drunkonlife.net | Minimilist Marketing for Small Business

Different Layouts for Different Sections on WordPress? No problem.

I have a client who has a monthly magazine that is supported by advertisers. Usually, the layout is pretty predictable; content on the left, ads on the right. However, over the past few months, she has been doing 2 magazines a month with one being a “special” edition. The special edition has different advertisers which means that I can’t cross her regular magazine advertisers with her special edition advertisers.

I could handle this easily by customizing sidebar content but over time, the side bar area will be long. Instead, I wanted another solution to handle this without manipulating php code to make it happen.

And for this, I chose WordPress Toolset.

What does WP-Toolset do?

Basically, it allows you to refine the look of your wordpress website by literally rewriting the php for you. This allows you to do things like create a magazine layout, build robust filters (think real-estate search with radio buttons to select parameters) and create templates that you can then add content to.

To work this, you create a “view”, which is basically a “block” that you can add to your pages. Each view can be styled so that it looks exactly how you want it to look.

You can add these at will in your post and page editor via shortcodes….

This is pretty cool but it gets more interesting when you take multiple views and turn them into a “view template”. A template in WP-Toolset is nothing more than a collection of views mixed with other things like types. Here is an example of a template for one of her special editions….

The types fields are basically pre-determined places that she can place a picture in (should she want to). For her articles, she has a field type that allows her to place the article picture (without having to insert it directly into the WYSIWYG editor. This space is predetermined size and placement wise. The bottom of the code has another place where the author’s bio will go into, which has a separate WYSIWYG editor.

And the code inbetween it all allows everything else to happen with a little CSS styling to boot. The “ads” go to the right of the content and the “single post views” creates the php that pulls in the content for that particular article post.

And selecting the template is as easy as selecting it in your WYSIWYG editor.

There are a couple caveats here to think about before you go out and decide that Toolset is for you. First, you have to be comfortable with CSS (and if you aren’t, you can click here for a primer.) Toolset simply allows you to call up different sections onto the page. You still need to style the content to make it look good.

Secondly, there is a slight learning curve here. The good news is that the guys over at Toolset have a ton of videos that will help you maneuver through the various scenarios that are most common with webmasters.

I’m only scratching the surface here for the things this plug-in can do. You can actually do a lot more with it and even play around with things on a demo site before you commit.

Or you can simply go to the website & check out WP-toolset for yourself.

Amazon Paid Ads Strategies (A very Good Video)

I accidentally ran across this most excellent video from a seminar that Hollis Carter did. The Cliff’s note version of this is how to use Amazon Paid Ads to generate traffic and sales and build your list (for an online only business, this is perhaps the most important thing most people could do.)

One of my favorite techniques that I learned was rather than make a marketing push off the traditional Optimize keywords / SEO methods on Amazon, instead focus on “climbing the ladder” which involves segmentation first and then moving into the more general market as you scale….Strategically, you may actually be able to do this from an SEO frame as well but at this point it is just a theory.

Are You Practicing or Performing?

When I first started playing music in a band, we used to practice alot; 3 practices a week for 4 hour stretches and this didn’t include all the solo work that we put in. And we got tight…in practice. There was growth there. But it was stunted. And then we started playing out live and it became a whole new ballgame. For instance, different rooms posed problems with hearing each other. A crowded room sounded different than our practice room. And of course, you had a sound man, which was usually in house, which was the wild card.

But a funny thing happened. We got tighter. We found adapting to situations on the fly wasn’t so hard. After awhile, not hearing wasn’t as big of a deal for us. It was like the experiences made us stronger collectively and individually. As we put in more stage mileage, there reached a point where most of the things that happened weren’t cataclysmic because we had experienced it before.

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. If you play basketball or any competitive sport, you would know that there is a big difference between playing in the park and playing in a real game with people watching. When you are singing in the shower, it sounds much better than Karaoke night at the local pub.

The reason why I even mention this now is because in a lot of ways, most people who are flying solo are spending way too much time in the practice room. I know why they do it. It’s comfortable. You are in control of your environment. But I gotta tell you, if you are doing this, you aren’t growing as quickly as you could be.

