Using Trackbacks and Pingbacks to Connect with Other Bloggers

One of the biggest challenges when starting a new blog is getting traffic to that blog.  Nothing like working really hard and publishing great content to no audience.  This may be gratifying to some but most people are publishing to get read.  Here is one way you can use the technologies of Trackbacks and Pingbacks to get an audience.

What are Trackbacks and Pingbacks Anyway?

Trackbacks and Pingbacks are a way to post something on your blog that is a commentary or opinion about another posting on a different blog.  For example lets say you love wine and you have a blog about your wine drinking experiences.  As a wine lover you also peruse other wine lover blogs and often try wines that they recommend.  As a result you sometimes have your own perspective on a wine that was recommended in another blog.  So you decide to write a post in your own blog about how you took this other blogger’s advice from a post they made and how that advice served you.

Now that is all well and good in and of itself but I bet if that other blogger knew you had written a post on your own blog related to one of their posts they would be interested in that.  That is what Trackbacks and Pingbacks are used for:  They are a way to let another blogger know that you posted an article related to theirs and it gives an easy way for that blogger to post a link back to your blog in the comments section of their own blog.  Basically what happens is a communication is sent from your blog to their blog with a link back to your post, what post of theirs your post is related to and a brief excerpt from your post.  This information will then automatically get put in the comments section of the related blog’s post.  That is unless they are moderating comments in which case the blog’s author has to approve the Trackback or Pingback before it gets posted.

Why Use Trackbacks or Pingbacks?

Great question.  Short answer: To get some attention for your blog.  Unless you are already a celebrity you probably need a good way to get the word out on your blog.   Imagine walking into a social gathering.  In keeping with my previous example of the wine lover let’s say this is a gathering of wine lovers.  You could walk in, find a spot in the room, and just start talking about wine and maybe some people would come over to you.  However that is unlikely because probably most people in the room are already engaged in conversations and not paying attention to the newcomer.  They might also think you are weird because you are standing around basically talking to yourself.

A better strategy would be to enter the room, walk around and find a conversation that you could contribute to.  If you contribute something valuable to the conversation you can get the attention of those people.  Trackbacks and Pingbacks are an effective way to do that on the Web.

Go Get Some Traffic!

Head out there on the web and find some popular blogs on the same subject you are blogging about and contribute to their conversations using Trackbacks and Pingbacks.  In this article I didn’t really give any technical details on how to use this technology because there are already some great posts out there on how to use Trackbacks and Pingbacks.  Here is one I really found useful: WordPress Trackback Tutorial .  It is targeted to WordPress users but I think the information is presented in such a way that people using other blogging systems will find it useful too.

Let Me Know How It Goes

I am very interested in any comments you have and you can use a pingback to send me a comment from your own blog.  I moderate all comments so don’t spam me but if you want to share your experiences, ask a question or make a legit comment I would love to hear from you.

Who This Article is For

This article is written to help someone who has a company or professional practice but no web site.   These days potential customers judge you by your web presence.  If you don’t have any web presence you are making a statement about your business – and it isn’t a good one.  Does this mean you must have a huge and very fancy web site?  Not necessarily.  For instance if you are a single attorney practice serving a very local market you may only need a web page that states who you are, your qualifications, a description of your practice and your contact information.  The domain name for the site may just be your name or something like johnasmithpc.com.  This has the added benefit of giving you an email address like jsmith@johnasmithpc.com which is much better and more professional than an email address @aol.com or hotmail.

Of course the more you put into your web presence the more you will get out of it.  A lot of people today find business not by using the phone book but by typing something like “dentist mytown” to find a local dentist.  The dentist who has taken the time and effort to create a web site that is search engine optimized for local searches will show up and have an opportunity to get that business.

What is the Basic Information You Will Need to Set Up a Web Site?

