Do you have a WordPress blog or website that you may want to add more features and functionality using the existing Plugins and Widgets that WordPress has on their platform? If so, you may have already tried to do so and cannot find a place in the control menu to add Plugins; it is probably most likely that you cannot. If your WordPress website is hosted at www.wordpress.com and not on a hosted website like GoDaddy, then you cannot add new features without upgrading. See WordPress at WordPress Plugins for details of why you cannot. Basically WordPress says it is for security reasons. If you want to see what widgets are available on WordPress check out WordPress Widgets for what is available beyond the basics. For an extensive list of Plugins see WordPress Plugins Directory to choose from one of the thousands of submitted Plugins. J2Net can help you navigate through the extensive list and focus you on what you really need for your business. Some of these Plugins require knowledge of the base WordPress PHP code and making some modifications so they can be added to your WordPress site.

If you like to upgrade your WordPress website to have more feature and improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), contact us at J2Net for a quote. We can host your WordPress site and will do the website transfer which will allow you more features and increase Internet visibility for your Blog or website.

Author Alex Cohen

Four years ago, I joined a relatively new company called Commerce360 – then a digital agency with a strong focus on search. The company was formed by two serial technology entrepreneurs, Lucinda Duncalfe and Craig Danuloff, with the explicit goal of finding a technology opportunity.

We were early customers of some second generation search technology, but quickly hit the limit of what existing tools could do. We had found our technology opportunity and made the switch to a software company.

Shortly afterward, I took over the marketing role and we rebranded as ClickEquations. In early June, ClickEquations was acquired by Channel Intelligence. Later this month, I’ll be joining H. Bloom as director of marketing.

I’ve learned a lot in my time in the search community, which has always been very generous with its knowledge. In my continuing effort to give back, here are the 10 key things I learned working at a search startup. It’s a mix of tips about search marketing, B2B marketing, and life at a startup.

1. Education is Everywhere
When I started marketing ClickEquations, I knew very little about paid search – something of a problem when your product is for search marketing.

The good news is that there is a tremendous amount of training on search marketing and articles are constantly being written.

•Conferences: If you’re new to search, you must attend at least one search conference. It’s the quickest way to get immersed in the field and you just can’t get that kind of in-person networking anywhere else. They’re held throughout the year in cities including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco (SES San Francisco is just a couple weeks away). Make a point of going to the parties and social events. Trading notes with peers often reveals a lot of tricks and contacts you wouldn’t get elsewhere.

•Email newsletters: The great thing about PPC is that it changes on an almost weekly basis. The easiest and lowest time commitment way to subscribe to the two major email newsletters from Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land.

•Blogs: In addition to the two major search news sites, blogs are the best source of current, practical information in the field. Need to learn about remarketing? The best way to use sitelinks? The help files only get you so far. I recommend these:

◦ClickEquations Blog
◦Certified Knowledge
◦Rimm-Kaufman Group
◦Inside AdWords
◦PPC Hero
◦BoostCTR

•Twitter: Twitter has mostly replaced my RSS reader to find interesting articles and get breaking news. It’s also a great place to network with other PPC professionals. The best example is the #ppcchat hashtag conversation that happens every Tuesday or so. Here’s a streamcap from a recent chat. This is a good list of PPC people on Twitter to start following.

2. Reputation is Everything & Being Awesome at Sharing is Key
Thought leadership was a big part of how ClickEquations built a name for itself and for good reason. If you’re viewed as an expert, people are more likely to listen to you and trust your products and services. It’s time intensive, but cost efficient.

The online marketing community is small and your reputation can’t be bought. Reputation follows the 1000:1 rule. It takes 1,000 good deeds to build a reputation, but only 1 slip to destroy it.

I’m a firm believer in quality over quantity. There is just far too much noise online and we all have far too little time. Between one and four great posts per month is much more valuable than four to eight mediocre pieces of content.

Being awesome at sharing is key. People probably don’t want talk about your product most of the time. But, they are willing to share interesting information, things that help them do their job, or anything that helps them express themselves.