I didn’t realize this until I started freelancing design and SEO work. When I was doing it exclusively for myself, I hardly ever left my comfort zone. But once I started freelancing, this all changed. The client became the wild card. They would want something and I would be forced to figure it out or risk losing them.

I discovered a couple things while doing this:

I had enough foundational knowledge to figure out the other stuff.
The more I experienced, the less surprised I was when a client asked for something “different”.

In regards to SEO, it was the same. For example, I probably would have never bothered to try to figure out schema data because, frankly, most people don’t really need it, especially if you are doing affiliate type work (which is what I was doing before I started freelancing). But suddenly, a client asks for something you aren’t that familiar with and it forces you to grow beyond where you would normally grow. And Local SEO? Why bother, right?

The point here is that if you want to experience growth (in business or life), you need to stop practicing and staying in your comfort zone and start performing live and deal with the challenges that doing it live will bring.

image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixdollarbill/692089215/

Marketing to the under 30 crowd? That Facebook Page is Probably Useless.

If you are an online marketer or simply a small business trying to improve your reach by using social networks, you may think that Facebook is the place to go. And it may…if your target market is 30+. But if you are trying to reach the younger crowd, good luck using Facebook.

I had my suspicions about this but the proof came from this past weekend when I was joking with a friend’s 18 year old son. He was checking his phone and I asked him (jokingly) if he gave his dad his passcode to open up his phone. He smirked and said his dad could have it as long as he didn’t open up snapchat, Twitter or Instagram. When I asked him about Facebook, he told me point blank that “Facebook was a place for old people to keep up with friends that they wouldn’t care about in real life.”

Yeah. That about as succinct as you can get. He also said that it would be weird to have his grandma like photos that weren’t intended for him. I asked him if any of his friends were on Facebook. He told me the only reason why he (or his friends) use the social network is to keep up with family. I don’t know about you, but I remember being a teenager and not really wanting to keep up with family.

The point here is to know where your market is hanging and don’t assume too much about what is popular at the moment. The reality is that young people choose places that are gated and shuttered away from the prying eyes of us old folks. They don’t like the idea of co mingling friends with their parents (and why would they?)

The younger crowd is more hip to social media than people above 30. They understand that it probably isn’t a good idea to shoot off drunken photos of a party on a day when you called in sick. They use other things. They control who sees the message better. They understand that once things are out there, they are out there permanently. Which is why they are on instagram (and most are private…as in invitation only). If things get too dicey, they use snapchat, which not only controls who sees what but how long they will see it.

And they are pretty hip to advertising tricks as well. Oh…and they don’t use email. So, your sources are more limited than marketing to the geriatric crowd (*ahem* “over 30″)

All this is bad news for Facebook. Sure, they have a billion users. If you aren’t growing, you are dying. And Facebook simply isn’t as cool as it used to be. Ask anyone under 30, they will tell you that it isn’t where it’s at. It’s a place full of squares….family members and work colleagues.

The only good news or forward thinking that Facebook did was buy up instagram…which happens to appeal to the younger market…beats me how you can go about monetizing it though. Because once you do, they will move on.

If you are looking for answers, I don’t have any here though. The point is that if your target market is the younger crowd, I probably wouldn’t waste my time or money building a Facebook page. They simply aren’t there.

Take Photoshop Images and Automatically Create CSS for Web Design

When you are designing a website, most likely you are starting the project in Photoshop to get a better idea of what you want but eventually you are going to have to dive into first the structure of the page (HTML) and then the styling details (CSS). The task of writing (and rewriting) code can be monotonous and frankly, is what most would consider to be the lionshare of website design. Things like replicating shadow and gradient work, border radius, stroke and opacity settings can chew up a ton of time.

Is there a way to automate these types of web design grunt work?

There actually is. It’s called CSSHat and what it does is builds the CSS framework for what ever you are doing for you. Below, you will see part of a graphic package I was working on for a client (I was built the powerpoint presentation). The seminar is now over and I need to transfer this to the web so that the attendees can grab the exercise material. In doing so, I simply grabbed the first part of the powerpoint and then built a button at the bottom of the graphic.

With CSSHat, I can build the button in photoshop and then, with a click of a button, it generates the css of the layer so that I can extropolate and add into into the css of the website.

