Monday, July 14, 2014

Does Facebook Drive Traffic To Your Website

This morning I have a very interesting case study.

A client that has not got enough time to fool around with Facebook. A Facebook Post.. even one poorly written, takes about a minute if you count it all up.


Lets compare site traffic to posting!



Their last posting  (that wasn't the general 4th of July posting that I put up for all of my clients"  marked their last real web traffic.  The web continued to get traffic from organic sources. But the real traffic, is clearly a cause and effect tied to Facebook.   

While Many of my clients have some "general" cause and effect between site traffic and social posting.. this client is one of the most starkly clear cause and effect case studies.

The clear answer is social drives traffic to your site.

I don't have time to fool around with Facebook.

A very interesting statement.

IF you did "fool around with FaceBook"  would you have time to service the new clients it would bring?


Have a great day everyone.




Jeff


Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Disruptive Digital Marketing 2014

Things are really happening here at 4th street web.

1. Our first internet property that is OUR property, not a client work, will be launching 2014.

2. We welcome to our group our first permanent developer. Tharindu has made a massive difference to the amount and quality of web marketing that we have been able to deliver. Welcome Tharindu.

3. New Platforms - in the ever changing web world, one must constantly evaluate and re-evaluate all of our technology decisions, and 4thstreet has made the decision to embrace WordPress, Specifically the Multi-site version, as the primary platform of choice. We will continue to develop with, Joomla, however their is now an overwhelming tool set for security and other functionality for WordPress.

4. Servers - the physical equipment part of our world is the ugliest part of our business. You will speak to NO digital marketer that actually loves their server provider. We had intended to move to the Amazon Cloud, or the new Google Hosting, however it appears that they are not attuned to the needs of midsize digital marketers. We also discovered that most of the providers for folks like us, are actually all owned by the same group, and housed in the same building - guaranteed mediocrity. We are moving, over the next 3 weeks to new ferociously powerful, and very secure isolated servers, where their specialty is in our tool set. We have had 4 failures of our servers in the last 6 months, including one in the middle of my vacation where I spent the entire vacation glued to my notebook... This is not an acceptable level of service for us, nor should it be for our clients. We look forward to our new launch.

5. Client Portals... we get so much email, spam, offers, client correspondence, order confirmations.... that important correspondence from our customers is getting lost. We are researching a new client portal that will give our clients a secure way of communicating with us, leaving us files, requesting updates, etc.

7. Project Management - along with the client portal, the unbelievable growth in demand for our digital marketing services has lead us to move into structured project management software. The project management software we chose will be fully integrated with the client portal, and we will be far better able to serve your needs.

2014 will be an amazing year for 4thStreetWeb and all of our clients. Thank you for your support.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Rosenfeld Realty Advisors: Tourism Hiring Flat, but Construction Growing

Orin has sure taken to blogging!   and it's helping!

Way to Go Orin!



Rosenfeld Realty Advisors: Tourism Hiring Flat, but Construction Growing: The Palm Beach Post has just written an, at best neutral, but frankly gloomy article about the recovery in Florida. In their article they...

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Rosenfeld Realty Advisors: Brazil and South Florida Commercial Real Estate

@Orin Rosenfeld is representing a new property that would make an amazing Brazilian Restaurant in Boca Raton.   Good Luck Orin, whoever it is that leases this restaurant in Boca Raton is going to do well!


Rosenfeld Realty Advisors: Brazil and South Florida Commercial Real Estate: Despite the Chill in relationships between Brazil and the White house over Email spying, Brazil continues to be a major contributor to the S...

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Do as I say! Not as I do.. local social Media

OH THE GUILT!!

An old friend in Canada posted on Facebook.. look at all the people trying to sell social media.. that aren't doing their own blogging, or facebooking or.....

Jacquie... you are so right.   And here I am telling people they need to blog and twit and FB .. and this is only post #2 for our newly rebranded website.

Yes, I use all the same excuses my clients do, not enough time, not sure what to say, blah blah blah blah.. but the truth is.. I haven't done it.  Simple discipline   We do the Social Media and Blogging for several companies that market to local business.. but like the cobbler's kids that have no shoes.. we don't do it for our self.

So this is my commitment.... even though we are not actively looking for new client's at the moment, I will start using 10 minutes a day at lunch time to run through my thoughts on localized internet based marketing.  What has worked, what hasn't worked.. what's coming up.

Not looking for new clients???  Of course.. existing clients, people close to us, referrals,  we will work with you, however at the moment we are very involved in a project that will simply redefine how any industry looks at local directories for their niche market.  We are very focussed on this project, and it will be a part of future blogs.  Interesting, we launched the new directory for only 1 city, and a search in that city... we came up not just on the first page of google.. but the first competitor was on page 3.. everything else was our work.  We are definitely redefining the value statement when it comes to niche market directories.. I can't wait to finish the pilots and begin sharing our results!

I look forward to this moment with you, my readers and clients.  Finally.. We are putting words to paper (pixels?), and speaking to the local business person.

I have to be very frank, local businesses.. you are being lied to, given false information, ravaged in fees and inundated in salespeople.  I'm going to do my best to shoot straight from the hip.

