Category Archive: Articles

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-08-30

Posted on August 30, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-08-23

Posted on August 23, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization on a Budget

Posted on August 17, 2010 in: Search Engine Optimization|Post Comment

Regardless of your company size and history, a lot of your traffic is going to come from visitors who found your site from a search engine. Most startups don’t have a large budget to dedicated to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) expert, but the good news is you can achieve decent results without draining your funds by following a few basic principles of SEO and SEM.

1. Setup a Google Adwords Account

With AdWords you can have ads placed in Google’s listings based upon location and keywords. It is a pretty simple system, but you have to spend time really deciding what you are targeting. If you are a local business your ads should be targeted to a very specific location (city, county or region) rather than nationally. Also consider the context of the searches: if you are an auto parts store do your customers search for “auto parts” or do they search more specifically for “honda civic auto parts”. The Google Keywords Tool can help you find out who is searching for what, and how popular it is (the key is to find popular searches with low competition). You get a surprising amount of traffic from this so budget for a good amount each month, and increase it as you bring in more revenue.

2. Create Keyword Rich Content

Adding relevant content to your site can really help you out with search listings. You want this content to be very rich in the keywords you selected from #1 above. So if you are targeting “maryland widget repair” (for example) a page on the site with a title “Maryland Widget Repair” that talks about some key clients you’ve had, or current projects it will really help you out. Write your content and be sure to include those words, “Maryland widget repair”, multiple times in the content while making sure the content is still reader-friendly. Just putting a bunch of keywords in the content over and over nonsensically can actually can hurt you. The basic concept is that Google sees these key phrases mentioned over and over in your site and determines it is relevant to the user’s search. Over time (weeks, months, years) more people click on your site after searching for those phrases, and Google gives you an even higher rank because of it’s popularity.

3. Pay Attention to Page Titles

Page titles are extremely important for search engine optimization so use clear titles with keywords from item #2. Instead of a page titled “About Us”, it can be more effective to have a title such as (for an auto parts store as an example) “Honda Civic Parts Distributor - Exhaust, Suspension, Transmission | Acme Auto Parts, Inc.”. That title doesn’t have too much thought put into it (it is only an example) but you get the point - put your keywords in the title and make it count. Every page on your site should have a different title relevant to the content. So take the most common keywords from your page content and make sure they also appear in your title.

4. Social Marketing

Marketing through social networks is a relatively new tactic and for the most part does not return a lot of traffic directly. From our experience the best returns through social marketing are in combination with another marketing effort, and using social marketing to get people talking about that campaign. Think of how much Old Spice’s recent advertisements have blown up simply from people talking about the videos and sharing the links through various networks. The campaign is not based solely on social networking (i.e. the advertisements are not only available on Facebook), rather Facebook and other sites are used as an outlet for those marketing initiatives.

5. Continue to Grow

A website is never finished. If you haven’t looked at your site’s statistics, revamped your advertising, or added new content in a few weeks then you are falling behind. Make it a habit to continue to add relevant content to your site, tweak your ads based on what is most effective and to align with other marketing tactics, and keep track of any problem areas. Find any pages that visitors most commonly exit the site from and determine why those pages may cause them to decide to leave. Keep track of possible usability problems - is your navigation hidden or overly complex? Are visitors having trouble finding the content they are looking for because it is so buried in the site? If you are using your website as a primary source of marketing leads then you have to be prepared to dedicate a large portion of your time to improving it.

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-08-16

Posted on August 16, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-08-09

Posted on August 9, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Release Early, Release Often

Posted on August 2, 2010 in: Business|Post Comment

“Release Early, Release Often” is a term used in Web and software development referring to the concept that you should put a site (or boxed software) into production as early as possible, and to release updates as often as possible. I hear developers use this term all the time, but I never really see the importance of it conveyed to the customer. The benefits of releasing early and releasing often are significant and can make the lifecycle of your site/product more profitable and cause less headaches.

With traditional Waterfall development, you wait until the very end of a large set of features to deploy a site. This method is usually the standard concept of how Web sites are created: decide what you want, and wait for it to be created. The problem is if there are a lot of features you may be waiting weeks, months or years before your first release! With “Release Early, Release Often”, the developer is typically using an agile method, which in a nutshell means building the site feature by feature, and releasing as soon as possible.

Effect on Cost

E-commerce sites are great examples of the benefits of releasing early and often. Let’s say you have a site that will take six months to develop using traditional software development practices (release when everything is implemented and finalized). During those six months your profit from the site is $0. Once you hit the sixth month and the site goes live, your sales and visibility steadily increase. IBy the end of the year you bring in a total of $50,000 in sales.

Now let’s follow the release early, release often practice. After the first month you have a very basic e-commerce site ready. It does not have the blog and news sections, you don’t accept PayPal and some of the categorization features aren’t available yet. The site goes live and customers start making orders. Meanwhile you are under way having the next set of features created. A new set of updates is made to the site every week. By the sixth month your original set of features is complete. And by the sixth month you have brought in $30,000 of sales. By the end of the year you have brought in $160,000 in sales simply because your site has been available to uses for five additional months! In essence the site pays for itself by going live early.

