Custom website for Allison Pest Control

We’ve just launched a brand new website for the nice people at Allison Pest Control in Farmingdale, New Jersey. The site took over 130 hours to complete and I believe it is one of our best so far.

The site contains 33 custom created pages chock full of interesting well-written content about New Jersey pests. The website contains a variety of navigation styles as well as an integrated site search feature that make finding any topic easy on the site.

Using the greens and logo from the client’s trucks, we created a custom look that pleased the client and looked crisp and clean. The site is built as an authority website and is geared up to place well organically on local search terms.

With additional service areas created in the new site, both commercial and residential clients will find topics of interest and service information. Adding numerous client testimonials in both the home and business areas helps readers and prospects to better understand the type of services the client, who has been in business since 1917, offers.

The client has already started to get outstanding feedback and is already planning on adding a blog to the website in the next several weeks. We invite you to check out this new website and see what you think at www.AllisonPest.com.

First it is simple to set up and add to a Twitter List. Here’s how:

1. Go to your follower page on Twitter. To the right you will see a few icons, one looks like a list. Right click on the icon and a menu drops down. From here you can create a list or simply tick next to an existing list to add that follower to a specific list. You will have the option to make the list private or public. Private is for your use only. Public allows others to actually subscribe to your special list and follow who you are following on your “short list”.

2. Set up list to group your followers. Some of my lists are clients, team members, SEO stars (people in my industry who are interesting to follow), and Interesting people. Those are just my lists, the ways you sort your own Twitter followers is totally up to you.

3. Then work your follower list and sort your followers by list. I have over 900 followers and it took me about 15 minutes to sort them. Not everyone is on a list. People who I really liked to read I have now been able to reconnect with as their tweets had been hidden in the “pile”.

4. Now this is the best part as far as I am concerned. Now add your lists to HootSuite with one click. Just select to add a new column in HootSuite and select the list you want to have appear in the column.

What Twitter lists do for me is to allow me to really watch people who I want to watch by pulling their Tweets into a separate section both on Twitter and on other applications like HootSuite.

Some of you who are reading this post may say “that’s why I use TweetDeck!”, but if you are like me and manage many Twitter accounts for clients TweetDeck simply doesn’t cut it. You can only see one profile at a time try to manage five or six full Twitter accounts with all the columns needed and you will see TweetDeck is just too restrictive. This is why for me HootSuite is best. I can set up a separate HootSuite account for each client and view all information when I want to and now can follow lists of top followers for each client.

If you are just managing your own Twitter account, TweetDeck is fine and in fact Twitter Lists are really a “knock off” of the features that have made TweetDeck so popular and the reason why many people have flocked to TweetDeck. With Twitter embracing lists other applications like HootSuite are now able to show this functionality that make sense of all the tweets you get when you are active on Twitter.

There are several reasons why every business owner should make sure that this is one of the pages they include in their website.

1. If you advertise on any Pay Per Click platform, the spiders which measure quality score will be reviewing your website looking for this file.
2. If you link out to any websites from your website, you need to cover yourself legally and make sure that visitors know you cannot control what those other sites do from installing malware, to showing photos you may not approve of, or sharing comments or points of view you don’t share.
3. In our litigious society, it is unfortunate that you have to also cover your proverbial “butt” by having that hated legalese language that makes you “law suit resistant”.
4. Additionally it also helps your readers to know what you do with their email addresses and information. Do you share the information to third parties, do you sell their email to spammers? It is by far better to be transparent in regards to what you do to build confidence and a relationship built on trust with your readers.

So, if you don’t have a privacy policy, here is mine as an example for you to review. You may want to consider creating one that is similar to help keep your business “covered”.

Here are my tips in a nutshell:

Businesses That Really Should be using Twitter

1. Those with a national presence
2. Those that need to monitor their name and customer service comments and ratings
3. Those that are in business to business sales

Businesses That Don’t Need Twitter or May Not Benefit from Twitter

1. Businesses that really only sell to local markets and not nationally
2. Businesses that sell mainly to consumers
3. Business that reach out to clients using Facebook or blogging

I have found that Twitter interaction is really globally based. If you are really working a local market you may find that your followers are so scattered around the globe that they would never even be able to buy or use your local products. For a business such as this, a Facebook Fan page and blog would be better places to invest money then Twitter ghosting services.

That doesn’t mean that if you want to try Twitter you shouldn’t but I would strongly consider your business base and who you are selling to before you invest in services for Twitter setup and Twitter ghosting such as we offer.

Remember however that some of the lower numbers are due to the shorter month, but just the same there were losses across the board. I wish I had more answers as to why. Personally I just think that the shoppers weren’t buying in February.

Another trend I started to see this month is a drop in cost per click on many accounts. The bid that used to buy position 3 to 5 is now buying 1 or 2 which means it’s time to pull back your CPC.

So between low conversions and a drop in CPC, it tells me that some advertisers have moved out of the marketplace in Google AdWords. That means for the people who stay the course that there will be less competition for clicks and very possibly increased conversions in March.

What do you think? What have you seen on your AdWords account, any similar trends?

#FF @mccordweb, @czworldwide, @bedbugexpert

What exactly is this and why is it done? The above line on Twitter would be calling other users attention to Twitter profiles that you think are noteworthy. The #FF means the tweet has been tagged as a Follow Friday tweet and appears in Twitter searches under Follow Friday search index.

Follow Friday has been something that has been around since Twitter started. It means, if your name appears in someone’s list, that they like your tweets and think you have something to say of value. Sometimes you will see people do a tweet like this on other days but typically in “Twitter Culture” these kind of posts are done on Fridays.

It is a fine complement to be included in another Twitter users Follow Friday list. When I get mentioned I always send a direct message back to the person who has recommended me with a thank you. Not only is it a complement, but you can pick up new followers from the network of the person who mentioned you as many users will click in to check out who was recommended and consider following them as well. Personally I do this as well as a way to find out who the people I really watch like and follow themselves.

So this Friday, why don’t you list a few tweeters you like and use the #FF syntax. If you want to mention me, my Twitter ID is mccordweb. I would be most grateful if you would. See you on Twitter!

It bear repeating, but we do not work or provide any of our services for these business sectors:

Adult Content

Any site that has adult themes such as dating sites, soft core pornography, images of partially clothed women that are used to sell your products, lingerie, any sexual aids or products, we just do not provide services for regardless of whether it is blogging or even Google AdWords.

Stock Brokers, Day Traders, Forex Traders and Their Management Software

In this case we have simply found that the nature of your business is so complicated that the time it takes us to learn and be effective for you is just not cost effective for us. In many cases you are additionally governed by regulations making even blog writing a difficult operation.

E-Books and Products Sold by Squeeze Pages in Multi-Level Marketing Programs

We typically do not supply services for products that are e-books or online how to guides. Although you can still be successful with these approaches, we simply do not have a passion for working with products that are typically sold using these vehicles. This would cover e-books on how to make money in real estate, sell or trade stocks or use the forex, or how to sell multi-level marketing products.

No one likes to hear no, but it is by far better for you to find a supplier that has a true passion for what you do and what you sell. We can help many businesses, but just not all.

The Secret to Getting Google Maps Placement

I am starting to see a few trends in Google Maps that can be leveraged for placement and wanted to share them with you. It is important to note that I am not seeing this specific trend appear across all market sectors for all of the searches that I have done, but have seen them in many cases. I consider the information noteworthy.

First, it is important to note that not all businesses will really consider a great position in Google Maps valuable. However, if you sell services and products in a location specific area, Google Maps placement can be crucial to your business’ success. Some types of businesses that will generally want or need excellent Google Maps placement are restaurants, dentists, pest control firms, lawyers, plumbers, roofers, and local brick and mortar stores. Read more…

Getting Service Reviews for Google Maps

If Google Maps placement is valuable to your business it is time to get busy soliciting customer reviews. Google appears to be pulling reviews from these sites and several others: FlipKey.com (for real estate services), CitySearch.com (for restaurants and services), Maps.Google.com, Insiderpages.com (for restaurants and services), Judysbook.com, Tripadvisor.com, Superpages.com, Menuism.com (for restaurants), and others.