Thanks to all who follow me.

So many topics to choose from tomorrow's lunch.. is local SEO dead?  what did Google think they were doing when they moved all the Google Local submissions over to Google Plus?  Yelp...is advertising there a good idea?   Pay Per Click on Google - what's our and our client's experience?   Who'd have believed Facebook would be so productive?   Why are there so many bad local internet marketers banging on your door every day... worse... are the bad internet marketers, that are good salespeople!

So.. I will pick from the list, or . . . send me some feedback.. what would you like to hear about.  Tomorrow Lunch starts my discipline to write for at least 10 minutes on a blog a day.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

What Drycleaning taught me about SEO - A Series

Hello everyone!
This blog entry is about to become a series.. and it comes as an inspiration at an odd time.
I was driving my van (a massive van to fit a large family) and thinking to myself in one of my quiet moments, how hard it is for most people to understand this whole search thing... and it dawned on me.

Most of what I did in the traditional retail world in the 1980's when I opened a dry cleaning shop applies directly to the fundamental elements of search today.  The more I thought it through, the more obvious the local marketing parallels between traditional retail marketing and local Internet search become obvious.

Let's start with something as basic as signage!

Our shop was called Jorgen Anton Cleaners.  It was directly across the street from another cleaner.  In fairness to my former competitor, I will call his shop, Waldo's Cleaners.. It is very close to the truth.  We were on SW 18 St. in Boca Raton Florida in a fairly affluent area of town. The street we were on had a lot of traffic, commuter traffic, people heading to and from their homes and work.
Now.. My signage said Jorgen Anton Cleaners and was on the road.  Across the street, much to my delight, Waldo was limited by county ordinance in signage.  Like most business owners, his name was his brand.  His signage said WALDO'S.

Picture yourself driving home, and needing dry cleaning services.  Across the street from each other you see one sign that says CLEANERS and the other says WALDO'S.   Where do you think the cleaner is in the neighborhood?  I know it's a loaded question.  Obviously, the signage that says CLEANERS is more clear about the business than the sign that says WALDO'S.

Now, lets take this example from the 1980's to 2012 and the age of local Internet Marketing.
Businesses that have a web page, have what is called a domain name.  The domain name is the name people type into the browser to call up your site.  For us, its
www.4thstreetweb.com

The sign on the street for the dry cleaner is like a domain name.  The sign tells people driving by what you do.  Instead of traffic driving by, the Internet has clever little software programs that are called Spiders, because they travel the world wide web  (Spiders.. Web.. get the connection.. and you probably thought Internet search geeks weren't funny!).

These Internet search spiders have the tedious job of indexing the entire internet so that when you search for something, the search engine knows where it is.  The spiders run tirelessly indexing this great big Internet of ours.  Its goal is to make sure that if someone is looking for your business or service, your website shows up around the top of the search page.

You see, search providers like Google, and Yahoo and Bing, and all the others know that you have a choice.  They know if you don't see what you are looking for when you search, that you will probably go to another search engine and try again.  THEY HATE THAT!  So, they try to find whatever is the most "relevant" match for your search.  Keep that word in mind by the way.  Internet Search, especially Local Internet Search, is simply enough about "RELEVANCE"
So a spider on the Internet is like the traffic on 18th street.

If you want the traffic on 18th street to know that you have a dry cleaning shop, then CLEANERS is a better sign than WALDO'S.   The parallel is that if your domain name has something to do with the goods or services you offer, then it is better for search than a domain name that doesn't.

Take 4thstreetweb.com  We are in the web business.  We service local businesses, and want to focus on businesses in our area.  In St. Petersburg, Florida, we live just off of 4th Street.  4th Street is home to thousands of mostly locally owned business, within an 8 mile radius of our business.  Now we have someone in the area who has a VERY creative name.. a very artsy and savvy brand, and they use that for their domain name.  In fairness to our competitor, we will say they are "arstyfartsy . com"  Our domain name is very geo targeted to 4th Street, and specific to web.

If someone searches locally for "web developer on 4th Street" or they search from a location that is close to 4th Street (Google KNOWS where you are when you search) then 4thsteeteweb is pretty relevant to the search.. much more so than "artsyfartsy".

It comes down to relevance.  Your domain name does not have to be the name of your business.  It should be about you.  You can also have 2 domain names that point to the same place.  I have a client Maintech Pool Solutions.  By the way, if you need a pool guy, these guys are great.  They do our pool so we are clients of each others businesses.   That's the way local marketing should work.. but I digress. 

Their primary domain name is
http://www.stpetersburgpoolservice.com/

they have another domain name that is literally parked right on top of it called
http://www.maintechpoolsolutions.com/

They have one domain name that tells the spiders "Hey, I do Pool Service and I am in St. Petersburg"  When someone searches in St. Petersburg Florida for a Pool Service provider.. what do you think is more relevant?    StPetersburgPoolService?  MaintechPoolSolutions?  The answer is obvious.
Your domain name should be relevant to the services you provide, and if you can add in some geography.. so much the better.  It is just like the sign on the road, trying to catch the attention of the drivers looking for a drycleaners.