personal profile which has to manage friend request. Every time someone becomes a fan, comments, clicks the “like” link, or shares your post, it shows up in that fan’s news feed for all their friends to see. So “viral” is built in which should increase your “likes” as long as your posting regularly which should be included in your company's social media marketing strategy.

Not sure what to post, or how to get started? Contact your WSI consultant to get started with your Facebook Fan page today!

Creating, finding and sharing compelling content can prove to your customer that your business knows its jurisdiction, is a thought leader in its field and wants to help them keep current on important developments. Businesses are placing a greater emphasis on content marketing’s ability to add value for current and potential clients.

Because we are surrounded and bombarded with content from social media, it hasn’t made life easier on content production.  According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing down. This can be overwhelming for your business because you want to make sure your content is being seen.

In an article on emarketer.com it quotes:
“Content curation is not a low-touch activity, and according to HiveFire the greatest challenges are creating content that is original and compelling, and finding the time to do so. It was much less of a challenge to find quality content from third parties, but still, nearly half of marketers reported that was difficult as well”.http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008327

Right now it seems that content curation, and curation platforms are going to be an area of growth on the web because it’s easier to search for good content and share it then to create it. One of the single most valuable roles you can play in this uproar of content is to be the one who lends sanity to finding and sharing only the best of the best.