For more information on the Vest Rest go to VestRest.net
They Say That An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
April 11, 2008 – 9:36 am
They say than an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but is that really true in today’s world? Find out today on our podcast….
They Say You Need To Clean Your Carpets Once A Year
April 4, 2008 – 9:24 am
I’ve heard for years that you need to get your carpets professionally cleaned at least once a year, but I didn’t think it was that necessary. On today’s show we talk with Samson Rollins of Royalty Steamers who tells us exactly why getting your carpet cleaned is so important…and I was surprised at how important it is.
They Say That Once You Go To A Chiropractor You Have To Keep Going Back Forever
March 28, 2008 – 3:08 pm
I have heard over and over in the course of my 33 years that once you start going to a chiropractor, you have to keep going back forever. I, myself, enjoy a good chiropractic adjustment and keep going back because I have a fairly hazardous lifestyle and need the help, but for normal people, what is the real deal? Do regular people need to see a chiropractor every week for the rest of their lives? Find out when we interview Dr Matthew Hull. (Sorry for calling you Nathan!)
Automating Your Email Newsletter
March 28, 2008 – 9:08 am
One of our favorite ways of using technology to connect customers to business is the use of RSS feeds, blogs, and email broadcast services to effectively automate delivery of your message to your desired audience.
It works like this:
We set up a blog or an RSS feed enabled website for you. We also set up an email broadcast system to capture that RSS feed information, format it for emailing, and send automatically to anyone that has given you an email address. Once the system is set up, all you have to do is go to your site twice or three times a month, write a relevant article on your industry, and your message will be emailed to everyone on the list. The email will have a link to your website and a synopsis of your article. Your customers will click the link and come back to your site, every week. If your messages and offers are compelling, your customers will buy from you over and over again.
If you’d like to profit from this kind of automated emailing system, give us a call. 801 979 7277.
Your Site Does Actually Need to Be Pretty
March 26, 2008 – 5:24 pm
I have been seeing a rash of poorly designed or just plain ugly web sites recently. One theory for it is that those that design them are just bad designers. Another is that they are good designers but don’t know how to put together a good site. The last is that design just doesn’t matter. Some people even think that the only important concept to consider when designing your site is search engine optimization.
Let’s take these on one at a time…
Bad designers exist. I, myself, am a good designer. I don’t consider myself a great designer, but I would give myself a good rating. My sites are clean, up to date, and are easy to manage and update. Some of my best work has been sites I have created from start to finish, including logos. The bottom line is: there is no excuse for using a bad designer. If you don’t know if someone is good or bad, find a friend or three and ask them what they think of the designer’s portfolio. If your friends don’t like the designs, don’t use the designer.
If you have a good designer who has done good logo work and good marketing work for you, keep them! They are not that easy to find. The only issue is this: they aren’t web designers, they are graphic designers. Occasionally you can find one person that is both, but generally a good graphic designer can do a website, but they aren’t really a web programmer. My suggestion in this case is keep your designer and find a programmer to compliment the designs and make you a good looking, functional, search engine friendly web site.
Next, let’s talk about whether or not design matters. My sarcastic remark is that web design doesn’t matter - in 1992. Anytime after 1992, design matters. In 1992 you could put up anything and it was marvelous, mostly because at the time there just wasn’t that much graphic content on the World Wide Web. If you live in the world of 2008, you need a smartly designed website. Why? Because it matters to your customers if your site is good looking or not.
What are your web surfing habits? How much credibility do you give to a web site that looks bad or is poorly designed? Do you want to buy products from sites that look terrible? How impressed are you at a professional that has a site that looks like this one: http://www.lanyardsupply.com
Lastly, the biggest myth is that it only matters what the search engines think about your website. Let’s just look at the logic behind that…
If you get 10 million individual visitors every day to your website and it is poorly designed, loads slowly, has irrelevant content, but mostly looks ugly, how many people do you think you’ll convert to customers? 1%? 2%? That is still really good conversion…Ok, so you convert 100,000 a day. Who gets those kind of numbers? No one.
Reality is that if your site is ugly, you won’t even convert 1%. And how much traffic does your site really have? 100 unique visitors a day? Maybe a thousand? If you can’t convert even 1% of those visitors, why do you have a web site? Even if your page is the number one ranking in Google for your specific key words, who cares if you can’t convert those clicks to customers?
At a minimum level you need to have a visually pleasing site. You should have a compelling offer so you can gather the name and email of your potential customers. You should have contact information on every page. But mostly, you need a site that is visually pleasing to at least half of the people that come to your site.
Collecting Information From Potential Customers
March 25, 2008 – 4:29 pm
I met with a man the other week that has a website that has over 250,000 unique visitors every month. He’s in a fairly specific industry and his website, without disclosing too much, is a small directory website with less than 300 businesses listed on his site. He’s had a great run, does a magazine to boot, but wanted to expand his web presence with some other something to make money with all of that traffic…but what?