Don’t just tweet out your press releases. When you’re presenting, don’t just shill your products and features. Give value and you’ll get trust.

3. Conversion Rate Optimization is Essential, Not Optional
I was working on my friend’s PPC account and all of the basics were in place: tight ad groups, relevant copy, and good negatives. The numbers weren’t working though. So, I launched a series of tests for landing page variations. Within a month, conversions doubled and CPA dropped by 75 percent.

No amount of work before the click can save you from a poorly designed site that isn’t persuasive. Conversion rate optimization and landing pages are essential, not optional.

•Google Website Optimizer is free, though not yet an enterprise tool
•WhichMVT can help you pick the right tool
•WhichTestWon is a useful for sourcing testing ideas
•Unbounce is affordable and easy to use software for landing pages
•Monetate is great for retailers

4. Beginners Can Prosper
Before 2010, I had never spoken at a major conference. By the end of the year, I had spoken at eight. I’m consistently impressed that, in many ways, the search community is a meritocracy. If you put in the work, you can get ahead.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to start a blog. You have 100 percent control over the message and the list (your readers) is yours. Most people won’t bother to start a blog. Most people who start a blog will stop after a few months. If you start, persist and focus on quality, people will notice. These blogs can help:

•Copyblogger
•Performancing
•Pearsonified
•Problogger
Having a name, and articles to point to, helps in landing a speaking gig, but it’s not required. The trick to landing a speaking slot is to pitch early. Most shows plan their agendas at least 3 months in advance, and many are done 6 months in advance.

Shows typically go through two phases of planning: setting the agenda and picking the speakers. That gives you two opportunities to get selected. Pitch at both times and pitch early.

5. Conserve Cash and Spend Strategically
In a startup, cash is king. It determines what you can invest in, when you have to get funding, and under what terms.

The easiest way to cut costs is to outsource to online companies. In some cases, you trade off a little domain expertise and they require some hand-holding.

•99 Designs – Great for graphic design, especially simpler projects like banner ads, logos and business cards. They run design contests, so you have to commit to reviewing the drafts. But, if you find a good designer, it’s easy to book them for side projects afterwards. Custom banner ads are only $200 for 1 treatment in a variety of sizes, which is a steal and great for refreshing creative quickly.
•Elance – A wide variety of freelancers, with more writers. It’s good for research and content help.
•oDesk – Similar to Elance, but with more of a focus on development and technical freelancers. Great for coding projects (e.g., WordPress).
•Mechanical Turk – Amazon’s service to outsource basic tasks to human workers. It’s ideal for routine work better done by people than machines (e.g., classifying photos). The cost is very low and you can scale easily.
•PrintPlace – This is the best vendor I’ve found for printing collateral. Prices are reasonable, they have heavy stock and turnaround

6. You Need Lead Nurturing & Scoring
With B2B marketing, the sales cycle is always now, but buying cycles vary significantly. It can be 60 days or 2 years.

There is also a finite pool of people actively shopping for your product. But those same people are looking for education in their field – white papers, webinars, conferences, etc.

That presents two related problems:

•Converting education leads into sales leads
•Influencing sales leads throughout the buying cycle at scale
The bridge for moving both types of leads to opportunities is lead nurturing (targeted email marketing) and lead scoring (prioritizing leads based on scores from fit and online lead activity).

Successfully implementing lead nurturing requires:

•A clean SalesForce implementation.
•Content to send to the leads (blog posts, articles, white papers, links).
•Specialized software (I use and recommend Marketo, but there are other choices like Eloqua and Pardot).
•Someone to manage the channel. I kept everything in house, but there are specialized lead nurturing consultants, like DemandLab, for strategic or tactical assistance.
•Executive commitment. The success of lead nurturing depends as much on sales and marketing culture as anything else. You need executive buy-in to invest spend the money on the software, the time on the programs and commitment from sales to use lead nurturing and scoring in the sales process. It’s very much collaboration and a commitment you should get before you start.

