Digital Marketing Dude Monthly Marketing Message

Top 3 Website Mistakes Healthcare Providers Make

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:35:53 GMT

and how to fix them!

Hello there, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. Welcome to my next video: 3 Website Mistakes Healthcare Professionals Make.

Most healthcare websites are not losing patients because they’re bad providers. They’re losing patients because the website creates confusion, weakens trust, and makes the next step harder than it should be.

Welcome again. I’m Peter Brissette, the Digital Marketing Dude. We’re going to break this down today and talk about the three website mistakes healthcare professionals make.

So what’s happening? What is the problem here? Why are they losing clients?

There are three main reasons I already mentioned: confusion, lack of trust-building, and friction. Clients don’t know what they should do once they get to the website. There’s no opportunity to build trust, and there are lots of challenges with how the website is laid out. It makes it very difficult for clients, prospects, and patients to actually engage and want to do business with that business.

So what is it that visitors actually want?

They want clarity very quickly. You have anywhere between three to seven seconds to grab them, to get them to stay long enough to dig deeper and find out if they want to engage with your business or not. They want to know if you can help them. Are you the right provider for them, and are you able to help solve their problem? They also need to know what to do next. That’s what they’re really thinking about.

So why does this matter?

Well, your website is a lot more than just an online brochure. This is an opportunity for you to communicate to your ideal prospect that you are the right business for them and that you are going to solve the problem. The website is a tool that helps you build the trust you need in order to do that.

It most often is the first point of contact. When people do a search, they’re learning about you. They’re going to dig into your website to really see what you’re about and, again, whether or not you can help them.

When we look at the assets we own versus the assets we rent in digital marketing, your website is one of those things that you own. You have complete control of it. You can make it the best that it can be, and that’s what you need to do.

A high-performing website should guide visitors toward an action: downloading something, booking a meeting, calling, or filling out a form. Something needs to happen, and your website is the place to do that. We have a limited number of eyeballs. It’s not like we can get tens of thousands of views on our website from an ideal prospect. So every prospect that does hit our website, we have to take advantage of that and get the most out of that interaction.

All right. Here are the three mistakes: unclear messaging, no clear call to action, and outdated or cluttered design that hurts trust. Let’s break these down.

Mistake Number One: Unclear Messaging

What does that look like?

It looks like generic headlines such as “Compassionate Care” or “Quality Service.” What does that even mean, and why should your customer care about that? It looks like vague language, no clarity, no specificity, no explanation of services in an easy-to-understand manner, and no clear indication of who the site is for.

Often what we see on websites is that you’re talking all about your business, but you’re not talking to your customer or your prospect. You see pages and pages full of internal language instead of something that is patient-friendly in terms of how it is speaking to them.

You also have to remember the rule of three clicks. If it takes me more than three clicks to get to the information I need, I’m probably gone. That’s too much work and too much friction. When you have to click around too much to get to the right content and the right information, you lose people.

So why does this happen?

A lot of providers assume that visitors already understand what they do, so they’re not really putting themselves in the mind of their prospect or their clients. Or they’re trying to sound too broad. They worry that if they’re too specific, they might limit the right person. So instead of being specific, they are very broad and very generic. Or they try to say too many things in an unorganized way.

I think of a dentist. A dentist can have a very long list of services that they provide, but it needs to be very organized and very easy to navigate on the website. It also needs to be communicated in a way that is easy for those who aren’t dentists to understand and to see what that means for them.

So some key points to remember here:

Don’t make website visitors have to work to understand the site. Don Miller talks about this as cognitive load. If I have to think too much about what your website is saying to me, I’m probably going to go somewhere else. You have to make it very easy for people to understand.

The homepage needs to answer basic questions really quickly:

What’s the problem you solve?

Who do you solve it for?

What’s the next step I need to take?

Clear always beats clever. We’re not trying to be cute. We’re not trying to be clever here. We’re trying to communicate a very clear and specific message. Specific will always beat vague.

So how can we fix this? What do we do?

Use a clear headline at the top of the homepage that clearly states:

This is what we do.

This is who we do it for.

This is the problem we solve.

This is who we solve that problem for.

It needs to be very brief.

State exactly what you offer. Talk about who you help. Organize the pages around the patient questions or client questions. What do they need to know? What are they actually looking for when they’re on the website? What questions are they trying to answer?

Way too many websites do not have any frequently asked questions on them. None. So having questions specific to each service, along with general frequently asked questions, is very important to have on a healthcare website.

Use simple, direct language. Simplify it. Take out the jargon. Make it easy to understand. Reduce options and clutter.

So that’s the first thing.

Mistake Number Two: No Clear Call to Action

This is actually a significant problem for almost all small business websites.

So what does this look like?

No visible appointment button. The phone number is hard to find. The contact page is difficult to get to. There are too many competing buttons.

I was looking at a website just the other day, and just above the fold—in that first view—there were four different calls to action. That’s too many. We have to reduce this to a single call to action, and that single call to action should be repeated throughout the page.

If you’re using a mobile device, you also have to think about that mobile user. What’s it like for them? Is it easy for them to make a call or fill out a form? A lot of times the forms are not mobile-friendly.

Again, why does this happen?

Because businesses assume the visitors will figure it out. They focus on explaining the business, not guiding the user. You have to think of yourself as the guide in how you direct the visitor through your website.

There are too many options instead of a clear primary call to action. And the site was designed more for looks—which is important—but it had no conversion thought to it, no thought about how we’re going to help people actually do business with us.

Key points here:

A website should guide visitors toward an action.

The next step should be very obvious on the page.

Every page should support movement toward contact, booking an appointment, or some type of inquiry—a phone call, whatever it might be.

So what should we do instead?

Choose one primary call to action. What is the number one thing you want a prospect to do when they get to your website? Make that very clear and obvious.

It should be in the header of the page. It should be repeated throughout the page, particularly the homepage. It has to be mobile-friendly. I have to be able to do it on my phone.

Use very specific language, and match that call to action to your business model. Are we trying to book an appointment? Is that what we’re after? Are we trying to get them to make a phone call? Do we want them to fill out a form or request a consultation? What is it we want them to do? Be very specific about that.

All right, mistake number three.

Mistake Number Three: Outdated or Cluttered Design That Hurts Trust

So let’s talk about what that looks like.

Pixelated images. Blurry images. Stock photos that don’t really align with who you are and what you’re doing. There’s a cognitive dissonance there. There’s a separation between the words I’m reading and the image I’m seeing, and the image is totally throwing me off. So having quality images is really important.

Maybe it’s old branding or inconsistent branding. Maybe you have print materials or social media that don’t match the branding on your website. You want to have consistent branding throughout.

It can also look like a crowded layout, too many colors or visual elements, the wrong kind of contrast, hard-to-read text, text that’s too small, or text that doesn’t have a strong enough color. A lot of times, instead of being solid black, it’s a slight gray, and that makes it very hard to read.

It also shows up as not enough spacing, things too close together, pages loading slowly, and sites struggling to actually be mobile-friendly. Pages should not be loading slowly at this point. With all the technology we have now, pages should load quickly, particularly on mobile devices.

So why does this happen?

Because we built the website a few years ago and haven’t touched it since. The last blog post is dated from seven years ago. A website is really never finished. It should be constantly worked on and constantly updated. It’s a never-ending project. It’s a tool to be used, and to be used often, to help promote your business.

Another reason is too much packed into a page. I think you can design a lot of content onto a page as long as it makes sense and as long as it’s a flow that takes people step by step through it. But if you try to put too much information on the page and it’s all over the place with no flow, that’s a problem.

There is often no clear strategy on conversion. How are we going to actually convert people in this process? The site was built quickly and never improved, never updated, never changed. And there isn’t enough thought about why visual trust matters and how important it is.

So what does this hurt?

It hurts trust. That’s what it comes down to. I’m associating your website and how your business operates with the quality of your business. Is your practice going to be the same way your website is? How am I actually going to experience engaging with you and your business?

The clutter makes the site hard to use. Poor design can reduce confidence before a patient ever calls. Building those moments of trust is critically important, and if the website has been neglected, it’s going to call things into question.

Some key points to remember here:

In healthcare, trust is everything.

Your website is your first impression.

Invest in it.

Make it quality.

Make sure it does what it needs to do.

A clean design does not just look better; it performs better. Simplicity helps people feel more confident in your business and in doing business with you.

So how do we fix this?

Use clean layouts. That is easier than ever to do with websites.

Improve the image quality.

You can use some AI images, but so many healthcare sites are very heavy with stock photos. Getting professional images done is a game changer, and if you really want to set yourself apart from your competition, get some professional images made. Hire a photographer and get some really good-quality images.

Make sure fonts and spacing are clear and easy to read. Make sure there is lots of open space on the site. Make it easy to scan. Use more bullet points. Use icons to separate information.

Make sure the mobile experience is dialed in. A higher percentage of people are probably experiencing your website on a mobile device versus somewhere else. Make sure speed is good, responsiveness is good, and the site looks great on different screen sizes.

And take out any unnecessary clutter.

So again, on the homepage you want:

a clear headline,

a short supporting statement,

one main call to action.

In that first above-the-fold view, those three things have to be there and they need to be dialed in. You also want a good, strong supporting photo that supports the headline, the statement, and the call to action. They all go together.

Then below that, you want your trust-building elements:

reviews and testimonials from your clients,

a brief listing of your services,

why people do business with you,

and the quick, easy steps they can take to solve the problem they have.

Those are the kinds of things that will build trust.

So those are the three things:

unclear messaging,

no clear call to action,

and outdated, cluttered design that hurts trust.

So what can you do next here?

We’d like to give you some feedback on your website and point out where some of the challenges are, while also giving you specific recommendations on how you can fix them. You can get a free review of your website.

To do that, go to freewebreview.com . Put in your name, your email address, and your website. We will take that information and build a personalized video walkthrough of your website with very specific suggestions on how you can make improvements.

We’re going to look at your homepage. We’re going to look at your headline, your supporting headlines, and your calls to action. We’re going to run this through our tools and look at how your website is being viewed by AI. Are you even showing up in the AI tools, and do you have the things necessary built into your website right now so that you can support Google E-E-A-T?

We’ll talk more about that when we follow up, but it’s very important to have those things ready and in place. We’re also going to send you some checklists to help you review that. It’s going to be a very detailed report that we send out to you.

It takes us a couple of days to do this because we actually use human power—not just AI power—to evaluate your website.

So please check out freewebreview.com , and be looking for our next video out here on YouTube and on social media.

We’ll talk to you in the next video. Take care.

AI Generated Summary

This post explains why many healthcare websites fail to convert visitors into patients, even when the provider offers excellent care. The problem is often not the business itself, but the website experience. According to the transcript, the three biggest issues are unclear messaging, no clear call to action, and outdated or cluttered design.

The post argues that healthcare visitors want three things quickly: clarity, confidence, and direction. They want to know whether the provider can help them, whether they trust the business, and what they should do next. When a website is vague, difficult to navigate, or visually outdated, it creates confusion and friction that causes potential patients to leave.

A strong healthcare website should do more than look professional. It should clearly communicate what the practice offers, guide users toward a next step, and build trust through good design, fast performance, and patient-focused messaging.

Key Takeaways

Many healthcare websites lose patients because the site creates confusion and friction, not because the provider lacks skill.
Visitors need to understand within seconds what the business does, who it helps, and what to do next.
Unclear messaging makes it harder for potential patients to know if they are in the right place.
Weak or missing calls to action reduce conversions by making the next step feel unclear or inconvenient.
Outdated, cluttered, or poorly maintained design can hurt trust and lower confidence in the business.
Healthcare websites should be built to guide action, not just display information.
A better homepage includes a clear headline, a short supporting statement, one primary call to action, a strong visual, and trust-building elements.
Mobile usability, fast load speed, readable text, and strong visual consistency all matter.
FAQs, testimonials, service summaries, and simple patient-focused language can improve both trust and usability.
Small improvements to clarity, design, and conversion structure can make a meaningful difference in results.

Detailed Outline

1. Introduction to the Topic

The speaker introduces the video and frames the topic around healthcare website performance.
The core claim is that many healthcare businesses are losing patients because their website creates confusion, weakens trust, and makes the next step more difficult than it should be.
The rest of the video is organized around three common website mistakes.

2. The Core Problem

Healthcare websites often fail in three key ways:
they confuse visitors
they do not build trust effectively
they create too much friction
This makes it harder for prospects, patients, and clients to engage with the business.
The website experience can quietly drive people away before they ever make contact.

3. What Visitors Actually Want

Visitors want clarity immediately.
They often decide within a few seconds whether to stay on the site.
They want to know:
can this provider help me
is this the right fit
what should I do next
If those questions are not answered quickly, they are likely to leave.

4. Why the Website Matters

The website is more than an online brochure.
It is often the first point of contact for a potential patient.
It is one of the digital assets the business owns and fully controls.
A good website should guide visitors toward an action such as calling, filling out a form, booking an appointment, or requesting information.
Because healthcare businesses do not get unlimited high-quality traffic, every visit matters.

5. The Three Main Mistakes

Unclear messaging
No clear call to action
Outdated or cluttered design that hurts trust

6. Mistake #1: Unclear Messaging

What it looks like

Generic headlines such as “compassionate care” or “quality service”
Vague messaging with little specificity
Services are not explained clearly
The site does not quickly show who the services are for
The language is internal or business-focused rather than patient-focused

Why it happens

Providers assume visitors already understand what they do
Businesses try to sound broad instead of specific
They worry that being specific will narrow their audience
They try to communicate too many things at once
Content is not organized around user understanding

Why it hurts

Visitors do not know whether they are in the right place
Important information is harder to find
Excessive clicking creates friction
The more effort it takes to understand the site, the more likely visitors are to leave

Main principles

Reduce cognitive load
Answer basic questions quickly
Clear beats clever
Specific beats vague

7. Mistake #2: No Clear Call to Action

What it looks like

No visible appointment or booking button
Phone number is difficult to find
Contact page is buried
Multiple competing buttons create confusion
Calls to action are not repeated throughout the page
Mobile users struggle to call or complete a form

Why it happens

The business assumes visitors will figure it out
The site focuses more on explanation than guidance
There are too many options and no clear primary action
The site was designed for appearance instead of conversion

Why it hurts

Visitors do not know what to do next
Interested prospects leave without contacting the business
Friction reduces motivation
Easy conversion opportunities are lost

Main principles

A website should guide people toward action
The next step should be obvious
Every page should support contact, booking, or inquiry

8. Mistake #3: Outdated or Cluttered Design That Hurts Trust

What it looks like

Blurry or pixelated images
Generic stock photos that feel disconnected from the business
Inconsistent branding
Crowded layouts
Too many colors or visual elements
Hard-to-read text
Poor spacing
Slow-loading pages
Weak mobile responsiveness

Why it happens

The website has not been updated in years
Too much content is packed into a page without structure
There is no clear design or conversion strategy
The site was built quickly and never improved
The business underestimates the importance of visual trust

Why it hurts

Visitors associate site quality with business quality
Clutter makes the site more difficult to use
Poor design lowers confidence before a patient ever reaches out
A neglected website creates doubt about the professionalism of the practice

Main principles

Trust matters deeply in healthcare
The website shapes the first impression
Clean design performs better
Simplicity helps users feel confident

9. What a Better Homepage Should Include

A clear headline
A short supporting statement
One main call to action above the fold
A strong supporting image
Trust-building elements below the fold
Reviews and testimonials
A brief list of services
Reasons to choose the practice
Simple steps showing how to get started

10. Final Recap

The speaker summarizes the three main issues:
unclear messaging
weak or missing call to action
outdated or cluttered design
These problems are common, but they are also fixable.
Small improvements in these areas can strengthen trust and improve results.

11. Offer and Next Step

The speaker offers a free website review
Viewers can submit their name, email, and website
They will receive a personalized video walkthrough with recommendations
The review includes analysis of headlines, supporting copy, calls to action, AI visibility, and overall site structure
Additional checklists and detailed guidance are also mentioned

12. Closing

The audience is invited to request a review
The speaker points viewers toward future content on YouTube and social media
The video ends with a brief sign-off

Conclusion

The main lesson from this transcript is that a healthcare website should not just exist as a digital placeholder. It should actively support the business by helping visitors feel informed, confident, and ready to take the next step. When messaging is clear, design builds trust, and calls to action are obvious, the website becomes a tool that supports patient growth rather than holding it back.

For healthcare businesses, improving a website does not always require a complete rebuild. In many cases, the biggest gains come from simplifying the message, reducing friction, and making the site easier to trust and use.

Biggest Mistakes that Authors Makes with Their Domains and Websites

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:16:48 GMT

Stop Losing Your Readers Before They Even Find You: The Domain Dilemma

You’ve spent months—maybe years—pouring your heart into a manuscript. You’re ready to share your voice with the world, but there’s a massive roadblock standing in your way: Your own name.

Many authors realize too late that building a personal brand website is an urgent priority, only to find that their digital "home" is already occupied.

The Frustration of Being "Taken"

It’s a common, sinking feeling. You go to buy YourName.com and discover a famous person, a squatter, or even just another "John Smith" got there first.

If you can't own your name, how are readers supposed to find you? Are you forced to use a clunky, forgettable URL that looks unprofessional? Without a clear, memorable domain, you aren’t just losing clicks; you’re losing the trust of your potential audience before they even read your first chapter.

The Simple Fix for "Occupied" Names

The good news? Your domain isn't "life or death"—it’s a tool. If your primary name is taken, you can still build a powerful, searchable brand by using modifiers .

Add a Middle Initial: A simple JohnQSmith.com is often enough to differentiate you.
Use a Brand Modifier: Terms like "Official" or "The" (e.g., TheJohnSmith.com) are easy for readers to remember and don't hurt your searchability.
Focus on Content Over the URL: Google prioritizes the relevance of your content. Even if your domain includes a modifier, you will still show up in searches for your name if your website is built correctly.

From Traffic to Trust

We understand how overwhelming the technical side of authorship can be. You want to write, not troubleshoot SEO and domain redirects. But the bridge between a casual visitor and a loyal reader is Trust .

When your messaging is clear and your website is optimized for modern search, you stop shouting into the void and start converting visitors into fans. By taking control of your platform early, you ensure that when someone searches for your voice, yours is the one they hear.

Is Your Website Truly Ready for Readers?

Don't let a confusing domain or a "leaky" website stall your career. I’m offering a Free AI-Ready Website Review to help you move from traffic to trust.

Our expert team will provide:

A custom-crafted headline designed for conversions.
An AI-Readiness and Authority (E-A-T) check .
Your personal Trust Potential Score .
A personal video walkthrough with actionable improvements.

This isn't a generic automated report—it’s a deep dive based on years of expertise.

Claim your free review today at FreeWebReview.com .

How Your Website Is Inviting Spam (And How to Stop It)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:03:27 GMT

Hey there everybody, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude.

I want to give you an update this month on email and website security, kind of a combination there.

One of the things that we’ve noticed over the years is whenever you put an actual email address listed on a website, it usually just gets scraped by spam bots and AI now. And then that email gets used to send you spam. A lot of it can be fairly innocent, but in some cases, you can get a situation like this.

Clients started to send me this email that they were getting, and it comes from info.digitalmarketingdude.llc@gmail.com First sign, it’s probably not from us. We send from our dmdude.com email. But they start talking about support and due to one of the vendors that we use for some of our services, which our clients, you know, they don’t know that. So it’s kind of like, what is that?

We always do a full SEO setup from the very beginning for all our clients as well, so it’s already been done. There’s nothing else to do anyway. Where they got this email and this information was basically just from the website itself.

So we really highly recommend that folks use a form on the website versus just having your email address just sitting on the website, because it can get scraped and used for purposes like that.

So we recommend, you know, have a contact form. Contact forms can get spam as well. And so we use, you know, Google’s got a tool for CAPTCHA to help limit the spam that can come in using CAPTCHA.

So I’ve got a calendar there to book with, but I also have this basic contact form. It uses the CAPTCHA from Google to help prevent spam from coming in. It still does happen. It doesn’t prevent all of it, but it prevents the majority of it.

But if you go through my website, you’re not going to see anywhere where it lists an email address, “Contact us at this email address.” So we recommend just using a form.

For our clients, we’re just going to start changing that out and making those changes over time.

And then the other thing where we get a lot of spam from as business owners, if you have a business email account, there’s this platform called Apollo that allows marketers to buy access to email lists.

So what we recommend, and I’ll put this link in the blog post, is that you go to this link here where it says “Don’t sell my info,” and you can opt out your email address from being in their database. And that will help cut down on the number of spam emails that you might get from that.

So to recap, this video is about your email address being actually on your website where it’s visible, or even if it’s a link there that says “click here to email” and then it opens up the email. We don’t recommend that either.

We recommend that you use just a form on your website and not have your email address just listed on the website, because AI bots and other tools can scrape that off your website. You wind up in a database like this, and you wind up getting a lot more spam.

And it can actually lead to things like this where you’re actually getting fraudulent emails, people trying to actually scam you out of money.

So if you have questions about this, just put it in the comments where you see this, and I’m happy to take a look at your own website and make sure that you’ve got the right things in place for email security.

Here is the link to Opt Out of Apollo Email Database - Click Here to Opt Out

AI Summary

This post explains why business owners should never display their email address directly on their website. Public email addresses are easily scraped by bots, AI tools, and spam databases, which leads to increased spam, phishing attempts, and even fraudulent emails that appear to come from trusted companies or vendors.

Instead of listing an email address or using “click to email” links, the post recommends using secure contact forms with CAPTCHA protection to reduce automated spam submissions. While no system is perfect, CAPTCHA blocks the majority of unwanted traffic and significantly improves email security.

The post also highlights how business emails end up in marketing databases, such as Apollo, where marketers can purchase access to email lists. It explains how to opt out of these databases using “Do Not Sell My Info” links to reduce future spam.

Key takeaways:

Never list your email address publicly on your website
Avoid “click to email” links that expose your address
Use contact forms with CAPTCHA instead
Understand how email scraping works
Opt out of email list databases that sell contact information
Reducing spam also reduces the risk of scams and fraud

Overall, the post focuses on protecting business email security, reducing spam, and preventing phishing and financial scams by making simple but critical changes to how contact information is collected on a website.

Google to Allow Anonymous Reviews

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:14:09 GMT

Video Transcript:

All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews.

So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that.

So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services.

So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services.

The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews.

And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy?

How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there.

I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update.

If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com.

Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025

Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en

AI Summary:

Google now allows anonymous reviews - December 11

To announce Google's new anonymous review feature and its business impact.

Key Takeaways

- New Feature: Google now allows users to post reviews under a custom display name (e.g., "Dogmom1234"), providing anonymity without a separate account.

- Business Impact: This change is expected to increase review volume, especially in sensitive industries (e.g., legal, healthcare) where privacy concerns previously deterred users.

- SEO Benefit: More frequent, recent reviews build trust and improve local SEO performance in Google Maps and Search.

- Actionable Tactic: Update review request templates to inform customers about the new privacy option, encouraging more submissions.

Topics

Google's New Anonymous Review Feature

- Google now allows users to set a custom display name and profile image for all contributions (reviews, Q&A, photos, videos).

- The change is retroactive, applying the new pseudonym to all past posts.

- This provides public anonymity while Google retains the real account data for verification, mitigating the risk of fake reviews.

Business Impact & Opportunities

- Increased Review Volume: The primary benefit is a higher frequency of reviews, as the privacy option removes a key barrier for many users.

- Specific Opportunity in Sensitive Industries:

- Legal Services

- Mental Health & Healthcare

- Addiction Treatment & Recovery

- Financial Advisors

- Sensitive Home Services

- SEO & Trust Benefits:

- More frequent, recent reviews build customer trust.

- Improved local SEO performance in Google Maps and Search, especially on mobile.

Recommended Strategy

- Update Review Request Templates: Add a line informing customers about the new privacy option to encourage more submissions.

- Example: "For extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name."

- Provide Instructions: Share the link on how to change a display name to help customers utilize the feature.

Next Steps

- Peter Brissette:

- Share the link on how to change a Google display name in the post.

- Offer a consultation on current review management strategies.

Facebook Profiles vs. Professional Mode vs. Business Pages: What’s Best for You and Why It Matters

Tue, 27 May 2025 14:38:45 GMT

Transcription

Hey there, everybody. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. About 15 years ago, Facebook added the option to have business pages. So not only did you have a business profile or personal profile, you could also have a business page. And you used to be able to customize them using some HTML, like the same stuff we were building websites with. And for a little while, I created a bunch of templates so that people could really customize their Facebook business pages.

That seems like a lifetime ago at this point. And it lasted for a little while, maybe about a year or so before Facebook changed things. And I actually got in a little bit of trouble because I got a domain that was custom Facebook page template. And I used the word Facebook in a domain name. And I got a letter from the legal department of Facebook on that. But the point of today's video and the blog post is, what is the difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page? And actually, a version of the personal profile called Professional Mode. And that's what we are going to talk about here today.

So I'm going to share my screen here. Yeah, we are going to go through this. All right. What's the difference? And why does it matter? And what's the best choice for you? So there's basically three options here we're going to look into. So first one is your personal profile. So this is kind of the standard thing. When you go to Facebook and you sign up for a Facebook account, it's a personal profile. It's you as an individual person. That is how it's set up to be. This is where you make your social connections. You connect with friends. It's a reciprocal exchange. Someone can send you a friend request. You accept it. You can be sent a friend request. You can accept it. So, you know, it's your normal Facebook personal profile.

You can have a maximum of 5,000 friends on your personal profile. Now, there's nothing really business related in terms of tools and things like that that we'll see that are available on your business page, but it's really just for those social connections.

Now, here's the thing that's key about this, and it still happens all the time. I'm surprised it still happens, but a lot of folks will create a Facebook account, like a personal account, but as a business. And if you create a personal page as a business. Now, a lot of times you can get by with it. Facebook doesn't notice, but a lot of times Facebook will notice that you're operating a personal profile as a business, and they will shut that down. And I see it happen all the time with that. So it definitely is against Facebook's terms of use to do that.

Now, they recently added another category with a personal profile. It's called a professional mode. So it's a little bit different, but it's the same kind of process to log in and use it. But it gives you some business type tools. There's a little more information you have. Available that you can access.

You get the 5,000 friends. That stays the same, but you can also have public followers. So people can follow you and, you know, your content, but it doesn't have to be a two-way reciprocal thing. You don't have to follow them back. They can follow you without you having to follow them on a profile.

So this is more for influencers, for creators, folks like that that really want to extend their brand, and it's a very personal brand that they're able to do. And there is some advertising you can do there with a strictly personal profile. You can't do any advertising, but there is some advertising, paid advertising you can do on that.

And then finally, there's the Facebook business page. So a business... This page is very different. So you create the business page. You have to log in through a personal profile and then create the business page. That's how it has to be done.

What you're able to do with that is keep your personal and your business completely separate. Because when you use Facebook as your business page, none of your personal stuff is carried over there. So if you post something as your page, none of your personal information gets posted there. It's all strictly for the business. So organizations, local businesses, your plumbers, your contractors, your dentists, like all of those types of businesses would use a Facebook page. No friend limit. Right? It's not a two-way exchange. People follow the page. They like the page. They follow the content, like the content. There's no friend limit. could have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers of your business page. And there's all kinds of tools. So there's analytics on the back end, advertising that you can do. There's some search engine benefits. Some of that gets indexed by Google. So a lot that goes with a Facebook page that you now have access to that you don't have on a personal profile. It's a completely separate entity.

So what should you use and when? So let's look at that. For a personal profile, this is, you know, who you're connecting with personally and who you want to connect with. Uh, and it's your family stuff. It's your vacation. It's what you had for dinner or breakfast or whatever. Uh, you know, some people are very political. Some people are not political. Some people are friends with a lot of people. Some people are only friends with people they actually know. Uh, so you get to use that, uh, personal profile any way that you want to use it. Um, it's not business related. Now, that doesn't mean you can't post something about your business. You can, you certainly can post stuff about your business, but the main setup of a profile, you know, it's got your picture there, not your logo from your business, uh, as the main image. Uh, but you certainly can post, um, content there, but typically that's not what you're using it for. And it allows you to keep things completely separate. can keep your business separate from your private life. If that's what you want to do, um, you can totally do that.

Professional mode, again, this is more for the, you know, coach, author, speakers, creators, people that are publishers, publishing content, very, you know, public-facing brand, then that professional mode is something that you want to look at doing. You can grow your audience, but you're not going to have all the full business features that you're going to have inside of the Facebook business page. And sometimes, basically, you're just kind of testing the waters, testing engagement. How are people going to interact with you and something that you can try out before you go to a full business page?

And then, if you are looking at a business page, you want to market your business. You want to market and promote. Your business, you want to, maybe you have other team members that you work with, you have a product, a service that you're trying to get out there, then the business page is definitely for you. You can do Facebook ads, you can, again, look at analytics, you can add other users to be administrators on the page. Again, everybody can, will log in through their personal profile, but they can switch over and be an admin on the Facebook page. A Facebook page does not have its own separate login. It only has administrators that administrate the page. It can have multiple administrators, but there's no direct login. You don't put a username and a password in, in order to access the business page. Again, it's very helpful to, a lot of the pages get indexed by Google and it'll show up. A search result, another way to build trust and be able to get found for your business.

So, what's next? Now what? What do you do? Here's what I recommend. Be strategic about it.

What is it you really want to accomplish? Who's your target market? Who are you going after? What do you want them to do? How do you want to engage with them? Really think about that and make some decisions so that you know how you want to operate within the Facebook ecosystem.

The key thing to remember is always be moving people from social media to your actual list. How do you get them on your email list? How do you move them from Facebook to having actual conversations with folks and getting to know people in that? So, think strategically and how you want Do to do that? Are you going to have offers? Are going have free signups for different things? Do some contests maybe? Different things that you can move folks from just being connections on Facebook and actually being on your marketing list. And make a plan.

Put a plan together. Set a goal that you want to achieve. Do you want to increase the followers of your business page? Do you want to get more engagement on your posts? What is it you want to achieve and accomplish?

Pick a simple goal and then look at what are the tools I need to do this? I could probably use Canva for creating content, canva.com. Maybe I need a Google spreadsheet to put things together to track the information I want to track and track it over time. Is there other tools out there? Facebook, the Meta Business Suite. Is that a tool that I want to use to help me post and create content? So what are the tools that you might need to use in order to accomplish your goals that you've set?

And maybe you need to get more additional information, more support. Certainly you can talk to us. We'd be happy to do a free consultation with you. YouTube is a great source for information about marketing on your Facebook page and a lot of really great marketers out there that are teaching and training on using Facebook and social media for marketing all the time.

And get after it. Get to work. Get started. Go for it. Pick the direction that you want to go and get moving. Get moving in the direction that you want to get things done.

And get the support that you need so that you can start to build your followers and start to get more traction and get more clients and more customers. That's the real goal, right? We're not just doing this to get more clicks. We're doing this to be able to actually accomplish growing our businesses and helping our businesses grow.

So that's the post, the video here on Facebook and the different options. In the blog post as well, I'm going to add some bonus content. We have a couple of frameworks around trust potential and how you build and measure the trust potential for the content that you're creating, as well as how do you do ACES marketing, attract, capture, engage, and sell. Some ideas and ways to do that. So that'll be some extra information that'll be actually in the final blog post that you can check out there. So please like the video, put your comments and questions as well, and we will see you on the next video. Thank you.

Bonus Content

How Your Facebook Setup Impacts Trust Potential

Choosing between a Personal Profile, Professional Mode, or Business Page isn’t just about features—it’s about building real trust with your audience. Let’s break it down using the 4 M’s of Trust Potential :

�� 1. Message – Are You Communicating Clearly and Credibly?

Each setup sends a different signal:

A standard Personal Profile used for business can create confusion or seem unprofessional.
Professional Mode blends personal connection with public-facing credibility—ideal for creators or coaches.
A Business Page clearly communicates your offer, builds authority, and opens doors for engagement (ads, reviews, and customer support).

Pro Tip: Your message is strongest when it’s aligned with how people expect to find and interact with your brand.

�� 2. Medium – Are You Using the Right Tool for the Job?

Facebook Business Pages are built for marketing, SEO visibility, and ad integration—perfect for product or service businesses.
Professional Mode is a great medium for thought leaders or solopreneurs wanting to build influence without managing a full business account.

Choosing the right medium increases your content’s effectiveness and perceived legitimacy—both on Facebook and in Google’s eyes through E-E-A-T.

⏱ 3. Moment – Is Your Approach Timely and Aligned with Audience Expectations?

If you're just starting out, Professional Mode can be a great “starter kit” to build an audience with low friction.
When you're ready to scale with ads, reviews, and SEO indexing, the Business Page is the right move.

Meeting your audience where they are—with the right format at the right time—strengthens trust and keeps you top of mind.

�� 4. Measurement – Can You Track What Builds Trust and Converts?

Standard profiles offer no analytics.
Professional Mode gives you basic reach and engagement insights.
Business Pages unlock full analytics, ad performance, and customer behavior metrics.

Tracking performance helps you make data-backed decisions—and shows your audience that you’re serious, strategic, and invested in improving their experience.

�� ACES Marketing Overview

ACES stands for:

Attract – Get attention from the right people

Capture – Convert attention into leads

Engage – Build relationships and trust

Sell – Turn trust into revenue

Let’s break down each stage with specific Facebook tactics tailored to the 3 account types.

�� A – ATTRACT

Goal: Get in front of your ideal audience on Facebook

Facebook Type Tactical Actions

Personal Profile - Post value-driven content (behind-the-scenes, stories)

- Tag relevant people and use location-based posts

- Share occasional updates about what you do (with CTA to business page)

Professional Mode - Optimize your bio to reflect your niche or brand

- Post Reels and public content consistently

- Use relevant hashtags and join niche communities

Business Page - Run targeted Facebook ads

- Boost high-performing posts

- Use SEO-optimized page descriptions and services

✅ Pro Tip: Use visual content (Canva or native Reels) to boost attention and shares.

�� C – CAPTURE

Goal: Turn interest into a lead you own (email, SMS, opt-in)

Facebook Type Tactical Actions

Personal Profile - Add a featured image with a lead magnet CTA

- Include a link to your email list or freebie in the "About" section

Professional Mode - Include call-to-actions in public posts (e.g., “DM me for a free guide”)

- Use link-in-bio tools to drive traffic to opt-ins

Business Page - Set up lead generation forms via Meta Business Suite

- Add a “Sign Up” or “Learn More” CTA button

- Create a pinned post with a free resource or offer

✅ Pro Tip: Offer something of value (checklist, webinar, mini course) in exchange for their email.

�� E – ENGAGE

Goal: Build ongoing connection and trust

Facebook Type Tactical Actions

Personal Profile - Reply to comments & DMs personally

- Engage with others’ posts to stay top-of-mind

- Share authentic wins/losses to build relatability

Professional Mode - Go Live to answer questions or share insights

- Use Stories to show real-time updates and behind-the-scenes

- Create a content theme schedule (e.g., Monday Motivation, Friday FAQs)

Business Page - Respond to all comments and messages promptly (use automated FAQs)

- Post testimonials and reviews to build social proof

- Share case studies or results from real clients

✅ Pro Tip: Use polls, questions, or behind-the-scenes stories to spark interaction.

�� S – SELL

Goal: Guide leads toward a buying decision

Facebook Type Tactical Actions

Personal Profile - Softly mention new offers and success stories

- DM conversations with warm leads (not spammy!)

Professional Mode - Promote limited-time offers with urgency

- Use Reels and short-form content to drive interest to offers

Business Page - Run retargeting ads for warm audiences

- Add products or services to your page shop

- Use Meta scheduling to align promotions with audience behavior

✅ Pro Tip: Sell with value first. Showcase how your product/service solves a specific problem.

�� Bonus: Combine Platforms for Maximum Impact

Funnel Stage Best Tool(s)

Awareness Professional Mode + Business Page (ads + public reach)

Lead Capture Business Page (CTA buttons + lead forms)

Relationship Professional Mode (personal content + growth)

Sales Business Page (ads, retargeting, trust signals)

AI Overview

Facebook Profiles vs. Professional Mode vs. Business Pages: What’s Best for You and Why It Matters

By Peter Brissette – The Digital Marketing Dude

�� Hey There – Let’s Clear Up the Confusion

Facebook has come a long way since I first started helping clients create custom business pages using HTML templates (yes, that long ago). Today, if you’re a business owner, content creator, or marketer, you’ve got three main options to show up on Facebook:

Your Personal Profile
Your Personal Profile in Professional Mode
A full Facebook Business Page

But what’s the difference? Why does it matter? And—most importantly— which one should you be using ?

Let’s break it all down.

�� The 3 Facebook Setup Options (and How They Work)

✅ 1. Personal Profile (Standard Mode)

This is what everyone starts with. It’s built for social connection—not business promotion.

Max 5,000 friends
Reciprocal relationships (you have to accept friend requests)
No analytics, no business tools
Risk: Using it as a business violates Facebook’s terms

✋ Watch out: Many people still use personal profiles for business. It might work… until it doesn’t. Facebook can shut it down at any time.

⚙️ 2. Professional Mode (Upgraded Personal Profile)

This is a newer option and a game-changer for creators and public-facing brands.

Still capped at 5,000 friends — but you can have unlimited followers
Basic post analytics, monetization tools (if eligible)
Public-facing content that supports audience growth
Limited ad capabilities

Great for:

Coaches
Authors
Speakers
Influencers or solopreneurs testing content before launching a full business page

�� 3. Facebook Business Page

This is the full package for brands, local businesses, and organizations.

Unlimited followers
Full access to Meta Business Suite and analytics
Ad creation, post scheduling, team roles
Facebook Reviews and Google indexing for trust & visibility
Total separation from your personal content

This is the go-to setup for:

Local service businesses
Ecommerce brands
Agencies
Teams with shared management responsibilities

�� Compare at a Glance: Which Facebook Setup Does What?

(Insert the 4-column comparison graphic here)

�� Building Trust Online Starts with the Right Strategy

Let’s run this through the 4 M’s of Trust Potential Framework to help you make a smart, strategic choice:

�� 1. Message – Are You Showing Up Clearly and Professionally?

A Business Page clearly communicates your offer and builds credibility.
Professional Mode is ideal for those whose brand = their personality .
Standard Profiles can muddy your message if you’re mixing business and personal.

�� 2. Medium – Are You Using the Right Format for Your Goals?

Business Pages are designed for visibility, searchability, and scaling.
Professional Mode is a solid medium for creators or those growing into a business.
Personal Profiles are for private connections—not scalable for business growth.

⏱ 3. Moment – What Stage Are You At in Your Business?

Testing content and building an audience? → Use Professional Mode .
Ready to scale with reviews, ads, and SEO? → Create a Business Page .
Just sharing occasional updates? → Stick with your Personal Profile .

�� 4. Measurement – Can You Track What’s Working?

Only Business Pages give you full access to analytics and ad data.
Professional Mode offers limited insights.
Personal Profiles give you zero metrics—making it hard to optimize.

�� Strategy = Your Next Smart Move

Here’s the truth: The best choice depends on your goals.

Ask yourself:

Who are you trying to reach?
What action do you want them to take?
What tools and data do you need to make that happen?

�� Tip: Don’t just post—plan. Choose your Facebook setup based on what will move people from social media to your email list, website, or booking calendar.

�� Tools + Tips to Support Your Plan

Content Creation: Canva for social graphics
Scheduling & Analytics: Meta Business Suite
Organization: Google Sheets to track engagement and goals
Learning: YouTube has tons of tutorials—plus, you can always book a free strategy session with me

�� Final Thoughts: Make Your Facebook Presence Count

We’re not just here for likes and clicks—we’re here to build trust , grow our visibility, and win real clients. Whether you’re just starting or scaling fast, choosing the right Facebook setup is your first strategic step.

➡️ Pick a direction. Set a goal. Get moving.

And remember—you don’t have to figure it all out alone.

The SEO Blueprint: Laying the Groundwork for On-Site and Off-Site Success

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:45:34 GMT

If you're trying to figure out how to make your website more visible on Google, you're not alone. One of the most common questions small business owners ask is: “What should I do to actually get found online?”

The good news is—there is a blueprint, and it starts with understanding the basics of on-site and off-site SEO . Whether you're launching a new site or optimizing an existing one, this foundational approach will help you build trust with search engines and potential customers.

Let’s break it down in simple terms, just like we do in strategy sessions—with a mind map, a few practical examples, and a focus on results.

��️ On-Site SEO: Building Your Website's Foundation

Your on-site SEO is everything on your website that helps it rank better. Think of it like setting up a clean, well-organized storefront that Google can easily understand and recommend to visitors.

Here are the key elements:

1. Content That Counts

Each important page on your site—especially service pages—should have at least 1,000 words of relevant content. Why? Because Google needs context to know what your page is about.

And no, this doesn’t mean fluff. It means giving real value, answering common questions, and clearly explaining your services.

�� Pro Tip: Don’t try to rank your homepage for everything. Focus on individual service pages with supporting content instead.

2. Smart Site Structure

Your website should have a clear hierarchy:

Home Page
Main Services Page
Individual Service Pages
Related Blog Posts

This setup helps distribute SEO value and creates strong internal linking. For example, write blog posts that support each service and link them back to the main service page. It’s like building a content ecosystem that tells Google, “Hey, this is important!”

3. Metadata and Alt Text

Behind the scenes, every page should include:

Page Titles
Meta Descriptions
Alt Text for Images

These bits of info are used by search engines (and accessibility tools) to understand what your page and images are about. Sprinkle in relevant keywords where it makes sense—without stuffing.

4. Video Content

Don’t forget video! Embedding videos (from YouTube or uploaded directly) keeps users engaged and adds SEO value, especially when paired with transcripts or keyword-rich descriptions.

5. Sitemap & Analytics

Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console so Google knows how to crawl your site.
Install analytics tools like Google Analytics so you can track what’s working and what needs improvement.

This is your digital housekeeping—keeping everything tidy, trackable, and crawlable.

Download the Website SEO Mind Map Created in the Video: Click Here

�� Off-Site SEO: Driving Traffic and Building Authority

Once your site is in shape, it’s time to bring in the traffic. That’s where off-site SEO comes in.

1. Link Building 101

Links from other websites back to yours act like digital referrals. They boost your credibility and help improve your Domain Authority —a score (from 0–100) that reflects how trustworthy your site is in Google’s eyes.

�� A new site might start with a DA of 3–5. Most small business sites fall somewhere in the 15–30 range. Big sites like CNN.com are at 90+.

You can build links by:

Writing guest blog posts on industry sites
Sharing your content on social media (every post is a chance for a link)
Listing your business in local directories (Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing, etc.)

2. Local Listings & Citations

While less powerful than true backlinks, having consistent listings across platforms still matters—especially for local businesses. Make sure your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) info is consistent everywhere.

3. Scaling with AI (Yes, Really)

Content creation is easier than ever with AI tools. You can write blog posts, social content, and even emails more efficiently—keeping your site fresh and giving you more content to share and link back to.

�� The more high-quality, keyword-rich content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank, earn links, and drive traffic.

�� Wrapping It All Up: Start with What You Control

If you’re just getting started with SEO, here’s the bottom line:

Focus on on-site SEO first. It’s low-cost, high-impact, and completely in your control.
Build content that supports your services and links together strategically.
Then start sharing your content and earning links through simple off-site strategies.

And if you’ve got the budget down the road? That’s when you can look at premium link-building services to grow your domain authority even faster.

�� Ready to Build Your SEO Foundation?

We’re here to help you lay the groundwork—from content strategy to technical setup. Whether you’re DIYing it or want a partner to walk with you, building trust with Google starts with smart, simple SEO.

�� Need help mapping your site structure or writing your first SEO blog post? Let’s chat.

Download the Website SEO Mind Map Created in the Video: Click Here

How to setup a lead magnet to capture emails on Wix Website with Mailchimp

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:16:59 GMT

Christine Gregory - March 05

VIEW RECORDING - 24 mins (No highlights)

@0:00 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Hi there.

@0:01 - Christine Gregory

How are you today?

@0:03 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

I'm doing all right. How are you doing?

@0:05 - Christine Gregory

All right. Thank you. Thank you so much for meeting with me today.

@0:09 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, I'll be to you.

@0:11 - Christine Gregory

Um, I do apologize. have a little bit of a dry throat coughing happening. So I apologize if I start coughing right there with you.

Um, so I actually got your name from John Shields, who I met with last week or the week before.

Um, and he said that you caught me with maybe some questions about like different links and using QR codes and all that fancy jazz.

@0:39 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah.

@0:40 - Christine Gregory

Awesome.

@0:41 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah. Back to you.

@0:43 - Christine Gregory

Awesome. So my questions, um, I'm trying to understand how to create a PDF so that I shareable with other people.

That's my first time.

@1:02 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Do where are you creating the document right now?

@1:07 - Christine Gregory

So originally I was creating them in Canva and then saving them as a as a PDF. Yeah, but I can't understand how to make that into a link.

Yeah, yeah.

@1:23 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Okay. Do you so do you have a website right now?

@1:28 - Christine Gregory

do.

@1:30 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

And where's that website? it WordPress or what kind of website are we talking about?

@1:35 - Christine Gregory

It's with Wix.

@1:38 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Let's see here, Wix, Wix, Wix, Wix. Let me just do a quick search here. There's a couple ways to do it.

So, um, here's what, here's what I would recommend. I'll just show you, I'm going to show you on a, it's a different platform, but it'll be the same principle regardless.

SCREEN SHARING: Peter started screen sharing - WATCH

I don't have any clients with wicksites right now.

@2:39 - Christine Gregory

Um, let's see.

ACTION ITEM: Set up PDF download page on Wix site, add opt-in form, connect to MailChimp list - WATCH

@2:42 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Let's use this one here. So, ideally what I would say is, I would have a page on your website.

@3:18 - Christine Gregory

Come on.

@3:21 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, let's see. Let's pick. Then that's got a button on it, link one, that's fine. All right, so we're going to have this page, and then on the page, we're

Alright, so I'm going to hit preview here. So now when I click this button, it's going to open a link that will have the PDF.

Okay, so at that point, so we got two ways here, so we can have a link to this page.

So this page is my website dot com forward slash new page, and you could send that link to them, which is kind of a good idea because here's why.

You can use this link directly to the PDF, right? I like about doing it this way to my page because I might update that PDF and make it better or changes.

somehow or edit it. And then all I got to do is re-upload it and connect it to the button.

Whatever materials already have out there that are linking to this page are still going to stay the same. Whereas if I change this name or anything like that to that PDF, now I got to, you know, if I use a QR code or something like that, I got to completely re-create it.

So I prefer with PDFs to just have a page where I put it, and then just have a button where they can download it from that page.

And then that link for that live page is the link I share. So whether I send that in an email or connect a QR code to it, however, you know, you want to do it so they can download it.

@6:52 - Christine Gregory

Awesome. now my next question on that is if I, I'm having trouble creating an opt-in,

@8:00 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

this button out. So this form, let's see here, manage form. So basically, I'm going to have something like this, whoops, come on.

Okay, so the forms, you know, hey there, get my free download, put in your name and email address, hit submit.

Okay, again, it could be a pop up on the page or it could just be a full page. So then again, if you're going to share that page on social media or somewhere else or send it in an email, then they're going to a page, but you could have a pop up on your website as well.

@9:19 - Christine Gregory

Okay.

@9:20 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

And then within the back end of Wix, then you should be able to set on this form, you know, what happens after it's submitted.

So do I send an email, it's an email go out, you know, do I redirect it to another page?

So in that case, then you could redirect to the page where the PDF is and they can just see each.

So here's the basic email message. Click here to download. And then here's the page, my website, gone forward slash download.

That takes them to the page where they can click the PDF and download.

@10:19 - Christine Gregory

Okay, cool. Awesome.

@10:24 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

So yeah, that's kind of the most simple version of that.

@10:29 - Christine Gregory

Yeah, you can always make it more complex.

@10:33 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

There's lots of tools and systems out there, but just within the basics, I'm pretty sure within Wix, you could set all that up and at least, you know, have something functioning there that will get the job done for you.

@10:46 - Christine Gregory

Okay. Um, my next question on that is, I'm also using, so I have my website through Wix. is where it's probably too complicated for me.

ACTION ITEM: Experiment with creating both inline and pop-up forms in MailChimp, embed on Wix site - WATCH

Website through Wix, but I have my email and step through like my email list through MailChimp. So is it easier to just combine it to and have it all through Wix or is it possible to still work through both of those?

@11:14 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Well so in that case you know so the your email signup form what you can do with MailChimp is I should have asked you that question ahead of time so I didn't I didn't confuse you again still use your website to put the I'm still gonna use the website for your where you put the form but within MailChimp you can but there might be two ways to do this one in MailChimp you can create a website form that's you know name email hit submit and it will you know send it into MailChimp so then it's on that list

So you can embed that form here. So what most websites have, like Wix, has some kind of widget, like we call HTML widget, where from MailChimp, you're going to say in-bed form, there's a place in MailChimp to embed form, and once you set it up, it's going to say copy this and put it on the website.

So you copy that, you stick it in here, and once you update that, it will show that form that you just made inside of MailChimp.

@12:43 - Christine Gregory

Yeah, I've tried that before, and it was unsuccessful. I don't know where the disconnect was, but I did try to embed it.

And it doesn't act as like a pop-up. It just never shows up.

@12:57 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

So it depends on, yeah. It depends on how you created it in MailChimp, so I think MailChimp will let you either create it as a pop-up or as what it inline form, so yeah, so then you can set up that reply email within MailChimp and again I would say send the link to the website where they can download it.

If you want to share your screen like login to MailChimp and share your screen we can look in there and see what you got set up.

Let's see if we can tell why it's not working. you

SCREEN SHARING: Christine started screen sharing - WATCH

@14:11 - Christine Gregory

Okay. So. Okay, so this is my mail chimp and if I go to sign up forms, I think this is where I did it.

Yeah, so I tried to just do some example just to mess with it.

@14:57 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah.

@15:00 - Christine Gregory

And now I can't see where to, oh, continue. Okay, your form is ready, copy and paste into, so now I do this into Wix, right?

@15:13 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yep.

@15:14 - Christine Gregory

Okay, let's see if I can. Yeah, and that's an inline form, not a pop up. Oh, so how do I know it's an inline form?

@15:28 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

It's, it doesn't really say, but it's. It's, it's an embedded form that has another option for a pop up form, which is a different.

It's a different one. Oh, create pop up form.

@15:53 - Christine Gregory

Yeah. Mm hmm. Okay, but I can still like, once I create a pop pop-up form, then it's still an embedded thing.

@16:03 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, you still copy the code, but it's a little bit different how you set it up, and it'll give you the instructions on where to paste it, but because it has different functionality.

So we're an embedded one, you create a page, and you just take that embed form and pick where you want it on the page, where a pop-up, you've got to put the code in a different spot, so that it will, when someone comes to the website, it will pop up and they can, they'll see it and they can fill it out.

@16:35 - Christine Gregory

Okay. Okay, well, I'll experiment with that. Yeah.

@16:45 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

And again, my recommendation is I would do, I would have both, because you may have situations where you want to do different things.

So find it, have the pop-up for visitors to the website. lot of people just click on. off of that.

But, but when you're promoting, hey, get my thing, you need to send them a link where they can put their name and email address into you.

So if you're going to do, you know, QR code or suit them an email, here's the link where you can get this, put your name and email in and you'll get it.

So I would have, I would have both just so that you've, you know, you've got the most options. Mm hmm.

ACTION ITEM: Create QR code using free online generator, link to desired landing page - WATCH

@17:29 - Christine Gregory

Okay. Awesome. And then that brings me to QR codes. So I have a link tree that has a QR code on it, but how do I create just like my own QR code?

Is that possible?

SCREEN SHARING: Peter started screen sharing - WATCH

@17:43 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Easy. Let's see. And you're already using canvas. you can do this Okay, look. uncharted interesting. What does that mean?

@18:27 - Christine Gregory

How exciting. I love camp.

@18:30 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

I love. I love camp, by the way. I'm not a gravity designer, but I pretend like I'm one when I use camera.

So the way I do it is I create a blank image. A thousand pixels by a thousand pixels square.

Just so it's a decent size and. a decent resolution wherever you put it. And then if you. Go to the apps and then just look up QR code.

@19:13 - Christine Gregory

Can I do this in the free version or is this the premium version?

@19:19 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

I, you should be able to do it in the free version.

@19:21 - Christine Gregory

Okay.

@19:24 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, and then you just send it your email. Or email, enter whatever domain. So this is my website if it's your landing page, link, whatever, put the full link in there, generate code.

@19:47 - Christine Gregory

Oh my gosh, that was so easy.

@19:50 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

It drops it in there. resize it so it's that full size, name it whatever. Download it and then you can throw it on whatever you want to throw it on.

@20:05 - Christine Gregory

Oh my gosh.

@20:06 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

That was so easy Yeah Awesome cool For some reason it's not It's got to be the paid version you just go to Google and do Qr code generator Skip past the sponsored ones go here Then same thing Yeah, I'll accept your cookies

And it'll generate right there and then you can download it.

@21:05 - Christine Gregory

Okay. So with these ones, I feel like I tried to do this before and I don't remember the website, but I think it like expired or something.

Is that.

@21:17 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

I mean, it's a, it's a set graphic that points to that website. It can't really change.

@21:26 - Christine Gregory

Oh, okay.

@21:28 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

It's a fixed thing. If your link, your link could change like if for some reason this link was no more valid, then the QR code is not going to work because that link's not available anymore.

@21:40 - Christine Gregory

Okay.

@21:41 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

So if you had landing page. As the URL, but then you came back and you changed it to. You, you know, add in a dash that QR code that you had longer work because you changed the name of the page.

@21:59 - Christine Gregory

Okay. I see. Awesome. Well, that was all super easy. you so much.

@22:08 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, you know, it's there are no secrets, really. Information you don't have yet. Great.

@22:19 - Christine Gregory

Yeah. I feel like I had one more question and I was expecting to sit here and just like take a million notes and it all seems like way easier than I thought it was going to be.

But yeah, the PDF to link was one. The QR code was one. And then I had one more and now I can't think of But thank you.

This was super super helpful.

@22:47 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah. if you think of it, just shoot me an email if it's just, you know, one quick question or whatever.

Yeah, I'll get back to you with an answer. But yeah.

@23:01 - Christine Gregory

It's normal, no more regular stuff, but that's good stuff, right?

@23:05 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

ways for people to opt in and, you know, get your things and capture emails. So whatever you're doing in your marketing, you've got a way to move them off the social or if you're doing in person or however you're doing it.

Getting up on your list so you can follow up and do all that other stuff.

@23:23 - Christine Gregory

Very cool.

@23:24 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

That's the next level.

@23:29 - Christine Gregory

Awesome. really appreciate you. I know your time has ended early, but you answered all my questions.

@23:37 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Well, these were easy ones today, so.

@23:42 - Christine Gregory

Next time they'll be harder, it's all right. I was just going to say, if I come across more questions, is it okay to reach back to you?

@23:50 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yeah, yeah. You can always book again, no problem.

@23:52 - Christine Gregory

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

@23:57 - Peter Brissette (Digital Marketing Dude)

Yep, we'll see you.

@23:58 - Christine Gregory

All right, sounds good. Have a good one.

Turn Your Talks into Income: Build a Backend System with systeme.io

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:19:09 GMT

As the Spring Conference Season approaches, speakers are gearing up to deliver impactful presentations. Beyond captivating audiences, there's a growing need for speakers to establish robust backend systems that enhance their professional offerings and generate additional revenue streams. Enter systeme.io, a comprehensive platform designed to streamline and elevate your speaking business.

I have had the opportunity to setup systeme.io for a couple of my clients who are speakers, coaches, and consultants. They were looking to simplify their current systems, to use fewer applications, and to lower overall costs while keeping a robust system in place.

As I started learning how to setup their applications for their particular business needs I was very impressed with what I was seeing. So much so that I am moving my current applications to systeme.io and taking advantage of many of its built in features.

I am recommending this change to all my speakers, authors, coaches and consultants to allow them to build a robust backend that is easy to use and manage.

Why Speakers Need a Strong Backend System

While delivering engaging talks is at the heart of a speaker's role, managing the business side is equally crucial. A well-structured backend system allows speakers to:

Monetize Expertise : Beyond speaking fees, speakers can offer online courses, memberships, or digital products to diversify income.
Automate Marketing Efforts : Efficiently manage email campaigns, sales funnels, and customer relationships to expand reach and engagement.
Manage Affiliates : Build and oversee an affiliate program to promote services and products, amplifying marketing efforts.

Introducing systeme.io

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform that consolidates essential tools for online business management. For speakers, it offers features tailored to streamline operations and enhance audience engagement:

Sales Funnels : Create customized sales funnels with ease, guiding potential clients from initial interest to confirmed bookings.
Email Marketing : Develop and automate email campaigns to nurture relationships with your audience, announce upcoming events, or share valuable content.
Online Course Creation : Develop and manage online courses or membership sites, allowing you to offer additional value to your audience and generate passive income.
Affiliate Program Management : Establish and manage an affiliate program to incentivize others to promote your services, expanding your reach.
Business Automation : Automate repetitive tasks, such as email sequences and payment processing, freeing up time to focus on your core speaking engagements.

Benefits of Using systeme.io for Speakers

Integration : With all tools housed under one platform, there's no need to juggle multiple subscriptions or platforms, simplifying your workflow.
Cost-Effective : Systeme.io offers competitive pricing, making it accessible for speakers at various stages of their careers.
User-Friendly Interface : Designed with simplicity in mind, systeme.io allows users to set up and manage their backend systems without requiring technical skills.

As you prepare for the upcoming conference season, consider leveraging systeme.io to build a robust backend system that supports and enhances your speaking engagements. By automating processes, diversifying income streams, and efficiently managing your online presence, you'll be well-equipped to make the most of your opportunities and deliver value beyond the podium.

Getting Started with systeme.io

Because I like the system so much I am offering a one time special discount on setting up systeme.io.

Here is the basic setup of systeme.io.

Add domain settings - typically a subdomain like learn.your-domain.com
Add email domain settings to allow for emails to be sent
Add initial course
Import Contacts
Setup an initial email campaign with email template
Setup CRM Pipeline
Connect Stripe.com for taking payments
Add forms that can be embedded on website for lead capture
Add initial sales funnel
Add a "linktree" that can be used on social profiles
Provide an overview of training

This setup would normally be $799 but for the next ten speakers that respond we will do the setup for just $299 a 63% discount.

Lets have a conversation - Go to my Calendly link and schedule a short 15-minute time slot see if a setup of System.io will be right for you.

Mastering the Marketing A’s: Understanding Your Audience for Better Results

Thu, 23 May 2024 02:22:06 GMT

In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, the 4 A's—Audience, Attention, Acquisition, and Analytics—serve as fundamental pillars for building a successful strategy. Understanding your audience is crucial for crafting personalized and relevant messages that resonate with specific demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. Capturing and retaining attention ensures that your marketing efforts stand out in a crowded marketplace, engaging potential customers through compelling content and visuals. Acquisition focuses on attracting and converting new customers, driving business growth and sustainability. Finally, leveraging analytics provides valuable insights into campaign performance, enabling data-driven decisions that optimize marketing efforts and maximize ROI. Together, these elements create a robust framework for effective marketing that drives engagement, conversions, and long-term success.

Understanding Your Audience:

The Foundation of Effective Marketing

In the dynamic world of marketing, knowing your audience is the cornerstone of success. The audience refers to the specific group of people you aim to reach with your marketing efforts. Key elements such as demographics (age, gender, income, education, occupation), psychographics (interests, values, lifestyle, personality traits), behavioral factors (purchase behavior, brand loyalty, usage rate), and geographic considerations (location, climate, urban/rural) play a crucial role in defining this group. Understanding your audience allows you to tailor your messages and strategies to meet their unique needs and preferences, leading to more personalized and relevant marketing that increases engagement and conversion rates. Effective audience segmentation starts with thorough market research and the creation of detailed buyer personas, utilizing tools like surveys, social media insights, and analytics to gather and continuously update audience data.

Audience

Definition: The specific group of people you aim to reach with your marketing efforts.

Key Elements:

Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, occupation, etc.
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, personality traits.
Behavioral: Purchase behavior, brand loyalty, usage rate.
Geographic: Location, climate, urban/rural.

Importance:

Understanding your audience helps tailor your marketing messages and strategies to meet their specific needs and preferences.
Effective audience segmentation allows for more personalized and relevant marketing, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Strategies:

Conducting market research and creating detailed buyer personas.
Utilizing tools like surveys, social media insights, and analytics to gather audience data.
Continuously monitoring and updating audience profiles to reflect changes and trends.

Capturing and Retaining Attention:

The Key to Engagement

In a marketplace flooded with information, capturing and maintaining the attention of your target audience is more critical than ever. Attention involves engaging content that is relevant, valuable, and interesting, coupled with visual appeal through eye-catching visuals, videos, and graphics. Personalization plays a significant role, as tailored messages and offers resonate more deeply with individual preferences and behaviors. Utilizing the right mix of channels—social media, email, blogs, and more—ensures you reach your audience where they are most active. Successfully gaining and holding attention not only boosts brand recall and engagement but also drives higher conversion rates. Crafting compelling headlines, leveraging storytelling, and incorporating interactive elements like quizzes and live videos are effective strategies to keep your audience engaged and connected.

Attention

Definition: Capturing and maintaining the interest of your target audience.

Key Elements:

Engaging Content: Creating content that is relevant, valuable, and interesting to your audience.
Visual Appeal: Using eye-catching visuals, videos, and graphics to attract attention.
Personalization: Tailoring messages and offers to individual preferences and behaviors.
Channels: Utilizing the right mix of channels (social media, email, blogs, etc.) to reach your audience where they are most active.

Importance:

Gaining and holding your audience’s attention is crucial in a crowded marketplace where consumers are bombarded with information.
Sustained attention leads to higher brand recall, engagement, and ultimately conversions.

Strategies:

Crafting compelling headlines and calls-to-action.
Using storytelling to create emotional connections.
Employing interactive elements like quizzes, polls, and live videos to engage users.

Acquiring New Customers:

Fueling Business Growth

Customer acquisition, the process of attracting and acquiring new customers, is vital for business growth and sustainability. Key elements include lead generation through content marketing, SEO, and social media, and conversion through persuasive and effective sales funnels. Understanding and optimizing the customer journey from awareness to purchase is crucial. A steady influx of new customers ensures a growing market share and revenue. Effective acquisition strategies involve targeted advertising campaigns (PPC, social media ads), offering promotions and discounts, and using email marketing and retargeting campaigns to nurture leads and drive conversions. Focusing on acquisition helps build a strong customer base, which is essential for long-term success.

Acquisition

Definition: The process of attracting and acquiring new customers.

Key Elements:

Lead Generation : Identifying and capturing potential customers through various tactics like content marketing, SEO, and social media.
Conversion: Turning leads into paying customers through persuasive and effective sales funnels.
Customer Journey: Mapping out and optimizing the journey from awareness to purchase.

Importance:

Customer acquisition is essential for business growth and sustainability.
A steady influx of new customers ensures a growing market share and revenue.

Strategies:

Implementing targeted advertising campaigns (PPC, social media ads).
Offering promotions, discounts, and incentives to encourage trial and purchase.
Utilizing email marketing and retargeting campaigns to nurture leads and drive conversions.

Leveraging Analytics:

Data-Driven Marketing Decisions

Analytics, the use of data and analysis to measure and optimize marketing performance, is a powerful tool in today’s data-rich environment. Key elements include data collection from various sources (website, social media, email), identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value, and conducting data analysis to gain insights into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness. Regular reporting on these metrics helps track progress and make informed decisions. Analytics provide valuable insights that enhance marketing strategies and tactics, leading to more effective and efficient efforts. Utilizing tools like Google Analytics, CRM systems, and marketing automation platforms for data collection and analysis, conducting A/B testing, and continuously monitoring and adjusting campaigns based on data insights are essential strategies for maximizing return on investment (ROI). By focusing on analytics, businesses can make data-driven decisions that drive growth and success.

Analytics

Definition: The use of data and analysis to measure and optimize marketing performance.

Key Elements:

Data Collection: Gathering data from various sources (website, social media, email, etc.).
Metrics and KPIs: Identifying key performance indicators such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, etc.
Data Analysis: Interpreting data to gain insights into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness.
Reporting: Regularly reporting on metrics to track progress and make informed decisions.

Importance:

Analytics provide valuable insights that help improve marketing strategies and tactics.
Data-driven decision-making leads to more effective and efficient marketing efforts.

Strategies:

Using tools like Google Analytics, CRM systems, and marketing automation platforms to collect and analyze data.
Conducting A/B testing to determine the most effective strategies.
Continuously monitoring and adjusting campaigns based on data insights to maximize ROI.

By focusing on these four A’s, you can create a robust and effective marketing strategy that drives growth and success for your business.

By mastering these four A’s—Audience, Attention, Acquisition, and Analytics—you can build a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy that propels your business towards sustained growth and success.

Should I Follow my Competitors on Social Media?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:18:32 GMT

The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them.

So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.

How do I test marketing on TikTok or other platforms?

Mon, 15 May 2023 19:52:35 GMT

And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me.

But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process.

Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.

If my website is a GoDaddy website can I change it to something else?

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 18:37:44 GMT

The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow?

You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime.

Thank you, Peter.

What can I do if I have a limited budget for online ads?

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 19:32:43 GMT

Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so.

Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else.

So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy.

But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.

What is the best option for hosting a website?

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:41:55 GMT

The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.

Can a competitor connect to my website and then market ads on social media sites?

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 19:23:57 GMT

The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.

What is a simple website builder?

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:18:33 GMT

The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that.

Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.

Will there be an alternative to twitter?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:11:03 GMT

The question that we have is, do you see another alternative to Twitter coming on the scene? Can you create a viable touch plan without it?

Well, here's how I've seen Twitter for a long time. Again, everything is answered by our strategy. Who's our target market? Who we're going after? Is it important to us that Twitter even exist or not? Because if my target market is not on Twitter. Then it makes no difference to me. If you've been using Twitter and it's been an effective means for you getting clients. And that's where your target market is then that's a different story, so. That that's where in terms of marketing and marketing your business, that's where that comes in. Is there going to be an alternative Twitter, who knows, maybe. I mean there's. You know, we didn't think Tick Tock would be a thing, and now it's a thing. And it's, you know, impacting. Facebook and Instagram dramatically like Facebook and Instagram are having to change some things around because of the space that Tik tok is taking up right now but again you know what's important for our conversation it's more about you know what what's the what's my strategy who's my target market and can that be an effective means of driving traffic and getting leads then if it is then great use it make the most of it know that platform well get really good at it and build that audience but always be thinking rented space versus own space i'm here on this platform i'm renting that space how do i get them on my email list how do i get their cell phone number so i can text them and now i have something that i can hang on to and i can continue to market and communicate with them regardless of what platform is the current platform or someone changes or elon musk goes and buys another one who knows?

Awesome thanks.

How to get bad links to my website removed

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 16:17:09 GMT

How to get bad links to my website removed?

And the next question that we have, as you mentioned, we own our website, it's our property. If an entity or backlink is on my property without permission, what is my recourse for SWIFT removal? Usually if you find that, that's an issue and it's a problem. Normally you can just request it like go to that site, you know, contact that site and request removal. That usually is enough to take care of it. If for some reason it was, you know, it's a negative, really negative thing, you know, maybe you have to do something. More severe, like hire an attorney or something like that for the but for the most part.

Most of these platforms will remove your content on request awesome thank you.

What is the best video orientation?

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 16:10:58 GMT

What is the best video orientation?

Here on the next question is what are your thoughts on vertical oriented versus horizontal oriented video? Would be nice to use the same video on both website and social, but it's a horizontal video less effective on social than a vertical. Umm, yeah. I mean, I would say it's not necessarily the effectiveness is probably not different, it's really figuring out. Again, what is my audience looking for? So going back to strategy, who's my target market? and. Well, this content I'm providing them. Help them engage with me. Am I gonna get the engagement from my audience and be able to grow my audience? In the format of the video, so you know you can't do a wide video on Instagram.

Like that's just not even an option. So if you're going to be using Instagram, then you've got it created in the format that's going to work for Instagram. So it's really not about. I don't know that one is more effective than the other, but each platform has its benefits. I tend to, just for ease of use, default to just a square. You know, video, but if you're doing reels, that's not gonna work. Like it's wide, but it's tall. So you got tall, you got wide, you got square. So again, what is it you're doing? And you may need to edit that video. For the particular platform, there's a lot of great tools out there that you can take one video and dump it in and it'll give you all the formats.

You know, so look for that. I'm not sure what that is on top of my head. But that's very. You know can be a way to save some time so you can create the different formats if that's what you're using. Again, tie it back to strategy what results do I want? Am I measuring results? Or am I just throwing content out there hoping something goes viral? Thank you, Peter.

A marketing professional said I must be on TikTok.

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 16:01:41 GMT

A marketing professional said I must be on TikTok.

And the next question that we have is, I recently had a marketing professional tell me that I absolutely had to be heavily active on TikTok to drive business. Does it create business or is it just a time sink? So it can, I mean the thing that you have right now with

TikTok and if you know you want to. If you have the time and you can do it. And be active with it. It's right now being very generous with promoting your content.

Like it's heavily promoting your content to other users and trying to find common users so. And all kinds of business categories are doing it. So it could be a method for you. Again go back to your strategy and you know make sure your strategy lines up. And then and my thing with almost anything is you know don't take my word or some gurus word for you know what you should or shouldn't do.

You need to test it for yourself and figure out does this fit within my marketing plan and test it and measure results. And figure out OK,

I'm going to do this test and this is my goal from this test. And let's and then we can, you know. Decide, you know, let a real test. Decide what I should or shouldn't do and based on my strategy and the results that I get. Versus just be like, oh. That they said like I had to.

I don't have a choice, you know, so. That's my approach to any of that. For that type of question thanks.

Is GoDaddy a website builder tool?

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 15:49:45 GMT

Is GoDaddy a website builder tool?

The next question that we have is GoDaddy a website builder tool or do you still need WordPress etcetera? GoDaddy does have a website builder tool. Personally, I think it's not good. I was going to be really much more mean than that, but I don't think it's a good builder to use at all. I would not recommend it if you have like a real legitimate business umm.

And so I would not. That would be my very last choice. If I just couldn't do anything else to do the GoDaddy website builder, GoDaddy can't also provide hosting for WordPress. Which again not my favorite platform for hosting for WordPress sites. I think GoDaddy is great for domains and buying domains umm. But I would not build my website on that platform would be my advice. Thanks, Peter.

What is the lighthouse chrome extension?

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:39:04 GMT

What is the lighthouse chrome extension?

The next question is the site that you shared in your presentation. Is the site like the Lighthouse Chrome extension? So the website that just happens to be their name, but the lighthouse Chrome extension is an extension that kind of helps you look at key factors of a website. And I can't remember all the details on it. Mostly what I look at is. The Google.

Let me get this link. Google Page speed insights. I'll put this link in the chat. And that's more what I would use. So there's some connection with lighthouse, it's called Lighthouse, it's just some key factors that. Like page speed and things like that are important. For that, yeah. So thank you, Peter.

Should you build a website mobile first?

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 14:59:46 GMT

Should you build a website mobile first?

And the next question that we have is it a better approach to develop your mobile presence first and have the website developed as responsive to the mobile app? I mean, yes and no. You kind of have to develop both at the same time, you know, as you're creating, here's what it's going to look like on desktop. Let me also look at what it's looking like. It's mobile, so you kind of do it in tandem, together umm. But you gotta look at it differently. You gotta go. This is what's happening when I'm looking at it on desktop. Now let me look at the mobile and go, OK, how is this going to work? You know, we've got to move things around.

We got to make it easier to navigate. So really you do them. It kind of happens in tandem, really, practically. Thank you, Peter.

How can links get connected to our website without our knowledge?

Mon, 02 May 2022 14:35:45 GMT

How can links get connected to our website without our knowledge?

Next question that we have is how are backlinks attaching to our website without our knowledge? They may be. That can happen. There's a lot of difference. There's a lot of different business directories out there. That if you got a business license with the city if you have. You know your Google business profile. You got a phone with the local phone company, that's all public record data and that gets, you know, shared out there with a lot of different websites. And those websites can just, you know, there are some sites that will just go crawl a bunch of data and throw your data on there and link back to your website.

So that's why it's good to use a tool like Moss or whatever so that you can evaluate what are the links coming to my website, where are they coming from? Do I want that link? Is it from a decent website? And if it's not then you can try to reach out to them. I've done that for clients before or I'm like how do we get this link and it's total spammy link.

Google doesn't like it, it's not doing any good for the website and trying to like contact that the administrators on that website. To get that link removed and get their content removed off their website, sometimes easy, sometimes hard so awesome thank you.

Google Changed Google My Business? Really?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 20:30:22 GMT

Hey there, everybody. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and just got a little bit of an update for you on Google. As Google really likes to keep things interesting and change things on a frequent and regular basis. We're very used to, for a while, with our Google business listings being called Google My Business. It's been called that for a number of years now. It's basically that maps listing when people do a search or someone does a search for a particular business and Google list, here's their information, their hours, their reviews, all that comes up on Google. They have now changed the name to Google Business Profile. So it's your Google Business Profile. And just a couple little updates that they've made with that. There's nothing necessarily major with this name change, but a couple of different options that they're giving you now. So let me share my screen here and we will pull this up.

So the initial way to get to your Google Business Profile, you can see now it's called the Google Business Profile Manager is business.google.com. And if you have more than one location, you'd be able to see those there. And then of course, everything is here like it has been. Nothing really new here that's included. But you've got all your information, insights, reviews, what calls have come in and so forth. Very good information here. And I'm not going to dig into this in this particular video. But just wanted to let you know that it is now called the Google Business Profile Manager. Now there's one other option that they've added here. If I just do a search on my business here, and that listing comes up right here, it actually allows me to make edits right from here. So you can see here, it's got your business on Google, how many views this month, edit profile, get more reviews, add an update.

So it just gives you a lot of different things right here in this panel. So you don't even have to go to business.google.com. You can just look up your business and be able to start to edit information about it right here. There are some new Google ad things coming out with Google My Business... see, I can't even say it correctly, Google Business Profiles. And we'll probably talk about that in a later video as well with some of those things. So that's the quick update on Google My Business, now Google Business Profile and the Google Business Profile Manager. If you haven't logged in there and checked it out in a while, you might want to log in, update some information, make sure it's complete, because that is the primary way and the first way that most people are finding your business online is through your Google Business Profile. That's it for this time. Thanks. And we'll see you next time.

Does faces shown in videos impact the algorithms?

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 17:40:15 GMT

Does faces shown in videos impact the algorithms?

Actual faces. I don't know that we have that. I don't know that the algorithms have that capability yet. To determine that in a video. I wouldn't be surprised though that with the AI stuff that we have, you know, out there now that couldn't become part of it, but I'm not seeing any evidence that a video with a face versus. Graphics or something else ranks any differently?

What is the best software and device for editing video?

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 17:55:38 GMT

Does faces shown in videos impact the algorithms?

What's the best way to edit video from iPhone? From an iPhone, that's a great question. I would say have a MacBook. It's already got the video editing software on it. I don't use iPhone, I use Android, but I'm sure there are apps that you can use on iPhone.

Deborah yes, thank you Deborah, she is I movie on your iPhone. Is actually on your iPhone. Ok great yeah.

The iPads really great for it too and.

From what I've seen, people really can. I mean, you can do all kinds of stuff from an iPad. With the video in terms of editing, all that. So I'm not a Mac, I'm not a Mac user. So I've other software that we use for editing and that kind of stuff, but. That there really is no better editing tools for images than iMovie and Photoshop and all that. I mean max, the king. If you're going to be doing a lot of that, then you definitely want to be in that space.

Do I need multiple landing pages for each audience I am marketing to?

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 17:26:04 GMT

Do I need multiple landing pages for each audience I am marketing to?

The next question we have is what do you think of creating multiple standalone pages, each targeting a specific part of one 's niche that point to a single web page that contains all of your services? Yeah I mean there's you definitely can do that. So that's really going you know here's our General Services, but if you have different audiences that you need to speak to specifically, then yeah, create a page that speaks to that. So if you do any marketing. To that particular audience, then send them there so that you got that marketing message match. That this is who you are. This is the problem you have.

That you're communicating that to them so that they get that. So there's nothing wrong with having. You know, multiple pages. It might be a similar service, but that's geared towards a very specific audience if you have those. But start with your biggest audience first. Get that, get that main thing figured out, and then come back later and go, OK, what's my next biggest audience? You know what? What's the next biggest need? And then? And then add that one. Thanks, Peter.

You are the expert! No Seriously you are!

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 20:57:42 GMT

Hey gang, Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. I wanted to record a quick video and I just had an interesting experience that I wanted to share with everybody. So sometimes we do something, we do what we do, and we for a long time. And sometimes we might think of ourselves as an expert but I think sometimes we might question that or wonder that. I would say most of the time I don't but then there's times when I go, "Oh, am I really an expert at what I do?"

I had an opportunity through the SBDC, Small Business Development Center, to be on a panel of other digital marketing folks who were speaking to an audience and answering questions and was clearly on there with some folks that had been doing this even longer than I've been doing it. I've been doing this 11, 12 years or 13 years, whatever, and some folks doing it even longer than that.

I was just reminded that I know what I'm doing. We were talking about different things about digital marketing and websites and content and strategy. I would say almost entirely there was a hundred percent agreement on terms of how we answered the questions, what we were emphasizing. We all had maybe some slight different takes on it. What that did for me was going, "I am doing the right thing. I'm doing the right thing for my clients and making sure that they're getting the best opportunity to market their businesses online and that I am up to date and current with the way to do that and what's important and the things that we should be looking at and things that should be considered in that process and doing it at doing it at a high level and can compete with any other marketing agency that's out there."

It was a great confirmation. I think that sometimes those things are great to have. And so my message to you is this, you are the expert in your business. You truly are. You probably have been doing whatever you're doing for a long time. You know it well. Share that expertise. Share it. That is the content that you need. Talk about the frequently asked questions, make videos about the frequently asked questions in your business and share that content. Share that information because you know what you do best and you're good at it. Let people know and don't ever think that you're not the expert. You may have differing opinions from a lot of the different people but what most of us do in most of our businesses is provide the best possible solution for the problems that we solve for our clients. Keep on doing that and that's what makes you successful in business. Take that little note with you and let me know what you think of this video.

What are the best options for domains and hosting?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 14:30:02 GMT

You've talked about hosting your website and Websitebuilder. Do you have a recommendation of the best place to purchase a domain name from? Does that matter?

Well, here's what I would recommend on this. So again, working with clients over the years, there's been a lot of times where we've had to rescue websites because they weren't sure where the domain was or where the hosting was, they had a guy that set it up or whatever. So I highly recommend just for ease of access is buying domains on GoDaddy. The reason is that GoDaddy is such a big company, and if you have a challenge or a problem with your domain, you can call and talk to somebody on the phone. And there's not a lot of the domain providers out there that you can actually do that with.

We had a client recently that they had a change in ownership in the company. Nobody had the information on how to access their GoDaddy account, but the domain was on GoDaddy. So GoDaddy gave them means to provide additional information, to show that they owned that domain because it was their business name. Their business website was sitting on that domain. And so they were able to get access ultimately to that domain since it was on GoDaddy. So it's just much easier to do that. So I highly recommend doing domains on GoDaddy.

Where you actually host your website, I think GoDaddy is trying to get better, but I've never been a fan of hosting particular WordPress sites on GoDaddy. Our host of choice is called SiteGround, siteground.com, for hosting websites. So much better technical customer service on the site, on a platform like SiteGround than others. And of course, you can connect that domain from GoDaddy to SiteGround, to [inaudible 00:02:16] your website. If you're using GoDaddy's website builder, then that's going to be on GoDaddy and that's fine. So that's my two cents on that.

What are some ways to check page load speed?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 14:30:02 GMT

What's your goal for page load speed? Obviously fast is better than slow, but do you have a number?

There's a tool out there called GT Metrics, GTmetrics.com, which is a good tool for measuring that. And what it will do is give the page a score. And usually, it's ABCDF for the page load speed. So you want an A, if you're using that tool. And if there's things that aren't loading quickly, like sometimes your images are optimized and it'll tell you that.

You can also do a search for Google page speed tool, and Google has its own tool that will look at your page speed and give you a score. And obviously, you want to try to score in the green, which it uses a more of a number. So like in the 90% and above, just as a number. Where GT Metrics will give you the score as a grade. But yeah, you want to be in the green on either one of those tools. So you use those tools to check it and see where you're at. And obviously, you want to do what you can do to get into the green. It doesn't have to be 100%, but ideally if you can at least be in the 90s, it's the best. And then, you know it's loading well on all different devices and people are able to interact with it.

What website builder do you recommend?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 18:05:52 GMT

What is the best website builder to use. I know you mentioned Wix and Squarespace. Do you have one that you send people to, especially if they're just getting started?

If you're just getting started, Squarespace is super easy to use. That's one out there. Actually, recently, I used to not like it at all, was the GoDaddy website builder. They've actually made a lot of improvements to it. It's actually not that bad. It's pretty good. So if you just need to get something up for now, I think either one of those are totally fine. WordPress is a whole different beast. A lot of people say, "Oh, WordPress is so easy." It's not. There's a lot of complications that can happen. I'm working with a client's website right now that got infected, and so we're trying to clean it up and you get malware and things like that. Where these platforms like Squarespace and GoDaddy, you're not going to have those kinds of problems and issues with it.

You've got to look at stages of where you're at. What can I afford to spend right now? Can I do that myself? Fine. That's all I can afford. Once you have some money and you can spend some money on your website, again, you own it. It's worth investing in. Then start looking at other options, start talking to possible folks that can help you with it because there is a lot of technical aspects that go into making sure that it even works for the search engines and for Google and all that.

What impacts Search Engine Optimization the most?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 18:01:42 GMT

What impacts SEO the most?

There's a couple of factors. For local business, your reviews and your Google My Business page are super important, because long before I ever get to your website, that's the thing I'm going to see first. So if you have great reviews out on Google and your Google My Business page is updated and being used and you're posting content there, as well, that's where you're going to be seen first, in terms of a category search, if I'm searching for a plumber or a veterinarian, or whatever.

In terms of the website, it's kind of the combination of making sure that the website's fast, the SSL is in place, that your titles and your descriptions are all in place on the website. As long as that's in place, you at least have a solid foundation and something that you can build on from there, to do that. But that's the thing I see the most that's missing. There's just not enough content on the website. It's not good content. Content really is the driving factor more than anything outside of the technical aspects of it.

How much should I pay someone for help with social media?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 17:57:11 GMT

How much should a business pay someone to post on behalf of the business? Small business, only two or three independent contractors, and no employees, my time is limited.

What you have to do is go back to your strategy and you have to really decide what are the results that you want to get. So what's the measurable outcomes that I want to have happen? And then determine from that what's the value of that to the business, or how much is that going to help you in terms of either getting repeat business or getting new clients. So how does that connect together so you have a little better idea of what you're trying to accomplish with that, and then you can really go to somebody and say, all right, this is what I want to have happen, how do we get this, how do we measure these results?

So it really can vary on what is being done. So it's about the content, are they creating original content versus just posting? Someone that's just scheduling content that you're doing, that wouldn't cost that much to do, but if they're creating content, they're doing audience engagement, maybe they're running an ad campaign, that might be a different thing.

In a nutshell at a general range most social media managers are probably going to be in the $300 to $500 range per month. And again, it's going to vary on how many platforms and all of that, so it could be a lot more, it could be a little bit less, but somewhere in that range is usually where you wind up.

Can you target engaged users with ads on Facebook?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Mon, 24 May 2021 17:52:45 GMT

"Is there a way to target people who are engaged, and who clicked the link on your posts or ads on Facebook?"

Absolutely. So there's a couple of different ways. Again, this gets into how you build your audiences. Video is one of the best ways to do that, because you can actually create audiences based on how long they watched your video. You can also do it based on engagement. So how engaged? Did they like and comment on your content? So you can build out audiences that we would say are warmer. So if you're just going to a cold audience, they just saw one of your ads, they don't even know who you are, right? That's a cold audience that's seeing that. But an engaged audience, someone that's commenting, someone that's watching the video, you can actually segment those out in your audiences in the ads manager so that you can target more specific ads to those folks who are more engaged. So absolutely you can. Again, Andrea Ball, on her website, she has a lot of information about building audiences that would help you do that.

How do you get more followers on your social media channels?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 17:46:07 GMT

What is the best way to get people to start following a business?

The best way to do it is to ask. This kind of gets into the category, I'm going to talk about reviews a little bit. Wasn't the highest on our agenda, but in particular for local business, your reviews are going to be super important. The number one way to get more reviews? Ask. The number one way to get more followers? Ask. We have to be asking.

So, what are the ways that we can ask? Can we send an email and ask people to follow us? Can we hand them a piece of paper that says, please follow us on these platforms? Can we send them a text message that says, follow us? The best way to do it is to keep asking, to ask our best customers, our best clients, to follow us on the social channels and do that.

You can also, Facebook as an example, if you want to get more followers on your Facebook page, you can run an ad campaign that's specifically focused on getting more followers to the page. It's one way to do it. Maybe not the best, but it is a way to do it. And then I kind of mentioned how you can organically use your Facebook page. That's a great way to get more followers. The more your page is engaged socially in your community, the more followers you're going to get. People are going to click that like button and follow your page. But you got to come up with lots of different ways to ask people to follow you.

Should every business use every social media platform?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 17:12:08 GMT

Should every business use every social media platform?

Please, no, don't. Every business should not use every platform. Again, pick one, if you really haven't figured it out, you're not really sure how to get the most out of it, then just pick one and get really good at that one, and then you can start to expand from there. Again, it's about the strategy that we talked about. Who's your target market, are they on the platform, do they engage on this platform? That needs to be the biggest deciding factor on which platforms that you use, and how you want to use it. So, go back to your strategy, look at how you want to engage, how do you communicate better your problems, the problems your clients have, and your solutions, and develop your strategy around the specific platforms from that. Good question.

Is it a good idea to post to all social media channels at the same time?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 23:51:46 GMT

Sam wants to know, should every business use every social media platform?

Please, no, don't. Every business should not use every platform. Again, pick one, if you really haven't figured it out, you're not really sure how to get the most out of it, then just pick one and get really good at that one, and then you can start to expand from there. Again, it's about the strategy that we talked about. Who's your target market, are they on the platform, do they engage on this platform? That needs to be the biggest deciding factor on which platforms that you use, and how you want to use it. So, go back to your strategy, look at how you want to engage, how do you communicate better your problems, the problems your clients have, and your solutions, and develop your strategy around the specific platforms from that. Good question.

What is a good marketing strategy for an office supply company?

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 19:44:42 GMT

It says, "This is Nathan." He says, "Hello." Hi Nathan.

Hi.

"I'm from my office, et cetera, which is an office supply company. What would you suggest for live video there?"

Good question. So what I would start with is what are the common problems in an office environment that some of the products you have fix and solve and make easier? So it could be somehow two types of stuff that you do.

It could be a very specific product that solves a problem, but does an office need to be better organized? Absolutely. Does an office need better tools and equipment to run the office better? Absolutely. So what are some of the common problems that office spaces have? And start with that.

I would also look at... I didn't mention this because we didn't really dig into the content piece that much, but I always like to start with, what are the frequently asked questions? What are the most common questions that you get about your product or service? And address those. Make those part of your live videos.

And then also another category is should ask questions. What are the questions that you wish your customers were asking you that you provide solutions for? And include those should ask questions as well. So those are a couple of places that you can look at and start with, but again, it's always problem solution. What's the problem that you can solve and here's the way to solve it.

Thanks.

Monthly Marketing Message Training Call #13 Facebook Events

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 20:32:59 GMT

All right. Welcome. I want to go over a couple of things here. Welcome to the monthly marketing message. Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude, and we're doing our coaching training call. A question that I had come up was, one of many questions, was Facebook events. So if your Facebook hasn't changed yet... Probably has. Oh, if you like, you can temporarily switch to the classic Facebook. Wow. Look at that. This is the new version of what it looks like. It's kind of annoying, but thank you, Facebook for... Always changes things. But wanted to talk about events.

So I had a couple of folks ask about ways to promote their events that they were having. And it's like, well, we got a great way. It's called Facebook Events. And so if you go to your Facebook page, it should have these options here on the left, and you can go into events, and see your past events down here. And then of course you can create an event. So is this an in-person event or an online event? You get to choose. So let's say this is an online event, and... Yeah.

All right, here we go. So we're just going to say our monthly marketing message training coaching call. And let's say that was going to be today at 11:30. I don't think you have to have an end time. Location is if you're doing a location. It's public. Our monthly training call. And category. So we'll call this... What will we call this? Call this other. Okay. And we'll go next.

Location. And we're going to do Facebook Live, so you can schedule on Facebook Live. External link or other. So you could put other instructions, or if you're going to link to something. So it could be a Zoom link, for instance. So let's see here if we can... Get to our Zoom link.

Whatever. We're just going to do this. Zoom.us. And click next.

Then you can do a cover photo. So your cover photo... I'm not sure the exact size of the cover photo, but normally... Let's see here what we can do. I want to go to... Let's go to... This is taking me too long. Let's see if I can get something here. How about operations? Presentations?

Let's see. Just trying to find a good size. [inaudible 00:04:24] here. Here we go. Nope, that's in there. Let's see if we can get one out of Facebook one-on-one. This is probably... Well, it's a postcard size. [inaudible 00:04:58] print. Here we go.

So, not great image there, but you can play with that. I always recommend canva.com for creating graphics for your socials, so you can easily find templates for Facebook events. So here's your Facebook event cover, so 1920 by 1080 pixels on this one, it shows. So you can do that. That's a bonus for you.

And that's it. So then you can create the event. You can also preview this, desktop or mobile. So here's your event. And then what you're able to do is actually boost the event. And then you're able to get some insights on that. So if I wanted to boost this, I could decide... So the content's already there, it's not a special category. So then I can choose my audience. So do I want to do this locally? Do I want to do it all over the country? So you get to dig in here to exactly age groups, men, women, radius, distance, and then this will give you an idea how many people are potentially in reach. And then you can always dig into more detailed targeting inside the ads manager as well.

And then set your number of days. He wants this to run for five days. End date, so we got that.

Oh, well. The date is today of the event. So the event would have to be in the future. So we'd have to change that. Then you could set the number of days, you could set the budget, how much do you want to spend. That'll give you an idea how many reached per day. And then if you're using your Facebook tracking pixel as well, which is just the tracking code for that.

So that's basically it. Just wanted to give you a quick overview of Facebook events. Hopefully you found that helpful. If you have questions about that, and more details, be happy to answer those. So you can ask those wherever you see this video. That's all for me today. We'll see you next month.

Social Media Strategy and Basics - Video Training

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 15:10:47 GMT

Google My Business - Covid 19 Updates - Coaching Call #11

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 18:15:36 GMT

Hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing dude. A little update for you this month. Want to share my screen here.

A quick update on Google My Business, in particular as it relates to COVID-19 and COVID-19 updates, quick three things. One, you want to on your Google My Business page make sure you review all of your information there and make sure that it's up to date. If you have anything specific to how you're operating now as it relates to COVID-19, there's certain restrictions you have, people need to wear a mask, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you update that on your Google My Business page. That's probably the first place that people are going to see that information, even before they get to your website. You can update that there.

And of course, always, always, always get more reviews. I'll show you this real quick on my Google My Business page. If you come to the main page, you can update your business hours and then post any updates that you have for COVID-19 specifically. Google is trying to help you get that information out there. You can do different posts, which is basically just information and can include a link back to your website. You can add the image there and do COVID-19 specific updates. You definitely want to do that.

Again, all your information, make sure your hours are correct, your business categories, website links, if you use appointment links, all your services description, all of that, you want to make sure that you've got up to date. You can also add services here.

Then of course reviews, a couple of reminders on reviews. One, keep asking, get more reviews. For a while there, Google was not posting the reviews. They were capturing them, but they weren't posting them live, but they're back to posting them live again.

One thing I noticed a lot of business owners forget to do is reply to the reviews. You always want to make sure that you respond to every single review that you get, in particular on Google. Google will actually improve your search rankings. One of the many ways it can help improve your search rankings is to add a reply to all your reviews.

And I will add a lot of information a lot of times when I respond in terms of who the client is, what's the work that we did for them, where are they located, just so that that provides some useful, helpful information for other prospects that are looking at us as well as helps Google in knowing what to have us show up for.

That is our quick update for the month, nice and short. If there's anything we can help you with, please reach out, visit us at dmdude.com. I have it set up on the homepage there are full marketing blueprints, which is about 15 plus hours of training around everything for marketing your business, from strategy to websites to social, et cetera. Check that out on the homepage of the website completely free. Just put your name and email in, and you can sign up and get access to all of that. Thank you, and have a great month.

What is the easiest way to create content?

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 15:57:03 GMT

All right. Good morning Peter Brissette here at Digital Marketing Dude. And we are doing another Q and A call. So a question that I had come up, I will share with you here in a second. So the first thing I wanted to share with you was how we're going to do categorizing content a little bit going forward. So we have eight main categories that are part of our marketing blueprint. So if you go to the homepage of our website, you can access our full marketing blueprint. And in there are eight categories: strategy, websites, content, social media, email marketing, reviews, funnels and paid advertising.

This month we are on content and talking about content. So this is our call number 10 here that we're doing. And the question is, what is the easiest way to create content? And so it's pretty simple really. Number one is make a video. There's lots of ways to make a video. You can make a video with your phone and do it that way. That's the primary method, I would say, of making your videos. These phones that we have make amazing video.

Now you can add a lapel microphone. So if you go to Amazon, you can order a lavalier microphone. They're 10 or 15 dollars. It has a cord that you can plug into your cell phone. You just got to make sure you get the kind that will work specifically with the cell phone, because the tip on the end is a little bit different, so that you get really good audio with it. And you make a video and you can talk about anything that you want. You can make videos the way that I'm making a video right here, right now. I'm using Zoom, I'm recording my screen, I've got a little video of my face in it as well in making this video.

Once you have that video, regardless of where you made it, you want to go to rev.com, and on rev.com you can then transcribe that video. Now if the audio is really super good quality, you can upload it and it will do a really basic transcription for less than this. Right now it's $1.25 per minute. So they just recently had a price increase. Still super reasonable with that, but once you're logged into this... I'll just let you into the back here so you can see what this is like.

When I'm done with this video, I will be uploading it. So when I place a new order, I can also choose automated transcription, which if the quality is good enough, an automated transcription is pretty cheap. So is the background noise free? Are speakers close to the mic? Is conversation clear without over-talk? Do speakers have clear accents? So we say yes to all of those. You can upload a video. So in this case it's only 10 cents per minute. So instead of the $1.25 per minute, it is 10 cents per minute. So that's a pretty cheap way to do, so if you have a longer file or something like that that you want to upload and get transcribed, but you know the audio is pretty clear, then this is a good way to do it.

And once you do that, they have a pretty cool tool that helps you if you want to clean that audio up from there. So here's this video and the transcription, and I can hit play and listen to the transcription. I can see it highlights where the text is there. And then if I see things I want to change, I can come in here and change the text and then when I'm ready to download it, I can download it as a Word doc. And I've got all the text from that. So this is what we do with our blog and our videos. So last month was "What's A Meta Tag?" So there's the video that we did, I upload it to YouTube and embed it there. And then this is the text that I pulled from Zoom. I'll make a few edits, but very minor edits. I really don't go and try to change a whole lot in the text.

Now you've got a video which you can upload to Facebook. You can upload it to YouTube. You have text. You could break that text up into social media posts with the picture, with the image. You could have different images and pull different text at different times. So you have a whole lot of text and content now available to you off of a five minute video. A pretty simple thing to do, and you can pull out quotations out of the text and emphasize those and then link back to the blog posts that you created from them.

So for me, I think that's one of the easiest ways to create content, and content that can be used in multiple ways, is find a way to make a simple video. It can be one minute long, it can be three minutes long, it can be 10 minutes long. There's all kinds of different opinions about length of video. But make it appropriate to the content that you're creating and get it transcribed, upload it, and then break that up and use it in a lot of different places.

That's our Q and A for this month on ways to create content. If you want some more ideas on that, please reach out to us. We'll be happy to talk to you about more ideas on creating content. I frequently say I have a lot of ideas. Some of them are good. You have to decide which ones are the good ideas. So until next month, signing off. Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you.

What is a Meta Tag?

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 17:20:43 GMT

Hey there, Peter Brissette here with our monthly coaching training call, also, our monthly marketing message. I wanted to talk to you today about something I've been working with clients quite a bit on right now. And that involves some basics of search engine optimization, SEO and in particular what is on your actual website. Today what I want to talk about is what are meta tags we're going to get meta today. All right, let me share my screen here so we can look at a couple of things. What is a meta tag? Three things we'll kind of hit on here. Number one, it's important for search engines and I'll show you why and where, which also makes it important for those who are searching and it actually lives behind the page. What does all that mean? Well I will show you that real quick.

The first thing I want to do is when I do a search for anything, there are search results that come up. I searched Lighthouse Assisted Living and what came up here was their homepage. You can see there's a name here, Lighthouse Assisted Living: Assisted Living Littleton, Colorado. And then right here is a description of that page. This title, that's the title of the page is inside the meta tags, the metadata. This description is inside the metadata. There's two reason that's important that we said. One, this helps Google know what this page is about, so Google knows how to bring it up in the search results. But secondly, it's good for me as a searcher because I can look at this and go, "Oh, what is this information here and should I go ahead and click this link or not?" This description and title helped the person doing the search to better understand also what that page is about.

They're more likely to click the link to go look at the page. You can 100% control this title and this description for the search results that we're seeing here. So where does that happen? This gets set up in different websites, have a different way, but you set it up as part of the page settings. When you look here on this page, you're not going to see anywhere where it says meta-description or meta title. You don't see it. It's not something visible as you look at the page. But if I go look at the source code on the page, and I just did a search on the word meta. There's a lot of meta information I can find here. Meta description, so here's the meta description in the contents of that description. You'll see this description... Might be hard to see. Let me blow this up.

You see this description matches the description that we saw in the search results. We can also go... Now, where's my title? Well there's also a title tag. Let's see here. Yep, here it is right here, title. Those are the meta tags, they show up on the backend of the page in the data, which again it's going to help both Google in particular a search engine, understand what that page is about. And it also helps the person searching, understand what that page is about and why they should click the link to actually go and visit that page. If you don't know what your meta tags are, you don't know what your titles or descriptions are, we can do a quick audit of your websites that goes through and will tell us page by page every title and every description and let us know if things are missing or things that might need to be updated on that.

If you have questions about that, we can run a free report for you. That's the question of the day. What is a meta tag? A meta tag is data that's behind the page that helps search engines and help people doing the search and lives behind the page. Hopefully you found that useful and we'll talk to you again next month.

Facebook Page vs Profile - What is the difference?

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:24:20 GMT

Monthly Marketing Coaching Call #8

Okay. Hey guys. Peter Brissette here with our monthly marketing coaching call and I'm combining our two brands on this call. So we have our Review Me Marketing, which is focused on reputation management and Assisted Living Marketing, which really focus on the senior care space. The work we do is really similar and a lot of crossover between the two. So I decided to combine our monthly coaching call between the two of those. What I wanted to talk about today was the difference between your Facebook page and your Facebook profile. What is the difference between those two and how do those two function? There can be quite a bit of confusion about those things. So let me share my screen here and we'll jump into that. So this is call number eight for our monthly marketing training and coaching call.

Facebook page versus profile, what's the difference? So first of all, let's just talk about Facebook policy. A personal profile on Facebook is that it is a person. That is how Facebook has set that up. Some people accidentally create a new personal profile for their business. So they'll use a business email address and create a whole new profile in the name of the business. So that technically is against Facebook policy, because a personal profile is about a person. That's why they have the separate Facebook pages that are used to represent a business. So that is the fundamental difference.

To log into Facebook, you have to have a personal profile to login to Facebook. Where it gets confusing is when someone has a Facebook page, like what's my login information to my Facebook page? Well, the challenge is there is not a login per se to the Facebook page. A Facebook page is given access to personal profiles. So there's administrative rights that can be assigned to multiple personal profiles in order to manage a Facebook page. You don't log in directly to the Facebook page. So let's look at what that looks like. So here I am, I am logged in to Facebook. This is my personal profile page. So you see my personal newsfeed. You see my name here, Peter Brissette. Up here at the top, you see my picture, this is my profile.

If I click here, this takes me to my actual profile page and this is all the information, my posts that I've made, comments that people have made, pictures, friends, all of that. So this is my personal profile. I can edit my profile, I can look at my activity, on and on the things that you can do. You could do a list for you grid view. All of this is related to my personal profile. Now, I also have a business of course. So the business has a separate page that is just a Facebook page. Okay? So let's go to manage pages. I manage a lot of pages, but here's my Digital Marketing Dude page. So this is how you can tell. So you can click here on manage pages. If you're an administrator of a page, it'll show up in this list.

Now this you can see is a little bit different. again, my profile is still up here, so I'm still logged in as me, but you can see this is the page information. You see these options here at the top. That means I'm an administrator of this page. I have access to the ads, there's an inbox, there's an events tab, you can manage jobs, there's notifications, there's insights, publishing tools, page quality. I can edit the page info, I can go into settings, I can get help there as well. So that's access that someone just visiting the page doesn't see, only you see that if you've been made an administrator.

Where do I see who's an administrator? So if you go to settings, you go here to page roles and here you can see who's the page owner and then who are the existing admins on the page. There's different degrees of admin. You can be just an editor, a moderator, an advertiser, different things, but admin is the highest access that you can have on a page. So those are the existing page roles and who can actually access and manage this page, which means they can function and operate just like the page. So what's the difference with... Let me pull this back up again. So when I go to post content, you can see it's showing my picture. What's on your mind, Peter? So when I post this content, it's going to post as me, okay? This is my personal profile. I'm posting on my personal profile, okay, into my newsfeed. So all my friends that I'm friends with may potentially see that.

That's the other difference, I should mention this, the difference between how you connect with it as an outside person. So people become friends with me through my profile, okay? We're actually friend to friend, we're person to person. Again, that goes back to Facebook policies. Facebook wants people connecting together as friends. For your Facebook page, you're not my friend, but you can like my page, you can like my page, you can follow my page. Those are the things that you can do. You can decide do I want to see that stuff first, do I want to see it all on, do I want notifications? All of that. So that's what you have from the Facebook page, people can like and follow your page.

Now, the other difference is that here I can post something, but I can't spend any money on advertising to make sure everybody sees it. It's just a post. Where on my page, when I post something, I can actually turn it into an ad and I can boost the posts, which means I can basically turn it into an advertisement and pay for advertising so that that content can be seen by all the followers of the page. So here's all our different tabs on the page. When I go to write a post, you can see it has our logo there. So when I'm writing this post, even though I'm logged into my personal profile, I'm interacting as the page. So when people see this post, they're going to see that it's from Digital Marketing Dude as the page, not from me personally. So that's a big difference.

One of the things that we teach people to do though is to interact with other entities as your page. So when you want to grow your page followers, you're not sending friend requests, right? That builds your personal profile. If you want to build your page, then what you can do is interact with other pages in a different way. So when I come down here, so I just see that they did this post, okay? This is from Westminster Chamber of Commerce. If I come down here to comments, so you can see there's that icon and there's the icon. So there's a dropdown here. When I click this dropdown, I can actually switch and interact with this content either as my personal profile or as my page. So if you want to increase your followers of your Facebook page, you can actually be very social with other things on there. So here's my Digital Marketing Dude page. I'm going to change this. So now the logo changes. You can see it changes there and it changes there. So now I'm commenting as Digital Marketing Dude as my page with this content.

All right. Member Monday, highlighting three amazing women in our community. I actually do know these ladies. They're all awesome. But I'm commenting as Digital Marketing Dude. So now as people interact with this post and people will engage with it, they're going to say, "Oh, who's Digital Marketing Dude?" Chances are they might click on my link and go over and visit my page, check out my content as well. So that's the way to organically build the followers of the page.

Quick recap. I know this a little bit longer than normal video, but a really important distinction, a personal profile versus a page, Facebook's policy is very clear on this. A personal profile must be a person, not a business. So if you have your business as a profile, create a page. You can invite people to like the page and then ultimately you'll need to get rid of that profile and just use the page and learn some of the tips and techniques. I've got a lot of blog posts on the blog about how to do that. So you can definitely check those out. So if you have any more questions about that, feel free to reach out. You can post questions on the blog where you see this. You can post these if you see it on YouTube on the video there. But that's the training that I wanted to provide here this month for you for our monthly coaching and training call. Hope your January is off to a great start and we will talk to you again next month.

Marketing Strategy: How to narrow your target customer and grow faster

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 16:24:40 GMT

All right, welcome to the Review Me Marketing Monthly Training, Coaching and Q&A Call. We're on call number six today. And real quick I wanted to hit on a little bit of strategy just in terms of marketing in general and then we can answer anybody's questions about this or anything else.

So the one thing I wanted to talk about is how do you actually narrow your market and narrow your target customer. So a lot of times, especially newer businesses, I see this in, they don't have a really good defined target customer or market that they really want to go after. And it really makes it difficult to get all their marketing put together to have their content organized and really to have, what is the problem I solved?

So all that gets into the basics of marketing. Who's my market, what's the problem they have and how do I solve it? And then what is all the information just around that space that does that? We often go way too broad in our marketing. For example, real estate agents. Real estate agent, they want to sell a house or help somebody buy a house. Well lots and lots of people buy and sell houses, right? So they just go after anybody with a pulse. That's just natural starting now because it's a hard market and you've got to try to find a deal. So you're like, I need anybody who even thinks they want to buy a house. That's who I want to talk to. But you can actually narrow that market even and be much more strategic and be able to build referral partners and relationships and connect all your marketing to that.

So one example of that is a local gentleman, and I don't actually know his name, I wish I did, but what he promotes himself as, he's a real estate agent, is he sells garages with attached houses. So what he's done is taken his hobby, which is the love of cars and connected that to be a piece of his marketing strategy and narrow his market. So he goes to car shows. If you go to this website, it has information, you'll see a picture that is a garage with lots of nice cars, Maserati or Ferrari sitting in the garage. Then you can explore the rest of the website to see the rest of the house, that kind of thing. So his business card, it's him sitting in a car, nice car. So that's a way to narrow your market.

So I want to give you seven quick ways to become the best in your world, in your marketplace. And few ways to do that. One I gave you was a hobby, so you can connect your hobby to it. One's location, so you could make it specific to a city, county, a state, whatever it is. A demographic, so this could be an age, this could be an income, it could be several different things that you pick out of a demographic for your market.

Having a much more narrow product. Like you could offer a lot of different services depending on your business, but can you just narrow it down? So you know, maybe you are a financial planner that can do all this financial planning, but you want to focus on just one area. Maybe you want to focus on life insurance. Even though you can do everything else, that becomes your focus and you can always add those other things on.

Another way to do that as a personality. Personality is the dealing Doug's right? The Jake Jabs, that kind of stuff. So if you want to make that, that's a way to become best in your world. Size of client, size of project. Have a handyman friend right now that's wants to really keep things focused in the handyman space and not have big projects come up that take up a lot of time. So it's two hours to two days, that's his max. So that's the size of project that he'll do, won't do something bigger than that.

And then another way is expertise. So expertise can be, you go and you speak on that topic, so you do training on it, you write blog posts, maybe even write a book about that particular thing. And so you become known as the expert in that particular niche, in that particular space.

So those are seven common ways to do it. Another way that you can differentiate yourself in narrowing your target customer is to offer a guarantee. So if what you do is just almost the same as what everybody else does, but if you're able to offer some type of guarantee where your competition doesn't do that, that can help you as well. But the idea is with these different things is to create a much narrower market, a smaller market where you can be the number one in that market and that's what you're trying to do.

So you just cutting out niches within niches and making smaller niches until you can be in that number one spot. Of course, the other things matter, right? Do they have a big enough problem that they're willing to pay money to solve this problem? And is that market big enough to sustain a business and to grow a business that's important to the equation of this, when you're talking about narrowing your market. Because if your market's so narrow and there's only 10 people in the world that would want what I have, that might be too narrow. So somewhere in the middle there is the balance.

So that's our strategy review for this month. Hopefully that was helpful and we look forward to being on the call next month.

Why you need an FAQs page on your website

peter@dmdude.com (Peter Brissette) — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 17:06:27 GMT

This is call number five in our monthly training, coaching and Q&A calls. So the one thing I did want to talk about and then answer any questions for you guys related to that or whatever.

One of the things that we've been doing, actually, I've done this from day one, when we started building websites for clients 10 years ago, is adding FAQ pages, frequently asked questions to client's websites.

I wish I could get all my clients to do it. They don't always do it, but we always attempt to get them to put some of that together. There's a couple of ways to do it. So this one's a pretty simple way where you have the question, and you just click a little drop down and it expands out with the answer.

So why do we do this? Why would we want to have FAQ's? So part of this is the process of just trust-building with your clients, with your prospects, and really helping you qualify that prospect better, so by the time that prospect comes to you with a phone call or you know, fill out a form, your online chat or whatever it is that they've already kind of qualified themselves. They're a much more qualified prospect cause they've answered and understood most of the key questions about interacting with you and your services.

That was always my main reason for it in the early days. The other question that comes up a lot in general is how do I come up with content? Like, what is the content that I should be using? So whether that's for my social media, for my website, or whatever. Well, FAQ's are a great place to start in terms of just basic content.

So we have text here for all of these, but these would be great videos to have. You know, two to three to five minute videos that talk about each of these questions. So, now we have a core set of content that we can use over and over again. That's evergreen, that's always going to be important to our prospects because we're answering the most basic questions that people have.

Is that what evergreen means?

When I say evergreen, I mean it's something you continue to use over and over. Right? It never gets stale; it never gets old.

Thank you.

Yeah, we're going to always have it. We're going to use it. It's the basics that you need to have.

It's like what every client should start with, or.

Yeah.

Okay.

Absolutely.

So the other thing that that's really become important with this is the different voice search tools that are out there now. So, you know, we have Google Assistant already. We have Siri on the iPhone, but we also have things like Cortana.

Assisted living in Centennial.

Rose of Sharon Valencia. Serenity House, Assisted Living, Hunters Hill. Centennial, Colorado. Brookdale Greenwood Village Skilled Nursing. Greenwood Village, Brookdale. Greenwood Village and others.

So Cortana's reading those results to me, all these results are on Bing, so if you're a local brick and mortar and you're like, "What's Bing? I don't know what being is." Well, so that's something you might want to find out because Bing's doing that.

Now, we can always ask a question. Let's see. Let's pick one of these. How about this one? What is hospice?

Hospice means a home providing care for the sick or terminally ill.

So now a simple one like that's probably just going to come out of their database. Let's see if I do this. Are your assisted living homes licensed by the state of Colorado?

According to SeniorCaring.com, Colorado's assisted living homes regulations and assisted living homes are regulated by a state to state basis. Every state has a publicly accessible legal document outlining the regulations, licensing, operation and other rules for assisted living.

So it's actually pulling that answer from a website and reading that answer back. So, there's a whole other aspect of, you know, can that be our website? And how do we make that happen?

Obviously, there's a lot of work that can go behind that to make that possible. And then obviously again, this is using Cortana right out from my computer and looking at the search results that come up in Bing. So every different tool's going to have a little bit of a result with that. But as we build out and think about our website, I think the FAQ's a pretty important piece in terms of potential search results possibilities.

So between Alexa ... Alexa now is not just a speaker, it's actually an app. So, I have Alexa on my Microsoft computer here and I can use Alexa. Alexa is an app that can be installed on your Android or your iPhone. So people are going to be using Alexa in more and more places than just with their speakers. And again, Alexa is used in a different search function.

So what I see at some point we'll be able to measure these, you know, what's coming from voice search versus someone typing something in over time. Right now, we don't know 100% for sure necessarily where some of that comes from.

Alexa at this point, there's no Alexa analytics that say, you know, how much did my website come up in an Alexa search?

We'll get there at some point, but right now, at least through Google and anything that connects with Google and Google search or Bing search, that type of information we can track. And typically when I see a full question, my assumption is that probably came from some type of voice search, so Google assistant or Siri, most likely, a lot of the times.

It's kind of surprising Bing doesn't have one.

So I think FAQ's are super important on any any website for any business that's offering any kind of services for those reasons. So anyway, that's it. That's all I wanted to really emphasize today. If you have questions about that or questions about anything else, happy to tackle those.

How Can You Prove That You Are a Trustworthy Business?

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 06:00:00 GMT

Hey, there. Welcome this month to our monthly marketing message. Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. This month we are talking about ways that you can prove that you’re a trustworthy and reputable business. I’ve got a few ideas that I want to share with you. So let’s pop up the screen here. Three basic ideas that I would like to share with you right now … Let’s pop this up full screen so you can see it.

#1 Reviews and Testimonials

The number one thing that you can do to help show and prove that you are a trustworthy business is reviews and testimonials.

People trust more what other people say about you than what you say about yourself. This is a key piece of why reviews and testimonials are so important and have to be a key piece of your overall strategy for helping your prospects trust you and to be willing to take the next step with you, whether that’s a phone call or a proposal or whatever it is that you do. If you’re in senior care, it’s can someone come in and take a tour. Is it schedule an appointment to speak to somebody? So how can we get them to trust you enough to move to that next step? One of the biggest, fastest, easiest ways to do that is reviews and testimonials.

#2 Case Studies

Another level of that or another degree of that are case studies. Case studies are examples of clients that you’ve helped in the past. Here was this situation. This client had ABC problems. When we saw that, here’s what we did. We did one, two, three in order to solve those problems, and as a result, this is what happened. The problems went away. The client’s happy. They got the result that they were after. So really basic case studies and with enough detail that other prospects could see themselves in that solution. They could say, “Yes, I have that same problem. That seems like a reasonable solution and it worked for this one. Why wouldn’t it work for me as well?” So case studies is a great way to do that.

#3 Website Trust Builders

The other piece of this is what I call trust builders. This would be something on your website. As a reminder, and I talk about this a lot, where do you want to focus your marketing budget and your marketing expenses? Well, you want to focus on the things that you own. Well, the number one thing that you own is your website. So if you’re going to put any effort into your marketing, focus it on your website. What are trust builders on the website? Well, number one is video. Do you have video, and personal video with you talking or whoever your key individuals are within your business? Do you have video of yourself talking, speaking, sharing information, inviting your prospects to engage with you and engage with your website? So that’s important.

Other trust factors on your website, trust builders, are things like your phone number’s really obvious. Maybe you add a chat box on the website so someone can chat and interact with somebody through chatting. Whatever the method is, what are the things that you can do so people go, “Oh, this is really a legitimate business. I can see an address. I see a phone number. The website’s easy to navigate. They want to engage with me. They want to interact with me and they have ways to do that”? So those are really important in terms of providing proof that you are a trustworthy and reliable business.

So those are a few tips for you here this month. If you need any assistance with that, with your websites or talking about reviews and building those up so that you can really prove and show that you a trustworthy business, reach out. Let us know. We’ll look forward to talking to you again next month.

What is a Conversion and How Do You Track It? – Three Tips

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 06:00:00 GMT

Hello, everyone. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. Welcome to this month’s marketing message. This month we’re talking about conversions. What is a conversion and how do you actually track that? Now, the key with conversions … most often we’re tracking conversions as it relates to some form of paid advertising. This is typically with Google Ads or Facebook advertising. If you’re doing paid advertising to better effect, excuse me, better track the effectiveness of that advertising, you want to have conversions set up. So let’s talk about some conversions, and I’ve got three tips, surprise, again here this month for you on tracking conversions.

The first thing you wanna do is decide what it is you wanna track. Typically, there’s a couple different things that you can track. The real key is, and it gets into tip number two is, how do we measure some level of engagement? That’s really the key piece that matters. There’s different things that you can track depending on the system or platform that you’re tracking. One thing you can track is if someone clicked a particular link, even from an email, for instance. Did they click that link or go to a certain page on the website? So when they visited that page, we count that as a conversion. That is one form of a conversion.

To put this in a frame of, let’s say, marketing funnel, if they went to a landing page that said, “Hey, here’s my offer, put in your email address and hit the submit button.” They hit the submit button. The conversion would be tracked once they go to the next page. The next page is the thank you page after that. Once they’re on that thank you page, we’re now tracking that, who visited that thank you page and marking that as a conversion. We can track that back into our analytics, whether that be for the Facebook Ad campaign or the Google Ad campaign, or just regular Google Analytics as well. You can track that that is what you are calling a conversion. You’ve achieved a certain goal that you wanna track in a specific way, and there’s different ways that you can track that.

Another form of conversion that we use very often, especially with Google Ads is phone call tracking and counting a phone call also as a conversion. So if a phone call is made, we have software and tools that we use to track that and then we count that as a conversion. So again, that’s another level of engagement that’s very exactly measurable piece of engagement that we’re able to do. There’s different things you can do, in particular around Facebook, to measure conversion. If you’re doing some video marketing or video advertising, you could put a video out there that converts when people watch 50% of the video and things like that. So you can actually track conversions based on their actual engagement level with content, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do on Facebook advertising.

The real key then is to track that over time, so how did we do last month, how are we doing this month, and then tracking that historically to see how well that’s working. Then, figuring out what do we need to adjust. So we track over time to then make adjustments. So if we see trends where the trend is going down, then we know, “All right, maybe we need to refresh our ad copy, or take a closer look and make sure that this is still the right message for the right market, and we’ve got everything set up the way it needs to be set up.”

That really is what conversion tracking is, is just a next level way to track your ad spend, by deciding what things do we wanna track and count as conversions, count as goals being achieved, and then take that data and use that to enhance the marketing further and then really tracking it over time so we can see how effective we’ve been and what tweaks and adjustments we need to make. So that’s your monthly marketing message here this month. Please like, comment, and share. If you wanna talk about conversion tracking for your business, we would love to talk to you about that. Let me know, we can schedule a free 15 minute call to check and see what you would like to track in conversions for your business.

Thank you and have a great month.

How to Have a Simple Marketing Funnel Without Going Nuts

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Hey there. Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. Welcome to this month’s marketing message. This month we’re gonna be talking about marketing funnels and how can you have a super simple marketing funnel without driving yourself crazy? And I’m gonna give you a couple of tips for that.

I’m all on this three tips kick. So how do you have a simple marketing funnel without going nuts? Let me give you some basic ideas that I think might help you out with that. So first of all, we’re talking about marketing funnels, we’re talking about some way to get someone who most likely doesn’t know who you are, who is what I would call, a cold audience. And how can you get their attention and get them to do something to engage with you? So it’s how do we create some type of engagement with someone who doesn’t know who we are? And so you have to start looking at what’s really close to you. So here’s the tips:

First of all, you’re gonna tap into your expertise. What is it you already know in terms of what you do and what you do for your clients and customers? You have a level of expertise that you’re able to offer them, that you can solve problems that they have. And your expertise is the solution to the problem. So tap into that and think about what’s their biggest problem. That really gets us into number two. These two things go together, your expertise, tip number one, and number two is, what’s one quick problem you can solve for your audience, that gets them started with you, that takes a cold audience and gets them introduced to who you are and what you can do for them and gets them to engage with you?

The key is to make this simple, so when we talk about marketing funnels, we can talk about landing pages and we can talk about email follow-up sequences and we can talk about upsells and downsells and one time offers and all kinds of marketing jargon that goes with that. But you can make this so simple. You can make this simply a message you post on Facebook that says “Do you have a problem with A? I have a solution because of my expertise. If you’d like to know more, send me an instant message, or here’s my email address. Shoot me an email.”

It can be that simple, and that is a marketing funnel. That’s the beginning of a marketing funnel. You can make this really simple. So if you can think about, what’s a significant problem that your target market has, that you can solve a piece of that problem or a particularly of that problem, that gets them introduced to you, so you can start a conversation and begin to have some type of ongoing dialogue with somebody so that they can get to know you, so that they can see that they can take the next step with you.

So don’t overthink it, don’t make yourself go nuts thinking about it, it has to be perfect or it has to be a certain way. If you simply tap into your expertise, what you already know and how you solve people’s problems, what’s one quick problem you could solve for them, that gets them introduced and how can you just get them to engage with you? How do you get them to reply to an email, to reply to a blog post, to reply to a message on Facebook or whatever that might be. And simply start there and you can create a very simple marketing funnel that will get you started with having a conversation with somebody. If could be an invitation to then go and get on a phone call, and let’s actually have a conversation for 15 minutes. So don’t make it too complicated. Keep it super simple and that’s a simple, basic marketing funnel that anybody can implement in their business here today.

So that’s your marketing message for this month. I hope you got a lot out of that. Please like, comment and share if you have questions, or wanna talk about ideas about a marketing funnel for your business. And let’s have a conversation and let’s talk about that and see what might be something you could do today. Happy to give you some great ideas, no cost or obligation at all for that.

Thank you, and you have a great month.

The Care and Feeding of Referral Sources

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 07:00:00 GMT

Hello there. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. Welcome to this month’s marketing message and here this month we’re continuing our three tip series. I’ve got three tips for all kinds of things. This month we’re talking about the care and feeding of referral sources.

Believe it or not even though I’m the Digital Marketing Dude, I believe it’s really important to nurture your referral sources and that that can be an ongoing source of new business for you that may be the best aspect of all of your marketing. And here’s why. Often we are focused on the marketing to a cold audience. Meaning people out there who’ve never heard of us, who don’t even know who we are, who have zero relationship with us and we spend a lot of money, energy and effort trying to reach those.

And depending on our business, oftentimes those who already know us and like us and have done business with us, those often are actually the best sources of new business for us. And if we spent some time and effort and possibly even money on working with those we may actually get a better lead source and a more consistent lead source than doing the cold marketing and cold advertising. I think there should be a combination of that in any business working your cold market and your warm market.

Three tips for you here that I’m going to share today. First of all is that not all referrals are the same. You should have some way set up in a spreadsheet or a database, CRM system, something that specifies this is number one, a referral source and then number two that this referral source is a one a two or a three. Meaning one means this is a really really great referral source. I need to have more touches with this particular referral source. A number two might mean well, I need some touches with them but not as much. And then level three is, they’re a referral source and they might send me something if I ask them.

How can you do that? It might mean that a level one referral source is something that you touch base with every singe month, 12 months out of the year. And maybe you send them a birthday card and an anniversary card. You go the extra mile for that particular referral source, because one, they have access to your clients, type of clients that you’re looking for or they’re really a big fan of yours and they love to send you referrals.

The level two might mean, you need to reach out once a quarter and touch base with this person. And maybe it’s a card, maybe it’s a note, maybe it’s a phone call, maybe it’s a cup of coffee. And then finally, the level three might mean they’re just on my monthly email list and I reach out and I touch them on a monthly basis and that’s what we do.

Look at your referral sources. Look who has sent you referrals in the past. And then begin to track that. That’s tip number two. How do you track your referral sources? Are you actually measuring that and tracking who they are? Even if it’s just in a simple spreadsheet you can track how many referrals have they sent me in the last 12 months? How many could they send me in the next 12 months? And then what do I need to do to nurture the relationship with this individual?

And then third, if you really want to take it to the top level, find a way to serve them. If you can find a way … Even though you might not be referring business back to them but they’re referring business to you, there’s probably some way you can serve them or help them. And it could be so many different ways that you can do this. It could be gift cards, it could be thank you notes, it could be inspiring messages. Think of a creative way that you can build and nurture and serve this particular relationship in an authentic way, in a caring way. Not just because you’re trying to get business.

That’s important. We’re all here to try to make profitable businesses but at the end of the day we want to feel really good and find great meaning in what we’re doing. And so this is a great way to do that in nurturing and building those relationships.

Those are my three tips for you this month in The Care and Feeding of your Referral Sources. Another aspect to your marketing that you can spend some time thinking about. If you’d like to strategize some ideas, feel free to reach out and schedule a quick 15 minutes call with me. I would love to do that. And once again it’s Peter Brissettee, The Digital Marketing Dude, with your Monthly Marketing Message. Have a great month.

Email Marketing – 3 Tips

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Hello everybody. Welcome to this month’s Marketing Message. Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude talking this month about email marketing. And kind of like this idea of three tips. So this is kind of my kick right now is three tips, and talk to you about marketing emails. So let me just share my screen here so we can look at this. So we’re talking in email marketing. All right, three quick tips for you.

The first tip, email is still an effective tool for marketing. Probably the biggest question you have. Should we even be using email as a part of our marketing? And the answer is yes, it’s still the number one most used means of communication, in particular for business related transactions, for people engaging in communication. So still an effective tool. Are there other tools that you could think about and possibly see if you could work into the mix? Absolutely. More and more people are using the communication via social media platforms, those chats systems. But ultimately your goal should always be to get people on your email list.

I talk often about the two things, really three things that you own. One, you own your messaging, your brand, and who you are and what you do. Number two, you own your website. So you should always make sure that that’s up to date. And then number three, you own that email list. You own that. So it’s worth building that list. So whatever other marketing you’re doing, you should be moving people over to your email list, so you have some means of communication with them that you want.

The second tip is that you must have a plan. So you must really think about how am I going to use this to communicate? Is it in a regular monthly newsletter to existing clients. How am I getting prospects and how am I going to communicate with them? How can I use this as a productivity tool to actually get more done in my day? How can we use it effectively with our teams? There’s so many aspects to how we can use email and being able to actually automate and systemize elements of the business, in particular with marketing, client onboarding, and even new staff onboarding. Email can be an effective tool to help you accomplish that.

And then the third tip is choosing the right tool. So you really have to choose the right platform that’s going to be right for you. My personal favorite at this moment in time, it has been for a little while now, is Active Campaign. So it’s an email marketing tool, it’s an email automation tool. It’s also got a contact manager, so a CRM system in it as well. It’s a sales tool. It does an awful lot and it’s very reasonably priced and works with many other systems out there. But it doesn’t matter which tool you use. So find the tool that you want to use. If you’re just getting started and you need something to pick from. MAILCHIMP is free for up to 2000 contacts and it works with just about everything and it can be an effective tool as anything else. So those are my three tips that I wanted to share with you here this month on email marketing. I hope you found that useful. Please like, comment and share. Sharing is caring. And look forward to next month’s marketing message. Have a great one.

Three Tips for Google Reviews for Health Care Related Businesses

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Hey everybody, Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. Welcome to the Monthly Marketing Message. I wanted to talk to you this month a little bit about Google reviews, and in particular, most of our clients are in some healthcare-related industry. And I wanted to highlight some of the really important stats that are out there from a recent study put together by a company called Bright Local that manages and researches online reviews for local businesses.

I’m going to share my screen with you here, so that we can take a look at some of this information. Let’s take a look here. All right, the first slide here that I’m gonna talk about is the percentage of businesses with reviews in terms of volume of reviews.

At the top end of this are bars, restaurants, and hotels. They really dominate the online review space. But, at the other end of this, and kind of in the middle, is where I really want to focus. So, when you start talking healthcare-related businesses, you can see dentists here are at about 84 percent in terms of volume, compared to other businesses.

Health and fitness, which would be any kind of fitness space, is at 75 percent, and then medical in general is at 73. And for those of you that are senior living industry, assisted living, memory care, et cetera, only at about 70 percent.

So, the ones that are below that are, you know, real estate, landscaping, construction, marketing companies, and accountants. So, there’s a couple things that this tells me in terms of the volume is that, if you work at this and you’re in health and fitness and medical, senior living, that you can actually really outshine your competition because in general, there’s not as many in terms of the volume of reviews that are being left out there.

Again, this is by industry in terms of the average number of reviews. Again, senior living, the average number of reviews is only five. That’s incredibly low. And not surprising. So, it’s difficult to get a volume of reviews in that space. But again, this means there’s opportunity. If you work hard at this, you can do well.

Again, health and fitness averages only 20. So, if you’re in that range or below that range, you’ve got some work to do, to really improve that and see that grow. That average rating by industry, so this is interesting. Unfortunately, for senior living, the average rating is only 4.05. I think that’s large, in part, because as an industry, senior living does not work very hard on asking for reviews and getting the good reviews.

What can happen often is the only reviews that are out there are negative reviews. So, there is work to be done, in particularly, in the senior living space. Medical in general averages 4.2. And health and fitness, actually, has pretty good overall ratings in that space, and doing pretty good on that.

So, how does that affect your rankings online? That’s really the key question here. So, on average, when you’re looking at all reviews, if you have a 4.47 average or higher, you likely are gonna be able to rank from one to three. So, that’s in the top three results, in particular for your Google reviews, Google My Business page.

So, that’s pretty significant. And then, if you realize that, well, if I’m only less than four and a half, 4.46 to 4.45, that’s not much difference. That’s .01 difference, can drop you from four to six, or seven to 10. And not, and kick you out of that top one to three ranking.

So, your overall average does matter in terms of how you are going to rank in the search results.

Three tips for you. First of all, check your reviews. If you’re not checking and looking at your reviews, please do that. If you need help with that and you don’t have our review in marketing service, talk to us about it so that you can stay on top of that.

Secondly, I would check and see how many reviews does your close competition have. So, those folks that are five to ten miles around you, what are their reviews? How many do they have? And what’s their overall rating? That becomes your goal. Then, you know what you’re looking for, and what you’re trying to accomplish in your reviews.

And number three, ask for reviews. If you have a conversation with your clients, and they give you positive feedback, immediately ask them to leave a review, and ask them to leave it on Google first, so that you can get your Google reviews up, so that you can help improve your search rankings.

All right, so, those are your tips for this month and your Monthly Marketing Message. Hope you found those useful. Please like, comment, and share on this video. Let others know if you know business owners who could get some good use out of this video, please let them know. And we wish you a fantastic month.

Thanks to Bright Local for the research they did on this topic.

Do You Own Your Domain?

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey, everybody, Peter Brissette here, with the Monthly Marketing Message for you.

This month, what I wanna talk about is this simple question. Do you own your domain? I’m talking about your website domain. Do you own it? How do you know that you own your domain? The main question you have to answer is, is there a website where I can log in and have control over my domain? It’s my account, I can access it. Someone else doesn’t have the domain and have control of my domain, I have it.

As a business owner, this is a critically important question that you must have answered for yourself and for your business. You must maintain control of your domain. Now how do you know where your domain is and how you get access to it? So there’s a couple of ways that this works. The first thing that you can look at is … I’m gonna share my screen here. A website called whois.com. And I can come in here and put in my domain and do a search, and it’s gonna tell me who my registrar is. So what does registrar mean?

Registrar is the site or the company that has the registration of your domain. Now that is the one place where that’s basically controlled. Everything about your domain is controlled through that company. Now in my case, the Fast Domain is actually a part of Blue Host. So when I come down here, you can see in more detail the registrar’s server is Blue Host. So Fast Domain and Blue Host are kind of one in the same. Now there’s a difference between the registrar and the hosting. They’re not the same thing. So when I have a domain name that I own, I have a registrar that is the main company that controls that. That might be on godaddy, that might be on Blue Host, that might be on any number of domain registrars that register the domain information.

The second piece of that is your hosting. The hosting could be in completely different places. And hosting, all that hosting is is where do the files for my website actually sit. Where’s this computer, this file server, where my files are actually sitting right now? So you can have your domain controlled on godaddy, let’s say, but have your website hosted on Blue Host. So the files and everything are on Blue Host, but the main control of your domain and the ownership of your domain is in your godaddy account.

So the main thing that you have to focus on is going, “Okay, can I log in somewhere like godaddy and see my domain? I can renew my domain, I can change the settings on my domain, I can control that domain that way.” ‘Cause here’s the issue that comes up and we’ve seen this come up for many different clients where they decide they wanna change something on their website or get a new website and they’ve hired a new company to do that, a company like ours. And they have to give access to hosting, or give access to the domain. And suddenly the person who had it before is not happy about that and they’re not giving you access.

So the thing you have to remember is that you ultimately as the business owner, you own that property, that’s your property, the property of your business. Your domain name and your website. And if anyone starts to tell you that it doesn’t belong to you, it’s not yours, that person needs to be fired immediately and you need to move it to where you have complete control of it and someone cannot say that or do that as a part of your domain or your website.

So that’s the main thing I wanted to point out today in this month’s Marketing Message. Do you own your domain? Do you have control of your domain? Can you log in somewhere and get access to that domain so that you can direct it where you need to direct it? And then, where is it also hosted? And how do I get access to my hosting account? And again, do I have complete control of that hosting account if I so choose?

Now you may hire some company to host it and they may provide a list of services and that’s fine, but there should be a basic understanding that this belongs to you, as the business owner, not to the other company. So I hope you enjoyed this message this month. Please like, comment and share. Let me know if you have any questions. We’d be glad to help you out and we’ll talk to you next month.

More Changes to Google My Business

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Good morning everybody, or afternoon, or evening, whenever you’re reading this. Peter Brissette here with your Monthly Marketing Message. Today, I wanted to do another quick recap, I’ve done this before it’s probably been about a year, about your Google My Business page. Basically your Google Maps profile, and I want to share my screen with you here, and show you a couple things that are going on with that, that I think are really important for you to know, so you can really take advantage of your Google My Business page.

To get to this you can go to business.google.com or google.com/business. Then, obviously, if you’ve got control of Google Maps, which is your location page you’ll want to be signed into whatever Gmail account that it’s associated with. There’s a few things that I want to show you.

First of all, in the info area something that they’ve recently added is additional services and attributes. You can now add a comment, basically, a business description. They used to have this, and then they took it away. They’ve added it back in again, so that’s something you want to make sure that you update is your description. Then, you can also add services here. For example, we’ve got one called marketing strategy, we could add more items, and more sections. There’s a lot of different things that you can add there, so you can really have a greater description of whatever services that you might offer. I highly recommend filling those out, and adding that.

You can also add other attributes, this is new as well. Some of those that they’re highlighting here are veteran lead, or women lead, and different things like that. There’s different key attributes that you can now add to the page as well. Do you have WiFi? Do you have outdoor seating? Again, if you’re a restaurant, or some other type of business what are key important attributes about your business that would be of interest to people who search for you, and find your Google Maps page? Make sure you get in there and do that.

Always, always, always, just as a reminder, any time you can add new pictures it’s always good to add new pictures to your profile. That’s one of the key things that people look at in particular on mobile devices. We’ll talk a little bit about the mobile as well.

Then, let’s look at another item here, which are the posts. There’s different kind of posts that you can do. You can do a basic post, which a basic post will be there for seven days right now. Any time you post something it’s there for just seven days. You can see here, I posted a link to the blog, and let me show you what this looks like. Basically, what you can do is post an image, you can add some text, so you have up to 1500 characters here, which is a lot, so you really have a detailed post. Then, you can add a button. The button, these are preset what you can do, so it’s whatever call to action you want. You can use one of these call to actions, and then a link back to your website, ideally.

The other type of post you can do is an event, so where a post only lasts seven days what you can do with an event … let’s look at this events here I set up. Now, I didn’t add a picture, but you can definitely add a picture to this. I’ll just show you what that looks like. Added the picture. With an event what you can do is have a start date and an end date. Your end date can be pretty far out, I don’t know what the limit is. I just did this through the end of December but theoretically, as far as I know, you can have this out there for an entire year. I just have, this is our monthly marketing message. Ongoing training, watch the blog for latest videos and guides, and a link to the blog, that’s going to show up all the time.

Where does that show up, that’s the question. I’m posting these, where does this actually show up? Let me show you that. When someone’s searching for either your business directly, or your type of business your Google Maps page will show up here on the right side, if it’s on a desktop. Where those show up is down here, so not only do I have pictures, I’ve got reviews, I’ve got information, so people can book appointments I also have these showing here, these two items. I’ve got the monthly marketing message, which is going to stay there through December 31st, and then the other posts that I added there is going to be there for about seven days.

The way this looks like on a phone … let’s see if we can find these here. This is my profile on a phone, and you can see there’s the overview tab right there. Then, what you’ll see as you scroll down on your phone you’ll see these items to show up. They show up pretty big there, and you’ve got tabs here, and depending on the business these are going to be a little bit different. It could be under the overview, it could be under more information, there’s a couple different ways it shows up. On mobile device they can actually see these things, then click, and select these things, and go to them by just pressing on them. That, again, really gives you a way to really maximize your Google My Business page, which is one of the primary ways people are finding your local business, your brick and mortar business with an address, they’re interacting with this.

Then, the final thing I’ll just show you real quick are the insights. Insights shows you different search terms that you’re coming up in. How many went direct to you, how many were doing discovery because they were searching a category. Did they search specific for your business, or just for a category? How many listings on general search versus Maps? How many visited your website, how many requested directions, how many called you through the Google Maps page, so there’s a lot of good information here that you can look at in the insights.

Now, something that’s coming, and I don’t know what this is going to look like, just a little heads up, is Google Websites. Not going to get into this now, that can be another one, but Google’s trying to get into the website business. Not sure what that’s going to look like, but it’s going to be interesting to find out more about them.

That’s this month’s marketing message, make the most of your Google My Business page. If you have questions about this, you need help managing your Google page, need to get it approved, you want someone to keep their eyes on this, and dig a little deeper please let us know we’d be glad to help you out with that.

Thank you, and have a great month.

Paid Advertising

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey there, everybody. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude with your monthly marketing message. We’ve been talking a little bit about the marketing blueprint the last couple of months here and a couple of the key areas, and the one I want to talk about today is just the paid advertising aspect of digital marketing and really just want to focus on Google ads.

This used to be called Google AdWords. Google has just updated their branding to now just be Google Ads, so they’re trying to compete I think a little bit with Facebook Ads and be a little more aligned with what Facebook is doing, but just want to talk about a few key elements on why you would want to do Google Ads. There are a few different reasons that we would do this. One thing that we really look at in this space is are you looking for something to happen quicker, like you need to run ads and get people to call you as soon as possible versus doing standard search engine optimization that might take a few months or many months or even longer depending on your industry and where you’re located and a lot of other factors there.

Google Ads is a way to jump into the market almost instantly and be able to carve out a little bit of space with your competition right away. If you want to have things like make the phone ring, then Google Ads can be a good way to go. The real thing that you have to think about is what’s my real market in terms of either the keywords that people are searching and where are they searching, so what’s the geographic space of that. Most people are local businesses, and a lot of the clients that we work with are local businesses. You’re really targeting a geographic area. That is one of the nice things about Google AdWords. Sorry, it’s Google Ads, not Google AdWords anymore. That’s going to take a while to fix.

But you can target a very specific geographic area so that you can really maximize your ad spend. You’re going to get the most out of your ad spend because you’re only focusing on the specific area that you really need to. If you’re a local business, a brick and mortar business, and trying to get foot traffic into your location, and you’re on the north side of the Denver, you can target a five-mile or a 10-mile or a 15-mile radius, whatever that typically is for your particular business, how far do people come for whatever it is you happen to offer, and you can target just that specific area really in just a circle around your business. For many local businesses, that works just fine.

It allows you to be more competitive that way. Almost every industry anymore has a pretty significant amount of competition in the Google Ad space. What we find usually though is that a lot of the advertising is done very sloppily. There’s not a real good plan. There’s not any changes happening to ad copy. They don’t maximize all the different features that are available inside of the Google Ad setup. There’s a lot of different things that help you extend just the standard ad copy that you have available.

The other thing that we see most often that gets missed is goal and conversion tracking, so not having either tracking numbers or really tracking what happens when someone actually does something. When someone clicks on an ad, they go to a webpage, they fill out a form, they make a phone call. Is that tracked back to the actual keyword that they used in their search. Then did that come from a mobile phone that they went to that process? Was it a desktop computer that they did that process? All those things are really important in the setup of an ad campaign that if that’s missing or not completely done, then you’re typically winding up spending way too much money on the ads themselves and not getting good results from them.

That’s just a highlight on Google Ads, some of the key aspects of it. Obviously, the keywords are important. You’re able to target geographically, the copy of the ads and updating copy on a regular basis, doing split testing on the ad copy is very important, and then everything from what’s the page people land on. Probably shouldn’t be the home page of your website. Should be the special page, and then you’re tracking everything. You’re tracking phone numbers. You’re tracking what we call conversions. Conversions basically are somebody did something. They filled out a form or made a phone call, are primarily the conversion aspects that we’re looking for.

That’s just a quick cap on Google Ads. If you do want something to happen faster rather than waiting, Google Ads is a great way to do that. Setup time’s fairly quick to be able to get an ad campaign up and running and to begin driving traffic to your website and eventually to be able to start making the phone ring and get foot traffic in your store, whatever it might be.

That’s your monthly marketing message for this month. Hope you enjoyed that. Let us know if you have any questions. We’d be glad to help you out and answer any questions that you have regarding that. Then next month, we’ll talk a little bit about Facebook Ads.

Marketing Funnels

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey guys, Peter Brissette here with our monthly marketing message, and this month we are talking about marketing funnels. Just real quick, what is a marketing funnel? Basically a marketing funnel is a simple way to walk a prospect through bit of a process that, ideally, is a fairly automated process or it could be some human interaction as well. But, how do you move someone along a process that’s fairly automated or fully automated so that you can move them from interest all the way to capturing this out? That’s the basic idea behind a marketing funnel.

Couple things in background, you can kinda see here our basic layout of the marketing funnel, which uses a simple formula that we can ACES Marketing, thank you to my mentor Go Go for giving me that, which is attract, capture, engage, and sell. One thing as a reminder before we dig too far into this … let me go back here to ACES Marketing. Again, just a reminder, you always gotta start with strategy. What’s your unique selling proposition? What makes you different? Why should people listen to you? That’s really critical in setting up your funnel for success.

Then look back in my blog past, past blog posts, for the 4P Framework of people, which is your demographic. What’s the problem that you solve for them? How do you uniquely solve that? What’s your process to do that? And then, the final P is: What’s the passion, the personality? What’s the epic story that pulls all that together? Once you know that, then you can do ACES Marketing. So, attract, capture, engage, and sell. What we see often times is people jump on social media or they jump on email campaigns, and it’s sell, sell, sell, sell right from the very beginning. Then they wonder why they’re not having very much success. Often, the reason is because they don’t take the time to nurture somebody to let someone get to know you and have a chance to trust you enough to move to the next step. That’s really part of what a marketing funnel does. A marketing funnel is about helping build trust so that people will move along through the process.

Let’s talk about these real quick here: attract, capture, engage, and sell. How can you attract the attention of your ideal prospect? What is it that your ideal prospect needs where you can answer a question for them, solve a problem that helps them go, “Okay, you solved this immediate problem, but I need more. That’s not enough, yet. I need more of this problem solved.” That’s some type of offer. What’s your offer to attract attention? Commonly you see eBooks. What I like to do or things that I call marketing widgets, what’s something that you can give away? A tool, a checklist, something that is something that’s useful and beneficial to your ideal prospect that may even get them to use it more than once. Maybe it’s some type of calculator where they gotta fill out some information. Maybe it’s what I prefer, is a decision making tool. How do I know I should do business with you? Answer these four questions and depending on your answers, here’s what you should do next. Those types of things are things that we can use to attract the attention of our ideal prospect.

Then you’ve gotta capture. It’s a little bit of a militaristic term, “Let’s capture them.” How do you capture them? Well, usually there’s a landing page. This is a page that has the information that you’re offering to them. A landing page basically is a page with limited navigation. So, there’s not a lot of things that they can do on this page. It’s very focused on, “Here’s the offer. Here’s the message. Put in your name and email address.” They’re giving you their information. That’s basically what a landing page, or a capture page, you could call it a capture page as well.

Then engage. So, how are you then going to take that information and nurture this person to develop and build that trust? This could be, in what we call an Auto Responder Series, where you have a set of emails already pre-programmed to go out and be sent to that person who’s giving you their email address for that. That could be three emails, that could be five emails, it could be an email every week for a year. You can pre-program that anyway that you want to.

Then, of course, we wanna sell them. What we like to see in terms of messages that are informational and helpful and useful, and then the actual asking for the sell, closing the sell, is that there’s a five to one ratio. Five informational messages to one, “I’m asking for the sale,” message. At some point, that’s our goal. All this stuff that we do doesn’t matter unless something happens. This could be just a phone call for a sales conversation that you use a marketing funnel for, but it could be an actual, “I’m buying something. I’m buying this service. I’m buying your offer.” Maybe it’s all online, but this works the same for any kind of sales process. Maybe you offer a service, so that selling part is actually a phone call or a face to face meeting where you go over the final details. You’ve answered all their questions already through your engagement campaign, they know who you are, they understand who you are, they trust you, now it’s just finalizing the details so that we can actually deliver the service and solve your problems.

A couple of tools, just to mention, that we like to use for these types of campaigns. One is called Active Campaign. It’s a great email marketing tool and CRM System, where you can track both email marketing campaigns and sales activities as well. Then click funnels is kind of one of the biggest ones out there. There’s a lot of different tools out there where you can easily and quickly build marketing funnels that have landing pages and things like down sells and up sells and all these different things that you can add to that and be able to do that. It could be membership systems, things of that sort.

That’s the basic ideas behind a marketing funnel. How to attract, capture, engage, and sell. You use ACES Marketing to build your funnels. It gives you a nice little plan of the basic steps that you need to do that. I am going to do a much more detailed training on marketing funnels and some of the tools we use on creating marketing funnels that you’ll be able to find inside our full marketing blueprint. If you go to the home page of DMD.com, you can opt in to the marketing blueprints and you can get full access to our training that covers not just marketing funnels, but these eight key areas of marketing for your business.

This is this month’s marketing message. Hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought in the comments and please like, comment, and share if you come across this video, wherever that might be.

Thank you and have a great month.

What Browsers Are Used When Viewing Your Website

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey guys, Peter Brissette here with this monthly marketing message. I want to talk to you this month a little bit about the way your website is actually being viewed and the actual size of screen that your website is being viewed on. This is a website called W3Counter and it’s got global stats based on current monthly trends on the platforms that are being used to view your website. The first thing that you see here is that predominantly 60% of users viewing websites are using Chrome. That’s the highest used browser. Internet Explorer is less than 7% of the total users that are viewing websites. Safari is 15%. By in large, users are using Chrome, so you need to make sure that your website first looks good in Chrome.

The other thing that is interesting in this report is it gives us the top 10 screen resolutions. If you’ll see here the top here at 26% is 640 by 360. That’s normal. 1366 by 768 is probably a tablet version of it. Then, 1024 by 768 is probably also tablet. This could be small laptops as well. You can see here you’ve got a big chunk of views predominantly that are much smaller screens. Only 6% are this full view 1920 by 1080, which is basically a full screen view, but only 6% are viewing it that size. The vast majority are viewing your site when it’s smaller. You can also verify some of this data in Google Analytics. If you look in your Google Analytics, you can go to audience under technology browser and OS and you can see this is just last 12 months for this particular client.

You can see the number of users with Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and you can see those numbers pretty much match up there as well. It doesn’t tell a screen size, unfortunately, which will be good, but you can look at how your site’s being viewed desktop versus mobile. Now in this particular case, still largely desktop, but this varies on website to website. A lot of websites depending who your target market is, you’ll see mobile as the higher number. Just some good basic information on when you look at your website, the different ways you should be looking at it in terms of the browsers you should be using and what’s optimum screen size that you should be using to make sure that your audience can see and view your website properly and get the information that they need.

Hopefully, you found that helpful. If you need any help with this or want us to review your website to see how it looks with different screen sizes and to make sure that you’re getting the most out of it, reach out to us, let us know, we’d be glad to help you out with that.

Thank you.

The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#3

Thu, 31 May 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey, guys. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. And we’ve been working on a series of videos called The Three R’s of the Trust Formula. And what is the trust formula? Just a quick reminder, the trust formula is something that’s kind of come together just from my years of experience in consulting with hundreds of businesses about their marketing, and how can you make your decision making process easier, so that you can make the decisions that you need to about your marketing?

The trust formula really narrows down the most effective and most efficient ideas, strategies, and tactics that will help you in making the right decisions when it comes to your marketing so that you get the most bang for your marketing buck. That’s really the idea behind trust formula.

And what I’ve found in consulting with so many different types of businesses, is that these things become foundational. These are the things that every business needs to be thinking about, and working on, and focusing on. So that’s kind of the foundation of where the trust formula came from and why I think it will help you in simplifying your decision making for your marketing.

So I’m going to share my screen here, so we can catch up with where we’re at on all of this. So we’ve talked about reviews, make it easy, ask for them. The six questions for amazing testimonials. If you haven’t got those six questions, you can email me, peter@DMDude.com, with the subject line six questions for amazing testimonials, and I will send that over to you.

The second R is Referrals. Or, another way to say it is the network effect. What are the referrals that you’re getting from existing clients? What kind of strategic alliances and partners and lumberjacks do you have? And you can watch the second video in the series to learn more about those. And then how are you caring and nurturing for your referral network?

Before I talk about number three, I just want to remind you once again, what are your owned versus rented properties? So this is a foundational principle of trust formula, is that you own your website, and you own your email list, your CRM, your contact database. So what are you doing to keep the most relevant information on your website, and make the most use of that?

Then what are you doing with your contact database? How are you building that list? How are you nurturing that list? That is foundational to making all these other things work effectively. Rented properties are things like Facebook. You can be on Facebook and use Facebook, but you don’t own that. Facebook could take away that access at any point in time.

So let’s talk about number three. This is called RFP. And RFP is three elements, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. So what does that mean? So when you’re deciding, “Okay. How often do I do anything?” What you have to do is go back to, “What’s the end result that I want? Do I want a referral? Do I want a client out of this? How do I take a prospect from point A to all the way through to point Z? From being prospect to a client?”

So a couple of ways to think about that is when it comes to let’s say, dating. The first time you go on a date, and if you’re the guy with the girl, and you go on one date, and at the end of the date you’re like, “I think we should get married.” That’s probably not going to go over too well. Probably not going to get a yes out of that. If you do get a yes out of that, you might want to run away. That might not be a very good thing.

So marketing is a lot like dating in that there has to be a certain number of contacts, so you can go back through your database and look at your client’s history, and kind of go, “Okay. How long did it take me to land this client? What were the number of contacts I had to make, either in person, on the phone, via email? What was the number of contacts and when did they have to happen in order to land that client?

The question of recency and frequency are really super important to getting to proximity. So when you go, “Hey, I sent an email out. Why didn’t anybody respond?” Okay, well, how frequently are you sending emails? And when was the most recent time that you had sent an email? So if it’s been months and you’re a stranger now, you’re probably not going to get as much of a response. But if it’s more recent and it’s frequent in the sense that it’s consistent.

If they know once a month they’re getting an email, they can follow that. If it’s once a week, whatever that frequency needs to be. You need to look at, “How often should I post on social media?” Well, again, how recent do you need to be? How frequent do you need to be to move a prospect along to become a client? So you can determine some basic numbers to do that.

Because we all want proximity. What is proximity? How close can we get? So if you are dating somebody for months or years, and there’s recent and frequent interaction, you’re going to build a closeness. The proximity is going to close and become closer. What you’re moving towards is, “I want to get close enough for a hug.” Chuck Blakeman, one of my mentors, who talks about this. “So what do I have to do to get close enough to get a hug?” And entirely HR appropriate hug, okay. Let’s be clear about that. HR appropriate hugs only. So hopefully you get that joke.

So RFP determines when do I send emails? When do I post on social media? And so you just got to work back from existing clients. Think about the number of contacts, how recent and frequent did you have to be to get those clients? And then just come up with a plan. And this really ties into your marketing calendar. If you’re going to be doing social media content, you should have a calendar that says, “We’re going to post on these days,” and then you can make up a content calendar, and plan out the type of content that you want to do. And then we can always get into how do you choose the content that you should be doing? Actually, I think I’ll do another video on that. That’s a great idea. Thank you.

So that’s really it. This is the Trust Formula. The Three R’s of the Trust Formula, Reviews, make it easy. Ask for them. Use the six questions for amazing testimonials. Work your referrals and your referral network to build partners that will send you clients, month after month, year after year, to help you grow your business on autopilot.

And remember, RFP, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. We want to move close enough to an HR appropriate hug, and be able to do that. So what’s the recency and frequency needed to accomplish that? And, of course, remember, what’s your own versus rented properties?

Spend the most time, most money, most energy, and effort on building and developing the properties that you own. And that is my advice for you. And the advice I’ve given to many different types of businesses over the last eight or so years.

So again, it’s Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you for joining me in these videos. I hope you found them useful. Please take a moment to like, comment, and share. If you have questions, please post those, as well. Remember, sharing is caring. We love to get our message out, so if you can help us do that, we really appreciate it. Thank you and have a great week.

The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#2

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hey, Peter Brissette, digital marketing dude. Here again with another video. We’re doing a series of videos on what I call the trust formula and the three R’s of the trust formula. The purpose of the trust formula is, how do you do the things that are going to get you the most response the fastest? There are all kinds of decisions that you can make about marketing your business, so how do you make the most efficient, most effective decisions about that?

So, the purpose of trust formula and the R’s of the trust formula is to help you really focus on what’s going to be the highest and best use of your time? Where am I going to get the most bang for my marketing buck and do I make the decisions that are going to matter, that are going to get me the best results the fastest? That’s the basic core of the three R’s of the trust formula.

The trust formula is something that has just a process over many years now of consulting with businesses, all types of businesses on how to be effective in their marketing. After consult, after consult, after consult, I’ve really come down to these handful of really high priority things that really should be done, basically, by every business out there. So, that’s really the idea and the purpose behind the trust formula.

So, let’s talk about the three R’s. I’m going to share my screen with you again. If you look at the previous video, I talked about the first R of the three R’s and that was Reviews. That you need to make it easy. You must ask for them and I talked about the six questions for amazing testimonials, if you want those questions, please email me peter@dmdude.com and with the subject line, six questions for amazing testimonials, and I will send that over to you.

Another key thing that we have to remember is, our own versus rented properties. The property that we own, that we have complete control of is our website and our email list. So, these are the two areas that I see the biggest challenges with most businesses is keeping the website up to date and current. And then, also having a really effective database of contacts. So, it’s your email, your CRM, how are you staying in touch with people, how are you building that list? What are you doing to add more people to the list? Those are really key foundational principles of the trust formula.

So, let’s talk about R, number two here. And R number two is what we’re going to call referrals. Now, this isn’t just about referrals, it’s kind of, it’s referrals and what I would call the network effect. So, let me see if I can explain that for you. There’s different types of referrals, so we have referrals from our existing clients, right? We have existing clients who will refer other customers to us. We get this all the time in our business. It’s great to have those warm referrals. I’m sure that you get them in your business too.

If you’re not, or you don’t think you’re getting enough, then you have to step back, ask the question, what am I doing to get more referrals? Am I asking for them? Do I have some kind of process or intention towards getting more referrals than I am now? That’s the most basic referral, but there’s different levels of referrals.

There’s what we would call strategic alliances or partners. If you’re familiar with three to five club, we call them lumberjacks. Basically, so a lumberjack, to describe that term, this is somebody that goes to the forest, chops down the wood, and then brings it to you. So, this could be a strategic alliance where it’s somebody that’s, maybe they don’t do business with you, but they have your same ideal clients and so, they refer business to you.

A really basic example of this might be, you know, a chiropractic doctor and an acupuncturist. So, perhaps, they share and refer clients back and forth. That could be a very basic strategic alliance. We might call that just a referral partner where you refer business back and forth. But a lumberjack, might be somebody that never does business with you, but they’re a big fan. They love what you do, and they have access to the same clients, and they will send you new clients on a regular basis.

And there are degrees of this. So, there’s just basic, you know, relationship, which is really important. What kind of relationship do you have with them and what are you doing to continue that relationship? And then, there’s actual strategic relationship, so we have some partnerships with other marketing companies where we provide some backend services for them for their clients. They sell the clients and we just provide the backend service for them.

So again, there’s different levels of that, so who are your strategic alliances and partners? Another example of this, might be associations. You know, are you able to work within a trade association that all their members are your ideal clients? So, how do you partner with that association? Where the network effect takes place and really impacts that is if I’m on the stage at an association event, essentially, that association is putting their stamp of approval on me as a business partner at that event and for their members.

So, there’s a degree of trust. There’s a network of trust that’s transferred from the association over to me, in that particular audience, in the members of that association. So, that’s where the network effect begins to really have an impact and begin to position you properly as an expert as someone that knows what they’re doing and can get things done.

That’s kind of where that falls into place. So, you have referrals from existing clients, strategic alliances, strategic partners, lumberjacks, who just send you business, and then you have referral partners. These are folks that maybe you cross transfer referrals back and forth to one another. That’s the second R of the trust formula.

The other thing that you have to keep in mind then is, how do you nurture your lumberjacks? So, how do you take care of them? What marketing plan do you have for staying in touch? Some examples of this might be you do a special event once a quarter. You do a happy hour, let’s say, and you only invite people who are in your strategic alliance to come to that happy hour. Maybe you send them a gift card on a regular basis. Maybe you take them out to lunch. Buy them coffee, whatever it is. What’s your plan to continue to nurture that relationship, to grow that relationship, and to show your appreciation to them so that this can continue to be a source of new business and a source of new clients?

The same for the referrals from your existing clients. Is there something in place that you can reward them for? So, sometimes it makes sense to have some type of reward system for that, doesn’t always. But, maybe there’s a way to do that. So, you should have some type of strategy and then some tactics, some very practical tactics of what you do and when you do it in order to nurture your referral network.

So, that’s the second one in the set here of the three R’s for the trust formula. I hope you got a lot out of that and I’ll be sharing the next one here in the next video coming up. If you have any questions, please ask them, wherever you see this video and please remember to like, comment, and share. Sharing is caring. We love to get this message out to small business owners everywhere. We appreciate your help in doing that. So, thank you. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you soon.

The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#1

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 06:00:00 GMT

Hello, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. I’m putting together a series of videos on what I call the Trust Formula. This Trust Formula can really work for a local business and it can work for almost any type of business. It really works whether it’s a business that’s a mix of online digital or if it’s offline, and parts of your business are offline as well. That’s really typical for most businesses, there’s some mix. There’s the online and the offline and how you mix those together.

I want to talk about the Three R’s of the Trust Formula and I’m going to share my screen with you here in a second, we’re going to start to break these down over the next series of videos. The one thing I want to take to you about first is kind of a key principle that’s a basic foundation that we have to remember and make sure that we’re understanding where it fits in the mix. That has to do with what you own and what you rent. This is really specific to your digital assets, your digital properties. What do you own and what do you rent?

Let me see if I can explain: For your website you own that. Now, you might have it hosted on another company but that’s your website. You own it. You control the content. You control the information that is there. You own that. That’s your property. Your Facebook page, your business Facebook page. Do you own that? Technically no. Technically Facebook owns it, they’re letting you rent it. Okay? They’re letting you use that Facebook page and be on their platform to do marketing of your business. At any point in time Facebook could take away that access. They could shut you down and not allow you to market anymore on their platform.

That’s a couple of basic examples. The other thing that you own that you own that so many businesses that I talk to, and I consult with dozens of businesses every few months, and I find it as a common thread. They don’t own and don’t have a really good email list. Excuse me. I’m leaving that in. They don’t own their email list and they don’t have real control of their contacts, their customers, their past clients, their database. That is one of the key most important assets that you do own, that you have control of and you have to keep it in a really good system that’s easy to use, easy to track your contacts and easy to create follow up systems that you can stay in touch with them.

The two main properties that you own are your website and your email list. Just remember that as key principles of this overall of the Three R’s of the Trust Formula. Now, I’m going to share my screen with you and we’re going to dig into the first R of the Trust Formula. Again, we’re going to keep this out here as this reminder of our owned versus rented properties. That’s really your website and your email list. That’s what you own. The things that you rent are your social media profiles; Facebook, LinkedIn, and maybe some other various marketing tools. I am just going to put that right there so that’s part of our set up here.

Now, the first R that we’re going to talk about is reviews. Actually let me go in here. There’s a few key aspects for reviews that we’ll talk in this video and the next video’s coming up we’ll get into the other R’s. When it comes to reviews, a couple things to remember, these are super important. People trust more about what others say about you than what you say about yourself. This is really critical to build trust quickly with someone who doesn’t

even know who you are, maybe that’s never heard of you, maybe wasn’t a referral. They’re just coldly looking at who you are. Your online reviews and what people say about you is super critically important.

How do you get more reviews? How do you get better reviews? The first thing you have to do is make it easy for them. You must have some basic system that makes it easy for people to leave you a review. That’s something that we offer as a tool and a service, so regardless if you use our tool, someone else’s tool, or you just come up with a way to make that easy for them, you have to make it easy.

The reason for that is that when there’s a negative thing that happens, I’m really highly motivated. I can’t wait to go and say something about you negatively. I’m very highly motivated. When I’m really happy with the service that I got, I might be really happy with it but I’m not necessarily as motivated to go express that somewhere in a review online or send you an email, a testimonial. Now, it can happen but it’s just not as a strong a motivation.

That’s why you got to make it easy and then you got to do step two, which is you must ask for them. You have to ask for reviews. You just do. Because there is such a pent up reviews sitting there just waiting to be given, if it was easy and someone asked them they would do it. That’s why you need to do those two things. Finally, I’m not going to share on this video but there are six key questions for amazing testimonials. It’s from a guy named Sean D’Souza that came up with this, out in New Zealand who’s brilliant. We’ve used this for creating some of our key testimonials. If you sell a very high dollar service or product, if you really need to build a high level of trust to really connect to your audience on a much stronger level, then you need to take the next step and do the six key questions for amazing testimonials.

A couple key principles with that is that you need to schedule time with that person to sit down with them and go, “Here’s the questions. Please go through these and answer these.” Give them a way to type it up or write it up right there. It could be a phone interview or a Zoom web meeting, something like that. You want to have that individual actually set some time aside and make an appointment with them because this is really going to be critical to the kind of testimonials that you can have that you can share on your primary properties; your website or via email, or even on the rented properties that you have out there.

That’s the six questions. If you want the six questions, please message me on this post or on Facebook or wherever you see this, and let me know. We’ll shoot you an email with that. In fact, you can just email me if you want: peter@dmdude.com. That’s peter@dmdude.com. Just put subject line: six questions for amazing testimonials and I’ll send that back to you so that you have that.

That’s number one of the Three R’s of the Trust Formula and we’ll be working on R number two and R number three here in the coming weeks so that you can review those and get some help for your marketing for your business. Thanks for joining me on this video. I hope you got a lot out of it and if you have thoughts, questions, comments, please leave them below.

Google Changes in SEO – What Should I Do?

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Hey, everybody. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I want to talk to you a little bit today about SEO. Yeah. I try not to talk about this topic too often, because it’s a very huge topic. There are a lot of key factors with SEO. First of all, what is SEO? It stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is something that you do to your website to help your website rank better to get found in what we call organic search, meaning when someone types into Google a keyword phrase, that your site will have a chance to come up in the search results.

There’s a lot of things surrounding that, and I want to share my screen here and just talk a little bit about an article that just came out here in March that talks about this. A couple of things that I want you to know about. First of all, Google makes a lot of changes. Second of all, there’s key things that you should always focus on as the foundation. Then, finally, what do you do about it going forward? Depending on when you’re looking at this, this is, came out here on March 17th, this article, and in March, Google made a big update. The result of that big update was that some sites improved in the search results, and some sites actually lost traction, meaning they’re … They lost traffic. Their traffic decreased after this big change that Google made in their search algorithm.

What does that mean for you? Well the first thing that you want to focus on is something called EAT. In this article, and I’ll put this link in the blog post in the video that we’re watching so that you can read all the details of this and all the changes that were made and some of the different expert opinions on it, but the one thing that you want to always focus on with your website is something called EAT. EAT is an acronym for expert, authority, and trust. When you’re putting together content for your website, this is what you need to remember. You need to remember how can you express that content from the standpoint of being an expert and from being an authority on that topic, which is your business. That should be natural for every business owner and for your website, that you are an expert and you are an authority about your business. Then, the final one is trust. You can go back through a lot of our blog posts. We talk about trust a lot and how important that factor is.

All of those things need to be thought about as you develop any content for your website. EAT, expert, authority, and trust. Those are really, really important factors. As long as you are focused on that on your website, in the long term, you’re going to be okay, because that’s what Google wants. Google wants you to show your expertise, to show your authority so that the visitors to your website have a degree of trust. Some of those elements vary, so in this article, I want you to go through and look at it. He does some case studies on some different websites, on what they did in order to fix their website in order for it to improve and rank better.

Most of my clients don’t do a lot of ads and advertising on their websites. That was a big factor that impacted people. If you don’t run ads on your website, then you don’t have to worry about that one, but things related to the usability of the website, how easy was it to navigate, the general trust factor of the website, those things were all important things into whether this last update helped the website improve or made the website decrease in the search engine results.

The big key to take away from this going forward is remember that Google is going to make changes. They are going to make updates to their search algorithm, and it probably is going to have some impact on your site one way or another. Remember to always focus on your website as one of the properties that you own and you control, and focus on that EAT. Are you demonstrating that you’re an expert, that you’re an authority, and are you demonstrating trust? One of the best ways to do that is to show your testimonials and reviews on your website, as well, which we talk about all the time.

That’s a quick SEO update on what’s happening with Google and the changes that they’re making. If you’ve seen some significant changes in your websites, it’s something we could take a look at for you and try to diagnose what happened with that. We have a service where we can do a complete competitive analysis on your site and your top three competitors to find out where you stand and what it’s going to take in order to get your site to rank better. We’ll put a link to our calendar if you want to talk about that further. That’s a little monthly marketing message for you. Hope you got some good out of that. Please do us a favor. Like, comment, and share this, and let other people know about this, as well. Thank you very much, and we’ll talk to you next month.

What Content Should I Be Sharing?

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Hey guys, Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. I’ve got another video here just

for you to help you with your marketing. A common question that I get: “What content

should I be sharing?” If I’m going to do marketing online and social media marketing and

all this, what content do I do? Where do I get the content?

I want to give you a few ideas on basically an endless supply of content that will help

you in your business. I’ve talked about this some before but I’m going to talk to you

more about it in this video. I’m going to share my screen here, I’m looking away. We’re

going to talk about content planning.

The first piece of content for you to work on is your FAQ’s. Okay? Frequently asked

questions. Make sure I spell it correctly here, asked questions. You get questions every

single day in your business, on a wide variety of topics. What are those questions?

Simply take a moment, write those questions down. Make a list of the questions that

people commonly ask you. Now you have a huge source of content, this is content that

goes on social media, this is content that can go on your website. You can send this out

in an email. You can build out your content calendar and have a content plan for months

on end, just based on frequently asked questions. It could be a one minute video, it

could be a ten minute video. It could be a blog post that’s written. However you want to

do the content, I think the easiest is just to make a video but whatever that is, do that.

If you’re someone that’s managing and just helping with the content and there’s

someone else that’s the expert, give them the question. Say, “Hey, here’s a question for

you.” Turn on the video camera and record it. Then you’ll be able to capture that and

now you have new content that’s fresh, that’s relevant, and that person really didn’t

have to do a lot of work because these are questions that they answer all day long all

the time. What are the FAQ’s, the frequently asked questions in your business?

The second category that we look at are what we call ‘should ask questions.’ A should

ask question is question that someone should ask you but they don’t know. They don’t

know what they should be asking. They’re not an expert. You being the expert in the

field could come up with some of these should ask questions. For example, if you are a

CPA let’s say. You’re a tax CPA. What are the questions that a business owner like myself

should ask a tax CPA when I’m considering hiring them? What are the questions that I

don’t know that I should ask, but I should be? Those are kinds of questions that you

could ask. Again, part of this is to show your expertise but part of this is just to show

that you’re authentic, that you’re real, and that you’re willing to give useful helpful

information to your audience that’s going to help them in making the next step in their

process.

These two things for content planning, FAQ’s and SAQ’s. Other things that you can add

into this, you know, you can always add in client testimonials. What are those? Those

are great to have a mix into the content. There’s what I call team stories. Team stories,

basically anybody that’s a member of your team, have them share a little bit about why

do they work there, what do they love about what they do? Let those team stories be

part of your content.The other category is messages from leadership. If you’re, you

know, you’re the one leader, these are messages from you that are important to you.

Things that matter. These are your values, your mission, your vision of your company.

That can come from you as an individual, but if you’ve got a multi-person team then

there’s messages from that entire leadership team that can be part of your content as

well.

These are some basic ideas for some content planning. Hope you found that useful and

helpful in this video. If you have comments or questions about this please leave those

comments and questions wherever you happen to see this video. Please do like,

comment, and share. Sharing is caring. We appreciate your help in getting our message

out to others. Again, it’s Peter Brissette, digital marketing dude. Hope you have a great

week.

Merry Christmas from DMD!

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 07:00:00 GMT

The Digital Marketing Dude Team wishes you and yours a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Make Your Marketing Memorable

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Hey, Peter Brissette here. Got a monthly marketing message just for you. Behind me you’ll see a classroom up at Front Range Community College, but I’m attending a business workshop here today. I have a couple ideas that I wanted to share with you around the idea of, “How do you create an endless stream of content that you can use in your marketing?”

The simple answer to that, is by telling stories. How do we do that? Well, first I think you should use video to capture it, but we should tell stories. I’ll give you some ideas. First of all, you can talk to your clients and prospects about why you got into doing what you’re doing, and why you do it every single day, outside of, “Yeah, I got into business to make money.” Well sure, that’s why you start a business, a business is supposed to make money. As the business owner, why do you do this, whatever it is that you do? For me, a lot of what we started with in terms of our clients, and what we have today, are a lot of clients in the healthcare business. These clients are assisted living clients … hey, guys. What? Welcome to my video …

Assisted living, chiropractors, other clients, and what we like to do for them, is help them to be able to find and get more clients. Now, I will never be a care giver in an assisted living facility, but by extension, because I am helping them find clients, I am helping care to be given to someone who is a senior. They are serving the most needy, those that need the most help in our society. While I can’t do that myself, I by extension, am able to help serve that, and see that happen. That motivates me. That drives me. That makes me want to do a better job for my clients, to help them be able to provide care by extension, to their clients.

That’s the first thing you can do. The second thing, and I haven’t done this, but I’m going to start doing this, is interview your customers, interview your clients. Take a phone, even if you just hold it there and do a selfie with it, but ask them questions. Why do they do business with you, what are their goals, personal stories, whatever it is. Share those stories of your customers.

Then the third area that I would do is get your team involved. Tell the stories about your employees. Talk about their day, and walk them through that process. What happens when they are doing a particular task? Why are they doing that task, and why are they doing it that way? Why do they do the job that they do every single day? Those are just a few ideas.

If we spend a little bit more time thinking about it, you can come up with many different ideas on how you can actually have this endless supply of content. Why do I want an endless supply of content in my marketing? Two basic reasons. First of all, is you want to be memorable in your marketing. The best way to be memorable is by stories. People remember stories. They forget facts and figures, but they remember the stories. That connects to them mentally, and emotionally. The stories really, really matter.

The second thing, it will make you not be boring. The first rule in market is, “Do not be boring.” By having stories as part of what you do, and included in your marketing messaging, you will not be boring. Be memorable, do not be boring, and you’re going to get a lot farther along in your marketing.

That’s this month’s marketing message. Interruptions and all, but we’re going to go with it, because that’s how we do things around here. We’ll talk to you next month.

Maximize Your Google Map

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Hey, everybody. This is your monthly marketing message. Peter Brissette here. Just wanted to share with you some ideas around your Google Maps page, probably a few things you haven’t thought about or didn’t realize. I’m going to share my screen here with you, so that we can look at a couple of these important items.

When it comes to online reviews, the number one site that you want to get reviews on is going to be Google. How you know how many reviews you should have really is a matter of how many your closest competition has. Check out your competition and see what they have, and try to get more reviews than that.

There are quite a few (listings) with a number of different sites, we call them citations. They’re directory listings, or any place where there’s a website similar to Google, Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, Apple Maps, that has your business name, address, phone number, and usually your website as well. All of those need to be claimed and updated, but the most important is Google. There are a few things going on with the Google Maps page that I wanted to bring you up to speed on, and up to date on, as to what’s going on with that right now. So here on my screen you go to … on Google.com/business or business.google.com, and go to the dashboard for your page. You’ll have to be signed into your Gmail account associated with your Google Maps account.

One of the first things is the pictures and virtual tour. People really look at the pictures that are tied to your Google Maps account, so if you’re not adding pictures on a regular basis, that’s definitely something that you should be doing. You can also add the 360 degree virtual tours as well. That’s something that we’ve started doing for our clients. If you have some interest in that, please let me know. We’d be happy to help you out with that.

One thing people don’t realize, is that outside of Google Analytics, which is the normal Google Analytics for your website, there’s specific insights for your Google Maps page. The information that you have here is really tied around people that have searched through your page, and then people that have taken action. Have they visited your website? Have they requested directions? Have they tried to call you? That’s all interacting with your Google Maps page. It also shows photo views. It shows how many times your pictures were viewed, and then if there are similar businesses like yours, they kind of give you a comparison. And photo quality. I mean, I think all that’s kind of new there. They keep adding new stuff to this. Really good information. Direct customers that found your listing, searching for your business name, or discovered they were searching for your business category, and your page came up. Again, it’s reminding you here to post photos. The other thing that is new, is that you can actually post on the page now, and make a post. It’s fairly limited. You can add a picture, it’s 100 to 300 words. You can add a button so that it links to it, and you can put in the link here, so, “To learn more,” or, “Buy now,” or whatever it is that you’ve got, and you can post this to your page. It’s really kind of a new feature. Not a lot of people know about this, but definitely it’s another way to get more information out there about your business, so that people can find you when they’re searching for businesses in your category.

Another thing that I wanted to remind you about, is there is something called Google Contributor. I’m a Google Contributor, meaning I leave reviews for businesses, and I also recommend changes to their Google Maps page. If I see information that’s not correct, or Google will actually ask me questions about a business. Is this business kid friendly? Is this business got good parking? Is it expensive? What’s the price range? Google is always asking me these questions, and getting my feedback. There’s who knows how many people like me out there, that are doing that. You’re going to get requests to your Facebook business page … not Facebook … your Google Maps page from people asking you either questions, or recommending changes to your page, based on information that they believe is accurate. It’s another reason really to be checking this on a regular basis, and knowing what’s going on with your maps page, because there could be recommended changes that people are making to your page that you’re not aware of, and you should be.

The other thing that they’ve added here is this messaging functionality. Right now on your Google Maps page, when you pull up your Google Maps page, people can go to your website, they can get directions, or they can call you right from the Google Maps page. If they’re on the mobile device, they just hit the number, and the phone will dial. The other option that you can add, is the ability to let customers message you, basically meaning a chat app. So whatever chat app that they access and use, they’ll be able to chat with you. This is all done through SMS messaging through your mobile phone. If you want to be able to get messages from your Google Maps page directly to your phone, with questions and so forth from your customers, then this is a good way to do that.

You can check your reviews here as well, (which is something) you want to do, and you can also reply to the reviews. You can make sure your website link is up to date. (That’s a little feature that I’ve kind of looked into a little bit, where they want to basically offer you a way to build a separate website. I’d rather not have my website that connected to Google in that sense) Then of course, you want to make sure all your info is updated, current, accurate. Your hours, the location, business description, and all that. Then your pictures. If your pictures haven’t been updated, you don’t have a logo, other information, and you can really break these up. Interior, exterior, people working, people on your team, your basic identity. So your logo, that type of information, you want to make sure is all set up and good to go there.

That’s just a little bit I wanted to share here this month with your Google Maps page. If there’s something that you would need help with on that, again, we can help you with getting the 360 degree virtual tour set up for your business. If you’re a business location, we can do that for you. If you just need some help with getting your Google Maps page verified, or getting the information updated, be happy to help you with that as well.

That is your monthly marketing message. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know if you have questions, if we can support you in any way. Thank you, and have a great month.

Facebook 101 Not just for Assisted Living Communities

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 21:36:12 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

All right. Welcome, everybody. I’m Peter Brissette, the owner of the brand, Assisted Living Marketing & Assisted Living Marketing.com. We work with a number of assisted living communities all over the country, helping them market their communities. Today we’re talking about Facebook basics– the Facebook basics for assisted living communities. Some of this will cover lots of businesses but we want to focus on that particular industry here today. The first question, really, is like– why? Why should I care about what I’m doing here? With stupid Facebook anyway! Well OK, so there’s only like a gazillion billion users on Facebook, which is fine. But the real question is: do the family members of your residents use Facebook? And the answer to that question is “yes”. By and large, the vast majority of them are using Facebook, whether that’s the children or extended family members, grandchildren and so on.

So we want to be able to, first of all, to reach those family members of our current residents. How do we communicate with them about what’s going on in the community? What are the events that we’re having? And we’ll get into some of the content things related to that. But first and foremost, we’d love to see this used as a tool for just communicating with your current resident families and extended family members. So to do that, one of the first things you should do when somebody becomes a part of your community, when you get a new resident; is send them a link to your Facebook page and ask them to like the page, because this is one of the ways that you provide communication to them, and ask them to share that with their family members as well.

The second main thing is, how do we use this to do community outreach and to actually do some lead generation? How can we get a lead from the activities we’re doing on Facebook? So that’s something that we’ll talk about in terms of how you do community outreach with your Facebook page and how you can reach a broader audience that’s really targeted to your specific audience. If your communities are in Littleton you do not need to do outreach in Longmont? Those are two vastly different areas. They are a long ways apart. You’re probably not going to get many leads from Longmont. Most of your leads are going to come from a close vicinity to your specific communities. So we’ll talk about some ways on how you do that.

So what I want to try to do, and we’ll answer that, is look at the most common questions that I get, and try to address those. So, common questions are: What kind of content should I be posting, and when should I post it? Some of that is: Is my page set up correctly? And really, how do I increase engagement, how do I get people to interact with content? Some of the different types of content. And then what about paid posts. if I want to do any kind of paid advertising? That’s really going to be the core of the questions we’re going to try to answer here today.

So let’s talk about content. What do I post to when should I post it? Anything and everything! Anything is content for your community, whether that’s just a message that you’re posting on the page or if that’s a picture of some activities, or a video, or links to your website, or links to other content and information.

There are a lot of different options for content that you can share on your Facebook page. If you have a blog post on your website and you’re blogging new content, then the link to that page is something that you want to share on your Facebook page. I kind of address it now, but we have the question of the different types of content. What I’m really encouraging folks to do right now is do more video. Video is really kind of taking over Facebook. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it is very heavily used on Facebook. In particular, doing live video. You can do this if you’re the administrator of your Facebook page, you can do live video from the page itself and do that on your phone. That’s where typically it’s done. They’ve made it available so you can do it from a computer. But that’s really not where people are doing live videos, it’s all being done on your phone. So let me just show you that.

So this is just a screenshot of my phone.

If I want to post and do a live video from my phone, I just hit the ‘Post’ option and then you can see there you’ve got the ‘Go Live’ option here, when I press that it’s going to let me describe my video and then I can hit the ‘Go Live’ button and it goes live. So what Facebook does when you do that is…that’s kind of cool view.

What Facebook does when you do that is actually try to build you a live audience and it notifies everybody what you’re doing and wants to try to build a live audience. Now honestly, for the most part, I don’t care if you have a live audience of live viewers or it’s just a video that people watch later. It’s just video content that you’re doing, you’re covering a live event, you’re singing happy birthday to some residents, whatever it is. It’s a quick little video that you make. It can be one to two minutes long, and then you post that and it’s extra content on the page. That content will then get shared out more. The live video feeds are getting shared more than any other content in terms of how Facebook pushes out that content. So one of the things that comes up is: “Hey, I posted something on my page but only three people saw it.”

That’s one of the things that Facebook has done with the pages in particular. Even though I have a page like this one that’s got 212 followers. Then how do I make sure all 212 see my content. It’s not a one to one ratio, just because I posted doesn’t mean Facebook is going to push it out to everybody. So you have to do something else. One is, it has to be more engaging content. That’s where the video comes in. The more engaging the content is, the better it’s going to get pushed out to your audience. And as people like, comment, and share, then Facebook says “OK well I’ll share it with more people now.” So the more organically you can do that, the better. The ultimate way to make sure all 212 see it, is to do a paid post and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, on how you can do that.

But that’s the only way to make sure that everybody sees it. What I want to talk about now, is a little bit about how you set up certain things on the page and making sure certain things are in place. So one of the questions we had is about the page name. So right here we’ve got @ Lighthouse Assisted Living as the page name. How do I change that, or set that, was the question. Well, there’s a couple different ways to do it. Sometimes you can just click right there on that, if it’s not been changed, and it will let you change it. You can always go and actually hover over this, it tells you where to change the username in the ‘Page Info’ section.

Go to ‘Settings’. And let’s go to this page, these are your tabs. I want to edit this. Lets go to ‘About’. Here we go. So in here is where you would edit the page name. You have your categories, the name of the page and then the actual page name that you name here. So Facebook likes you to not change this very often so you really want to try to do the best you can with naming it. I’ve been able to get pages renamed but they don’t like to do it. This is just under the ‘About’ section where you can edit that. This is one of the main areas that you want to make sure all the information is correct. In particular the category, a little bit about your story, your vision, mission, your hours.

Any other business details you want to have. You definitely want to have a phone number. This is the Messenger link. You can add e-mail, website address, you want to make sure all of that information is up to date and correct in terms of the basic page information. Now you’ve got different tabs here that show up. So how do you adjust those? We’ll go back, we were just looking at that. These are all your General Settings. You know there’s a million options here. For the most part, you don’t need to change a whole bunch of these. The one that is a good idea to do, and this is kind of problematic for some reason with Facebook, but you can also verify the page. The benefit of verifying the page is that Facebook gives your page a little more priority because it’s verified. And you get a little checkmark badge on the page that says it’s authentic.

And typically, what you have to do is put in your phone number and Facebook calls you and gives you a code. That you can then put it in and verify the page. And for some reason, we’ve done this before on pages, and then a month or two later for some reason it’s not verified now, it’s like– what happened? We verified it once. So it’s a little bit problematic. But if you can verify it, I would definitely recommend that you do.

All right, let’s go to ‘Edit Page’. These are the different tabs that we were talking about there so if you wanted to have a tab for services, I think that was one of the questions: What are the different services? And a lot of times it’s the different tabs, you can use default tabs or you can add additional tabs, things like services.It just gives you an extra space for content that you can then add additional information to.

So you can add a picture and a description of those services. Again that’s under ‘Edit Page’. And under tabs. So why would you do that? It’s really just up to you. If its there or not there, if you want to use it or not. I tend to try to narrow down how many tabs because sometimes you wind up over time with tons and tons of tabs but you’re not really using them. So you know it’s not a necessity to have it I guess. But if you do have some services that you want to list out there it’s not bad way to do it. That’s really the two main setting areas that kind of cover the highlights of it. But really this ‘About’ section is kind of the most important where you’ve got all the critical information so you want to make sure that’s up to date.

Obviously, you want to have your images branded. And you know, looking nice. So here’s another example of a good nice image as a cover, you get the logo and the cover image.

That’s a picture of the facility but it’s also got a web address and phone number and it looks really nice on the cover image. OK.

Oh, we got another question: “What is the difference between a story and an impressium?” So there are different areas where you can add additional information. This is 2000 characters that you can add in here. Impressium seems to be some European-ish type of thing so I don’t think that’s required as long as you’ve got the main content over here. But again if you want to have more information then go for it.

So how do we build followers, get more followers and actually do a little more of the community outreach? So, if I’ve got a community in, let’s say Aurora. There’s a lot of stuff in Aurora Colorado. So what I can do is do a search on Aurora Colorado and see what all is out there.

So this is the City of Aurora. One of the things that I can do here in instead of liking as myself, I can click on the little dots over here on the right and I can like this as my page. So when I click on that it’s going to say ‘Pick one of your pages’ or whatever page it is you want to do.

So I think you get the idea. What are some of the things in your area close by you that you can follow as your page? So this is kind of the first step to begin to do that.

A great thing to do with the Chambers of Commerce, you can see them interacting with a lot of the businesses in the area and that can give you other ideas of other Facebook pages that you can follow.

I go through and I do all that. Now what do I do with that? What you do is, when you go to your page over here on the right, it’s kind of obscure but it gives you this information. It says here’s your response rate. Someone messages your page, this is how often, how quick you respond. This is how many followers. And then there’s the option here for ‘See Pages Feed’. These are posts from pages that you’ve liked as your page. So when I click on that it’s then going to show me just that content and it shows me all the pages that I’ve liked. And what I can now do is actually interact with these pages as my page, as my community page so I can like this page and go…

This is what happens, other people are seeing this that have nothing to do with my page or that are just part of the local community, probably close by where this location is and they’re going to go “Oh who is Lighthouse Assisted Living?”, and they may be able to just go to my page right from here and like my page because they saw my comments on Gigi’s Cupcakes. So this is a way to do outreach. Here’s something from Senior Planet. If this is some good information that you like, you want to share it and you can share it back to your page to share with your own followers or you can just put a comment. So this is less local, I might not do much with that. You know here’s the Melting Pot. “We love this place!”

Now you’re commenting and being able to share and get your page out there to a much broader audience. So what you do to do this is just set aside X number of time per week. For one hour a week, I’m going to go comment, like and share on my Facebook page, on all the pages that I follow. And I’m going to search and find other pages that I can follow. And build up that audience. And then you can really see over time that the number of followers you have will grow. So we’re growing our followers by sending to every resident that we have and their family members and asking them to share it out with the rest of their extended family as well. Because we want to get all of those folks following the page.

And then we do this organic reach, which is trying to organically extend our Facebook page into the community by liking, commenting, and sharing on other items that are going on, other activities, events, posts, content that is happening within our community on other Facebook pages.

Then the next thing is how do we boost this? So if I were to invest $50 a month or $100 a month on some paid advertising, where do I spend it and how do I spend that money? So the thing that we want to look at is our ‘Insights’. So when you click on ‘Insights’ this gives me some stats on the Facebook page. For instance, let’s go last 28 days. This will tell me how many actions on the page, how many page views, how many page likes, the total reach…we can see this page only has 212 followers.

But its reach was 1659 people. So even though you have a small following you can still reach a pretty broad audience. There were 660 post engagements. A post engagement is a click, a like, share, a comment. How many people watch videos and how many new page followers. And this kind of gives you a quick highlight of some of the paid campaigns.

So how do I decide what to share? Well as you’re adding content, you can click down here where it says ‘Post’ and this will show you all of your posts to your page. What it tells you is how much ‘Reach’ has that page had, either organic or paid. What you want to change here in this view, is this right drop down here. And this is called ‘Engagement Rate’. That’s really the thing you want to look at. Which page has the most ‘Engagement Rate’. So this one here has 20 percent engagement rate. Now it doesn’t have a big reach but it’s got really good engagement. Here’s one is 16 percent with a good reach. Here’s one 13 percent with a really good reach. When you hover over this it tells you: Was it organic? Meaning it was naturally pushed out by Facebook. Or was there paid advertising done for that particular post? So something like this, it’s got good organic reach, and it’s got fairly good post engagement.

That to me would be a good post to boost. Even if it was just five or ten dollars. And typically what we do is people who like your page and their friends. So extending it out from the people that like your page and beyond that. Then you just set your budget. Let’s say I want to do ten dollars over the next seven days. So it’s going to spend a $1.42 per day to push that out. Now what you can do is drill down a little bit more. So this right now is the entire state of Colorado.

But you could say, “Let’s keep this in Littleton” because I really don’t care about anything outside of that. So it will still be people who like your page and their friends but they have to live within this specified area. That way we’re getting the maximum reach in our targeted area for who we’re trying to reach. And then you boost it. And then you see how it does. That’s a pretty simple way just to get content that’s already got some engagement, has had a little bit of basic reach, organic reach already and that’s how you decide what you should post out there. Some of the other content that we share too, which is something that we do for most of our clients, if you have a daily calendar of events, daily activities, will we post all those to your Facebook page as well. Some people are concerned it’s like “Oh well I posted three times this week on my Facebook page, is three times too many or is three times not enough?”

I can tell you, you could probably post three to four times per day and that’s still won’t be too many. Because again, your organic reach, as you can see, even though I have 200 followers for that page doesn’t mean 200 people are going to see that post. So being concerned about “Oh well, I posted once every day, it’s clogging up my feed and people are getting confused.” That’s actually a common thing people say, “Oh it’s clogging my feed.” I don’t know what ‘clogging a feed’ means. You can clog a pipe but you can’t clog your Facebook feed, it’s completely different, completely different. Ok I’m cracking myself up here.

Let’s see. So one other thing I want to show you, I’ve got to test this, but there’s the option of making your cover image a video. If anybody is interested in this we could probably do this for you for a small fee, but I haven’t tested it yet. But I want to see if there’s a good example here, that’s just the picture…

So you see that’s a Facebook cover image that they made into a video. It has to be a very specific size for it to work.

And I’ve got a couple ideas I think that would be pretty cool for the Facebook cover image actually done as videos.

So if anybody is interested in that let me know and we will see what we can do with that. Ok, those are the main things I want to cover. Let me make sure I answer my questions here:

What do I post and when should I post it? So in terms of time of day when you can post, it really doesn’t make too much difference. Kind of post as you want to. The other thing I will show you about that is, “Well hey, do I have to go physically on there every day and post?”. When you’re posting content you can actually choose when you want to publish it, you can even backdate it. You can save it as a draft or you can choose to schedule it. So if you wanted to you know schedule content for an entire month you could sit down maybe for an hour or two and just schedule the dates and the times that you want that content to be scheduled. So that can be a big timesaver. In terms of, “Oh I got to do this every day? What a time suck!” Nope, you do it one hour a month and schedule your content now. So that way you can be a little more efficient with your own time.

We talked about paid settings, talked about increasing engagement, talked about different content and paid posts.

You’ll see all the pages on the left. But do they automatically show on your homepage as well? No, It’s only here. It doesn’t pull any content to your actual page. It just gives you this way of being able to go in here and view it, then decide how you want to interact with this. If you want to share it back to your page then yeah, you can share it back to your page if you want to. But no, it doesn’t automatically show up. You’re the only one that can see this particular feed.

This is definitely different than like a personal feed…Right? Yes, this is only from your page. Because the main thing you can see is this: when I write that comment it’s got that image there, on my personal page. Let me go to my personal profile here. This is another way that you can do this, but you can see when I like, comment or share on something there is a little drop down that has got my picture. But if I’m just in my news feed and I see something that’s like “woah! whats that dude?” You don’t know what you’re going to see in my news feed! That’s why I don’t share. Here we go, here’s a good one Tuesday Tip. If I want to share this to a different page I can drop down here and it will let me like, comment and share as different things. Right now this just because it’s my page.

Let me see about something else that’s more….it’s going to vary I mean it depends on how the person posted it too. Sometimes I can change who I am when I’m looking at this. But any time you see the dropdown, then I can pick the different page if It’s in my own news feed.

But yeah that’s why you go around and you like all the other pages, the other content that you want to follow. And then this is kind of the simplest way. Now I got a quick easy news feed I can just scroll through. I’m doing everything on my page at that point. I hope that wasn’t too confusing.

I got it.

Good deal. We’ll send you guys out some ideas on the Facebook cover videos that we’ll share with you so we can see what you guys think of that. Might be a service that we do, I have a couple ideas for that. But that’s really it. That’s what I wanted to cover today and kind of get you guys on the right track, kind of know what are really the most important things for you to be doing for outreach. If you have other questions, we’re kind of like #askteamdude. Just ask us whatever questions you have. Shoot us an e-mail, if you haven’t liked our page yet, let’s send our page out to everybody Megan! Make sure that everybody likes our page. I post regular content, different tips that kind of cover all different industries and types from time to time so you can catch those tips and ideas, as well as our monthly marketing message which we send out every month. So if you’re not on that list and you’d like to be, let us know and we can add you to that.

The Not-So-Secret Secrets that Google Wants You to Know

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 06:00:00 GMT

What I want to share with you today is an excerpt from my presentation”Grow Your Business Online”. I call it The Not-So-Secret Secrets that Google Wants You to Know About in regards to what you need to do with your website. Eighty percent of this presentation came directly from Google and the SBDC (Small Business Development Center) which is a partner with Google on helping local businesses get their Google Maps listings updated, and that’s something that we do through the SBDC.

So as a part of that training program, they give you this presentation and say, “Here’s what you need to go and share with businesses.” So this is not based on my interpretation– this is directly from Google, the source.

The first thing you have to do on your website, and anything you do online, is answer the question, “How do you actually measure success?” A lot of times we think, “Oh, how many friends do I have? How many likes did I get? How much website traffic? Is the traffic going up? Going down?” That’s interesting information sometimes, but that’s not the end goal. Traffic isn’t the goal. Customers is the goal. So we always have to remember, we want qualified prospects.

Everything that we do needs to be built around that. How do I get a qualified prospect? And is the site– is the social– is whatever we’re doing, moving us towards getting a qualified prospect? These things might be interesting information in terms of traffic and subscribers and friend and followers in our total reach, but it’s not necessarily the goal of what we’re trying to accomplish. So this is a good reminder on that.

Google has really taken a mobile-first strategy in how they’re doing everything now, because so much of the search has transitioned away from desktop to mobile. At the point that someone has a need, they grab the phone, they do the search. Google calls it a “zero moment of truth.” How do you show up at that particular moment and those split-second decisions that people are making about your business?

These are just some stats that Google has. 80% of consumers use the search engine when looking for information about local businesses, 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. So in terms of local business, what’s happening on mobile is critically important. And how your business will show up on that mobile device really matters, and we’ll talk about this, tips that they have for that.

Below is a typical search query– I’m using a bakery for this example. Someone puts in their search query and then this comes up. You can see has got the little word, “Ad” next to it. They used to be only on the top and on the side, but now they’re only on the top now and on the bottom, so Google has actually made fewer ad options. You used to be able to spend a little less, by choosing to get an ad on the side, but now that’s completely gone, so you have to compete with the top three spots and try to get there as an advertiser. But we can adjust that in the algorithms in our bidding, so you don’t have to advertise. These are organic search results, so this is just the website, but this is the Google Maps listing over on the right.

So how do you get there? If you don’t have the listing, or you don’t have a login to go in and change it, then this is what you need to do: If you go to www.gybo.com/business, you can do a search for your business. Google will probably find it, and then give you the chance then to claim that listing. The way you claim it is through a verification, which is usually a direct phone call. It will call your business phone number, and as long as someone can answer that, it’ll give you a six-digit code. You type in the code, and you’re verified.

If you can’t do it via phone, you can do it via a postcard that Google will send to you through the mail. So you’ll say, “Send me the postcard.” which will take about a week to get to you, and then you can go back in, type in the verification code, and you’re verified. Once you do that, the information you want to appear is going to show up there. A lot of times, the information is out there, but it’s the wrong information because you haven’t claimed the listing and haven’t updated it. So that’s verification.

So what can you do once you’re verified? You can edit all the info. You can add your hours and put in special hours if you’re taking off holidays and things like that. The photos are really a big piece of this. People really look at the pictures. I don’t know why. For some businesses it makes sense, but for other businesses where you would think they wouldn’t care about seeing the pictures. But there’s a dashboard in the back of analytics for this that shows how many people view pictures, how many people got directions, how many people made a call. It’s all tracked in the back end of this. Updating the pictures makes it more relevant. It also helps improve the search results, because Google sees that you have a more updated listing than your competition, then Google will give you a little more preference.

Trust Potential – The Fourth M – Measurement

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 06:00:00 GMT

Hello, welcome to this month’s monthly marketing message. Something just for you this month. We’ve been doing our series on trust potential, talking about the four M’s of trust potential. Those are the message, the medium, the moment, and the measurement.

Today, we’re talking about the fourth M, the measurement. What should we measure? I’m talking about three basic areas that are areas that we should be measuring.

First, is our total online presence, our engagement with our prospects and our clients, and the results that really matter. Let’s measure our total online presence. What is that? That basically is the number of likes, the traffic that we have on our website, how many emails in our database. That’s a general idea of our total online reach. Now, those numbers in some cases are more vanity numbers than actual numbers that mean anything, but they’re numbers that we should still be looking at and measuring.

Are we increasing our followers on our Facebook page, for example. Are they the right followers? Is it the right target audience that we’re reaching in that as well? Pure number of likes on a Facebook page aren’t going to help you a lot, but the number of likes with the right audience that you’re reaching, that’s a whole different story.

That gets us to the next point, which is measuring engagement. When you know you’re reaching the right audience, you’ll be able to see that in engagement. In general, what is engagement? The most basic way we look at it in Facebook terms, are numbers of likes, comments, and shares. Are you getting likes, comments, and shares of the content that you’re posting on Facebook? That’s a really good way just to measure a basic level of engagement. That the audience, number one, appreciates the content that you’re putting out, that they like the content that you’re putting out, and they’re willing to actually go to the next step of sharing it. That’s when you’re connecting the right message with the right audience. That’s exactly where you want to be in engagement.

On your website, this might be downloading a pdf, or a report. It might be filling in an opt-in form. On your website, it might also be how long do they spend on your site? Are they spending 10 seconds on your website, or are they spending 30 minutes on your website, and what pages are they looking at? Are they watching videos and are you counting the video views? Those are things that you can measure in terms of engagement. What this tells you, engagement tells you is that you are nurturing your audience. You’re nurturing your prospects, your nurturing your potential clients, and that’s why engagement is important to measure.

Ultimately, what should we be measuring? Our number one goal for our website or online presence for all of this is to generate qualified and quality leads for our businesses. That’s the end result that we’re all after. That absolutely needs to be measured across your online presence. How many qualified leads have we generated? What was the source of those qualified leads? Ultimately, how many sales did we make?

What is it that we actually sold in terms of dollars, in terms of number of clients, and how’s that impacting our bottom line? Then, what did it cost us to not only acquire the lead, so there’s cost for the lead, but then what did it ultimately cost us to get a new client? In understanding your cost per client, acquisition cost is really super important to measure as well.

Those are the things I wanted to share with you here this month in the monthly marketing message. The fourth M of trust potential. The three previous ones are in the blog post and videos that we previously did. If you haven’t seen those yet, go back and watch those so you can get a better idea of what trust potential is all about. Hopefully, these are some basic guidelines and some direction that you can have in developing your marketing presence, whether that’s online, or even in person, all of the same things inside of trust potential apply to either one. Thank you and we’ll talk to you again next month.

Trust Potential – The Third M = Moment

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 06:00:00 GMT

Peter Brissette here, and I’ve got something for you again this month in our monthly marketing message.

We’ve been talking about trust potential. Trust potential is the basic idea that any marketing or advertising that you do has an inherent amount of trust built into it, depending on a number of factors in four key areas. The first area is the message. What is the message that you’re delivering and saying to your prospects?

The second is the medium. What is the delivery system that’s delivering this message? Is it a video? Is it a newspaper ad? Is it a text message or an email? How is this message being delivered to them?

Then the third one that I want to talk about today is the moment. That is when that message via that medium is delivered. It’s very important to understand that as you’re planning your marketing, you need to include when you want to deliver specific messages.

When can you decide, and how do you decide when is the right time for a specific message?

Ultimately, this is a question that you have to ask your prospect. A simple way to do this is to break it down by the need. Mr. Customer, is this a current need? As in, you need this immediately right now. You have a problem that you need to solve, and I have the solution for you, and you need to do it today. Versus, this is something I know that’s a coming need, and I’m interested in this area, and I want to get more information, but it’s not an immediate need, it’s a future need. That basic criteria right there can tell you which message you need to deliver, and when you need to deliver that message, based on that.

All this data is tied up within your current customer base in clients that you have and understanding when was the right time to deliver a specific message to them? There’s a whole other avenue that you can go deeper into this, and there are some really interesting things that are happening because all this data about us, each of us, is anonymous data that’s floating around out there, and there are all different sources of this data that’s being pulled in and being used to send us marketing messages.

It’s basically the idea of, what was the movie called Minority Report with Tom Cruise? And in that movie, there were some scenes where you would walk into a store, and it would scan your eyeball. The scanner would scan your eyeball, and as soon as it scanned your eyeball, it identified who you were and began to deliver you specific messages based on who you were because it understood your interests and what you liked, and your purchases that you have made.

We’re starting to see this level of technology that’s showing up in some of our advertising platforms, platforms like Facebook where we can target specific behaviors, not just demographics, and so that is really the future of marketing, and it’s kind of here today in terms of really thinking about how you can deliver your message at the right moment to the right audience.

So there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into that. In order to get the ultimate goal, which is a conversion, and what is a conversion? A conversion means I’ve taken you from a suspect to a prospect, to a potential customer and eventually to a converting client who is actually making a purchase.

That is the third M in trust potential, and next month we’ll be talking about M number four, which is the measurement. How do we measure the results of our marketing campaigns inside of trust potential, and we’ll wrap it up with that message.

That is your monthly marketing message for this month. I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave your comments. It is nice and caring to share, like comment as well on the video where we might see this. Thank you very much and have a great month.

Trust Potential – Medium – The Monthly Marketing Message

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 06:00:00 GMT

I have been talking the last couple months about trust potential. Trust potential is that basic idea that everything that you do in your marketing has a certain inherent built-in trust factor.

There are four main criteria that we look at inside of trust potential, that’s the Message, the Medium, the Moment and the Measurement. Last month, you can check out the video we did that talks about the Message. This month, I want to talk to you about the Medium.

The Medium actually matters. So what is the Medium? The Medium is how the message is delivered. For example, you could do an ad on a commercial on TV. You can run ads in the newspaper. Maybe you send out a postcard or letter in the mail. There’s a number of different ways that you can deliver the Medium. That might be email messages or text messages. It could even be your website or a Facebook post. All these different forms of Medium that are out there are ways to deliver your message, but are they all trusted the same? The fact is they’re not.

Nielsen does a study every couple of years and measures consumers’ trust in advertising and they look all these different factors and ask people how much they trust certain aspects of marketing messages. For example, an email message that you signed up for is actually only trusted 50% of the time. I find that very interesting. Text messages are not trusted all the time, even if you signed up to receive text messages from a company. Then what we find is, there’s really just a couple that are trusted the most. So what are the most trusted forms of marketing and advertising? Well, first of all, it’s one that you might not think of as a Medium for your business in terms of delivering a marketing message, but the number one most trusted is actual personal referrals. That means somebody who has engaged with your business before, telling someone else about your business.

Now, this is a really overlooked piece of marketing, I think, in most businesses. It’s really about how well of a job you did working with your existing clients to help them in their business or help them however it is that you deliver your service. The better you do that, the more they’re going to tell other people about you. That planning in your business becomes really critical on how well we deliver, actual impact how well we can get more customers, because our existing customers are always going to refer more business to us. So, that’s the number one that’s most trusted. It’s like over 90%, 96%, 98% most trusted. People trust those personal recommendations.

The second most trusted form of Medium, if you will, is reviews posted on third-party review sites. these are reviews that your clients give you to say how good a job you did. It’s not quite the same as a referral, but it’s really, really close. There are different studies out there, but basically online reviews are trusted about 70% or so. It varies depending on the study that you look at. The key that’s important there is that if you’re not getting online reviews, you’re missing out on a real big opportunity to help get new clients into your business, because people do trust those reviews. Reviews can make all your other marketing better. So, two things, one, where are these reviews? These reviews are on Google, they’re on Facebook and they’re on Yelp. Those are the most common places that we see for most businesses. And then whatever your particular niche is. A lot of my clients are in assisted living, so sites like caring.com are really important sites for collecting and showing reviews because that’s a very prominent site that is used by families who are looking for communities for their loved ones. That piece is really important.

The second reason why this really makes the rest of your marketing so much more powerful and so much more effective is a relating sample that I’m seeing from somebody named Tom Shane. You’ve probably heard Tom Shane in his radio advertisements. Tom Shane with the Shane Company. “You now have a friend in the diamond business.” (That was not a very good impersonation!) One of his ads that I really, really like that he talks about, in particular he’s talking about engagement rings and where to get those and why you should pick him. He references a site, I can’t remember the name right now, but he references a site that a lot of people use who are about to get engaged or getting married. He says, “Go check out our reviews on that site.” They have literally thousands of them on there. But what a powerful message. Say, “Hey, I’m saying I’m a great company, but don’t take my word for it. Go take the word of all these people that have tried us and used us and actually posted their name and their information and said, “Yes, I put a stamp of approval on this company.” That’s really, really powerful.

When you do send out a postcard you can say, “Hey, we think we’re pretty great, but you know what? You don’t have to believe what I’m saying in this postcard because you only trust this 30% of the time. Go check out my reviews.” So, now you’ve got a postcard with only reviews combined together and you put together a really powerful way to get your message out there. The message is important. The Medium and how you deliver that message is also important. If you need help with your online reviews, if we’re not already doing that for you, we’d love to talk to you about that.

So, that’s this month’s marketing message. Hope you enjoyed it. Please like, comment and share. Sharing is caring. We appreciate that. Thank you and have a great month.

Trust Potential – The first M = Message

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:00:00 GMT

Peter Brissette here at Digital Marketing Dude. Have a message for you this month in our monthly marketing message. I want to go back and talk a little bit about a concept called “trust potential”, and focus on one small aspect of the trust potential.

What is trust potential? Trust potential is the idea that each area of your marketing has a built-in amount of trust inherent to it. It recognizes that not all marketing has the same impact, because not all marketing is trusted to the same degree by the consumer. It’s a framework that I came up with to better understand what parts of your marketing will be the most effective, how can you increase your conversions, and how do get a better return on your marketing dollar.

I’ve identified four main areas of trust potential, that I call the four “M’s”. Those four are: message, medium, moment and measurement.

What I want to talk about today is just the message. Now, message could be broken down into a lot of different areas, but I just want to keep it simple today and talk about three main elements of the message.

Number one, who’s the message for? This brings up the conversation that you need to be thinking about of, who’s my target audience? What is that persona? What are the demographics of that market that I’m trying to go after? Do you really understand them? This could even be your niche. A lot of times, early on businesses will focus too broadly, rather than going really narrow. Being narrow helps you actually grow faster than if you’re too broad. Who’s the message for?

Secondly, why do they want to hear it from you? I ask that question that way because you need to think about what is the problem I’m solving for this target audience? What is the problem that they have that I solve? Are you communicating that in the message? Do they understand that you know their problem, that you know exactly what their challenges and issues are, so that you’re able to definitely help them? It helps you to connect with your target audience better.

The third thing I want to talk about is, how are you at least a little bit different in your messaging than your competition? If you look like, sound like, act like your competition, it’s kind of like the saying, “It looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, must be a duck.” Right? How are you at least a little bit different? How have you done something that makes you stand out a little bit from your competition? I have great service. I have the best service. That’s too generic. Anybody can say that. How are you actually different from your competition? Think about that and include that in your marketing messages. When you go to work on your next advertising campaign, stop– think about the message, who is it for? What is the problem that I am solving? Am I communicating that? What makes you at least a little bit different from your competition? If you do those things you’ll get much better results from your marketing efforts.

I’d like you to take some action on this. If you have a message that you want me to look at, just put it in the comments, wherever you find this video, and I’ll be happy to respond to that. I’ll give you some thoughts and ideas on how to improve that message. Please like, comment, and share this video. I really would appreciate that.

That’s been this month’s marketing message. The first M of the four Ms in the trust potential framework. Thank you, and have an awesome month.

What is “HTTPS” and Why Does it Matter?

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 07:00:00 GMT

What I want to talk about this month is “https”. What does the “S” stand for in websites? I’m going to show you a couple things here. I’m going to bring up my browser and share my screen with you, and talk about https and something that Google is doing, and what can we do about it, and what should we do about it?

Back in September, Google published this blog post, talking about their browser, Google Chrome.

Right now, when you go to a website that doesn’t have https, which means that it’s not encrypted, and this is really important for if you have a form or a login, or you’re putting any kind of personal information on a website. What it does is encrypts that data, and helps protect it, and keep it from other people getting ahold of it through the “interwebs.” What Google is doing is going to display websites as either being secure or not secure. I’ll show you an example of what secure looks like:

We have https on the DM Dude website, and you can see here, this is what it looks like in Google Chrome. It shows up saying it is secure– it’s got the https. Now, right now, as Chrome Version 53, it just shows an “i” next to the name if it’s not secure. So here’s a website denver.org. Now this is not a site where you have to put information in, other than your email to sign up for an email list, or to do a search. So it’s not necessarily necessary to be encrypted, but you got the “i” here. When I click on this I, it shows here that this site is not secure. That can make you a little bit nervous about that.

Now what they’re going to, this month, so when they do the Version 56 of Chrome, which should be launched some time in January, it’s going to actually say, “Not secure,” next to that. Instead of just the “i”, it’s actually going to say, “Not secure,” but eventually, it’s going to actually show up in red, with kind of this warning sign. “Warning. Warning. Not secure. It’s not secure.” What should you do about this? All right. Here’s my take on this. Number one: Google is kind of pushing the issue with secure. Not 100% sure why they’re trying to push this.

It’s honestly, in reality, not that big of a deal. Most websites are not capturing a bunch of data, they’re just information websites; they don’t really need to be secure. But Google is hinting at providing more search engine juice, or improving the search ranking of sites that have https. We don’t know if they’re actually doing that, or how much it will impact your search results. It’s really hard to say, but Google is definitely pushing the issue. The cost of this is maybe a couple hundred dollars a year to have it on your domain, to make it https, so if it’s not a big press for budget-wise, I would say go ahead and do it.

But when do you need to do it? Is it something, “Oh, I got to do this immediately. I got to drop everything and do this right now?” No. I would say, you don’t need to drop everything and do this right now. What we’re recommending for our clients and customers is, if we’re able to do it pretty easily right now and they’re fine with it, we’ll go ahead and upgrade them to the https. But in general, we’re kind of watching it. Is it absolutely necessary for every single website? The fact is, no. It’s not. Google’s pushing it, but the challenge really is that people are going to get the impression that a website is not safe because of what they’re going to put in Google Chrome.

It’s really not necessarily true, but if it’s a concern for you and your website, and depending on how vital your website is to your business (which for a lot of business owners it is) then it’s kind of a simple process to get it set up and have it done, and then you won’t have to worry about it.

This is the big thing I wanted to share with you here in our Monthly Marketing Message for January. Just kind of one of the latest, greatest things that’s come upon us, and changes that Google is making, and just to make you aware of that.

I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions about it, and you’d like to have some input on what kind of questions you like us to answer, just put that in the comments below this video. Whether that’s on YouTube, or Facebook, or wherever you might find it.

Thank you, and have a great month.

The 4 M’s of Trust Potential

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 07:00:00 GMT

Hello everybody. Peter Brissette here. In this month’s marketing message I want to talk about trust potential. We’ll talk about the 4 M’s of trust potential. What is trust potential? Basically it’s the idea that every form of marketing or advertising that you do has within it a level of trustworthiness built into it. Some are easier to trust and some are not. There’s basically 4 M’s that we use to identify that so that we can make sure that we’re getting the most out of any marketing or advertising that we do. The 4 M’s are this: The Message, the Medium, the Moment, and the Measurement.

I’ll give you a quick highlight of each of them:

The Message. Obviously what is it you’re saying? How are you communicating that? Is it words? Is it video? What is the primary message that you’re trying to convey and get across to the person that’s listening? What is your message? There is all kinds of research done about copyrighting and how to say things in a way that are going to appeal to people. The message is critically important. That’s one piece of the trustworthiness of a message, or a marketing message.

Then the Medium. How was it delivered? What is just a text? Was it in a video? Was it in a picture? Was it in a newspaper? Was it in an online advertising? What was the medium that was used to deliver the message to the individual? Was it an email? There are lots of different ways that these messages can get delivered to our target audience. That is a piece of the overall success or failure.

The next key point is the Moment. When did it reach them? Did it reach them when they wanted it or did it reach them at a time that was inconvenient? This is a very important piece of determining the success or failure of a marketing message.

Finally, Measurement. What is the measurement? Measurement is how did it do? We sent 100 of these messages via this medium at this moment. What was the result? What happened from that? That helps you determine how you need to do it differently in the future.

That’s a quick overview of the 4 M’s. We’ll dig into those over the next few months in talking about how the 4 M’s effect the trust potential of your marketing messages. Hopefully that will be something that will help you to improve your marketing messages in the coming year. Looking forward to it.

Thank you very much. Peter Brissette, out.

The Power of Online Reviews

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 06:00:00 GMT

Hello, Peter Brissette here, and I have a new video for you here this month. In this video, I want to talk about a new survey that was just completed in September from a company called Bright Local.

It is a local consumer search survey, focused on how consumers are using reviews right now, and their thoughts about reviews. I’m going to share my screen here, so that I can point out to you some of the highlights of the survey results.

One of the first stats is that eighty-four percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Now I think this is significant because a personal recommendation, a referral, is the number one, most-trusted form of advertising; the most-trusted form of marketing that there is. Nothing is trusted more than that. Based on this question that was asked, and how the survey responders responded, they’re saying that most people, eighty-four percent, trust reviews just as much as that personal recommendation. That’s a big deal in my mind, because there is so much trust given to a personal recommendation. I think this is significant to the fact that reviews are very highly trusted in general. It’s one of the most important activities that you can do to help demonstrate to someone who doesn’t know your business; that’s not familiar with your business; on what kind of company you are; that you are a trustworthy business; that you can be trusted; and your reviews are a reflection and demonstration of that. This is a significant statistic.

The next one that I thought was interesting is that seven out of ten consumers will leave a review for a business if they are asked to. This is our mantra when we talk about our ReviewMeMarketing system to clients. There are really two things that you have to do: First, you must make it easy for them. So part of our tools and training that we do is to help you be able to do that; make it easy for your customers and clients to leave you reviews.

Secondly, you must ask (for reviews), and you have to systemize the way that you ask. This is pretty evident, and I totally concur with the stats that they’ve found. I’ve found this to be pretty similar, that most people will leave reviews if they’re asked, and if you make it easy for them to do that. Do you want more reviews for your business? You’ve just got to ask.

Next, we see that “Ninety percent of consumers read less than ten reviews before forming an opinion about business.” There are a couple of different ways you can look at this: You can look at like “Well, I’ve only got five reviews, so I don’t need anymore. Done. I don’t need any more than that.” But another stat we’re going to share here says that’s not the case, that, if you just have five, and never get any more, it’s not going to be as effective for you. It does mean that the reviews that they do see, the reviews that they do read, doesn’t require more than ten for them to form an opinion about your business. So if all you have is a few reviews, and a couple of those are bad, that’s going to be a challenge for people to trust your business. However, if you do have some bad reviews, but they’re from awhile back, then that’s not as big of an issue. We’re going to talk more about that.

Fifty-four percent of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews. You want to get more reviews (traffic) to your website to your website, have positive reviews. People are going to check out your website, because they want to learn more about your business. They’re obviously interested. They’ve trusted you enough to take the next step, to try to look more into your business to find out if you have the service or the product, whatever it is that they happen to be looking for.

Seventy-three percent of consumers think that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant. We were just talking about that, about the number of reviews that people look at, less than ten, typically, when making a decision about a business. But they also look at how old the reviews are. Are these reviews recent or not? If they’re recent, within the last ninety days, they’re going to have the most impact, be the most relevant. If you just got a negative review, it is a challenge. The best thing you can do? Get ten more positive reviews as quickly as you possibly can. Build up those positive reviews. As time goes by, and as the quantity goes by, it’s going to move that negative review down the spectrum and cause it to have less impact on how people are making decisions about your business.

Seventy-four percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. Again, most people trust online reviews, and it helps people trust local businesses more for the most part.

Fifty-eight percent of consumers say that the star rating of a business is the most important. That overall average, that overall aggregated score that you have for your business, whether that’s three stars, three and a half, four, four and a half, five, that overall star rating is that quick glance, that zero moment of truth, “Z-mot”, as Google calls it, that zero moment of truth, where I have an instant to try to make a decision about your business, and one of the quick ways that people do that is looking at that overall star rating that your business has.

That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Just some quick stats from recent surveys on how people are interacting with reviews. It just tells me that reviews are continuing to be more and more relevant, that you need to be working on your online reviews, and we’re here to help you do that. If we can serve you in any way, please reach out to us and let us know. Thank you, and go Broncos!

Like what you see? We like reviews too. Click here and tell us what you think.

What is the Trust Economy?

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 06:00:00 GMT

A couple months ago I did a video called “What is Trust?” Trust is a major theme for us here at DMD Consulting. Today, I want to talk about the trust economy.

What is the trust economy? It has been popularized by a woman by the name of Rachel Botsman, who a few years ago wrote a book and did a TED talk. The title of her TED talk was “The Currency of the New Economy is Trust.” (The TedTalk video is at the end of this post if you want to check it out.)

What does she mean by that? The best way to explain this is to give you an example:

There’s a website called Airbnb.com. You’ve probably heard of it. On Airbnb.com, I can rent out a room in my house to a guest. Now, how does someone decide if they want to rent your room or someone’s room down the street? It’s really about the online reviews. What do the reviews of people who have stayed there before say? What have they said about you? What was the experience like? What was the relationship like to the person that owned the home? Airbnb is being popularized all over the world. Cities like Paris, San Francisco, New York, even places in Colorado.

There’re a few key aspects, I think, that are important about the trust economy.

First of all, that it’s driven by technology. The fact that we have this great technology now and we’re able to connect this way is really driving the whole trust economy.

Second, we realize is that the trust is contextual. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, just because I trust to rent a room from you on Airbnb doesn’t mean I trust you to put together a piece of furniture for me from IKEA.

Finally, learn that it’s based on collaborative consumption. Sites like Airbnb.com and companies like Uber, where I’m able to take my vehicle and able to consume the use of that vehicle with others. It’s a collaboration of consumption.

What do we learn from the trust economy?

It’s Not About the Technology:

A couple things that we learn from this, that it’s not just about the technology. The technology is just a tool that helps people connect and build relationships. Ultimately, it’s still about building relationships. That will never change.

Reputation has Value:

We also learn that your reputation has value, real, strong, actual dollar and cents value.

Reputation is Online:

We also learn that your reputation shows up in many different places. One of those places is online reviews on third-party review sites. What is your reputation online? What does it look like?

It’s the whole reason why we developed Review Me Marketing, to help you be able to take control of your online reputation and to build it and grow it and protect it.

If you’re using Review Me Marketing, congratulations. You are taking charge of it.

If you’re not sure about it, or maybe you’re not getting the most out of it and you’re not getting the most out of your online reviews, then let’s have a conversation and come up with some strategies and ideas that help you build your online reviews and help you build the value of your reputation so that people will trust you faster and be willing to take the next step with you so your business will grow and you’ll grow your clients and your customers easier, faster, and better than before. Thank you.

Google Adwords New Expanded Ads – What is the Difference?

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 06:00:00 GMT

On this month’s marketing update I want talk to you about Google AdWords. Google AdWords has recently made a lot of changes to the AdWords platform and to the kind of results that you will see in searches. I’m going to share my screen with you here so that we can look at some different options. One of the first things that they did recently was actually move all the right-side ads. Before, whenever you did a search in Google you would always get ad results on the top and also on the right, but as you can see that’s no longer happening.

If you do a search for plumbers in Broomfield, Colorado you will see the ads that come up. Four ads that will show up most of the time. Before, you only used to have three and then you had all the ads on the right. Now there are four ads there. And if it’s a local search you also get the Google Maps; what we call a local 3-pack. There used to be seven businesses listed, but now it’s only three. Just a note on this, the biggest impact I’m getting in here is your reviews. As you can see, 47 reviews, 38 reviews, 5 reviews, 4.7 overall, 4.6, 4.2. That’s a great example of how much impact your reviews can have on your listings.

The other thing about these ads is that the ads have changed dramatically. It looks like a lot of these have made their updates to their ads. For 15 years, Google AdWords has been set a very specific way for the number of characters in the ad. This is what this ad looked like before, but by being able to add more text to it, now it looks like this. You get a much better URL, your website address, so you can do more with it. You’ve got two 30-character headlines which lets you build out much better headlines, and instead of a total of 70 characters for your description, you have 80 characters for your description. Overall, with everything that they’ve done, it’s more than a 40% increase in the amount of text that you’re able to add to an ad.

If we run AdWords for you, we’ve already updated these ads and added the new expanded ads. We’re keeping the old ones as long as they’ll let us keep those, but we’ve added totally brand new ones as well. That’s what you’re seeing now in search results. Just so you know, all the ads on the right are gone, you’re going to get three to four ads here, and depending on your search and type of search and competition and all that this is going to vary on one, two, three, or four text ads. If it’s local search, you’re only going to see three businesses listed in that, and the biggest impact that I see is the number and quality of your reviews. Next time you’re searching, check that out.

We’re starting to see those ads roll out for a lot of businesses now. If you have any questions about that, we would be happy to talk to you about that or any other kind of digital online marketing. We’re here to support you, answer your questions, and if we can help you in boosting your reviews then let’s have that conversation, talk about that as well. That’s it for this month. Thank you for being a client of DMD Consulting or Review Me Marketing and we look forward to serving you.

What is Trust?

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 21:38:48 GMT

My topic today is “What is Trust?” Now the most basic definition of trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something.

When we’re talking about businesses, in my opinion, it is about trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is 3 things: 1. Are you competent, 2. Are you honest, and 3. Are you reliable? Those are the things that people are looking for. They want to know that you can do the job– that you have the ability to do it. That you’re going to deal with them honestly. That you’re not trying to cheat or rip them off. You are going to do what you said you were going to do. You are going to be reliable in delivering your product or service.

I believe that trust is your most important asset. There is no asset that you have in your business that’s more important than that.

I want to talk about 3 areas of trust.

Your potential clients

Your current clients

Your Team

First of all, your potential clients. Why should your potential clients trust you over your competitors? That’s why online reviews are so important. It helps people to see why they should pick you versus their competitors and why we work so hard to try to help you get more online reviews.

Second your current clients. It is important to maintain the trust that you’ve already established with them. That’s how you deliver your product, deliver your service. Whatever that is, continuing to do that at a very high level and doing a good job, you are maintaining and keeping that trust with those clients. You know what happens when you do that? They refer more clients to you.

Thirdly, trust with your team, with your staff, your stakeholders, your employees. That’s hugely important, and that comes down to, as the leader of your organization, how do you deal with your team in maintaining and keeping that trust? Really hugely important in how they are delivering your product and your service to your customers. Those are 3 areas I wanted to mention to you today.

Finally, why do we have to ask for a recommendation from somebody else?

When I’m looking for a business, I might look online. I might look in an advertisement, and yet I’m not making a decision about that business. I may wind asking a third party person for a recommendation for somebody in that particular industry. For example, if I’m looking for a plumber, I can look online, I can listen to the ads, and I can respond to that. Yet sometimes I might go a step further and ask a few people I know if they have tried a plumber.

Sometimes it’s so hard to pick and decide on who should use because their website doesn’t really tell me why I should use them. Their online reviews might only be few and far between, so that’s not going to tell me the story either. Now I have to ask for a recommendation. If you really want to set yourself apart, keep working on reviews, so that you can build trust and provide that to your potential clients, your existing clients, as well as to your team.

If you have questions or anything you’d like me to talk about in these videos, please let me know.

Consumer Trust in Advertising

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 21:37:32 GMT

How do you build trust with potential clients and prospects faster and easier?

I want to share some stats from Nielson’s Trust in Advertising Survey that they do every couple years. Let me just share my screen, here with you, so that you can see this. What we have here, I just want to highlight there … One quick area, here, and it’s what you would call earned trust versus something that you actually owned.

Earned trust is what other people are saying about you. The trust potential, the trust that people have in forms of advertising, is what Neilson is measuring. The first one we have, here, is this recommendations from people I know. That’s trusted 83% of the time. It’s still a good idea to make sure that you’re helping your clients work for you and that’s by obviously doing a really good job for them.

Encouraging them to do so and finding ways to encourage your clients to refer you. It’s still a very solid way, and a great way to get a return on your investment. The number two most trusted form of advertising is consumer opinions posted online.

What other clients, your clients say about you in online reviews is trusted 66% of the time. That’s actually down a little bit, it was high as 72% for a little while. Actually, I think it was high as 79% as a trust factor. It’s down from what it was a couple years ago, because a lot of people try to scam the review systems.

It’s worth spending time, trying to collect and get more reviews, because they are so trusted … And that’s going to help you with people finding you, first of all, in search results, and any other form of advertising that you’re doing is going to be more powerful and more impactful … Because of the reviews that get posted online.

Of course, editorial content. You get a news story about you, and your business that’s hopefully a positive news story. That’s trusted just as much as consumer opinions posted online. Those are earned recommendations. Earned referrals that when you do a good job, your clients and other people are going to say good things about you.

Some of the part that you own, which is your website, which is your brand, if you sponsor an event … And the emails that you send out, those have different trust factors, as well. Your website’s trusted at 70% of the time. Brand sponsorship, 61%, the emails that your clients if they said they signed up for them, are trusted 56% of the time.

Something to think about in terms of email making sure that you’re creating content in messaging that helps to build trust with … With your prospects and your clients. That’s just a quick survey, this is from Neilson’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey that they did in 2015, and comparing to the results that they had from 2013.

Hopefully, that’s helpful information for you to be working on your reviews … So if there’s anything we can help you with, you have questions about how to get more reviews than you’re getting right now, please reach out to us. We’re glad to talk to you about that, and help you work on that.

Thank you very much again, for being a client, DMD Consulting and Review Me Marketing, and we’re here to serve you and your marketing needs. Hope you have a great day, and great month until our center, and video for next month. Thanks.

Digital Marketing Dude Monthly Marketing Message

Top 3 Website Mistakes Healthcare Providers Make

and how to fix them!

AI Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

Detailed Outline

1. Introduction to the Topic

2. The Core Problem

3. What Visitors Actually Want

4. Why the Website Matters

5. The Three Main Mistakes

6. Mistake #1: Unclear Messaging

What it looks like

Why it happens

Why it hurts

Main principles

Suggested solutions

7. Mistake #2: No Clear Call to Action

What it looks like

Why it happens

Why it hurts

Main principles

Suggested solutions

8. Mistake #3: Outdated or Cluttered Design That Hurts Trust

What it looks like

Why it happens

Why it hurts

Main principles

Suggested solutions

9. What a Better Homepage Should Include

10. Final Recap

11. Offer and Next Step

12. Closing

Conclusion

Biggest Mistakes that Authors Makes with Their Domains and Websites

Stop Losing Your Readers Before They Even Find You: The Domain Dilemma

The Frustration of Being "Taken"

The Simple Fix for "Occupied" Names

From Traffic to Trust

Is Your Website Truly Ready for Readers?

How Your Website Is Inviting Spam (And How to Stop It)

Google to Allow Anonymous Reviews

Facebook Profiles vs. Professional Mode vs. Business Pages: What’s Best for You and Why It Matters

How Your Facebook Setup Impacts Trust Potential

�� 1. Message – Are You Communicating Clearly and Credibly?

�� 2. Medium – Are You Using the Right Tool for the Job?

⏱ 3. Moment – Is Your Approach Timely and Aligned with Audience Expectations?

�� 4. Measurement – Can You Track What Builds Trust and Converts?

Facebook Profiles vs. Professional Mode vs. Business Pages: What’s Best for You and Why It Matters

�� Hey There – Let’s Clear Up the Confusion

�� The 3 Facebook Setup Options (and How They Work)

✅ 1. Personal Profile (Standard Mode)

⚙️ 2. Professional Mode (Upgraded Personal Profile)

�� 3. Facebook Business Page

�� Compare at a Glance: Which Facebook Setup Does What?

�� Building Trust Online Starts with the Right Strategy

�� 1. Message – Are You Showing Up Clearly and Professionally?

�� 2. Medium – Are You Using the Right Format for Your Goals?

⏱ 3. Moment – What Stage Are You At in Your Business?

�� 4. Measurement – Can You Track What’s Working?

�� Strategy = Your Next Smart Move

�� Tools + Tips to Support Your Plan

�� Final Thoughts: Make Your Facebook Presence Count

The SEO Blueprint: Laying the Groundwork for On-Site and Off-Site Success

��️ On-Site SEO: Building Your Website's Foundation

1. Content That Counts

2. Smart Site Structure

3. Metadata and Alt Text

4. Video Content

5. Sitemap & Analytics

�� Off-Site SEO: Driving Traffic and Building Authority

1. Link Building 101

2. Local Listings & Citations

3. Scaling with AI (Yes, Really)

�� Wrapping It All Up: Start with What You Control

�� Ready to Build Your SEO Foundation?

How to setup a lead magnet to capture emails on Wix Website with Mailchimp

Christine Gregory - March 05

Turn Your Talks into Income: Build a Backend System with systeme.io

Mastering the Marketing A’s: Understanding Your Audience for Better Results

The Foundation of Effective Marketing

The Key to Engagement