Author Archives ⇒ Brandon Hann

Web 2.0 – Feedburner

· Brandon Hann

I talked a lot about RSS over on another page, but now we can get into the basics of promoting that feed. When you run a CMS like WordPress, you generally get an RSS feed automatically that will allow subscribers to view your latest updates at all times as long as they’re subscribed to it via bookmark or email. But, now you can do so much more with it!

Feedburner is my choice for web feed management. Since I use Google for all of my online services, it just made sense to use their Feedburner service for my RSS feeds. Google bought the service in 2007 and has since made existing “pro” services free to all users.

Benefits of Feedburner

Using a feed management service is a great way to monitor your RSS activity. If you didn’t use one, you may never know who’s subscribing and how they’re using it. And as I’ve been teaching you, knowing as much information about your users as possible is a key to the success (or failure) of your website.

  • Track subscribers – If you notice at the top right of most of my site’s pages, you’ll see a little orange box that tells you how many readers are currently subscribed to my feed. This number changes constantly, but it gives me a basic snapshot of how many people are reading my site consistently.
  • Analyze subscribers – I didn’t get a chance to use Feedburner before Google took over, so I don’t know if this feature is new, but it allows you to see what feed readers and aggregators your subscribers are using. This can help you optimize your content for specific readers.
  • Google AdSense – One of the major concerns webmasters have about RSS is that visitors can read the site content without seeing ads. Since ads provide your site’s revenue, this is the equivalent of using a DVR to watch tv. However, with Feedburner, you can insert your AdSense ads right into your feed content so your visitors can still click on them.
  • Track traffic – You can also use Feedburner to see what’s being clicked on. Think of this exactly like stats for your website and again, this can help you optimize your site for your RSS readers.
  • Optimize and Socialize – Using the optimizing tools allows you to better optimize your feed content to increase browser compatibility and make it more user-friendly. To help promote your blog, you can add a Twitter account and allow Feedburner to automatically post tweets about your latest updates.

There are plenty of other tools you can use to get the most out of your Feedburner account including HTML exporting of RSS content, merging Flickr into your RSS, etc.

My two cents

You can already tell that I’m a fan of Feedburner, but it just makes sense. If you already use Google for your other web services (and you should be if you’re not!), you can’t go wrong with Feedburner.

<< Back to Ping.fm Forward to Tribe Marketing >>

Web 2.0 – Ping.fm

· Brandon Hann

Social networks are the major driving force behind the Internet and using them is almost a necessity these days. In a world without Facebook and the bunch, you would have to market your products and services all by yourself and do it all manually. Now, subscribing to a site such as Ping.fm allows you to post news, updates, status changes and other informational tidbits to just about every service you can imagine.

What is Ping.fm?

At the time of this writing, Ping.fm supports 42 social networking sites and services. The premise is simple–you sign up for Ping.fm, add your login credentials for each of the sites you are part of and start posting.

Ping.fm simplifies your life by enabling access to your desired services and allowing you to post once to your Ping account via the website or their desktop software and your message instantly becomes available to all of your social sites.

They also allow you to post your messages from a slew of other sources like Skype, SMS from your cell phone, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! or right from your iPhone (no app yet).

Signing up for Ping.fm is free as well as all of the services it supports, so there’s no reason not to get a few under your belt.

Do I need more than one service?

You or someone you know might only be connected with a Facebook account and a Twitter account, but find that even then, it’s too much to handle. I agree–when you use these accounts for personal use. However, in the business realm, I find that the more sites you join (and post to), the more exposure you get. Actually, it’s just plain common sense.

I don’t know exactly how many social networks there are out there, but I can contest to at least over 40! Obviously, if you had a login to every service, you’d go nuts trying to update all of them. Fortunately that’s where Ping.fm comes in to play.

My two cents

From a business standpoint, you’ll want to have a multitude of services at your disposal. The more, the better. Let’s take a small example to see why this is a benefit to you. Pretend that of the 42 services Ping.fm offers, you only had a Facebook account. If you had 100 friends on Facebook, you can send your message out to 100 people each time.

Now what about the 50 co-workers that don’t use Facebook? They’re over on LinkedIn and they don’t get your Facebook post. Wouldn’t it be nice to broadcast your message to 150 people? Now add the people searching links on del.icio.us, Yahoo!, etc. and the total number of people can really add up!

