What most of us may not stop and think about is the information we’re giving this website. No, it’s nothing Big Brother-like. Statistics like number of visitors, repeat traffic, page views, visitor location, time on pages, and view paths are crucial for many businesses because they allow the business to evaluate its web-based marketing strategies.

Often, the most important measurement is traffic, or the number of visitors to your website.

Traffic to a website is like oxygen to blood. For web-based businesses, the entire income stream can depend on the amount of new and repeat visitors. For businesses that use their websites as a marketing and communication tool, traffic brings in new clients. For smart businesses, both web-based and non, traffic means loyal, involved customers providing more than just income.

As I mentioned in my last Stagecoach Express article regarding community innovation, web communities can encourage and produce many benefits to businesses.

How do we, then, create these communities?

The Field of Dreams approach can only take you so far. Just like a garden, you have to grow a community, and it takes a lot of care, hard work, and brow sweat.

Start by picking a medium. How do you want your community to interact, and what do you want your part to be? Blogging, and encouraging comments and discussions about subjects and articles you write can be a great way to start. By writing blog posts, you’re adding that all-important content to your site.

As you develop a blogging style, begin to market your blog. Encourage everyone you know to go online and read! Drive visitors who already go to your website, add the link to your e-mail signature, put the link in your profile on other sites. Make sure to measure your blog’s traffic, and keep an eye on subscriber rates (if you’ve added an RSS feed). My next Stagecoach Express article will take you through the basics of blogging, and how to make a blog work for you.

Forums are great for encouraging high-level community discussion. An online forum is the evolution of the “message board.” Individuals who wish to contribute to a discussion become “members”, and are then permitted to post messages. Forums can be harder to start because they rely on members posting content, instead of the website owner, but once they get going they can be a rich source of information and innovation.

For businesses, a forum can be an ideal way for customers to discuss issues of relevance to a product or service. A sporting goods store might have a minor league hockey forum (and it would be wise to moderate this site very carefully!). A pet store might host a forum on rescued animals available for adoption. A camera store might host a forum on photography. Once I’ve covered the boons of blogging, I’ll write another article exploring forums and their advantages for many businesses.

Once you being to see seedlings, make sure to keep watering. Keep your content fresh, and encourage comments. If you’ve chosen to go the forum route, make sure you’re keeping your community clean, and adding/removing topics as required.

Want to learn more about web communities, and how they can help your business? Be sure to stop by the Stagecoach Designs storefront at 249 King St. West in Dundas, ON, or call us at 866-914-4442.

100% recycled bathroom tissue and recycled plastic trash bags.

I’m not saying these two purchases are saving the planet, nor am I looking for a pat on the back. What interests me most is why I made these purchases how I did.

Most environmentally friendly options have financial reasons to go along with the others. CFLs run with less electricity and don’t have to be replaced as often. Energywise settings on computers reduce electricity consumption as well. Our programmed thermostat keeps the equipment from freezing, but we don’t need heat blasting all night, and thus can cut our natural gas bill. What was my financial incentive for these two purchases, however? The items were the same price as their non-green counterparts, if not slightly more expensive.

As far as I can tell, my motives were pure. What does this say about others who make the same decisions, however?

• The other day we were looking for a restaurant and as we started to walk in, we saw a candidate’s poster proudly displayed in the window. It didn’t happen to be the candidate I support and I noticed how I felt a little less positive about that business. Will those feelings linger after the election is done? I wonder.

• A colleague of mine sent an email to clients criticizing the Bush administration for recent economic problems. Some of her clients wrote back saying the real problem was the Clinton administration and she shouldn’t be criticizing the Republicans.

• As a private citizen, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Obama during the U.S. primary and then decided she wouldn’t allow any other candidates on her show. Sarah Palin really wanted to be on Oprah and so this created some conflict and publicity for Oprah’s show. It also pulled her into the political fray.

In all three of these situations, people chose to mix business and politics. I am not sure this was in the best interest of their businesses. Now, Oprah can probably afford to alienate some of her audience, but most businesses spend large portions of their budgets on marketing and can’t afford to potentially alienate half their client pool.