I asked, “Are you capturing your visitor’s information?”
“No,” was the answer.
Now allow me to rant. One of the most simple and easy things you can do to boost the revenue of your site is to start capturing the name and email address of as many people as you can get your little hands on. In today’s world of internet and online marketing, the best asset you can have is a huge database of people that you can easily communicate with and sell things to (think email).
I realize that this is Internet 101, but there are so many sites I go to that don’t even attempt to entice me with any kind of offer, even if it is as simple as receiving a free newsletter. I sign up for some of those, and I’m an internet guy…
If you have a website and you aren’t collecting data (read email addresses) from as many people as you can, you are missing the boat and your site isn’t performing as well as it could for you.
What can you do with an email database of 250,000 people? I will leave that to your mind to figure out, or if you’d like to partner on a solution, I have a long list of them I’d love to share with you for a piece of the pie…
Until next time, happy collections!
Relevant Content
March 24, 2008 – 3:55 pm
The web is huge. I remember when the web wasn’t very big. I’m an old AOL and local BBS user and I remember when the web just wasn’t that big. Ten years ago the web wasn’t big. Now it is huge. Hundreds of millions of users going through hundreds of millions of web sites all searching for one thing: relevant content.
Let me give you an example. This afternoon I really wanted to see what is happening with the Utah Jazz so I did a Google search for Utah Jazz. The first couple of pages to return were the local news outlets; the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune. I read a couple of articles and then I wanted to find a schedule of upcoming games so I went straight to UtahJazz.com. I know they have a great front page schedule so I don’t have to sift through pages to find the information that I want.
To recap, I went to three different sites to get the information I wanted, and paged through at least 8 pages to get to it. And I knew what I was looking for…
The web is huge, and your website will get lost if you don’t have relevant content. Once you have relevant content there are a couple of ways you get traffic from the web, the biggest being search engine links. As far as my understanding goes, search engines look for three things when looking at your site to see if it is worth putting in their pages: content, links out, and links in. That’s it. That’s the big secret of SEO. Now you know everything you need to know to get your page to number one in the search engines….
If it were really that easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing the same thing?
Well, not necessarily. Are you writing original content for your website? Chances are your competition isn’t either. If you did, what would happen to your ranking in the search engines? It would go up…
I used to own a barter business and I had a website that no longer exists. On the site I had been hosting news about what was available to barter for my members, for at least a year and a half before I got the idea of doing a weekly podcast about barter. Before I did my podcast, my page rank was 0. Google didn’t even have my site in their pages. Three weeks after producing my podcast and putting it on about a dozen different podcasting sites, my page rank was a three. That’s a pretty wild jump for a site in three weeks. What happened? What changed? I had created relevant content.
Google went in and saw that I was updating my information, and since I was providing written transcripts of the show it was seen by Google as relevant content.
Three weeks is all it took. Relevant content was the key. What happened?
For the next year any time you went to any of the search engines and put in barter trade utah or oregon or any combination of two or more, my site or links to my site were the first two entire pages of links. Two pages of links to my content.
How much more business could you get if your website or links to your content were the first two pages of Googles search content? That’s what this is about…getting you more business via your website.
If you are in a niche business like bartering you can capitalize on the complete lack of relevant content on the net by starting a blog, a podcast, or a video podcast, and broadcasting your message with the use of RSS Feeds. I’m not going to go in to the technical aspects of these things in this post, but if you want more info call us and we will fill you in on what all of this means. 801 979 7277
We are experts at taking you and your message and making it in to relevant content for the search engines, and ultimately your customers, the top of the game.
Flash Websites and Flash on the Web
March 19, 2008 – 1:27 pm
There is good news for those of you designers that love to make Flash websites…
Flash is now completely indexable in all of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. That means all holds are off for those of you that love to use Flash in your web designs. Click the link above if you want to see the whole article.
I have a good friend that is probably the best Flash programmer I have ever met. He may not be the best at animating in Flash, but he isn’t trying to be either. He built a website entirely in Flash that converted 87% of the visitors to customers. Think about that…87% of the people that went to his site became cash paying customers. His secret? Discreet use of Flash. I’m not going to say anything more about his secrets because he would probably come over and kick me in the shins or something, but the important thing is that you don’t have to be afraid to use Flash in your website anymore or be afraid to build your ENTIRE site in Flash.
So, have fun creation your next new Flash website…
Here’s a quick flash header I did for one client:
http://team2power.com/tableofinfluence/
or here
They Say Spraying For Bugs Is Toxic
March 19, 2008 – 1:12 pm
Have you ever wondered if spraying for bugs can give you cancer or something? Ever wonder if you really do need to keep your pets indoors after they spray your lawn? On today’s show we talk with an expert, Carl Wilson of Extrol, about the reality and the myths of pesticide and herbicide and what you can do to protect yourself from bad things happening to you because of improper use of sprays. Tune in for more…
