A lot of us have been in webinars and web conferences. I have attended many and even presented in one. I really loved it and was amazed when they first came out with the concept back in the late 90s. I think it must have been 1998 or 1999. I am not sure if WebEx pioneered it, but they were the first ones.
So recently when a client asked for my help setting up a webinar he could host (it is his first time), I pointed him to WebEx. We went to the webex.com site together and tried to sign him up for a webinar. The web site was really good at giving some information. There were a myraid of options but fortunately it was easy to locate the section that talked about webinars. However, there was no pricing online. So, we decided to pick up the phone and call Webex. The person on the phone was nice and took down all the information - but was nothing more than a secretary. He could not give us pricing and had to setup an appointment for someone to call us back. Alright, I walked over to the client’s office again at the appointed time - but no one called. Finally, almost an hour later we got a hold of our appointed inside sales rep. He said it was a “consultative” approach to tell us what the pricing is. After answering some of the same questions as before here is pricing we got -
33 cents a minute for the web conference
20 cents a minute for the audio portion (which, btw, he shared only after we specifically asked about the audio portion)
Adding up to 53 cents a minute. I about fell out of my chair. Client is expecting around twenty attendes, for about 60minutes. That would be $636.00 for a one time webinar!
Ok, so it was time to shop around. We, Right On Interactive, use ReadyTalk from time to time. And have had good very experience with it. I wasn’t sure how much we paid, but I knew it wasn’t 53 cents a minute. So, next place to shop was ReadyTalk. A quick call to the ReadyTalk sales number told us that the rates were 13 and 8 cents for web & audio portion. Much better! That adds up to 21cents per minute per attendee, or about $252.00. Still expensive but cheaper than client driving out-of-town to present in person.
In an earlier post I commented on a cool Google Analytics widget that allowed for key web metrics to be displayed as a widget on the users desktop by the Yahoo! Widgets desktop application.
And then I ran across a neat email campaign monitoring widget for ExactTarget created by Doug Karr. In full disclosure I used to work for ExactTarget and my company is an agency client and preferred partner, so I may be biased…but I think this is a great tool!
Basically you enter a “job id” (a unique id applied to an email send) and then it updates that campaign every 15 minutes so you get near real time reporting on campaign activity. Pretty slick.
Also, There is another “Advanced Tracking” widget, but as of right now I could not get it to install properly on my computer. I do look forward to using it once they get it figured out! Once it is I will post it here.
So if your an ExactTarget client and find yourself obsessively logging in to see how your email marketing campaign in doing…this little tool may be the answer!
I have built alot of Flash presentations in my lifetime and they can be really effective at getting a point across, especially if you have a complex story to tell.
The problem was that developing those presentations either in house or outsourcing it to an agency quickly costs a lot of time and money. They were “nice to have” but always fell into the ever elusive “3rd Phase” when talking about our phased online strategy. No one ever wanted to commit the resources and budget to it.
Lately I have been marketing a lot of software and putting together an effective presentation whether it is in Powerpoint or Flash has become as important as ever. An online demonstration can help prospects a great deal when they are narrowing down their selection. The more info you can show them…the better.
So thats why I was very impressed when I came across this little tool called “Wink”. Its extremely simple to understand and use…and the best part is that its free!
You can get up and running almost instantly. You just download the application, fire it up, and press play. It will immediately start recording your mouse movements and you can narrate by simply talking into your microphone. When you are done, you can add descriptions, pictures, arrows, sounds, interactive buttons, and even links to urls to help you further tell your story. It makes putting together an effective presentation quick and easy!
What do you have to loose? Go try it out!
I have been evaluating a cool tool provided by VivAlytics for the Yahoo widgets desktop application.
Its pretty simple to get up and running. You just download the Yahoo Widget Engine and then download the VivAlytics Google Analytics Desktop Widget …and after customizing the application to view the reports you want regular access to - Voila! You have all of your favorite metrics available to you right from the desktop.
If you dont want to get deluged with scheduled email reports and dont want to have to login to Google Analytics every time you want to recieve your favorite metrics then this little tool may be for you.
I actually found that the Yahoo Widget Engine 4.0 to be a very cool application and have found a number of tools that I am using it for so its worth checking out on its own. There are hundreds of widgets available for it and its increasing every day.If you take VivAlytics for a test drive let us know your experiences here!
