Unfortunately most email applications, either web-based or locally installed, will not allow you to take the video’s code and embed your video right into your email message. Instead you could opt for a screenshot or frame capture of part of your movie and embed the static image into your email message. This is better than no image at all but wouldn’t it be better if you could simulate the video and engage the reader with a better chance of them clicking through to your video?

Yes, But How Do I Simulate a Video Embedded in My Email?

While flv or other web-based video file formats cannot be embedded in emails, more standardized imagery can, such as gifs and jpgs. The wonderful element of gif images is that they can be saved as animated gifs. There are many pieces of software that will allow you to create an animated gif file some paid and some for free. A simple Google search will yield many results. I’ll leave it to you to sift through and find a solution that is right for you needs. With your new animated gif capable software installed, you will need to play your video and take a screen shot/frame capture at various intervals throughout your video playback. I would suggest no more than 10. Now take your frame captures, crop them to size and add them to a time line in your gif software. (Note, for added effect, I suggest leaving the video player frame around your screen shots/frame captures so that the email reader can see that the animation is indeed a video and not some random image sequence thrown in there. Playback of your animated gif will show a somewhat jumpy sequence of your video clip, that tells the story of your video while capturing the attention of the viewer.

Now that you video is in an abbreviated format and exported as an animated gif, you can freely place the file into your email newsletter just like you would a static image. Now once in place you can set your image to link to the live version of your video on youtube or wherever you placed it, when the user clicks the image (animated gif).

Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments!

Why Can’t Search Engines See My Photo-Filled Site?

The main factors search engines use for determining search rankings, is to read site text and coding to learn what the site is about. Since the search engine spiders/crawlers (or whatever you want to call them) aren’t human, they cant see a picture of a house, for example, and record that the site is about houses. It will see the picture and likely move on.

If you have text converted to images so you can use a special font or another reason, this is a big SEO no no. You should make the change right away to use a more generic font, and replace the image text with real text. The sacrifice of the fancy font will be more than outweighed by the increased SEO visibility. Think of it this way, what is the point in using a stylish font style on your site if nobody can find it?

I Still Want Images on My Site, What Are My Options?

Images aren’t completely invisible to search engines, there are certain “tags” that can be coded and associated with your images so that you can tell search engines what the images are. The Google Images search feature uses these for example. Although, this alone is not enough in itself to maximize your visibility.

Follow these steps to bring your image loaded site into SEO compliance:

1. Remove any text imagery and replace it with properly coded html text
2. Reduce the amount of images on your site or at least reduce their size
3. Add html text to page in the areas where the images have been reduced or removed that talk about the image or content relevant to your site
4. Use appropriate tags (see below) to code your image placement so that search engines can read them. Remember to use descriptive keywords and phrases relative to your company

Which Image Tags Are Important For SEO?

Alt tag: This tag appears when your mouse rolls over an image. It also replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken

Title tag: This tag text replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken. Although similar in nature to the “Alt tag” both of these tags should be used. When this is the case, the Title tag will override the Alt tag for a broken image. The good thing is that search engines pay attention to both the Title and Alt tags.

File name: Avoid using a generic file name like image1.jpg, instead, for SEO advantages, name your file with a keyword or phrase related to your field.

Now you know what to do to have a “pretty” site while keeping it relatively optimized for search engine visibility. Go for it and start making some changes. Let me know if I can help in any way!

Is a Mobile Ad Right to Reach Your Audience?

Before you start going down this route though, it is important to determine if a mobile app is right for your audience. The way we did this was to take a look at our website analytics. If you use Google this process is simple. Log in to your account, on your analytics dashboard view click “Visitors”, then “Mobile”, “Mobile Devises”. You’ll then be provided with a screen that shows visitors to your site from various mobile devices. Locate “iPhone”, iPod” and “iPad” rows and look at the number of visitors. At this point you will be able to see how many potential customers/clients could possibly see your ad via their phone. Obviously the user will have to have the specific app to see your ad, not just have the device. The visitor number will just give you an idea of the number of your customers who have the device. It’s up to you as to how many visitors will warrant your investment into an ad program for the iPhone. It is advisable to look at the percentage of total visits on the mobile devices rather than actual numbers. Because every industry is different, some websites convert higher than others, so for these sites, a lower volume of visitors would be perfectly acceptable for an iPhone ad program.

