With all the talk about social media, it can easily make a website owner or company think they need to create a community. But it’s not as easy as getting a great script, software or integrating Facebook. Running or creating a community is a full time job. It takes work, not only to promote it but also to make it remain popular and engaging. and once it up, who will monitor it?

This is not even to mention what happens if you fail. What message does it send to have a forum with no posts, or a fan page with 5 subscribers? Sure there are ways to promote a forum and a community, but before you leap into creation, make sure you study your market. Does it even make sense in the business area you are in? For example, if your focus is B2B (Business to Business) your users may very well not have the time or the ability to engage with your content. Demographically your audience might also have no interest in it as well.

Then there are other barriers, such as  technological, in the B2B sphere. There is a growing number of companies blocking Facebook and Twitter. If you rely on their Authentication or content, this alone could kill the involvement in your community. The old thought of: ” build it and they will come”, is no more a fallacy with community as it is with a new restaurant thinking by simply existing and having great food means people will show up.

Before you begin to even consider creating a community we suggest you think long and hard about the pros and cons. If you are serious about communities (and have the money), we suggest you use a reputable company, and have a detailed action plan. You can also consider free self-hosted options like Elgg or BuddyPress, but be aware of the hours of customization this will take. Just like a website, your community is a reflection of you.

In the end, should you decide to create a community, have patience. Very rarely does it explode to success over night. Much like a website, it takes time to get traffic. We also suggest you start small with a select handful of your best customers to try it out (in Beta), so you can slowly build content. Most importantly you can gather feedback before you launch and get the word out. And don’t be shy to pull back if it does not fly in your industry. Not all solutions are one size fits all.

Creating A Community: Does It Make Sense for Your Business is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Brand recognition is a huge part of marketing. No matter if you have an online business or not, one of the things a business needs is a unique logo or graphic which allows them to be recognizable to their current clients and potential future customers. So what can you do when you want a logo or new banner ad? Sure you can try your own hand at creating it, with some time and Photoshop. You could hire a teenager you know with some skills. You could even try one of those online low cost (or free) logo generators. While those are all great solutions, if you’re serious about having a real choice with a professional unique design, we’d like to introduce you to a great website called 99designs.

Around since 2006, 99designs offers everyone (especially a small business owner) access to a pool of great graphic talent. If you’re serious about looking good its worth the investment.

Last month, 99Designs announced their new logo shop. They have over 4,000 logos ready to be purchased and customized for just $99 for a non-exclusive license, or purchase the logo exclusively for $298. After selecting the logo you want the original designer will customize the logo with your business name and within 24 hours it will be all yours.

If you wish to get something beyond logos, like a banner ad or a customized website theme,  99Designs “helps you run a design contest, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.”

What we like about 99Designs is that  you get what you want at the price point you choose. This is  especially important in those instances where you do not have access to a graphic designer but you want a professional look to your project. We highly recommend you check out 99Designs for your next design project.

99Designs: Over 65,000 Graphic Designers For Your Next Project is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

You might have heard of Click Tale. It’s a great product which offers some unique tools not offered by any major analytics vendor in such a complete package:  Visitor Recordings, Mouse Move Heatmaps, Attention Heatmaps and more. They also have a free lite version which is a tad limited, but will give you a wonderful taste of the tool (scroll to the bottom of the page to find it).

Do not take this as an ad for ClickTales, because its not – we just wanted to point out an overlooked tool if your have the budget for it. For those that don’t have a major budget and might be using Google Analytics or Piwik, there is now an option. It will require some work on your part (but not much), but it will allow you to get some of the features found in ClickTales. Its an open source script called Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) from Luis Leiva which allows you to record mouse activity on Web pages and replay mouse activity in real time. Below is a screen shot of the data you can record for each visitor (but you can aggregate it, if you choose):

You can download Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) here or check the demo here.The requirements to get SMT for yourself are really basic, like it should be for all open source projects. All your Web server needs is a MySQL 5 database and PHP 5 installed with the cURL and JSON libraries. These settings are very common on most Web servers. The install process is also very easy much like WordPress, just follow the steps in the readme file. Once you are up, you will need to add the following to the head of each document you want to track:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-aux.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-record.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    smt2.record({
      recTime: 300,
      disabled: Math.round(Math.random()),
      warn:true,
      warnText: "We are going to record your mouse movements for a remote usability study."
    });
  } catch(err) {}
  </script>

Modify the code as necessary. For example you can change the warn text to something like:

warnText: "We'd like to track your mouse activity\nin order to improve this website's usability.\nDo you agree?",

Or you can change the randomness of the visitors recorded, the amount of time visitors are recorded etc.

As you can see this is a very powerful tool, but this does not replace a fully integrated system like ClickTales. Nevertheless, for the more adventurous this could be a great add-on to free solutions you are currently using. Also being it is open source and actively developed, who knows if maybe in the future some plugins will be created to make it easier to integrate with Piwik, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other CMS systems.

Mouse Tracking, Heat Maps & Record Visitors For Free! is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Recently we were working on a project where we needed an email marketing software. The goal was for something we could totally configure and customize, and not incur extra costs for a license or hosting. In our research, we came across PoMMo (also known as the post modern Mass Mailer), which in our view, one of the most underrated and missed gems of the open-source movement. We do add the caveat, that work by the principal developer Brice Burgess has seemed to have stopped (no release of new version since late 2008) so you’re basically on your own. Nevertheless, the bulk of work Brice and team has left behind, can get you started to having a great email marketing software of your own. This is not a project for the faint of heart, but with some time to tweak the code, you will have a very robust system.

One freebie from us, is when you start, explore themes/shared/css/default.admin.css. Some changes need to be made. Mostly for ease of use. Trust us, when we tell you, change line 24 to the following:

#content {
    /* display: inline-block; */
    margin-left: 200px;
    padding: 5px 15px;
    background: #FFF;
}

You’ll also want to play around in themes folder in general to make it more your style. Its really not hard though, as PoMMo uses SMARTY templates, so changes can be made quickly.

The main reason we are high on PoMMo are the features already present in the software. You can read the full feature list here, but these are the highlights:

As you can see PoMMo is a very powerful software. We were able to get ours up and running to satisfaction within a week. If you have basic PHP/MYSQL knowledge and Dreamweaver, you should be able to do it yourself as well. Its too bad development has been stopped on this software, but in all honesty, what has been left behind really does a superb job. As well, thankfully, there is active forum, with users contributing tips and workarounds. There is a working demo here, so you can check it out for yourself.

PoMMo: Best Open Source E-Mail Marketing Software is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

We wanted to wait a bit before we commented on Google’s newest release: Google Buzz. While it’s interesting as a concept for keeping in touch with family and friends, from a marketing perspective we think its something to pass on. By integrating it so closely with one’s email,  people are more skeptical to follow those they don’t know. Its also not uncommon for many users to have their social network segmented into different compartments online, and Google Buzz seems to take this away. And while Google did get 150 Million users by making Google Buzz opt-in, most of the adopters of this type of technology are already into Twitter, and have  no interest in a second account, that (for now) they need to update separately.

Then there is the whole privacy fiasco faced by Google Buzz. It has turned off many users who have opted-out and will likely never opt back in.  And as the bad press continues it does not help their case in getting users to to adopt this new tool. Google themselves took the feedback, and  made several changes. Nevertheless, some of the changes are draconian, like you can opt out of Buzz, but then your whole Google Profile is deleted.  Personally, I think Google should examine a separate domain for Google Buzz like Twitter, and make it optional for your “buzzes” to be made available in Gmail.

Nevertheless, one area of Google Buzz is making some headway. Many sites are now adding a Google Buzz button next to their Tweetmeme integration. You can see it in action at Mashable for example.  Mashable is a blog focused on social media and has over 2.3 Million followers. Actually Mashable is the perfect lab to follow the integration of Google Buzz. Below is an example of their share area for an article:

As you can see, (and all over their site), Google Buzz trails Twitter and Facebook. It might change in the future, but for now Google Buzz has not got the same penetration. We still suggest you have your brand name as a Google Account, but beyond this, Google Buzz is not something essential for your marketing plan.

Google Buzz for Marketing: Pass for Now is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

In Quebec, a province in Canada, there are strict rules about operating a website in the province. You must offer a bilingual site (French and English) to customers if you do business in the province or are resided in that province. Actually the website content must be in French, but English is optional, as French is the official language in the province of Quebec. Failing to comply with the rules, can run you afoul of Office Quebecoise de la language francaise and possible fines and sanctions.

So what do you do if you are a small business without the resource to create a French site? Thankfully Google offers you some solutions other then spending a small fortune in translation services. Below are the solutions and the scripts you need:

1- Translate all the pages

This is the more time consuming solution by if you visit Google Translate, you can enter your site text, visit your website url, or upload your documents/web pages. Instantly Google will translate your files into French. Of course this is a machine translation, but it will give you the ability to come pretty close. If you know someone who reads/writes French, this will quicken the turn around time in translating your site. We recommend you add your French pages to a subfolder on your sever (i.e http://www.yoursite.com/fr).

2- Offer Translation Tool on Index

A quick solution is offering Google’s translation tool on your pages. Just use the below code.

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en',
    includedLanguages: 'en,fr'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

3- Use .HTACCESS file to redirect based on browser language.
Using an .HTACCESS file, you can detect the language of the visitors browser. If a visitor has a French version of Firefox, Chrome or IE when coming to your site the site will be translated to French automatically using Google. If they come to with an English language browser, they will not notice a difference. All you need to do is replace “www.englishsite.com” in this code with your domain name. Sure to save file as .HTACCESS filetype.

The other option is this code which will create sub-folder for each language. English users will be taken to www.yoursite.com/en unless they are using a French browser. In this case they will be taken to www.yoursite.com/fr.

So there you go! Three quick solutions to get your site in French fast and keep your Quebec customer happy. Now you may ask why we did not offer an IP blocking solution. Unfortunately, its just not efficient. For example, you would need to keep an updated IP list for all users in Quebec. This is a major issue, because there are always new IP addresses. Furthermore how do you identify users in Quebec with ISP’s in Ontario or for that matter those visitors using a proxy?

The best solution in our view is to start with solution # 2 or 3 above, while you work on using solution #1. A we have mentioned earlier, sometimes you just have to spend the money on website design. Having a fully translated website is the best way to increase your revenue from a local market and the most professional way to present your site. Most of all, we hope the above solutions helps cash-strapped (small) businesses in Quebec (or elsewhere) facing issues in translation.

Bonjour Quebec: Quick Way To Translate Website To French is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Its not a secret that Facebook and Twitter are great avenues for promotion of your website. Almost every major  search engine marketing expert can offer details on how to optimize  your Facebook fan page or use a Twitter coupon campaign. We however, have a different take after several discussion with clients. Take a deep breath before you buy into the hype. Not every business should be in the business of producing social media content. For example if your company blocks Facebook and Twitter, does it make sense? First of all your own employees will have no idea of your promotions online, and when faced with questions from customers, they will not be able to see them. You also have to look at the industry. If your company blocks Social Media, isn’t there a good chance your target audience will be in the same boat. In a surveys done last year there are estimates that as low as 54% to as high of 76% of users are blocked from Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter at work.

So what is the next step? The most important thing to do is establish in your mind the target  audience. This will allow you to decide how to move forward with your campaign or even if there should be one. Remember, though, Facebook and Twitter have now permeated fully onto a new range of smartphones,  you can still get to your audience even if they are blocked at work. The real questions then becomes will your audience care to find you outside of work time  or follow/interact with you outside the normal channels if you are not providing value. What do we mean by this? For example if you have a retail business, social media can be used for coupons or to alert people to specials or new products- like 10% off Nike Sneakers for Twitter users who buy online in the next 24 hours. If you are selling B2B (business to business) services or products, the application of social media might be a bit more difficult.

There is no shame in not having a Facebook or Twitter page. You might really not need one no matter how tempting it seems.  Nevertheless,  creating content and owning the page are two different things.  Our advice regardless if you decide to get involved in social media n or not is at the bare minimum to grab the Twitter and Facebook name for your company. You want to make sure it is not abused or used by your competitors.  Create a Facebook Business Page, but keep it simple and include information which will redirect people back to your main corporate site. Grab you twitter profile, and make sure you tell people in the summary this is the official Twitter profile (maybe consider getting it verified) and tell them to visit your website. The beauty of this strategy is it locks up your name and allows you the luxury to decide later if it is worth developing further. Nothing would be worse, then realizing later you need a Twitter account and someone already has the name taken.  What do you think? Are you on Twitter or Facebook for your company account? How do you use it to attract customers?

Using Facebook and Twitter for Business Promotion is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Recently, Matt Cutts announced at PubCon Vegas that there is a strong possibility a new ranking factor will be added to the Google algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads. This is part of Google’s steps to make the web faster. As Google shares, studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. We recommend to take the time before the holiday crunch to optimize your site. Not only will it allow your users to have a better experience, if your site is not impacted by the holiday season it is a quiet time to fix speed issues. To help in this endeavor there are many tools to diagnose the problem. Considering Google is so important to many marketers, the first stop should be Google’s Webmaster tools. Google has now included (in beta) a site performance tool. The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. Below is an example:

Google notes recently on the Webmaster Tools blog, that the idea is to bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your own site and bring specific and actionable speed information backed by data. Performance charts and tables will only show in your account if there’s enough data to do so.  Google is also providing a new tool for diagnoses called Page Speed, which you can download and use with Firebug in Firefox.

Google is not the only one with tools though. Yslow is a great add-on for Firebug in Mozilla  which also analyzes web pages. Using Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites, it can advise you why you page is slow and how to fix it. There are also many  basic speed tools which just tell you page load speed, one we like is Free Speed Test.

We also have some basic tips to get your site to load fast:

1-Beware widgets and Plug-ins.

Sometimes its great to have a cool plug-in, or a widget, but if it slows down your sites load times you have to make a choice. Recently for example, we killed the “Twit This” WordPress plug-in for Tweetmeme and we saved 4 seconds on our load time. Not a lot you think, but its noticeable.  We have spoken about this before, but it might be worth a refresher.

2- Stats but not every stat

Sure it’s important to have Analytics, but choose one or two and forget the rest. Do you really need a dozen different stat tools? Make a choice on your favourite and forget the rest.

3- Watch Your Image Size

Images are great to add to a story, but not if they hog precious load time. There are many free online image optimizers so don’t be shy to try something like this  Online Image Optimizer. It will  reduce the file size of your gif, jpg, or pngs and done right neither you or your visitors will be able to see the difference.

4- Keep you code clean

This is important. Put your CSS at the top, and put your Javascript at the bottom (if you can). Remove useless scripts. Avoid unneeded calls to a MYSQL database that you can embed right into your code. For WordPress, check out three quick tips to make it happen.

5- It’s not the website, but what runs it!

If you have a cheap host, or you get the wrong package/setup, you can cause loading problems. In short, you can get what you pay for if you don’t do the right research.

6- Always create a backup.

No matter what you do, make sure to backup your work, so you can go back. I know the advice is simple, but you’d be amazed at the horror stories.

7- Keep Learning

We don’t have all the answers. No one ever can. The real goal is to know where to look. With a quick Google search you can find other fine tips. Heck in a couple of seconds alone we found some other great tips here and here that we were not aware of . In short don’t assume you have all the answers either.

Why Page Speed Matters! is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Imagine you have two Google Analytics accounts, and you don’t wish to share profiles. Recently we came across this situation. We also learnt having two copies of the Google Analytics code on a page will not work. Eventually we stumbled onto a simple solution with the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://
ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-
analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var firstTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1x");
    firstTracker._initData();
    firstTracker._trackPageview();
    var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-2x");
    secondTracker._initData();
    secondTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Make sure your firstTracker and secondTracker are in a separate <script> tag from the the first part (with the document.write). Replace UA-XXXXX-1x and UA-XXXXX-2x with the two accounts to have data sent to. Voila, a simple solution–hope we saved you some time!

Two Google Analytics Accounts, One Website is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

If you have a site which allows for user comments, you should be aware that being lackadaisical on “monitoring” comments can have an SEO impact ( as recently revealed by Google). So why it’s important to have open discussion and feedback, there is a rogue element who feels it appropriate to add comments with useless links and unrelated topics. Simply put, being constructive is not their goal.  So what should you do if your site is full of spam and you want to avoid issues with your rank within Google’s search engine? Start a clean up as soon as possible by deleting spam comments and ban the spammers from your site. The next solution is to adopt security measures to stop any new spam activity. Here are just some ideas according to Google:

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming. (We recommend ReCAPTCHA)
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

If you are using WordPress we highly recommend using Askimet and Bad Behaviour. Both of these plug-ins will reduce your spam. It also helps if you modify your discussions settings in the “Before a comment appears” section. We recommend checking both ” An administrator must always approve the comment” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. Experiment what works for you, but we know default settings will not work.

If you are looking for more info, Google has recently written on comment spam and what to do when your meta tags are hijacked by spam.

Why SPAM in your comments cannot be ignored is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More