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Use Images to Improve Your Business Blog

February 13th, 2011

business blog attract visitors

Inbound team put up an interesting article and video on Business Blogging about how to find beautiful images on Flikr.

The right image will make your blog more interesting, and can help you deliver your message to your readers.

Plus, you can get some SEO benefits:

  • Visitors can better find your site via image search tools.
  • By naming the images correctly, you’ll get more attention from search engines.
  • Using keywords in image Alt attributes will help the search engine know about your content.

Finding images on Flikr is easy, and using them on your blog isn’t hard either. You just need to do it the right way!

What do you think? What’s your best idea for making a blog post more interesting and attracting the search engines?

Photo By: ell brown

Clarke Bishop General

Find New Leads by Surfing the Web

December 6th, 2010

SEO, blogging, PPC, landing pages, social media, video — All are important tools. But, don’t forget to find and help the potential leads who are already on the web looking for help!

Recently, I found a post on a forum that was about some of the key software tools I use — Hubspot and Infusionsoft. So, I looked up the woman who wrote the post and called to see how it was all working for her. Really, I was just curious about her business and what she was doing.

But, it turned out that she had some challenges I could help with, and my casual, curiosity phone call turned into a sales call!

Sales is all about connecting with people that you can help. So, don’t forget that “listening” to the web is part of inbound marketing, too. It’s not all about writing content. Make sure you spend some of your marketing time:

  • Commenting on blog posts
  • Surfing the posts on relevant forums
  • Searching on Twitter
  • Just being curious and open to connections

Clarke Bishop Inbound Marketing, Marketing

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

November 7th, 2010

Hubspot and Marketing Profs have created a nice overview on how to blog effectively for business. See more videos and education on Inbound Marketing …

Key ideas in this video include:

  • Know your audience, their needs, problems, and pain.
  • Develop a persona that represents your audience. Here’s more on How to Create Personas.
  • Be the Expert for solving your audience’s problems.
  • Ask for comments in your blog post & start a conversation.
  • Use social networks to listen and see what people want to talk about.

Professors: Ann Handley & Mack Collier, MarketingProfs

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

Clarke Bishop Inbound Marketing, Marketing

Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses

June 13th, 2010

Every day, I talk with small business owners and entrepreneurs who have heard about some “hot” new marketing idea, technology, or service. Well, I’ve got good news and bad. The good news is that online marketing really can connect you with your customers and prospects and rapidly build your sales revenues.

The bad news? There’s a lot of noise and hype too! And, a lot of companies and vendors who mostly want to separate you from your money.

Oh, and one more piece of bad news — It takes work. Honest, consistent work! Not really hard work — After all, how hard is it to type on your computer? Just the right kind of consistent work is what’s required. So, if you are looking for a magic fix, go ahead and click your back button.

If you’re still reading, you must be OK with doing some work. But, how do you know the right things to do? What should you pay attention to?

That’s where Hubspot helps. They’ve put together software that both shows you what’s working, and points you in the right direction. See our Inbound Marketing Education page, or visit Hubspot to learn more. I also really like their Website Grader which gives you some actionable feedback on the quality of your website.

If you have questions or want to talk this over, please leave a comment, a question, or Contact Us.

Clarke Bishop Inbound Marketing ,

Infusionsoft Overall Architecture Review

March 23rd, 2010

Infusionsoft Architecture Overall Grade: C

The overall technical architecture might not be part of a normal review, but it affects a lot of things and I think it may matter to a lot of users!

The good things about the architecture:

  • Infusionsoft is written in Java and JSP.  Java is known for being one of the most reliable, enterprise-grade server languages.
  • In my experience, Infusionsoft has very good up time.
  • Infusionsoft is very good about communicating outages and updates.

