Now along the way, you’ve probably realized that these horribly long URLs you get from Google URL builder (which identify at least your source, medium and campaign variables) is not something you can fit into a print ad or a billboard.

As an art director, I maintain that copywriters (and their long-winded approach to advertising) are the enemy. It’s only slightly facetious to cite the struggle of getting 1,200 words to fit into a 4″x3″ ad, making sure the type is legible, and leaving appropriate space for imagery.

Add to that a URL that’s a mile and a half long.

In print advertising, where you’re relying on users to manually type the URL to your site, it would be appropriate to keep the URL short and sweet. You could use the URL plainly without worrying about measuring traffic from these ads, but most of us would add a short extension in our print ads like, “/city” or “/pubname,” and create individual landing pages for these ads in order to measure the traffic these ads drive to our website.

Unfortunately, you’re left with an ugly mess in your Google Analytics account if you have a ton of these, and you’re having to create landing pages for every ad. It can be a real waste of time if your intent is just to send traffic to a static page on your site… or even the homepage. Neither will your print ads provide the traffic metrics that you’ll see from digital placements and Google URL builder.

Until now.

If you’re a geek like me, you’ve relaunched several websites the right way. You’ve got your head around Apache’s mod_rewrite and are familiar with the .htaccess file. You’ve probably set up permanent 301 redirects from old content to new content. If so, keep reading. If not, hire me.

In the following example, we’re going to assume you’ve purchased a couple outdoor boards with different creative in 3 different markets. I’m going to illustrate these examples using the bare minimum variables you could potentially include in your URL. We’re going to be placing boards in Los Angeles, Austin, and Fort Lauderdale. The LA and Ft. Lauderdale boards have the same tagline, “now hiring,” while the Austin board reads, “job fair in your area.” The URL extensions on the billboards read, “/la, /au, and /fl,” respectively. With URL builder, we’ve decided to call the source, “outdoor,” the medium will be the city and the campaign will show the creative. You can adjust these variables to suit your campaign needs.

Here’s the redirect formula that will allow all of the imaginary short URL extensions you’ve included in your print and outdoor advertising provide the same traffic metrics you’re seeing from your digital placements:

Redirect 301 /la /?utm_source=outdoor&utm_medium=losangeles-001&utm_campaign=now-hiring
Redirect 301 /au /?utm_source=outdoor&utm_medium=austin-001&utm_campaign=job-fair
Redirect 301 /fl /?utm_source=outdoor&utm_medium=fortlauderdale-001&utm_campaign=now-hiring

When people see these billboards and type http://yourwebsite.com/la into their browser, the 301 redirect will send them to http://yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=outdoor&utm_medium=losangeles-001&utm_campaign=now-hiring. And in your Google Analytics account, you will find these visitors under the Traffic Sources>Campaigns tab.

Congratulations. You’ve saved yourself a ton of time and made your traffic reports more comprehensive.

Since 2002, MediaCross has helped MSC meet and exceed its recruitment levels each year. MediaCross provides much of MSC’s primary communication via a very intuitive recruitment website. Information about the annual recruitment strategy, all advertising, career fair planning and hosting, outreach activities to schools and more is available to an average of 50 thousand site visitors each month.

The latest iteration of sealiftcommand.com was relaunched on January 8th, 2010. I had the privilege of being involved in this project from the ground up. The development of an enterprise level site was an amazing experience and sometimes extremely challenging. I’d like to share some of the details of what it was like to develop an enterprise level site using WordPress as a content management system.

Challenges

WordPress by default is an CMS optimized for  blogging. We had to extend the core functionality of WordPress by developing a theme that allowed for authoring content that occurs in the future, and applying a couple hooks into WordPress’ query loop that allowed for an expiration of specific content.

Search engine optimization was a chore before because every page was a separate HTML file on the old site. This did not allow us to be as nimble as we would have liked and content revisions were quite tedious.

There was a ton of existing content that users and search engines were previously accessing. It was important to ensure that they new the old content hadn’t disappeared; just moved.

The old site was built using old HTML conventions, such as nested tables instead of DIVs and CSS positioning.