Here’s the process we used to get an ad up and running on a couple of relative apps:

1. Research – Find an app relative to your industry, one that you think your prospective customers or clients may use. They must have and existing ad platform in place for their ads (check to see if they have any ads on their app)
2. Contact the app creator and ask them about their ad program. Find out how they track impressions and clicks and any other metrics you would like to know. Note that unlike websites, where impressions are the number of times your ad is displayed, your app ad provider may not be able to get as specific as that. In those occasions they will likely be able tot ell you how may times the app is accessed per day. To calculate the effective impressions, you will need to take the number of opens and divide it by the number of advertisers that rotate in your placement. This will obviously not give you an exact number since if someone spends a lot of time on the app, they may be subjected to your ad in more than once depending on number of advertisers. That said, the number of app opens will give you a good idea of your exposure.
3. Negotiate a price – You can base this on your knowledge of web banner advertising. Just remember that apps are generally not accessed as much as popular website, so you will have less exposure but can be more focused on a specific niche, depending on your industry and app that you are advertising on.
4. Create the ad – Ad mentioned earlier, the ad formats appear to be fairly limited to a static image. These generally have pixel dimensions of 320 x 50 as a common size, but may vary from app to app. You might want to talk to your app vendor and see if you can supply two versions so that you can do some split testing and determine which type of ad content is more favorable for your app viewers. For example, one add might promote “free shipping” another might promote that you are a “green/environmentally friendly” company
5. Create tracking urls – I use Google’s UTM service as documented in a previous post, then you can monitor your traffic specifically from your app advertising campaign.
6. Submit your ad creative and tracking url and you are ready to go!

Google provides a service where you can create a custom trackable URL using its “URL Builder“. The builder allows you to enter your destination URL as well as campaign information for your link. Once all the information is added, you can click “Generate URL” and you will be provided with a trackable URL. Use this URL for your banner ad or email link. Change the information in the url builder each time, to create a separate URL for each link location. Now every time that URL is clicked you will know exactly where it came from.

The following fields may be defined when composing your URL, not all are necessary (* are required fields):

Campaign Source: *     (the website or newsletter where your ad will be placed )
Campaign Medium: *     (what type of ad will you be placing? banner ad, text link, etc)
Campaign Term:     (identify any paid keywords that will cause the ad to display)
Campaign Content:     (use to differentiate ads, e.g. “free shipping” or “buy one get one free”)
Campaign Name*:     (product, promo code, or slogan)

Unless you want to be very granular in your tracking abilities, only the * fields need to be used. Note that the more information you provide here (fields you complete), the longer the generated URL will be.

I Want to Use This in Twitter, But the Long URL Wont Fit in My 140 Character Limit Twitter Post. Can I Still Use UTMs?

As well as Twitter, there are other times when the long URL cannot be used, all is not lost! UTMs can be entered into a URL shortener like bit.ly to have the URL size reduced. The UTM will still record the clicks and traffic from the URL since the shortener service is redirecting the URL to the trackable URL NOT directly to your site. Now you can use Google’s UTM feature for tracking specific Twitter posts. In the past you would only have been able to record the number of clicks for Twitter in general. Now you can see which links were clicked the most, and more importantly , which clicks generated the most conversions.

What Does UTM Mean?

The term UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is the format/coding that Google uses to track your unique urls.

Useful Links

How do I tag my links?

Understanding campaign variables

The UTM URL builder

What is Contextual Targeting Then?

Contextual Targeting works in a similar way except there is not ramp up time needed to gather user data, instead contextual targeting displays ads to users based on the context of the page that they are reading. For example say you wanted to market to ATV consumers online. You will generally gather a lot of user information and can market quite successfully on ATV focused websites. Instead of targeting those sites though, what if you could position your ad in front of a web user reading an ATV-related article on a news website, or a generalized outdoors website that you normally wouldn’t advertise on since its not focused on your industry?