Google used to show reviews from Yelp.com, but after their deal to buy Yelp.com fell through Google does not appear to be showing reviews from Yelp. In fact, Yelp didn’t come up in a single review I saw as I did my research.

Reviews that you capture yourself by email or direct solicitation and post on your website are not considered by Google. The reviews must be on a third party website or on your Google Maps page itself. Read more…

We decided to buy a Playstation 3 over the XBox 360 mainly due to the free online game access and the integrated Blue-Ray disk player that the Playstation has. My older son who is 20 is an accomplished gamer on all the systems, Wii, XBox, and Playstation and he said that the free online access was for him also the big reason he likes the Playstation as well and recommended it to us.

My husband and I originally started out to buy a Wii, but when we saw the graphics of the Wii compared to the Playstation and XBox there was simply no comparison. The Wii uses about 460 dpi and the Playstation and XBox about 1260. That’s a big difference in visual graphics!

The clincher for us was when we saw the Gods of War demo and the graphics were so life like it knocked our socks off. So stay tuned in the weeks and months to come as I play these new games and then pass on my candid, unvarnished, unpaid, for parent reviews.

Currently we are using Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and www.GoArticles.com for several clients and post copies of their best topical blog posts there as well as on their blog. I was worried initially that this would not be a workable link-building strategy but have now been proved wrong with over three months of statistical data accumulated showing a positive trend in link building and documented referral traffic.

Here’s what we do. We select the top blog posts and then select two a week to post to Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and GoArticles.com. Since doing this for the last three months we have seen a slow but steady increase in links that Google is recording in the Webmaster Control panel. Additionally we have been able to see consistent referrals coming in from these three sites.

That is excellent news for building organic placement as link building with articles has always been an excellent approach but has been hampered with Google’s new link evaluation. The bottom line is that not all article sites will be good choices to focus on, but consider the top three that we have selected for your link building strategy as well.

First, you can access our feed by clicking the orange icon in your browser’s tool far near the “Home” button. When you click the feed, you will see that we have several RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Select one from the drop down and click. A new page will open which shows the address of our RSS news feed and also the content of the news feed. Depending on your RSS news feed reader you will add the address into it directly. Just grab the address from the address bar.

If you use IE 8, when you click the RSS news feed link, you can click subscribe right on the page and then access our news feed without even coming to our blog site. You access your subscribed feeds from a place near the IE 8 browser favorites bar.

If you want to start using RSS feeds but don’t know a good RSS news feed reader, I would recommend www.My.MSN.com. I used to love www.My.Live.com but it has been retired. To add our feed to www.My.MSN.com, you will need to set up an account (it is free) and then click “add content” near the top of your new account page. Then pasted in  my RSS feed address in the box subscribe to feed.

I read about 40 news feeds daily using www.My.MSN.com and am able to read the first paragraph or so from within the reader and can click in to read the full article if I want. Using a news feed reader I can scan volumes of content from sites that I monitor and then read only what I want very quickly. RSS news feed readers allow you to review a lot of content in a very short period of time.

I do a monthly e-newsletter and try to keep what I blog about separate from my newsletter so that there is real value to someone subscribing to it. I do not want the two vehicles to be the same. I use my e-newsletter sometimes to flesh out a point or topic in more detail than I do in a blog post.

Yes, it does take time and effort to create a newsletter but with now over 1,200 subscribers it is a wonderful vehicle to keep in touch with past clients, current clients, and prospects. One of my clients, who was a top long term care insurance client, told me that you need to keep your name in front of a client at a minimum of four times a year to continue to build business with them.

Additionally, it is typically less costly to work your existing client base to increase your sales than to bring in a new clients. I feel that it is important to have a mix of both approaches; always reaching out to new clients and making sure that older and existing clients know what you have to offer and of any new services you add.

I tell customers who do an e-newsletter to make sure you offer value. There is no faster way to be blocked from inboxes if all you do is talk about yourself. If you offer value in regards to tips, information that your audience really wants to know, and soft sell your services in a winning way you will grow your subscriber base.