Solution

I designed a site that took advantage of some of the cool features available in modern browsers, such as transparent PNGs and header image replacements that allowed me to not only provide search engines with the necessary content to appropriately index the site, but allow users to have a very cool, highly visual experience.

I used recent photography, rotated random images and included category specific thumbnails to provide each user with a fresh-looking site upon each visit. I also anchored the main navigation of the site to the very top of the page and the HTML so both users and search engines could easily access the entire site.

I then took the site and themed it for use in WordPress. This allows all of our non-HTML proficient staff access to update necessary content on the site. Some of the custom hooks were accomplished by a mixture of free third-party plugins and some original queries. Things like this allow the career fair and current opening waterfalls to work. Each open position is authored using an expiration date, and it will automatically fall off the site once the position reaches it’s closing date.

I also took advantage WordPress’ built-in RSS feeds to syndicate content by specific categories, like a career fair feed and a now hiring feed. Then, by using Google’s Feedburner, the site automatically notifies the maritime_career Twitter account.

Between SEO, paid ad placement, organic link-building, and social network integration, it’s safe to claim the new MSC site is very Web 2.0.

Success

There’s already some early success to tout. Within the first few hours, we were ranked on the first page of Google search results for “maritime employment.”

WordPress

A state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability, WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. Indeed, this CMS is open-source and free to implement. And I think with MSC I’ve proven that it can be used as an enterprise CMS solution.

Think of how much you’ll spend in licensing on SharePoint to do the same thing. $40K a year? WordPress is free, more feature-rich, more extend-able, and clearly the better CMS solution for a public-facing website.

This all started back in August around the time I went out to shoot Washington Avenue in my St. Louis by Type project. We landed some new business at MediaCross, and I started drawing again. Here are some of the products of the past 3 months:

I found myself frustrated in a couple instances were people would call meetings for no other reason than calling a meeting together. So, I began to doodle. This turned into a short-lived Twitter meme known as the L33t-z00, which was a tennis match of drawings between @DetailedGhost and I.

The idea was to take L33t-Speak and represent these social acronyms and nonsense words, “LOL, ROFL, Pwned and others,” by creating animal caricatures of them.

Meanwhile I was steadily working on several other real projects. The first being a recruitment micro-site that’s programmed all in Flash for the Ascension Health ministry. It’s a pretty kick-ass application.  It was built to utilize some pretty hefty traffic from social networks via AddThis, Twitter & LinkedIn. Flash also allowed us to re-imagine our metrics goals, because we could pick and choose exactly what user-interactions we wanted to monitor. I’m happy to say that this site has finally launched and is going to be a huge success with support from a huge social media campaign, online banner ads, emails, job board postings, fliers, posters and brochures. Check it:

http://www.youaresymphony.com

Credits:

Site Design & Intro Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
CMS & Flash Programming: Adam Kellogg
Account Team: Jennifer Umali & Connie Risby
Copywriting: Rich Heend

Latest feedback: “It looks awesome!!!!!! I looked at it last night! Thank you for everything!”

— Jennifer Umali

During the time that the Symphony site was in production, my friend Kelly asked me to put together a website for her new floral design company. We talked about the idea a little bit, and she gave me some ideas about color’s she liked and told me the name of her company is, “The Crimson Petal.” That pretty much stuck in my mind as I created a logo for her. I was able to quickly draw a nice lotus-like icon by hand, thanks to my recent doodling practice I’d been getting in. I brought it into Illustrator and refined the shapes enough to make it replicable and passed her an email.

A big thing she asked for was “Asian-inspired,” which to me meant: “make sure you show off my flowers and not your design.” We got together and discussed business cards, which I ended up ordering for her. The great thing about Kelly is that she was really interested in what I had initially done with her logo, and trusted me to run with my creativity all the way to the finish line. I couldn’t have felt more free to create and she clearly got some really elegant cards out of it. I was able to pull off a great pearl foil on the white card front that just adds so much depth and texture. If I had it to do all over again, I might consider letterpress, but I’m really happy with the way they turned out, and Kelly is also.