<< Back to RSS Syndication Forward to Feedburner >>

Web 2.0 – RSS Syndication

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen it all over my site and probably many other sites you’ve been to. It’s the little orange icon that indicates there’s a subscription you can subscribe to on a website. If you want to get all the latest updates for a website without having to go back multiple times a day to see what’s changed, subscribing to an RSS feed will help you.

RSS is short for really simple syndication and it is exactly that! A feed is the url that provides the content to your visitors. As a publisher, you enjoy the benefit of all your content and site updates being automatically syndicated through your RSS feed, while your users benefit from having these updates delivered to them instantly. Current web browsers usually offer the reading of RSS feeds inline with the browser which means it opens and navigates just like the original website. Go ahead and try it now by viewing my RSS feed. I’ll wait…

Some browsers don’t read the RSS inline, but rather bookmark the feed in the browser and then open it in a built-in RSS reader. Here’s a list of popular browsers and how they interpret RSS feeds.

  • Google Chrome – Chrome opens feeds directly in a new tab (or window) and allows you to read the content in the browser. From there, you can bookmark it as you see fit.
  • Mozilla Firefox – When you click on a feed link, you’re automatically prompted to bookmark the feed. This feed is then sorted by all of the content entries by title. When you click on any link within the bookmark, it takes you directly to the original page on the site.
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer – Internet Explorer 7 and newer will open a feed very similar to the way Chrome does, but it has the added benefit of being able to sort content by category (site tags).
  • Apple Safari – Apple also opens feeds just like Chrome and Internet Explorer, but it allows you to sort and search content in greater detail than Internet Explorer.

Publisher benefits

A old way of keeping your visitors notified of updates was to have them sign up for an email newsletter and hope they check their mail. Since email is so flooded with spam these days, it’s getting harder and harder to retain the attention spans of your web visitors. By having these updates delivered to their browser window, it increases the chances that they’ll respond.

  • Ads – If you’re using Google AdSense, Google has new tools for RSS feeds that allow ads to be dropped right into the feed content and it works the same way as it does on your site.
  • Bandwidth – Although images and video still show in your feeds, other images such as themes and logos don’t. This can save you bandwidth charges every month when people view your content only through RSS.
  • Loyalty – Your visitors love updates and the faster and easier they can get it, the better. RSS provides you with both of these features and the best part is that it’s all automatic.
  • Promotion – Your feed urls can be distributed all over the Internet to create more or less, a new following for your website.

I recommend syndicating your RSS through Feedburner, which is now part of Google. This way, you add another useful service to your Google account and also take advantage of Google AdSense. Everything is built right in and you are able to create multiple feeds in needed.

<< Back to MyBlogLog Forward to Ping.fm >>

Web 2.0 – MyBlogLog

· Brandon Hann

This one is mainly for those running blogs. However, this doesn’t limit you to personal blogs. A lot of businesses are now using blogs to promote and sell products. If you can imagine a Facebook geared specifically for blog sites, then MyBlogLog is what you get.

What is it?

MyBlogLog is now a Yahoo! service after being acquired in 2007 for around $10 million. Blog owners can download a widget to put on their blog that connects other blog owners with each other based on content and keywords. When you create your free account, you are creating a blog community for your listed blog(s). This community is then searchable, shareable and subscribe-able by all users of MyBlogLog. See what I mean by going to my MyBlogLog community–you can join right from this page.

This service is a great tool to continue spreading the word about your site. One thing I really like about sites like this and Technorati is that they are designed for bloggers. Getting listed in Google is great, but your site is thrown in with the masses and is compared to all other web-types out there. When your blog is within a blogging community, you’re undoubtedly going to be better embraced.

Widgets

There are website widgets available to place on your website that extend your site’s functionality for your account. Widgets allow you to display recently viewed pages on your site as well as recent members who visited your blog. This allows you to show your MyBlogLog visitors to your own visitors. All links are based on related content and doing this creates a much deeper network within the community.

Another widget, which is actually a WordPress plugin, called Just for You goes a step further in connecting people based on interests. What’s really cool about this one is that it displays related content on your site based on whether that visitor is a MyBlogLog member or not. If your visitor is a member, they’ll get to see related posts on your site based on the tags they have in their account. If they’re not a member, they will see related posts based on recent member’s tags.

Other widgets allow you to display your current statuses and updates to your blog alongside countless other services and features that you integrate into your MyBlogLog account.

