This is the subject that frustrates me the most out of all web design topics.  Some companies just refuse to either upgrade their 1990's website or get one all together.

I don't think business owners really realize how big of an impact a website has on their sales.  I'll list a few reasons below.

1.) When's the last time you picked up the yellow pages? I can actually remember the last time I picked up the yellow pages and that was 7 years ago! Stop advertising in the yellow pages if you are and get on Google!  Google is the new yellow pages.

2.) I can't tell you how many times I have heard something along the lines of "Well, let's not stay at x hotel because the website looks really crappy.  Oh, y hotel looks good, let's stay there!".  Congratulations x company, your losing business everyday because of your website.  Don't be that company.  That goes for all types of businesses too, not just hotels.  I actually see this happen a lot for restaurants as well.

All I'm saying is that you are hurting yourself more by NOT getting a website than you are by getting a website.  The internet is here to stay, are you?

We have come across this a few times now where clients have e-commerce stores and they use adwords, but they don't use the "conversion" functionality that is part of adwords...  A conversion is when a person comes onto your site through clicking an Adwords link, and they end up purchasing something on your site.  You converted an Adwords click to a purchase.  If you aren't tracking this, then how are you tracking Adwords' effectiveness? The answer is... you're not.

You track a conversion by simply setting up conversion tracking inside your Adwords account.  You go to the Reporting drop down and then select "conversions".  Once inside conversions, you simply hit "New Conversion" and walk through the guide.  Once you have a conversion set up, you take the code from the conversion and put that code on a page that your customers will see AFTER a sale.  Usually this is a thank you page or a confirmation page.  That way, when a person hits this page that came in through adwords, adwords knows to record this as a conversion or sale.

Once that's done, you obviously collect the data over the next month or so and then you can see which groups or keywords are effective and which ones aren't.  You can also see how much each keyword costs per conversion.  You may want to do away with the expensive ones that have high costs per conversion because that means not many people that are coming in through that keyword are making purchases.  It's completely up to you what changes you make, but this should shed some light on your Adwords' effectiveness.

Why Twitter is Becoming Increasingly Important to Marketers

1. Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists are changing the game. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter
The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships
Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community. If you what you're not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail.

4. Traffic That Cares
Twitter can bring you not only random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually passionate about the niche that you are a part of. Retweets are huge in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting the sincerest form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are willing to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.

5. Staying Current
Being found in Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main area of focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) provides a lot of opportunity for exposure. Check out tips for getting found in real-time searches.

6. Connecting with Local Customers
There are a variety of ways you can connect with local consumers and customers using Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools which let you find Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to keep an eye on is Google's new Social Search. It's currently just a lab experiment, but could become more. It certainly has potential.

A recent Search Engine Land article made some good points about the potential of local marketing with this tool, which delivers Google search results based on the communities you are a part of. It draws from Google profiles, which include the networks that people are connected to (based on what any person includes in that profile).

7. Going International and Multi-lingual
Twitter is expanding into more languages. If you thought Twitter was important to marketing already, consider that for most of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it's in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That's not only going to be huge for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it's going to be huge for Twitter's growth, and the more Twitter grows, the more potential customers are out there.

8. It's Still Young
Consider that Twitter is just getting started in the grand scheme of things. It's still young. There are no doubt going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don't forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already out there that can make Twitter useful in different ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton's site OneForty.com, which is like Yelp for Twitter apps, is pretty good for that. It has reviews, and people tell why certain helps have helped their businesses.

Resources from: http://www.webpronews.com

There have been a significant number of studies released recently indicating that email marketing is doing quite well. Epsilon shared some findings about how email marketing is driving offline purchases. The same firm also found that email open rates increased for the fourth quarter in a row (up 18% YoY according to the most recent study). Forrester Consulting and ExactTarget found that email marketing is the most popular channel for consumers. Earlier this year, Forrester Research reported that email marketing in the U.S. alone was expected to reach $2 billion by 2014.

Is the email landscape changing? Yes, without a doubt. Social media has become a very large part of the online lives for many Internet users. Earlier this year, social sites were even said to have surpassed email in usage. That said, Facebook has come significantly close to matching Google in terms of unique visitors, but that doesn't make Google any less important does it? The two can co-exist, and so can email and social media. They are co-existing.

We personally have been trying to push more for online newsletters.  Everyday less and less people are paging through newspaper ads and more and more are signing up for email ads.  It's easier, less clutter, and if you want to purchase something, it's 1 click away instead of a drive to the store.  A few of our clients see it's a good idea, but their first objection is, "How do we capture the emails?" We tell them that this is actually one of the most painless and easiests tasks.  Think about it, unless you are capturing emails in a sneaky fashion, people will want to sign up.  They want to hear about your special deals and promotions.  So a simple button "Sign up for our monthly newsletter" would do.  Or, you can add it to a sign-up feature with the option to opt into receiving the newsletter.  The second objection is some business owners relate email marketing to spam.  There is a complete difference between the two.  Spam is un-wanted emails.  In my mind, email marketing is the same as putting an ad in the paper.  People will be looking for them.

Some information from: http://www.webpronews.com

1. Let's Get Competitive

If you run a site that thrives on user generated content (or you're thinking of adding this feature to your site but aren't sure where to start), then this is one technique to increase interaction from users. In forums, competitive behavior occurs naturally as users try to achieve various levels of status within the community. Other sites can mimic this behavior (and the consequential engagement it brings) but they may need a structure to help it along. Here are a few ideas:

- if you have a product or place that you want reviews for, feature a 'Review of the week' (don't forget to email them to let them know they're featured!). It's up to you how far you want to take this- why not take your top 5 reviewers out for dinner once a month?

