Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

No matter how often you talk with a client or how in the loop your agency is, there will always be things that slip through the cracks in terms of information coming from the client. Whether it’s “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Joe’s been transferred to Omaha” or “Man, you guys should have talked with us last week. We had a bunch of fires to put out.” Each one of these is a lost opportunity to assist the client and improve your existing relationship, but it’s also lost revenue for your agency. Well, there are many ways to stay more in the loop as a result of information constantly being posted online, specifically your clients.

The following are three ideas of how you can stay more in the loop, better service your clients, and improve your bottom line at the same time.

Job alerts
You’re probably thinking, what am I going to learn from job alerts from my client? Well, the first thing you’ll learn is whether they are going to be a client much longer or not. As marketing is often the first place cuts are made, when your client stops hiring, it often means their bottom line is flattening or starting to decline and hence your relationship may come into jeopardy. Second, it will clue you into things that are going on within the organization that you are often not privileged to as a third party. Are they hiring in sales or marketing? Product development or HR? Are there trends or is this an ongoing thing? For example, if you are constantly seeing the same position come up within the marketing department, does it mean the department is growing or do they just have a lot of turnover? Do you need to make other inroads and obtain other client champions in case your client contact is transferred, laid off, fired, etc.?

Ok, you get the point, so how do you do this now? Well, the first place I would start is:

Read more

I found this website yesterday on Twitter called Tweetbeep. Here’s Tweetbeep’s description of their service:

TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter! Put in a keyword or website, and get emails when others tweet it!

That’s pretty much it. I’ve already found several people on twitter talking about things related to me or my industry, but that I would have never found otherwise. One of my friends (@exitcreative) asked me, “why don’t I just subscribe to the RSS feed from Summize Search.Twitter.com?” Frankly, my tendency is going more and more away from RSS these days and pushing everything I can into email. Except for my really high volume RSS feeds, which would just inundate my email, I prefer to keep everything in as few repositories as possible.

In closing, check out Tweetbeep. It’s fantastic, even if you’re not on twitter. You can still see what others are saying and interact with them at your leisure.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Crowd Sourcing is the idea that you take a project or problem and distribute it amongst “the crowd”. The crowd then becomes a partner to help solve your problem or complete your project. In many cases, using the crowd is beneficial as they don’t have as much overhead as internal employees (job security, suggesting ideas which are too risky, wanting to save face, etc.), but they may not fully understand the business problem or issues at hand, so you might not always get exactly what you want, or expect.

In the creative community, crowd sourcing is often celebrated and chastised in the same breath. On one hand, it opens up a realm of new possibilities that would have been otherwise kept within the walled gardens of agencies or large and small businesses. It also allows for agencies and businesses to tap into a much larger community above and beyond their in-house creatives. Inherent in this is the fact that there are no guarantees for the work you receive.

On the other hand, at least until the marketplace learns the value of what they’re getting, it drives down the cost of creative a bit. This is mostly due to buyers being cautious of the new marketplace and evaluating risk versus reward.

In my opinion, the net-net is a positive impact on the creative scene as a whole. As such, I’ve decided to showcase some of the creative marketplaces available and I’ll leave it to you to make the decision as to whether they provide a fair value for the work being done on a case by case basis.

Threadless (Medium of choice: T-shirts)
If you live in Chicago, you know about Threadless. Although personally I think the best shirts I have from them are printed on American Apparel tees and not their house brand, I’d still recommend that creatives looking to expand into t-shirt designs definitely submit them to Threadless. They have a rabid fan base and provide tons of valuable feedback on each design.

CrowdSpring (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
CrowdSpring is meant as a creative hub for all digital media creation. If you need a business card, CrowdSpring can do it. If you need a logo, CrowdSpring. If you need a website designed (just the layout), CrowdSpring. They have tons of projects that are constantly being created and plenty of opportunities for testing new creative ideas.

Denook (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
Although similar in function to Crowd Spring, Denook doesn’t have the coolest community manager around.

Genius Rocket (Medium of choice: Videos)
Genius Rocket is a crowd sourced community around video creation; ads specifically. A client creates a creative brief, a prize is assigned, and voila, the creative community gets to work. Churning out ads as fast as they can be reviewed. If you’re trying to get your foot in the door doing video work, why not try your hand at creating videos with a real purpose and win some cash in the meantime?

PopTent (Medium of choice: Videos)
PopTent is much the same as genius rocket, but they have a slightly different videographer audience. Whereas genius rocket is open to anyone to submit a video, PopTent only allows for select video creators to compete for the projects created. Contact PopTent to see if you can be added to their list of select vendors.

YouTube Contests (Medium of choice: Videos)
And last, but not least, we have YouTube contests. Again, what better way to get your feet wet than to say “I won the Home Depot green video contest“.

Did I forget any other sites? Am I completely missing some aspect of this controversial creative medium? Let me know in the comments.

