What is the best marketing option for the money?
- realtor

The answer to this could vary based on your industry and audience, but in general we feel that you get the most value for your marketing dollar with a blog. A blog is a website (or part of your existing website) where you regularly post new articles, images, and even videos. It can be very inexpensive to create a blog, and the software is designed so that you can make the updates yourself instead of hiring a web developer for each change.

A blog does require a commitment on your part. While you won’t be spending a lot of money to keep the blog chugging along, you need to be adding new content regularly. That could be daily, and should definitely be at least weekly.

So that’s what you need to put into a blog, but what are you going to be getting out of it?

• Home base for your social media – on Facebook, Twitter, and your other social networks you can direct people to your recent blog posts
• SEO - search engines will rank your site higher (resulting in more web traffic) if you are frequently posting fresh, relevant content
• Position yourself as the expert - regular blog posts will teach your followers to turn to you for the latest news in your industry
• Dialogue with your visitors – the commenting dynamic of blogs allow you to get valuable feedback and make connections with your visitors
• Ongoing contact - regular updates to your blog keep you in front of your audience
• Ease of sharing media – photos, audio files, and videos are easy to share through your blog

Not quite convinced, yet? Check out what Seth Godin and Tom Peters have to say on blogging.

If you have a blog, what are you getting out of it? Is it worth the time you’re putting in?

What do I do when someone leaves a negative comment on my blog?
- almost every person who’s attended one of our blogging seminars

The first step is not to panic. Have you ever gone to a restaurant where they screwed up your order? The meal can go two ways after that. The server might assume there’s nothing that can be done to salvage your experience and give you shoddy treatment the rest of the night. The other approach your server might take is to apologize, take responsibility for the mistake, and make it right. That might mean saying sorry, a free dessert, or getting the manager to comp your meal depending on how bad they screwed up.

If they handle it right, you’ll leave the restaurant even more impressed and pleased than you would have if the order had been right the first time. Sometimes seeing how someone responds to a problem is what makes you love them. The downside with the restaurant example: only one table got to see how the server responded in a crisis.

So back to the blogging scenario. Someone leaves a comment about a bad experience they had with you. Here’s your chance to respond to that person and make it right. Not only does the commenter see it, but everyone who reads that blog post will see it, too.

Update: everyone sees it because you are responding in the same forum: the blog comments. This is hugely important. See the comments of this post for an example. (Thanks, Robby.)

So what do you do? Here are the elements that should show up somewhere in your response.

• Apologize. Do it sincerely.
• Take responsibility. If there’s any part of the problem that was your fault, own up to it.
• Make it right. Offer an exchange at your expense. If you provide a service that wasn’t right, offer to go out and do it again for free.
• Thank them.

That last one may leave you scratching your head. What are you thanking them for? If there’s a problem with what your delivering to your clients, you need to know about it so you can fix it. Most clients who experience a problem don’t tell you. They simply move on to your competitors, and you never learn why. You’d pay a lot of money for a consultant to survey your clients to find out why they leave. When you find a client that goes out of their way to give you that information unsolicited, they deserve your appreciation.

How do I make blogging important to sales people who can’t write and don’t care?
- sales training

It’s a common problem to have people in your organization who aren’t particularly interested in writing blog posts, even when their knowledge and role in the company makes them seem like a natural fit for blogging. I can think of two big objections that may be going through their mind:

1.) I don’t have time.

Of course this might be 100% true. It seems like most of us already have more than enough tasks to fill up our week and then some. There’s no getting around the fact that writing blog posts takes time. Here are some suggestions for dealing with this:

• Allow them to write a one-time post. Instead of trying to get the CEO to commit to writing a post three times a week, just try to get a single post on some topic that’s important to him/her.
• Repurpose existing content. Use something that’s already written. Maybe the introduction to the company’s printed newsletter or annual report would be a good post. How about the transcript from a speech someone in the organization gave?
• Use multimedia instead of text. Although search engines really prefer the text on your site, the real people that visit your blog may love to see a video. So record a presentation that your reluctant blogger gives.

2.) I don’t write good.

