New Orleans Internet Marketing

About a year ago, I got my first Hilton Honors credit card for my business and started making the most out of the money I spent on advertising by getting rewards points that went towards hotel stays at any Hilton resort. It’s worked out so well for me, that I now use another HHonors card for my personal expenses as well. I try to pay any bills I possibly can with the credit card, and I end up getting at least one free hotel night every month! Since I was never the type of person that was good at saving money for vacations, this has worked out very well for our family.

With the monumental rise in gas prices this past year, credit cards with gas rebate rewards have become increasingly popular. Keep in mind that there are many cash-back reward cards available, and they typically give you 1% - 2% cashback on any purchase. Well for gas, your savings can be much higher. Some of these new gas rebate cards are offering as much as 10% off for an introductory period! The Discover Open Road and BP Visa offer 5% for the life of the card. These are huge savings (0.20 per gallon on $4 / gal. gas) compared to traditional rewards cards. It really makes it worthwhile to get one just for fueling up, especially if you’re someone who drives a lot.

To help make these cards more available to the public, this weekend I launched Gas Rebate Credit Cards.com, a site with the top gas credit cards and my other favorite rewards cards as well. I plan on keeping it updated with the best cards as they become available, so check it out if you’re in the market for a rewards card!

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of LiquidWeb’s dedicated servers since I started using them last year. I got my invoice this month, and read a little further down the email where I was surprised to learn that they now have Zero Latency, Solid State Drives available for their dedicated servers! “What is that?” I first though. I put 2 and 2 together, because I know what latency is (and “0″ is a good number when you’re talking about it), and I know what “solid state” means (usually refers to circuitry as opposed to moving parts), so it became clear that they’re offering these brand new solid state drives (SSD) on their servers. Wow!

What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest bottlenecks on a computer is the hard drive. If the PC needs to access your hard drive, it slows things down considerably. This is why having enough RAM can speed things up significantly - with RAM, you eliminate the bottleneck of having to search and rescue data from a spinning hard drive. Well, Solid State Drives work like RAM. It’s like replacing your hard drive with a giant RAM chip :) the data becomes instantly accessible to the processor.

Can you imagine how great this will be for websites? Especially forums like mine. It should make them blazingly fast.

I had to call LiquidWeb to find out more. I talked to one of the sales guys, and he confirmed that “yes, the solid state drives are available for the dedicated servers, and LiquidWeb is currently one of only a few dedicated server providers in the world that have them available.”

So the almighty “RackSpace” doesn’t even have these things yet, and when they do get them, RS customers should be prepared to whip out their pocketbook. LiquidWeb will do the upgrade for $150 / mo. right now, with discounts for volume. Not cheap by any means, but I would imagine that it’s a nice performance boost for database driven sites. While it’s not in my budget right now, I can’t wait to try them out. Hopefully anyone with experience with them will post a review.

For more info on LiquidWeb, click here.

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost. Read the rest of this entry »

A common question I get is, “Chris, we got a quote from this company for our new website and they want to charge us $XXXXX - is that too much?” “Well, what are they going to do?” I counter. “I don’t know, design our website!”

Simple “Brochure” Type Websites
The fact is, $2,000 can be too much or too little, and so can $20,000. It depends on what the purpose of the website is and what type of functionality you want it to have. The simplest websites to build are like “brochures” or “business cards” on the web. These have static content, meaning that if you want to change anything you need to have web design experience or have your designer make the changes. These types of sites generally go for $1k - $5k, depending on the experience and quality of the designer, and depending on if it will have flash, and how many pages it will have.

Content Management Systems (CMS)
The next upgrade is a site with some form of “content management.” CMS allows the site administrator or anyone else with permission, to login to the site and make changes to content and pages using a simple text editor. Website owners like CMS because it makes them less dependent on their web design company for changes. Changes to content can be made quickly and easily by the site owner or admin. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years back I decided to start using website monitoring services, and I’m grateful that I did. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about hosting and how good or bad the services I was paying for were. This was part of the progression that led me to get a dedicated server last year, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a web designer / developer. Website monitoring is also vital if you’re running a search engine marketing campaign.

What do website monitoring services do?
They check your website from different locations around the world during the course of the day to make sure that it is up and functioning. You can usually choose how often you want them to check, and different services have different options. These days I use a company called SiteUptime, and I’ve been pretty happy with them so far, but there are plenty of others out there and it’s good to shop around to get the features you want.

Why is monitoring a big deal? Don’t you know when your website is down?

