PTMS SEO Seminar – You Need To Know

Search engine optimization is vital to your site being found online. But most websites don’t do enough to ensure top rankings for their most important keywords?

That’s why the SEO Seminar being offered by PTMS is a great opportunity. There’s a price point on the training session, but you’ll not only leave the session with a manual on how to do SEO, you’ll also get a report of what you’re doing well with SEO for your site – and what you need to improve.

Sign up here.

Internet Marketing Webinar from AIADA and ADT

Learn how to get more from your internet marketing budget at this seminar on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 – 2:00PM EDT.

It’s FREE, only 30 minutes, and will offer strategies to help automotive dealers more effectively execute internet marketing strategies and budget. This webinar will cover:

• Online inventory
• How is inventory displayed in classifieds
• Where are your efforts focust
• Getting the most real leads online

Find out more about this seminar and sign up here.

Why CMS Might Be Right For You

If you’re going to build a new site – or even revamp your existing site – you’re going to want to be sure you’re building it so that it will work for you next week and next year, as well as it does today. And to do that, you’re going to want to build it with a content management system (CMS).

A CMS allows you to create, edit, manage, search and publish pages on your website without having to learn a programming language PHP or even markup languages like HTML/CSS. A good CMS platform has a simple administrative interface that makes creating, storing, and publishing pages easy, so you can keep your site up to date.  Another important part of a CMS is extensibility.  If your site is more than a simple informational site, you’re may want to build functionality on or around the CMS.

Here are four benefits to implementing a CMS on your site:

CMS systems save you time and effort: Using a content management system drastically reduces the time and effort needed to update your website.

CMS systems help manage costs: Without a CMS, you will likely have to pay someone in-house or out to update the content of your website. With a CMS, anyone can easily keep the content current.

CMS systems help you keep your site current and meaningful: Because you can do it yourself, a CMS makes it easy for anyone at your company to update content. You can update it as frequently as you want.  That means you can ensure your site has new information to visitors keep coming back.   You don’t want to miss business opportunities because you are unable to add timely or topical content to your site.

CMS systems can help you manage your SEO: A good CMS is built with the search engines in mind. By standardizing layouts and properly labeling content and structure, your CMS can help search engines like Google index and rank your website. Additionally, regularly adding new content to your site will give search engines more to crawl and improve your ranking.

Is your website doing everything it can for you?

IKIWISI – How to solve the “I’ll know it when I see it” dilemma

IKIWISI!
“I’ll know it when I see it!” That seems to be the current mantra in software/web development.  It means stakeholders don’t know what they want their final web product to be until they see it.

Software and web developers have tried to accommodate these make-it-and-we’ll-see requests through technologies like the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.  Products like Protoshare, IRise, and Axure have taken this a step further, creating clickable prototypes which not only gives stakeholders a visual representation of what the site will look like, but can also provide an indication of how it will “breathe” – or to put it in other words, what it will be like for a user to traverse the site: Will it be intuitive? Crowded? Does prioritization of items on the home page make sense? You get a basic answer to these questions with these products.

But it’s an uphill (and unnecessary) battle to try to take specs, create the product in its entirety, show the stakeholder the final version, and expect a quick approval. In fact, since most people (including sophisticated software developers) don’t know what they want until they see it, there’s a good chance that all your work will end with a, “Hmmm. No. That’s not it. Try again.”

So how do you solve the puzzle of what your customers really want, so that you can both be profitable?

I think the solution is to create the final product iteratively.  This high-level chronology is what I use to create websites, and it’s worked well. The process goes like this:

1. Create the Site Map: This includes agreeing on the goals of the homepage, and should incorporate the most recent specs. Without a site map one has almost no framework to work from. The site map will also help you see how the pages relate and will give you an idea of flow through the site. (You will need to communicate that flow through discussions.)
2. Design the homepage and any pages with unique functionality or unique user interface.  This can includes search pages, search results pages, user input pages (forms), etc. Share the designs, make sure that the customer agrees with the overall look and feel. Details can be worked out as you’re moving forward.
3. Begin building the “shell” of the website with live links/navigation and on a server that all stakeholders can easily access.  Usability testing (at least informally) can begin to take place at this point.  If you expect stakeholders to start understanding what they want at this point, you’ll realize that they’re going to request changes.  It’ll still be early enough in the process at this point where you can embrace those changes – which will make your client very happy.
4. Code the remaining functionality of the site.  Unit tests can be written between steps 3 and 4 if that is something your organization engages in. Upon completion of the coding, all unit tests should be passed, and post-production testing should take place. I like to show the client the un-skinned functionality to make sure we’re on the right track.
5. Skin the site.  That is, do any visitor-side programming that needs to be done (CSS/HTML). Make the site look pretty.  Get final approval from the stakeholder.
6. Push the site to live.