Here it is…
If you logged into your Google account recently you saw a notice about Google Analytics undergoing a face lift. So I was pleasantly suprised when I logged into my account today and saw that my account had been migrated already and I was able to take it out for an initial test drive!
I have to say that I really love the new interface. Its much more intuitive and even simpler to use and understand than before…which was hard to do since it was already a pretty sleek and easy to use interface.
Here are the main improvements:
- Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
- Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
- Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
- Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.
I have to say that I really think the interface is a huge improvement in helping you find the information that is most important to you. Where you usually had to dig through to find the data - you are now able to get to it more quickly, save it, and share it.
So far I am very impressed. What do you think?
There are alot of tools out there to help you with SEO. Some of the best tools are extensions for Firefox. You can see some of them here. They are a must have in any optimizers arsenal.
But a cool SEO tool I have used previously is SEO Doc by Instant Position.
This is a great little tool especially if you are new to search optimization and need some guidance when getting started in SEO. It evaluates everything for you based on what keywords you want to target - and lets you know in simple terms how well you score on individual areas of search optimization (meta, title tags, keyword frequency, inbound link popularity, body content, ect.)
I have used SEO Doc to do search optimization for clients and had great results. It helped me target the keyword phrases that I wanted to use for my most important pages and proved extremely helpful in helping me get them to the top of the search listings in all of the major search engines.
But that doesnt mean that I used it once and then sat back and waited for the results to come in. I still had to research and tweak my keyword content even after getting optimized in SEO Doc. This is true of any SEO tool, even the more costly tools like Web Position. Search optimization is an ongoing process - but very worthwhile once you are successful. SEO Doc is great tool to propel you in the right direction if you arent sure how to get started.
A members costs very little at $80 a year and you can get a feel for how it works by testing out the simplified free version. You can also sign up for a free one day trial if you want to see how the full version works - which I definitely suggest. By doing so you will gain access to a plethora of other online marketing tools in addition to SEO Doc.
Take a test drive and let me know your thoughts!
I have been testing this tool for a few months now and I am excited about its release to the public!
This finally brings sophisticated split and multivariate testing to the small business marketers that don’t have the budget for an expensive tool like Offermatica. The beauty once again is that Google provides it for free.
My personal experience with it has been great.
The power of Website Optimizer tool is evident. It is very easy to set up simple test right away - it took me 30 minutes to get my first one set up. You can test simple page elements or entirely different layouts - the choices are entirely up to you. All that is required is a little knowledge of html and what makes sense to test. Everything is available to you - long term and short term tests, A/B splits, or large multivariate tests.
Once note: Some people may run into issues if they are running a fairly sophisticated content management system or don’t have access to the back end. However this shouldn’t hinder using it for landing pages unless they are tied to your CMS as well. Landing pages are arguably the most important pages of your site so it makes sense to begin there. Detach them and begin testing!
And for most websites the implementation will be simple across all of their web pages.
What is cool is that combined with Google Analytics, this is extremely powerful. Now you not only have a place to measure traffic in aggregate, but a easier way to do testing. No more having multiple landing pages to keep track of - just set up your tests and the data comes pouring in.
You will still need to know what to do with that data, however. Check out this post for a little help.
So with the launch of this new product you no longer have to spend thousands of dollars to compete. The playing field is leveling and the small business marketer can rejoice. Now its time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with testing and analytics!
First off - I am a rabid Firefox fan…not because its open source (I love that too) but because its a very thin application that you can build out and customize.
Being a marketer, I find that I have rapidly accumulated a ton of tools to help me with everything from search marketing, web design, usability, social networking, and competitive research. I have way too many to list in one article - and some are more of a personal preference than practical, but I thought it would be a good place to share my favorites… and more specifically those integrated with Firefox.
Web Developer 1.1.3
Its safe to say that I use this application daily. It is the ultimate companion for any website designer/developer. This tool is so versatile that covering everything it does would be impossible to do here -it could be its own article. If I had to sum up what I use it for mostly would be for its validation ability, real time style sheet editing, visual guides, and document control. Go here to see everything this awesome tool can do…
IE Tab
I no longer open up separate explorer windows for websites and applications that only support IE (i cant believe they still exist either…) Its also great for doing some quick browser testing. A must have if you are still forced to use IE every once in awhile.