My two cents

The goal for your blog or any website that you’re building is to get it out in the world as much as possible without spamming or doing other “shady” practices. This site allows you to just add one more way to get your content in front of others that are looking for it.

If you’re looking for another similar service that is not part of this series, check out my article on Arkayne. There’s a video that explains it all!

<< Back to Authority Hubs Forward to RSS Syndication >>

Web 2.0 – Authority Hubs

· Brandon Hann

Originally, this was just going to be a topic header, but I felt like you should become familiar with the term hubs and authorities first. This terms is also defined as the HITS algorithm. It is generally thought of as a precursor to Google’s PageRank and operates in a similar fashion. By ranking websites based on the amount of links it has throughout the Internet, you generally get a few that float to the top. These sites become authoritative in their subject matter and are considered higher ranking sites because of this.

When making your own website, becoming an authoritative site is not that easy and should not be one of your starting goals. In time, you may get there, but for now, your focus should be on utilizing existing authority websites. The ones I break down on my site are just two of the more popular “hub” sites that specialize in exactly this purpose. However, any website with a high authority score can add huge benefits to your site. An example would be WikiPedia.

Wikipedia is considered a HIGHLY authoritative site given the vast amount of information it contains. If you were to provide a website or blog that contributes important information, you might be able to score a link from a Wiki article. Even though WikiPedia uses the rel-nofollow tag, it would still provide a substantial increase in traffic for a trending topic.

Getting links

I wrote a detailed article about the various types of links and how to get them for your site, so I won’t go into it here, but I did want to to mention a couple of things. Getting backlinks to your site is very important. Hub authorities are great for this because they allow you to interact with users that share common interests while also providing them with information that they can subscribe to.

Generally speaking, you want to maximize your coverage for your website. There are tons of services out there that allow you to share all sorts of information. Obviously, not everybody uses the same services, so you want to spread your site across as many as you can handle to ensure that everyone can search for and find your information. More traffic=more income.

Services

Authority hubs are similar to social bookmarking sites, but since I have a separate section planned for that, I don’t want to confuse the two. Take a look at the next two pages to see the two service sites I use for my site.

<< Back to Web 2.0 Forward to MyBlogLog >>

Site Creation – Memberships

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen them before–store memberships, clubs and mailing lists. It seems like you can’t go anywhere these days without being offered to sign up for this or sign up for that. As much as this might be irritating to you, don’t take it personally. These businesses are not out to steal your information or upset you in any way. They’re practicing a great business technique that really works!

Offer member incentives


When you run a business, especially one online, you have a unique opportunity to increase customer retention when you offer your them the ability to become members of your website or blog. They not only feel like they belong, but you are able to offer them the latest news, product updates, special discounts and everything in-between. As an example, on my site, you can sign up to the newsletter that I offer. This allows me to communicate just about anything I think you’d be interested in later on down the road.

The reason this is so important is that you may not come back to my site for a long time because you’re not a regular reader, but if you get updates through email, you’re not going to miss anything. Plus, I can offer you the latest tools right when I find out about them.

If you run an ecommerce site, you really want people to become members of your store because you’re inventory is most likely always changing, so it’s even more important for you to get those updates out. This will increase sales and make the customer feel more important. Offer people discounts, free stuff, special “members-only” items, etc. and you’ll win a customer for life!

Managing members

Every site structure is different, so managing your members can be everything from easy to difficult. What you don’t want to do is mis-manage them. This is especially true of email subscribers. You never want to given the impression that you send spam email. You also don’t want to have a huge list of members only to sit on it and not do anything for them.

Staying connected means sending out information, promotions and updates regularly. You’ll need to cater specific needs to your members based completely on the industry that your business is focused in. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, you’ll want to make sure that your updates and promotions are geared around style trends and seasons. You can offer great deals on summer clothing in the winter and vice versa.

Notes

I use a company called Aweber to manage all of my newsletters and mailing lists. Not only do they manage all of your members, but you can create any type of marketing materials you want! You can also setup automatic messaging to send out emails whenever you choose.

Do not waste any more time on this topic! You need to start turning your customers and web traffic into members of your business today!

<< Back to Security Roles Forward to Site Creation >>

Site Creation – Security Roles

· Brandon Hann

No matter how large or small your company is, security should be a top priority. While you might not be managing hundreds of thousands of user’s credit card numbers, it is important to protect what data you do manage. When you run a website or a blog system, there are various security roles you need to configure.

