Tools & Tips – Page 13

Don’t Make These 5 Domain Name Mistakes

May 12, 2015 Beth Devine

Your domain name is a critical component to your online presence. As your internet address, it points visitors to your website. Without it, you have no visitors, no readers, and no customers.

Don’t make these domain name mistakes and risk the safety of your domain name and website.

Mistake #1: Falling for the Fake Renewal Notice

Because all domain names must be registered with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, they are there for the taking by spammers and marketers who do Whois searches. By doing a ICANN Whois search, you can get a domain name’s data, including the owner’s name, address, phone number, and email address.

Having this one global internet has its drawbacks. After registering your domain name, you might start to receive marketing spam to the email address you used to register it with.

Watch out for the renewal notice sent by fake registrars (or very unethical ones). If you pay the renewal invoice to these fraudsters, you are not only losing money, but you could be initiating a domain name transfer. Your website and email, if you have it through your registrar, will crash and your original domain name provider will no longer be in effect.

Use extreme caution when you receive a renewal notice. Make sure you know who your registrar is and when your domain name expires. A quick check Whois search will answer these questions.

Any unsolicited domain name emails inviting you to either register for a new top-level domain name or to renew an existing one should be treated as if it is spam until you verify the information.

Mistake #2: Thinking You Own Your Domain Name When Using a Privacy Service

Whois privacy services are designed to protect your domain records from public viewing. Instead of our personal contact information, you will see the registrars (or whoever is selling the service). What most people don’t realize is that the name listed in the domain Whois record as the domain registrant is the owner of the domain.

In a rare dispute case, the owner of the case isn’t you, regardless of anything written in a contract of terms of service agreement. You have no legal rights to the domain.

Another concern is that some domain registrars will sell your private contact information for a small fee to anyone who asks. Also, if a law enforcement or government agency wants it, it’s as good as theirs. (This doesn’t seem like a problem, but the rumor mill has it that they will give out this information at the first mention of the word “infringement.”)

A simple way to handle this if you’re concerned about privacy issues is to have your web hosting company list their name and information. Having a good relationship with your web hosting company can help you solve a lot of potential website problems!

Mistake #3: Forgetting to Renew Your Domain Name.

Make sure you have a valid email address for your Whois records. Not only will this be used to contact you to verify any changes that are made, but to warn you of impending domain name expiration.

In both cases, there is often a time limit imposed by the registrant, and if not met, your domain name will be suspended. Trying to recover a lost domain name involves financial costs and a few headaches.

Consider signing up for automatic renewal with your registrar. Your web hosting company can also be responsible for your automatic domain name renewal, leaving you without the worry of following through on a reminder from a registrar.

Mistake #4: Paying Registrar Transfer Fees

You are free to transfer a domain name registered in a generic top-level domain to another registrar, assuming you meet none of the exclusions as outlined in ICANN’s policy on transfers between registrars. These include waiting more than 60 days from domain name creation, no evidence of fraud, and no reasonable dispute over the identity of the Registered Name Holder or Administrative Contact.

If you pay a transfer-out fee, which can be more than double the cost of the domain name registration cost, then you’re paying for a charge that’s in violation of the ICANN transfer policy. Ask your credit card company to reverse the charges, and be glad you’ve transferred out.

Mistake #5: No Registrar Change Protection

Unauthorized domain name transfers are easy to avoid by taking preventative measures. The registrar lock, once set by your registrar, prevents unauthorized, unwanted, and unintentional changes to your domain name.

Unless it is unlocked, no one can modify, transfer, or delete your domain name. While locked, you are still able to manage your domain name by renewing it. Only certain top-level domain names can have registrar lock, including .com, .net, and .org.

Another added security layer is auth code. Some of the top-level domains require an eight character authorization code before you can transfer it. The auth code is supplied by the current registrar, and you will need it to transfer to another registrar.

These protections are generally offered for free by your registrar, and are often put in place automatically. If you have a transfer complaint, go to ICANN and fill out their ICANN transfer complaint form.

The work of managing your domain name can be turned over to your web hosting company, leaving you worry-free. But it’s good practice to be aware of the mistakes to avoid as well as who is responsible for making sure your domain name is safe.

Domain Name Management and the New Name Extensions

April 29, 2015 Beth Devine

What is a domain name?

Your domain name is the unique name to your website using letters from the alphabet. It’s easy to remember, whereas the IP address (Internet Protocol address) associated with your domain name consists of a string of numbers that is difficult to remember.

There are two parts to your domain name: the top-level domain (TLD) and the second-level domain. The letters that come after the dot are called the top-level domain or extension, and the letters preceding the dot are called the second-level domain or the label. When you refer to a website, you use the label or second-level domain.