FireFTP
I have grown very close to this add on. I used to use any number of free-ware applications to ftp files into my sites, but since integrating it into my browser - I have not gone back. Its a simple yet powerful tool for those people who have a handful of websites that they want to ftp files into and don’t want to leave their browser to do it.
Rankquest SEO Toolbar and Search Status
The combination of these two add-ons are perfect for keeping track of your website and competitor websites in search engines. They offer pagerank and alexa rank in the status bar and one click access to an array of traffic details. If you want to get serious about SEO, these tools are absolutely required.
Colorzilla and Measure It
These little add-ons come in really handy when I am designing. I can click a small eyedropper or ruler in the status bar to easily get everything from website color values to pixel measurements of anything online.
Dictionary Search
If you are anything like me you probably aren’t a walking resource library and come across words every day that you don’t know their meaning. The cool thing about this little tool is that you can double click any word in a web page and instantly pull up its dictionary meanings in a small pop up window. Efficient!
Google Preview
This is a great little feature that adds a web page thumbnail to Google search listings. Its especially helpful for when you are doing multiple searches and need a quick visual to help guide your clicks.
Like I said, there are alot of others that I use - but these are the cool little ones that make my day a little easier. If you have some that you love share them here!
I was reading an interesting Marketing Sherpa article that summarizes top marketers analytics frustrations and had a couple of thoughts.
Check out the article here…
The second frustration listed in the article discusses the wealth of information and how such a small amount of it is useful. This is the place where I think some SMBs gets overwhelmed.
The article goes on to discuss how Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) can help you decide what information is worth tracking and measuring. This is where the playing field levels considerably.
The truth is that you don’t need a huge analytics platform to measure against most of your KPIs. If you understand what impacts visitor behavior and how you can measure that you are already half way home. Something as simple as “average depth of visit” can be a truly telling statement if you run an ecommerce website that has a defined purchase conversion funnel. If buying the red widget takes 5 steps to complete an order and your average depth of visit is 2 pages…you have a serious problem.
Its important to approach analytics in order…
- Do an audit of your business and revisit the goals you had for the website when you built it.
- Revisit that website RFP and proposal from when you had the website built. Are the business goals the same today as they were then?
- Spend concerted time understanding the website and the actual process of taking action.
- Its amazing how many SMB’s don’t actually know what is involved for their customers to take action on their website. Reintroduce yourself to your website and get familiar with how you expect your users to find and interact with it.
- Understand what impacts that behavior
- Is the online demonstration too long?
- Are there too many steps to purchase?
- Did search traffic lead to increased revenue?
- Open up your analytics tool and find the metrics that measure that behavior
- Time spent on page
- Average depth of visit, exit pages
- referrers
- Create dashboards that track those metrics
If you do any of this out of order - you might find that you are tracking things that aren’t really actionable and therefore an inefficient use of your time. Spending time fully understanding your business and its online presence will make all the difference.
For those of you that are building out multiple landing pages I have a simple javascript that may help you with passing variables from campaign url strings into your landing pages.
For example, if you have landing pages that contain identical forms and only need unique “lead source” information you can use this javascript to pull a variable passed in a url string to change the lead source information.
Place the following code where you would normally put your hidden lead source fields.
<script>
function getQueryVariable(variable) {
var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
var vars = query.split(”&”);
for (var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) {
var pair = vars[i].split(”=”);
if (pair[0] == variable) {
return pair[1];
}
}
}</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” language=”JavaScript”><!–
document.write(’<input ‘);
document.write(’ type=”hidden” ‘);
document.write(’ name=”lead_source” ‘);
document.write(’ value=”‘ + getQueryVariable(”ls”) + ‘”>’);
//–></script>
You can then access the page with the variable attached to the url:
www.yourwebpage.com/landingpage.html?ls=leadsource1
The variable populates the hidden form field with the lead source information.
<input name=”lead_source” value=”leadsource1″ type=”hidden”>
When the user clicks submit the information will populate in salesforce.com eliminating the need for multiple landing pages.
You can also use this in correlation with you analytics link ids to maintain consistency in your reporting. Just change the variable in this line of code:
document.write(’ value=”‘ + getQueryVariable(”change-this-value”) + ‘”>’);
You can be creative and use this script to pass multiple values if needed…think about personalizing the landing page from a personalized url string in an email. You could pre-populate a form or even personalize the landing page with their name or any number of attributes in the email database!
Best of luck to you!