This objection might also be completely justified – especially if they use good in place of well. You can offer to edit the article for them before it is published, but that may not be much comfort. You might find you’re talking to someone who is just as embarrassed to have you see their underdeveloped writing skills as they would be to have the general public see them. So what can you do?

• Write the post for them. Take a conversation or email that you’ve had with this person and write it up from their perspective. Now you’ve given them the power to take a look at it and make edits/changes where necessary.
• Go multimedia. The video route is also a great way of getting the wisdom of someone who isn’t a natural born wordsmith onto your blog.

Those are the first two that came to mind. Have you come across other obstacles? Are you constantly hounded by someone on your team to write a blog post? What are the roadblocks for you? Sound off in the comments.

My website isn’t very clean, and it’s a bit confusing. How can I clean that up using Wordpress?
- sales training

Wordpress is an open source blogging software package that you can use to create a website with a lot of functionality and stability. When Silver Square determines that the best route for one of our clients is to use an existing piece of blogging software, Wordpress is the one we use.

The problem you describe seems to be a design issue with the site. The strength of Wordpress is giving you a  robust system for updating the content of your site, whether you are doing a traditional blog or using Wordpress as a de facto content management system. The design of your site still falls under the umbrella of your designer,  who creates your site to be both an extension of your brand and a useful business tool to engage your visitors.

Now once you have a good design in place, the structure of Wordpress can make it easier to make changes to the content of your site without “breaking” it. A site might be great when it first created, but as the months roll on different bits of information (tradeshow appearances, new products or services, etc.) get tacked on to a design that wasn’t created with the idea of adding new information. Since Wordpress by its very nature is built on the premise that you will continually add information to your site, it can help a good website design remain good even while the content of the site is changing.

This is one of those questions that seems minor to me, put as it turns out is a big deal to some of our team members, so want to get a professional opinion.

Scenario:  We have some logoed shirts. We have a new shirt order being made by various people within the firm. The shirts are in good taste, look professional, etc. All will have our logo. Controversy – all sorts of styles (all professional) and colors are being requested – a navy polo, a white long sleeve, a pink whatever. So, what is appropriate?

a) Company apparel with uniform colors (ie, company colors); various styles ok, but uniform colors?

b) Company apparel on whatever colors (they will match of course); various styles ok?

c) Something else? Sorry to bother you with this, but I need some support to back up my decision, whichever way it may be.

- CPA Partner 

This is one that you may not like my answer, but it’s what I’ve seen time and time again, and my personal management style matches up to this, so here goes. This is classic employee relations FIRST, brand second. What you’re discussing, like you mentioned, is minor. It’s not making or breaking your company. Losing an employee or keeping one happy, is far more important than if someone wants a pink shirt with a white logo.

So let them get what they want. Let pink go on pink, let white go on pink, let anything go that stays under a professional looking umbrella. Color, in this instance, is just not as important.

Someone told me it isn’t good to re-use a blog post.  Is this true and if so, why?
- process guru

The answer to this depends entirely on how you are planning to re-use your blog post. 

At Silver Square we are big believers in the idea of repurposing your content. If youv’e gone through the trouble to research, create, and put some polish on something valuable there’s no reason to use it once and then forget about it. The key is to find other channels where you can share this information.

So suppose you give a speech to you local chamber of commerce about what the next 6 months are going to look like in your industry. The speech is well received and everyone thanks you for your time. Are you done? No way. Take the notes from your speech and turn them into a blog post. Write an article for your newsletter. Shoot a simple video where you cover the key points from the speech and put it up on YouTube.

In each case, you’ll need to tweak the message a little to fit your audience in each of those venues.

Now back to the idea of re-using blog posts. Some unsavory characters have attempted to get rich on the web by scraping the content off of other sites and publishing it on their own. Google and other search engines don’t want to respond to search queries with a long list of the exact same article on ten different sites. So they have complicated algorithms that attempt to determine which site is the authoritative source of the content. That’s the one that shows up in search results.

The other sites don’t appear. If this kind of things happens on enough of their pages, they start looking really suspect in the eyes of the search engines. (You probably don’t want your site to look fishy to Google.) This phenomenon is known in the search industry as penalizing duplicate content.

If you want your post to appear in two different blogs, I would advise rewriting it. You can use the same ideas, but don’t copy and paste the post word for word.

