Photo by Nathan Harpe

Say “Butts-Mehre Building” five times fast and you’ll understand why this building name is a favorite marketing fail of mine!

I graduated from the University of Georgia, and I always wondered who could possibly have decided that “Butts-Mehre” was a good name for the athletic association’s building. Of course, the University of Georgia loves its athletics programs, especially football. Wally Butts and Harry Mehre were coaches at UGA, so it makes sense that the athletic association’s building is named after them.

But the building could have been named “Mehre-Butts” instead. Maybe name this building “Mehre” and another building on campus “Butts”? Really, most any choice would have been better than “Butts-Mehre”. No wonder UGA gets ribbed about the quality of its academics so often.

Of course, this makes me glad that I’m an Internet marketer. On the Internet everyone can see your marketing mistakes, but at least it’s relatively easy to correct them! This building at UGA has been named “Butts-Mehre” for 35 years now.

The post Marketing FAIL: The Butts-Mehre Building at UGA appeared first on Las Vegas Web Design.

Photo by Ky Olsen

You have a web site. You post on Twitter and Facebook, and even send out a monthly email newsletter. This is online marketing, right? Maybe so.

Ask yourself a few key questions:

1. Are my social media posts and the web site bringing new leads to my business?
2. What am I doing to take those leads and turn them into opportunities where I can speak to these prospects on the phone or in person?
3. What percentage of my web site visitors are turning into leads and into customers?
4. Am I tracking all the right metrics so that I know where I need to improve?

Many companies cannot answer more than one of these questions. Almost none have a plan to convert web site visitors and social media contacts into leads and customers.

You Gotta Have Goals for Online Marketing

Online marketing should be more than just putting up a web site and chatting folks up on social media. What online marketing should do is generate leads and increase revenues.

Start by clearly defining your goals. How many new leads or extra revenue do you need for the next 12 months? How much of that needs to come from your online marketing versus offline marketing?

You should have analytics in place to track visitors to the your site, conversions of visitors into leads, and leads into customers. You also need to know where your visitors come from so that you know where to focus your efforts.

The Takeaway

What I hope you’ll take away from this is that online marketing is still just marketing. The medium and methods will differ from offline marketing, but the purpose is still to drive sales. You track ROI on your offline marketing right? Well, do the same for your online marketing too!

The post What is Online Marketing? appeared first on Las Vegas Web Design.

Photo by Stew Dean

1. Google’s search ranking algorithms give a higher preference to data from Google’s own services

   Have you ever done a search for a keyword phrase on Google and in the results a less-than-helpful Blogger/Blogspot site page ranks in the top three results? That happens because Blogger is a Google owned property, and Google ranks pages from its own services higher than normal web pages!

   So when Google sees the keywords in your Google+ posts, it will give you something of an edge over your competition to rank for that keyword phrase. And since Google has full access to crawl its own Google+ service, but less access on other social media sites, you might gain more search ranking credit for social signals on Google+ as opposed to Facebook or Twitter and other social media sites.

2. Google shows pages that your Google+ connections have +1′d on the first page of results

   One of the great features of social media sharing is that when someone shares or retweets your posts, your post is then potentially seen by all of that sharer’s friends & followers. Your potential audience is much larger than just your friends & followers.

   Google+ takes this idea a step further. When someone adds a +1 on your content, any of her Google+ friends & followers will see your web page ranked near the top of Google search results when searching for your keywords. Now that’s powerful SEO medicine!

3. Google Places has been rolled into Google+

   You know those Google Places listings for local businesses that show up near the top of Google’s search results? If you want to show up in these local places results for a keyword, you have to be on Google+ now!

   Google recently rolled their Places service into Google+, which means that you have to setup your Google+ account in order to list your business in the local places listings that apepar near the top of search results!

   Considering how important Google Places has been for local businesses to get traffic to their websites and making their phones ring, I expect that businesses will flock to Google+ for this reason alone.

4. There are LOTS of Google+ users coming!

   Google is automatically signing up every new Google and GMail account to Google+, increasing the user base very quickly. This and the fact that every local business needs to be listed in Google+ Local (previously known as Google Places) means that the number of Google+ accounts will increase fast.

   “So what? Nobody’s actually using their Google+ account” you say. Read on!

5. Google+ is highly visible to users of the various Google services

   Google provides lots of free apps to the public. What do they all have in common? At the top of the window for each of them is a gray search bar. On the right side of this search bar are two features that will help drive more Google+ use and engagement.

   The first is a square button with a number in it. When you have any Google+ notifications, such as friends & contacts adding you to their circles, this button turns red to get your attention.

   The second feature is a “+ Share” button. Clicking on this button displays a pop up box where you can add a post to your Google+ account. How convenient is that? Think that might help pursuade Google account holders to use Google+ sharing? You betcha!

The Online Marketing Takeaway

You have a business and you want to generate more leads from your web site. So you need more traffic. To get more traffic, you want to rank well in search engines, especially Google. Having a presence on Google+ can give you a leg up in the fight for top search engine results.

The post 5 Reasons Why You Can’t Ignore Google+ in Your Online Marketing appeared first on Las Vegas Web Design.