SIAServices.net

I deleted my old post because I wanted to give the opportunity, once again for people to promote themselves and their businesses.

Many of use use these blogs to help build back links and gain exposure for our businesses and websites.  Well now I am giving everyone the opportunity to do it again, no huge articles on politics or religion this time.  Just shameless self promotion.

The rules are simple.  No Adult, illegal or pornography.  Do not defame any other poster, and don’t send your automated spam.  Other than that, I don’t even care if you are a direct competitor of mine.

So Post About Your Business, Your Family, Your Church, or even your Dog.  Pimp Away.

We have all heard it in the past, if at first you don’t succeed try, try again. Well we have also heard that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sharon, an intelligent single mom, came rolling up to my Sacramento office in her beat up 1979 Toyota Corolla in 2006 after three years of barely making enough money in business to pay her home bills and nothing more to show for it. Before she came into my office I learned that her business was making power point presentations for businesses and had even won an award for her work. She sat down with every piece of paper she had that related to her business and in less than five minutes my office looked like someone opened a file cabinet and turned on a hurricane fan.

There were papers, folders, and receipts everywhere. She had even brought me her mileage log and CDs of different presentations she had done. I laughed as she told me that her rep told her to get everything together before she met with me. I guess some people have a very different definition of the word together.

One of the folders that caught my eye immediately was hand labeled “advertising” and was probably one of the thickest folders I had ever seen. I gravitated to it and made sure to lift with my knees not my back when picking it up. It was so thick that she had to industrial rubber bands on it holding the papers inside in.

Now one of the first things I do is a general overview of the company based on the advertising and marketing expenses and the annual sales of the company. In doing the math I saw that Sharon had pulled in slightly over 100k in sales on average in her past three years. Not bad for the type of company she had running out of her home. Then I painstakingly tallied everything she had spent on advertising throughout the life of her business, worked out to just over 250k in three years. That meant that Sharon was on average spending nearly 84% of everything that came in on just advertising and was living on just under 17k a year.

I pointed this out to Sharon and she threw back my first red flag. “You need to spend money to make money.” In addition she said that she knew if she didn’t spend the money advertising that her competition would.

Let me express to you why this is a warning sign for me. Statements such as those Sharon mentioned are often used by salespeople rather than marketers. Let’s be honest here; most advertising sales people know that statistics say you are going out of business within just a few years and their job is to get you to advertise with them as much as possible before your business flat lines and is declared dead by the county coroner. To this end, most sales people have their best interest mind, not yours.

Marketing, true marketing, knows that time is money and helps you to find the proper balance of the two to increase your likelihood of success. A proven marketer knows that it is their reputation that they are putting on the line when they help you market your company. To that end marketers may seem short, blunt, and sometimes downright rude, however their goal is to get the point across in any way that they can.

In looking at Sharon’s advertising versus monthly sales I found something very interesting. There was a year that she did not get her business in the yellow pages. “Yes, I missed the deadline because my graphic artist wasn’t able to finish my ad in time.” What caught my eye most about that was that it was also the year that she made more money than the other two. “Well since I didn’t have the ad I knew I had to go after more people myself and did a lot more door knocking and phone calls.” I showed Sharon that she hadn’t lost sales because of it but in all honesty, had the best performing year she had ever had. She just stared blankly and I sat in silence while the gears turned in her head. “So I saved twenty five thousand dollars a year by just not advertising in the yellow pages?” My nod was really just the assurance that her epiphany was correct.
Many people think that the yellow pages, print ads, and newspapers are the best returns for their advertising. I can’t tell you how many people I hear parroting back to me why they should be advertising on a specific radio station, or how they know the exact viewing audience of a certain television station. The truth is, unless you are carrying a huge profit margin and have more money than time, these forms of advertising just don’t work.
The yellow pages are a dying breed. You know that because most yellow page advertising employers are surprised if an employee lasts more than a year. Don’t get me wrong, yellow pages have their place. If you own a business that is emergency, situation, or impulse based, don’t turn a nose up to advertising in your local yellow pages. Locksmiths, electricians, and restaurants often still see a majority of their business coming in from their yellow page advertising. Mostly because in those situations it’s hard to check online for a locksmith when you can’t get in your house, so printed media is the way to go. However if you are running a business that doesn’t fall in that category, imagine the damage you could do putting that funding somewhere else.
First of all, mass media productions work on a dragnet principle. You throw a big enough net in the water and you are sure to eventually catch the kind of fish you are looking for. However, you don’t own the boat and you don’t reap the benefits from the other fish that are caught, only the fish that you are specifically looking for, then you have others who want the same fish as you.
I explained to Sharon that for her business, a solid web presence would be the better way to go and would not even cost one tenth of what she had spent. She took me to her website and it was a very basic website. Yes it was search engine friendly in the context that it was not a template website and contained some original text. What was surprising for me was that she had no samples, no testimonials, and no way for people to decide if her services were right for her. What wasn’t surprising was that she had done no business through her website.
Proper website optimization isn’t just about getting people to your site, but keeping them there as well. You have to juggle the balance of information and design to get people to come to your site and stay there. Yes you want people to call, but if your store, even your online one, doesn’t catch someone’s attention you are much less likely to generate a sale.
We sat down and drew up a new strategy for Sharon and her business which included a well designed site, pay per click campaign, and an aggressive search engine submission package. Within just a few months the calls started to trickle in and a few weeks she was so busy I didn’t hear from her.

