The goal of the month-long study is “to understand how many phone calls local businesses receive as a result of their Facebook Page.”

What facebook wants my client to do is replace the phone number on their Facebook fanpage with the special Facebook issued tracking number. Calls to the number will still be routed to my client’s business. Facebook claims they are just “monitoring usage”. According to their website, “Facebook will primarily log the number of phone calls made from the special number on your page. We will not record or listen to your calls.”

Unfortunately the study is only open to a small group of businesses who have been invited to participate. No information was given as to what the criteria were for selecting my client’s business.

You can learn more about Facebook’s Call Tracking Study on their website.

Would you route your business phone calls through facebook and let them monitor them? I guess it depends on how many calls you receive from your facebook page. Maybe you should conduct a research study to find out.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Facebook Offering Businesses $500 to Monitor Their Phone Calls

I knew companies were increasingly utilizing social media websites such as facebook and twitter to connect with customers. I had no idea that in some cases these social media sites were outperforming these companies corporate websites… and to such an extent. I suppose it depends on the product, brand or service. In Starbucks case for example, what would be a compelling reason to visit the Starbucks corporate website? Compare this with the company’s facebook page. 600 million users, many of them presumably Starbucks customers, are already on facebook’s site. If Starbucks wants to connect with those users, they need to be there too.

The article goes on to point out the benefits to businesses of each method of online marketing, social media and your own website.

Benefits of Social Media

1. Inherently interactive.
2. Where people are spending time.
3. Easy to acquire users / fans.
4. Virality.

Benefits of Your Own Website

1. Control the design.
2. Own the data.
3. Targeting and personalization.
4. Reach all your audience.

Does your company have a facebook fan page? If you would like one, check out my web design company, Power Play Marketing and our social media marketing packages.

Here is a link to the complete article on bnet.com, Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website?

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Social Media vs Your Website

The first thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to provide some value. It’s a give-and-take situation – you’re giving useful information and in turn you’re “taking” traffic and backlinks.

If you approach it from a purely selfish point of view, it’s not going to work as well, and chances are your Yahoo Answers account will get suspended sooner or later (probably sooner!)

That means that you’re not going to include a link to your website in every single answer you post. You might include a link to other sites in some answers, or no link at all in others. You want your account to grow naturally. In other words, if someone from Yahoo was to review your answers, you don’t want every single one of them pointing back to your own website.

The most effective way to use Yahoo Answers is to spend some time on it every day. Search for questions in your market and find some that you can answer. Ideally, find the newest ones so you can be the first, or close to the first person to respond. The higher you are in the list of responses, the more traffic you’re going to get.

And ultimately, you want to have as many of your answers as possible chosen as the “best answer” because it will be shown right underneath the question from that point on.

When you answer a question today, if it’s chosen as the best one, it could generate traffic to your site for years to come.

When you answer a question, there’s a spot where you can enter a link to a website that provides more information about it. That is where you can include a link to your own site in some of the answers – not in the answer itself.

One good way to approach this is when you find a relevant question that you don’t already cover on your site, write a new blog post or article explaining the answer in some detail. Then provide a shorter summary on Yahoo Answers with a link to your new article.

This kills two birds with one stone – coming up with ideas for new content on your site and answering questions on Yahoo.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Website Traffic Tips: Yahoo Answers

There are quite a few PPC sites, but the most widely used are Google Adwords and Yahoo/Bing adCenter. Facebook advertising is also growing quite fast so it’s another option to consider.

As a general rule, Adwords will be the most expensive place to run your ads, because they are the largest. That means there are more people competing for the ad space, driving up the costs. Yahoo/Bing is less expensive in most cases, but it will depend on the market you’re in to some degree.

Adwords also has some fairly strict policies, so you’ll need to be sure that you’re offering some real value to the people who click on your ads, and that your website meets all of Google terms of service.

One of the most important things about pay per click marketing is to be sure you’re targeting effective keywords in your ads. Generally, the more specific your keywords are, the better. And ultimately you want to find “buying” keywords – the ones that are used by people who are actively looking to buy something.

If you target your ads at general keywords for your market, it can generate a lot more traffic, but a lot of those people are just looking for information – they’re not necessarily going to convert into paying customers. While getting a lot of traffic sounds good in theory, it isn’t good if it just costs you a lot of money with no significant returns.