To generate this, all I had to do was select the layer and then open up CSS Hat. It gives you the CSS and several preprocessors such as LESS to choose from. You can also add the width and height, it generates all the webkits for the various browsers and if you want, can actually structure the class attribute to the beginning of the structure for you.

CSS Hat isn’t free. It’s $29.99 but in my opinion is very much worth it if you want to build buttons and don’t want to tinker with things like shadows, gradients, and what not.

And in case, you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing to gain from suggesting it.

Check out CSS Hat Now

Tiered Links About to Take a Hit? Why co-citations matter more

We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers–some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well. And in fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we’ll see whether that bears fruit or not. -Matt Cutts

If you haven’t watched this video about upcoming changes for SEO by Matt Cutts, you should. And if you have been relying on so called tiered networks to provide you with powerful links, then this should be a wake up call that doing more of the same will eventually get you penalized.

For those who don’t know what a tiered network is, basically it is where you build a network of websites (usually via blogger, tumblr, wordpress, squidoo, etc. but the more sophisticated networks own the websites outright and use varying IP’s to misdirect intent) and then layer them like a cake. As the layers grow outward, you start linking them up until finally all the authority points down to your main website. Over time, the links become stronger and the “juice” pushes your rankings upwards.

The benefit to this is that, unlike subscription based link networks, you own and control what links get dropped onto the network which can lessen the SEO footprint if you know what you are doing. Some networks are absolutely huge and have been honed and developed over years.

It works. For now. In fact, it works so well that a lot of SEO companies are in the business of building their own link networks more so than actually doing legit SEO and link building so they can plop down client links quickly. Let’s face it. It’s easier to own your links than to hunt for them.

And now Google has these types of networks in their cross hairs. So how are they going to root them out? I have a couple sneaky suspicions here, the biggest being relying more strongly on co-citations.

Co-Citations

Regardless of how big you may think the world is and the market, realize this ; in most cases, the legitimate websites all run in a profoundly smallish crowd. Here’s an example. Think of how many SEO websites there are- possibly tens of thousands. However, when push comes to shove and you start filtering downward, you will ultimately come up with a couple thousand legitimate SEO websites which ultimately link up to each other here and there. And then there are the top SEO websites which are not only linked up by the couple thousand afforementioned websites but who are more likely to link to EACH OTHER. That’s how co-citations work. And that is extremely hard for anyone to game.

So what happens when a new kid on the block comes in and gets little to no links from these websites? How does it look when no one within your industry is linking to you but you are getting a ton of links from other websites that either have little to nothing to do with your market or if they do, aren’t getting links from other websites in the industry either?

That’s how co-citation works. And it only makes sense that if most websites in an industry predictably link up to certain websites and the top websites within the industry link up to each other, then the legitimate websites that are lower would follow suit. And like I said, even the biggest industries are pretty small, from a intertwined network perspective.

Here’s an example. One of my clients writes about the HR industry. She goes to conferences. She is connected to a lot of people within her industry. So, it only makes sense that the links she gets are (1)SHRM related and (2)come from local, regional and (in some cases) national sources. She is in the middle….among hundreds of other HR websites clamoring for respect from the upper tier of the industry. And with enough conferences and enough networking, she will get there. That’s the difference between those that rely on tiered link networks and those that don’t.

It would also make sense that those who link to her actually are within her network or tertiary network. None of the trackback spam that she gets is even close to being relative in those matters. The websites that go after trackbacks (and comments) won’t gain credibility without being in “the club”. And no self-respecting webmaster would allow that junk on their website anyway.

Revisiting “Content is King” and Virality

Content is NOT king. It never has been. Your network is king. I’m not saying that your content shouldn’t be good. What I’m saying is that in a foot race, someone’s network can out hustle the greatest content in the world.

It’s why we have always had mediocre music on the airwaves.

It’s why some of the best films don’t make the most money (and if you live on ET, why you haven’t heard of them) .

And it’s why a mediocre product can sometimes steal the lion share of their market.