The usual sad truth for me is that in my job I only see people when their business marriage is on the rocks. Once I get their relationship back on track with good principles and tools, I generally know little more about them than that their checks are still coming in or I see an order for them on it’s way past my office.

Sharon came to my office in her new Acura a couple of months ago to thank me for all of my help. She brought me a gift basket and a jeweled globe that proudly sits behind me in my office. I love marketing. I love it even more when someone listens and thanks me for the efforts I put in.

So if at first you don’t succeed try something different, it can’t be worse than the failure you just had.

SIAServices.net

We’ve all seen them. We type in www.Google.com (if it’s not already our homepage) and type in something that we are looking for. We click on a link with a promising description. We walk away to grab a drink while the site loads. We sit down and carefully put our Diet Pepsi on a coaster in the chaos which is our desktop and look up at the screen.
What we see makes our pupils expand and contract, positive there is an optical illusion there somewhere. Clashing colors, dead image links, gaudy design that couldn’t be louder if it wanted to. The design is so bad you just stare at it wondering where the punch line is. So much flashing your sure this site has claimed its fair share of epileptic browsers. You wonder how God himself could have allowed such an atrocity to be unleashed on the cyber world, clicking on your back button before your screen and retinas are permanently etched from the chaos on the monitor.

Another fun day for me. A customer comes in to pick up an order from their Account Manager. I make the mistake of asking them for a sample to use as a marketing tool. Once they learn I am a marketer they want to tell me how great they are and get my approval for what they have accomplished. Yes this may seem a little on the cocky side, but imagine being in my shoes for a second; You spend over a hundred thousand dollars to hone your trade, countless sleepless nights to stay on top of the market, and have won awards for your work. Then in someone walks showing you what they did and you smile at them like a kid explaining to you that the blue thing on the paper in crayon that looks like someone had convulsed mid stroke is a dragon.
That happens a lot for me. But in this case, the customer took it even further. Proceeding to follow me into my office he showed me his website for his landscaping company. He loved it, and I mean if he could take it to dinner he would, loved it. I quietly listened as he told me how proud he was of designing the site himself and all the effort he put into it. For a good ten minutes he painstakingly showed me how he made each button and got the crude flash to work. All the time I saw slow loading page after page of bad pictures, little text, and frames that had no business being there.
Then came the inevitable…..
The question you never want to ask me…..
“So what do you think?”
Damn.
How do you do it? How do you tell someone that the pictures of their son are the ugliest thing you have ever seen and that there should be a law against displaying him in public? How do you tell someone that it isn’t the dress that makes their butt look big, it’s the Doritos? At what point do you finally let someone know that they will never have a career in singing, dancing, or movies? Yet here I am, looking at a doe eyed thirty something year old contractor who is trying, yet failing, and asking me how his most important marketing tool looks to me, the guy who does nothing else for a living.
I often try to put the shoe on the other foot. How would he react if he came in my back yard and saw all my amateur attempts at trying to build a koi pond which is off level with a fountain pump that sprays off to the side? What would he think of the garden I built out of five gallon buckets with holes drilled in the base? If he saw the dead patched because of my faulty sprinklers, what would he say when I asked him the same question?
Anyone who knows me, knows what happens next on the outside, but I want to paint a picture of what is going on inside. It’s not easy being blunt, curt, and up front. But in marketing, sugarcoating just doesn’t get the message across.