Another important factor for success with PPC marketing is good tracking. If you’re getting visitors from several sources, say articles that you’ve submitted, the search engines and Adwords, you need to know which of those visitors are generating revenue for you.

If the paid ads don’t generate enough to cover the cost, you’re losing money on them – even if the site is profitable overall. By tracking the different traffic sources through to the final conversions, you’ll know exactly where the money is being made.

There are a lot of horror stories about people losing a lot of money on PPC advertising. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you definitely need to make sure you understand how it works, what your risks are, and how to target the right people before you start spending any money.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Website Traffic Tips: Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

It should be mentioned that SEO is an element of search engine marketing, also known as SEM. SEM is an umbrella term for lots of specific techniques including:

• Article marketing
• Linkwheels
• Social bookmarking
• Video marketing

All of these methods (and a number of others) will help to improve your SEO results, and you should be using multiple techniques on your sites.

There are two aspects of marketing websites – onsite and offsite optimization.

Onsite factors include things like using your keywords in appropriate places such as the HTML title tag, the content itself and links to different articles or categories on your site. Basically, all the things that you can do to your own site to help the search engines understand what it’s about, and send visitors to it when they search for related things.

Offsite factors, on the other hand, are things like backlinks, length of visit and so on – the things that you don’t have direct control over.

For the best results, you need to focus on both aspects – on- and off-site.

There are a ton of onsite techniques that people use, with varying degrees of importance. Let’s just look at a couple of the most important ones.

First, the HTML title tag. You want to make sure you use the primary keyword for the page in your title tag, as well as add some related keywords – also known as LSI keywords.

But don’t just stuff it with keywords. Make it clear what the reader will get when they visit the page. Most of the search engines use the page’s title tag as the headline in their search results, so you want it to grab people’s attention and get them to click on it.

The second important onsite SEO factor is using your keywords in your content. This can be a double-edged sword, mind you. If you overuse your keywords on the page (also known as keyword stuffing) it can make it harder to read, and may even affect your ranking negatively.

Instead, sprinkle your main keyword and some different variations of it throughout your content. And make sure you use some related keywords as well, so the search engines can “understand” what the page is really about.

As for offsite optimization, the biggest factor here is backlinks. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, from a range of different websites – and the more authority those sites have themselves – the higher your site is going to rank in the search engines.

If you set your pages up right in the first place, your onsite SEO really doesn’t need much maintenance. So you’ll want to spend the bulk of your time working on the offsite SEO. Put in some time and effort, and it will pay off in the long term.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Generate Free Website Traffic With SEO

Don’t forget the traditional methods of advertising your website. Businesses for years have used traditional methods to get the word out to the consumer public. These are methods like flyers, business cards, bumper stickers, and window decals. All should have the URL to your website prominently displayed.

Use social networking sites to get the word out to a select group. The social network craze of late is popular because it is not only free but it allows you to find those with interest in what you have to offer and within your own geographical area. They are great for focusing on your target market.

Give away a free software tool. You may have a talent for creating customized software or you may be able to contract a freelance programmer to help you with this. However, there are many creative ideas you can come up with for offering a free software download that could help a patron to your website do his job easier. People like free items and this is a powerful promotion tool.

Offer a free ebook for download. This is also a popular promotion item because it is informative and free. Write an ebook to give helpful information to your site patrons and they will naturally want to see what else you have to offer.

Keep everyone current on your blog. Keeping your blog current builds credibility for your site. You should also respond to reader posts if you allow them because it shows you are actively engaged in your business.

Create a free newsletter. This is a great way to keep everyone informed about the latest offerings and promotions on your website. Give visitors the opportunity to subscribe to it and then send it periodically to their email address. Free newsletters are also good for getting repeat traffic to your site.

Perform effective SEO on your website. By doing this, you will make your website prominent in the search engines. The goal is to appear in the first one or two pages of search results when using your target keywords in a query. Keep in mind that effective SEO takes time and anyone promising quick results may be using unethical methods.

Pay for SEO results. The major search engines get numerous requests each day to index websites. On top of this, there are those who run automatic submission software to quickly make batches of requests. The search engines try to discourage this simply because they cannot handle the volume. If you want to get indexed fast, check out some of the paid submission directories. While it might be expensive, it could later pay off.

Create your website content in a helpful multi-part series. This motivates your visitors to come back for subsequent visits. Also, make sure the content is current.

