Keeping a tight schedule is generally considered to be a good thing. We associate people who schedule their lives well in advance with being in control and organized. It’s certainly the case that having a full and well-planned schedule can help to make sure that you stay on task and not miss out on important meetings. But it’s also true that being too scheduled can have a negative impact on your ability to get things done.

Generally speaking, if you have schedule a meeting for a set length of time, it will go that length of time even if it doesn’t need to take that long. People want to feel like they blocked out a set amount of time for a reason and they will find ways to use the time — even if the use of time isn’t productive. This can lead to endless meetings where you are accomplishing a lot less than you should be with your time.

One way to solve this is to keep your meetings short — perhaps a half-hour in length. This gives enough time to discuss what needs to be discussed without inviting meetings to run on incessantly. If something needs more than 30 minutes, plan ahead and schedule multiple meetings. This will force you to address the problems in bite-sized chunks, which can be helpful in tackling complex issues.

You should also schedule time for yourself in between meetings to do something like take a walk outside of go get a coffee down the street. You might say to yourself that you are going to “find time” between meetings to take a break but it’s easy to let that time slip away. If you put breaks on your calendar, you are more likely to take them.

Scheduling phone calls the same way that you schedule meetings is a great way to avoid losing time to idle chit-chat. Unless it’s something urgent that needs to be dealt with immediately, you will almost always be able to schedule a call for later in the day. This gives you time to research the issue and be informed before having a conversation and it also sets parameters for how long the call should go.

The key to any successful relationship is communication and this is true when it comes to the relationship between a freelancer and who contracts with them for their services. When a person knows what to expect from their freelancer, they have the right basis for evaluating their success. It also gives a freelancer clear parameters to operate under since they know what their client is expected to receive.

This is especially true when it comes to the world of online content marketing. When you work with a freelancer or an outside content marketing service like eVisible, it’s critical that you set your goals before the project starts and communicate regularly with the outside freelancer or firm to make sure that objectives are being met. Expecting that they “know what they are doing” and are taking care of everything perfectly on their own is typically an invitation for headaches down the road.

When you are interviewing potential agencies or freelancers to help you with your content marketing, make sure that they are being realistic in presenting the services they provide. You don’t want to hire someone only to realize that they can’t deliver what you thought they would at the start of your relationship. Ask tough questions and don’t always be limited by talking about “best case scenarios” — find out what they think are the obstacles to the success of a content marketing campaign and what they plan to do if these roadblocks occur while they are working for you.

Ultimately, freelancers and content marketing agencies thrive when they are able to end projects with satisfied customers. This comes from setting expectations that are realistic but will also meet the marketing needs of their clients. In order to do this, it’s important for clients to be very clear about what they want to accomplish with their content marketing. Just saying that you want “better content” isn’t enough — you need to know what goals you want to use the content to achieve and have a way to communicate this clearly with the freelancer or agency.

When you are creating an AdWords campaign, you have a limited amount of space to reach potential customers. And you need to accomplish this with many competitors also running PPC campaigns that are trying to reach the same audience. Making your ad campaigns stand out from the crowd with only a few characters to work with is challenging but creating successful and measurable PPC campaigns can be done.

Here are a few tips for how to get the most out of your PPC campaign:

Highlight Results

Since your PPC ad will appear when someone searches on a keyword, you don’t need to use your headline to remind them about what your company does. Instead, focus on the solutions that you provide and the end result that a customer will get by clicking through to your site. Make it very clear what you are offering in return for a click.

For example, a headline such as “Learn More About Fat Reduction” is weak because it gives you no unique information about the product. Instead, a headline that says “Use Laser Liposuction to Painlessly Lose Fat” tells the reader exactly the type of treatment (laser liposuction) being offered and the unique benefit (pain-free treatment) that they can get.

Motivate Action Through Time Sensitivity

People are motivated by thinking that they are going to miss out on a special deal or offer if they don’t act immediately. One way that you can spur people to act quickly is to add a countdown clock or timer to your PPC ad. Google now has given advertisers a way to insert a countdown timer into their text ads by simply adding a snippet inside the headline or description of the ad. This gives you the ability to let people know that a sale is ending or that a special is only good for a few more days (or even hours).

Use Specific Numbers to Add Credibility to Your Claims

It’s one thing to tell your customers how much money you can save them or how many customers you’ve proved services to over the years. It’s another thing to attach specific numbers to these claims. Using figures instead of broad terms such as “many” or “countless” gives your statements credibility in the eyes of potential customers. It’s also been proven that people respond better to exact numbers (like 1,512) rather than rounded numbers (such as “more than 1,500.”)

Keep Ads in the Present

One way to improve your PPC campaigns is to take specific numbers and apply them to the amount of customers you’ve provided services for or products you’ve sold in the last month or year. Doing this creates timely and relevant ads that will make readers want to learn more.