So as I promised, over the weekend I installed CushyCMS on one of my clients websites. The process couldn’t have been easier. Here are the steps to install CushyCMS on an existing site:

1. Sign up with CushyCMS.
2. Setup the website in question by providing FTP login information. I had this on hand, so it was very easy, but you may have to track down an email or something to get it implemented.
3. Download the website source files to make the appropriate CSS changes or use a local copy if you have the latest version of the site.
4. Open one of the files in question and update the content areas where appropriate. I had to change some items like:

   <div class="content">Content Content Content</div>
   to
   <div id="content" class="cushycms">Content Content Content</div>

5. Obviously, you have to change the CSS to reflect these changes as well, but a few “Find and Replace”s later, every page in the site is updated with the appropriate CSS and HTML changes.
6. Login to CushyCMS and add each file you want to be able to edit via the CushyCMS interface. This was actually the longest part of the process. This website had about 30-40 pages and it took me about 10-15 minutes to add all the pages. No big deal, but I’d suggest that CushyCMS perhaps add a “bulk assign” function so that I can assign several files in a directory to a website and it will take the name of the file as the “Page Name”. Like I said, not a big deal for a small site.
7. Verify everything is working properly when editing.
8. Add a few editor roles (i.e. my clients) to be able to edit pages as necessary.
9. And Viola! You’re done.

I’m currently waiting feedback from the client to see if they like the new editing interface or not. They are not HTML savvy and the interface removes the need for that and all that is necessary is a knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite of products, which most people are familiar with.

All in all, I’d recommend this to anyone creating a small website who has to support a client with either limited maintenance budget or little in terms of technical expertise, or both. It’s super easy, and with a Pro account, you can even brand the editor as your own interface.

I’ve been seeing a number of these being released recently and as I am constantly trying to make my life easier, as well as my clients, I thought I’d put together a few of these for others to use as they see fit. I’m going to give CushyCMS a shot with a small client of mine and I’ll post some feedback after I’ve implemented that. The others I’ve yet to try Sitemasher, but the rest of them I have either some direct experience or anecdotal.

CushyCMS
I heard about CushyCMS a long time ago via TechCrunch. This is a really easy to implement CMS in that you just have to provide FTP access and add some CSS information into your website and CushyCMS provides a front end for you to manage your website. It also allows for the creation of roles so that you can give a login to your client and they can only change the appropriate areas of the website - not the backend code. Like I said, I’m going to try this out pretty soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sitemasher
Sitemasher is way more robust than CushyCMS in that it provides a more in terms of user interface, version control, database integration, and search analytics. It’s not as free as Cushy either. It’s $99/month on the cheap end, but if you are in the market for a piece of software that provides some online functionality where you can manage your content from anywhere, as well as all the functionality I listed above, check this one out.

Wordpress.com
A lot of people know they can use Wordpress as a blogging platform, but really it’s just as easily transformed into a content management system. There’s already a number of people that are doing this. If you’re not that technically savvy, I’d suggest sticking with Wordpress.com as they update the software whenever a new release occurs. if you’re a little more tech savvy or want to keep things under your own control, you can go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version. Keep in mind though that this means you have to manage the database, software installation, and future upgrades yourself, but really it’s not THAT daunting - I promise.

There’s tons of other CMS platforms out there: Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Sava (if you’re into Coldfusion) and so many more. What I’d recommend when selecting one is decide what your technical expertise level is and how much time you have to devote to learning a new piece of software. If you need something quick and easy and don’t have a lot of technical expertise, choose one of the online versions I mentioned above. If you do have some time to learn new software and how to integrate them with database backends, choose one of the CMS’s I mentioned at the end of this article, or talk with your friends or colleagues and see what experiences they’ve had with any of these and what they like and dislike about each.

Shoot me an email if you have any other questions, or drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

There must have been something in the water the last few days because it’s been stats, stats, stats lately.

AdGooroo SEM and SEO Tracking
At work recently, we’ve started using AdGooroo, which is a fantastic SEO & SEM monitoring application. It can keep track of your paid and natural campaigns, as well as your competitors. The great thing is that you don’t even have to define your competitors. It will simply aggregate everything it finds, and those logically become your competitors.

Facebook Application Tracking
I was reading today on TechCrunch that a new startup called Sometrics (Some Metrics?) is shooting to start tracking applications in Facebook. From their site:

We’re a developer-founded, developer-friendly company that gives you the analytic tools you need to understand your audience.

All of your demographics are compiled every single day. You can even see statistics for specific hours of a specific day. Who was using your app or social network at 3 AM last Tuesday? We’ll tell you.

We track:

• Page views and unique visits
• Installs and uninstalls
• Age
• Gender
• Number of friends
• Locations (down to the specific state if in US)

Features:

• Pie chart for age breakdown
• Maps show saturation of different locations
• Calendar tool that allows you to see statistics from a single day as well as aggregate statistics from multiple days
• Export data to Excel (.csv)

Sounds pretty interesting and, depending on the cost, worthwhile, but what do you do then with those numbers? 13,000 page views - is that good? 200,000 downloads? Ok, so what? It’ll be up to the interpretation of that data that will ultimately lend value and prove ROI. Regardless, it’s exciting to see these kinds of metrics being available for marketers.