What are security roles?

Some systems refer to them as user roles or membership roles. Essentially, when you have multiple people working on single items or a website as a whole, everybody is responsible for specific duties and tasks. For example, you would not want a blog contributor to have access to edit user accounts. Speaking of blogs, let’s take a look at the security roles in WordPress:

  1. Administrator – This user role has complete access to the entire system. Admins can do anything within WordPress including adding, deleting and changing all user accounts, blog posts, comments, links and pages. This is usually the blog owner and should only be access by use or someone you trust.
  2. Editor – Editors have complete control over all content such as links, categories, comments, posts and pages but they have no configuration access for the blog system nor can they create or delete user accounts. This role would usually go to someone who’s just there to moderate your blog.
  3. Author – Authors can write and publish posts without review from an Editor, but can only edit the posts they’ve created. They can also only manage the comments left on their posts. This role is designed for users which need to publish blog posts, but do not need to manage content they didn’t create.
  4. Contributor – Contributors are similar to authors except they cannot publish any posts. They can only submit posts for review by either an Editor or an Administrator. If you would like people to be able to submit their own writings to your site, give them this access.
  5. Subscriber – Visitors to your site can register (provided you allow them to) on your site and this account role will give them access to leave comments on any posts and modify their own user profile. Subscribers have no other access to the blog. There is an option in WordPress to force users to register to leave comments.

You should become familiar with each of these roles and what permissions they give to each user. You don’t want to be surprised later to discover that one of your users has more access than they need.

Benefits

If you’re the only person running your business/website, you will not see any benefit in creating various security roles. However, it’s important to understand your backend system and what types of controls you have over it because in the future, you may expand and require the help of others to maintain everything.

More often than not, you find in businesses where users are sharing their usernames and password to various systems to gain more access when they need it. This is very dangerous because all it takes is one person who knows what they can do with that access and your entire company can come down in one fell swoop.

Just like you lock your doors at night, never take for granted the security of your website and system software. It could mean the difference between a secured business and no business.

<< Back to Portals Forward to Memberships >>

Site Creation – Portals

· Brandon Hann

Business portals generally provide web-based access for authorized users to core functions of a business. In the past, businesses opened at 9 and closed at 5. When the lights went off, so did your work. You went home and forgot about everything for a while and nothing needed to be done until the next day.

In today’s business world, things are not so serene! Due to huge advances in technology, we now rely on everything 24/7 and this includes our emails, files, contacts, orders and general processes. If you’re running a business online, you need to be ready for anything at any time. Business portals are designed to do just that. Better yet, they help streamline your operations.

Better Communication

Your organization can always use a better and more efficient way to work. Creating a portal for your company can consolidate backend functions that would normally require multiple software programs (and probably personell) to manage. When you have constant access to all of these features, you can get the information you’re looking for whether you’re travelling, with a customer, at the office or at home.

Improve Productivity

Unlike the past where business hours dictated your personal hours and family time, the world we live in now requires our time like never before. To make up for this lost time, most people prefer to work from home. This way, they can spend time with their children while tracking sales reports from the early morning. Studies have shown that if an employee works from home, they are likely to become more productive because they’re in their own comfort zone and are generally stress free.

By offering a portal within your company, you’re also offering a new collaborative way for team members to share ideas and work on projects. What used to take days of mailing revisions back and forth and waiting hours for travelling employees to arrive at their destinations, can now take minutes over the Internet. Imagine having all of your employees logged in to the company portal from wherever they are in the world and be able to provide the same level of quality without having to be in the same room!

Improve Partner Relationships

Your company might be working globally, but not everyone in the world works on your schedule. Business portals allow your far off partners and clients to access your company when it’s convenient for them! You can even provide them with various levels of access that pertain to their specific requirements. This way, they can update needed information without you having to even be awake.

Improve Customer Relations

Being able to track customer’s buying habits and preferences allows you to stay in-tune with your customers. Provide them what they’re looking for better than you competitors and you’ll win every time. Customer experience is the number one focus when it comes to retention.

