By John Carranza

If I had one piece of advice on how to best use the internet to grow your business, it would be to position yourself as an expert in your field. Like never before, the internet presents several opportunities to communicate with your current and future customers and allows you to share information and valuable resources that can position you as an expert in your industry.

An effective website is just one small part of the bigger picture. Today, by using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can present information and resources to your target market that are of real value to them. In doing so, you gain their trust as an authority in your market. This will lead to loyal customers who seek you out as opposed to the more traditional (and less effective) method of searching for customers by pushing your message to them – inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing.

Marketing has definitely changed recently as the internet revolutionized how businesses find customers. In reality, it is now a case of the customers finding the products or services they are interested in purchasing. If you are like me (and the research has proven that a huge percentage is), you go to Google first when looking for a product or service to buy. If you take advantage of the power of the internet and use those services I mentioned like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, etc. then you increase your chances dramatically that you will be found online. And today, that can be the difference between having a business that is thriving, or one that is barely surviving.

by Matthew Montanez

I too was once a skeptic of social media’s actual ability to draw meaningful traffic to a website. On the surface, blogging appeared to simply be a method of publicizing your personal journal, lacking any real business-level value. Facebook appeared to be another MySpace-like application more about maintaining personal relationships than business relationships. Twitter appeared to be another method for those bloggers to post personal information irrelevant to anyone but themselves. Researching these applications online via tutorials and seminars turned me into a slight believer of social media’s business potential. It was only when I began utilizing these applications and measuring results myself did I become a true believer.

Since I have established my own blog, set up towards the end of August 09, it has become the number 1 entry point for traffic coming into my website. Twitter and Facebook currently contribute to 20 and 17 percent of all traffic coming into my website, respectively.

Just recently, I posted a blog about a weekend trip to San Francisco: My Trip to, from, and in San Francisco. Headlining the post, I included a photo of the city from my hotel room window. The very same day, the hotel, hotel Nikko, posted up my photo, with a link to my blog, on their Facebook wall. Traffic to my website quadrupled that very day!

There are obviously a large number of possibilities when it comes to online marketing through social media. It is highly significant for businesses to realize this now while it is still quite simple to take advantage.

Within the past 6 months, I have experienced first hand the effects of a slow economy. Many of my clients made the choice that they could not afford to invest in advertising and marketing during these times. I continued to market my services (of course, since that is what I know…) and a few of my good clients continued to do so as well. Interesting enough, they are the ones who are not just ’surviving’ as many like to call it, but they are doing quite well. One of my best customers (who’s become a good friend) recently told me that while his competition cut their marketing budgets, he increased his email marketing and also started a blog. Instead of experiencing a decrease in his business, he actually saw his sales grow (although nothing dramatic but in today’s economic climate, he’ll take it).

So for those of you afraid to invest in your business, you should be more afraid of what may happen if you just sit and wait and hope to merely survive. Your competition very well may be going after the customers that are out there.

I’m back. I was in New York all last week with my son for a baseball tournament in Cooperstown and had an amazing time. As you all know, it’s never easy coming back to work after a vacation. I have been trying to catch up but it’s an uphill battle. Before I left, Matt and I were brainstorming on several iHOG marketing projects and we came up with some great ideas. I think I’ve said it before but one of these days I’d like to videotape our iHOG brainstorming sessions – they are hilarious.

We hope to follow through on some of those ideas, especially the viral videos where we explain some internet marketing concepts. You’ll love those.

One thing we did start that we felt there was a need for is a guide to using Google. There is much more to Google than most people realize so we hope to explain some of its features, especially for business use. Look for this Google Guide ebook within the next month. Of course, it all depends on our workload and it seems like the economy is really picking up based on how busy we have been getting. Until then, here is one little Google tidbit that I bet you didn’t know about. Do a Google search for ‘find chuck norris’ and click the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. Check out the results. (I know this isn’t very useful but it sure is funny…)

by John Carranza

How would your business change if you had a dramatic increase in quality visitors to your website? For most of you, I’d guess that there would be some real value there. But how do you go about getting more traffic to your site? And at what cost?

I could write a book on how to attract more quality traffic to your website – in fact, I am writing an ebook on it – but for now, I will mention some key methods that you NEED to be engaged in to accomplish this.

The most obvious way is to get great (not good) search engine results. This means that when people do a Google search for keywords related to your business, you want to be on that 1st page. Good results may land you on the 3rd page but research has shown that unless you are on that top spot on page 1, most people will not see you. Getting on page 1 depends on your specific keywords and how much competition there is. For example, it would be nearly impossible to get top ranking for the keyword “attorney” since there is so much competition, but also it is a very general term. You would have a much better chance if you target “criminal defense attorney in Pasadena.”