Requirements Changes

It is a fact that requirements change over time. Business decisions are made that effect the priorities of feature sets, or deadlines are moved and require modification of the original project scope. With a larger project these changes can be debilitating to releasing a product. In the example above where an e-commerce took six months to release using the traditional method, what if you (the client) were forced to move to a new inventory management system midway through the project? That type of major change could push back the schedule weeks or months. So now your six month deadline has now become eight months, and you still don’t have a site bringing in any profit. With the release often approach, you can make these shipping changes incrementally with each new release until you are fully migrated to the new system.

Early User Feedback

It doesn’t matter how great you think your new website will be, it matters what the end-user thinks. By releasing early you are able to receive user feedback immediately, which will allow you to make adjustments, assess the potential return on investment, or scrap the project entirely. If your site receives poor feedback and you aren’t hitting the revenue benchmarks needed to continue, you are able to cut your losses early. If you had used the waterfall method and released after the project was completed, you will have spent over twice the time and money just to hear this feedback.

Security and Reliability

No matter how well tested a site is, there are always going to be small bugs that are uncovered as your site’s visibility increases. With a traditional approach you will have to wait until your next set of features is complete (which could be another six months) before these issues are fixed. If you are releasing often though, it may only be a few days before these issues are fixed. With a Web-based product you should always take advantage of being able to release updates instantly with no interaction from the user. If there is a minor bug occurring only to a select group of users, you can fix that issue instantly before anyone else experiences the problem.

Think Small

The major point of releasing early and often is to take small features and build them out quickly and efficiently. All too often we see companies delaying projects entirely just to fit in one more feature they feel is necessary for customers to stay on their site. The reality is most of these features go unnoticed. Your first goal should be getting your site online with the minimum number of features possible. From there you can continue to build your site as you receive vital feedback from the users, and plan your next set of features and changes based on those comments. You can’t build a house without laying the foundation first, and there is no sense in delaying the entire project simply because the light switches you wanted aren’t available.

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-08-02

Posted on August 2, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Why Your Company Needs A Wiki

Posted on July 26, 2010 in: Business|Post Comment

By definition a wiki is a “website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.”. Most people instantly think of the most popular wiki, Wikipedia, but in reality a wiki is an application at heart that can be repurposed for any number of uses.

At the Riddle Brothers we have an internal wiki that we use for just about everything - from our Operations Manual to client information to project management purposes. It is essentially an open repository of knowledge that can be referenced at any time. How would your company benefit from a wiki?

One Common Reference Point

Your wiki is the brain of your business. If you continually update your wiki over time, it can be referred to for absolutely everything. Prior to using a wiki we used various spreadsheets in Google Docs. Over time we had dozens of spreadsheets with different permissions going out to various users. Then new version were created for the new business year and formats changed over time. After our third year of Google Docs we decided to move to the wiki format and it has made life much more simple. We still use Google Docs for a lot of purposes but more for client purposes rather than internal references.

Internal Operations

How many times have you tried to find out how to complete a task, and your co-worker said “go ask Jim, he knows how to handle that”? Your entire division may be relying on the knowledge of one person who may one day decide to leave the company. If you use a wiki you can build up your documentation so your co-worker instead says “look in the operations section of the wiki”. A wiki is a living site that should be updated daily whenever you are completing a new task. You can store server configurations, login credentials (make sure you secure your server and use an encrypted network), human resources documents, and pretty much everything. Every time someone asks you how to do something check to ensure it is available in the wiki. If not then you can add a page and never have to answer the same question twice.

New Employee Training

Hiring a new employee? Have them read through the wiki on their first day. You can include a section for new employees with everything they will need to know about the company in general, as well has how to operate on a day-to-day basis. This works particularly well with office jobs where you are in front of a computer 90% of the day and can access the wiki at all times. You could also keep printed copies on hand although they may quickly become out-dated depending on how well maintained your information is and how routine that positions’ tasks are.

Permissions and Accessibility

If you aren’t using a wiki then you probably use some type of local network for sharing documents that contain this information. Maybe you have a VPN or use Dropbox to sync folders of this information. However if you are keeping internal documentation stored here you are not benefiting from other features of a wiki including version control, page-based permissions, and being able to access the information when outside of your network. Also there are a large number of extensions that can be integrated to cover nearly every common purpose. This is not possible on a local network of files unless you are using a separate application such as a web-based intranet.

Cost Effective

While there are commercially available wikis (usually a paid-hosting suite) the software that powers Wikipedia is available for free (it is open-source). No software licenses means you only have to pay for hosting, the domain, and the cost to have it installed and configured. Most companies will want some branding integration which is also possible with a majority of solutions - some even featuring a full templating system for advanced themes.

Convinced?

As I mentioned we use a wiki for 90% of our internal documentation. I usually have it open in a browser window throughout the day in case I need to refer to it or add something.

If you are interested in finding out more, or would like to get a wiki set up for your company let us know!

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-07-26

Posted on July 26, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment

Riddle Brothers Tweets of the Week for 2010-07-19

Posted on July 19, 2010 in: Articles|Post Comment