Registering Your Domain Name

Because your domain name is your online address, it must be registered in order for your website to be found. There are many domain name registrars. To find out what registrar your website uses, you can search using a Whois search for your domain name using InterNIC.

For more information about your website, such as who the registrant is, try doing a Whois search using http://whois.icann.org/. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They coordinate the internet’s address book by making sure the domain names all over the world can find each other. By keeping the Domain Name System (DNS) operating, we are able to have one global internet.

You can check to see if your registrar is an ICANN-accredited registrar. If it’s not, there is a simple procedure to follow to transfer to another registrar.

Managing Your Domain Name

The registrant of your website is the person who owns the domain name. There will also be an administrator and technical contact. A registration service provider might also be listed. Any or all of these could be your web hosting provider.

Having a domain name management plan in place is essential. This will assure that your website remains registered for your domain name without interruption. You should know who your domain name registrar is, how it is renewed, and whose name it is registered under. It is also important to know where the domain name points, or to what site it takes you.

As a business owner, records should be kept indicating all this relevant information in the event of any change, such as an employee leaving the company. Knowing who is responsible for what to do with domain names will ease any transition that might occur.

A clearly defined policy includes indicating which employees are designated for each of the following:

Domain name registration procedure
Who is named as registrant
Who is the technical contact
Who is the administrative contact
Which registrar or domain name company is used for registration
Renewal of domain name
Confirmation of where each domain name points
Password preservation and recovery

The New Domain Name Extensions

Did you know there are many new top-level domain names or extensions?

You might be surprised to find out that there are many other extensions besides .com, .edu, .net, and .org. New generic top-level domains are fast becoming available, with over 1,300 new names predicted over the next few years.

All the TLDs shown in this post’s picture are the real thing. Your imagination is the limit to what you can create.

Are the New TLDs Better?

Top-level domains have been under the control of ICANN, but in 2014 the creation of these URL extensions was opened to entrepreneurs. TLDs now comprise an endless number of possibilities as business owners can pay to have their website end with a specific TLD, such as jewelry, cafe, wedding, diet, and dentist, to name just a few.

There are over 5 million websites with new TLDs. Despite their obvious unique appeal, a study by Moz on generic TLDs showed that users weren’t likely to trust a domain based on its TLD. “A new gTLD is probably not a silver bullet.”

As for SEO, TLDs don’t offer any improvement. Search engine algorithms don’t include the new TLDs as a ranking factor.

According to John Mueller from Google, “There still is no inherent ranking advantage to using the new TLDs. They can perform well in search, just like any other TLD can perform well in search. They give you an opportunity to pick a name that better matches your web-presence. If you see posts claiming that early data suggests they’re doing well, keep in mind that this is not due to any artificial advantage in search: you can make a fantastic website that performs well in search on any TLD.”

Your first move in domain name management shouldn’t be worrying about your TLD. It should be checking the list to see that you know exactly who is responsible for each item, and keeping the information in a secure spot.

How to Stay Safe With WordPress Updates

April 22, 2015 Beth Devine

wordpresssecurity

WordPress is a fantastic content management system and blogging platform, but like most popular open source software it can be vulnerable to certain malicious activities–especially if your software, theme and plug-ins are not kept up to date and running the most current version.

What kind of malicious activities might occur?

Someone could install files with malicious scripts within your WordPress installation that send out SPAM. This could lead to an exceptional load on the hosting server causing it to slow down website performance and the volume of SPAM can cause the mail server to be blacklisted. The blacklist could prevent other folks from receiving your emails that you send causing you to lose business. And it can be time-consuming to get a server off a blacklist.
A malicious script redirects your site to another (SPAMMY) location causing you to lose business, damage your reputation and hurt your search engine rank.
Any number of other mean-spirited activities the hackers decide to wreak upon your site that will cause you to lose business, or your reputation or both.

It’s important to protect your website.

We’ve talked about WordPress security before (and will probably talk about it again). See No-Worries Website Security , More Password Hacking Methods and How to Stay Safe, How to Change Your WordPress Username, and How To Prevent Zombie Hack of Your WordPress Site, and 6 Ways Your Site Is Hacked and What To Do About It for some previous posts.

There are many tools and plug-ins useful for keeping you site secure, but today we’re going to talk about managing WordPress updates. Let’s get started.

How to Manage Your WordPress Updates

WordPress makes it very easy to keep your website up to date. The most important thing to ensure is that you have a current and complete backup of your database and your files.

There are many ways to backup your website, but here are the easiest and most common.

You can create a backup from your web hosting cPanel.
There are backup plug-ins that you can install in your WordPress dashboard that will automatically backup your site at set intervals.