To get started you will first need:

1. Company Name
2. Contact Name
3. Company Physical Address (1234 Main St, Anytown, PA 19000)
4. Phone number you want to be contact on.
5. The name of industry/market you serve.  Can be more than one.
6. Company description
7. Logo
8. Domain Name

Numbers 1 thru 6 is pretty simple and straight forward and most business people have that or can put it together rather quickly.  The next two items, a logo and domain name, some people may or may not have.

Getting a Logo on a Budget

It can’t be stressed enough that a company, even a one person professional, needs a logo.  Don’t get your cousin who likes to play with Illustrator on the weekend to do your logo.  Believe me it shows.  On the expensive end a good logo done by a top logo designer will run around $6,000.  If you are a small to medium sized business and have big plans for the future I strongly recommend investing the money.  A great logo designer I would recommend is Michael Manoogian. 

On the other hand if you have a smaller budget you can get a logo for around $500.  For that you need to go to Netgonian’s cheap logo design where you can get a logo in around 7 days starting at $499.99.

Getting a Domain Name

This is a very important part of the process.  Your domain name is your address on the Internet and you want it to be something that will represent you well.  Usually that would be your company name but it can also be something like “anytowndentist.com” if you are a dentist in the town “anytown”.  Domain names are cheap, about $10/year.  Follow this link to get a domain name.

What Pages Should You Have on Your Website

You could get away with just a one page web site with a brief description of who you are and what you do.  That is better than nothing but without too much effort you can put together something much more professional and much more helpful for visitors with a 5 page website:

1. Home Page – this page should tell the visitor exactly what problem you can help them with and how to get in touch with you.
2. About Us page – this page is there to tell the visitor who you are and answers the question “Are you qualified to help me?”
3. Contact Us page – this is a self evident page and instruct the visitor more thoroughly how to get in touch with you (phone, fax, email, business hours, driving directions).
4. Testimonials page – this page helps the visitor have more confidence in your ability to help them.
5. Services/Products page – this page helps the user know in more detail what types of things you can help them with.

In setting up the content for your pages keep in mind that the web site is for the visitors and usually helping them solve 3 basic problems:

1. knowing that you provide the service/product they are looking for (home page, services page)
2. gaining the confidence that you are the right person/company for them (about us page and testimonials page)
3. contact you so that they can get the help they need (home page and contact us page)

The above applies to corporate presence web sites and is a basic guideline that can help many businesses with their first web site.  If you need more help designing your site architecture just give us a call!

Now You are Ready for a Web Site

Armed with the above you are ready for your first web site.  If you don’t want to do any work in getting your first web site together you can have the professionals at Netgonian put together a very cheap web site that will only cost $49.99 per month.  This is great if you have simple web site needs.  But that solution isn’t good for you if you want to really play in the big league in terms of web presence.  We offer starting at about $1,000 great solutions that give you more control over your web presence and allows for better search engine optimization and more advanced features.  Contact us for a web site design estimate.

Not having a valuable marketing goal for your website cost your company a lot of money in wasted effort.

Notice that I said valuable goal. There are any number of goals for a website but you will miss out on the value of a website if you don’t understand how to establish valuable goals to benefit the company. Find out about the three goals that will return value for any marketing strategy in my video "How to Establish Worthwhile Marketing Goals for Your Website"

There could be any number of goals for a website but the difference between getting real returns on your investment and not is establishing goals that actually have real, measurable value vs. goals that cannot be measured and don’t have real marketing value. Aside from the value of the goal the two most important qualities of these goals are: They must represent something and that something must be quantifiable. To better illustrate this lets look at a goal that is not a good goal because it does not have these two qualities:

Goal – create a beautiful website.



This goal is expressed as an action. It is something to be done rather than something to have. This may seem like a trivial point but it is actually the first mistake when formulating a goal that will lead to not getting value from the project. We could change the statement of the goal to "a beautiful website" and the goal now represents something tangible, something that you can have as the end result of actions taken. However even after restating that goal we still don’t have something that is quantifiable. You cannot quantify "beautiful" – there is no objective way to measure that.