1. The problem is, I didn’t always know… you just can’t be on your website around the clock. Especially when you have multiple sites.
2. For search engine marketing campaigns, being unaware of downtime can cost a lot of money and skew conversion data.
3. Downtime is money. When you have profitable websites, you lose money while they are down, regardless of whether or not you’re running pay-per-click campaigns.
4. I had no idea how unreliable shared hosting was. Once I started monitoring my sites on the shared accounts, I realized that I was having regular weekly downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.
5. Monitoring services give you information that can be used to diagnose problems through support. When I talk to support about downtime, I now have a record of exactly when it occurred, with the IP of the test site(s), and the length of time it occurred. This information can go a long way in helping to get to the cause of the problem, and it gives credibility to your complaint - especially with shared hosting providers.

I’m glad I started doing this because it’s standard practice for me now. At our firm we always recommend that clients monitor their sites, and set it up ourselves if necessary. If you’re running a search marketing campaign for someone else, how do you know if you had a bad day conversion-wise, or if their site was down for a few critical hours and no one knew about it? Things like that could mean the difference between keeping and losing a good client.

I posted about George Long a few months ago when we met and I was inspired by his excellent photography and his ability to capture the heart and soul of New Orleans through the lens.

At the time, he showed me a preview of his upcoming book entitled “Katrina Days,” which was a visually stunning look at some of the pitcures he captured following the storm. If you’re the type of person who likes the Time / Life “Year in Pictures” type-books, that highlight the great events of our time through photography, then this is something I think you will like. It’s also for the dedicated New Orleans residents who want something tangible to remember the events surrounding hurricane Katrina by.

I just got word that the book is now available through his website, and I placed an order. That’s what prompted me to write. It’s something I had been eagerly awaiting. To order a copy, visit: http://georgelong.com/book.htm

In the Fall of last year, Francis Ford Coppola’s computer and backup hard drive were stolen, and he lost 15 years worth of data, including writing and family photographs. He offered a reward for its return, but he never did get it back.

On a much smaller scale, last month I had a backup hard drive fail, which under normal circumstances should be no big deal. I should be able to buy a new one and just replace it, but the problem was that I had stored some data on it which was not stored anywhere else - so it’s now gone for good. I have the option of spending a few hundred dollars on data recovery to see if it can be recovered, but I haven’t been able to decide if the data is worth the price.

What About Your Websites?
Just 2 weeks ago, there was a terrible fire at The Planet, one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. The fire interrupted thousands of servers, but supposedly no servers or networking equipment was damaged. Let’s suppose there had been damage. Suppose that your web server and its backups at your hosting provider were destroyed. Most people who work on static websites have copies on their local machine that they FTP. But how many websites these days are database driven? Are you backing up your databases? I don’t know many people who do, unfortunately.

Here’s What I Do.

I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve lost too many irreplaceable files over the years. I now have a library of digital pictures of my growing family from the past 5 years on my computer. Losing these files would be a great loss for me. So here’s how I’ve come to handle local data. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of ways to get links for most SEO campaigns, but one thing I almost always do is hire some outsourced personnel who contact related websites asking them to link to the site we’re promoting from their “Resource” pages. This can be very time consuming work, that’s why most of the people I’ve met who do this are from India. The value you get for your dollar is very good in India. We pay these link builders anywhere from $5 - $50 for a link, and we get a one-time fee, permanent link from another website. Outsourcing companies, like OutsourcedLinkBuilding.com are getting more and more popular due to the cheap price of labor overseas. Outsourced Link Building dot com in particular, has secured tons of valuable links for me in the past. Granted, there are times when I wind up paying for a few I wish I hadn’t, but the overall service is incredible for the price you pay.

The value you get from one-time fee, permanent links is so great, because when you specify a decent part of your budget for that, the links really build up over time. So does your PageRank, and so do your rankings. I’ve found so many ways to get permanent links these days, that it’s rare that I rent links. To me, renting links (paying a monthly fee) is little different from pay-per-click advertising in that you’re renting your space at the top. Don’t rent! Own!

First let me say, that Google does not recommend changing domain names, and neither do I. My next disclaimer is that I can’t control what Google does (the classic SEO disclaimer that every long-term SEO has had to resort to at some point in time). So if you try this at home and it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault.

The internet marketing firm I work for recently ran into a problem that is likely to happen to anyone who names their firm after the partners - one partner left, and we had to change the name. So “Foreman & Pike Consulting” became “Reciprocal Consulting,” but that was the easy part. We had top search engine rankings in Google for “Internet Marketing Firm” and “Internet Marketing Firms,” which had been two productive keyword phrases. How were we going to change our domain name and retain our search rankings?

I’ve been doing SEO since 1998, so I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done (301 redirects) without looking anything up, but this was a big deal, and the other guys in the firm were depending on me! I’m the only SEO guy, and I needed to get it right!

What helped things out, was that I had done some research for a consulting job on this very thing not long ago, and I tried to find out what Google’s “official” recommendation was on the matter. Here are a few good snippets that I found: Read the rest of this entry »

Ever “Googled” yourself? If so, what do the search results show? If you have social media profiles and web pages with your name on them - there’s a good chance these will show up. This is what the concept of reputation management is built around - managing your online reputation. For people who do business on the web, their company name frequently comes up in social media circles….potentially on forums and blog posts, and it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to deal with negative statements about them. Although the best defense in good customer service, we all know you can’t keep everyone happy all the time.