Once you ensure that you have a current backup, it’s very easy to complete the updates from within your dashboard. All updates for plug-ins, themes and WordPress versions will be noted under WordPress updates in your dashboard. Simply click the update links and in most cases the site will begin updating.

The Order of Operations

In my experience I find it best to start with the plug-ins and update all the plug-ins that have updates available. Once those have updates have completed, move on to the theme (see theme warning below) and update it, then update WordPress itself.

Theme Warning – Why it’s important to use child themes.

Ensure that your theme hasn’t been modified or your updated theme may not display your website the way you want it to look. We usually build websites with all the style modifications made to the child theme so it’s less likely to cause a problem when updating the theme.

OOPs! Something went wrong!!!

You’ve made your updates but now…

Your website doesn’t look right – See theme warning above.
You can’t even see your website and you see a “Fatal Error” message(s) instead.

Now what do you do?

Disable Plug-ins.

Sometimes a plug-in doesn’t play well with the current versions of WordPress. If that’s the case, it might actually make your website unavailable. Instead of seeing your website, you’ll see a fatal error message. So, if you’re seeing a fatal error message, the first thing to do would be to disable all the plug-ins. Probably the easiest way to do that is to login to your cPanel and find your plug-ins directory and disable it. An easy way to disable it is just change the name on the plug-in folder. Use something like Disabled-plugins.

Did that fix it?

If yes, continue reading this section. If not, continue on to restore your website from the backup.

You’ve determined that your website works with plug-ins disabled so you know that one (or more) of the plug-ins caused the problem. You need your plug-ins so you’re going to enable them one by one to find out which plug-in caused the problem. To do that create a new folder in your cpanel called plugins (don’t get creative here – put it in the same location as the old plugins folder was located.) Copy over each plugin folder from the disabled-plugin folder to the plugin folder. Check after moving each plug-in to the active plugin folder to see if the website is still working. When the website breaks – you’ll have discovered which plug-in broke the website. Now you need to consider whether you really need that plug-in or not.

Restore your website from a backup.

Here’s where it’s important to have you backup database and files.

In your cpanel:

Overwrite or restore your WordPress files with the backup files you saved.
Restore the old database you saved or create a new database and import your backup database into the new database. Change the wp-config file to point to the corrected database.

Your website should now be restored to the state it was in prior to trying to update it. So now you’re back to square one with a working but outdated WordPress installation. Chances are during the restoration you discovered if it was a outdated plug-in or outdated theme that created the havoc during updates. It’s likely you’ll want to replace the plug-in and/or theme with something that is compatible with the current WordPress version.

Latest Email SEO Scam On Mobile-Friendly Updates

April 21, 2015 Beth Devine

Why is it we’re more likely to question the credibility of unsolicited phone calls than we are to suspect emails? Unsolicited emails selling SEO services continue to run rampant, and now there is a new twist.

Google’s Mobile Friendly Update has brought with it a new spate of false email claims. The latest email SEO scam claims that your website isn’t mobile-friendly and will lose its ranking in search engines. The scam email might also include claims that your site isn’t “search engine friendly,” has an outdated design and layout, and a huge bounce back rate.

Of course, without their professional SEO services, your site is going to suffer numerous harmful search engine calamities, including losing potential clients. These self-proclaimed SEO experts say they have the instant fix to your SEO woes, and too many businesses fall prey to crooked or ignorant SEO marketing swindlers every day.

Stay informed and avoid getting taken advantage of with these tips.

Don’t Respond To Unsolicited Emails

If an email is unsolicited, there’s a 99.99% chance it’s not trustworthy, particularly if it is trying to sell you something and is using inaccurate information.

Google warns site owners to “be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.”

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

Read that again. If you’re worried about your website not being mobile friendly, this is definitely not your answer.

Look for Red Flags

If an unsolicited email claims that you are in need of their services due to something you are lacking, your first reaction should be to question their information. Where’s their reports to back up their claims? Do they have proof of what they say they’ve analyzed, such as your site’s low rankings, high bounce rate, and absent mobile-friendly design?

You can check with Google Webmaster Tools to see how your SEO is doing. Begin with their Mobile Usability Report. Raise any concerns you have with your web hosting company before making any decisions.

Check Their Reputation

Don’t rely on a few good reviews and satisfied clients. This doesn’t mean that they’re not scamming you or haven’t scammed anyone else in the recent past. Take the extra few steps of checking with sites like the Better Business Bureau, Rip Off Report, and your state’s attorney general.

You can also search using the title of the company followed by “review,” “complaints,” “spam,” or “scam.” Beware of search results that include pissedoffconsumer.com, rippoffreport.com, or complaintsboard.com.

