Marketing – Page 6 – Wingrove-Services

Using MailPoet

The following is of interest if your site has a newsletter application built in called Mail Poet.

If you have an email address list containing more than 70 subscribers for your newsletter please do take care with the last step before you send out your newsletter. Generally speaking shared hosting providers do not like bulk mailing applications running in their hosting. They use a variety of methods to detect mail being sent from the hosting which includes monitoring the volume per second/ minute and the number of error messages received such as “recipient account does not exist”. Continue reading Using MailPoet

The Favicon and it’s friends

What is a Favicon?

A Favicon is a small image which may appear in the browser tab as in the example above to the left of where it says Home-Start Derby…. It is created from a logo. I have created these for many sites in the past, they are nice to have but not essential.

However there are other related icons that are requested from a website for “favourites” on devices such as the iPad and iPhone. These are larger, but can be based on the same image. They frequently come up as “page not found” in error logs on websites. I do not generate these because it has not been particularly important to do so. Most of you will be unaware of them.

Part of the issue is how long these things take to create and add to a site, which is why I have not created all of them in the past. Continue reading The Favicon and it’s friends

Some thoughts on Sponsorship and recognising supporters

On some of the websites I have built, I have customised the template and added an area to recognise sponsors in the footer. This has worked reasonably well, but in this age of funding depletion and shifting loyalties, funder’s which were often considered to be regular supporters will change. So now your website is out of date.

I generally get requests to help in this area. It is more complex than conventional editing. One way to handle this is to locate the image in the media library which is normally a composite of several images, delete it and replace it with a file of the same name and size. However this does not work if the media library is split into directories on a monthly basis. (You may not be aware of this, but the directory structure in WordPress is either a single directory or multiple directories based on Month and Year.)

Other complications

As I start to move over to Responsive (mobile friendly) sites, images generally scale but text stays constant as the width of the screen changes. If an image on your site has a live (clickable) area, then this may move as the image scales. If you look at the image below, the letter A is “live” but the letter “B” is not. This is because I have created an area which is invisible but makes part of the image support a live link. These may shift as the width of a page is rendered.

A and B example

A solution

One way around this problem is to have a full width image at the bottom of your home page on your site. On this image you place the various logos of your supporters. You make the whole image a clickable link, and set the target destination to a page within your site which specifically recognises sponsors and supporters. (A friends page for example).

footer-icons2 — Example set of logos. The entire image is live. If you click on it you will be taken to another page.

In the example above the whole image is set up as a clickable link. As you move your cursor over the whole image it changes to a hand (On a PC).

If you click on it, it will take you to a special page. On this page you could list each sponsor and carry a link back to their website to demonstrate your support.

Social Media – Spread the word

Social media in all of it’s forms is increasingly important, particularly for organisations with small budgets, or no marketing budget at all!

I have come across a very neat plugin for WordPress, it is called Social Media Feather. I have incorporated it on a couple of sites and it seems to be moderately easy to set up.

I have also set it up on this site as well. You can add it to your website by logging in as an administrator and going to Plugins, Add new, and searching for Social Media Feather.

It provides two sets of buttons, one for sharing a site/article/page and another set for following a Facebook/ Twitter or similar feed. Continue reading Social Media – Spread the word

Crowd Funding – a source of donations?

Crowd Funding is not a new phenomena, it has been around for at least 5 years if not longer. The principle is that you advertise what you want to do and how much money you need to do it and the “crowd” (people like you and I) offer to put money up to help you to achieve your goals.

The idea originally came as an alternative method of funding compared to seeking venture capital or going to the bank to start a business. So in these cases you are seeking a share of the business or organisation. However I have seen this extended to apply to charitable causes and projects. In this case there is no return on investment for those donating.

We would like a website…. but

Each year I get enquiries from organisations that do not have a website, but would like one. I provide a summary of the costs and the process, then I don’t hear anything else. I chase it to find that they cannot afford it, even at my very low acquisition cost.

It seems to me that these organisations are stuck in a rut. They are short of funds, and are having to be very selective on what they spend them on. We all know that local government funding is disappearing for many charities providing family services for example, so I fully understand the problem. However with a website, they would have a presence on the internet, they can be located, they can seek funding through it, direct funding providers to it to establish their value proposition. So it seems to be a chicken and egg problem. Is there a way around this?

Returning to Crowd Funding

I have looked at some sites that specialise in raising capital, it would seem feasible to document a project where a website and hosting can be provided to a charity based on crowd funding for say £200-£300 in the first year. If you know of any Not-For-Profit or charitable organisation that might be interested in this approach please put them in contact with me. I would be happy to give it a try.

Crowd Funding applied to your organisation

Of course it follows that this concept could be used to help your organisation. First you need a value proposition, what is it you are going to do, or want to do? Write it up and get it on a crowd funding website as a project. Then advertise it through your website, your facebook or twitter accounts.

I suspect it is unlikely that a single benefactor will pop up from the internet, however for a given project, it may be easier to raise £200 from 40 people assuming you have the connections. Using social media to make this happen will extend your reach to more than those you directly connect to. If you look at some of the projects they are more compelling than others.

If you are interested in this area (either something that you wish to pursue for your own organisation, or as a joint venture) contact me and I will help you look into it. Use my contact us page to drop me a line.