7. Create Late Stage Content First
In B2C marketing, the shopping cart and landing pages are closest to the sale and even small improvements can provide big, quick wins.

The equivalent in B2B marketing is late stage content – collateral that addresses the specific needs of buyers who are close to a purchase decision.

B2B buying isn’t purely logical and, emotionally, it’s driven a lot by the desire to mitigate risk. Focus first on late stage content, including:

•Product Info – Presentations and sell sheets for the reps to deliver and standalone decks that leads can pass around internally.
•Demos – A standard story to position your company and product consistently across reps and demos.
•Objection Handling – Common questions and responses. Sales reps aren’t expected to be subject matter experts, but they need to be ready to field detailed questions.
•Competitive Comparisons – You’ll always be in some sort of shoot out with a competitor. Regardless of how well you position, a prospect will always ask “How are you better than ____?”
•Case Studies – Everyone wants to see proof from third parties that the claims about your product are valid.
•Implementation Information – Eventually, prospects want to know what it takes to get started with your product. Material that helps explain setup, orientation, and support are helpful in late stage conversations.
Those documents are the basic arsenal for any sales team. It’s the first thing they’ll need for any sales conversations and they support outbound prospecting.

8. You Need A Brand Separate From Your Company
For me, writing and speaking has opened a lot of doors. Professionally, it made it much easier to promote ClickEquations. I was able to connect with influencers and decision makers, which helped with PR and word of mouth.

Personally, it has given me a platform and name recognition that I can take with me now that I’m moving onto H. Bloom. Regardless of what I’m marketing or where I am, I have a way to stay in touch with the great and generous people in the community.

Job security has been replaced with skill and network security. I was fortunate enough to have several people in the industry reach out to me for potential positions. Companies and positions come and go, but a great network can make sure you always have options.

You can’t wait until need help to connect with people. In fact, it’s the opposite. You have to make a concerted effort to help people often and generously without expectation of anything in return. If you give, you’ll get.

9. Offline is Critical in B2B Marketing
As much as B2B research and buying is online, offline is still essential to B2B marketing. I’m specifically talking about events. Here are a few tips I learned from sponsoring trade shows at ClickEquations:

•Location: Book events early for the best booth space. Corner booths tend to be the best, because you get two directions of traffic. Note where the entrances, food, and bars are, as these tend to determine the flow of attendees.
•Contracts: Buy in bulk to save on shows. The more you commit to, the bigger the discount and the more frequent the extras.
•Contract Add-Ins: Vendors will often include extras along with sponsorship as incentives to buy or buy more. Some add-ins just aren’t worth it, some are. I like bag inserts, ads in the show guides, any ability to present in the expo hall (separate from the editorial content), and pre-show mailers. Anything on the first day of the expo hall is more valuable than the second day, because foot traffic drops off a lot.

10. Hold Onto Good Freelancers And Vendors
Trying to find great vendors and freelancers is really time consuming.

Word of mouth is still the best source for recommendations. First Round Capital, one of ClickEquations’ investors, smartly created an Opzi group for all of the marketers to share ideas in a closed community. LinkedIn Answers and Groups can be helpful to start the search, though it’s full of a lot of sales people and self-promoters.

by Alex Cohen, SEW, August 2, 2011

There are so many SEO companies and so much advice about how to get ranked highly on Google. How can you tell the good from the bad?

It is true that Google comes down hard on sites who disregard their webmaster guidelines. Probably the highest profile example of this was when they effectively removed car manufacturer BMW from their search results for using doorway pages.

With many search engine optimisation companies still using these ‘black hat’ techniques, it is important to be able to tell the good from the bad.

Later we will look at some of the SEO techniques that can get you blacklisted but first lets examine ways to identify a less than reputable SEO company.

Spotting the black hat operators

Always be sceptical of any company that contacts you out of the blue. If you are going to hire an SEO company, ideally you should use a personal recommendation.

Definitely beware of companies who guarantee a particular ranking. If a company promises that you will be ranked number one on Google, ask for more information. It is relatively easy to get a website ranked number one on Google for an obscure term. However it is much harder to get ranked for something that is useful from a marketing perspective.