- take a leaf out of Trusted Places' book and create badges for Local Experts

- follow SEOmoz's example and create a leader board that is powered off thumbs

Any of these incentives could be turbo-charged by adding a followed link back to the user's site.

2. Feature your users

Allowing guest posts, or even 'guest content', on your site is a great way to let your users know how much you value them. If a site I spent time on came to me and asked me to write a feature for them because they valued my input up to now, I'd be bowled over (yeah, I know, it doesn't take much).

If you'd rather not put the time into contacting individual users, try just putting a button on your site that invites guest posts or pitches. Savvy bloggers will be in touch before too long and you'll give off great vibes implying how much you value your users.

3. Donate to charity

Promising you’ll donate to a charity if someone links to your site feels a bit mafia-esque to me. Seeing as donations are a slightly gray area anywhere, I’d advise going after other kinds of beneficial user behaviour. For example, a client of ours donates about $5 to charity every time someone reviews his product. You could also use this method to acquire usability feedback, UGC and email newsletter sign ups.

How to do it

1. Have a look at your site and decide where it is this tactic could be useful. Ideally, users will be very close to interacting in these ways already- the charity angle just serves to push them into action.

2. Depending on what you're after, present the donation option when the user is in the right place to action it. For example, it would be much more effective to ask for a review of a product once someone has actually bought one! Similarly, why not ask for usability feedback when the user leaves the site, sweetening the deal with a promise to donate if they acquiesce.

3. You should definitely have a dedicated page that describes what you're doing, why you're doing it and how much you've raised. Include a link to this in any relevant call-to-action.

4. If possible, have a small list of charities that you donate to and let users choose which one they’d like the money to go to.

5. Once you've had the donations up and running successfully for a few weeks, let the charity know what you’re doing and suggest they might like to link to you to verify the process for your users. Win win.

6. Make the process as shareable as possible: ask if the user would like their friends to know about how they can make a free donation to charity.

A word of warning: even though this isn't an opportunistic scam and allows everyone- you, the charity and your users- to benefit, some people will have a problem with it. Make sure to be careful and respectful at all times.

4. Product Giveaway

If you have an ecommerce site, do you have any small, cheapish products that you could send to bloggers to get them to review? If you do, then this is a great way to build relationships with bloggers in your niche and encourage them to talk (hopefully positively) about your company. I wrote a whole thing on how to go about doing this, but then Rob pointed out he'd blogged about it a couple of weeks ago- so have a read of his post about Link Building for Small eCommerce Sites

5. Competitions and Prize Draws

Competitions are a really adaptable way of incentivizing certain types of user behavior. Here are just a few examples that we've seen recently:

- To get email sign ups - Fat Face- Win A Camper Van (very viral- has a 'refer a friend' draw as well)
- To sign up to a newsletter- Silksleep.com - win a silk blanket
- To get reviews - Pitchup.com- review a campsite and win a tent
- To generate buzz- the Hoxton Hotel competition- first set-number of entries win a room for a £1 and, of course moonfruit- enter anyone that mentions you into a prize draw (This doesn't necessarily have to happen on Twitter, but the real-time nature of it really helps to add momentum)
- To receive blog engagement- New Scientist - win a piece of moon rock

If you have any other examples of using 'positive motivational influences' to encourage certain kinds of user behavior, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Entry from: Lucy Langdon on October 5th on http://www.seomoz.org

We get asked a lot if advertising on our clients websites are a good idea.  So we decided to put a list together of the "Do's and Dont's" of website advertising.

As long as you keep your visitors to your site in mind while putting advertising on your site, you should be in good shape.  You DO NOT want to annoy your visitors.

Do Not create a "site intro" for advertising.  This will cause visitors to immediately leave your site.  In the website world, they say you have around 7-8 seconds to capture your visitors attention.  Well, if 5 of those seconds are for an intro to advertising, you can kiss those visitors good bye.

Do Not create popup advertisements.  These have been dying down recently and aren't as bad as they once were, but none the less, still a very bad idea.  This is the #1 way to make a visitor unhappy with your site and gaurentee they won't be back for another visit.

Do Not create audio ads on your website.  If users can't find the pause button within a second or two, they are going to leave the site just for one reason: to get rid of the sound.  You do not need any additional reasons to cause visitors to leave your site.

Do Not create in-line text ads.  There is nothing more annoying to me than when I am reading an article and using my cursor as a guide (which many people do) and happen to rollover a text hyperlink that causes a popup.  Popups have always been and will always be viewed in a negative sense.  Keep your site clean and easy to navigate and you will keep your visitors.

Now on to the "Do's" of website advertising.

Do ask local businesses if they would be interested in advertising on your site.  Now, you may be asked by these companies for traffic statistics.  This is normal.  Companies do not want to advertise on a site that only has 15 people visiting it a day.  So be sure to ask your web developer if he keeps the statistics and have them handy for the local businesses. 

Do have your (or their) graphic or web designer design the advertisement and be sure they look professional.  Businesses don't want to see a "text" advertisement for their company.  They want to see something professional that they will be proud of.  Also, at the same time, you want something that visitors will not mind seeing.  For example, take a look at most major league baseball team's sites.  Let's take www.reds.com for example.  As of today (8/27/09), they have 2 advertisements that you can't even notice at first glance.  One for StubHub and one for Shop.MLB.com.  They look like they just "flow" with the site.  You get the best of both worlds, you keep the visitors, and you make the businesses happy because it looks very professional.

Do keep the amount of advertisements on the site limited.  Too many advertisements really takes away from the site and pushes visitors away.  At some point, the visitor doesn't know what's an advertisement and what's the real content they want to find.  They will leave immediately for a more "cleaner" site.

-Chris