Combine Them

Regular online targeted marketing and contextual targeting can generally be used independently. However by combining standard web targeting with contextual targeting you would have the ultimate targeted marketing solution. Not only would you benefit from web user gathered information, but you would also have the opportunity of reaching the “new” users in your segment. Those users that haven’t been surfing, subscribing and purchasing products online in your industry for very long. Since these users are just learning the industry, they generally will need to spend money on getting into a new hobby or sport, thereby increasing the value of your ad spend further. Yes, you will get some overlap in the audience that you reach, for example, obviously users whom you have data on already, will be highly likely to read an article or access content online related to your industry but on non industry sites, like a news page. In those circumstances you are strengthening your brand to them by repeatedly display ads to these people. They are more likely to remember you or even be reminded that they need to make a purchase from a company like yours.

Have a question about contextual marketing? Send me a note… or leave a response below.

There are two key aspects of spam prevention to look at when considering email as a tool for marketing your products and services:

1. Server-side settings – These are configurations and options that need to be setup on the server where your email marketing messages will begin their journey. Your hosting provider should generally set these.
2. Email content – Your email content should be something your recipients want to read. They should also follow the requirements set by the CAN-SPAM act.

Below is a checklist of items to be implemented when composing an email for marketing purposes. By applying these, we believe that the likelihood of your email entering the SPAM folder will be greatly reduced.

Server-side Settings

1. Set up Domain Keys: Domain keys are an email authentication system designed to verify the DNS of a domain an email sender to validate integrity.
2. SPF Records: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is fairly new method for fighting spam. An SPF record is placed within the domain DNS (Domain Name Server) settings and specifies a list of authorized hostnames and IP address that can mail from the server for the specified domain name.
3. Reverse DNS, sometimes referred to as PTR record check: This is particularly important when your domain resides on a shared server (i.e., the space is shared with other domains). The reverse DNS setting specifies the domain associated with your IP address. Some email servers perform a reverse look up to see if the domain/IP address that the domain is registered to matches the domain/IP address that the email originated from, and blocks any mismatches.
4. Secure Server: The server where your email client resides should be secure, open relay and proxy servers are highly susceptible to abuse. With an unsecured server, spammers can easily hijack your account and use your resources for spamming.
5. Segregate your email streams: If possible, it would be advisable to split up large email sends to multiple lists with multiple IP addresses assigned to them. In this instance, if one IP address or email list becomes blocked or spammed out for whatever reason, it will not have an effect on your other lists/IP addresses. Obviously your goal for ensuring good email content and best practices should remain.