Folks talk about going viral as something that simply happens because the content was so good. The cream always rises to the top philosophy is referenced. If you are good enough or unique enough or funny enough, then ride it out, pay your dues and you will be rewarded for your patience. It doesn’t happen as much as what most folks think though. In the end, how you market yourself and how you manipulate the networks in control (by either outwardly paying for it or out hustling your competitors) will determine how far you go.

In other words, writing great content isn’t going to cut it.

I’ve talked about this before so I won’t droll on about it. Just watch the slide show above.

How to Create a Unique Navigation Button in WordPress with CSS

Creating navigation is pretty cut and dry and straight forward. You can adjust the navigation wrap and colors and add a customized menu in the menu settings. But this is global. Every one of the navigation tabs will look the same. So what do you do when you want one tab button to stand out from the others?

Doing this is incredibly easy if you know basic CSS as well as where to find the information. And this is what I am going to show.

In order to do this, you will need to download the fire-bug add-on for Mozilla Firefox (and install the mozilla browser). Fire-bug will allow you to find the specific navigation menu item number to add to your style sheet. On top of that, it is a great little coding cheat when you are trying to figure out what a website is doing, mark-up wise, to achieve the look.

Add the menu item you want to the custom menus in your wordpress back office- This can be found under Appearance ->menus. In the event that your theme supports more than one menu location (a lot have two), you will also need to identify which navigation panel you are working with.
Open up firefox (or a tab if you are using the browser by default). In the top right hand corner, you will see the fire bug icon. Click it.
The firebug panel should open up at the bottom of your browser. Click on HTML then the element inspector. This will allow you to hover over an element and view the page source of the element itself.
Hover over the element you want to see. Record the menu item number (see image below).

Style the Navigation Button

Now that we have the menu item ID, we can style it like we style anything else on the page. Rather than explain it, I will show the style I made for this page;

#nav-2 #menu-item-3619 a { background: #bf1e2e; color: white; -webkit-box-shadow: 1px 0px 0px 0px #333333; box-shadow: 2px 2px 10px 2px #999; border-width: 1px; border-style: outset; border-color: #333; font-size: 17px; } #nav-2 #menu-item-3619 a:hover { background: #333; color: white;

And there you have it. Simple as can be.

How to Get Clients for your [Blank] Online Business When You Have None

client-work It’s a catch-22. You provide a service for clients but your clients want to see past work…of which you have little to none. What do you do?

I don’t know what others do but I do know how I have managed to get clients when I first started out and personally, I think that anyone can do this if they have enough hustle to make it work. I started with one client 2 years ago and since then have served a couple hundred in some shape or fashion( some have been merely consults).

These days, I’m a generalist in scope; I do SEO, internet marketing, and web design as well as hosting. Last weekend, I had a job for an ad for print that had to be rushed to deadline. But how I got started was a lot different than what I’m offering now.

I’m sure there are lots of way to getting clients and building a business. This just illustrates how I was able to do it and some of the challenges that I have had to deal with along the way, from positioning yourself in the best place to make your offer, to the offer itself and all the way over to dealing with pricing and your time.

Here are some key things that I did to get my first clients.

Lesson #1 If the market share is small & competitive, choose a similar vertical

Doing SEO for local businesses in a small market like Memphis is hard. It’s hard because there are other more established businesses you are competing with. In my case, I was competing with the local paper, the Commercial Appeal. I wouldn’t be able to find the work without severely cutting my prices to the point where it would be uncomfortable.

I already had a couple SEO clients but in no way was I going to be able to feed my family with what I was getting paid.

So, I decided instead to go into website design, something that I was familiar enough to work with but not an expert by any degree of the imagination. The next year would have me learning as much as I could about javascript, jquery and CSS (which, incidentally is ongoing). It wasn’t a fake it ’til you make it kind of scenario but at times it sure did seem close.

I figured I would be able to pivot into SEO and marketing from the relationships I built with future clients. And I did. But it took time and several wrong turns.

Lesson #2- Segment the Market.

When I first started, I was a “specialist”, meaning I offered my services to a particular segment of the market.

piece of the pie Actually, that’s only half the story. I already had a couple clients that I was doing SEO for but I quickly found out that getting local SEO clients was difficult because they didn’t understand the value of an ongoing SEO service and we didn’t have the relationship in which they could trust me. So, I decided to begin with website work.

