Utah SEO Marketing Blog

Free Internet Marketing Offer

Internet marketing is not something you can do once and forget about it. The internet is one of the leading industries in technology and changes dramatically from day to day. If your business is ahead of your competition online this will become a major competitive advantage to your firm.

I want to help you gain that competitive advantage over your competition, not just today but everyday. I will continually track, monitor, analyze, and adjust your internet marketing efforts to help you increase profits and be successful. This is our passion and I love to help our clients climb to the top of their competition in the internet battlefield.

There are many aspects to internet marketing, as our client I will research your industry so I can better assist you, not all industries compete in the same fashion online. Because each industry is unique I discover the methods of marketing that will best benefit your organization. Some examples are search engine optimization, pay per click campaigns, newsletters, providing useful information for your potential customers, offline advertising in magazines or radio, building links from other industry leader websites, etc.

When you succeed I succeed and that is something I will not forget.

Free Internet Marketing Review Offer

If you are looking for a free internet marketing report then you are in luck. You probably have a website but it is not very profitable or not as profitable as you would like.

I will review your website for free and send you some suggestions for improvement. This can range from natural search engine optimization suggestions, link building suggestions, affiliate program management, newsletters, interactivity, PPC, special offers, conversion improvement, professional design, etc.

Of course I could help you with those suggestions if you wish, but if not we hope that you will find the information useful and keep us in mind if you pay someone for the services. Contact me with your website, name, and email address and we will send you your free internet marketing report.

Why Me?

Web Site Marketing: Your website will be easy to find for your customers. We design every web site with your customer in mind. We will build a web site that is marketed on the internet and search engine optimized.

Custom Made Web Site: Your web site will be custom-made. We make every web site by hand, every web site is unique to your industry and your company.

Industry Research: We will research your industry and company. We will spend several hours researching what your business does so we can make the most efficient web site for you. Through the research we will also be able to ask you specific questions to get information from you to promote our ‘easy web site design’ value.

Web Site Design Price: You may think we charge more than others when it comes to web site design price. However, you must remember that EVERY web site we design includes web site design services and web site marketing services, sometimes known as search engine optimization. Many business spend thousands of dollars a month alone on internet marketing alone and most web design firms do not usually include this service complimentary.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Utah Web Design & SEO

Wow, so I have been super busy lately.  It has been a long time since I wrote in the blog but I am hopefully going to do so a little more often in the future.  I have made a move of quitting my full time job and becoming a full-time freelancer.  I will be providing utah web design and utah seo services to companies in the salt lake city area, or anywhere as people find me.  I am very excited for this new change and things are going very well so far.  The only problem is that I am already a bit busier than I was expecting to be, but being busy in this economy is a blessing so I am very grateful.

I am hoping to start posting some specific examples of what I find works and what doesn’t with my SEO experimentation.  Publishing results from analytics, rankings reports, etc.  Sorry this is so short, but I will be back again shortly with more fun information.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Park City Alpine Slide, Coaster, and Zipline

Usually I blog about internet marketing but today I felt like posting about a family excursion that was fun.  Park City Mountain Resort in Utah is one of my clients and I decided to take the family up there this last weekend.  To say the least we had a great time.  I went there last year too but had forgotten how much fun it was.  For those of you considering heading up there one day for their summer activities I am posting a quick review and videos of our trip to give you more details.

Park City Alpine Slide

The alpine slide was the first activity we did.  You get to ride the scenic chair lift up to the top of a mountain, one near the base of the resort.  The chairlift is pretty slow, but its comfortable and gives you time to talk with your family or friends and have some quality time together.  I should note that you have the option to continue on to the next mountain peak and hike down, ride back down on the chairlift, or ride a bike down the mountain – I think the bike option would be a blast but you have to bring your own bike.  Once you are at the top of the mountain you can go either left to the alpine slide or right to the zipline.  You drag your alpine slide with you from the chairlift drop-off point over to a set of 4 alpine slide tracks.  We were there on a weekend and the wait was only about 5 minutes once you made it to the slide tracks.  Going down is pretty fun, and somewhat adventurous.  Our 4 year old and teenage foreign exchange student did start to fall out at one point and got some scrapes which the medic tended up nicely.  That is part of the thrill though I suppose, you know you can get hurt if you go too fast or are dumb and lean the wrong direction.  It is quick and gives you a good thrill though, similar to big water slide at a water park. Here is a video at the bottom of the ride, next time when I know I won’t die doing it, I will take a video as I go down!