Any publicly posted complaints are obviously a bad sign. Even if some reviews are from disgruntled consumers who are overzealous, consider that there are potentially a dozen unhappy customers for every one who took the time to write and complain.

Do Your Own Investigating

Before you decide to respond to an email – preferably one that isn’t unsolicited – do your homework and check out their references. You can dig even deeper by investigating their website, their social media sites, and the websites in their portfolio.

All the pieces of the puzzle should fit together to point to a reputable, trustworthy SEO service. They know what they’re doing, and it doesn’t take much for them to build a facade with all these different tools. They are counting on the fact that they know more than you, and that most interested parties won’t take the trouble to investigate beneath the surface layer.

As “Mobilegeddon” spreads its pervasive new algorithm across the world wide web, website owners and publishers will want to make sure their sites are mobile friendly. Don’t let the mobile-friendly scare tactic fool you. It’s just the latest in a series of fast-talking pitches that promise to fix your website of things that might not even need fixing.

Check to see if your site is mobile friendly by reading our latest post, Is Your Site Mobile Ready? Then check with your web hosting company to see what needs to be done to make sure your site is responsive to all screen sizes.

Is your site mobile ready? Do you care? Google does.

April 16, 2015 Beth Devine

Google’s view on what makes your site mobile-friendly is about to affect your search engine results. Bad search results can cause your site’s traffic to diminish. This “significant impact in our search results” begins April 21, when Google changes the ranking signal for mobile searches worldwide and in all languages.

In other words, if your site isn’t designed for “mobile-friendliness,” you’re going to see a drop in your rankings. If you don’t know what a mobile-friendly website should look like, or if you even have one, read on.

How to Know if Your Website Is Mobile Friendly

If you’re unsure whether or not your website has Responsive Web Design (RWD), there’s a simple way to check. RWD is a web design that allows for easy reading and navigation across a wide range of devices, including mobile phones.

To find out if your site gives viewers optimal viewing on phones, Google has released a handy Mobile Friendly Test. Just type in your site’s URL and Google will analyze it to ensure you’re ready for the upcoming algorithm change.

Another way to check your site for mobile-friendly design is to do a quick search on your phone to see how it displays in the results. If your site is optimized for mobile, you will see “Mobile-friendly” before the meta description in search results.

What You Can Expect from Google’s New Mobile Changes

Google will reward website’s that are designed for viewing on mobile devices without the need of resizing, zooming, and scrolling. Another criteria to avoid is the fat-finger syndrome. This is the prognosis given to sites with links that are too crowded and buttons that are too small, causing the wrong links to be tapped.

Because the numbers of mobile device users is accelerating at high speed, Google wants to make sure websites engage their viewers with easy-to-navigate content. As a website owner, you want to give your customers and readers the best first impression, which is now often on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly sites won’t drive customers to competitor’s sites, and you will get better traffic and better revenue.

Which Is Better: RWD or Mobile-Dedicated?

There is a difference between Responsive web design and a dedicated mobile website. RWD is designed to respond to the size of the screen. The particular theme within your content management system (CMS) that controls the website’s content often has mobile website styles configured.

A dedicated mobile website is also known as a mobile web app. It has a separate website version from the desktop version that is designed to fit on small screens. It detects when a viewer is using a mobile device and redirects them to the mobile website version.

There are several disadvantages to a dedicated mobile website. Separate and duplicate web content for the desktop and mobile versions can be necessary. Sometimes a viewer’s device is not recognized with the site detection function, and the best version won’t display. Finally, the duplicate content can negatively impact Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

RWD doesn’t have the additional burden of creating and maintaining duplicate content. It is designed to give viewers the best experience for all devices, including phones, tablets, e-readers, and even new devices as they enter the marketplace.

As the world wide web continues to grow, it’s important to keep your audience in mind as you build and maintain your website. In many cases, your website is already mobile-friendly, thanks to its Content Management System. Ask your web hosting company to help you determine what the best option is for you and your audience.

How to Optimize Your Website for 2015

April 15, 2015 Beth Devine

website optimization — “death and taxes” by lucyfrench123, used under CC BY / Modified from original

As the saying goes, there are three things you can count on: death, taxes, and changing SEO. Okay, so I added number three because optimizing your website is also unavoidable. Thanks to perpetually changing SEO, you can count on having to keep your website up to date.

Best practices must not only be reviewed, they need to be revised. Adjusting to continually changing SEO or search engine optimization strategies is easier than meeting the tax deadline. So don’t get frustrated with the inevitable.

Read on and see how you can optimize your website for 2015.

Make your website mobile friendly.

Boost your rankings with Google and other search engines by making your website mobile friendly. It’s no surprise based on the numbers of mobile users that mobile-friendly sites rank better with Google.

