Profitable Connections

Helping You Grow Online

Project Type: Quick Tips

  • Content Marketing

    Content Marketing

    Content Marketing
    Content Marketing Definition

    It’s a late night and I am in bed scrolling through Youtube when I come across a video titled “Yellow Jackets INFESTATION inside Bedroom wall! Sleeping with Wasps!” It’s not really a good idea to watch what was behind a thin layer of paint in someone’s bedroom right before bed. It was a video from a guy called the Hornet King. He has an entire video series, where he removes wasps and hornets from just about everywhere. The videos are well shot, informative, and entertaining.

    If I had a hornet infestation and lived in the Hornet King’s service area, I would call him to remove it, based solely on those videos. The Hornet King has 449 thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel and the list is growing. Not everyone is in his service area or has a bald faced hornets nest humming, chewing, and wriggling in their walls, but he could use the traffic generated from YouTube to drive traffic to the company website and social media. Driving interest to those other channels, adding unique content, and showcasing his videos will cause those channels grow. Facebook and Google both have location based searches and use traffic to determine search rankings. By increasing the search rankings and using proper SEO, his company could dominate search page results. This is important, because I don’t think a panicked homeowner will click through search result pages, while they stare down a swarm of hornets. If the homeowner is a fan, he knows the Hornet King already and probably won’t even consider another company.

    This form of Content Marketing is very effective at generating interest. This interest can be very effective at generating sales. It’s really a win for everyone but your competitors.

    HUGE Yellow Jacket INFESTATION above BEDROOM ceiling! Wasp Nest Removal
  • Email Marketing

    Email Marketing

    Online advertising covers a variety of methods of marketing communication, and an early technology still in use is Email Marketing. Marketing through email has a long and interesting history. It’s easy to do, costs very little, and produces traceable results. I could start one this afternoon.

    But,

    Before this job, I worked for an internet service provider in their tech support department. It was a fun job at times, because I like solving interesting problems. It was an awful job at times, because people were very angry about those problems. A lot of those problems came from spam. Email is one of the giant arteries of the internet from which everyone is blasted a barrage of messages. A large amount of these messages are things you want, things you don’t care about, tracking tools, and to a small degree malicious code.

    I would certainly want to be one of the messages you want, but so does every other message in your inbox, and you only have so much time to scroll past.

    So how do I become the message that sparks your interest?

    Marketing companies have been trying to answer this question for many years, and they have come up with a few answers.

    One idea is to offer opt-in advertising, by providing the customer a way of signing up for the email campaign. This is usually done with a special offers or newsletter sign up box.

    Some companies use transaction emails to up sell the customer on additional products and services. Transaction emails are messages triggered in response to a customer action such as a confirmation email for a purchase. Along with the appropriate sales information, one can include information about upcoming sales and promotions.

    So what do you think of email marketing? Is it something you feel is effective? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

  • Social Media Marketing

    Social Media Marketing

    I meet business owners that feel most of online marketing is a waste of time. They usually have a few forms of marketing that they use. They might have a truck wrap that advertises to people stuck behind them in traffic. Sometimes, they put a sign up on the side of the road; so people can read that, while they are stuck in traffic.

    They do have some non traffic dependent advertising. There is word of mouth and putting a coupon in a flier.

    Truck wraps, direct mailers, and road signs can be effective, but are limited and not for every industry. If you have a slow day, there is a change in business, or you want to announce a sale; it is difficult to let people know with any of these methods.

    Word of mouth, if positive, is great. If people are happy with your business, they will tell their friends. If people are really happy, their friends will tell their friends, and soon you have either hire some help or turn people away.

    It’s important to note that this process works very well in reverse, and negative word of mouth will turn away business prospects before they even consider your business.

    If your business is not always flooded with work, social media is an affordable option to consider for creating that word of mouth buzz that may be difficult with a truck wrap or a paper coupon. Social Media is where your customers will spread comments about your business, and where your business can respond.

    Social Media Marketing uses social media platforms for promotion and customer engagement. It offers the chance to respond directly to your customers, advertise to the general public, and build a loyal customer base.