Park City ZipRider (Zipline)

The zipline is also at the top of the mountain and you have to take the chairlift to get to it.  You do have to get a special ticket for the zipline because there are only 4 lines so it takes a while for the line to make it to the ride itself.  The ticket will give you a time frame of when you are supposed to be there, i.e. 2:00-3:00pm.  Once you are there they buckle you in and push your feet against a gate which they open and off you go!  It is a thrill as well but not a scary one, somewhat calm and relaxing to be honest.  It feels kind of like you are flying or floating down the mountain with the air rushing by your face and it does take a good minute or two to get to the bottom.  I was expecting a very abrupt halt at the end but they have a coil system in place to cushion your land so its actually fairly smooth.  I did notice when I curled up in a cannonball like posture that I went faster vs. having your arms and legs all the way out catching wind. I wish I would have had my camera out to take a video coming down, I will do that next time. Here is a video of some people coming down though from a ground viewpoint:

Park City Coaster Ride

The alpine coaster ride was by far my favorite.  This is the only one that has a line at the base of the mountain.  Since it was a weekend the wait was a bit longer, maybe about 20 minutes, but still not that bad.  The coaster cars are on an actual track so you can’t fly off of it like the alpine slide.  Once you are in a car it hooks up to a chain and pulls you up a nice little scenic ride up the mountain in between lots of trees, I think they were aspen.  You go through a little bridge/tunnel type thing (see video) and up a fairly steep incline after that.  It takes a good 10 minutes to get pulled to the top where your car take a sharp turn to the right and starts heading down the mountain.  At that point your car races in circles, back and forth, etc. at fairly high speeds.  It reminded me a lot of a roller coaster but a little more fun since you are in a small car just to yourself (or one other rider) and you can control your speed.  You can brake on your way down but its not advised as you could probably get rear ended by the person behind you who may not notice you are slowing down.  This was very very fun and I highly recommend it. Here are two videos of going up on the coaster, next time when I have time to ride it more I will be more adventurous and make a video coming down the ride:

Other Utah Summer Family Activities

Have a great time up in park city, you really should check out the resort and all it has to offer in the summer.  In addition to the above main attractions they also have miniature golf, a maze, carousel, jumping thing, rock climbing, cool restaurants, shops, hiking, horseback riding, and more.  I hope this guide was useful and if you do end up going please post a comment about your experience.

Useful Park City Resort Summer Links

Summer Family Activities Report - find out which rides are open and which ones are not (i.e. if its raining or something)

Park City Mountain Web Cams – view the base of the resort to see people walking around, how crowded it is, what the weather is like, etc.

Park City Utah Family Summer Activities – a list of summer activities for your family and friends.  Get info on the alpine slide, alpine coaster, zipline, etc.

Park City Mountain Resort Summer Pass Prices – get info on prices for the different activities and a link to the operating schedule/times.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Misc. | 3 Comments »

Social Media Optimization Google Analytics Filter

As social media marketing becomes more prominent for internet marketers one challenge is to determine how to track success of a social campaign. One easy way to gain some insight into your social media marketing campaigns is to setup a specific campaign in Google Analytics to track traffic from these sites. This will give you insight after you push social strategies online if they are bringing in more traffic to your website or not. Google Analytics already tracks visits from social sites but you can easily setup some filters to put them all together in one campaign so you can see the overall health of your social strategies without having to look at them individually.