Also ask what happens if a company fails to live up to its guarantee? Is there any real value in their promise? The answer is probably not.

Finally ask the SEO company to clearly explain the techniques they are intending to use. If they are evasive with their answers they should be avoided.

If you do discover the techniques they are intending to implement, this will enable you to judge whether you are in danger of being blacklisted.

Know their techniques

Most search engines provided guidelines about unacceptable SEO techniques. Google in particular provide excellent documentation for website owners looking to improve their rankings. They provide advice on selecting an SEO provider and layout what it considers unacceptable techniques. These include:
Hidden text and links – Some SEO companies use hidden keywords and links that provide no value to the user, but are designed to increase search engine rankings. Techniques include adding text that is the same colour as the background, hiding content with CSS, setting the font size to zero or hiding text behind images.
Search engine only content – Using techniques such as redirects and cloaking it is possible to show different content to a search engine than to a real user. This approach is often adopted on sites built using Adobe Flash. However, this breaks Google’s terms of service and could led to you being removed.
Sending automated submissions to Google – Many website owners and SEO companies use software packages such as Web Position Gold to automatically submit their websites to multiple search engines. Again, this breaks Google’s terms of service and could led to you being removed.
Duplicating content – Although Google recognises that some content is duplicated for legitimate reasons (e.g. a separate print version of your site), it frowns on websites that deliberately duplicated in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.
Doorway pages – These are pages that are created with the sole purpose of ranking well for certain keywords. They often have poor content and exist solely to funnel users into the main site.
Keyword stuffing – This refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking. This can results in a negative user experience, and could harm your site’s ranking.
Participating in link schemes – Although your site ranking is partially based on who links to you, link exchange programs are still a bad idea. Exchanging links indiscriminately without considering their relevancy will damage rather than help your ranking.

Will implementing the above techniques get you removed entirely from Google? Probably not. However, they could damage your ranking over the long term and will almost certainly be a waste of money implementing.

Should you therefore avoid hiring SEO companies? Not necessarily. There are many reputable companies offering superb advice on how to improve your rankings. It just depends who you go with.

by Paul Boag

Author Garry Przyklenk

Having worked in online marketing and web analytics for nearly a decade, I’ve heard it all when it comes to myths passed around small and large companies alike. Here is a top 10 list of my favorite web analytics myths and practical advice on how to dispel them.

1. Free Analytics Software is Just as Good as Enterprise Analytics

There are several reasons why free software is never the best solution. Some of my favorite retorts to “why do we use Omniture rather than Google Analytics” often involve witty comebacks like “because I have to pay the bills” or “because my boss said so.” If that doesn’t work (and it never does), the primary reasons to go with enterprise analytics are:

•Service Level Agreements: What happens if your software fails? If you pay for analytics, you have a neck to choke; if not, you have to wait it out and pray nothing is lost.
•Data ownership: Free doesn’t mean consequence-free. Someone is paying the bill. Free software is often offered “at no cost to you.” Enterprise solutions enable you to take your data with you, should you so desire.
•Privacy: Enterprise solutions offer security and privacy through non-disclosure agreements protecting both sides of the contract.
•Customization: Hacking free solutions like Google Analytics is possible, but only to a certain degree. Enterprise solutions are built for customization with business objectives in mind.

2. Bounce Rate (or “Insert Metric Here”) is the Best Metric

Avinash Kaushik calls it the sexiest metric, but it’s not the best because there is no “best” metric. I know of several companies that employ teams of analysts whose sole responsibility it is to monitor a “God metric,” but rarely do these stand the test of time. It’s best to focus on a handful of metrics that actually drive profitable insights.

3. Everything Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, or Eric Peterson Says is Gold

Don’t get me wrong, Avinash is brilliant, but none of the experts in analytics know your business well enough to provide a plug-and-play measurement strategy. On a high level, their best practices are indeed gold, but nothing beats digging into your data and creating an analytics playbook of your own.