    Social media offers its users a variety of ways to share, create, and subscribe to content and form communities with other users. It does this for free and tries to build a large and diverse user base. It encourages a lot of personal content. This user base is not the social media company’s target audience. The user base is the commodity, and the target audience are businesses.

    Businesses gain access to this user base through a variety of ways. Most offer a range of online advertising platforms that can be focused down to relevant targets. Businesses can gain subscribers through attracting interested people with relevant content and through advertising campaigns.

    The best truck wrap or the prettiest flier will not help you with the customer that is looking for your service on Google or Facebook. You will also be completely helpless against negative feedback, if you are not monitoring these services.

    The business owners that do not believe social media is important are usually people that do not use social media personally. To those business owners I usually tell them that there is a big difference between a business and an individual using social media. As a business, you want to market where your customers are. Talk to your customers and find out what they are using. If your customers have Facebook, creating a business Facebook page will allow them to follow your page for new offers and sales. It’s also likely their friends and family use Facebook, and they can share and recommend your business. Overtime, it can grow and can be used to develop sales.

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

    Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

    Early in our relationship, before we got married, I took my girlfriend to Baltimore for a weekend getaway. It was in the winter and a thick gray sky covered the brick and stone city like a wet blanket.

    We took Amtrak into the city, and it was a short walk from the train station to the hotel. Once we got everything up to the room, we were starving for a nice breakfast. I asked the lady at the desk where a nice restaurant was, and she drew us a map to a place with chicken and waffles.

    Outside we went again, into the wet chill of the morning, looking for chicken and waffles. The further we walked, the more it became obvious that the hotel lady was awful at maps; and we found ourselves lost, wet, cold, and hungry.

    This is when I learned that my girlfriend gets hangry.

    “We have about ten minutes to find this place before I lose it,” she said in between sniffles. At this point, we still had that new relationship smell; and I wasn’t going to let a poorly drawn map ruin my weekend.

    I had a shiny new business phone in my pocket that I hoped would make me look like a hero to her. “Hey Google,” the little phone lit a little swirly ball to let me know it was listening. “Find Breakfast.”

    The phone pulled up several places. The top result was a place featured on the Food Channel for its chicken and waffles. They had a Google Business page that included a link to Google maps. I hit the link, picked walking directions and street view. I could follow the pictures of the buildings on the phone as we walked by them. The phone gave voice directions as we went, and I realized that a guy would have to be really stupid to get lost with something like this in his pocket.

    We found the restaurant, and we had the best breakfast I have eaten in a long time.

    This story’s happy ending is brought to you by Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Search Engine Marketing, which involves the promotion of websites and other information through Search Engine Results (SERP) pages, is what businesses use to help generate leads and ultimately sales. Search Engines offer free services to public and generate their money in advertising revenue.

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works with SEM in that it ensures the website is not only readable by the search engine but is also effective. SEO determines how the results are displayed by using the latest code supported by the search engines.

    Currently, this is achieved through the use of meta tags, snippets, and keywords.

    The chicken and waffle place was very effective when it came SEM, because someone very carefully setup their SEO. By entering their business into google maps, they were able to take advantage of Google’s location based search services. They had an effective Google Business page that came up in the search results that provided pictures of the dining room and the food. This is where they added the information about being featured on the food network.

    SEM achieves results through the use of advertising. Search Engines make their money by using an advertising system that works through an auction system. Businesses use their marketing platforms to pay for advertising space at the top of the SERP. It’s an auction system, so the more you are willing to pay for the click, the more likely your ad will be displayed at the top of the page.

    All of this information, the pretty pictures, the map program cheerfully navigating me through the city, and the threat of my girlfriend having a hangry meltdown, led me past dozens of places to eat to the chicken and waffle place.

    The beauty of SEM is that it works for you all the time attracting leads, and can be something you do better than your competitors.

  • Web Cookies

    Web Cookies

    Web Cookies are a type of code where bits of information are exchanged between a web browser and a client for a variety of uses. The data exchange is small and is used to provide information about the user to the server.

