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If you’ve ever looked into hosting your own webinar at first glance they may seem difficult and expensive to produce but with products like GoToWebinar and Simple Event keeping in touch with your customers is easier than ever.

Here are some tips:

1. Choose a stable software that has just the right amount of features.  No need to have all the bells and whistles you’ll spend weeks trying to learn it and GoToWebinar is good starting application at only $500/yr.

2. Plan it.  But don’t read it.
3. Practice! Practice! Practice!
4. Get help.  Have someone in your office attend it and monitor your presentation for errors.
5. Forget online audio, way too many problems. 
6. Use a free dial in service like Simple Event.
7. Test the audio.  The easiest way to lose an audience is if they can’t hear it.
8. Keep it short and to the point. Remember you’re on the internet, one of the most impatient places on earth.
9. Have fun! No need to bust out knock knock jokes but making your audience smile could be the difference between an OK webinar and a great one.

This Wednesday February 21 join us for a free online webinar titled “Pay Per Click E-Marketing: Why it’s OK to Buy Your Way to the Top.”

In 10 minutes or less the discussion will focus on the Pay Per Click providers,  their costs,  marketing strategies, tips and techniques. 

Join here: http://toplingo.com/webinars.aspx

The power of the ink on paper is still king and moving around in the real world we’re fully surrounded by ads that are effective.  Yellow pages, billboards, newspapers, mailers, business cards, bus benches, coupons and what caught my eye this morning … a vehicle wrap.   

Driving to work I passed by a truck with big picture of a dog cleaning up his own poop. Braking hard in laughter I slowed down to read “Doody Dude Pet Poop Removal – We’re #1 in the #2 Business!” HAHA! How rad is that? And even cooler and appropriately placed below the tagline in big, bold, readable letters was their website address.   

Minutes later I arrived to the office and you can guess what I did first? The same thing you’re gonna do …  hit up DoodyDude.com.

Offline ads work.

What’s in a name?  Everything. Just ask us.  

Originally named Slingshot Development we went through a 2 year lawyer letter battle with a Texas ad agency who trademarked Slingshot 10 years prior and claimed we infringed.  Whatever.  Do a Google search on “Slingshot” and with 5,410,000 results returning  it was a long shot at making the top 10 anyway.  Those spots feature companies like Slingshot New Zealand Internet Providers,  Slingshot Kiteboarding, Slingshot Bikes, Slingshot Karaoke and the Slingshot Anarchist newspaper.   

Listed at #7 even the Texas agency is drooling at the #1 spot.  

Now do a search for “topLingo.”  Bam!  #1. And the top 50 reference us as well.   

Get the point?

Google is always making things easier for web users and especially for website owners which includes their application: GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS.

This free diagnostic service allows you to see how Google views your website, aids in potential problems, reviews how your site is performing and shares info with Google to help your site index better.

Two quick tips …

1. Create and use your robots.txt file

2. Make sure your website has a sitemap.

Explaining to a client the other day I realized not everyone understands or probably cares how selling advertising and posting ad banners on your own website is managed. If you care there are really 3 ways to go about it:  

1. Do it yourself. 
Using HTML and other programming methods you manually code it into the desired location on your website then track impressions through an analytics software. When ads change you re-code.

Advantage: Cheap  

Disadvantage: Poor stats, room for error & lots of labor involved.  

2. Coordinate. 
Buy and implement a software solution like BanManPro that you install, configure then program the HTML one time only.  When ads change you replace the HTML on your website but the software saves you loads of time in reporting on impressions and click throughs and also offers many more features.

Advantage: One time fee and not too expensive ($500+)
 
Disadvantage: Need a skilled programmer to install and administrative labor is involved.  

3. Pawn it off. 
Hire an ad serving solutions provider such as AdJuggler, DoubleClick, Atlas and EyeBlaster who provide you with the HTML that you implement one time only where they then manage ad replacements and tracking but give you full access to reports and more.