Portal Software

  1. DynaPortal – This company provide portal software online. You can choose from over 50 web-based applications to help manage your business.
  2. BroadVision – They offer portal services to large companies and allow you to completely customize your web interfaces with multi-lingual tools and applications.
<< Back to Current Relationship Management (CRM) Forward to Security Roles >>

Site Creation – Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

· Brandon Hann

Managing relationships with your clients and sales prospects is a challenge within itself. The moment you lose sight of goals for satisfying your client’s needs, you begin to lose sight of your company’s overall objective. CRM for the most part involves goals for acquiring new customers by attracting and winning them over, retain existing clients, winning back former clients and reducing marketing and customer service costs.

With technology, performing these tasks becomes easier and more streamlined. In the past, a suite of software and hardware tools were need to manage your company’s customer relationships. However, “cloud computing” has now taken over as the go-to format for this task. By utilizing web-based software through companies that offer these services, your company benefits from not having to pay initial startup costs for a CRM system.

CRM Key Benefits

  • Streamlined sales and marketing processes
  • Higher sales productivity
  • Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
  • Improved service, loyalty, and retention
  • Increased call center efficiency
  • Higher close rates
  • Better profiling and targeting
  • Reduced expenses
  • Increased market share
  • Higher overall profitability
  • Marginal costing

Is this for me?

Unfortunately CRM software is not just something you buy, install it and then sit back to watch your company improve overnight. While software can surely help you meet that goal, it requires hard work and most of all, dedication from a team of valuable employees. Collecting information from your clients is only worth your time and money if it’s used correctly.

Before you set out in this venture, your company needs to decide what data it needs to pull and how it is to be used. As an example, if you were a clothing company, you would want to study your customer’s spending habits at particular times of the year. Since the clothing industry revolves around styles, seasons and trends, this information is extremely valuable to ensure that you’re offering the best products to your customers, but more importantly, at the right time!

If you ever wondered why stores ask you for your birth date, your phone number, zip code, etc. it’s because they’re “mining” you for bits of information that can help them sell to you better. Even store security cameras that were once only used to catch thieves are now being used to watch how people navigate stores and find things (or not). All of this data is helpful to everyone involved in the company from the product buyer to the person that stocks the shelves.

In the online world, things are a bit different, but the rules generally apply. How you design your website such as page layout, colors, links and more will ultimately define how your customers interact with it. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to find out more about where people are clicking on your site, where they came from, how long they stayed on your pages and the list goes on. As an example, if you sold a product that for some reason was selling much better to people in Finland than the United States, you might want to consider creating a second version of your site in the Finnish language. You will drastically improve your sales to those customers in Finland who could not read your English page.

Getting started

The costs associated with setting up a CRM solution can vary greatly depending on your desired results. CRM is a service and much like advertising, it doesn’t come with a sticker price. You can spend as little or as much as you wish, but also like advertising, you get what you pay for. Large companies can expect to have a CRM budget of around $500,000 while very large companies have been known to spend over $10 million!

Small businesses and/or small website operations can of course forgo having CRM teams and multi-thousand dollar budgets by simply opting to introduce some basic CRM software in their tool set. Even software such as Microsoft Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager can perform basic customer relationship management tasks.

When you’re a small business, the goal is to maintain a relationship with your clients. You do this by sending out newsletters, monthly updates, special offers, birthday cards, etc. As an example with my site, I have RSS feeds that users can bookmark so every time I post content or make updates, they get the information without having to come back to my site to look for it. I also offer a monthly newsletter to anyone who signs up at my site. This newsletter is really a way to condense monthly updates while offering new information and promotional items that aren’t on my site.

Customer surveys are a great way to interact with clients. You can offer people discounts the next time they shop with you if they are willing to answer some basic questions. This way, you not only get the information you’re after, but you may also gain a lifetime customer!

Online CRM

As mentioned above, cloud computing has really taken off lately. Cloud computing is basically a set of online tools that would normally be spanned across 3-5 software programs installed on your computer. For example, instead of using Outlook for your email, you use webmail from your company domain. For CRM, there are a plethora of online services that offer tool to manage your customer base. One of the larger ones is SalesForce.com. They offer services starting at just $5 per month.

The advantage of online CRM solutions, besides the fact that you don’t have to buy and rely on software, is the ability to grow your needs only when your business grows. You don’t have to buy one $5,000 package for the 5 clients that you have. You can start out small and add tools as needed.

More information

These sites have much more information on this topic and they’re worth a look if you’d like to move forward with a CRM plan.

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