By giving your visitors a better user experience, you are working with Google’s common mobile mistakes to avoid. Faulty redirects, blocked media, mobile-only 404s, and slow mobile pages are a few to check into.

Look for our next post for more about search engine rankings and Google’s new algorithm for mobile-responsive websites.

Maximize for Local Search Update, a.k.a. Pigeon

Google’s latest search algorithm update was coined Pigeon by Search Engine Land, because it’s a “local search update and pigeons tend to fly back home.”

Anyone who wishes for their business to be found locally on Google should maximize their site for local search results. If you serve clients at a physical business location and have a physical address, you may be affected by Google’s Pigeon update.

Continue with these tried and true best SEO practices for your local search strategy:

Get listed on Google My Business and create a Google+ page.
Create a content strategy with local focus.
Stay engaged on social media.
Keep your listings up to date. Check out Local Visibility System for a definitive list of local search citations. All your listings should include accurate data, including your business name, address and phone number. Include when possible such things as product descriptions, services provided, hours of operation, any coupons, photos, and payments accepted.

Maximize Your Website’s Speed

Fast load times becomes more and more important as users refuse to wait. Google made site speed a signal in their search ranking way back in 2010.

Here’s what you need to know to speed up your website:

You can test your site speed using Google’s PageSpeed tools. This will analyze a web page’s content for both a desktop and mobile device and give suggestions on how to increase the speed.
Reduce your image sizes and optimize them for the right file format. PNGs are good for graphics fewer than 16 colors, and JPEGs are good for photos.
Use a quality web hosting company whom you can trust and who can handle your site load.
Too many plugins can slow a site down.
Embedded video can also slow down a website.

Use Proper Page Titles

Search engines identify your page titles and headings by their tags. When you use a Content Management System like WordPress, you won’t see the code that brackets the titles. <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> tags tell a search engines the level of importance of the content. You can see this by viewing your content in the Text or HTML mode.

Each page or post should have only one H1 tag at the top of your content. All other tags should follow below and be H2, H3, and so on. The H1 tag should include the most important keywords when possible. Most importantly, it should tell your reader what the content is about.

Heading tags should tell your readers and search engines about the page’s or post’s topic. Avoid using generic terms, such as “home,” “introduction,” “overview,” or “products.” Others are adjectives that can indicate something appealing, such as “help,” “best,” and “top.”

Don’t use generic keywords that attract visitors who aren’t interested in what you are offering. Keyword phrases that specify an otherwise generic term, like “toy,” are preferable, especially in high-competition categories.

Finally, if your H1 tag is an image, use the image alt tag to include the important keywords.

Why You Should Worry About HTTP vs. HTTPS

Google is pushing for heightened security on the internet. The importance of using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) over HTTP means that your website is encrypted and can’t be hacked.

Google is currently using the HTTPS as a ranking signal in less than 1% of their global queries, but they may decide to strengthen it because they’d “like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.” Having an action plan is a wise idea should Google move to rank secure sites higher.

How to Rid Your Blog of Dust Bunnies

March 27, 2015 Beth Devine

repurpose your blog post — “Dust Bunny Large Enough to Have a Name” by Kim Carpenter, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Are your blog posts collecting dust bunnies? Or in extreme cases, is your blog attracting mammoth-sized versions of dinosaur bunnies?

Getting rid of your blog’s dust bunnies is a simple matter. All you need to do is a little spring cleaning, get out your duster ––er, your creative cap, and repurpose your blog content. Take those dust balls and brush them off when you extend the reach of your blog, and create new and relevant content that will add life to your hard work.

Repurposing your blog content can turn it into new media formats. This saves you time, money, and prolongs the life of your online marketing investments. By taking your old content and making it new again, you can offer a new audience an updated format, sending the digital dust bunnies off to distant oblivion.

If you’ve been blogging for awhile, or you have empty warehouse syndrome (aka, you’re out of ideas), and the dust bunnies have moved in for the kill, you’re not alone. Here’s the scoop on how to do some spring cleaning and repurpose your blog content.

Brainstorm: Which blog posts are best for repurposing?

Which posts received the most traffic? Which posts are evergreen (content that continues to be relevant long past its publication)? Which posts could use updating?

Once you’ve determined which content in your stockpile is best for repurposing, you’ll need to decide how you want to reuse it. Different formats appeal to different people and their learning styles.

Hit the Refresh Button

Some of your blog content will have a lot of value, but it just needs a little tweaking to be current. Depending on how things have changed, you will need to modify your content to be relevant with the new information that’s available. This could mean writing a new article, in which case you could add a note at the end with a link to the post’s original content.

If the changes are minor, plugging in a few alterations for a makeover allows you to salvage your original post. When you repurpose in this manner, keep the post’s URL the same so it retains its SEO value, but change the date to a new publishing date if possible.