Worst case scenario is having sites like these (click) pop up about your business. Who wants a whole website devoted to attacking their reputation?
:(

Sometimes the best defense is an early one, and here are two simple ways you can monitor your online reputation:

1. Alerts: Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have alert services that will let you know when the top 10 or 20 search results change for a search you choose. Here’s where to set them:
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/alerts/
http://alerts.live.com/Alerts/Default.aspx

2. Search Blogs: Use Technorati.com to monitor the blogosphere by subscribing to RSS feeds of the searches you want to monitor.

Many people are aware that I work for an internet marketing firm called Foreman & Pike Consulting (used to be www.ForemanPike.com). We have now changed our name to Reciprocal Consulting (www.ReciprocalConsulting.com). I am happy to say that we will continue to be able to provide the same top-notch service that we are well known for in the industry. Here is the letter from John Pike on the change:

As the internet advertising market changes each day, so must we.

Foreman & Pike Consulting has always been on the cutting edge of growth, development and performance; and this will not change. We will continue to offer Internet advertising solutions, successful conversions, increased sales and most importantly, a return on your investment — all on a pay for performance basis. However, we benefit from your success as much as you do because after all, without you we would be without purpose.

It is for this reason that Foreman & Pike has changed their name to Reciprocal Consulting.

We believe that Reciprocal better describes who we are, what we do and what we offer, as our relationship with our clients is mutually beneficial. We want to stress, as we always have, that we are Partners with our clients. We take on your vision, make your goals our goals and our success is measured only by your success. This is the difference between an Internet Marketing firm and Reciprocal Consulting.

Nothing has changed and nothing will except for our name, which we feel better represents us and our relationship with you, our clients.

Sincerely,

John E. Pike, Owner & President

Reciprocal Consulting

When I moved almost all of my websites to a dedicated server at LiquidWeb about 4 months ago, I thought I would be getting some peace of mind, but I had no idea about all of the other great things that would result from having a managed, dedicated server of my own.

Here are some of the things I find really advantageous about dedicated servers as opposed to typical shared hosting that I was handcuffed by before.

1. Incredible Response Times - granted these differences are in milliseconds, but obviously there is a significant difference here. These two charts are my site monitoring results from my dedicated server at LiquidWeb, and my Gridserver (shared hosting) account at Media Temple. If you look at the scale on the left, you will see that the LiquidWeb dedicated server is about twice as fast on average. I should also mention that the Media Temple account has regular unscheduled downtime, still to this day.
   LiquidWeb Dedicated Server:
   
   MediaTemple Gridserver:
   
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re involved in the internet marketing profession, there is eventually going to come a time when you will need a picture of yourself for a bio or “about us” page. Especially if you’re a blogger - a good picture helps readers to connect and get a feel for who you are; Problogger has a good post on the benefits of using your picture on your blog.

My time had come. I needed a picture for our firm’s website. I’ve been getting along with some crappy old pictures that I cropped from random photos for too long. So being the internet marketing hacker I am, I hit Google up for some “New Orleans Photographers,” and that’s how I was lucky enough to find George Long.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being the webmaster of a site with over 400 direct advertisers (who are therapists), I often get asked about stats, and currently I don’t have anything set up to deliver stats to my directory’s advertisers. The population I advertise for are therapists who, for the most part, are relatively new to internet marketing. Since I also manage a few individual marketing campaigns for therapists, I have a good idea about the kind of traffic that converts into referrals for them, and the kind of traffic that doesn’t. I even get to see how good my site’s competitors do at sending conversions to therapists. It’s a really unique vantage point, and here’s what I’ve come to learn from it.

The truth about what people are selling you in terms of advertising, is that the bottom line is the price you pay for each conversion. In the case of the therapists who advertise on my website, a “conversion” is a referral for counseling services. With that being said, statistics on visitors and pageviews that people send their advertisers can potentially be meaningless due to the fact that conversions are highly dependent on how targeted the traffic is. Read the rest of this entry »

LSU 38, OSU 24.

While the Ohio Buckeyes started off strong, their #1 ranked defense was no match for LSU’s offense. Congratulations LSU Tigers we’re proud of you.

I didn’t even know about managed DNS until I read about it on John Chow’s blog a long time ago. I could relate to the stress of DNS propagation issues though, and I thought it would be a good idea to try it out.

Today, I’ve been using externally managed DNS for about 4 months, and I’m very happy with the results. For my more important websites (the ones that make money), I decided to keep backup copies of them on a less expensive hosting account just in case my dedicated server ever goes down. I realized the need for this type of setup after years of dealing with shared hosting and unscheduled down time (inevitably at the worst possible time).