Make your website pleasant and easy-to-use. Make sure it loads fast and has intuitive navigation. This is not only good from your visitors’ perspective but it creates less work for a search engine indexing crawler thus increasing the chances of ranking faster in search engines.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

10 Tips for Effective Website Promotion

These days, Fcebook advertising provides a way to reach your target market more effectively.  But what is Facebook advertising and how does it work?

A Way to Connect with Customers

As one of the fastest social networking sites today, Facebook is capable of connecting millions of customers and businesses around the world.  Facebook advertising allows companies to directly target those consumers who may be interested in their products.

Facebook provides an “Advertising” link where you can learn about strategies to reach specific customers and maximize your returns.  You will learn how to make ads that are effective.

Creating a Facebook fan page will help build a strong relationship with target customers.  A fan page humanizes you and your business.  Social marketing is now being used to reach out to more and more consumers and implement your marketing plan more effectively.  Best of all, social marketing is a way of presenting your business as a friend and not as a faceless company.

Marketing Strategies on Facebook

Advertising on Facebook involves creating a fan page.  You need to think of something that will catch the interest of your customers.  People usually seek information, so you should post links and useful articles on your wall.  Present yourself as an expert on topics related to your business.  By offering useful and interesting information, prospective customers will be encouraged to check out your business on a regular basis.

One big reason why Facebook advertising through a fan page is effective is that you get the chance to interact with customers and provide information about your business. You can personalize your message with photos and images.  A fan page will also help you attract new prospects.

Facebook advertising is a personal relationship.  Thus, you should make sure to fill in your profile information completely so that customers will feel that they really know you.  And when customers leave comments or ask questions, make sure you respond quickly.

Monitor the effectiveness of your marketing ideas and try to improve your marketing efforts.  Connecting your fan page with a social media page is a good start.  A thorough understanding of what Facebook advertising is and how you can use it to make your business grow is essential in social media marketing.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

What is Facebook Advertising?

Supporting the release of the iPhone 4, AT&T Mobility claimed the top spot spending just over $8 million on search ads. Remember, that’s just for one month.

Here are the top 10 spenders in June 2010:

• AT&T Mobility – $8.08 million
• Apollo Group (University of Phoenix) – $6.67 million
• Expedia – $5.95 million
• Amazon – $5.85 million
• eBay – $4.25 million
• BP – $3.59 million
• Hotels.com – $3.30 million
• JC Penney – $2.46 million — we’ll admit, this one surprises us
• Living Social – $2.29 million
• ADT Security – $2.19 million

How much did you spend each month on Google AdWords?

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Big Brands Spending Millions Per Month on Google AdWords

As many of you know, I am the Webmaster for Coach K’s Official website, CoachK.com. I thought I would share what’s been going on with his site during Duke’s Championship run.

As the tournament progressed and Duke advanced, the site traffic grew higher and higher.  The site traffic reached a peak of over 9,000 visits on the night of the championship game. On several occasions during the final four and championship weekend, the amount of traffic actually brought down the site.

CoachK.com is a WordPresss site currently hosted on a shared plan with Host Gator.  I’ve never really experienced  one of my sites going down due to the amount of traffic it was receiving. In each case, I worked with the Host Gator admins to get the site back online. In addition to their help in getting my site back online, I also received an education in caching plugins for WordPress.

Host Gator’s tech support was responsive, professional, and very helpful. I highly recommend them as a hosting provider.

This is a great example of the value a good hosting company can provide. Where is the value in cheap or free hosting when your site has a problem and you can’t get any support? On top of their great support, Host Gator is also very inexpensive and reliable.

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

Duke’s Championship and CoachK.com

The $97 info product is by Ryan Deiss and is available at GmailMindTricks.com (not an affiliate link) if you’re interested.

If you’d like to know how to make your ads appear in Gmail without spending $97, check out this YouTube video posted by Austin Lau, an Agency Media Planner at Google.

I watched the GmailMindTricks intro video but have not purchased the product. Ryan is a reputable internet marketer. Presumably the $97 product includes more than what is on the above YouTube video.

In either case, I thought the info contained in the YouTube video was worth sharing.

Have you had your ads appear in Gmail before? What has been your experience compare to “regular” AdWords?

This post is from Jeff Klein. Read more at his web design and internet marketing blog.

How to Target Gmail with Google AdWords