    The idea for Web Cookies came from the term Magic Cookie. A Magic Cookie is something programmers use to exchange a kind of identification token. A client downloads it from a server. The code is small and contains a unique number. This number is read when the client exchanges the Cookie with the server. You can think of it like like a valet service. When you hand your car keys to the valet, the person hands you a ticket, which has a unique number on it. The number is used to identify the ticket you are holding to your keys and your car. This exchange provides a lot of programming solutions in an elegant and easy to use way, which is how something becomes magic in the computer world.

    Web Cookies use the same concept and applies it to web pages. Websites use cookies for a variety of purposes, and they come in two basic flavors.

    • Session Cookies: Session Cookies only last while the user has the browser open and are deleted when it is closed. This cookie is used to store information the user has entered and to track which pages the user accessed within the website.
    • Persistent cookie: A Persistent Cookie’s expiration date is set by the web developer that created it. These cookies usually last across multiple sessions and is most often use to track the client web browsing.

    Cookies are used for a variety of purposes on the web, and this is a basic explanation of how they work. Persistent Cookies are of particular interest for marketing because they provide valuable data of user browsing habits.

  • The Wonderful World of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

    The Wonderful World of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

    When you click on a website, how long do you wait for it to display before clicking on something else?Would you wait two minutes? How long do you think your customers are going to wait?

    Google feels this is important as well, and part of your site ranking depends on speed.

    Welcome to the wonderful world of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is an HTML Framework that works to help web pages run faster on mobile devices. It was originally created by Google, but became its own open source project. Google has made it one of their factors when it comes to page ranking.

    Everyone lives in Google’s world right now, so if Google feels that AMP and speed are important; AMP and speed are important.

    But as far as evil overlords go, Google has been nice. They released control of AMP, so the AMP Open Source Project can make their own standards. Google provides tools to help developers test their site; and it isn’t hard to implement, most of the time.

    Their are many technical details that go into AMP that are beyond the scope of what I can cover here. There are also many ways to implement AMP and some methods require more technical skill than others.

    There are some basic things to consider with site speed and AMP.

    The first is to test your domain google has provided testing tools to determine how well your site does.

    https://web.dev/measure/

    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

    It is important to test your site regularly to determine performance.

    If your site has AMP implemented; but fails the speed test, site code and server capacity are the two main areas of focus.

    Server speed usually must be bought. Most web hosting companies will use a shared server for all of the domains it manages. This means that at certain times, when server capacity is high, the server may be slow to respond. At times of low capacity the server will be fast. For websites that need to be fast all the time, most hosting companies offer private servers that allow admins to manage the server directly, have dedicated hard drive space, and dedicated ram.

    Site Code is something that can be managed directly on the website. How one implements this, depends on how the existing site has been created. This is not something the average person can do, but you can test your site to see how well it does. A good web designer should be able to redesign it to conform to the latest standards.

  • Domains (DNS)

    Domains (DNS)

    The internet is a technological landscape of many different parts that come together in a way that is so seamless, most people take it for granted. These parts all work in the background to provide your internet experience. Most of the internet is made up of web pages that you access every day for various services.

    DNS or the Domain Naming Service is the boring part of the internet for many people. A business domain is often an overlooked asset, because people do not understand it.

    Domain names were developed, because people are bad at remembering numbers. People know they can type Facebook.com into their browser, but no one is going to remember 31.13.66.35, which is an IP address and is used to tell the internet the location of the Facebook.com server. Domain records also tell the internet where to send your email. Think of it as the internet house address for your business.

    You buy your domain through a registrar. It is the registrar’s job to know who owns what domain and the IP address of the DNS server hosting the domain. The DNS hosting provider in turn tells the internet where e-mail, web, and a variety of other services are located.

    This is a basic explanation of DNS, and there are an ocean of details that make DNS work that have not been described here. DNS hosting providers and registrars offer resources and instructions that can help with this.

  • Resources in Research

    Resources in Research

    Digital Marketing Channels requires regular research and updates to ensure they are working for you. A Google search will show a flood of information, some of which is outdated or wrong. Tech Companies want you to know how to use their services, and they provide videos and documentation that will teach you how.

    The following is a short list of some of these educational resources.

    These are all great places to start, but this isn’t a complete list. A good way to judge the information you are looking at is to see how it fits with what these root sources have to say.

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