Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Well, we are getting close to wrapping up our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series and the year. This week we had our company and department wrap up meetings. We talked a lot about this year but even more about next year.

This year I, personally and professionally, made a few mistakes but with each mistake I make, I learn something. Making mistakes makes me better than I was before. We all make mistakes but what is most important is what we learn from them. If it wasn’t for mistakes, I wouldn’t be as confident that we were headed in the right direction.

Trying new things and failing fast in business

Try new things – My last job was run with the ‘this is how we have always done it’ mentality. New ideas were threatening. What if they didn’t work out?! Looking at them now 4 years later and things still seem about the same, except many of their customers have left. Of course you want to be dependable and stable but you also need to keep up with what your customers want, how they want information and knowing what is important to them.

Make mistakes early – If there is a new service, social network, product enhancement you want to try… try it early. Try it before the next guy does. Master it before everyone else is thinking about jumping on board. If it doesn’t work – you will know first and you can stop.

Trying something and failing can do more good than doing nothing – Don’t be paralyzed with ‘what ifs’. I am going to paraphrase (and butcher it) my friend Saul Colt says he doesn’t think we should listen to what everyone else does or says because everyone else is not remarkable. If you read the top 100 Twitter users’ posts about top 10 Twitter tips – you, at best, will be like them. To really stand out you need to be doing something different and better than the next person.

I am excited for 2012. I am excited to take what we have learned and apply it to making our company grow and I am excited, personally, to face on challenges and make some daring moves. I even look forward to a few mistakes I will have along the way. They keep me on my toes and make sure I am still growing as a person.

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Collaboration is one of those things that I usually take for granted working in Internet marketing. It’s like the opportunity to learn new things – if we’re not always learning new things and collaborating on a daily basis, there’s no way we could keep up with all the changes on the web. But it’s easy to forget just how much collaboration goes into every project, and how important it is to the success of the project as a whole.

Last week the design and development staff at Hall got together after work to talk about new things we’re interested in, what we’ve been learning recently, and bounce new ideas off each other. It’s something small, but it makes a big difference over time and helps us build better websites for all of our clients.

Something that most people don’t consider in choosing a company to build their website is what happens once the work is finished. The web is always changing, and there are always new ways to do things better and faster (translation: cheaper) – so what happens once your site is built?

Maintaining your site is like getting your oil changed

A pretty common method is to wait until your website is so far out of date that you have to start from scratch, and some people are confused in thinking this is the best way to get your money’s worth out of a site. In reality, it’s a lot more like never getting your oil changed on your car and then buying a new one when it dies. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to keep up with the scheduled maintenance and have a car that lasts?

One of the ways that we help our clients keep their websites from falling out of touch is by keeping them in tune with all the new things we’re learning. That means that the new things we’ll learn on a project next month will get passed on to all of our other clients with similar websites – even if their website was built a year or two ago. If they want to stay on the cutting edge, they don’t have to wait to rebuild their website from scratch – they can add in features over time to make sure they stay ahead of their competition.

Collaborating on a Drupal upgrade – Tim saves the day!

A few weeks ago, we had the task of updating a Drupal CMS site to the latest version of Drupal 7. Up to this point, there was no upgrade path for the main SEO module, which means all of the client’s SEO data would have been lost. In fact, anyone upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 would be unable to migrate their SEO data (sidenote: it is estimated that well over 7 million sites use Drupal). Clearly this was a big problem, so we sat down and Tim wrote an upgrade path and submitted it back to the community for everyone to use. This was a lot of fun for us to do, but also had a lot of residual benefit for other members of the Drupal community as well as our clients who will eventually want to upgrade to Drupal 7.

Collaboration is a great thing for us, because it allows us to get better at what we do, pass on what we learn to our clients, and it gives us a great opportunity to save time so we can make every website and marketing plan better than the last. After all, Santa wouldn’t be able pull his sleigh with out help from Olive, the other reindeer, would he?

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Yesterday I completed my 2011 New Year’s Resolution!

Did you have a resolution this year? Did you complete it? Are you thinking about a new resolution for next year?

Last year, right around this time, I resolved that in 2011 I would start running again. I had gotten out of my normal work out routine and I knew I needed to do something that would be more of a long-term solution, so I committed to completing one 5k each month for the entire year.

I was nervous about this resolution because it was a year-long commitment; it felt big. But I started sharing my resolution with my friends and my family and most everyone seemed supportive. There were a few people who thought I was crazy and I am sure thought I would do it for a couple of months and then just stop. But it was also those people who gave me a little extra fire, like I had something to prove.

I quickly signed up for my first 5k in January so I couldn’t change my mind. I showed up and I finished. I felt good about that because I knew that I had already started reaching my goal. My time wasn’t the best and I walked a lot of it, but I had completed a 5k!

