The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

I love it when simple products do a job extraordinarily well. In a recent blog post, Refreshing Your Manufactured Housing website – why?, we covered some of the reasons why now may be the time to update your online information. If you haven’t read it, of have forgotten it, read it again.

In the July issue of MHMSM.com, Maria Cucchiara of All Seasons Communications wrote Six Reasons to Update Your Current MH Website, which explained why an updated website is a necessity. Again, read it or re-read it – there is wisdom in Maria’s words.

All well and good. All commercial websites need to be refreshed every few years or their effectiveness starts to fade. And that is a job for a web design professional. If that’s where you find yourself, call us.

But what about those little changes that need to be made from time to time? You know the ones… a changed price or phone number. Adding a feature to a bullet list. Adding or deleting a dated sentence…

If your’s is a small to medium operation, you may not want to call your web developer every time one of those pops up. If you hired an amateur – or a part-time developer – you may have to wait a long time to get the change made – if ever. They may have simply disappeared or gone out of business.

What if there was a way to make it easy for anyone in your office who can create a simple Word doc to make those little updates for you? Think that could save you some time and money? You bet it could!

If we had built your website, you probably wouldn’t be facing this problem right now because it would be built on a platform that allows you to make simple updates.

But even if your website was built using static pages, the ability to edit sections of your site can be added even now.

And if you can use Microsoft Word®, you can use the simple WYSIWYG interface that can be installed on your website using the files you use now, and keeping the “look and feel” of your current site – the design.

There is more information on this on the Update Your Own Website page at OrangeCat.net. If you are in the position where you or an employee need to make some updates to your website, this may be the answer.

And we’ve been doing this since 1996, so we’ve never vanished on any client.

As stressed in The Manufactured Housing REVOLUTION, you can’t have a revolution without change. Several times in the past month or so, we have mentioned the necessity to keep your website information fresh.

You may have changed models, prices, options or other important information. Sometimes the website lags behind. That’s not a good thing because according to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), some 80% of home purchases begin with the buyer doing research online.

Outdated information on your website can cause them to conclude that your business is out of touch with the market and may lead them to eliminate you as a possible source for their new home without further consideration.

Web design that hasn’t been refreshed in a long time (5 years is way beyond the optimal lifespan of a website design), can leave your business looking as outdated as the design itself. But that is a topic for another post.

There a lot of reasons why the information on a retailer’s or community’s website becomes outdated. One of the most common that I hear is that the web designer has disappeared, gone off to college or gone out of business – the recession has taken a lot of good web designers out of the field.

When the person that designed your website becomes unavailable to do updates, for whatever reason, the website tends to recede into the background of company concerns.

Bad move. An out-of-date website’s effectiveness as a marketing tool becomes quickly compromised.

Does your business or community website have current information on homes available right NOW at your location. If not, why not?

Is it because there is no provision for that information on your website? Or is it because there is no one available who knows how to do it? Or is it just too difficult and time-consuming to keep it updated?

Those are all common reasons for not having an updated homes list on your website.

How about your customer or community newsletter. Do you have one? Do you send it by direct mail or physically distribute it in your community? Do you email it? Do you keep a current issue and an archive of past issues on your website?

Again, if not, why not?

If you don’t yet have a website for your business, now would be the time to get one set up as the situation improves both in the general economy and in the Manufactured Housing industry.

What you are looking for is a solution that is easy to update for you or your web designer. An easy to update application will save you both time and money and simplifies keeping your website updated

Adding one or more blogs to your current website or creating a new website with blogging capability is the answer to creating a newsletter or listing single properties in a Search Engine Friendly (SEF) environment.

The Search Engines L-O-V-E blogs – blogs are (or should be) updated on a regular basis and they archive all of the information published to them in an organized archive. Search Engines try to supply searchers with solid, up-to-date information and a well-organized, organically growing website gets their attention.

Your chances of achieving a high search engine ranking in your region is greatly increased by having a blog, and you can have more than one blog attached to your domain.

For instance, MHMarketingSalesManagement.com has the main database-driven website with over 900 items and has blogs like this one that feature individual writers such as myself, Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach and Tim Connor as well as the Industry Voices and Inspirations blogs.

A blog (or blogs) can be added to any existing website fairly easily. A blog can also be the primary website by using pages more prominently than posts. A good example of this is the website I created for a limousine company in Danville, Kentucky and which now holds the #2, #3 and #4 spots for it’s keywords in Google’s Search Engine Results. It has all pages and no posts at this time and so functions as a traditional website.

The takeaway from this is that whether you have a website or not, you should consider adding a blog to your online marketing toolbelt. Use it to share new homes you have available, keep customers updated on what is happening in your company or community, get that newsletter online or perform any number of other online marketing related tasks.

Website stats. They have all the charm of 12th grade algebra. But they are very important in the world of online marketing. In this post, we’re going to look at a couple of web stats and what they might mean to you.

Annually, monthly, weekly, by the day or hour are the most common ways of looking at them. Any date range can be specified so you can have a look at your websites performance in large chunks or tiny slivers of time.