Follow these steps in Google Analytics so setup social media marketing filters:

1. Click on ‘edit’ to the right of your website profile on the main login screen.
2. Click on ‘Add Filter’ in the ‘Filters’ section on the next screen.
3. Name the filter something like ‘Social Media Grouping’
4. Select ‘Custom filter’ as the ‘filter type’
5. Select ‘Advanced’ from the radio button options list
6. *In ‘Field A -> Extract A’ select ‘Campaign Source and enter the social media marketing sites you want to capture in the text box, see below for more information
7. ~In ‘Output To -> Constructor’ select ‘Campaign Medium’ or ‘Campaign Name’ and enter ‘social’ in the text box, see below for more information
8. Leave the rest of the ‘yes/no’ boxes as-is and save the filter
9. You will have to wait 24 hours to start seeing the traffic being filter in the manner you just setup

* Note: for convenience sake you can copy paste this text to add some of the most prominent social type sites on the internet to your filter: twitter\.com|facebook\.com|myspace\.com|flickr\.com|linkedin\.com|Wordpress\.com|blogspot\.com|youtube\.com|stumbleupon\.com

~Note: this will change the ‘campaign medium’ from ‘referral’ to ‘social’. There is one drawback to this as you will not be able to see the referring website url from traffic coming from your tagged social media marketing websites anymore. There is an alternative to this. Instead of marking the campaign medium as ‘social’ you can mark the ‘campaign name’ as social. Then to see your social traffic you will have to go to ‘traffic sources’ -> ‘referring sites’ -> select a site -> filter by ‘campaign name’ to see your ‘social’ traffic.

Screenshot 1: Setting up the filter

Google Analytics Social Filter (above)

Screenshot 2: Viewing Social Site Traffic

Social Filter Website Traffic Screen

Popularity: 4% [?]

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25 Items to Address in a Website Redesign

Here are some notes I came across from a while ago on items to address when you are going through a website re-design so you don’t have to do another one in a long time.  This includes online marketing items mainly and does not address web design in and of itself much – more on the lines of search engine optimization and persuasion architecture.

Website Refresh Items

1. Define value from customer’s perspective and multiple personas.
2. Focus on emotion.
3. Focus on end-benefits (from all clients)
4. What are the customer’s real needs/wants?
5. “Why should I buy from you?”
6. What other options are there? Address them.
7. How is your product and company different from others?
8. What process does the client go through to buy the product/service?
9. What information do they need to know before they buy?
10. Establish trust!
11. Identify clearly points-of-action.
12. Internal linking! Link keywords to relevant pages.
13. Find “hidden area” – information they are looking for that they can not find anywhere else.
14. How? Why? Who? What?
15. Be relevant – address needs, values, beliefs.
16. Make copywriting personal! “you” not “We” – address feelings.
17. Establish confidence! Use emotion to appeal.
18. Scanning – use headings, quotes, links, bullet lists.
19. Homepage – communicate UVP and get them to click deeper.

Generating Leads

1. Time is precious to clients, value it and get their attention by showing how you can help their business by speaking in their terms.
2. Questions potential clients have:

1. 1. How will this service help my company?
   2. We’re doing okay, why do we need it?
   3. Is there another company out there that is better?
   4. Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
   5. Is the company credible?
   6. Can we afford it?

1. Focus on the positive aspects, not negative pain points. Ask the client ‘where do you want to be after this project?’
2. Automate lead generation with items such as messagemaker that are based on actions and behaviors taken by the lead.
3. Use stories and case studies to communicate with your leads.
4. Increase the likelihood of closing deals:

1. 1. Design marketing communications for each phase of the sales cycle, from awareness through consideration to purchase.
   2. Focus your marketing efforts on points in the buying process where high potential prospects are leaving.
   3. Increase face-face time you have with clients.
   4. Track marketing leads that close.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Posted in User Centered Design | No Comments »