If you see someone standing in the middle of a road with a bus barreling down on them because the driver is too busy flirting with the half attractive girl sitting behind him, you don’t waste time. You don’t ask the person if you can help them look for something or tell them the year, make and model of the bus, the speed at which it’s coming and how they may want to consider taking 6.2 steps to the southeast while avoiding a freshly dropped piece of gum that may plant itself at the base of their loafers.
No, if you are any kind of person you don’t do that at all.
You yell “BUS”
So guess what, I yelled BUS!!!
I watched his face drop as I tore into his site and everything that was wrong with it. I felt I was telling him the baby wasn’t his as I dove into the back end of his site and found no code to speak of. He slouched and looked slightly to the floor as I told him that he built his site to work for him, not his customers.
He sat there silent long enough for me to run through all the variables of what was about to happen. I am bigger than him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. Is he going to walk out and never talk to his account manager again? I was trying to locate everything in my office that could be used as a weapon that wouldn’t cost too much money should it get broken. He looked up after thinking for several moments, talking to himself, possibly contemplating the same scenarios I was. Or at least, so I thought.
“You’re Right. What should I do?”
So we sat down and drew up a plan, as we went through detail after detail he wrote progressively faster. Once he saw the direction he should go he started a fire and was soon writing faster than he could think. Then he suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked up at me again, this time with much more clarity.
“Can you guys do this for me?”
“SIA Professional Services has been serving the greater Sacramento area for nearly 15 years. The company was built around my marketing. I’m pretty sure we can design your site for you.”
He asked what he was looking at pricewise. I think he was shocked when I told him I didn’t know. But he understood when I told him that I simply gave the suggestions and that his account manager would be able to write up his quote for him. His account manager, who was with me the whole time, got him a quote while we finished talking and once he finished up his next job, he came in, with credit card in hand.
Website Design is like automotive repair; yes there are some things you can do on your own. On the important jobs however, like your business, you need an expert before you and the family are flying off the side of cliff during a Sunday drive, causing you to remember what that spare nut you had left over went to now.
Just like mechanics, not all website designers are equal. When you go to a mechanic for major work do you just look for the cheapest place you can find to work on it if you care anything about your car or the contents. If you had a brand new Ford you would probably look to someone like Eric’s Automotive who specializes in your car rather than some mechanic who has more reports with the BBB than Enron. Yet, so many people are content to have substandard websites that either doesn’t tailor to their demographic, or doesn’t have the back end support to get it running right on the search engines.
Keep in mind that your website, much like everything else in your business should be designed with your target customer in mind. It isn’t a matter of what you like; it’s a matter of what they like. If you absorb this one thing, you will be better prepared than over half of the small businesses on the market today.
“You are not Your Target Demographic.”
If you came to you and offered you your products and services at your price would you use you??? Of course not. You would do the work yourself and save the money while getting your exact vision out. But you are hired by customers who either can’t or don’t want to do what you do. Rather they hire you to do it. You have to identify your key customer and try to see your business through their eyes.

You should not design your logo, your company, and especially your website to look appealing to you, but rather those you want to do business with you. If you have a restaurant that serves American BBQ and you are Korean, you should reflect on who you are wanting to serve and who will be your best demographic and match them. The feel of your website should be the same. What colors, what styles, what format best matches your potential customer’s preferences. Look at their websites and look at your competitors websites. Between these you should start to get an idea of what you want your business and your website to look like.

The bottom line question is this; How many customers do you have to lose to make a bad website too costly?