Email Content

1. Adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act: First and foremost, if you follow these best practice guidelines, all of the following points will also be adhered.
   See the Official Compliance Guide for Business here: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm
2. Use Opt-in subscriptions: Only send emails to recipients who have subscribed (opted-in) to your service.
3. Regularly manage your email list: Spammers are notorious for sending mass emails and do not care about bounces etc, they just want to send in large quantities with the hope that some get delivered. Bounced email addresses and bad email addresses, not only degrade the performance of your emails, but also if you consistently try to send to these invalid and bounced email addresses, your are effectively telling their ISP that you are spamming as there’s no one managing the list. Make sure you remove bad emails right away to maintain a high quality email list.
4. Content relevancy: Your email subscribers have enlisted your email service to receive valuable content from you that should be relative to the sign up message. Make sure that you keep that message in line with your promise when they signed up. If you start sending unrelated or even less related information in your emails, you’re likely to get marked as spam.
5. Header information: Make sure that you send from a consistent email address and associated name. If you switch those settings around, your recipients will not recognize the header information and may be less likely to read your message eventually marking as spam.
6. Unsubscribes: If an email user unsubscribes to your email service, be sure to remove them right away. Most email software on the market today will unsubscribe the email addresses automatically when users unsubscribe using the relevant form, which is great, but do not neglect those that simply reply to your email asking to be removed. Make sure that you include an unsubscribe link in all of your email messages so that users can safely be removed if they want to cease receiving your emails. Otherwise they will be inclined to mark you as spam and therefore hamper your relationship with ISPs.
7. Physical address: Although emails are “virtual addresses”, be sure to include your physical address also. This will help with the validity of your message in the eyes of your recipients and also help tie in with your company recognition, that is, you are a real company.
8. Common SPAM terms: Every ISP has their own unique rules for marking a message as spam or not. These rules usually encompass the use of certain words or phrases in both the subject line and body content. The following is a list of known terms to avoid that will help you reach the inbox; Information you requested; Important information regarding; Guarantee, Guaranteed; Special Promotion; Great offer/Deal; Visit our website; Opportunity; 50% Off; Click Here; Call Now; Subscribe; Bonus; Free; All New; One time; Order Now; Amazing; Discount; Save up to; One time; Winner; Prizes.
9. URL links: Excessive use of links in your email message will almost certainly get you into the spam folder. The concept is that email marketers inserting too many links are aggressively trying to sell something and pushing it on the recipient. Although there is no hard fast rule and every ISP is different, I would suggest not exceeding 5 or 7 links per email message and would avoid placing a URL in the subject line entirely.
10. Personalization: By addressing your email messages to the individual subscriber, you are not only proving that you know more than just the recipients email address, but you have their name too. Statistics show that personalization increases open and read rates by about 600%.
11. Layout: Keep your email content clean and consistent. By using multi-sized fonts, colors and typefaces, you are creating a visual mishmash of content and won’t do you any favors when it comes to spam.
12. Attachments: Mailing an attachment to individuals or a small group of coworkers etc. is generally not a problem. However, when you start emailing an attachment to thousands of email addresses, you will likely end up in the spam folder. Instead offer the attachment for download or create a web page with the content that you’d like to share and provide the link in the email.
13. ALL CAPS: Avoid typing in all caps, even for brief sentences to highlight a point. It is much better practice to use bold or bold/italics to add emphasis to a section of your email. ALL CAPS text implies aggressiveness and a forceful approach. ISPs see this and are likely to spam your message out.

Additional Points

1. Feedback Loops (FBL): A feedback loop is an agreement you can make with ISPs where they get back to you the identity of complainers in their web mail. On your side you commit to blacklist/remove the user from your email list. You will need to provide certain information to each ISP to become enrolled in their program. A list of links to the application forms for the main ISPs can be found here:
   http://website.email-ethics.com/feedback-loops
2. Bounce handling: Soft and hard bounces should be handled appropriately. Your email software may have these capabilities built in. Typically, the standard procedure for soft bounces is to retry sending the email a number of times, if the email still bounces after these attempts, the email address will become a hard bounce. A soft bounce occurs if the mailbox is full for example. For hard bounces, i.e. a blocked email address or an address that is no longer active, the email address should automatically be removed from the list. Continually trying to send to a hard bounced email address will get you noticed by the ISP as a spammer and may result in your becoming blocked from every email address for the entire ISP.
3. Send frequency: Although you may deem your email relevant and your subscribers have opted in, if you send your emails too often your subscribers may become tired of receiving constant messages from you, which may result in you being marked as spam. If you have a lot of content that you want to send to your readers, consider a multi list strategy. Create multiple lists for your email content. Have your recipients subscribe to each of the lists for which they want to receive content for. That way, you are not blanket emailing the entire list, instead you are being specific about who you are sending your messages to.

Further Reading

• Beamond Creative article:
  10 Tips for a Successful Email Campaign and an Increased Open-Rate:
  http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/10/enewsletter-marketing-10-tips-for-a-successful-campaign-and-increased-open-rate/
• Yahoo best practices:
  http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/postmaster-15.html
• SPAM test tool:
  http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
• Wikipedia definition of email SPAM:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
• Blacklisted IP verification:
  Check your IP address against these verification services to see if your IP address is blacklisted. There are many more, but these are some of the more renowned services.
  http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
  http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
  http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup

When the form is finalized you are given a link that can be used to email or publish the form elsewhere for your audience to complete. You are even provided with the embed code to place into your own website design format.

Why do I Need a Survey?