4. Dashboards or Reports Should Have 4 Quadrants and Only a Handful of Data

Although it’s a lofty goal to aim for when producing any content (resumes, menus, etc.), it’s extremely difficult to integrate the data, insights and visuals on a single page that caters to everyone on a distribution list. A good strategy is to start bigger than necessary to showcase your capabilities, get the attention of several stakeholders in your organization, consult with unique business units, and fine tune custom reports for each audience.

5. Insights are More Important Than Data

Sometimes key data is all your executives need to make a decision. Should your company officially support IE6 for our next redesign? If only 2 percent of visits to your site for the last six months came from IE6 and incorporating development and testing for an application would cost several million dollars, the answer is easy!

6. Unique Visitors are Real People

Unique visitors is perhaps the single most abused metric in history. If you really think about it, the metric known as unique visitors is no more than: count of persistent cookies dropped in a browser. Unique visitors do not equal browsers, individual people, or computers.

7. Analytics Code Degrades Site Performance

All code degrades site performance. If you had a single webpage with nothing on it, adding any code to it would increase load and execution time. That being said, there are customizations that add considerable bloat to your JavaScript files supporting web analytics data collection. As with any code added to a page, try to measure the benefit of adding additional code versus the cost of not having it on a page.

8. Web Analytics is the Responsibility of Marketing/Research/Communications/Operations/IT/etc.

Web analytics is the responsibility of a data-driven organization. If your website influences your business in any way, it’s everyone’s responsibility within your organization to take a portion of the responsibility for coming up with actionable business insights that increases revenue, decreases cost, takes advantage of opportunity, or mitigates risk.

9. Metrics From Different Web Analytics Vendors, Web Logs, and Databases Should Match

Web analytics is inherently inaccurate and practitioners are rarely adequately versed in statistical theory, so to argue that any one data collection source should match another is futile. There are several factors that contribute to inaccuracies in web analytics data including:

•Browser compatibility with JavaScript code employed by any given vendor.
•Cookie acceptance.
•Data corruption: receiving, executing, and transmitting.
•Server-side caching, scripting or configuration issues.
•Filters and processing rules: reverse DNS inaccuracies, data sampling, data encoding.
Look past the numbers and analyze trends, ensure your findings are statistically significant before coming to a conclusion, and always be transparent about web analytics limitations.

10. Insights From Web Analytics is Free

Nothing is free. Adding JavaScript code to a site requires time and effort, analyzing reports and deep-diving may entail hard costs and additional access to tools, and the practice of web analytics itself comes at an opportunity cost to the organization that must be considered just like any other capability.

There are plenty of other gems out there, do you have a favorite myth that I missed?

by SEW Garry Przyklenk, September 12, 2011

Tips for Running a Successful, Profitable Website

Everything you “know” about social media for small business is wrong.

Small businesses—accountants, lawyers, and brick-and-mortar shops—don’t need 5,000 Facebook fans, Diggs, or blogs that are updated daily. They need business. You know, clients, customers, shoppers, or whatever you want to call them.

How do small businesses use social media to get more clients and customers?

It’s much easier than you think, and to demonstrate that, I analyzed 10 of my most successful small business clients, and discovered these 8 best-practices. Oh, and the best part is this: you can implement most of these tips in a long weekend.

Now let’s dive in.

1. Use Videos on Your Website
When you’re a small, local business, your main strength is your personality. To highlight that, you should create videos so that your local customers can “meet” you before they hire or buy something from you.
What kind of videos can you create? One client, Total Plumbing Orlando, created instructional videos like “How to Fix Your Sink.” This was great because if people in the area used his video to fix their sink, they wouldn’t hesitate to call for a more complicated job.
If you don’t want to create instructional videos, create testimonial videos. If you made one of your customers extremely happy, encourage them to film a quick testimonial video that you can show other potential customers. That’s what I do on my site and it works great.

Also, you don’t need a high-tech, expensive video camera. Most of my clients used a Flip Cam or equivalent and demonstrated a garage-band ethos. It may not look professional, but it got the job done just fine.