Joseph L. Zeleny
Chief Marketing Officer
SIA Professional Services

SIAServices.net

916-361-0792

It seems to be a common theme with inexperienced business owners.
“I’m not making enough money on this; let me add that to my list.”

“Mike P” came to my office after a few months of slow business. I had done marketing for him years in the past before the market shifted and he was doing well. But now Mike’s Sacramento construction business was slow and so he decided to add on automotive detailing to his portfolio. He bought a portable pressure washer, cleaning products, buffers, and equipment that he would really only be able to use detailing cars. He figured that while he was working at someone’s home he would offer to detail their cars as well and hopefully be able to pull a few extra bucks in the process.
This may not sound like such a bad idea at first. Many businesses need to expand their offerings during tough times, but there is a right way and a wrong way to expand on your business. Mike’s biggest problem was the simple fact that he had to buy 7k in new equipment and created a new offering that was in no way related to his existing business. After doing the numbers at a $35 profit on each car after materials we determined that Mike would have to detail over 200 cars just to hit the break even point. The other issue was that Mike was listed all over the web as a contractor with all his online advertising and such being related to construction. This would mean some costly additions to his business that he would have otherwise been able to avoid if he just would have talked to a good marketer first.

Eventually Mike learned he had made a mistake, as within 3 months he had only detailed 18 cars and had to sell his equipment to make ends meet.

Diversifying a business is not always a bad thing, but sometimes you want to look at your core and decide if you can expand your products and services with the tools you already have in your arsenal. Often I will have clients either bring me everything they have in equipment and lay it out in the back parking lot, or I will go to their place of business if it’s easier. Many times I look at what they have, think of the market we are presently in, and try to decide the best decision for them that will help them make more money without having to spend a load of extra money.

In Mike’s case, I took note of everything he had for landscaping and fence repair and replacement. It included a post hole digger, several saws, and everything needed to repair or replace fences. He even had about 200 fence posts because of a job that fell through. The idea hit me quick and I started doing some research and making some calls. When Mike came in to my Sacramento office to pick up his new business cards I handed him a two page service expansion summary.

Today Mike digs post holes for real estate signs using his post hole digger and sign posts which are nothing more than a couple of fence posts cut and attached. He contacted countless real estate companies and put together packages for each which allowed him to stay busy and at the same time talk to the home owner about any improvements they wanted in assisting in selling their home.

Solid diversity allows you to create a product or service line that will either promote or compliment your other offerings. Without buying any new equipment, without any additional expenses, and without spending a ton of new money that he didn’t have on marketing, Mike was able to make more money in two months that not only did he make up for the loss of his detailing equipment, but now has a staff who do nothing but post holes for him.

Before you go and add a product or service to your company, ask yourself some questions;

Is there anything I can offer that doesn’t require me to make any additional investments?
As I did with Mike, take a visual inventory of everything you have in your business to perform your job. If you have any specialty equipment you may want to look online for that equipment and see if there is anything else it can be used for. Many times one of these little extras can create a “light bulb” moment and get you going. Before you go nuts however, make sure that the new idea doesn’t itself carry a ton of new investments of its own. For Mike it was great because he had a dido blade, paint and everything he needed to make real estate posts, but if he didn’t we may have had to think things a little differently to get that off the ground. If you find that going off in a direction takes even more money that you don’t have, rethink, and look at something else. Eventually you should be able to find something else you can do.
Will this new widget compliment my existing business?
If your business right now is involved hand writing calligraphy wedding invitations, services such as birth announcements, memorial invitations, and graduation party invitations can help you expand your business while bringing your field of expertise to light with many new prospective. However, offering copying services would probably not give the same results since you are not targeting in on people who will use your other services. Copying is a wide and broad service, where people who hire professional writing artists are a very narrow group. Try to focus your new service to be a tool to present your existing service to your target demographic.
Is this new widget market sensitive?
In Mike’s case, he will be putting in many more posts as the market has forced more and more Americans to sell their homes in a desperate attempt to escape the hole they have dug. However in the above example, people are always getting married, always graduating, and sadly, always dying; so, though there is a seasonal approach on some of those services, for the most part, any market changes will have little effect on the business itself. You always want to consider this before jumping into a new service.
There are many other little things that you will want to consider before you diversify your business. Just make sure they complement each other, and don’t break you in the process or you will be like someone putting half their money on black and half their money on red in a roulette table; eventually green will hit, and you will lose it all.