The Crimson Petal website is a display of testimonials; both in the photographs of Kelly’s floral design and the words of her clients. I decided to bring her product to the forefront and created a slide show of testimonial posts. She additionally wanted to maintain a blog. This is not usually something many clients ask for, and it was refreshing to know that I was not going to have to spend a ton of time explaining the importance of fresh, relevant website content.

It’s actually a pretty simple site design. But, since it’s programmed in WordPress, Kelly gets to take advantage of all of the built-in social networking functionality of this framework. Her blog  automatically notifies her Twitter followers of a new post, which she’s able to track with bit.ly link-shortening analytics. Users can comment freely on her blog posts, and Kelly can engage a captive audience at virtually every turn. I wish her all the success in the world, and can’t wait to see the floral arrangements she designs for my wedding.

http://www.thecrimsonpetal.com

Credits:

Site Design & Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
Copywriting: Kelly Jurotich

Last, but definitely not least, the Dollar Bin website creation went underway last month. Dave DeGuire, former bar manager of Rue 13, moved his promotional efforts and DJ talent over to the Atomic Cowboy. Dave’s always done a whole lot of social networking. I remember helping him build the first Dollar Bin & Rue 13 myspace pages. Around that time I had just finished the Rue 13 site revisions, taking it into Flash & XML.

Every week at Dollar Bin, the staff walk around taking candid shots of all the party people. And every week, Dave posted those photos on MySpace for everyone to try and remember the night (especially helpful for those grossly intoxicated few).

As MySpace is quickly heading the way of the dinosaur, Dave had moved a lot of redundant photo updates to Facebook. He was literally doing twice the work he used to do; cropping, sizing, colorizing and logo-izing. I recommended that Dave get a home-base website. He was doing a ton of work between Twitter, Facebook & MySpace to bring people together, and was falling short of bringing that party together somewhere… online.

So that’s exactly what we did. I had a talk with Dave about desired functionality, and then took the reigns. Photos took center stage. I incorporated an opening slide show of featured images, and a gallery page to house the thousands of Dollar Bin photos. Next came social media integration. I added links to the Dollar Bin Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages. Then I made sure that all new posts to the site would automatically notify the Dollar Bin Twitter followers.

I also included a Tweet-up on the site for people that use the #dollarbinstl hashtag. Now DeadAsDisco, the Dollar Bin DJ is able to take requests via Twitter. And Dave is able to post notices about last-minute drink specials right on the front of the site from his iPhone. And everyone else that wants to just shout-out can leave their mark on the site.

This site is definitely a winner: http://www.dollar-bin.com

Credits:

Site Design & Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
Logo Design: Jason Kanzler

And if all of this weren’t enough, I’m writing this blog at 7:45AM after being up all night launching website(s).

Theme Demonstration: Modern Art v3.0
Release Date: 10/1/2009
Tags: two columns, fixed width, white, neutral, lightbox galleries
Description: Clever Event Manager is a two-column, widget friendly WordPress theme, customized to display photos with lightbox.
Plugins:

• Simple Post Thumbnails v1.5
• All-in-one SEO Pack v1.6.6.2
  
• Lightbox Gallery v0.5
• Contact Form 7 v2.0.5
• Really Simple CAPTCHA v1.0
• WordPress Thread Comment v1.4.9.4

Modern Art v3.0 WordPress Theme Author:
Bobby Duebelbeis

Twitter Blog will not only tweet your blog post, but it will also check hourly for replies to that tweet and turn it into a comment on that blog post. It also uses the bit.ly API for URL shortening and adds link generated to your bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

This is in active development so there will be frequent updates. Sometimes multiple per day. If you find any bugs or have a suggestion: twitter_blog@milkdogdesign.com

Current Features

• Tweets about your blog post on posting
• Creates a bit.ly link when your blog post is tweeted and adds it to your bit.ly link history
• Checks for replies to the tweet hourly and converts them to comments
• Direct Message is sent to the user notifying them their tweet has been added to your blog post
• Comment will be moderated and administrator will be notified according to system settings.

Future Enhancements

• Customizable Tweet format
• Use the Twitter user’s image for the comment image
• Add Twitter hashtags to tweets for individual posts

Thank you WordPress Dashboard! I love you.