Now let’s examine three of the most common goals that companies can use to get real value from their websites:

Goal Number One: A large audience of fans or members

First note that it has both qualities required: It represents something and that something is quantifiable i.e. we can measure the number of visitors that a site is getting and thus know if the goal is being achieved or not. A large audience of fans or members also expresses something that has marketing value .



Prominent examples of sites geared toward this goal are:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. New York Times

All 3 of those sites are trying to build large audiences so they can sell advertising. Facebook does this by providing services to help users stay in touch with their family and friends. The audience is attracted by the fun that they derive from being able to find and communicate with friends from all over the world.

YouTube gets it audience in two ways: The first is by providing an easy way to publish and share videos for people to see and comment on. The second is by making available a variety of original content for people looking for some entertainment.

The New York Times is simply extending its model of attracting an audience with interesting news stories to the web.

Once they get a large audience then advertisers will be interested in buying space on the site to try to get their message in front of that audience.

Goal Number Two: Sales of Products or Services

Again we have a goal that is quantifiable and valuable from a marketing perspective. Actually it pretty much could represent the ultimate goal of any marketing effort but it is worthwhile to separate it out as a goal because the Internet is a great way to get sales from people who a company otherwise could not get sales from. At the same time it is not good to use this as a goal for websites who ultimately have a sale as the end result but the sale does not occur via the website.



Examples of websites geared toward this goal are:

1. Amazon.com
2. eBay.com
3. Salesforce.com

Those websites all measure their success by the quantity and dollar value of the products sold. You can clearly see that everything about the site is to direct the visitor to make a purchase. Sites with this as a goal are also called ecommerce sites.

Goal Number Three: Leads of potential customers

This goal generally is or should be the goal of most websites for professional services businesses or businesses whose products or services are too complicated to be sold directly via the web. The object is to get interested visitors to minimally fill out a form with at least an email address so that the company can follow up and stay in touch or better yet get them to make an appointment to come in.

A great example of a lead generation site is Barackobama.com



These types of sites are offering something to get you to sign up and give your information. This is obviously quantifiable (you can count how many people sign up) and it is very valuable. The first step in marketing is to get a line of communication to an interested audience. An important point here is that your offer is targeted to be interesting to a particular market i.e. offering a book on how to choose the right chiropractor will get you the identities of people who must be, at least to some degree, interested in the services of a chiropractor. In this manner you get a valuable quantifiable return from your website.

Your Website’s Goal

The goals you establish for your website are what guides the design process. Without well defined goals the graphic designer will not know what to emphasize in the layout , the copywriters won’t know how to focus the copy and in the end the website will not result in a good return on your investment.

If you are looking for a good Internet Marketing Consultant or a Small Business Web Design Firm to help you get value out of the Internet: Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC has over 10 years experience helping companies get value from the Internet – http://yamcllc.com .

How Do I Start Marketing My Business on the Internet?

This is a question that can stump any business owner.  There are a lot of media to use:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• A web site
• A blog
• YouTube
• Pay-per-click Advertising
• Social Media
• Search Engine Optimization
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing

…and so much more.  It can be quite overwhelming and an important step is understanding what all those media are but first it is most important to have the end product of your marketing efforts clearly in view before figuring out how to achieve the end product.

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell

Internet marketing can be used to achieve any of the following marketing objectives:

• Exposing or offering your product, service or brand to potentially interested people.  Product: an impression.
• Collecting the contact information of people interested in your business’s products (your market).  Product: an email address, phone number or street address.
• Enabling interested people to purchase the product or service either directly via the Internet or by contacting your office. Product: phone call, email or online purchase from a qualified customer.

The Internet Marketing Formula

You may have one or more of the above objectives for your Internet marketing efforts.  Actually you can probably see how they could flow in a sequence or funnel and I am right here going to give you a highly successful Internet marketing formula used by all those “make billions online from home” offers:

1. Create a free offer for a market (a group of people interested in something).  The better your free offer the better this formula will work.
2. Use the Internet to get your offer in front of those people.
3. Make those people give you their contact information as a condition to receiving the free offer.
4. Use the collected contact information to make further offers or further expose your brand to the market on a regular basis.

Step 1 can be done by any business owner.  Here are a couple of examples:

• A local supermarket offers a super coupon for a popular product.  People who shop there will give their email to get it and then the supermarket can continue to email them offers and keep them coming back for more.
• An auto repair shop offers a coupon for a free oil change (something every car owner needs) and gathers a list of car owners who can be emailed car care advice which keeps the auto repair shop’s name on the car owners mind so that when repairs are needed they know exactly where to go.

Steps 2 thru 4 require some expertise on how to get your offer in front of the target market, setting up the infrastructure required to collect the contact information and deliver the offer as well as setting up how to continue to stay in contact with the newly collected list.  The team at Yves A Martin Consulting can help!  Just give us a call at 215-310-9325.

Subscribe to Stay Informed

Subscribe to this blog or our email list to get alerted when our next posts in this series are published – we will be clarifying what all those Internet media are and how they fit into the Internet marketing formula.

How Do I Start Marketing My Business on the Internet?

This is a question that can stump any business owner.  There are a lot of media to use:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• A web site
• A blog
• YouTube
• Pay-per-click Advertising
• Social Media
• Search Engine Optimization
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing

…and so much more.  It can be quite overwhelming and an important step is understanding what all those media are but first it is most important to have the end product of your marketing efforts clearly in view before figuring out how to achieve the end product.

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell

Internet marketing can be used to achieve any of the following marketing objectives:

• Exposing or offering your product, service or brand to potentially interested people.  Product: an impression.
• Collecting the contact information of people interested in your business’s products (your market).  Product: an email address, phone number or street address.
• Enabling interested people to purchase the product or service either directly via the Internet or by contacting your office. Product: phone call, email or online purchase from a qualified customer.

The Internet Marketing Formula

You may have one or more of the above objectives for your Internet marketing efforts.  Actually you can probably see how they could flow in a sequence or funnel and I am right here going to give you a highly successful Internet marketing formula used by all those “make billions online from home” offers:

1. Create a free offer for a market (a group of people interested in something).  The better your free offer the better this formula will work.
2. Use the Internet to get your offer in front of those people.
3. Make those people give you their contact information as a condition to receiving the free offer.
4. Use the collected contact information to make further offers or further expose your brand to the market on a regular basis.

Step 1 can be done by any business owner.  Here are a couple of examples:

• A local supermarket offers a super coupon for a popular product.  People who shop there will give their email to get it and then the supermarket can continue to email them offers and keep them coming back for more.
• An auto repair shop offers a coupon for a free oil change (something every car owner needs) and gathers a list of car owners who can be emailed car care advice which keeps the auto repair shop’s name on the car owners mind so that when repairs are needed they know exactly where to go.

Steps 2 thru 4 require some expertise on how to get your offer in front of the target market, setting up the infrastructure required to collect the contact information and deliver the offer as well as setting up how to continue to stay in contact with the newly collected list.  The team at Yves A Martin Consulting can help!  Just give us a call at 215-310-9325.

Subscribe to Stay Informed

Subscribe to this blog or our email list to get alerted when our next posts in this series are published – we will be clarifying what all those Internet media are and how they fit into the Internet marketing formula.

New Website Design for House of Shine Blog by Yves A. Martin Consulting, LLC.

House of Shine is a blog maintained by a creative team of bloggers out of Dallas TX.  The House of Shine team came to Yves A. Martin Consulting, LLC. when they wanted their blog to take on a new look as well as add functionality like:

• Forums for their users to interact.
• Ecommerce so they could monetize their efforts.
• A better blogging platform.
• A robust content management system so they could manage their own site.

(click for larger image)

Content Management System

The foundation on which a website is built is the content management system.  The right choice in content management system mean the website will be easy to update and can be extended with functionality beyond static web pages.  For this project Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC. chose to use the Dotnetnuke content management system.  Dotnetnuke is a premiere open source content management system with a large community of support and market of pre-made functionality modules.  This makes it easy and inexpensive to add functionality such as ecommerce, forums and blogging.  Dotnetnuke also supports basic content management and membership functions right out of the box.  This made it the ideal solution for this project.

Website Interactivity

The House of Shine team wanted more interactivity on their site so we suggested they add a forum to the website.  A forum is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to post topics for discussion and allows other users to comment on the topic.  In this way conversations are carried on via the website.  Click here to see the House of Shine forum.

Pictured above a user creates a topic and posts a communication.  Below users join in the conversation.

Blogging Platform

House of Shine is based around their popular blog so the blogging platform was the most important component of the website.  They also wanted features that would enable them to promote the blog on other website pages.  Here are some of the features that the new blog has;

Tag Cloud

A tag cloud is fun and visually attractive feature that can be placed on the website to show users what other content the blog contains so that after reading the most recent post they can also explore other posts in the site that might interest them.

Blog Search

Incorporating a search for the blog was key so that users can easily find content based on keywords or phrases.

Link to Recent Blog Posts on Home Page and Other Content Pages

The House of Shine team in growing from originally be just a blog website to becoming a community website with ecommerce and other features want to make sure that the blog is still prominently featured on the site.  Being able to link in an attractive way to the most recent blog posts from other pages on the site is a great way to keep the blog easily accessible from all page on the site.

Image above shows the “Recent Blog Post” module on the home page that automatically features the most recent blog posts as soon as they are published.  Below is the module that promotes the recent blog posts on content pages.  Again the content is updated automatically with the content management system generating the thumbnail image and text.  With this functionality the blog is constantly promoted through out the site without requiring any manual content updates.

Ecommerce

House of Shine integrates ecommerce into their site in two ways:

Amazon.com Affiliate Widget

The House of Shine community likes to read and recommend books and a great way for the House of Shine team to get money to support their efforts as well as getting great deals for their members is to integrate an Amazon.com affiliate widget on their site.  This way members can easily purchase recommended books, as well as other recommended products, and in doing so help support the community.

Paypal Integrated Shopping Cart

The House of Shine team also have branded items that they want to sell to support their community.  They wanted a robust shopping cart to integrate in their site that would work with Paypal to collect payments.  The Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC. ecommerce team found a great module to add to the Dotnetnuke content management system that allowed simple shopping cart integration with the site.  The House of Shine team can now easily add products to their store and feature items throughout their site.

Conclusion

This is a great example of the type of multi-faceted web design project that the web design team at Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC. is the perfect partner for.

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Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC created a website for the Ron Brown Scholar Program, a program that provides academic scholarships, service opportunities and leadership experiences for young African Americans of outstanding promise.

The web design team created the website around the SiteFinity Content Management System (CMS) that allows the staff at the Ron Brown Scholar Program to perform routine updates on the site. The site also included custom programming to handle the alumni features including allowing Alumni to maintain their own profile and network through site facilities. The site uses the Microsoft ASP.NET platform on a Windows Server 2003 virtual server.

Visitors to the Ron Brown Scholar Program website can learn about the scholarship program, apply for the scholarship and make a donation to the program. The website can be accessed at:
http://ronbrown.org/home.aspx

Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC Website Design services created a new website for Grounds For Sculpture, a 35-acre public sculpture park located in Hamilton, NJ. The Grounds For Sculpture website was redesigned to make the site more modern with more features.

The Grounds for Sculpture organization has been a client of Yves A Martin Consulting, LLC for over 6 years. The web design team created the new website around a custom designed Content Management System (CMS) that allows the staff at Grounds for Sculpture to perform routine updates on the site. Also, the website was made into an e-commerce site with the ability to accept online membership applications that connects seamlessly to their internal membership database application. The website uses PHP on the server-side, MySQL for the database and uses Authorize.net to process the credit cards.

The new website allows the visitors to check out the calendar to see what events are coming up, see what is to eat at the Rat’s Restaurant, pay for a membership and get an overview on the artists that have works on display. The Grounds For Sculpture website can be seen at:

http://www.groundsforsculpture.org/