Joseph L. Zeleny
Chief Marketing Officer
SIA Professional Services

SIAServices.net

916-361-0792

Pay Per Click, also called Pay Per Performance, Paid Perfomance and PPC all refer to the same business marketing campaign.  Placing your website in a special sponsored section of the search engines, generally giving you higher ranking and increased visibility immeidately, compared to what you would have previously received.

For this article I will be using Google as an example.  If you go to Google’s homepage (http://www.google.com) and type in mortgage you will see a huge number of results.  Within a highlighted bar, (orange for most settings) you will see three sponsored results, in addition you will see more results to the right in a sidebar.  These people have paid money to show up on that page in hopes that you will do business with them.  Now they are not paying anything to simply be there, however if you click on their link and go to their site they just spent money to have you visit them. 

PPC is the process in which an advertiser or business pays for each targeted lead to visit thier site based on categories and relevant keywords.  If you own an automotive detailing company and want to draw people to you, you will hopefully pick the keywords that best work in getting people to your website.

But this does not mean that you should put in just anything to get people to your website.  Your detail shop should not have keywords related to aquariums or Chinese food.  Since those searchers will be looking for those items, going to your site will just upset them.  They will in turn hit the back button and Google will take note that your visitors only stay on your site for a few moments before leaving your site.  You will enjoy a sudden drop in ranking and a large bill for no customers.  A PPC campaign should be targeted specifically for your customers.

If your business is geographically based you should take that into consideration when setting up your campaign.  If you are a weeding planner in Citrus Heights, and only want to target your pay per performace campaign for Sacramento, then you should include those words into your keywords for Google.  Yes, those of you who have rudementary experience in Adwords (Google’s Pay Per Click segment) say, hey wait, Google will let me pick my geographic location so that my ads only target my area.  This is true, however most searchers do not know that and will still type in their city.  Most PPC companies don’t take this into consideration and end up paying more per click than those who don’t.  The more targeted your keywords are the more likely you are going to have a better conversion rate rather than a ton of wasted clicks.

Pay Per Click Campaigns must be continually monitored.  Which keywords work?  Which ones cause more sales?  Can I see an increase in my visitors?  These are just some of the questions you have to answer when looking at a PPC report.  You will see words that may only give you a few visitors a day, but also get your phone ringing more than ones that give you multiple visitors an hour.  How will you or the PPC company you choose know which work best for you?  Three words;

Slow and Steady.

Yes, you could choose nine thousand keywords, plop them all in and when your sales increase you will probably be happy.  However you could very easily be throwing away hard earned money for no reason.  If you own a small restaurant and chose every keyword you could think of, yes, you may increase your sales, but strong marketing is about more than just increasing your profits; it’s also about lowering your costs as well.  In looking at your report you could see that you received 1,000 visitors, gained 15 customers a month and you would more than likely be satisfied with that.  However what if you had a BBQ restaurant and even though you were spending thousands of dollars a month it would be nearly impossible to track which keyword phrases were actually generating the phone calls without grilling (pun intended) the customer.  So you would be stuck keeping all of your keywords up.  That being the case you would never know that it was someone looking up “Rancho Cordova BBQ” that is getting you the most calls at $2 a click versus the $5 a click you are paying for “Sacramento Restaurant”. At ten thousand visitors a year you could be looking at a price difference of $30k.   Well more than you would have paid a qualified SEO marketing company like SIA to research the best and most cost effective keywords that would increase your return ratio.

Finally, understand that Pay Per Click does not always mean the highest bidder gets the click.  Google knows there is more to retaining thier nearly 70% market share of the web than just selling out to the highest bidder.  Every page of your website should be completely optimized to increase the chances of giving you solid ranking while lowering you per click cost.  This alone could end up saving you thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, in the long run rather than accepting your site as it is.