Surveys are a great way to connect with your audience and find out user experience with your company. This particularly useful for companies doing business online, you can find out how they like the format of your online store and determine any “pain” areas for your customers. Maybe they think the checkout process is too long, or they have a hard time finding products etc… All this is great information for tweaking your website and making it a better shopping experience for your customers. At the same time you are building customer retention and reducing your site bounce rate.

A Humorous Experience With My Google Survey

Anxious to test out the new tool, I quickly developed a 5 question survey to learn about the scooter industry. I created the form and tested it to see how and where the data was stored in the spreadsheet. This worked perfectly first time without any glitches. To promote the survey and gain user feedback, I created a couple of posts within industry related groups on LinkedIn (along with a few additional sites). After posting, and as I usually do, I proceeded to go back into the live post and test the url. I kid you not, after clicking the link I received the following message:

“Warning. Suspected phishing page. According to Google’s safe browsing policy, the requested external link maybe a forgery or imitation of another website designed to trick user into sharing personal or financial information…..”.

Yes, that’s right Google has detected that its own auto-generated url is a possible phishing page! Check out the screenshot below.

Once I had recovered from the excitement, I needed to figure out a fix. The simple use of a URL shortening service like bit.ly generated a smaller alternative url that I used to post the survey across social networking sites and via email. After testing once again, I did not receive the “warning” message.

Make sure you take advantage of the great new tool from Google!

]]> http://www.beamondcreative.com/2010/05/google-surveys-and-some-humor/feed/ 0 http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/11/join-our-linkedin-group-internet-marketing-source/ http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/11/join-our-linkedin-group-internet-marketing-source/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:27:30 +0000 Sam Beamond http://www.beamondcreative.com/?p=731 Here’s a quick post to tell you about our new LinkedIn group for Internet Marketers and those interested in the field.

While there are many web developers, bloggers, email marketers, SEO, social media professionals etc. out there, these practices in themselves are not the solution to marketing a company, product or service on the web. Members of this group understand that a successful online strategy encompasses all aspects of these online channels to achieve the marketing objective. Different levels of each aspect are required depending on industry and audience. Named “Internet Marketing Source”, the group aims to bring professionals together in these marketing fields, to learn from each other, exchange ideas and share real life success stories from the field. Join today to broaden your knowledge of internet marketing, and contribute your expertise.

Follow this link to join the “Internet Marketing Source”! http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2475645

Contact us to learn more about how Internet Marketing techniques that will grow your business.

To determine the best fit for you you should first look at the frequency of that you will be sending your newsletters AND number of recipients on the list. You can then figure out the most cost effective option. My preference, however, would be to use a license based software and not have to worry about paying ever again. You pay a couple of hundred dollars up front for the license (a little more if you want it installed on your server for you) and you are ready to go, unlimited email addresses and frequency etc. The only downside that I can forsee is the fact that you are using your own server resources for the software and mailing. Depending on the amount of site traffic and email use you currently have, this may or may not be a key factor. It has never caused me any problems in the past 5 years of using this type of software.

Ask us today about setting up an email marketing system for you.

Blogging has become so popular…

It now extends far beyond the “online diary of my cat”, and into the business world. Blogging has become a great knowledgebase resource for business, both to educate the world on your products or services, and to establish your presence as an expert in your industry.

While these advantages are useful and of great benefit to every business, the SEO benefit of Blogging for your corporate website should not to be overlooked. This article will differentiate Blogs from websites and talk about how owning a Blog as well as contributing to other Blogs “Blogging” can increase your web traffic, thus lead flow and sales should also increase.

Note: For the remainder of this article, when referring to Blogs, I am talking about Blogs for business. Although these points could apply to personal online spaces also.

Your Blog

To own and operate an active Blog in your industry means another “channel” to talk about and market your business products and services. It is effectively like having another website. However, a Blog and a website serve two different purposes.

What’s the difference?

The difference between a Blog and a website mainly involves two criteria; content and functionality. Your website can hold a lot more information and more sophisticated functionality, such as complex searches, account login and control panel interface and inventory management. The list could go on, but you get the point.

Blogs are article-based

A Blog is more related to article posting that can include text, images and video. Blogs are informal writings about your business and industry. The intention is to build an audience that is interested in what you are writing and having them “subscribe” to be notified when you add more content.

