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The Latest Doodlekit News, Events And Helpful Tips:
Doodlekit FREE PLAN websites will be down in protest for a 12 hour blackout on:
Wednesday, January 18th, from 8am–8pm EST
Doodlekit has joined an internet blackout protest with many other major internet companies to bring attention to the fact that Congress is trying to pass two well-intentioned (but deeply flawed) bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.
These laws would hold Internet Service Provider and Public Social Media websites (like Doodlekit, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc.) liable for all content posted by their users. This in effect would force us to remove all our FREE PLAN websites as we could get sued or shut down for content our users post that the government feels is a violation of these acts.
"Censorship begets censorship, and inherently defies oversight. SOPA is the wrong solution to any problem we might believe it would solve."
- Neil Stevens
Click Here for more information. Please Contact Your Congressman to help block these bills.
Last month I covered evaluating your marketing efforts. Hopefully you all saw the post and took a few moments to do an assessment and run Hubspots free Marketing Grader application on both your website and that of at least one competitor.
So now what? You either can pat yourself on the back that you are doing a pretty good job or you can sulk about the fact that you are not or you can take action! I am a take action kind of girl and I like helping people so let’s do it together shall we! Let’s make some resolutions together this year to do one thing every month to improve your marketing. I will be here to help you along the way. Every month I will give you one specific actionable idea that you can do using your Doodlekit website to increase your Marketing Grader score. At the end of the year I would love to profile one or two Doodlekit customers who have increased their scores on my blog SavvyB2Bmarketing.com and will give your business website even greater exposure. You can start at any point during the year but just like most New Year’s Resolutions results do not come overnight. It is only through steady consistent progress that you will see long term results!
So let’s get started!
This month’s challenge is to start or improve your blog! Studies have shown that websites with a blog have 55% more visitors and just having a blog improves your Marketing Grader score. Every Doodlekit site (even the ones made with the free website builder) comes with a blog. So if you haven’t checked out or enabled your blog in the past let’s start by some of the great features that the Doodlekit blog page offers you.
- Intuitive entry screen with word-like editing features
- Ability to enter photos, upload documents as links and position widgets within the post
- Utility to schedule blog posts to go live on a certain date or time
- Comment functionality so you can “dialogue” with your readers
- Tags so you can aggregate your posts by topic
- Spam filter so you can speak to real customers and not robots looking for cheap links
Why Blog?
I gave you one really compelling reason to blog in the intro of this piece. Websites that have a blog get 55% more traffic than those that don’t. This isn’t a magical statistic. It is purely that blogs that are well written have a lot of keywords that are likely to be in search phrases that people type into search engines. Search engines like Google see a concentration of those keywords or tags (categories you create to group your blog posts) and they rank this higher in their organic search.
I am going to give you a few less scientific but just as significant reasons to blog. Small businesses need a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to show they go the extra mile for their customers. If you are in a retail business you need to give people a reason to shop locally rather than on-line. You need to convey that you provide an extra level of customer service that is unmatched. You have a chance to build a rapport with potential customers before they ever set foot in your door. You can convey your passion, expertise, unique value proposition and personality through your blog. You can in a word make yourself memorable! When your business is memorable you take yourself out of the commodity market and into the value add market!
In most purchase processes 70% of the activity occurs before they find you! That means they are aware of your product, service and their need for it. Buyers find when they are searching for a solution and evaluating potential vendors. I don’t care if you are selling mufflers, personal training services or pet supplies you have an opportunity through a blog to communicate your unique value to your prospects.
A Small Business Blog Case Study
A little over a year ago my family bought a new home. 2 days before our inspection window was over we got the results of the radon test. The results in the basement were border line so not significantly egregious. So we had a choice to make whether we wanted to ask for money in the final contract to have the issue mitigated or not. The seller was not obligated to mitigate the radon because the level came in within the state acceptable level. However the basement was going to be in our new home our children’s playroom so I needed to learn as much as I could quickly about the possible about why radon mitigation was recommended.