When people buy a product or service they want to feel good about their purchase. They want to feel valued and cared for. I doubt many people would think, “This business supports a different candidate, so I’ll take my business elsewhere.” But they may have a slight shift away from the feeling of being supported and cared for. They become more aware of differences. They may look at your competitor with new eyes sometime in the future. Business positivity is delicate and fragile and needs constant care and attention.

I wholeheartedly support a person’s right to support a candidate, and by no means am I advocating for political neutrality. I recommend volunteering, working the phones, and even canvassing on behalf of your favorite candidate. Make sure to hand out your business card to everyone you meet while you are working on behalf of your candidate. You may be able to build some business relationships with other people committed to the same cause. In this way, creating political allies can be good for business.

Wearing a campaign button at work, posting election signs in your business window, and having political discussions at business meetings is “blanket advertising” for your favoured client. These methods indiscriminately advertise your support, and could alienate those who do not support your candidate. Networking with others who share the same positive feelings about a particular candidate is “targeted advertising.” You can strengthen existing relationships and create new ones by judiciously working for the benefit of your favourite candidate.

As a business person, part of your job is to create positive relationships with your clients and potential clients. Remember that mixing business and politics can be counter-productive if you don’t do it right.

Stagecoach Designs can help focus your brand in your marketing as you develop or overhaul your website or print marketing materials. Let us help you develop a brand that works…for you and your client. Contact Marianne at msandvall@stagecoachdesigns.com to get started!

Opera also ran the pages indexed by MAMA through the W3C’s validation tools to see how many conform with standards. The results show that only 4.13 percent are valid.

Every site designed by Stagecoach Designs passes the XHTML 1.1 validity test. That means every one of our clients is part of this 4.13%!

Compling with web standards is important to us, since it insures that even without revision websites designed by Stagecoach will be cross-browser compatible, and stand up to coding standard changes far longer than most websites.

To learn more about Stagecoach Designs coding standards, and how we do business, check out the Methods & Values section of our website, and be sure to stop by and visit us at our storefront location at 249 King St. W in Dundas, Ontario!

http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml

Designed to get slackers like me into running without burning out from overexertion, the Couch-to-5K program was ideal for my particular situation. By starting slow and building up, I found myself enjoying running, and even promoting this program to my friends and family.

If it weren’t for a man named Robert Ullrey, however, I wouldn’t be following this program at all.

Robert wasn’t part of the CoolRunning.com team. He was just a guy who, according to both his podcasts, is “43 living in Northern California and on my birthday decided to start running again.”

For me, and for him, there was a problem with the program. In order to follow the instructions, I either had to mark my distances ahead of time or keep glancing at a stop watch to see how long I had been running. As any inexperienced runner knows, these things are not good for a lot of reasons.

He turned this wonderful running program into an even more valuable tool by adding podcasts. This allowed me to ditch the neon orange spray paint, keep my eyes on the road instead of my watch, and enjoy running! Ullrey’s instructions on when to start, stop, and adjust my pacing (as well as his excellent music selection), made the Couch-to-5K program something that I could do, and easily. Robert Ullrey’s free podcasts can be found here:

http://www.ullreys.com/robert/Podcasts/

CoolRunning.com developed a great product and, by releasing it onto the web (as open source as a running program can be), received in-kind a product that can now be used by a larger user base.

Your community of users wants to support you, and wants to get the best possible use from your products. Allowing your user base to innovate, manipulate, and make your products better allows your products to grow, and gives your users a feeling of involvement.

By designing your website to attract maximum traffic, Stagecoach Designs can help you get exposure for your product and inspire the creativity of the community. We can also discover the ways that products similar to yours are being marketed and used on the web, as a way of helping you with product development and sales. Contact Marianne at msandvall@stagecoachdesigns.com to talk about this innovative approach to web-based marketing.

9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, you can find us at the store at 249 King St W in Dundas. Stop by and see us!

Starting October 27th, we’ll have apple cider and Halloween treats for everyone who stops by!

Its not just indicitive of my behavior, either. Before writing this, I sent an e-mail to some friends, family members, and co-workers to get some information from them. In fact, I sampled a total of 50 people I know some way or another, and even I was suprised by the results.

Of the 50 people I gathered information from, a whopping 96% of them said that, when asked where they would go to get a phone number for their local pizza place, they would look either on the company’s website or on Google Maps.

When asked about the last time they used a phone book, 64% said more than 1 year ago, and 20% more than 6 months ago.