I will be doing some research on it over the coming months, and may initiate a project to learn how it all works. If I learn anything more I will add an article on it.

Referrer Spam and other ghost statistics

It would seem that the value of having Google Analytics on a website is diminishing. Prior to 6 months ago, the statistics made some sense. Now I see wild peaks in the statistics. The problem is being caused by something called Referrer Spam. This comment which I have taken from a support board for Google Analytics says it all:

“CarolleM said:
I appreciate your feedback AnalyticsEdge…I’ve been here before. So here’s my thoughts on the situation.

I know that we (the general WE) have seen this type of activity before with Semalt, dorador, alibabaexpress, iloveitaly and the list goes on. Here’s my point – we manage multiple websites and use GA as a means to measure whether our marketing initiatives increase awareness, traffic, conversions, funnel as intended, etc. These pings screw up numbers enough to effect reporting to the client. We are now in a position that we need to explain crawling, bots and pings to our clients who may be suspicious of the validity of the system to begin. Once again, this type of activity makes it difficult to track KPIs without this additional static. Since most clients are unfamiliar with reading these types of stats, we provide our clients with reports and explanations that they can appreciate and understand. With these bogus hits skewing the numbers (and I see this only getting worse) it feels more like selling snake oil than proving ROI.
Google if you want people to continue using your product as a means to substantiate website traffic, analyze visitor behaviour, track marketing initiatives, and all the other goodies you can do with this tool, then help us get clean output!!!! And if you look after numerous properties, as I do, it would be helpful to be able to batch these functions rather than spending a day on creating filters for each and every property individually – that is a total productivity killer. Can anybody explain why we need to put up with this type of spam? Or can we insist that GA find a proper fix?”

Continue reading Referrer Spam and other ghost statistics

Promoting Sponsors

As I pretty much exclusively deal with charities, most of you are seeking support through traditional funding sources which we all understand have been drying up during the recession, and will probably continue to do so. Some of you however are looking at novel ways of getting sponsorship from organisations.

There is currently an example at the bottom of the home page for Home-Start Gosport and Fareham based on the south coast.

In this case anyone landing on the home page and working their way down the content can see that the organisation is recognising the sponsorship of the Local Property Index. It is simple to add an image, and place a link under the image to the sponsors site. If the sponsors site is using Google Analytics then they will be able to tell how many referrals came from the website.

Some may consider an advert like this to be a little too obtrusive, it could have been added elsewhere. This is ultimately a decision made by the client.

However the lesson here is know that it is easy to do (and remove) and it can generate revenue for you with the right sponsor.

You can see the site here: http://www.homestartgosportandfareham.org.uk go to the bottom of the page to see the implementation.

Google Analytics

I have around 75 sites running Google Analytics, I can grant full access to you so you can see your statistics. There is also a video tutorial I have created which gives a very brief overview on interpreting the information. The video can be found on this page: Video Tutorials

Interpreting the data

There is a great deal you can do with Google Analytics, and there are some specialists that make a living out of using it, and interpreting it. I would encourage everyone to take a peek at it. It will show you how many hits your site receives per month, and what people are looking at. I would not however take it as gospel. It does need some interpretation, and at best it gives you an indication of how many visitors you had expressed as a range, rather than an absolute value. For example some visitors arrived by accident. They tend to leave from the page they arrived on. These are recorded as “bounces”. What is not clear though is how long they spent on the page, and whether they got what they were looking for.

Doing your bit

There are some organisations I have worked with that have not followed up and checked their sites rankings in Google. There are things that I can do to improve your ranking through the development of the website, and there are things that you can do. Without both of us working together on this, you cannot benefit from being at the top of an organic search. It is important to point out here that the goal is to be at the top of a google search without paying anything to influence your ranking. Continue reading Google Analytics

Changes in Google search criteria

Google understandably do not publish the precise methods used in indexing sites and subsequently ranking them for presentation in a Google search.

One thing I recently found out this week while looking at earlier sites and search results were some warnings that Google was placing on some sites that are not “mobile friendly”.

Because we have more and more mobile devices around there has been a shift over the past 4-5 years to create websites that change how they are presented to a user based on the screen size of the device they are using. These are generically called Responsive Websites. Continue reading Changes in Google search criteria

Asking your visitors to comment on your site

I completed a Home-Start site this week for Home-Start Bracknell Forest. One of the requests for content was quite unusual compared to the 100+ other charity sites that I have built over the past 3 years.

This group had an old site that I replaced. I was asked to add a feedback page, so they could gather comments from those people that came past the website on their views about the website.

I have used a function that is built into all WordPress websites where you can invite comments on articles (posts and pages). I have turned it on at the bottom of this page so you can see an example and make a comment. You can do this on your site as well (and turn it off again). But you need to be aware of what might happen.

Catering for the Bots

A growing problem is Form Blasting. This seems to be a relatively new tool in the world of the hackers and fringe groups who use computers to post adverts and links into forms. I have seen several examples over the past month where those that use Form Blasting advertise the fact in one of the forms that is submitted from your website. You pay say £150 and they will place your advert for knock off Gucci bags on 10,000 websites. Continue reading Asking your visitors to comment on your site