Personalize and Localize Your Pitches

Customers want to feel like you are talking directly to them and that they aren’t just receiving a generic pitch. You can accomplish this goal by using phrases like “you” and “your” as part of your pitch and headline. Another way to personalize your advertising is to localize it by mentioning the reader’s local area or directing them to call a phone number with a local area code.

Doing content marketing and doing it right are two separate things. Most people recognize that having lots of content is important to your search engine optimization efforts along with your online marketing program. However, fewer people take the time to think about the type of content tactics that will be most useful in building a successful strategy.

You can go beyond basic content marketing strategy by thinking about it as one part of your overall marketing efforts. A well thought out content marketing plan can help you to build your brand, create new connections with customers and improve your sales. As you get ready to plan out your content marketing strategy, here are five questions you need to ask first:

Who Is Your Target Audience?

You can’t craft a message designed to connect with a potential customer if you don’t know who that person is. You need to review all of your available resources in order to better understand who your target audience is and how you can effectively reach them. This can include researching your competitors and reviewing your current web traffic and demographic information. Use this information to answer questions about how your customers access product information and what information they are looking for when they go to a website.

Why Is Content Marketing Important To You?

This is ultimately the most important question that you can ask of yourself when developing a content marketing plan. Content marketing can help you attract the attention of new visitors while creating bonds with existing customers. However, if you don’t have larger plans for what to do with these potential or current customers, your content marketing work is wasted.

Where Can You Reach Your Audience?

By understanding who your customers are, you can also understand the best ways to reach them. Different customers will interact to certain types of content more strongly than others. For example, YouTube is a great option for customers interested in watching product videos, while Tumblr is an outstanding platform for visual content such as infographics.

When Should Your Content Be Published?

Along with how to reach your audience, you also need to understand when they are most likely to be online so that you can deliver them fresh content when they are ready to see it. You can leverage research from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see when certain demographic segments are most likely to be active on their sites and use this as a guideline for when to post your content.

What Do You Want Readers To Do?

The point of marketing is to entice a reaction from the person receiving your marketing message. This can mean many different things: signing up for more information, asking for a phone call or purchasing a product directly from you. The type of content that you create will be partially determined by the action that you want your potential customers to take after viewing your content.

Determining your plan for content is only part of the equation. It’s important to be just as focused when creating and distributing your materials. Make sure you are working with the right content creators and know the right places for the content to live. Figure out which rich media sources are right for specific types of content. Once you’ve created your content, have a structure in place for marketing it and tracking its success so you know what is working and what needs to be tweaked.

There is perhaps no piece of meta data on a web page that is more important that a title tag. This is the short description that tells both users and search engines what a web page’s content is about. One bit of evidence highlighting the importance of title tags comes from Kristine Schachinger of Search Engine World, who wrote that title tags are “like the title of the chapter of a book” and “the most important single tag on your page.”

It’s impossible to do effective search engine optimization without paying close attention to your title tags. This is particularly true with Google’s recent modifications to its results page layout, which places additional emphasis on title tags. With this in mind, what are some of the ways that you can leverage title tags to your advantage? Here are 10 of the hottest tips:

Grab Attention With Your Title Tag From the Beginning: Much like with a headline, you want to grab people’s attention from the start of your title tag. Use a strong, declarative statement to catch the eye of a reader.

Make Title Tags Long Enough to Explain the Page: Even if the description is too long to fully display on the search engine results page (SERP), Google may still be using all of it to determine the topic of your page.

Short Title Tags Are Wasted Opportunities: When you have a short title tag, you lose the chance to fully explain your page. You also run the risk of Google “filling in the blank” with extra content.

Be Bold: Having part of your title tag in bold will catch the reader’s eye. You can do this by including phrases that customers are likely to search for in your tag. Google will automatically bold the phrase that is searched for in the result.

Leverage Thematic Search Results: Google now can tell what you are searching for and delivers results based on this — not necessarily just based on your keywords. Using this information can help you to craft a broad title tag that can return many Google results.

Include a Call to Action in Your Title Tag: Just asking people to “click here” isn’t enough; you need to let people know what they expect to get out of clicking on your link. Tell them what the end result of their click will be ahead of time.

Do What Your Competitors Aren’t: In order to stand out from the competition, sometimes you need to take an approach that stands out from them. Review your competition’s title tags and try to approach yours from a different angle.

Give Specific, Real-Time Data in Your Title Tag: You can program title tags to include dynamic content related to searches. This might include information on how much of a certain product is available in a local area.

Don’t Forget About Your Brand: Even when you are posting links to products, it’s important to include your brand name. This helps to ensure that you rank for your brand and that you avoid possible SEO headaches.