Make Quote Pictures

Adapt the one-liners that stand out in your blog posts to create images with text. Name the new image with the post’s title, or write a totally new headline and include this as your image text. If you used a clever-sounding title the first time, change it to something more SEO-friendly and searchable.

Think about how you will repost your content with this image, and adapt it for that social media platform. Finding new images to repurpose content is easy with so many different free and legal online photo sources. My most recently discovered resource is Unsplash. Sign up and you’ll get ten free new photos every ten days.

Choosing which online photo editing site can often mean going back to your tried and true favorite, but try something new and see how you like it. Canva is great for social media because it has all the templates prepared for you. Or try an app like Wordswag for on-the-go creating.

This is the best time-saver in repurposing content. You created a new quote picture to share on social media, and you didn’t have to change any content in your blog post. Sweet.

Adapt Your Content for Tweets, Twitter Cards, and Other Social Media

Share your evergreen content by reposting it as part of a social media management strategy. This is a great way to make contact with people by hitting different time zones, using different headlines, and reaching new followers.

Your high-value blog posts will gain new value from their initial publishing date through re-promotion on different social media platforms that highlight different types of content. This Twitter research shows how reposts in the form of retweets can gain 75% of its previous number of retweets.

Twitter is an easy place to post repurposed content by turning snippets of content into tweets, and then linking back to your original post. Just be sure to use less than the 140-character limit to allow for retweets by your followers.

Try adapting content into Twitter cards and add a call to action to your blog post content. Twitter cards come in seven formats, including the Summary Card With Large Image. This is more likely to attract attention in twitter feeds, and a click on your image brings your followers to your blog post.

As a content creator, save yourself time and reap SEO benefits when you repurpose content. Remember to think about adding value to your original piece, and you’re repurposing efforts will grow your audience and extend your content’s life.

Say goodbye to dust bunnies and hello to a fresh start.

How to Convert Website Traffic into Leads

March 18, 2015 Beth Devine

If you sell a product or service online, the big question that arises is, “How do I convert website traffic into leads?” Turning traffic into leads begins at the top of the marketing funnel, where discovery happens.

The all-important secret to your business begins right here. By understanding who your audience is and what their needs are, you can direct your website traffic. Know who your audience is and it will help you with the following ways to turn traffic into leads:

Share Content Your Audience Actually Cares About

Cater to your audience by creating content that they’re interested in. Speak to the humans who are looking for answers. Use the term “you” as if you’re talking directly to them and their personal needs.

Use blogs as an online tool to share this content, making it easier for search engines to find your brand when your topics are Googled and searched. According to research by HubSpot, the average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 126% more leads, 97% more inbound links, and has 434% more indexed pages.

Use social media as a no-pay way to get attention as news feeds screech to a scrolling halt when they spy your eye-catching posts. Remember to communicate on each platform in the appropriate manner, including visuals whenever you can. Share your blog post links and photos, as well as entertaining items meant to capture your brand’s identity.

Writing and sharing your content is a critical step in getting your audience’s attention. You’re letting them know where to go for future information and entertainment value.

Keywords That Cater to the SERPS

You’ve heard the terms before: relevant, targeted, and organic keywords. It means using pertinent keywords to use in your site copy so your audience will find your brand in search results and ultimately land on your website.

Think about these keywords as you create copy. Optimized content helps with not only being discovered, but it’s proof that you’re knowledgeable and capable in solving the problems your audience is searching for answers to.

Somewhere out there they are looking for you. Help them to find you with a roadmap of keywords.

Offer Your Audience Something Compelling

They’ve discovered you at last. So what’s next?

This is where CTAs come into play. Call-to-actions are the go-to buttons for a compelling offer. These offers can be any type of freebie from a newsletter option to an ebook. Include the CTAs on your social media platforms, your promotional emails, and your landing pages.

Ask your audience for the most minimal information, their first and last name, and their email, allowing you to make future contact while giving them the opportunity to learn more about a program, sign up for a demo, download a white paper, watch a webinar, or get the deal. See Hubspot’s great CTA examples for a terrific source of inspiration.

If you include a CTA in your social media, it’s a good idea to use a URL shortener when you post a link that takes them to the landing page or designated form. CTAs are the most straightforward way to turn traffic into leads, so include them whenever it’s appropriate.

For your landing pages, CTAs are included as part of a clear and specific form, as detailed in Get Better Form Conversion With These 10 Tips. Don’t forget to label your CTA button with something besides “submit.”

Include an Email Subscription Offer on Your Blog

You’ve worked hard on your blog posts. Don’t let that effort go to waste.