YouTube Video Statistics with YouTube Insight
I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier, but YouTube has released YouTube Insight, which provides demographic data to marketers, users, or anyone interested as to who’s watching your videos. It provides insight into views, demographics, and popularity. Again, it’s great to know these numbers, but unless you know your competitor, can show some actionable result (users bought something, traffic increased, etc.) it’s not going to do marketers a lot of good to know that 20,000 from Turkey watched this video.

What other online metrics or statistical platforms are out there? I’m always looking for “the next best thing”.

There has been a lot happening in the local search spectrum lately: here, here, and here. It looks like some of the big players are really getting into local search, especially with the release of Google universal search (although I think Ask 3D is better), which mashes everything in the Google universe together in one data stream. So why all the hubbub about local search? Well, it appears that as Google acquires more knowledge, both from online streams and offline data, they are presenting more and more detail down to the neighborhood and street level so marketers are trying to continually jump in the mix as Google and other’s launch new features.

And as SEO rankings become ever more specialized and “the long tail” takes over, advertisers and marketers are looking for anyway they can get in front of the user with as few terms as possible. That’s where local search comes in. Here’s an example I’m quite fond of: chicago web development. As you’ll notice, those terms are pretty competitive with lots of optimization in both natural and paid search listings. Local search is the new backdoor to top SEO rankings. How did I acquire this listing? Well, it was as easy as creating a local business, entering my address in Chicago, and then selecting the categories for my business: web design, web development, etc. etc. Viola! I’m #1 with a HUGE piece of real estate at the top of the listings.

I’ve advised a few of my clients (and previous employers) on this and have seen it work wonders for them in highly competitive markets. In case you’re wondering how to get in on this, read over my previous post of how to set up a local business even if you don’t have a local business. So get on the local search bandwagon if you haven’t already.

It’s definitely worth the investment.

Image courtesy of ToastyToastyToasty

I haven’t checked the Chicago Transit Authority’s Trip Planner in a while, but it looks like they’ve done a bit of a redesign on the interface.

The new interface is a nice grid layout (point #4 on my recommendation list) as opposed to the previous layout, pictured below. They’ve added some nice MaqQuest-like iconography and moved the form over to the left, making it easier to jump right in to get directions. They still haven’t added any visual mapping of where you’ll be going during your journey across the city, but that’s still not imperative I guess if you fully trust the CTA to get you from point A to point B. It would still be nice to have a map of the beginning and end points at least so you have SOME orientation of where you are in the city.

I’d still like them to add the ability to export the directions via email or SMS, both to myself or to a friend. That would make it easy for me to tell my friends or relatives who are unfamiliar with chicago transit how to get around easily without having to explain the interface to them or give exact directions.

Overall, it’s a great next step. Clean design, CSS based layout. There are still a few things I’d like to see (embedding directions, sharing with friends, easier use on my cell phone*), but I can look past those things to the next iteration of the transit site. Thanks CTA!

* You can make it easier to use on my cellphone by either hiding the upper navigation (shown in the image below with CSS disabled) all together so I can skip right to the form to get directions, or providing me a link to jump right to the form “Click here to jump to directions”. Otherwise, I have to scroll past all the navigation items to get to the form.

Thanks for everyone who attended!

Please visit www.northsideartist.com for all the links and steps to set up a blog from the presentation on Tuesday, July 10th. Or feel free to contact me anytime at jeff@jeffwoelker.com for any follow up questions concerning blogs, online communities, search engine optimization, or bicycling in Chicago.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Here’s the listing for the workshop posting.

So the other day, my friends at SmartUSA sent me a nice email about “Thank you for attending our Chicago event to test drive Smart ForTwo’s.” That was really nice of them I thought. But wait, I didn’t test drive any Smart ForTwo’s. In fact, I meant to attend that event, but didn’t have time that weekend to make it there at all.

Email marketing lesson #1: Don’t assume. It wouldn’t have taken very long to vet a list of people who DID attend and send them one email and send everyone else another, “Sorry, we missed you in Chicago. Maybe next time…” Although, I know what they were trying to do, it should have been more personalized/customized.

I also received an email from Kayak.com telling me about great summer vacation deals. Great I thought! Oh, cheap flights to SFO, Oakland, Miami, and Chicago? Wait, they knew my default airport is O’Hare. Why would they include Chicago in this email? Why not try and sell me on another destintation, NOT Chicago.

Email marketing lesson #2: You have the data - use it. Kayak knew well enough that my default airport was O’Hare, so it’s pretty safe to say that I live/work in Chicago or the surrounding area and probably do not need a travel deal to Chicago. Instead, they could have further customized the message to remove my home airport and replaced it with another sales message. I used to do this ALL the time at my previous employer. We used every little piece of information to customize email and print communications we sent out. Kayak should do the same.

Just a few handy tips to remember when implementing an email marketing campaign. There are tons more here:

• Tips and Best practices
• Constant Contact Learning Center
• Microsoft Small Business email tips

Anything I forgot? Let me know in the comments.