A lot of new businesses make the mistake of saying they do everything for everyone. The problem is that the less segmented you get, the more competition you have from other competitors who likely have deeper pockets for advertising and more experience than you.

Of course, you can’t segment too much. If you do, you won’t get enough work to make a decent living. There is a sweet spot though. For me, initially, it was to build affordable websites for musicians, artists and photographers and offer hosting for them on the back end to bulk up my return. A lot of my decisions were based on my existing network of friends and colleagues (more on that later).

So I decided which professional group I was going to go after and then I went after them and positioned myself as a specialist.

This has changed as my business has grown over the last 2 years but this was how I was able to get my foot in the door.

Lesson #3 That’s Nice but What Makes You Different?

And for god’s sake, don’t say price…

There are currently 3 design companies in Memphis that take the lion share of work and probably a few dozen people like myself that compete for the scraps. Segmentation was the first thing that made me different from the rest. While everyone out there was vying for anyone and everyone, I decided that I would position myself as the go-to guy for local artists.

And that’s exactly what I did.

I had an immediate advantage over other web design companies when it came to musicians. For one thing, I was a musician myself and understood the market. I could talk the language of the musicians.

I also had training manuals. The way I looked at it was since most musicians would have to update their website in the least, monthly, rather than having to pay someone like me to update it for them, I could teach them how to do it themselves (which was a learning process in itself). This produced a hell of a lot more value than having some web designer build something in which their client couldn’t control.

And then there was my network…..

Lesson #4- Find a network that can distribute your offer.

Who would you be more likely to go with? An ad you found online or in the yellow pages or clipper or from a recommendation from a friend or acquaintance? This is the part where who knows you becomes important and can do big things for your business if you are willing to hustle a little bit.

I don’t have a website for my business. I have never advertised via PPC or print. No flyers were printed. In fact, my only ad medium (if you can call it that) was referral based.

People Do Business With People They Know and Like

If they don’t know you, they like to do business with suggestions from people they know and like.

That’s a hard thing for most to swallow. Because it means that you need to be out there as opposed to throwing up ads everywhere. The other option is to pitch cold.

Most businesses have to pitch cold which is frankly, hard. And this is the problem that most new businesses find themselves in even if they have a portfolio of their work. Luckily, I have never had to deal with this since all of my clients either come from existing or clients I have worked with in the past or a network of people that I am associated with. Because most of the calls I field are pre-sold, it’s not a matter of convincing them why they need to choose me as their provider, it is just a matter of whether I can do what they want and how much it’s going to cost.

I know that’s old school but it beats the alternatives.

So How Did I Get There?

You can’t rely on simply your friends and family for business. Usually, there isn’t enough business that comes from that. How I was able to start to get business was by finding organizations and groups that had the most potential for my market segment. I found 2 non-profit organizations that were geared toward budding bands and musicians and that had a nice database of members.

I went to my network of people locally. And one of those people knew someone who happened to work one of the local non-profits. I arranged a meeting and made my pitch; I would offer a deep discount for their 1,800 members if they went with me as their designer AND webmaster. They bit.

I then turned around and pitched the other non-profit and, with a little name dropping, was able to get them to sign on as well.

The next week, I got my first design client.

Lesson #5 Give Them a Reason to Keep Coming Back

Initially, my pricing model relied on keeping existing clients happy because I charged monthly. By doing so, I was able to give the appearance of being cheaper than I actually was. Another benefit was that it would buffer the slow months with a steady stream of income.

And, on a more practical side, I was able to constantly stay in the client’s field of vision.

When I mentioned this to a website designer in Nashville, he expressed a concern that my clients would pay for my design and then drop the service after a couple months. I didn’t think so though. Today, I have retained over 80% of my clients. My first client is still with me.

The point is that once you start to get clients, you want them to continue to be your client until they decide that they don’t need the service anymore. You want them to come to you for revisions. You don’t want future pricing to become a concern in the future.

If recurring income isn’t possible for your client base, you still need to think long and hard as to what you can offer to them that will increase their LCV. This way it doesn’t become so much a volume issue as much as a quality issue.