Sound too difficult? Well, the two blogs probably have a slightly different audience or tone even if they cover similar topics. Think about how you need to present your ideas differently to that audience, and the minor rewrite will come easily.

How do you know how many people selected to RSS your blog?  Is there a way for me to track that?
- process guru

If you’re not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it’s a way of letting your readers subscribe to your blog. Rather than constantly checking your blog’s website to see if any posts have been added, they will be notified when there’s new content. Although the technology works very differently, it feels a lot like your favorite sites send you an email when they have something new. RSS feeds are included by default in every major blogging solution.

You can actually see how much activity your RSS feed is getting in your standard web traffic statistics. As far as your web servers logs are concerned, accessing the RSS feed is the same as accessing any other page on your website. The activity level shown there is misleading, though. 

When I subscribe to your RSS feed, I’m actually telling a piece of software to regularly check the site for me. So if my software is checking your website for new content every hour, that will show up as 24 hits in your server log even though I’m just one subscriber. Someone else may set their software to check for updates every 30 minutes. That person will contribute 48 hits in your server log. 

You can filter the results by unique visitors if your site analytics package allows that, but even those results may underestimate or (more likely) overestimate your actual number of subscribers. And that’s all assuming you’re someone who regularly gets into your website statistics, and very few people are. So what’s the solution?

While there is no 100% accurate method for tracking your subscribers that we know of, a good option is to filter your feed through FeedBurner. This service is owned by Google, is free to use, and is a good idea for anyone who’s serious about blogging. Rather than having your subscribers access your RSS feed directly off your web server they access FeedBurner, and FeedBurner communicates with your web server. The reward for this extra step is you get to take advantage of all the cool features of FeedBurner without needing to hire someone to build them specifically for your RSS feed.

Using FeedBurner has more advantages than we’ll get into here, but one of them is a reasonable estimate on the number of subscribers you have. While even this number isn’t completely accurate, it’s still useful. If you see your subscriber count according to FeedBurner doubles from one month to the next, it’s reasonable to assume that your real number of subscribers approximately doubled, too.

What program would you recommend for mass emails?
- promotional products business

Just to make sure every one is on the same page, let’s preface this response by saying that any mass email campaign should only be sent to people who have opted-in to receive the message. It’s only for people who have demonstrated interest in receiving messages from you. 

Whew!  Now that we have that out of the way, there are several programs that come to mind that make it much easier to send email campaigns and measure the results.  You could just send an email to everyone in your address book from Outlook, but a campaign manager is going to give you better tracking, formatting, and anti-spam compliance.

Silver Square has direct experience with 3 programs, so we’ll talk about those.  This is not a comprehensive list, but these are some good providers that are very affordable.  (If anyone wants to share their thoughts on Emma, MailChimp, or any other campaign managers in the comments section, we’d love to read about them.)

Constant Contact

A very recognizable name, Constant Contact has been in the game for a while and is relatively easy to use.  The pricing model is built around the number of email addresses on your list(s).  You get your money’s worth by sending frequent emails (of course you don’t want to send so often that you annoy your subscribers).  At least as of fall 2008, the options for creating custom templates weren’t great, but a lot could have changed in the last year.

Campaign Monitor

With Campaign Monitor, you pay based on the number of emails that you send.  If you have a month go by where you don’t send a message to any of your 5,000 subscribers, then you don’t pay anything.  We’ve also found them to be exceptionally easy to use when building custom templates for our clients.  Even better, they let us setup an account for our clients to be able to login and manage their own campaigns using the templates we’ve built for them.  Campaign monitor’s back-end interface is by far the easiest to use of the three.

Exact Target

We have to give a nod to Indianapolis-based Exact Target.  They’ve extended their service offerings to include a lot more than just email campaign management, so you may struggle to figure out how to sign up from their website.  We’ve been working with them for years, though, so you know they’re doing a lot of things right.

We use all three of these services for different clients, and any of them would be a  good use of your marketing dollar.