It’s few and far between that I actually see a group of musicians that I really think are doing something truly novel. At the risk of losing all of my scene points and all credibility as a hipster, I have to admit; most of what I listen to is derivative. It’s not like I’m a Clear Channel fan-boy; getting new-metal, emo, or indie rock wrapped in corporate sponsorship crammed into my ears day in and day out. It’s just that most of the music I enjoy borrows from something that has already been done. It’s not dishonest of musicians or other artists to share ideas as long as there’s a conscious acknowledgment to what musicians regularly call, their roots. That’s not stealing sheep. That’s collaboration.

Music is a form of communication. Good artists struggle with being able to effectively engage an audience and maintain interest in their art long enough to communicate the intent of the work. Writing music involves conscious deliberation of the messages by which an artist has been influenced, the artist’s contribution/message, the media the artist selects, and the audience. Technically, this task seems daunting. It is inspiring for most of us to observe an artist that makes this process seem easy.

I recently had the pleasure of happening upon the live act of an instrumental duo, El Ten Eleven. The musicianship of the pair was astonishing, but the creative approach they take in communicating their music made me a new fan. I shot a short video with my iPhone to help explain how amazing the show was.

I apologize in advance for the poor audio quality towards the end of the clip; it’s not the room or the band. It’s the mic on iPhone 3GS not being able to handle the kick drum. I had a few adult beverages too, but that doesn’t excuse the poor camera work. Admittedly, this video doesn’t do them a ton of justice. I suggest you see El Ten Eleven live at your next opportunity. You’ll be doing yourself a favor and experiencing some truly novel art.

Special thanks to @DetailedGhost for inspiring me to share this post.

Robin: “I was wondering if this was you, Sean. My purse was stolen and your card was in it. So, I am going from memory. Sorry. You said to text you and I emailed. Robin.

Me: “This is not Sean. If this number was on a card with Sean’s name, I’d really like to see it.”

Robin: “Nope… I was trying to remember his number. I obviously remembered incorrectly. Sorry. Robin.”

Me: “That’s okay. Sorry about your purse. I hope you get in touch with Sean.”

Robin: “Thanks so much. Robin.”

Me: “Sean wouldn’t happen to be a web designer that you’re trying to reach because you want to hand him a huge check to design your website, would he? If so, forget Sean and meet, Bobby.”

Robin: “No. It was not about web design, or I would give Bobby a go. Robin.”

Robin: “I wish I had a huge check to hand him! Robin.”

Me: “Well, when you do, check out my portfolio: http://www.duebel.me.”

Robin: “I WILL! THANKS! Robin.”

When Robin needs a website, I’m sure to get a text message. If not on the merit of the work in my portfolio, Robin will remember this conversation.

]]> http://www.duebel.me/never-miss-an-opportunity-to-promote-yourself/feed/ 0 http://www.duebel.me/3-essential-free-internet-marketing-tools/ http://www.duebel.me/3-essential-free-internet-marketing-tools/#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:56:28 +0000 BobbyD http://www.duebel.me/?p=816 I don’t usually do product recommendations or endorsements, but in the spirit of that recently-passed and beloved pitchman, Billy Mays, I am going to make a recommendation of 3 services that make my life easier as an internet marketer. Let’s start off slow.

On the free side of things, without too much hesitation, I can recommend Tweet Deck for both the Mac & iPhone (of course for the unfortunate, it’s available for Windows too). Not only does this allow the savvy internet marketer to keep in touch with his/her Twitter community, but Facebook updates are simultaneously possible too. This is the quintessential tool for building links to your content, your client’s content or anything else from which your followers could benefit. If the importance of gaining popularity and PageRank via link-building is lost on you, read what Google has to say about links and website reputation.

TweetDeck Features

• Tweet directly to both Twitter and Facebook from TweetDeck and share photos and links.
• Manage direct messages, @replies, create groups, and follow status updates on both Twitter and Facebook with a versitile multi-column layout that looks the same across all platforms.
• Observe trending topics in a tag cloud column called, TwitScoop.
• Save searches into columns and follow topics in real time.
• Preview short URLs, view photo thumbnails, watch and record video all within TweetDeck.
• Build your own links and track metrics with a built-in bit.ly URL shortener.
• Sync and backup TweetDeck between platforms.
• Dodge SPAM with the new SPAM flag function.