Lesson #6- Pricing what you are worth or Pricing on Demand

Pricing Sweet Spot

I foolishly under priced my services initially, thinking that I could put a system into place that could help me better manage my time and streamline each action. It didn’t work out though, mainly because each client has different wants and needs (for instance, some want newsletters, others want scheduling plugins, some need ecommerce capabilities and others want user generated parameters, etc..)

The biggest problem with my initial prices was I charged a flat fee. This seemed like a great idea because most people who are searching for anything that has to do with the web are somewhat price sensitive (unless they are a business and you are talking to a department head).

The flat fee pricing schedule worked well for awhile but as my jobs started to increase, I started to realize that I may have made a mistake. This was okay when I was dealing solely with musicans because they were predictable with their needs. When I pivoted into dealing with real small businesses though, I found it hard to charge the same price for someone who wanted a simple website versus one that needed ecommerce functionality.

About 7 months into it, I figured out I was working too hard (in my opinion, not theirs) for too little and since I was suddenly in demand, I could use pricing to lower my workload.

The funny thing about pricing is it is both a friction point in sales (there is no way I am going to pay that…I will look around) and a benefit (he must be good if he is charging that price). Demand didn’t go up but it didn’t go down either starting out. So, I increased my prices even more until I reached a sweet spot where I was getting enough work to be busy but not so much that I was miserable.

I have since fixed this by doing some soul searching about the value of the service I am offering versus the value of my time. Initially, I charged what would have been the equivalent of $20/hour. Since then, the hourly charges range from $50/hour- $200/hour, depending on what I am providing. Mind you, I don’t tell my clients my hourly rate…I just figure out a time frame it will take for me to get it done.

Image Attribution- http://www.flickr.com/photos/joepemberton/3305233165/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/roboppy/1928986168/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/djwtwo/8177516875/

Do Exact Match Domains in Local Search Work?

Theory – Google reduces rankings for EMD’s with poor user metrics & leaves/increases EMD’s with good user metrics.

— Se▲n (@s_rvll) April 26, 2013

Let’s not kid ourselves here. Exact match domains still work and will continue to work until the end of time. The reason is plain and simple. If I am doing a search for “Target”, chances are very good, I am looking for information that has to do with target, the brand, in spite of the fact that I could be looking for something else. And Google is going to provide me with the information that it thinks that I am looking for.

If you are searching for drunkonlife, then chances are good that you are looking for my brand and google will likely supply you with information that relates to my brand.

Sean’s theory on how Google decides what EMD’s are good and what aren’t is plausible although I bet it is more simple than that. Things like bounce rate and time on site can be very misleading. After all, if you are searching for a phone number to a business, you may be on the website as little as 5 seconds and if you aren’t, then it may be more indicative of a poor user experience (having to click more than one page) than interest, right?

You could argue that a website that is there to provide a quick contact phone number and a little information wants the user experience to be as short as possible. You could say that in this case, a longer TOS or lower bounce rate could be a bad thing for the user.

So, what metrics may influence (local) ranking in the post-penguin era of SEO?

A while back, I was working with a local client (doing design, not SEO) and she was ranking very well for a high volume search word in a competitive market. This was despite having fewer links than her big brand competitors. Here are some key areas that she did well in (and the reason why I think she was able to rank well with her exact match domain.)

Verified Local Address
All the information across the various review channels accurate and synonymous with each other.
Quantity of reviews across the review channels- in particular, google places.
Few links but more importantly, no low quality link indicators; links coming from sources you would expect.

This is by no means a comprehensive list but are the things that I personally think affected her rankings. In other words, I probably couldn’t take the .net version of her EMD and rank quickly without some serious work and probably wouldn’t rank for it without going the same route that a real business would go when they are trying to rank in local search.

Should You Use Exact Match Domains for local search?

Most of the time, the domain name comes secondary to the actual business brand. So, while you could potential rank quicker with an exact match domain, this shouldn’t be the reason why you select the domain. In all likelihood, an EMD that isn’t reflective of the brand’s name will just confuse the visitor.

In the rare case where you haven’t chosen a brand name, you could include the keyword in with your brand although the city or area would be equally important. (ie. Memphis Eyeglasses & more, Memphis Dental Group, Germantown Farmer’s Market, etc.)