Include an offer to subscribe in all your blog posts as a logical way to continue giving value. Take this database of email addresses, add them to your marketing email program, and grow your leads and attract potential customers.

Effective CTAs in your blog will help end your post with a bang. An enticing, concise call to action invites your readers to take a specific step by clicking on a button, or on a few lines of well-written text at the end of your post.

Make the invite as seamless as possible. Try something simple: “Like what you’ve read? Join us for our email update each week by adding your email to the form on the right.”

Or try something sassy: “Pssst. Want access to our blog updates each week and be in the know before all your friends have the scoop? Sign up here with your email and we’ll keep this our little secret.”

So what are you going to work on? How will you keep your content filled with inviting ways to turn traffic into leads?

Use Images to Speak Louder Than Words

March 6, 2015 Beth Devine

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera,” said Lewis Hine, a photographer whose work was instrumental in ending child labor in America.

Most of us have been moved by an image at some point. In one of my college journalism classes, each student was handed a book of photography and after a few minutes shared how the images affected them. My book was a selection of post-Civil War photos of freed slaves.

When it my was turn to speak, the “thousand words” that a picture’s worth represents had formed a bottleneck in my throat. No words could come out. After several moments of suffering an inability to speak, my professor saved me from embarrassment. “I don’t think we need to say anything further. This is what images can do.”

Words Aren’t Enough

This powerful ability of images to convey so much emotion, to communicate such a vast amount of information and hidden meaning is why visual platforms are continuing to grow. Visual communication is the growing landscape where regularly occurring bottlenecks form because words aren’t enough.

As communication demands ever shorter ways to convey messages, images are stepping in and being showcased everywhere online. This shift from tell to show, from lengthy, text-only posts to quickly consumable visuals, inevitably leads us to image-based social networks.

Communicating your story or sharing a message the visual way is faster to consume than even the 140 character limit of Twitter. It’s more eye-catching than a block of copy. Images are a vital component to making the connection with your audience.

Find a good balance with your images and text that will compel your reader to stay and keep reading. Images take up more space in news feeds, particularly on mobile applications, which increases your potential for getting views.

Here are some ideas for creating visual images to use in your social media, blog posts, and website.

Free Image Sources

Free images are an invaluable resource for your image-creating efforts. In addition to the ones mentioned in Free Photo and Image Editing Programs and Where to Get Free Photos and Images, here are a few others to hit the internet, all with Creative Commons options.

Pixabay is the source of “stunning public domain pictures” with a free account. They encourage you to get rid of ads on your acccount by uploading ten of your own photos as contribution to its collection.
Compfight gets you both free and inexpensive stock photos fast, with different search filters. Use the Creative Commons filter and check for what permission each photo offers.
Wikimedia commons has images as well as videos and sounds, all free to use with licensing clearly designated.
Freeimages.com has both free and low-cost stock photos from photographers and designers.
Picjumbo has free images in handy categories and is maintained by one man who started the site when stock agencies wouldn’t take his photos. Unless you become a paid premium member, it appears that the most search specific you can be is by selecting a category and seeing what’s available.
Photo Pin has both stock photos and free images pop up when you search. Free photos has attribution licenses ready for easy copy and paste.

Personal Photos

Using your own photos to tell a story is the simplest way to convey a message. An author friend of mine, Kay Bratt, uses hers in a simple collage to share a story on her blog. A search for a lost cat had an ending that words alone couldn’t tell.

Free Online Editing Tools

Canva makes it easy to custom create images for various platforms, including Facebook posts, posters, Instagram posts, general social media, business cards, and even a handy Facebook cover or Twitter header template.

There are short, interactive video tutorials to help you along the way, scroll-through workshops for digging deeper into design, complete with lecture notes. For the small business owner, workshop four “Branding Basics” is essential, and for the teacher, there are numerous lesson plans to select from.

This is a must-try for both the novice and the more savvy visual creator.

Pablo, the new image editing tool from Buffer, boasts a less-than-30-second process for creating social media posts without making an account or logging in. There are less overall options, but if you’re looking for fast and simple, this is the place.

I tried them both and I still love PicMonkey the best. The Monkey is pure shazam.

Make Your Own Infographics

Already a superb image editing tool, Canva is also great for making your own infographics.

Piktochart, Infogr.am, and Easel.ly offer similar infographic resources, with each limited to a small number of free templates and paid subscriptions offering much more.

The possibilities are endless. They include responsive infographics, like How Far Is It to Mars?, interactive infographics such as How Data Travels Around the Globe, and even animated infographics as in 42 ButterFlies of North America.

Take a Screenshot

Screenshots are simple with tools like Snagit, Jing, and Lightshot. Your computer screen is ready material for instant images to embellish your blog and social media.