As for budgets, companies who sign up with business accounts for Google see a discount based on the volume of quality business they bring to the Search Engine Giant.  Many times, we save our customers enough money that it offsets the time and cost they would have otherwise incurreed in setting up the program themselves.  Some companies agree with standard marketing practices and allow for ten percent of their income from their website business to go back into their PPC campaign until they cap out, at which point their budget is larger than the amount of viable cusomters available, at which point it is time to sit down with me and figure out where to go from here.

So a well designed site, a solid grasp of what to expect to pay, and a little patience, can be a strong beginning to building a paid performance campaign that acutally pays you back.

Joseph L. Zeleny

Chief Marketing Officer

SIAServices.net

Earlier we discussed that Search Engine Optimization is the process of setting up your website so that people can find your company based on the products and services you offer rather than just knowing the name of your company.  Don’t be mistaken, it is important that people who know who you are can find you, however the next step in getting your web site better positioned is to setup the front end and back end so that people can find you based on the products and services you offer.

A large part of proper search engine optimization relies on you to ask some quesitons and make some very key decisions which we will talk about later; in the meantime however let’s look at some of the different kinds of optimizations that you should consider.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Optimization is crucial for your entire website.  With general optimization, which again just makes your website friendly for the search engines, a single set of keywords is propigated throughout your site, much like having the same kind of flooring laid throughout your home.  Keyword Optimization actually creates a seperate and targeted set of keywords which will be on your back end coding for each page.  For example, if you are a large multi sports complex your front page on your site would have keywords that reflect that.  However as you get deeper into your site you will have to specify mare targeted keywords.  This selection of keywords should help you see how different keywords get defined more and more as you go deeper into a website.  Each of these keywords for the sake of this example springs out into different pages.

Broad Front Page Keywords

Sports, Sports Complex, Amatuer Sports Arena, Football Fields, Baseball Fields, Basketball Courts

Football (one level down from front page)

Amatuer Football Tournaments, Football Leagues, Foot Ball Games

Football Leagues (one level down from Football)

Sacramento League Schedule, Northern California Football Tournament Signup, Elk Grove Flag Football Calendar

As you can see  the further down into the website we get, the more targeted the keywords get.  In using the example above we went from Sports Complex to very specific keywords whic even targeted location.  Our keyword phrases got longer and more specific to help the search engines decide how each page should show correctly and at the same time allowed the website owners to get themselves more listings throughout the search engines versus a single string of keywords propagated throughout the entire site.

Another step taken in optimizing your website is to make sure that each page of the website carries direct text (the text which the normal person can read) that is scattered with the similar keywords and synonyms that will go along with the back end text.  With matching title tags, outbound and back links, correct formatting, and several other factors, search engine optimization can take anywhere from a few days, to several months before the site is even ready to be submitted to the search engines again.

Of course the level of optimization one company needs, as compared to another, will vary greatly from website to website.  A company that offers only a very limited number of products or services will generally pay less than a company which offers more products than Walmart.  However, all Search Engine Optimization should allow for people to scale their budgets and only spend what can be afforded on a regular basis rather than paying a huge upfront fee.  Companies who do not allow for this generally do not because they are not confident in their ability to perform.  SIA however give unbiased third party results from Alexa.com to show clients where their site is prior to optimization versus where it is as each update is completed and the site with it’s updates are submitted to the search engines.

So as you can see, there is a lot that can go into optimizing a website, and this was just the tip of the iceburg.  A solid SEO company will have a degreed marketer who can help you step by step figure out which keywords, what titles, and what additional features can help your website raise in it’s rank on the search engines.

Joseph L. Zeleny

Chief Marketing Officer

SIA Professional Services

916-361-0792  

www.SIAServices.net

In this section we will talk about Search Engine Internet Marketing, what it is, and what is right for you.  Many Search Engine Marketing companies will tell you that Search Engine Optimization is right for anyone with a website.  But in my 14 years of marketing I have never seen any medium that wias the right fit for everyone and I will discuss some of that in the different pages of this Blog.

So feel free to search around, click on any of the pages, ask questions, and subscribe to this blog and you will be notified every time we have a change or new information.

Thank You

Joseph L. Zeleny

Chief Marketing Officer

SIAServices.net