As an aside, I noticed that the small businesses with 3 or more videos on their website reported having greater success with their online marketing efforts. While this was hardly a scientific study, my gut says the more videos the better.

2. Promote Your Phone number and Email Everywhere
When you work with a local business, you want a person with a soul who has your back. And how do you show people you have a soul? Make it extremely easy to contact you by placing your phone number and email address in your header, footer, and sidebar.
One of our clients, the international Tax Attorney Phil Hodgen, puts his cellphone number at the end of almost everything he writes online. He says “I get a lot of calls and it often turns into good business.”

3. Use WP-Sticky or a Static Page for the Home Page
When someone visits your website from search, they often visit your home page. Additionally, your loyal customers will often visit your home page, too.
The question is, how should you design your homepage? After reviewing my clients’ sites, the small businesses that did best used a home page that sells.
For example, Tim Blankenship, a real estate agent from Santa Clarita California, began using the WP-Sticky plugin to display some copy before people saw the traditional blog posts and the number of calls he got went up dramatically.
What’s the key takeaway? The traditional blog format is great for news websites because their core business is giving people the latest news. However, as a small business you’ll want your homepage to tell people what you’re about and what they can buy from you because that’s your core business.

4. Publish High Quality Content
Small businesses aren’t media companies, meaning, you don’t have to use Twitter or blog several times per day to build the right kind of audience.
As a matter of fact, my most successful small business clients created around 24 pages or posts per year (2 per month).
Think about it. Do you care if your accountant uses Twitter or blogs 3 times per day? Probably not. You want them to do your taxes. So, if you’re the accountant, publish less often and keep the content high quality.

5. Create Effortless, Predictable Navigation
When you create your website’s navigation, you should make it predictable and easy-to-use because people want to browse your website effortlessly.
How can you keep your navigation predictable? Place it where people expect to find it, which is at the top of the page or in the left sidebar.
Also, when you create the navigation, use the words people are accustomed to seeing. For example, if people want to reach you, they’ll look for “Contact” or “Contact Us.” If you use something clever like “Holla at me” you may lose potential customers.

6. Publicize Other Small Businesses
Have you ever walked into a local business and noticed a table with business cards from other local businesses? Of course. It happens everywhere. Local shoppers want to know about other local businesses.
Online it’s no different. People who shop local want to discover other local businesses, so help them do that by sharing links to other local businesses.
Should you worry about giving out too many links? Maybe, but after looking at my clients’ websites, I noticed most local businesses shared more links than they received from others. This helped because linking to pillars of the community make people think you’re a pillar, too.

7. Include Several Calls-to-Action On Your Website
If you’re creating a website to gather leads or interact with potential customers, make sure you’re clear on what you want your prospects to do.
Want your customers to buy your product? Ask them. Want them to contact you? Show them where they can do it.
Overall, inviting people to call or buy your products is important. Some people may not even realize it’s an option unless you specifically tell them that it is an option.

8. Establish Credibility
The consensus online is that you must give away something, like a white-paper, to get leads. However, when you’re a local business, that simply isn’t true. Being local and credible is enough.
For example, if you’re a plumber, it doesn’t matter if you wrote an ebook on how to be a plumber. Instead, you’re going to want a conversation with your customer—that’s why you use video.
Heck, you don’t even need that much content. All you have to do is look credible and show your customers that you have their back.
Note, sometimes a free ebook helps gather leads if it’s about the right topic. For example, if you’re a plumber, an ebook that explains the differences between a good plumber and a bad plumber would be pure gold if you’re positioning yourself as the good plumber.
The Bottom Line

After analyzing my top small business client websites, these 8 best-practices were used almost through-and-through.
The funny thing is, conventional wisdom, “have a blog, post often, and get massive traffic,” wasn’t true in almost any case.
So, if you’re running a small business website, consider straying from what people say is right and try out what actually works for small businesses.
Do you run a small business website? What have you noticed that worked for your customers?

by Chris Johnson