Using images is a productive and fun way to help your readers stay longer and keep coming back for more. Words alone are no longer enough.

What’s Net Neutrality and Why Should You Care?

February 28, 2015 Beth Devine

It’s finally over. Or at least a historical decision has been made in a 3-2 vote this week with the Federal Communications Commission approving the policy called net neutrality. The FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says the policy will ensure “that no one — whether government or corporate — should control free open access to the Internet.”

The vote secured what the FCC calls an open internet, a principle that prevents Internet Service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable from discriminating against the technology companies, websites, services, and apps that create content. It enforces equal treatment of the data from these companies, so, for example, Google doesn’t get priority over Netflix.

Without protections it is feared that small businesses and startups wouldn’t be able to compete, innovation would be discouraged, and the internet would no longer be equal playing ground. Small businesses who weren’t able to pay up (and can’t take their business elsewhere since there’s often no other broadband company who offers internet service) could see their websites slow to a crawl, causing users to shop elsewhere.

Was It Really the End of the Internet?

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia who coined the phrase net neutrality, predicts the possible dire fate of the internet without FCC regulations. “I think the worst case is that we see the Internet kind of wither and disappear as a forum for free speech and new companies getting started, a world in which to get started it’s more like cable television, you need a lot of money to even open a website and really reach a number of users, that things become entrenched and kind of frozen.”

Because ISPs are typically not supporters of net neutrality, it was initially worrisome when President Obama picked Tom Wheeler, a former top lobbyist for cable and wireless companies, to be the next chair of the FCC.

John Oliver, British comedian and host of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” weighed in on the debate with a thirteen minute segment devoted to net neutrality, possibly helping to turn the tide of the results at the time. Less than a year ago, with its new chair Wheeler at the helm, the FCC was deliberating on new rules to prioritize internet “fast lanes” for content providers who were willing and able to pay for it.

Oliver joked that hiring Wheeler was “the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo.” He then urged viewers to contact the FCC, which they did in droves, calling for net neutrality and reportedly crashing the site. Wheeler, it seems, was unperturbed, stating for the record that he is not a dingo.

It turns out that he most definitely isn’t a dingo, and small businesses can look forward to what some call unnecessary regulation by the FCC, where government bureaucracy will slow things down and prices for consumers will ultimately increase. We’ll find out soon enough if this is the price we pay for net neutrality.

“So today after a decade of debate in an open, robust year-long process, we finally have legally sustainable rules to ensure that the Internet stays fast, fair and open,” Wheeler said after the vote.

What Can You Expect From All This?

Without rules regulating ISPs, the concern is that they would force content providers to pay a premium for “fast lanes” in order to continue sending quality, high speed streaming to users. Small companies would only be able to afford paying for the second lane, or the slow lane, and be unable to compete with the high speed content delivery servers.

What is being protected according to NPR’s FCC fact sheet:

No blocking. Broadband providers aren’t allowed to block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.

No throttling. Broadband providers aren’t allowed to impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.

No paid prioritization. Broadband providers aren’t allowed to favor some lawful internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration, i.e., “fast lanes.”

Supporters of net neutrality, oddly enough, include big tech companies like Google and Facebook. As Oliver says in his video, “It’s not just anticorporate hippies who think that abandoning net neutrality is a bad idea.” A two-tiered internet system with a fast and a slow lane, where the rich get fast internet and the not-so-rich get the slow internet, isn’t something anyone wants except the ISPs, because then they can charge more.

What Started All the Brouhaha?

Content providers like Netflix seemed to have tipped the scales in the net neutrality debate. As their popularity grows, the load of data they are sending out is overwhelming the ISP facilities and resulting in that buffering cycle you see when connection is slow.

The ISPs feel it’s only fair to charge these network-gobbling content providers a bigger fee. One solution outlined in Mashable’s video on how the internet works involves shortening the distance this data travels by having companies like Netflix and the ISPs have a peering or interconnection agreement.

The public got an eyeful of what net neutrality protections can do with this graph that Netflix made public. It shows how their download speeds declined during negotiations with Comcast for increased service fees, then skyrocketed once they paid up.

The tremors of this debate might have missed your doorstep, but they’ve been widely distributed on websites and social media. Companies banded together for Internet Slowdown day to show what it would be like if cable companies were allowed to charge for internet speeds. Netflix tweeted it’s sentiments with a dramatic show of slow speed traffic should regulations on the broadband providers not get passed.

What if the Internet was so slow it loaded one word at a time? Don’t let Comcast win. http://t.co/OCoIdQiIN3

— Netflix US (@netflix) February 25, 2015

The Battle for the Net has been won, at least for now. Enjoy the lack of interruption to your website’s speed.