To get high search engine ranking you need to make Google love your site. To do this, you need to focus on SEO or search engine optimization, among other things. Briefly, SEO means that your site has the correct structure and was built with your keywords in mind. Without getting too technical, your title tags should use your keywords, each page of your site should target certain keywords, and you should incorporate quality linking strategies. This is where your web developer should have excellent knowledge of how Google operates.

Other methods to getting more visitors to your site involve taking advantage of blogging, social networking sites, videos, and writing and submitting good articles to various content sites. All of these involve a big time commitment (or paying someone to do it for you) but the return on your time and money will lead to more visitors to your site and more customers.

In upcoming posts and hopefully that ebook I have been working on, I will be more specific on some of the methods to attract more traffic, such as creating videos and writing articles. In the meantime, if you have any specific questions or comments or would like some help in incorporating these methods to get more customers, call or email me.

John Carranza
jc@houseofgraphics.com

The proud Internet Marketing graduate

By John Carranza

Last week I found out that I passed the online Inbound Marketing University certification exam. I am now an official Inbound Marketing Certified Professional. Inbound Marketing University (IMU) was put together by Hubspot, a company that focused on, among other things, helping businesses get found online. IMU consisted of a week of live online 1-hour sessions on various internet marketing topics. There were 2 sessions a day and were led by some of the most successful and knowledgeable professionals in their fields.

The class schedule was:

Class 1: How to Blog Effectively for Business 
Professors: Ann Handley &  Mack Collier, MarketingProfs
Class 2: SEO Crash Course to Get Found 
Professor: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
Class 3: Social Media and Building Community 
Professor: Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs
Class 4: Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn 
Professor: Elyse Tager, Silicon Valley American Marketing Association
Class 5: Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves 
Professor: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and
World Wide Rave
Class 6: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research 
Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Class 7: Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices 
Professor: Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABS, Marketing Experiments
Class 8: Inbound Lead Nurturing
Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch
Class 9: Successful Email Marketing 
Professor: Eric Groves, Constant Contact
Class 10: Analyzing Inbound Marketing 
Professor: Marshall Sponder, Monster.com, Web Analytics Association for Social Media

Each class covered a lot of useful information and in upcoming blog posts I plan on writing about some of the things that may be very useful for most of you.

By Matthew Montanez

The back-end development of an entire website consists of several fundamental tasks.

These tasks are as follows: convert the graphic design into script, create each web page from the derived script, create the backend code for shopping carts or custom applications, optimize the code, optimize each web page for search engines, and finally test the web site for consistency across browsers.

Each step is vital for the completion of a successful website. As a result, each step must be individually mastered. Only after several years experience developing websites have I been able to clearly distinguish each of these procedures and develop this essential checklist.

Sure, programming websites involves learning new languages (HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, SQL, etc.) however, once these languages are mastered, the back-end development of a website becomes a very logical procedure.

Keep in mind, the back-end development of a website is only part of the overall web development process. The graphic design is another essential element. The most important element however, is gathering the goals and requirements from your client to assure that any graphic design and code developed meets their needs and expectations.

Each fundamental task for back-end development will soon be further described in individual blogs.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since my last blog post. I apologize for that since I keep preaching that it is very important to blog frequently. In my defense, I have a pretty good reason – business has been as busy as it has been in a very long time. (Also, I went back to school -sort of – but I’ll save that for my next blog post.) Things have really picked up lately. And if I’m busy, that means that many of you are too. That’s a great sign. For me, it seems like all of a sudden, a dam burst and I was flooded with work. Things had been a bit slow earlier this year but once I launched my new website and used the power of the internet to get the word out, things started to happen. All those things I discuss on my website – blogging, social networking, email marketing – truly work.

If fact I was amazed that some of the videos from the site ended up on several other sites like TechVideoBytes and Owaks.com, a video search engine.  (Why they would want to have my ugly face on their sites, I have no idea.) Also, for a customer who I had set up a blog and Twitter page, they ended up on page 1 of Google for one of the keyword phrases we targeted within a few weeks. The Twitter page was in the number 2 spot and the blog was number 3, yes, right on page 1 of Google. Would your business benefit from being listed on the first page of Google?

Hopefully many of you are taking advantage of resources like social networking sites, blogs and email marketing to grow your business. I plan on creating some tutorials to put on my website on how to do some of these things but I need your help in finding out if there is anything specific you’d like to learn about. It’s going to take some time and effort on my part so I want to make sure there is a real need for this. I will be sending out an email survey this week to get specific information on what your needs may be so I know what specific videos I should create.