When shopping for a new website designer (to re-design an existing website), what questions are important to ask?  What makes some web designers more or less expensive?  Is it appropriate to ask to have controls over some areas of the site to change content?  What type do you suggest or is best for SEO strategies?
- business owner

Choosing a website designer is a big decision.  Unless you plan on regularly doing a complete overhaul of your site, the choices you make today are going to be affecting your business for years to come.  You’re on the right track with some of the questions you’re already thinking about.

The first point to consider is that there are actually two phases to building a website.  The design phase is creating the user interface, layout, and general look-and-feel of your site.  The programming phase involves creating the HTML+CSS, writing any Javascript, building a database, programming forms, and tying everything together into a cohesive site.  You either need a single developer who can handle both phases, or a designer and programmer who can work together.

Factors Effecting Cost

While there are always going to be people who charge a lot more or a lot less then they are worth, in general you get what you pay for.  From a web developer who charges more, you should be expecting…

• questions about your business, your customers, and what you want your website to accomplish
• engaging design that reflects your brand
• a well-defined process that lets you know what you need to provide and when (files, copy, etc.)
• clear answers to your questions about websites in general and your site specifically
• genuine interest in seeing your website help your business grow

Content Management Systems (CMS)

The short answer is you should definitely have content management in place.  There are going to be times when you need to make simple changes to the information on your site.  Don’t cross your fingers and hope the original developer is going to be available when you need to make changes right away.  They might be swamped.  With a good CMS, you’ll be able to change prices and dates, post announcements, upload photos, and even add or remove pages without needing to know a lick of HTML.

You also should be regularly adding new content to the site for SEO purposes (see below).  Constantly shelling out money to your web developer to add a paragraph to your site doesn’t make sense.  You’ll pay a little more for a CMS up front, but it will save you money in the long run.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Getting search traffic to your site is a very big topic.  One small part of that is optimizing your site to be as search engine friendly as possible.  SEO expert is a full-time job.  So while your website programmer doesn’t need to (and probably won’t) know everything there is to know about SEO, they must have a basic understanding of the principles.  A very basic touchstone is to ask if your potential developer uses table-based layouts.  If they blow off the question as unimportant or (worse!) don’t know what you’re talking about, tread carefully.  Also ask about search-engine friendly URLs.  There’s much, much more involved in SEO, but those two questions will at least help you identify the true amateurs. 

If search traffic is a big part of your strategy for your website, you’ll want to get an SEO specialist on your team.  (And, yes, we do know a guy.)

Other Factors

What else should you be thinking about?

• portfolio – Check examples of other sites this designer has created.  Do they match the level of quality you need?
• technical features – If you know your site has to have a shopping cart, online event registration, or some other feature make sure your programmer has the chops to pull it off
• testimonials – What are previous customers saying?

Another obvious but good tip is to check out the developer’s own site.  While there are exceptions, in most cases it will reflect some of their best work.  On that note, here’s a sneak peek at the new Silver Square home page that’s being developed right now:

What is the best time of day to tweet?
- automotive sales

When you post a message on Twitter will have a lot to do with how many people see it.  Post at midnight, and not many people are on their computers.  By the time they get on the next morning, your tweet has been buried by all the new messages that have been added since then.

Anecdotally, I find the best times to be first thing in the morning, around lunch, and right before the end of the day.  In the morning people are checking their email, RSS feeds, and social media before they get started for the day.  Lunch is a breaking point in the workday where people can stop what they are working on and check back in to see what’s happening on Twitter.  At the end of the day, there’s often few minutes to kill where it doesn’t make sense to start some new block of work that you won’t get very far into.  What’s great for killing a few minutes?  Twitter!

None of that is based on numbers, though.  ClarityWEB over in the UK did a little research on tweeting at different times of day.  The results show that globally the most traffic occurs around lunchtime in the U.S.  Based on that information you could decide that is when most people are on Twitter, and that’s when you should Tweet.  That’s not a bad approach.  I would point out, though, that some people may log in and read their Twitter account without posting a tweet themselves.  I don’t think that activity is figured into the data from ClarityWEB.

In short, there’s no authoritative answer, but I would recommend tweeting during the work day.  That’s when the largest number of people are on their computer or movile devices and can easily check Twitter.

If you’re curious, here’s a graphic showing when @SilverSquare is tweeting created with a tool by Xefer: