Ever come across an issue and spend an enormous amount of time looking for the solution? It usually happens when I need to get a project up and running with a hard deadline that is ticking away. Hopefully this article will help others with the issue that I recently tacked.

Third party shopping carts

Third party shopping carts hosted on a different server than the one your website is hosted on can cause some issues with tracking results within Google Analytics. Without cross domain tracking setup, Google Analytics will track all of the source traffic as a referral from your website. Not very useful when you are trying to track different advertising channels and their results.

Google Developer Knowledge Base

You can try reading this article from Google. Kinda useful but not really thorough. Where do I add the code? To the main website? The shopping cart?

YouTube

I love when people make YouTube videos that solve issues. Thank you! Than you!

Here’s a youtube video that also talks about the issue. It is definitely more descriptive.

Great, here’s the code that I need to add:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker, true]);

pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);

Here’s the answer that I needed to get the cross domain tracking for Google Analytics setup correctly.

1. Where do you put the code? On the main website google analytics code or the shopping cart?

The answer is both.

Adding the code to the main site will track the traffic entering the main website and share that with the analytics data on the shopping cart.

If you have links pointing from the shopping cart back to the main site, you will also need to add the code to the shopping cart Google analytics to track the traffic entering the main website from the shopping cart.

The rest is pretty simple. Add this code:

<a href="https://www.my-example-blogsite.com/intro.html"
   onclick="pageTracker._link('https://www.my-example-blogsite.com/intro.html'); 
return false;">
   See my blog</a>

to any link that it pointing to either website (make sure to change the website urls).

Hope this helps someone else!

What You Didn’t Know That You Need to Know

It’s common for a business or organization that is new to the web to be unaware of what’s best for their website. It’s even more difficult to know this when you might be lead astray by web designers, web developers and web hosts who don’t really understand or care about your needs. Several of our clients cursed the names of their website hosts or previous developers and designers once we informed them of the limitations of their website. In an effort to help others avoid this, I have a few recommendations for anyone who is looking to have a website built.

Choose Your Host Wisely

Some of the worst horror stories I can tell are to do with the poor quality of our clients’ website hosts. From hosts just being unreliable – meaning the site is down several times a month with no explanation and the technical support is impossible to get a response from – to being outright destructive, sometimes the stories are truly appalling. In one recent case, one of our clients contacted their host to inquire about the frequency with which their site was down. The technical competence or comprehension of the representative they spoke with must have been limited, because our client’s website ended up being deleted. There was no apology, but they did add some time on to our client’s hosting (which really felt like an insult).

The fact is that anybody with an internet connection and some hard drives can be a website host. Regardless of how professional a host’s site appears, the truth is that it might be one guy with 3 computers in a basement who only sidelines as a web host. Protect yourself and do a search for reviews of a website host before you decide to go with them. Also, if you know someone who is a professional web developer, they would be the best people to ask for recommendations. As web developers, we hate dealing with unprofessional website hosts and would be happy to offer our opinion.

Get FTP Access (Please!)

As a web developer, there is nothing more limiting than being forced to work entirely within the confines of a CMS, be it WordPress, Joomla, or something else. For this reason, we like to have FTP access to our clients’ websites so we can take customization to the next level. This will make any additions to the website much easier for us to implement. Of course, you might not realize that your website would benefit from such additions when you first have your site built, but for the sake of conversion optimization and SEO, we often need to get at the bare bones of a website rather than approaching it through the CMS.

It is also useful to have FTP access because it provides to access the .htaccess file (or the equivalent). These files allow us to tell search engines when files or sites have changed names in order to preserve the ranking of the original page or doman. This can be crucially important for SEO. In addition, having FTP access allows us to maintain backups of our clients’ websites, just in case something goes awry (see the anecdote about the crummy web host for an example of what “going awry” can mean).

Use an SEO-Friendly CMS

If you choose to have your site built using a CMS, check the forums on the CMS’s website to make sure it is SEO-friendly. Generally speaking, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are SEO-friendly to varying degrees (varying based on what themes and plugins you choose to install). However, there are a seemingly limitless number of custom CMSs out there that do not take SEO into account much or at all. The SEO limitations of a CMS are another reason why we like to have FTP access – if the CMS doesn’t provide us with what we need, we can sometimes modify the CMS to do what we want it to.

Our favourite CMS to work with is WordPress. While no CMS is perfect, and WordPress can certainly be the source of much frustration, it has proven to be the most user-friendly and the easiest to customize. SEO with WordPress is a breeze compared to some other platforms out there.

We’re Here to Help

If you’re thinking about establishing a web presence for your business or organization, I hope you will keep my advice in mind. We can help with every step of the process, so don’t hesitate to contact us. We love helping people get established on the web and especially helping them to avoid the pitfalls that some people aren’t aware of because they lack the guidance of a professional web development and web marketing team like Longevity Graphics.

Part One: How to find bloggers & Online Media

If you have a product-based business or brand, getting a blogger or online influencer to feature your product is one of the best ways to get low cost promotion online.

Public relations agencies rely on online media relationships almost as much as their traditional media relationships. Social media, newsletters and contest giveaways provide the ROI and SEO to prove that increasing your online presence on blogs automatically upgrades your brand online. As part of your marketing communication plan, you can choose to use an outside agency or in-house PR team. There are positive and negatives to each option.

In a perfect world and with the right budget and manpower, you can have an in-house team working on local media, bloggers and spokespeople or brand ambassador pitching. to compliment this, a PR agency can handle the major media- more traditional for TV spots, print media and product placement.

If you choose to bring PR in-house, researching online influencers is the first step. use the old cloud brand brainstorm.Write your brand and circle it in the middle of a page. Next, draw stems and list all the top categories your brand is related to.

What type of blogger would you want to promote you?
What type of blogger would be interested in your product?

Start by keeping the net wide; use the basic categories such as: Food, Health, Sport, Fashion, and Music etc. Now, let’s move to using your categories to find relevant online influencers.

Depending on your product, you can really find a huge number of like-minded bloggers on various social sites.

How do I Find Bloggers?

Searching is easy, but time consuming. Start with an excel sheet. Name the tabs per pitch. (If you are starting your pitch from scratch, then name your initial search ‘Master List’ and categorize each blogger in their respective areas researched above.)

Twitter Search

Twitter search is one of the better ways to find influencers. Why?

Basic- if they are on Twitter, they are socially aware.
Users that are active on Twitter, are usually active on their blogs.
The larger their followers, the easier it is to weed out who you want/don’t want to work with.

Searching on Twitter used to be easier. There was a section when you landed on another Twitter profile that would say, ‘Similar to Profile’, but now it just says ‘Who to Follow’. ‘Similar to Profile’: This tells you people that are similar to the profile you are on. This was great for finding more bloggers similar to the one you found. You could keep right-clicking and opening up profiles as you find them. ‘Who to Follow’: Is just a list of people you should follow, based you your own profile. Nothing to do with the profile you are on.

What are you left with now? Searching using hashtags! (You can also use basic words, but that could get crazy. So stick to hashtags. )

Start making a list of ‘Related Hashtags’. To make it easier, you can call it: ‘brand relevant keywords’. You’d use them for SEO, Google search marketing or tagging for articles or blog posts on your own website. Keep these handy for your whole team- pull them from your mission statement. These keywords are your brand in a bubble, they are the various descriptions of what your brand is about.

Once you’ve added a hashtag into the Twitter Search, a few filter options will appear on the left hand side:

Tweets> Anyone that has used that hashtag in a recent tweet. Depending on the tweet- open their profiles, follow them if they are relevant and open their website url to see if who they are.

People> Any people who regularly use that hashtag- relates to their profile. Use this for your main search. Open their profiles, follow them if they are relevant and open their website url to see if who they are.

Additionally:

Top Photos>Photos with that hashtag
Top Videos> Videos with that hashtag

Things to keep in mind when researching on Twitter:

Use a range for followers. Stick to a minimum you think is acceptable for you.
Sometimes they can have a ton of followers and a non-relevant site, so look further than the #’s.
The above, but vice-versa.

Google Blog Search

Researching usually starts on Google. Start off with using Google blog search to see if anyone has ever blogger about your product before.

Bring up the Google search bar- click on the filter of Blogs.
Google will then search within any relevant blogs to your brand/product.
Start your research of anyone talking about you here

Note: Google alerts are key for any yammering about your brand online. Make sure you have a good group of alerts emailed to you ‘when they happen’ so you know what’s being said about you online.

Happy Researching!

Next up:

Part 2: How to Search Within Blogs and Sending the first blog pitch.

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Written by: Cristina Pagnucco, Social Media Specialist, Longevity Graphics

Questions about this article? Email me [email protected]

Like us on Facebook & Follow us on Twitter

Longevity Graphics would like to welcome Michelle to the team! She joined our team as a marketing assistant on November 12th, 2013 and is currently a third year student at Simon Fraser University studying Communications.

We asked her a few questions for this article:

How are you liking your major?

I’m loving it so far! I’m taking different classes in the field and there are many areas that I’m interested in. It would be hard to pick just one.

Why are you interested in online marketing?

I’ve always been curious about the cyber world. Ever since middle school, I would come home from school, go on the computer, and try to teach myself HTML. I guess I was kind of an internet junkie. I eventually found myself blogging about things I’m interested in, such as fashion and beauty products. I don’t blog much anymore unfortunately due to work and school.

How do you balance work, school, family, and friends?

A lot of deep breathing. Whenever it gets too much for me I just take a second to sit down and inhale/exhale three deep breaths. It really calms my mind down, which helps me focus better.

What are your career goals?

As of right now, I’m not too sure about that yet. I’m still exploring my options and finding something that would suit me. Online marketing seemed like something I would enjoy so I decided to give it a go!

What are your hobbies and interests?

This might sound really generic, but I’m really interested in fashion. In my free time, I enjoy thinking of new outfit designs and sometimes drawing them out.

Describe your personality.

I’m very chilled and laid back. Even under stress, I always find a way to keep myself calm because I know I produce my best work when I’m not in panic mode.

We look forward to mentoring her and watching her grow professionally!

We Are Hiring a Marketing Assistant / SEO Specialist – Grow With Us

Who You Are

Are you an internet marketing professional with a passion for SEO?
Does your current job not provide you with opportunities to grow your skills?
Do you enjoy working collaboratively with a tight-knit team?
Do you value providing exceptional customer service and personal attention to clients?
If you answered yes to the above questions, you might be a good fit for this position.

Who We Are

We are a boutique internet marketing firm located in Port Coquitlam. Our clients are hardworking people who make an honest living working in the service industries. We use white-hat SEO and ethical marketing strategies to help our clients grow their businesses.

We are currently looking for a marketing assistant who specializes in SEO. We value real-time, face-to-face interaction between team members to create a more intimate, team-oriented work environment. Subcontractors will not be considered and telecommuting is not an option.

This is a full-time position with benefits.

Responsibilities will include:

– Developing search engine optimized content for blogs, press releases, and clients’ websites
– Research and analysis using tools such as Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
– Implementing link-building campaigns for off-site SEO
– Data entry and reporting
– May include SEM
– Optimizing HTML elements of websites

Knowledge of HTML and experience with WordPress is an asset.

Training will be provided for the right candidate, but some knowledge of SEO is required.

This is an excellent opportunity to grow with our company. Please send your resume to [email protected].

We used to do a ton of email marketing quite successfully for some our clients in specific markets certain times of the year.We have achieved great receive rates, open rates and click through rates for our clients.

We have noticed, however, that over the years businesses are experiencing less success with their email marketing. efforts. There are a couple of different reasons that can be directly associated with these decreases.

1. Spam filters are getting better

2. People are tired of being bombarded with marketing emails

3. Trust and credibility of email marketing is decreasing still

In order to run a successful email marketing campaign, here are a couple of tips that will help to improve results.

1. Choose a reliable list. It seems pretty straight forward but this is an area that I see businesses fail with frequently. Make sure the list is up to date. Sending emails to old email addresses that people do not check is pretty useless. Also, sending to emails like info@ and sales@ are also a waste of time as they are not directed at specific people and may not even get read.

2. Choose a targeted list. Make sure the list you are using is targeted to your demographic. An in-house mailing list to your current customer list is the most effective. When you buy a list, make sure that the list is up to date and is specific to the audience that you are aiming to reach.

3. Run your email through multiple spam filters before you hit send. A lot of email programs now have spam filter checks built in. I suggest running your email through more than one. This will help to get your email through more spam filters.

4. Do a test run to multiple mail servers. We all have multiple email addresses from different email providers. I recommend sending the email to as many different mail servers that you have access to before sending the actual email. This will allow you to ensure your email is being delivered and not being caught by a spam filter.

5. The subject line is key. A great subject line will make the difference between a successful email marketing campaign and a dud! Super important. Make sure you take a look at this resource for spam trigger words when writing your subject line. Be creative! There are lots of ways to entice people without getting blocked by spam filters.

If you are really stuck, hire a professional!

Thanksgiving dinner is one of my favorite dinners of all time. I love the way the house smells when the turkey is cooking. I learned this really amazing sweet potato pie recipe from someone (I can’t remember who-sorry) and it is always a hit at any potluck turkey dinner that I go to. I would love to share it with you today.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ingredients

2 large yams (or 5 medium)
pinch of salt
1 cup of butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 bag of white mini marshmallows

Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Pie Recipe

1. pre-heat the oven at 350 degrees
2. wash, peel and cut yams
3. place them in a pot of water with a pinch of salt
4. bring the yams to a boil, and simmer at medium until they are tender to the fork
5. drain the water
6. add butter, brown sugar, spices and mash until the yams are smooth
7. place the yam mixture into a baking dish and place them in the oven
8 back for 30 minutes
9. add marshmallows and broil for about a minute until the marshmallows are golden brown (keep an eye on the dish at this point so that the marshmallows do not burn)
10. serve and enjoy

A Poorly Designed Website Can Kill Your Sales

It is very important to have a website, and now more than ever, it needs to reflect your business, service or product. Having a professional website can make or break a sale. Your website is usually the first or second contact with a new customer. They either find you by doing a search within a search engine like Google or Bing, or they find your business via another source and they look up your website to find out more information about your business, product, or service.

Have you ever done business with a company that offers an amazing product or service, and their website just doesn’t reflect amazingness? They could be losing new business daily! Do them a huge favour, and let them know about the experience you had with their website. They can not change something that they are not aware of.

Tips for designing a killer website that converts into positive ROI!

1. Use Great Graphics

Having poor graphics can decrease the value of your website. Make sure your graphics are high quality and are not pixelated. If you are designing your website on your own (which some small businesses do) make sure you get someone to help with the graphics that you design or choose. iStock is a great place to purchase high quality graphics.

2. Make Sure It Looks Professional

I know that lots of business owners like to save money. Realistically, we all do. Having a budget to have your website designed professionally is important. Cheaping out and getting your site built by a friend, a student, or your own kid who took a course in high-school will only cost you money and sales in the end.

I have worked with many businesses that had their first website designed by someone new in the design industry, and I have found that the level of professionalism was just not there. Having a website that isn’t functional, or looks thrown together is only going to leave a bad impression with your potential customers about your product or service.

3. Spell & Grammar Check Your Content

How many times have you gone to a website and found errors throughout the content? It doesn’t reflect well on the business. The impression that you are giving is that you don’t care to do things well. Again, have someone go over the content to correct the errors. It can be a friend, colleague, employee or spouse. It takes just one look-over to find some errors that you just didn’t see because you had been staring at it for too many hours. It is worth it in the end.

4. Easy To Navigate

Help your user find what they are looking for easily. Implement a user friendly navigational system. Have people test it out and provide feedback. Using a tracking program like crazyegg can give you some great feedback on the usefulness of your navigation.

5. Make it Easy For Them To Contact You

Your website is the perfect place to interact with your new customers. I have had many consultations with new clients that complain about their existing website not doing anything for them. When I look at the website, I find their contact information buried in their contact page. I recommend placing the business phone number dominantly in the header of the document on every page so that the user doesn’t have to search for it. Also, I always add a simple contact form to every page. Yes, I said every page! Most importantly, make sure that it is above the fold. This will definitely increase the chances of your customer contacting you. We have seen a website go from 0 calls to action to over 60 in 1 month just by adding a contact form. It’s not rocket science, it’s just smart design.

Remember, when designing your business website, it is always best to hire a professional, so make sure that you set aside a budget when planning your marketing strategy for the year. Spending your marketing budget on great sources that drive traffic to your website is a worthwhile investment, but only if your website is setup to convert the traffic once it gets there.

As a student, I was extremely grateful to receive an internship at Longevity Graphics. Knowing that marketing and design are the fields I wish to work in, they gladly welcomed me. My first internship took place last summer, and I am happy to say that I have come back for the second year!

When I first came to Longevity Graphics, right away, I was accepted into their team. The atmosphere and the knowledge of the office made it easier to learn new things. Coming into the office, I was surely not as experienced as others. But soon enough, thanks to their help, I feel I have become much more knowledgeable about marketing and design.

Here are some of the things I have learned:

While designing projects for customers, keep key ideas of what they suggested in mind. Your job is to create their visualization, not your own.
Make tons of different drafts for the customer to choose from.
While on the phone, don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.
While making your first campaign on Google Ad words, make sure it is perfect. If it’s not perfect, you might mess up future campaigns.
Save everything. Twice even.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Working at Longevity Graphics has been a great opportunity and I am very grateful for the experience.

Thank you Longevity, you guys are the best!

Facebook advertising has grown exponentially in the last few years, with the opening of several new offices to provide support staff to their brand/business pages. There are more options on how you promote on a Facebook page than ever before and even still being constantly changed, updated and upgraded.

If you are a company that is using a relatively low Facebook ad budget, a great option to grow your fans on Facebook is to connect with a Facebook account representative directly. Usually you would have to spend a higher amount, around $2000 to have access to this representative, but it is worth it in the long run. Here’s an outline of the main Facebook ads used by brands today.

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There are 4 main types of Facebook Ads:

1. Sponsored Likes: Shows on friends of BRAND fans feed who don’t like BRAND: ‘Jennifer Like Brand’.

User has the option click on the brand profile picture- which takes them directly to the brand fanpage
Another option to ‘Like’ the page from the ad itself
CPC (Cost Per Click) on a simple sponsored ad is low and manageable. (Can go as low as $.30+)

Main Gain: It’s used to gain a large amount of likes over a shorter period of time.

2. Brand Promotion: Promote a contest/giveaway through a Facebook application advertisement.

User has the option click on the promotion picture- which takes them directly to the brand fanpage
Another option to ‘Like’ the page from the ad itself
CPC (Cost Per Click) is higher ($.95-1.6+)

Main Gain: Increase engagement and interaction for your Facebook promotion. Goal should be to get more clicks to the Facebook application- promotion/contest. Get the like, but get an entry etc..

3. Promote a Specific post on your page: Promote a post through default of last posted or a specific post.

User has the option click on the post/picture– which takes them directly to the post
Another option to ‘Like’ the page from the ad itself
CPC (Cost Per Click) on a specific post ad is the low-medium. (Can go as low as $.37+)

Main Gain: Increase commenting, sharing, liking on a particular post. Get the like, but also get engagement.

Another way to promote a specific post with the goal of engagement is to promote them right on your fanpage.

4. Promote a Specific post- NewsFeed -promote a post directly onto fans newsfeed.

To set this up, go to a post on your Facebook page. Underneath the post on the bottom right-hand side you will see ‘Promote’- which drops down into a Facebook Ad promotion.

Choose between audiences:

People who like your page
People who like your page and their friends

– Duration is set: 3 days from when first posted

– Cost Options: $51 – $2.01K

– Estimated Reach: 9K – 646K

Note: It will say ‘Sponsored Post’ at the bottom (Fans/Friends of fans will know it’s a paid for post)*

Main Gain: Increase commenting, sharing, liking on a particular post from your existing fans.

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Extra FYI: Facebook also shares success stories of brands that have had ‘success’ with a Facebook promotion. Yes, they are usually larger brands who have spent larger dollars on Facebook advertising and the like, but what you can do is take these ideas and scale them into a promotional option that suites your budget. Good luck!

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