Two of the most important web stats are “sessions” and “pageviews.” Other very important stats are “bounce rate” and “length of session.” Most web statistics programs such as Google Analytics and the Urchin software it is based on can display web stats in a variety of ways. There are a variety of other web stats analysis applications that may already be on your web server.

A “session” is recorded every time a visitor arrives at your site for the first time since the expiration of their last session. Session expiration occurs when activity ceases for a time specified in your server configuration or when the visitor leaves your site.

The “sessions” graph shows the number of visitors your website had in a given time period. In the example graph below (from the logs of a server I use for testing), you can see I had a range of session numbers from 2 to 13.

A “pageview” occurs when a visitor enters a page on your website. A visitor can visit multiple pages during a single session. Pageviews are often mistakenly called “hits” which are a different stat entirely. Calling a “pageview” a “hit” is a lot like calling a Manufactured Home by the “T” word.

The pageviews stat tells you how many of your web pages are being looked at in the specified time. Now we’re ranging from 2 to 126. I like to see 3 or more pageviews per visit on my site – more is great, but less could simply be the result of having a site with few pages to look at. Here is the pageviews graph from my test server.

“Hits” are the most misleading and worthless stats on a web log. A “hit” is recorded every time a page element is loaded. So if you have a web page with 5 images, a link to a JavaScript and a link to a CSS stylesheet, the log will record 8 hits. Anyone can increase their “hit” count by inserting more graphics, even single pixel transparent images.

When you hear someone describe how many “hits” their website is getting, it’s a good bet you can divide that by a factor of 10 to 25. Ask them how many pageviews their site gets. If they can’t answer that, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, “I put my hand on my wallet.” NEVER give advertising money to a website based on the number of “hits” they get. If they use the improper term, it could be an honest mistake (some manufactured home pros still use ‘trailer’), but they should know the difference and should be willing to share the correct data.

Here is a “hits” graph of my test server for the same period as the other two charts. Notice the difference, especially in the Saturday and Monday stats. Do you see how inflated the “hits” stats are? 1,171 hits for 85 pageviews? That’s a ratio of 14 hits per pageview on a site with minimal graphics.

“Bounce rate” is determined by the number of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. They can “bounce” for any number of reasons (for more, see the blog post What is Bounce Rate? What does it mean to you? on BobStovall.com. A decent bounce rate could be anywhere from 33% to 67%. Some one-page sales sites have a bounce rate of 100% and do OK. But if you have a multi-page informational site and you have an unusually high bounce rate (67%-95%) you need to have a look at your site and see what is driving visitors away so quickly.

“Length of Session” is another “tell-tale” stat. It tells you how long the average visitor is spending looking at your web pages per session. It might seem odd, but 2-3 minutes is a pretty good session length. if 66% of your visitors are leaving immediately, the other 33% are staying for 6-9 minutes and that is quite respectable.

There are a lot of other things your web logs can tell you, such as what percentage of your visitors are using Macs or Windows, how many are visiting using Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari, what pages they are entering on, what pages they are leaving from and more.

We’ll delve into more web stats in the future, but I think you now have a good basic understanding of which stats to keep an eye on and what to look for.

I posted this partially tongue-in-cheek Top Ten list to my blog at BobStovall.com on Tuesday. I’ve gotten so much positive feedback that I decided I should share it with you as well.

It’s amazing to me the number of small businesses serving local markets that still don’t have a website. Or, they have one but it hasn’t been updated in months or years.

But not ALL businesses need an updated and dynamic website. So I’ve carefully compiled a list – in Top Ten fashion – of businesses that don’t need a website. I hope you aren’t one of these:

10. Businesses that are closed.

9. Businesses that are about to close.

8. Businesses that will hold their head just above water for a time and then close.

7. Businesses that don’t need customers.

6. Businesses that don’t need money.

5. Businesses that are afraid of success.

4. Businesses that don’t want to plan a future.

3. Business owners that will win the lottery.

2. Businesses backed by a Sugar Daddy.

1. The Mob

No matter how bad your current (or non-existent) website is, it’s never too late. Resolve to fix it now so you can begin reaping the rewards of a fresh, updated website now.

If you’ve been to Tony Kovach’s Masthead blog post for today, you’ve discovered that we’re going to begin making podcasts of a good bit of the material here at MHMSM.com available in June.

That means that you’ll have the opportunity to listen to our articles and maybe some extra materials as you work or even while you’re in your car. This is part of our ongoing effort to make our materials more useful for you.

Most of you have discovered by now that the audio file you’re listening to is pretty much word-for-word the same as the text part of this post, and if you’re listening to this audio file right now and you’re like 80% of the people who are listening, you are also reading along with me.

This is valuable to you because research says that the more of your reader’s or listener’s senses you engage, the better recall they will have of your message.

And getting your message across is what marketing and advertising are all about. I’m going to make this a very short post because I hope you’ve learned one important thing from it – listening AND reading is better than listening OR reading.

If you’ve grasped just that one idea, this post may prove invaluable for you.

This is just one of the dozens of ideas we have to expand your marketing effectiveness. Jump on over to the MHMSM.com Solutions page when you are ready for more.