This All Might Not Matter: Google will give results based on what it thinks that users are looking for, which can mean that it will give your homepage title tag over your individual page’s title tag in the SERP for any number of reasons. You’ll need to experiment to see which strategies avoid this happening to your pages.

Title tags are just one of the many ways you can improve your search engine rankings through meta content. Find out more about how eVisible integrates meta content into our SEO services for clients by viewing our approach to SEO success. Have more questions about best SEO practices? Find out answers by reading our FAQ on SEO.

Few aspects of being a webmaster or owner of a website are more terrifying than the prospect of moving your site – either to a new URL or to a new server while keeping the same URL. In both cases, there’s great potential for problems to occur which can limit your ability to be crawled and indexed correctly and seriously damage your search engine optimization campaign.

In an effort to help webmasters who are undertaking a site move, Google has recently published an in-depth guide to moving a website. Whether you are moving your site without or with a URL change, Google has identified four key steps that are critical to successfully migrating your site.

Site Moves Without a URL Change

1. Set Up the New Site’s Hosting Infrastructure. Copy your current site to your new site and then do rigorous testing to ensure that it behaves correctly. This includes creating a private testing environment for the new site (complete with IP-restricted access), public testing on a beta site or live testing on a limited capacity. You’ll also need to check that Googlebot can access your new infrastructure using the Fetch as Google function in Webmaster Tools, review the Time to Live setting for your DNS and review the Webmaster Tools verification.
2. Move the Site. Get rid of any disallows in your robots.txt file and update your DNS settings to your new web hosting provider.
3. Monitor Traffic. Check the server logs on both your old and new site for any unusual activity. Use DNS checking tools and monitor crawl stats and errors.
4. Shut Down Your Old Site. You can do this after your traffic there reaches zero.

Site Moves With a URL Change

1. Set Up the New Site’s Hosting Infrastructure. Move your site to a new CMS and transfer over any images and files you currently host. Create your robots.txt file and create 404 or 410 error pages for any pages that will be deleted on the new site. Make sure that everything is ready to go with Google Webmaster Tools on your new site.
2. Perform URL mapping. You need to make sure that all the links on your current site are linked to URLs on your new site. Determine your current URLs, create a map of how they will link to your new URLs and then update the URL details. This update can include annotation, internal links and sitemaps. You’ll also need to do 301 redirects.
3. Move the Site. Google recommends moving everything on your site at once instead of in pieces. Remove all robots.txt directives from your old site and make sure the robots.txt file allows for full crawling. Go to Webmaster Tools and submit a change of address. Redirect users from the old site to the new site and include the old and new sitemaps on the new site – this signals redirects to crawlers.
4. Monitor Traffic. Use Google Webmaster Tools and other tools to review traffic and see if the new URLs are being indexed, crawled and search for by bots and users.

These are just some of the step necessary to properly migrate a website. eVisible’s Webmaster Services can help you avoid costly mistakes when moving your site, no matter how complex the move. Contact us today for a consultation.

If you are selling products online, you need to have landing pages instead of simply directing customers to your website’s home page. Why is this? It’s because your home page has to do many things – tell customers about your entire business and your entire product lines along with creating an atmosphere that tells the story of your business.

A specific product can get lost on a home page. Landing pages give you one place to direct customers to when they are searching for something particular. A great landing page creates a seamless flow to the product page from the ad or other point of entry that the customer used to get to the landing page. It should all feel like a natural extension of the same campaign.

Conversion rate optimization is all about finding out how to utilize landing page design to get people who visit your site and turn them into customers. But how do you do this? At eVisible, we use our years of experience to help customers develop powerful landing pages for their websites. Here are just a few of the practices that we’ve found can seriously improve a company’s website conversion rate:

BOOSTING CONVERSION RATES CAN BE A LAUGHING MATTER

Too many times, marketing experts translate their serious need to boost their conversion rates to the types of marketing they do. While it’s important to focus on letting customers know how you will solve their specific problems, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use humor to do it. In fact, when done correctly, a humorous marketing campaign can make deep connections with customers and lead to extremely successful viral campaigns.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can use humor in your marketing campaign with an eye on boosting conversion rates:

Use the truth: Customers often expect to get marketing speak and fluffy but pointless copy when they read a website or ad campaign. You can shock them out of this by appealing to them truthfully. Admit that your breath mint won’t cure athlete’s foot, make them wealthy or help them to marry a supermodel, but that it will make their breath smell better.

A matter of extremes: You can also take the opposite approach to attacking your conversion rate. Use playful exaggeration to showcase exactly how great your product is or counteract the claims of your competitors.

Two things that shouldn’t go together: Much comedy consists of humorous situations that arise when two things that should never go together suddenly come together. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” going somewhere like the opera. You can use incongruities to showcase key elements of your product.