I found a local vendor, Jim, from a Google search that had blogged extensively about radon exposure and the benefits of mitigation. He went into extensive detail about different mitigation systems, their cost and the pros and cons of different materials. I was in a matter of a few hours completely brought up to speed on everything I could possibly know. I called my real estate agent and told him we did want to add a stipulation to the contract that the seller mitigate the radon in the basement.
The seller’s counterproposal offered to have the radon mitigated with the cheapest materials / technique possible by a vendor of their choosing. Because I was educated not only on the dangers of radon but also the materials and techniques by the blog I read I knew quickly their proposed technique was not the best option for the type of basement we had. It was obvious to me that they were trying to limit their cost exposure. So instead I asked for the cost of their fix off the purchase price and hired Jim, who had written the blog, because I was confident that he would provide the best long term solution for the safety of my children.
The moral of the story is that Jim would not have gotten the business without his blog. He was able to establish credibility with me to the point that I was willing to spend more money in order to use his services. Additionally my real estate agent and the sellers agent were introduced to Jim because I quoted his blog in my rejection of the sellers counter proposal and they both agreed that he was an impressive choice they would refer to future clients.
I knew a considerable amount about Jim, his work ethic and his approach from reading what he wrote that I would not have known simply picking someone out of the yellow pages or from a Google local listing.
Next month’s installment will cover blogging best practices. I will demystify keywords, search engine optimization and editorial calendars. In the mean time explore the Doodlekit blog features and write your first post. I think “Why I chose this career field” or “Why I opened this business” is a really good place to start!
Happy blogging!
About the Author: Heather Rubesch is currently the Director of Content for DemandCon, the only industry conference focused on accelerating the entire sales and marketing funnel. Her penchant for collaboration drew her 3 years ago to co-found the Savvy B2B Marketing blog with five of the most talented content marketers in the universe!
We have reached that crazy time of the year when everyone is trying to close out their year, looking at their P&L statements and stuffing receipts in envelopes to deliver to their accountants. When I work with clients to set goals for their marketing content and social media efforts we usually talk about those goals on a per project or per effort basis but I always suggest that they do a yearly review as well. I believe it is important to look at the dollars you spent on all forms of marketing (advertising, sponsorships, graphics development, social media, website updates, etc) and ask yourself a few simple questions about each line item.
- Did I get what I expected for my investment of time / money?
- Do I know the measurable results of that spend?
- Would I do that effort / project again?
- What lessons did I learn?
Unless you have a specific background in marketing some of these questions might be hard to answer but I promise there is value in just reviewing them even if just mentally. When doing the review make sure you give consideration to even the “free” marketing efforts like your Facebook fan page and your Blog. While those might not be specific line items that cost you money but if you are doing them properly they are definitely costing you time which as a small business owner is one of your most valuable resources.
Once you have done a basic review of everything you have done in the past year to promote your business take a look at the competition. Look around at your competitor landscape.
What are your competitors spending time on? Are they buying Google Ad words space for key words where you are relying on organic search? Do you know the difference? If not check out this article.
Is your competitor publishing blog content weekly and yours hasn’t been updated since March 2009? Blogging can be a great way to drive organic search links to your site. A 2010 Hubspot Report indicated that B2C companies that blog have 88% more leads than those who don’t.
Once you have finished looking at your efforts and few competitors’ efforts do one last review. Use the Marketing Grader application. It is free and allows you to run it again your website as well as your competitors. Please wait until you have done your own “gut check” review first. Going straight to the automated tool is cheating! How much different is your score than your competitors?
- If you are more than 10 points higher – Congratulations! Go ahead and review the recommendations and see what areas of improvement you can capitalize on.
- If you are more than 10 points lower – Don’t despair! Everything pointed out here can be fixed and most of it does not require an extensive marketing budget. If you are willing to email me (heather@idea2paper.com) your URL and your competitor URL I will review and you might be featured as a “marketing makeover” for a future post!
- If you came out within 10 points of your competitor – you have a very exciting opportunity to differentiate yourself. Take advantage of many of the tools that are already a part of the Doodlekit platform like the blog to move yourself out in front and boost your organic search placement!
Stay tuned next month when I cover Small Business Social Media New Year’s Resolutions! How a little effort can go a long way to getting increasing your brand awareness!
About the Author: Heather Rubesch is currently the Director of Content for DemandCon, the only industry conference focused on accelerating the entire sales and marketing funnel. Her penchant for collaboration drew her 3 years ago to co-found the Savvy B2B Marketing blog with five of the most talented content marketers in the universe!
Why is there a splash page ad on my FREE Doodlekit website?
One word: SPAM. Without diving too much into the intricacies and complexities of how search engines/SEO works, I'll explain how these new ads effect FREE websites and how they help prevent spam.
The #1 way to get your website to show up high on search engines for certain keywords is to generate 'keyword links' to your website from other websites. That being said, spammers like to create as many websites as they can and fill them with spam links to their website(s) so that they can increase traffic.
So how does the splash page ad stop the spammers?
The best way to stop spammers is not only to block them (which we do), but also to remove the incentive they have to begin with. Thus enters in the new splash page ads for FREE websites. Instead of Google and other search engines finding the spam sites these guys generate through us, they will now instead find the splash page ad. The search engine robots that index websites and all their content will not be able to get past the splash page, therefore spammers get no benefit out of creating junk websites.
Why do you have ads on the splash page then?
Why not? We have to put something on it. The revenue it will generate will be fairly insignificant, but it helps fight the good fight against spam.
Will everyone that visits my FREE Doodlekit website see the splash page ad?
Yes - but only once (for the most part). Depending on their browser settings, a cookie will be created during their the first visit and after that they will not see the splash page ad again (until the cookie is gone or removed).
I hope this helps explain this latest updates. Feel free to post any questions you may have about the new ads here.
My apologies that this communication is a little late because things have been so hectic for us the last few months. As many of you know from our last update, we were estimating 3 - 6 months left of development until the new release (including new layouts) was complete. We couldn’t commit to a hard date because of the uncertainly associated with some decisions we made earlier, most notably our decision to move to a new and improved location.
About two years ago my family and I decided a move to Seattle would benefit us both personally and professionally. Actually making the move was easier said than done. With the current worldwide economic and housing crisis, we knew it would probably take us longer than we’d like to sell our home. We spent a few months fixing it up, and then a year and a half trying to sell it. Once we finally sold it, all new development I was doing for Doodlekit went on hold as we prepared for our big move. We were expecting no more than a month’s delay before I could get back to coding again.
Well, that didn’t happen. It actually took us over 3 months thanks in large part to our terrible moving company. Without warning us that any such delay was even possible, a few days before they were supposed to leave, we were notified by our movers that they were having problems finding a driver to Seattle. Of course we had our house already sold and our airline tickets already booked, so we had no choice but to just go to Seattle – with or without our belongings.
Without going into too much detail, we finally got our life back together about 2 months later. Our stuff (including my entire office) sat in a trailer in storage for many weeks. Needless to say we were a little upset. My family and I had to live in an empty home using air mattresses and paper plates to get by. While I had one laptop to do support work (which crashed ironically, but that’s a different story), any new Doodlekit development was impossible until our belongings arrived and I could dig out my office. For more details feel free to read my North American Van Lines Review on my personal blog.
The good news is we’re back on track and working hard on the new release. I’ll be working diligently to push out the new layouts as soon as possible. I apologize for the delay and the setback, but feel our new location is a step in the right direction for us all. As far as the new release, things are looking to be pushed out the first part of next year in January or February. I'm still very excited about this rolling out and can't wait to show off all our hard work - you're going to love it!