It’s like starting anything, whether you want to start using social media or start a blog, sometimes you just have to start. Then once you’ve started you can assess what you need to do to get better.

If you’re going to set some goals next year here are some things I that I learned that might be helpful:

• You need support. You need to have other people know what your goals are and believe in you. It’s hard to do it alone. If it weren’t for the familiar faces at the finish line or my running buddies I may not have pushed myself as hard. If you are setting goals for you and your team; make sure everyone is all on the same page.
• You need milestones. This particular resolution made it a bit easier to have milestones; I counted each month as a milestone. You can’t set a general goal, it needs to be specific and you need to understand when you’ll check in to assess where you are in accordance to the finish line. So if your goal is to have more revenue in 2012, decide how much more money you want to make and what dates you will check in to review whether you are on your mark or not.
• It’s a mental game. Just like most goals, it does require work to get there, but what I realized is that your head can sometimes be your biggest downfall. Maybe you’re not getting where you want fast enough or have had a fallback and then your brain does this, “Well, you’re failing or have already failed, so what’s the point with carrying on?” Most of the time this is when our New Year’s Resolutions fizzle out. But this is when you need to fight back and remember why you made that goal in the first place. Just like the end of a year marks a fresh start, remember that so does the end of a day. Sometimes I would get down on myself for not having the time to run between each monthly race and even during races sometimes I just wanted to stop and walk. But I remembered that I made this goal for a reason and that I had people that believed in me and it pushed me to carry on.
• Be proud of each step. Yesterday wasn’t the first time this year that I allowed myself to be proud of what I accomplished. I allowed myself to be proud every time I finished a race and completed a milestone. I was proud of myself the first time I ran the entire race without walking or when I beat my best time. It’s the small victories that led me to finishing my last race yesterday. Don’t wait until you have “succeeded” to be proud of yourself; be proud each time you make better decisions that will help you get closer to reaching your goal.
• You have to believe. There’s no point in making a goal for something that you don’t believe will be accomplished. You have to believe in yourself or, if you’re setting goals for your team, you have to believe in them. At the end of the day, I didn’t make the resolution for anyone else but myself, I needed to be my biggest supporter and I needed to believe that I could do it.

Are you thinking about your new year’s resolutions? What goals do you want to accomplish next year? Whatever they are, whether they are in business or personal goals, take into account the tips I noted above; stay committed and determined and be assured that you will complete your resolution. Good luck!

Enjoy more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

Google+ announced on Monday that they are now allowing businesses and brands to create their Google+ pages. For information on Google+ for business, please see the list of resources below.

What I want to talk about is the importance of claiming your business name on sites like Google+. Like many of you, the launch of Google+ makes me anxious – another presence to manage, create content for and try to build an online community on.

No one is sure what will become of Google+, if it will defeat Facebook or exactly how it is going to relate to search results. What we do know is that they sure are going to try and with the forces of Google behind them, there will be some impact.

If you don’t have a content strategy yet for Google+ or know how you are going to integrate it into your other marketing efforts, it is still important to grab your business name on Google+ page for branding purposes. This is also important for other popular social media sites you may not be participating on yet.

At this time, anyone can create a business page for anything they want without proof that that are associated with that URL or entity. Big brands will soon have a verification process but for many of us that will not apply. So in theory, anyone can set up a page under your business name and URL. I doubt it will turn into the Wild West but it makes sense to protect your brand before an issue arises.

We probably have all heard by now the struggles some businesses have had getting control of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts set up by a fan, an enemy or a rogue employee. Let’s not let that happen with Google+ too. Setting up a Google+ business page takes a matter of seconds. Trying to reclaim your business name by complaining to Google or the page creator could take hours, days, or even months.

Not ready to fully participate yet?

If you are not ready to participate on Google+ yet, that is fine. Set up your page, fill in the fields allotted and let it rest until you are ready.

Depending on your corporate voice you could:

• Leave a first status update that you set up the page but are working on the best way to use this new space
• Update your status with other ways people can currently connect with you
• Post links of some of your best older content from your site or blog that could use new eyeballs etc.

There are plenty of options on how to start your Google+ strategy but the first and most important thing is claim your space and protect your brand. Also, with Google+ brand pages you can create multiple pages. If you have a popular event, product or service that should stand alone from your business page – you should claim that too.

Resources on Google+ for businesses:

• Upcoming Hall Webinar – What are Businesses Supposed to do with Google+?
• Search Engine Land – Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More
• Google Blog – Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about
• Mashable – Google+ Launches Branded Pages
• SocialFresh – How To Create A New Google+ Page And Connect It To Google Search

Photo credit: Elke.Fleing