8% of the survey did say, however, that they had used a phone book in the last month. What did they look for? Outside of one look for the phone number to Murray’s Auto Store to call and see when they closed that day (the hours weren’t on the website), the rest was to find residential phone numbers.

What does this mean? Well, that you should have a website! Your website should provide the information your viewers are looking for, and they should have no problem finding it.

Above all else, however, your website should be easy to find!

Google recently made it easier to embed, into your website, any book available through Google Book Search.

Use this snippit of code:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer(’GkCpLIk7aisC‘,600,500);
</script>

Reference: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/embeddable-google-books.html

If you are wondering if blogging is for you and your business, if you are unsure of the costs and benefits of starting a blog, then keep reading!

Most importantly (and Nik, our General Manager and SEO expert is going to hate me for this), I have to say that it is the relevance of the content of your website that leads to more traffic and visitiors. Creating a blog, and keeping it current and active, accomplishes these tasks and much more for your business.

First stop, let’s learn in a nutshell how search engines work.

How Search Engines Work

Google created what they call ‘crawlers’, virtual machines that go around and around the Internet collecting relevant information from all websites. Page ranking is then calculated from several variables. These variables include but are not limited to: the url structure, meta tags (coding snips of keyword clusters specifically design for the search engine to read), the number of hits (visitors), the bounce rate (how quickly users leave a page; which heavily relies on how interactive a website is), geographical location, keywords, dynamic content change and website growth, the names and alternate text of images, clean code and current coding standards, even the diversity of the sources where the traffic to a particular site comes from.

What that relevant information is, and how it is collected and processed, is what most SEO and web marketing experts scratch their heads over. All these factors constitute the foundation and value of Google and other search engines such as Cuil, Yahoo and MSN. Not to mention search engines reserve the right to change their algorithm (their secret recipe) at any time.

Google (and probably most other search engines too) has ‘one big robot’, the deepbot, which hits every website about every 3-4 weeks, and inspects it more thoroughly. It is at this time that Google can also spot or suspect any evil activity, such as link farming, or misleading information. When any of these flags is raised, a website is queued for human review. This can ultimately lead to sandboxing (complete removal from Google’s website listing). There are many activities search engines consider “illegal” —but that is a topic for another post!

The Advantages of Blogging

A blog brings in the possibility of limitless expansion and website growth, the more articles you write, the more keyword-intensive your website becomes. The more relevant and useful and current your entries are, the more a person is likely run into one of your posts.

The purpose of a blog does not end there. For some businesses, a blog gives them an opportunity to express what the believe in, to share their expertise, and to showcase different areas of interest, which may or may not be directly related to their primary activity. Having such voice can give certain businesses an edge —the human element. After all, PEOPLE, like you and me, with families and loved ones, run these businesses. It doesn’t always have to be about the services a company can provide or the products they want to sell, but rather about connecting people that have something else in common together.

Last but not least, a blog does not always have to be in the form of a blog. For a professor or scientist, it can be a place to post articles and discuss ideas. For a telephone company it can be a way to provide technical support. For a massage therapist or a dentist, it can be a way to educate his or her audience about what to expect when they first come in.

The Disadvantages?

The only problem I can think of is maintenance. For your blog to work for you, you have to keep it current and keep it growing. Additionally, when you want to convey a sense of professionalism, you want to pay special attention to your writing style, political correctness, grammar, and punctuation. Needless to say, heated, controversial or sensitive issues can attract lots of websters, but can also get you into serious trouble from both legal and moral standpoints.

All of the aforementioned can also be time-consuming or even addictive. Some people just do not benefit enough from it, or are simply better off sticking to their business per se at all times.

Conclusion

A blog is a great way to keep your website growing, it can have amazing benefits from the SEO and web presence point of view. Unfortunately, it can be very time-consuming or controversial as well.

Before making the jump, ask yourself if the benefits outweigh the costs; however, in a world where the internet is taking over the yellow pages day by day, most times they do.

My BNI chapter is gearing up for a trade show on the third week of September, and as part of the cross promotion we are doing for this, I’d like to list the members of my BNI here for you. Maybe you’ll find a service you need, maybe you’ll see a person you know. “Read More” to see the list:

Bay Area BNI Chapter

BNI Referral Winners Dundas Chapter