Advantage: Thier software addresses all of the coding labor and have very in depth tracking and reports. Depending on the provider they’ll also deal directly with advertisers managing that headache.

Disadvantage: Higher cost as they take a cut of each advertiser’s ad deal.

If you use pay per click e-marketing to drive traffic to your website than you are familiar with the top two providers, Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.&nbsp; One of them is soon getting a huge facelift!<br /><br />Formerly Overture, the granddaddy of PPC, purchased by Yahoo now called Yahoo Search Marketing is upgrading their application to keep up with Google and others by providing critical features that advertisers have been begging years for.&nbsp; This includes:<br /> <ol> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Easy Management</span>.&nbsp; Honestly Yahoo’s interface is already easier to use and understand than Google and I’m all for making things even easier.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Fast Ad Activation.&nbsp;</span> About friggin time!&nbsp; Their current 48 hour wait for pretty much any update to any ad is a total pain to deal with.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Ad Testing</span>.&nbsp; Being able to test multiple versions of an ad will help.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Campaign Budgeting.&nbsp;</span> Imperative new feature for budget management. Hopefully they copy Google’s model which works perfectly.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Campaign Scheduling.</span>&nbsp; Awesome new feature to use if your keywords are time sensitive.&nbsp; This allows you to set times for displaying your ads hence targeting a finite audience like corporate California businesspeople which you would display from 8AM to 6PM PST.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Geo Targeting.</span>&nbsp; Google already has this cool feature to help geo target your ads associating them to a specific longitude and lattitude.&nbsp; Their version doesn’t work perfectly but it works well enough to justify investing in, hopefully Yahoo’s will be the same.</li><br /> <li><span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Quality Index.&nbsp;</span> Interesting idea to benchmark how your ad is performing against your competitors.&nbsp; No doubt developed from the fact that everyone already steals your keywords, descriptions and then out bids you anyway so why not report on it.</li></ol> <p>Yahoo’s&nbsp; release date is still unconfirmed but most likely will happen by this summer 2007.</p>

Word of mouth and Pay Per Click E-Marketing … that’s it!  For the past 6 years in business topLingo has not only survived but flourished on only two methods of marketing.  Lame I know, however being authors of over 300 projects during that period we’ve been lucky to get constant referrals and comments like “Oh you need a developer? Check out topLingo they kicked A$$ on my project.”

Not something I recommend for anyone starting up, marketing budgets are estimated around 10 to 20% of your annual sales, ours was like 2%.  So why did we do it?  Well, besides budget concerns and a steady referral rate it was a lesson learned from the dot bomb.  With millions of dollars being raised and lost in a short period Jason and I simply decided to build our business for the long term and on the slow growth route.  We’ve spent very little, borrowed very little and subsequently doubled sales every year since our inception.  Now this 2007 we’re right where we want to be.  Finally we’ll put some real money into marketing.  How about 3%?  Woo Hoo! Print ad’s here we come!

Welcome to 2007 and Happy New Year!  Lots of great opportunities in the web development world this year and just like each year before it some cool technologies and ideas will emerge and some will fade away.  And although personally I prefer to stay on the cutting edge of technology, the reality is that my business and my business clientele is about one or two steps behind.  Not a bad thing of course, in fact staying a step behind helps reduce the risk of investing into any unproven technology or concept thus wasting time and money.  So, with that in mind here are some things that we predict will be a hot topic for both our fortune 500 and small entrepreneurial clients in 2007:

• RSS Feeds
• Web 2.0
• Social Networking
• AJAX
• Paying more attention to the end user
• Online Marketing Tools
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Web Services
• Video in Flash

We’re a Microsoft shop but like a little brother we’re even calling bull$hit on this one. Apparently big bro is now trying to patent RSS technology as if they invented it. According to filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Microsoft is seeking a patent for “finding and consuming web subscriptions in a web browser.” Bumper stickers in Redmond are now reading “He who dies with the most computer technology wins!”