Following this order in production of a site can help eliminate the IKIWISI issue from killing your man hours. And remember, keeping stakeholders in the loop throughout the whole process will save developers/designers hundreds of hours of re-dos, redesigns, revisions, etc.

Social Media Today

I just got forwarded a BusinessWeek article: “Debunking Six Social Media Myths.”

While I agree with most of the premises for running a good social media campaign, I think there’s some additional points that need to be made about marketing planning in general:

First, traditional marketing is not dead. You need the right mix. Get your strategy straight before you start.

Second, let’s not forget branding and your own website. If you have a social media program in place and your website doesn’t convert, there’s really no point. In fact, before I’d spend money on a social media program, I’d make sure my site is not only converting, it’s pulling people for repeat visits. If you’re not giving them new content on your site regularly, is there any reason for them to come back? And if they’re not coming back, how are you convincing them to work with you?

Third, just because a lot of other companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Get your plan together before you expend effort and budget on this.

Finally, if you do endeavor to get a social media plan together and follow the advice in the BusinessWeek article on how to do it, you still are going to need someone on your end to answer questions and interact with those responding to your efforts. Make sure you have that in the budget before you run with it.

What are your thoughts?

Fortune 500 Companies are Not Dominoes

Fortune 500 companies are not dominoes. Getting one to buy your widget does not mean the rest will fall in line.

There is a common misconception among young entrepreneurs that if one Fortune 500 company makes an investment in a product, the rest will quickly fall into place – to reduce the risk of trailing their competition.

This premise is false for a couple of good reasons:

First, the people to whom you are making the sale, frankly do not care if their company falls behind their competition. They’re simply looking to hit sales or hiring quotas so they can keep their job. Either you’re going to help them do that or you are not. The exception, of course, is when you’re talking with board members, but as a young entrepreneur, even if you do get a meeting with one of these big wigs, you will likely be passed down to a lesser employee.

Second, most companies would rather let their competitors spend money on a new piece of tech first and then watch for the ROI. If they have success with your widget, then they’ll consider buying it. Otherwise, the value of your offering poses too much risk. There is no incentive to buy while the risk is high when all they have to do is wait a few months to see how things play out. After all, you’re not likely to turn down their money if they offer it later, once they’re more assured of your value.

So what does this mean to a budding entrepreneur? It means you need to assure that your product provides tremendous value to an individual inside a large corporation rather than providing value to the company at large. This can be a sales manager, project manager, marketing manager, etc. If your tool can increase their efficiency and make them look more effective, you’ve probably got a winner.

You may also want to review your pricing strategy, making your product affordable to anyone inside the Fortune company and then doing volume sales inside that organization.

E.g., don’t try to sell a $100,000 license to your recruiting software. Instead, make the license $200/month and sell it to 50 recruiters at one company. Sound difficult? Sure. But the $100,000 sale is a lot toughter. Moreover, it only takes one HR Director saying no to the $100,000 sale to sink you at a Fortune company – but there are PLENTY of recruiters to go around. So even if 10 say “no”, there are still plenty of others who may say “yes”.

Good luck!

It’s a marathon – Not a sprint

Running a successful business is a marathon, not a sprint.

The 90-hour week is a foolish endeavor born of reading “Art of the Start” one too many times. In truth, many of the stories entrepreneurs tell of the hours they pulled to make their companies successful are highly exaggerated. Organizational psychologists say after 50 hours you are wasting your time and you will spend the next 20 hours fixing mistakes you made during those candle-lit nights.

That is not to say that you cannot (and will not) pull all nighters. But working on Christmas is not only unnecessary, it is downright foolish.

It’s tempting to just work around the clock and expect your employees to follow suit, but a tempered approach will do more to keep everyone happy. The last thing you need is for those who work longer hours to start resenting those who work fewer – because the mood will catch and soon you’ll have an entire office of disgruntled employees.

Instead of giving out gold stars for working long hours, give them out for producing great work – regardless of whether it was completed during traditional business hours or during what should be “off the clock” time. This will encourage more successful efforts – not just time spent.

And isn’t success, after all, the bottom line?

Quietly Taking Over The World

Welcome to Leading the Nerd Herd.

Technology keeps advancing. It’s vital to it to stay on top of the advances because the importance of those who understand and know how to use it will only continue to grow.

Those in the herd live by this fact. We stay online and connected. We revel in the latest and greatest. We’re the early adopters who alpha and beta test, so that the rest of the world can have products that are easier to use.

I’m lucky enough to not only be a member of the herd, I’ve taken a position in helping to develop tech. On this blog, I’ll post thoughts about technology, web development, and business entrepreneurship.

Got a question? Just send it to me.