The Bloggers Goal

The ultimate goal for your readers, is to turn them into leads and finally, paying customers. Blogs are also interactive, which means that your readers can interact with you through posting comments and questions directly on the Blog, these of course can be moderated prior to inclusion on your live Blog.

Many of the SEO techniques that can be applied to your website can also be implemented on your Blog.

Your Blog, however, already has the advantage of being updated regularly (we hope) so that it is already showing Google (and other search engines) that your Blog is current and therefore worth ranking to some degree, in search results for relative keywords.

So, what more SEO can be incorporated?

With any SEO strategy a keyword list should first be created, based on industry keywords and phrases used by prospects or customers to search for your product. Creating a keyword list is a whole other article. So lets assume you have a list of around 10 common keywords and phrases already. The process now is simple, make sure that your articles and posts use these keywords often.

Don’t overdo it!

That could backfire, and count as point(s) against you! Intersperse your words throughout your Blog, sometimes your Blog post might be specifically relating to one or some of your keywords. Great. You shouldn’t have a problem using them here.

Use your posts, articles and images to direct traffic to your website

Of course it goes without saying that your posts, articles and images should be directing traffic to your corporate site, through obvious links, links from images or “for more information” comments and even the headings. Again, don’t over do it as you may deter readers as well as search engines noting your content as possible spam.

Host it yourself

One key point to mention when setting up your Blog is to host it yourself. Don’t use a free Blog url e.g. http://myblog.wordpress.com. Doing so helps Google see that you are not a serious player in the industry and may discredit you because of it. Sure, you can use free Blogging software like WordPress or Blogger, but make sure you register a domain name and install the Blog on your own server space. This will effectively “add SEO value” to your online space.

Blogging on other Blogs

So you have a Blog in place and its generating a decent amount of traffic for your brand and your corporate site, is there anything else? Yes, now that you have become familiar with the concept of Blogging and writing Blog posts, its time to start Blogging on other industry related Blogs.

There are millions of Blogs to choose from

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are millions of Blogs out there. That said, there stands a strong chance that there are already Blogs out there in your industry, regardless of how small a niche your business operates in. Try this, run a Google search for your keywords and include the word “Blog” in the search term. You’ll probably come up with a list of other Blogs in your industry. Check them out, look at the types of articles they are writing. Not only will this give you some ideas for your own Blog, it will probably present topics that you feel you can add something too, and maybe even comment about.

Don’t be shy, scroll to the bottom of the post and add your thoughts or comments about the Blog post

Always be sure to include a link to your own Blog and website in your response. Now, when other readers of their Blog look at the comments and read what others have said, they will come across your comment and links to your website.

Click-throughs

You already know that the reader is interested in your subject matter because they are reading a similar industry-related Blog to yours. Because of this, they are more likely to click your link to read more. This is called a “click-through” to your website. Great news. Best of all its a free source of traffic generation!

Get Google to vote for you

This benefit extends one step further in that now you have a link back to your website from a different website to one owned by you. Google counts this “backlink” as a “vote”. The more votes you get, the more reputable your website becomes in the eyes of Google. Get backlinks on popular and important websites, and your website becomes even more important to Google.

Don’t be tempted to SPAM

Be careful though, simply visiting Blogs and posting links to your website without contributing to the Blog with valued comments is seen as spam, both to the Blog host as well as Google. Doing this will work against your SEO efforts. Regular posting of quality comments and input to other Blogs will help you establish yourself as a “key player” in your industry, help build a reputation online and links back to your website. The results are increased leads and sales from a growth in web traffic.

Using these Blogging methods will generate traffic to your site

Use them wisely though, SEO is a sensitive piece of your online marketing efforts. Overdoing one aspect can work against you, not for you. By consistently publishing relevant Blog content using your keyword list WILL increase traffic to your website. How much traffic directly correlates to the amount of effort you put in. The more posts, articles and comments you submit, the more traffic you will generate to your website.

Ask us about setting up a blog for you or developing a custom SEO strategy and start increasing your web traffic today.