Summed up in their tagline “There are over 55 million blogs out there … some of them have to be good!” Technorati is an internet search engine focused on the world of weblogs or blogs for short.

A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Our topLingo blog, the one you are reading is written and Maintained by the experts at topLingo who provide focused information, resources, services and advice as they pertain to website and web application development.

According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Great! Yet another reason to spend more time surfing the web!

www.Technorati.com

Technorati Profile

Feed Shark

Wondering where your website ranks amongst the billion other webpages out there. Check out www.googlerankings.com and see how high you’re listed in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The search will seem slow, but the results are worth the wait.

A long time friend and well respected employee of ours recently read our blog and was concerned. “Dude, you’re giving away free consulting, what if your competitors take advantage of it?” My response was “It’s the internet!”<br /> <p>I remember long ago when I first discovered what the whole World Wide Web was all about. Except of course for the monthly AOL charge to get access via the slowest device ever invented, a modem, websites I visited always gave out massive amounts of free information. That was and is the beauty of it. So yes, if our competition wants to read, learn and stay in tune with the advice and ramblings found in our blog I invite them. Everyone is welcome. <br /></p> <p>And for even more free knowledge please attend our webinar series “dotcomGood” with a goal to provide advice on how to make your dotcom … good! Only 10 minutes in length perfectly timed for even the busiest professional, the next upcoming webinar is titled “To RSS or not to RSS” and debuts on Dec 6, 2006. Register Here.</p>

topLingo budgets every month  for e-marketing such as Pay Per Click campaigns, e-newsletters, ad banners, directory listings, etc. but up until a few years ago we were spending blindly.  Actually semi-blindly.   We knew how much we were spending and on what, but we weren’t sure what our true “Return on Investment” (ROI) was. Enter ROI Wiz. 

Although we’ve mastered the development of online applications sometimes it’s just easier and less inexpensive to buy a component, install it and move on.  We did just this and purchased the ROI Wiz software listed at $399 allowing us to create unique campaign identifiers and then sync them with the deal closer on our website. Our deal closer is the contact and quote forms, but yours may likely be the shopping cart.  In fact, here’s how you may use it:

1. In the ROI Wiz online software create a unique link for an e-marketing campaign like “Ad banner on Yahoo.com.”

2. When users click that link on Yahoo.com the link is being tracked on your website.
3. If that user purchases from your shopping cart ROI Wiz tracks the sale and associates it to the original link you created.
4. Login to ROI Wiz to run reports in real time on which e-marketing campaigns have better ROI then re-adjust your budgeting accordingly.

Most web developers’ philosophy on the importance of reporting web hits and web traffic via website analytic tools is mostly an afterthought.  Build the website, save the web logs and then when the client cares about stats, hookup an analytic tool.  Used for years, WebTrends is the most popular software on the market which is easy to install, easy to read, we bought, we use it, it works … but now we’re switching.

After 10 years of using a product why switch now?  Well, a new tool is in town and from a company whose stock is close to the $500 mark … Google Analytics.

Top 7 reasons include:

1. Hosted Solution
Being hosted by Google it’s the opposite of software packages like WebTrends who rely on your IT department to ensure web logs are current and integrated which ultimately allows more time for the IT department to do more important things.

2. Safe and secure.
Google takes the trust people place in them very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. They understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so they accord it the ironclad protection it deserves.

3. Integrated with Google AdWords
If you use this Pay Per Click service it’s integration helps calculate ROI easily.

4. Up to date stats.
WebTrends can be up to 48 hours or more behind in reporting.  Google is 24 hours or less and real time stats could potentially be on the horizon.

5. Piece of Cake
It’s not that we don’t like our IT departments it’s just that their time is valuable so installation and 100% use of Google Analytics can be done easily and without IT involvement.

6. Scalable
Any size site can use.

7. It’s Free.
Google’s competition freaked out when they heard this.