The next free tool is actually a suite of tools that will help you a variety of ways. It might be unfair claim to reference 3 essential internet marketing tools and then mention a suite of several products, but this may be the most comprehensive set you’ll ever use for free. Ever heard of Google?

Yup, that’s right. Google. Google allows you to manage search advertising campaigns and other paid placements with Adwords, monitor the success of your site’s organic search optimization with Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. I’m not going to be able to get into all of the features these products offer, but I can outline some of the most useful.

AdWords Features

• No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and their advertising network.
• Choose keywords and phrases related to your business, and pay only if people click your ads.
• Reach more customers in a vast advertising network, including AOL.com, Ask.com, Earthlink and NYTimes.com.
• Contextual targeting can automatically match your ads to webpages in our content network that are most relevant to your business.
• Measure and optimize your results with the Placement Performance Report, giving you the visibility into where all your ads appear.
• Define a custom local or regional area to target around your business for more efficient marketing expenditures.
• Get noticed on Google Maps with local business listings.

Webmaster Tools Features

• Get Google’s view of your site and diagnose problems. See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we’re having accessing it.
• Discover your link and query traffic.  View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with new link reporting tools.
• Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.
• Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let Google know how you would like the URLs they index to appear.

Analytics Features

• Advertising ROI:
  • Integration with AdWords and AdSense allows you to determine which keywords are most profitable and which sites generate the most revenue.
  • E-commerce reporting helps trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify your best revenue sources.
  • Track email campaigns, banner ads, offline ads and more with complete campaign tracking capabilities.
• Cross channel and multimedia tracking:
  • Internal site search allows you to find out what your customers are searching for and optimize your time to conversion.
  • Opt-in Benchmarking allows you to know whether your site is over or under-performing those in your industry.
  • Flash, video and social network application tracking.
• Customized reporting:
  • Advanced segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic and compare segment performance in side by side reports.
  • A drag and drop interface allows you to create, save, and edit custom reports that present the information you want to see organized in the way you want to see it.
  • Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that you can email to others.
  • Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
  • Plot multiple data points on a single graph for a faster analysis.
  • Export report data into Excel, CSV and tab delimited files.

Finally, and probably the paramount to all internet marketing is the ability to create unique content, on demand. If you don’t program your own website’s HTML or know how to set up blog, hire someone to do it for you. Spending the money on a Content Management System (CMS) is well worth the initial investment. This investment can be immense or very little depending on your needs and with all of the different CMS’s available in a Web 2.o world, choosing the right one for you can be very confusing. As I’ve promised FREE internet marketing essentials, we’ll stick with my favorite, WordPress.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

There are two ways to use WordPress. You can start a new blog on wordpress.com or you can deploy an open-source stand-alone version of the software on your own server and host the application yourself.

Most of what I do in CMS development is developed in the WordPress framework. There are several important reasons for this. There is virtually no overhead cost, as the WordPress core is free and open-source. It is also supported by a huge network of really intelligent programmers that develop plugins for the application that have allowed its features to expand well beyond the realm of blogging. Most full websites I create now are developed using WordPress as a CMS.

In contrast, here’s what you shouldn’t do:

If you’ve been around long enough to have experience with Microsoft CMS’s like SiteCore, Ektron and other .NET applications, and ugh… Sharepoint, you’ll know how little development support is provided for these systems. The cost of implementing these solutions is also insane when compared to a free, open-source solution. Between $1,000 monthly hosting fees and software licensing, you’re already in the ditch for almost $5,000 in start-up before you get to designing your website! This is probably why developers who work within these systems don’t share. If you need somethig customzied, the work your developer is doing is somewhat like re-inventing the wheel.

Content is king.

Once you’ve decided on a blog or website CMS, start writing. The most important thing to both your audience and Google is having fresh, relevant content. The days of brochure-ware sites are gone. Keep an update schedule and stick to it. I guess this actually makes you the most important marketing tool of all.