Under normal circumstances, a backup copy of your website on another server won’t do much good, because if you need to switch to the backup - you can expect a 24hr delay as DNS propagates. Not with externally managed DNS though. Now I can switch between the two servers in 5 minutes. No more having to wait until the next morning to find out if my site is functioning properly on the new server. Read the rest of this entry »

Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimization. While there are a lot of aspects of a web page that help it to rank well for keywords, the title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important.

The title tag is the html code that looks like this: <title>Title Goes Here</title>

It is contained within the <head></head> section of the html document and shows up at the top of the web browser. It is also the link that shows up at the top of your site’s listing in the search results. Here are some important considerations that will make your use of title tags more effective.

Read the rest of this entry »

I met a guy named Chris on Digital Point the other day, and he did some work for me. He did a really good job, so I asked him if he did anything else. He then tells me about these Ebay affiliate sites that he’s selling to people for dirt cheap. He sends me a bunch of examples, and I was blown away.

The sites are setup using Wordpress with an ebay affiliate feed for whatever type of item category you choose. He sets a cron job to update the feed, and walla! You’ve got an ebay affiliate site, SEO friendly and ready to go in a few hours.

So I had to try this out myself. I bought RolexWatchAuctions.com, and I bought AppleComputerAuctions.com for a friend of mine as a Christmas present. Here are some other sites he’s done:
http://1dollardvd.net
http://rockbandsource.com
http://guccigallery.com
http://mycoachstore.com


I got a few links for RolexWatchAuctions.com, and it’s already on the first page of Google for “rolex watch auctions,” I haven’t even had the site 2 weeks yet.

Here’s what you will need:

1. Choose a topic that you think will be profitable for an ebay affiliate website.
   
2. Create an affiliate account at Commission Junction so you can join the ebay affiliate program.
   
3. Buy the domain name.
   
4. Choose a Wordpress Theme (I customized the graphics at the top for mine, Chris didn’t do that).
   
5. Setup hosting somewhere or add the domain on to an account you have that allows multiple websites.
   
6. Send me $50 through Paypal (Click Here), and I will get you in touch with Chris so he can start your site. Make sure you put your email address in the Paypal message if it’s different from your Paypal email.
   

This offer expires on Jan. 10th, 2008.

I do a lot of pay-per-click management for the firm I work for, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I can build out good ad groups and ads, lower click costs, improve clickthrough rates, build good content match campaigns etc., etc., etc., but every now and then I do a consult for a client that’s thinking about using us for SEO. Here’s where I shine. SEO is my one of my favorite topics, and I have been doing it with success for many years now. These are the top 5 reasons I think SEO is one of the best investments you can make in your website:

1. Improvements to the way you organize your site and it’s content, will help the Search Engines to find and index your site better for the rest of its life. Best of all, it should help visitors as well.
   


2. The suggestions that your SEO gives you will be “best practice” standards that you and your designers can use for any future work you do.
   


3. New, original content that you add will be yours forever, and you can bring in search traffic from it for as long as it’s there.
   


4. Many links that you get will be permanent links, that will continue to exist, drive traffic, and help your search results for as long as the linking site remains online.
   


5. Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.

SEO is a great long term investment in your website. I like to look at a website as a piece of property, and SEO is not only home-improvement, but it also puts you in a better neighborhood.

I have about 15-20 websites that I manage, and most of them are database driven these days. Managing databases adds another whole level of complexity to moving and backing up websites that didn’t exist when everything I managed was plain html years ago. Only having to deal with MYSQL databases these past few years, admittedly, I’m not a pro. But I’ve managed to get the hang of things, for the most part.

So the old process was really cumbersome. At times, I had to install PHPmyadmin if it wasn’t already on the server, then worry about conflicting versions or settings between PHPmyadmin on different servers. Frequently, I got errors when importing SQL files that were dumped from another server. It really became a nightmare when I was trying to move sites from Media Temple to Liquid Web recently.

Then I found Navicat (http://www.navicat.com). Navicat is a program for Windows, MAC, or Linux, that allows you to manage MYSQL databases with a nice GUI and easy to use, straightforward features.

Have you ever purchased software, when you really didn’t want to spend the extra money, and then afterwards you thought to yourself, “wow, that was the best investment I’ve made in a long time?”

That’s how I felt after purchasing Navicat. It stores al of my DB settings, and I can backup, transfer, sync, edit, import & export, all with just a few clicks. It’s literally cut my DB management time by about 75%. Talk about “making an amateur feel like a pro.” Another good thing was that they had a fully functional 30 day trial available for download. So I got to use it for a while before I actually made the purchase.

I just wanted to pass this on because Navicat is “good stuff.” It seems rare these days that I run into products that work out of the box, and help me to accomplish my goals easier.