The power of real people: Sometimes all you need to do to create compelling content is let real people be themselves. Some of the most powerful stories can come from customers or employees in unscripted settings talking about the strengths of your company and your products.

Parody for fun and profit: Don’t be afraid to make fun of elements of your business or your industry to make your point. Customers – even those within your industry – want to laugh at familiar things. They even don’t mind laughing at themselves if it’s done right.

Just have fun: Sometimes the best conversion tools are just plain fun. This can be a simple video game, a coloring book or some other fun gadget on your site that attracts attention.

SQUEEZE PAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG

Squeeze pages aren’t listings for anacondas that are available to rent at children’s parties. They are landing pages that are specifically designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers. These emails can be used to send out newsletters, email announcements or prospect for new clients. However, just giving away some free information with the promise of more “if you send us your email” doesn’t work – people are just too jaded and protective of their privacy to give up their information.

Instead, you need to be sophisticated with how you construct your squeeze page. It needs to address a specific topic that you know your customers are interested in – in many cases, you want to propose a solution to a common problem. If you can back this up with specific numbers of how you solved the problem, this provides more credibility to your claims.

You need to construct the squeeze page thoughtfully. Start with a powerful headline that speaks to a customer’s problems. Add a call-to-action near the top that lets people know what to expect from the site. Informative videos can help to capture people’s interest. Make sure that you have several ways for people to opt-in at different points on the page. In short, give them a reason to opt-in and there’s a good chance that they will.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION AND RUN WITH IT

Studies show that you only have 10 seconds to convince a customer to dig deeper into your website. This means that you have to hook them quickly if you want to convert clicks to cash. The best way to do this is to clearly communicate the Unique Value Proposition of your business – that is, what makes your company a clear choice ahead of your competitors.

How can you do this? Here are a few things to consider:

• Think about what you want customers to feel about your business and convey that immediately.
• Use language that addresses the customer directly and that avoids marketing slogans and jargon.
• Along with discussing the features of your products, lay out how these features will benefit the customer.
• Use real world examples of benefits and uses whenever possible.
• Don’t use tired superlatives touting your business – no one believes these things unless you can back them up with proof.
• Understand the problems that have led customers to search for your company and address these problems – and your solutions to these problems – head on.

Once you have a Unique Value Proposition identified, make that a key component of your entire website. From your home page to individual product pages, reinforce this value proposition over and over again. You should even do this on action pages such as shopping carts to ensure that you close sales. And make sure that you evaluate what your competitors are doing – if their value propositions are vastly different than yours, it’s a sign that either you or them are not connecting with your customers.

Remember that context matters just as much as content when it comes to landing pages. You need to make sure that customers understand exactly how your products will benefit them in real-world terms. Telling them how you can help them is one thing – showing them is something far more powerful. No matter how you attack it, a powerful landing page is the best way to show customers what you are all about.

Search marketing is about more than just achieving the highest page ranks for your web pages. Getting ranked on the first page of a Google search isn’t useful if a customer isn’t given a compelling reason to click on your link. This is one of the main reasons that doing semantic markups on your website is important even though they are not a ranking factor with Google.

A semantic markup is the adding of HTML markups to your web pages that give Google clues about the context of its content. In many cases, this takes on the form of rich snippets of text, photos and other information designed to give readers more information about what is on a particular web page and who is responsible for it. While it won’t result in a higher search engine results page (SERP) listing, it can play major dividends for your click-through rate (CTR). The reported increase in click-throughs for results with rich snippets is an average of 15 percent.

For this reason, adding semantic markups to your web is one of the steps that eVisible recommends for our clients. Our website development and consulting services go beyond just achieving better search results and focus on improving your ability to connect with new clients. Semantic markups are a great way to increase your visibility with little extra effort required.

If you are not doing semantic markups on your site, you need to start. Here are four of the most basic types of semantic markups that you should consider implementing right away:

Breadcrumbs

Think of breadcrumbs as a way to let web users quickly navigate your website. Instead of just your home page coming back in a result, end users can see links to very specific landing pages. This can direct them to the areas on your site you are most interested in showing off and cut down the amount of clicks between them and a sale.

Facebook Open Graph

An Open Graph markup allows you to connect your web pages to Facebook’s social graph. This means that you can control how your web page is displayed when a link to it is used on Facebook or other social media sites. You can create a headline specially designed for social media sites and choose which images will be used when your links are shared.

Rating and Review Information

Give potential customers an idea of what other people think about your business by including ratings and review information in the search results. The rich snippet information can also include the number of reviews – a higher number gives people more confidence – price levels and other product-specific information.

VideoObject Schema

People want to know more about videos that you create before they click on a search result to view them. Including a screenshot and some basic information (description, length, etc.) about a video in the search results can enhance CTRs.