Even if you don’t have an e-newsletter right now, I strongly recommend that you update your privacy policy on your website to cover that you will keep email addresses if a prospect contacts you and you will use it for your own marketing. I also recommend capturing email addresses of current and new customers. This way if at a point in the future you want to do an e-newsletter you are building your own list. The days of being able to buy an email address list and being able to use that to springboard your own e-newsletter are long gone.

1. First, always make sure you are reviewing your junk mail folder as typically bounces and non-deliveries of emails will be sent here. If you don’t routinely check this file, you will never know if your email has been bounced back to you.

2. If you do find that your emails are regularly (more than several times) is being bounced back with a blocked mail message from Earthlink, then you need to take action. For me the first thing I did was to correspond with those clients using a different email account like my Gmail or MSN account until the problem was resolved. I then replied to one of the blocked email messages and Earthlink sent me instructions on how to resolve the problem.

3. I have to get the IP address of my mail server from my web host. Sometimes you can find this IP address in your domain records under the MX listing. If you don’t see it there, ask your web host.

4. Then using the syntax Earthlink wants in the subject line, send an email to Earthlink asking them to whitelist your IP address.

I found that they had not blocked my IP address as they confirmed that it was not on their blocked list and told me that it was most likely an intermittent problem.

It is a pain to have to go through this hassle, but if it had been blocked, this would have effectively resolved the problem or advised me of a bigger issue that needed more attention like my web host being a spammer haven with a whole block of IP addresses blocked. If you find that this would be the case, it would be a good reason to change web hosts immediately.

1. Make sure you link to your new blog from your main website. I like it best when you incorporate links to your blog in your main website navigation. If you can’t do that, create a button to go to your blog and position it prominently on every page or incorporate a link to your blog in your website footer.

2. Make sure you link your blog to your website. This is usually done in WordPress by creating a Blogroll. Typically I will include links to the main website, the contact page, and other important pages in the main website in the Blogroll. I do not typically link to outside sites in the WordPress blog roll. Additionally I like to position the Blogroll near the top of the column where it resides. Remember this is the navigation to your main website and you want to feed visitors there.

3. Make sure to enable your Blogroll and archive links on all pages of your blog. Don’t defeat this important navigation by installing this important feature on just the home page. All separate blog pages, archive, and tag pages should include these navigation elements.

4. Add items to your sidebars to make it easy for users to find what they need on your blog. Make sure to enable important features on all your blog pages such as archives, recent posts, recent comments, calendar of posts, and tagcloud. You can check out my own left and right blog sidebars to see what I personally consider important and where these items should be placed.

5. Use plug-ins to make your blog effective and easy to maintain. I always use the SEO All in One Pack plug-in. Additionally some of my favorites are: the Google sitemap creator, WordPress database backup, and Feedburner implementation. Additionally don’t forget to install Google Analytics or your web tracking script in your blog template.

If you follow my checklist above, and review all new plug-in configuration options you will be ready to go. Got a question, just click comments below and let me know and I’ll try to respond to each one.

1. Typically a blogger who is making a real living is not writing and making money from their own blog. They are making money being employed by a blogging firm that has a client base and they are providing contract writing services as a “for hire” service.

2. The best professional blogger is someone who knows how to budget their time and does not excessively word smith a post. It is impossible to make money blogging if each blog post you write for a client takes one to two hours and you are paid $10 to $15 for the post. If you have a natural writing style, innate grammar skills, and an interesting point of view you may be able to start out as a Junior Level blogger. The key to making money blogging is being able to write the volume needed on a consistent basis in under 20 to thirty minutes a post and then with a volume of five to ten posts a day.

3. Real money is paid to quality bloggers. One of our top bloggers makes from $2,200 to $3,000 a month just blogging. But not every blogger can start out at this level, and for that matter not every established blogger can perform at the level required to make this kind of money day in and day out. But, the best blog writers not only can make great money but can love the flexibility that the job provides. One of our bloggers only writes in the middle of the night. Another only writes on the weekend.