The not so good things, and why I graded Infusionsoft as a C:

  • The application does not seem to be structured that well. I know this from digging around in the internals and using the API. Some pieces of data are just hard to get to.
  • As a result of the gaps in the way the application is structured, it is hard for Infusionsoft to provide access via the API. This limits what you can do with Infusionsoft.
  • Some things are just plain wrong. For example, when someone places an order, the Shipping address is stored as address-2 in the Contact record. The information should be stored as part of the order. Let’s say a customer buys a product and sends it as a gift to someone. Then, later on buys another product and sends it to someone else. The first customers information is overwritten and lost forever. Supposedly, Infusionsoft is working on fixing this. But, the fact that it could get into the product shows there are some gaps in their thinking and process.
  • Updates end up causing too many things to break. Even with the best designed applications, an update can cause something to break. However, this happens too often with Infusionsoft. They seem to work hard to solve any problems, but the problems can still hurt users.
  • I think the lack of good structure is slowing their progress on adding new features and improving the product.

If you are a typical Infusionsoft user, most of this may not affect you that much. I have personally been the CEO of a software company, and we made many of the same mistakes. That’s why I can see the problem clearly! Still, it does limit the capability of Infusionsoft and affects how much you want to rely on their software.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft ,

Your Email ‘open’ Rate

March 23rd, 2010

A question came up this morning on one of the Infusionsoft support pages about email ‘open’ rates. This is an important and confusing subject, so I thought I would write more here.

Unfortunately, ‘opens’ are one of the worst named and most confusing email marketing metrics. To a marketer, it seems on the surface to be a valuable metric. After all, who wouldn’t love to know how many and which customers were opening your messages?

The problems are due to the technical limitations of how this works. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

  • Before your email is sent, your email company puts a small invisible image  in each HTML email.
  • When the recipient displays the message, the image is retrieved from the email server.
  • Each image has a unique name, so the email server knows which recipient got and ‘opened” the message.

But, this doesn’t work very well in actual use:

  • Many mail readers have images turned off. The default for Outlook is to turn images off, same with Thunderbird, Google’s gmail service has images off by default, etc.
  • The recipient might open and read the message carefully, but never show up as an ‘open’ because their email reader has images disabled.
  • Many email readers have a Preview Pane that will automatically retrieve images. So, the recipient could click the message to delete it, and still show up as an ‘open’ even though they ignored your message.
  • There is no tracking for plain text messages as you can’t put an image in a plain text message.
  • Common open rates are in the 10 – 15% range. Even though a higher open rate can indicate more reader interest, all the noise from the above issues obscures what is really happening. You can easily end up going off in the wrong direction or wasting a lot of  time trying to improve the wrong things.

So, ‘opens’ only provides a very rough measure of how your audience received your message. The main practical use for the ‘open’ metric is to look for a sudden variation in messages sent to the same list. If there is a sudden change, it can indicate a deliverability problem.

How to Really Measure Engagement

Fortunately, there is a way for marketers to find out which customers engaged with their message!

What you really care about isn’t whether your customer ‘opened’ or even read your message. What you really want is for them to take an action and engage with you. That’s how you know your message connected with them.

So, use links and link tracking. If a customer clicked a link, they actually responded to you. This is what matters. This is what you care about and should track.

The trick is to create links that customers want to click. This is part of the art of email marketing!

Here’s an article that covers Tracking User Responses with Infusionsoft trackable links. Similar approaches can work with other email providers.

Please leave a comment below and let us know how this works for you!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft, Marketing

Custom Storefront for the Infusionsoft Shopping Cart

March 21st, 2010

The Infusionsoft shopping cart is one of the weakest parts of Infusionsoft!

Fortunately, there is a work around that let’s you use their checkout and still have the other great parts of Infusionsoft — Marketing automation and email marketing. Here’s what you do:

  • Code your own custom storefront and cart
  • When the customer clicks Checkout, pass their shopping cart to Infusionsoft’s cart checkout
  • Lock Infusionsoft’s cart to prevent the customer from changing quantities

Code your own Storefront and Cart

You can modify one of the open source shopping cart solutions or create your own. This is potentially a broad topic, so if you want to know more, please leave me a question or a comment. The key things that are required are:

  • Ways for customers to find the products they want and add them to their cart
  • A way to store the products and quantities they have selected
  • A shopping cart page that let’s them see the items they are purchasing and add or remove items
  • A checkout button that will take them to the Infusionsoft checkout page.

Pass the Shopping Cart Information to Infusionsoft

Now, we have to get the products and quantities from your custom cart into Infusionsoft. Essentially, all you have to do is pass the products and quantities to Infusionsoft via URL parameters. Here is the base URL.

https://YourApp.infusionsoft.com/cart/?update=true&l=n&cart_skin=1&clear=true&Order0_OrderID=123

In this case, I’m also passing in an OrderID which is a custom order field I created in Infusionsoft. Then, add the following for each product:

&product_id=456 &p456_qty=2

I highlighted in red the values that have to be dynamically inserted. Now, when the user clicks checkout, you build this URL, and send them to the URL.

Lock the Infusionsoft Shopping Cart

There’s just one problem. You may not want the customer to change the quantities on the Infusionsoft side. Here’s a trick that let’s you lock the Infusionsoft checkout page. Enter the following javascript in HTML Area-1 in your shopping cart skin:

[cce_js]
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
	var elem = document.getElementById('theOneForm').elements;
	for(var i = 0; i < elem.length; i++) {
		if ( right(elem[i].name, 4) == '_qty' ) {
			elem[i].disabled=true;
		}
	}

	//Overrides the remove(key) function
	function remove(key) {
		alert('Please Click Continue Shopping to modify quantities or remove items.');
	}

	function right(str, n){
		if (n <= 0)
			return "";
		else if (n > String(str).length)
			return str;
		else {
			var iLen = String(str).length;
			return String(str).substring(iLen, iLen - n);
		}
	}
</script>
[/cce_js]

This script will:

  • Find all the quantity fields on the form and disable them
  • Override the remove link

It’s not a perfect solution, but it does work!

If you need a better, more complete shopping cart, the best thing is to use a 3rd party shopping cart (Like Volusion or many others), and then use the Infusionsoft API to get relevant data into Infusionsoft.

Please leave me a comment below if this is helpful!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft ,

Infusionsoft Software API Review

March 18th, 2010

Infusionsoft Software API Overall Grade: B-

API means Application Programming Interface. Essentially it’s a “language” that lets two computers talk to each other.

Let’s say you have some custom system that you use to run your business. If your system could talk to Infusionsoft, but systems could work together to help your business run more efficiently.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, here is a list of ways you can use the Infusionsoft API (from Joe Manna of Infusionsoft). If you have questions about what you might do, please leave a comment below.

For now, I’m going to give you my review of the API. Here are the good things about it:

  • It lets you solve a lot of problems that otherwise couldn’t be solved.
  • It’s reliable. Once coded and setup, it works well.
  • It give you a decent set of functions to query the available database tables and retrieve and update information.

But there are also some things that are incomplete or don’t work as well:

  • It uses XMLRPC which is an older web services protocol. It works, but can be harder to use.
  • There is a lot of data which you would like to get that isn’t accessible via the API.
    • For example, email statistics are available via the reporting interface, but not the API.
    • Infusionsoft is understandably protective of some data — Double Optins for example. If users could double optin via the API, that’s asking for abuse.
    • Still, for the most part, I think users should be able to retrieve their data.
  • The API does not always seem to be a priority for Infusionsoft.  Additional functionality is promised, but then never happens. There are clear gaps in functionality that need to be addressed.
  • Support for the API has declined lately. I think there has been some turnover and some key API knowledge left the company.

There is a PHP SDK that can help get a PHP programmer started. And, there are several websites that at least offer some documentation.

Overall, the API has a lot of possibility, but spotty implementation. I’m glad it’s there, but it could also be so much better!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft , ,

Marketing Basics: Define Your Business Goals

March 12th, 2010

It may seem basic to you, but having a set of clear, written business goals is essential! I talk with a lot of businesses who may think they have goals, but are often vague or change from one day to the next.

Why?

  • Without written goals, your thinking will tend to be more muddled. Worse, you’ll probably believe your thinking is clear and not realize how much your unclear thinking is hurting your business.
  • Your goals act as a filter to help prioritize your time and effort. If it doesn’t forward a goal, why do it?
  • Clear business goals will help you create clear objectives for your website. Do you want a website that generates leads for you, a site that sells products, or something else?
  • When you know what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it! There are various explanations for why life works this way. All I know is that it works.

So, how do you create good business goals?

Your goals should:

  • Be Specific
  • Be Measurable
  • Have a time frame
  • Be stated in the past tense.

This last one needs a little explanation.  Imagine you are in the future, and your goal was already fully realized. Writing your goals this way will make them seem more achievable!

Here’s an example goal:

XYZ company had $546,000 of total revenues in 2010.

This goal is specific, it’s measurable, it states a time frame, and it’s written in the past tense.

So, please, whether you’ve been in business for a long time or are just starting your company, create a set of clear business goals. If you get stuck, leave a comment, and I’ll help you get going! And, when this works for you, please leave a comment to tell everyone how you succeeded.

Clarke Bishop Marketing, Strategy

Infusionsoft Customer Support Review

March 12th, 2010
NOTE: This post is one section of an extensive review of Infusionsoft.

Infusionsoft Customer Support Overall Grade: C-

I split out Customer Support from Technical Support both because they are different, and because I have have very different experiences with them! (Here’s my review of Infusionsoft’s Technical Support).

Unlike Technical Support, Customer Support just doesn’t seem to be a priority for Infusionsoft. Here are some of the problems I know about:

  • I have heard regular stories of people who can’t get Infusionsoft to stop charging their credit cards. Infusionsoft promises “no risk” or “money back,” but then it is sometimes a hassle for the consumer. I don’t have any reason to think this is an intentional policy.  After all, you can always just dispute the charges with your credit card company. My best guess is that Infusionsoft just isn’t paying enough attention to this issue.
  • Customer Support systems are cobbled together and don’t work smoothly. I talked about the Fusebox in my Technical Support review. It is a good tool, but has some annoying quirks. For example, you create a technical support case, and their system sends you a status email. Great so far. But, click on the link in the email, and it denies you access — You aren’t logged in. The only thing is you can’t log in — There’s no login box! You have to log in to your Infusionsoft application, then click Help -> Take me to the Fusebox. Then, you have to go back to the email and click the link. It’s just annoying. It probably doesn’t work this way from inside Infusionsoft, or it would have been fixed.
  • This seems to have gotten better lately, but in the past, updates to the software have sometimes caused various things to break. Usually not big things, and they usually get them fixed, but the problems can still waste a lot of time.
  • Using a multitude of systems that aren’t well integrated together. Infusionsoft has just added their Ideas section into the Fusebox. This used to be on a separate site. The Fusebox version may end up being better. Still, it seems like there is an ongoing churn of separate systems that creates confusion about where you should go to get information. It doesn’t look like customer support was ever fully thought through.
  • I don’t think Infusionsoft focuses enough on the customer’s experience. Throughout the application, there are functions that work one place and not in others. Or work differently in one place or another. Here’s an example. There’s an Email Batch Status report that shows results from a broadcast email. It shows you this nice pie chart. But, it’s not clear that you can click on the slices to get more information. Sometimes that is! Some slices behave differently than others. It’s just confusing and annoying.

Most of these things in isolation by themselves are small and easily managed. But in total, they make Infusionsoft less usable. I think Infusionsoft could easily improve in this area with a moderate bit of effort, and I don’t understand why they haven’t made it a priority.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft ,