With the growing number of social media outlets on the web, I thought it would be a great opportunity to build an online community out of the The Concord Conservatory of Music (CCM) website, www.concordconservatory.org.  I wanted to create an area for students as well as family and friends to experience all that the school has to offer.

In working with Bartlett Interactive, they were able to incorporate several features such as video streaming through a video sharing service, Vimeo, for watching music recitals, a Flickr photo gallery so anyone can upload photos of events and/or students playing instruments, as well as a link to the CCM Facebook page.

The ultimate goal is for everyone involved in The Concord Conservatory of Music to feel like part of a community. By sharing photos with one another, watching recitals, interacting on Facebook, and making the website more user friendly, we are able to make that happen.

If you would like to see how Bartlett Interactive built an online community for us, visit www.concordconservatory.org

Kate Yoder
Concord Conservatory of Music

Should I have an e-commerce website for my small business? That is a question I have been asked often lately. Many small businesses are realizing that having an e-commerce website is a perfect way for their current customers to shop with them and it can be an invaluable tool for reaching new customers.

We opened our retail store in May 2005 and literally the first day we opened our retail store our customers asked if we had a website. It was very quickly clear to us that a website was something our customers wanted. They loved our unique gifts for dog lovers and they wanted to shop with us from the comfort of their own home.

I contacted Harry Bartlett at Bartlett Interactive in late summer 2005 and I told him that we were interested in having an e-commerce website for our business. I was quick to tell Harry that we knew very little about websites and that I wasn’t sure what a website would require from us. The truth is I thought attaching a document to an email was a “big deal”.

The first thing Harry suggested was that we answer all the questions on Bartlett ’s E-Commerce Project Profile. The Project Profile covers the many aspects of having an e-commerce website from:

• What are your goals from having an e-commerce website?
• How will you market it?
• How will your site be maintained? Why is this important?

An e-commerce website takes a lot time to build and maintain and this can be expensive if you’re not doing it yourself.

Our e-commerce website, Agatha & Louise launched in June 2006 and Bartlett has helped our business grow in the four years since. Fletcher has been our primary contact. We’ve never actually met Fletcher face to face; all of our communication is via phone and internet.

A month ago we launched our second website, A&L Home and closed our brick and mortar retail store in Portland Maine ’s Old Port. We now have an office in the Old Port where we manage our two websites: www.agathaandlouise.com and www.aandlhome.com.

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.  --Bill Gates

Gray
Agatha & Louise

Gray and his wife Persephone own Agatha & Louise and A&L Home, two internet businesses based in Portland, Maine. From time to time he writes entries on the Grow Blog to discuss small business and to share what is involved with having an e-commerce website (or two websites).

As you probably know, keeping a blog updated, let alone Facebook and LinkedIn, is time consuming. Learn how easy it is to automatically publish your blog postings on Facebook and LinkedIn. This will help increase your visibility with search engines as well as your overall effectiveness online.

Harry Bartlett, Principal at Bartlett Interactive, recently gave seminars focused on practical solutions for developing web 2.0 intiatives including the use of social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), e-mail marketing and SEO. See the events below:

1. Tuning Web 2.0: Practical Solutions for Internet Marketing
National Guild: North East Chapter and Workshop - Springfield, MA

                      
                                          National Guild Seminar
                     Left to Right: Harry Bartlett, Kate Yoder, Eric Bachrach

2. Investing in a Website: How the Internet Can Grow Your Business
Concord Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch Seminar - Concord, MA
 
The goal of the seminars was to emphasize how to prioritize initiatives, use low cost methods and gauge results as online marketing options continue to increase.
 
Highlighted Statistics:

• E-mail provides the highest return on investment of the following marketing programs:

               House e-mail marketing: 25%
               Search Engine Optimization: 18%
               Paid Search: 16%
               Public Relations: 12%
               Direct Mail: 12%
               Print Advertising: 4%
               Online Ads (banners etc.): 3%
                                           -MarketingSherpa Search Benchmark Guide 2008
 

• Outbound vs. Inbound Cost Per Lead

              Outbound (trade shows, direct mail, print ads, TV/radio ads): $255/lead
              Inbound (SEO, blogging, social media, RSS,  public relations): $45/lead
                                                                                             -Hubspot
 

• “There was an estimated 276% increase in Facebook users ages 35-54
  during the last six months of 2008, bringing their total to almost 7
  million users."

                                                                                            - New York Times
 

Recently, one of our clients, the Oration Group, asked that we find a way to post their YouTube videos to their website automatically. There’s lots of ways to do this including using several widgets YouTube supplies or by rolling your own feed parser.

Integrating the video listings with the visual styling of this site was essential, which ruled out the branded YouTube widgets. There was also a very small budget, which eliminated custom coding a feed parser to display the information exactly as we wanted.

Our middle of the road solution delivers a lot of functionality, with a minimal investment. You’ll have an automatically updating feed of video on your site in no time. Here’s how:

1. Download the files (Courtesy of Feed for All)
2. Edit the following code to use your website urls

   <?php
   $XMLFILE = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/youryoutubeusernamehere/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&client=ytapi-youtube-profile";
   $TEMPLATE = "http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/sample-template.html";
   $MAXITEMS = "50";
   include("/rss2html.php");
   ?>

3. Paste the script above anywhere on your php enabled website
4. Upload the files to the base (root) folder of your website.

If you’d like to learn more about what this script can do, including many customization options, check out the full documentation.

Learn about 3 tools that can make your website more visually interesting, simply and inexpensively. Our screencast "How to Make Websites More Visual" discusses ThickBox, SlideShow Pro, and Flash video with numerous examples and pricing info.

It has been 4 months since the launch of Bartlett's website eValuator tool.
 
For those who have not seen it, it is a tool used to assess the health of a website based on different indicators, such as search engine rankings, technical issues, marketing components and analytics.
 
The results have proven the inevitable: most websites are not well optimized.
 
Since the launch, 72% of all websites entered into the eValuator received a score below 80 (out of 100) and 83% in the month of February. Some of the common problems for small websites are the lack of an xml sitemap, favicon, and rss feed.

• An xml sitemap is a map of your site that helps search engines better index the pages of your site.
• A favicon is a small icon in the corner of the URL bar and can increase branding recognition by have one. 
• An RSS feed is helpful for sharing news about your company, new additions to your website, and more. The more you share information, the more visible you will be online.

 
Check back for new posts on more eValuator statistics.
To try the eValuator out for yourself and see how your website measures up, click here.

Since companies have been using traditional offline marketing for decades, many of them are unaware of, or afraid to use, online marketing strategies [even though they deliver a higher ROI than offline marketing].

Becoming friendly with the term 'Internet marketing' can help you to understand the most effective ways to increase visibility and sales. Below are a few of the statistics that highlight the effectiveness of Internet Marketing.

1. E-Mail

• E-mail provides the highest return on investment of the following marketing programs:

                * House e-mail marketing: 25%
                * Search Engine Optimization: 18%
                * Paid Search: 16%
                * Public Relations: 12%
                * Direct Mail: 12%
                * Print Advertising: 4%
                * Online Ads (banners etc.): 3%

         Source: MarketingSherpa Search Benchmark Guide 2008

• E-mail has the highest ROI of marketing vehicles producing $57 for every dollar spent. (OgliveyOne Worlwide, Jeanniey Mullen)

The following statistics are important to take note for the design of an email:

• 64% of key decision makers view e-mail on Blackberries and other mobile devices. (MarketingSherpa)

• 59% of e-mails are viewed with images turned off. (MarketingSherpa)

2. Lowest Cost Per Meeting

• Paid Search: $250
• E-mail: $700
• White Paper: $900
• Trade shows: $2,500      
  

      Source: Marketing Sherpa B to B Demand Generation Summit '07
 
3. Outbound vs. Inbound Cost Per Lead

• Outbound (trade shows, direct mail, print ads, TV/radio ads): $255 per lead

• Inbound (Search Engine Optimization, blogging, social media, RSS,   public relations): $45 per lead

       Source: HubSpot

4. Who Finds Who

• 80% of tech buyers say they found the vendor/product/service. 20% say the vendor found them. The most popular online venues are:

                * Google 83%
                * Vendor website: 26%
                * Online Publication: 21%
                * Online Directories: 20%
                * Online Communities: 19%
                * Analyst website: 13%
                * Yahoo search: 14%

       Source: MarketingSherpa/KnowledgeStorm Connecting Through Content 2007

5. CRM ROI

• Through 2010 enterprises that deploy CRM strategies (such as SalesForce.com and Eloqua) will return at least 25 percent better financial metrics than those that don't (0.8 probability).

      Source: Gartner, Inc. Ten Secrets for Creating a Customer-Centric Enterprise, by Scott Nelson, December 2005

6. PR ROI

• According to a Proctor & Gamble survey:

              * PR delivers significant ROI overall, much greater than advertising, and                  provides a halo effect over other marketing tactics
              * PR showed an overall 275% ROI
              * PR delivers high ROI with relatively low spend in comparison to other                    marketing vehicles.
              * SEO is a part of any PR program
 
      Source: Proctor & Gamble, as reported by Web Marketing Today

Whether you're making your own website, or going to a design firm, you need to know a bit about web hosts. It may not be the most exciting topic, but I've explained it in a language everyone can understand. The language of pies.

Bartlett Video | Websites are Like Pies

Really, they are.

Last night we hosted the Concord Chamber of Commerce’s monthly business after hours event. It was a great chance to show off our new studio and to network with other local business people.

After some great conversations, which inevitably ended up in the finer points of search marketing and web trends, we all gave our elevator speeches to the crowd. One of our clients, Shelley Amster from Apelles Partners attended as well as Peter Bagley from The Marketing Dept. I learned about Paul Jensen’s Jaegerbakkens (a dog breed of small munsterlanders) and that he has no problem with website traffic since he is the only breeder in North America (a marketing coup of which we’re all jealous!).

Lots of others attended, too numerous to mention, but we’d like to thank everyone who made the event a success.

Check out some more photos from the event