If you are not on my email list, please add you name to the opt-in box right on the iHOG home page. Or just send me an email to jc@houseofgraphics.com.

If you haven’t yet heard of Google Wave, you definitely will be hearing a lot about it very soon. Google Wave promises to reinvent how we communicate over the internet. They claim it’s what email would be like if it were invented today. It will not be officially launched until later this year but there is already plenty of hype surrounding it. After checking out a preview, it looks like an email program on steroids. It incorporates group forums, file sharing, wiki, instant messaging, and other pretty amazing features all into one application.

What does this mean for your business?
Well, it could provide a new and improved method of communicating or more specifically, collaborating with your customers, vendors or fellow employees. I personally have become a big fan of Google recently, mainly because they have so many useful and free tools to help businesses on the web (for example Google analytics or their local business center listing – which I wrote about in an earlier blog post). Google Wave sounds like it will be another winner.

If you want to learn more about it, check out the video where the two brothers who developed it previewed it at last week’s Google I/O Developer Conference. Just click here to watch a preview of Google Wave.

There is no doubt that this is a powerful new communication tool with the potential to attract millions of users but it won’t make much of a difference if people don’t embrace it and actually use it. But the fact that it was developed by the internet-giant Google, I wouldn’t bet against Wave becoming widely accepted.

Coming soon: info on Microsoft Bing, a new search engine that takes on – yes, you guessed it – Google…

I have a confession to make. As a graphic designer, I had always stuck to the idea that the most important part of a website was it’s creative design. I was always criticizing other sites for what I considered bad or boring design and praising other ones for cool fonts, graphics and special effects. Well, I now reluctantly accept that it is not always about the design. In fact, the creativity involved in building a website is but a small part of the process. Sorry all you creative professionals, I know this is a very unpopular statement for some of you but let me explain.

Sure, how good a website looks is a very important aspect and many years ago, it might have been at the top of the list (before Web 2.0). But today, a website designer that focuses more on creative design may be decreasing the effectiveness of a website. This is where it really pays for a web designer to understand some basic SEO concepts and realize that it’s more about purpose and function. Without getting too technical, designers like to communicate with pictures and images, including cool fonts but sometimes the content can become secondary. The problem is that search engines read text and content as opposed to images. I could, for example, build an entire website in Flash and although it would visually look extremely appealing to the viewer, the search engines would basically ignore it. Say for example that you have a hip & trendy clothing store (brick and mortar) where you spent a great deal of effort on the look and decor of your store, great colors, unique mannequins, young, good-looking staff waiting, maybe even a DJ playing music in the corner, but your store is in the middle of nowhere where you get very few people walking in. Wouldn’t it be much more important to focus more on the location so that you have a better chance of getting customers?

That is true of your website as well. If you rely on traffic from search engines, you MUST focus more on the functionality of your site over the aesthetics – unless you are planning on relying on paid traffic (pay per click, paid ads, etc). Remember, the search engines use spiders and robots to analyze web pages so the creative design of the page does not help in achieving high ranking and in fact, if the site contains mostly images and graphics but very little relevant content, it may not even be recognized by the search engine spiders. 

Ideally you need a web designer who can effectively engineer your site to achieve high search engine page results AND create a well designed site with good visual appeal and provides a positive experience for visitors. Yes, you can have both but you will need to understand that most of the SEO strategies occur behind the scenes and may not be obvious when looking at a site. 

When looking for the right web designer, find out what their background is. Many experienced designers, like myself, started in design for print and have transitioned into designing for the web. What I have seen, however, is that designing for print and designing for the web are quite different. And that difference was not obvious to me until recently. When I was creating a brochure, for example, everything was contained within that piece of paper. In other words, once all the images, photos, graphics, fonts, colors and text were printed on that paper, that was pretty much it with no strings attached. With a website, however, there are many strings attached – digital strings. No website is an island, every element on those pages is connected to the entire world. Not only that, but how the website is created will directly determine how many people visit it. There is much more responsibility and opportunity to build effective and successful sites. And I love that aspect about it. It truly separates the mediocre companies from those who really know what they are doing.

The first web sites I created were pretty much online versions of company brochures. If fact, many have referred to the initial wave of web design as brochure-ware. Today, things are very different. Designing a website has become much more technical. As a result, while I have dedicated a great deal of time and money learning SEO techniques, I have also partnered with a very talented programmer to help me implement them. This allows me to offer the ideal balance of creative and technical expertise in building highly functioning sites. This way you can have a great looking site that also attracts traffic and – most importantly if you are selling products or services – turns visitors into buyers.