Now, where should you put it? You basically have two choices:

• Put the blog at your website and use it to bring traffic to your website.
• Put the blog offsite and use it to send traffic to your website.

Putting the blog on your own website brings traffic to your site repeatedly, so people become accustomed to visiting your site and are more likely to take action. A regularly updated blog on your site gives your company site the SEO benefits of plenty of fresh content and more valuable content, both excellent things for a website.

That content allows your site to rank for more keywords, which can give your site a much more substantial look on the search engine results page. It increases the authority of your company, and you can control it.  As a rule, having your company blog on your own website is better.

There are cases in which you can’t (or prefer not to) have a blog on your own site:

• Your site may not have the technology to create a blog, and you might not have the budget to build a new website to accommodate the blog.
• Your site might not have been designed to house a blog, or you may feel that adding a blog would not be in keeping with the effect you want to create.
• You may not be sure you’ll keep up with blogging; an abandoned blog off site looks less lame than an abandoned blog on your website.
• You may want the separation and distinction between your company and your blog; for example, you might want a staid website and a lighthearted, fun blog.
• You might want multiple blogs from different points of view; one London design company chose to have each of their team members create a blog, and that provided all the marketing impetus they needed.
• You might want to have more than one property on the front page of the SERPs. If you have a good-sized presence for your website, your blog, your YouTube videos, and your social media platforms, you can own the page.

An external blog at WordPress.com or at Blogger can send significant traffic to a company site. We’ve done this type of blog for people, and have seen the blogs gain far more traffic than the websites, serving as major engines for referral traffic to the websites.

We always wish that all that traffic were coming directly to the company website.

However, an offsite blog can be successful, both as a blog and for your company’s website. If you decide that offsite is the way to go, plan for success:

• Remember that the object of the blog is to bring people to your website, or to your business in person or by phone. That means you have to make it easy for visitors to find their way back to your website, or to call your office or find your store. Have a link to your website, of course, but also mention your company in some (not all!) of your blog posts and include links that can entice visitors to explore your site.

• Remember that blogs are social media — in many ways, they were the original social medium. Just as with your company’s other social media, your blog should encourage interaction. Give your readers ways to connect: subscription options, “Follow” and “Like” buttons, a physical address if you’re a brick and mortar operation. Since you can be sure that not all the visitors to your blog will click through to your website, do what you can to encourage other kinds of action from those who don’t.

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• Have an exit strategy. If your blog is set up on a blogging platform like WordPress.com or Blogger, you are at the mercy of any changes they make. We used to build blogs on Blogger and put them into websites, until Blogger decided not to allow that any longer. We had to scramble around to fix the sites built that way. Plenty of blogging platforms flourished briefly and then were shut down or had changes in terms, including added fees. Not only will you have to be prepared for this sort of issue, but you may also find that you begin to want all the traffic from your successful blog to come to your company site. If you then add a blog to your website and move your blog posts over, you may lose your following and the SEO benefits of the blog. You can find yourself having to build up from scratch. The blog below is about to go through this process; its 4,000+ monthly visits would be nice for the owners’ main website — but now it will have to build back up to that prominence.

Our blog, the one you’re reading,  started on Blogger, back in the days when Blogger blogs could be embedded into websites. When the rules changed, we built a WordPress site and imported the blog into our new website, losing our posts’ PageRank and other SEO benefits. Recently, the imported posts have developed formatting problems which we now have to correct. Do we wish we had built the original site with an internal blog? You know we do.

Bottom line: build an internal blog on your company website unless you have a really good reason not to. If you feel that you must go with an external blog, be aware of the drawbacks and have a plan for dealing with them.

Linda Yellin explains in her column in More Magazine that she discovered the specialized lingerie company in question “when, for reasons known only to the panties, they started following me on Twitter.”

Naturally, I checked them out. I figured they’d be doing all the social media stuff we always advise. They’d have an intriguing background at their Twitter profile, an excellent self description, plenty of informative and entertaining tweets, relationships with relevant tweeps, and a nice link back to a terrific website, as well as regular links to awesome original content they created.

Nope. They’ve tiled their logo as a background. Their tweets are repetitive and, apart from obvious promotion, consist mostly of “Have a great day!”  Their followers are mostly auto follow and spammy, and they appear to have no real relationships — pretty much all the messages to them are “Thanks for the follow” with the occasional “Why is this panty company following me?”

In other words, this company simply follows thousands of people, focusing mostly on auto-follow-back accounts so they won’t follow way more people than they have followers. Then they choose journalists and follow them — they don’t spam them, apparently, or act aggressive in any way; they just follow.

Say that our of the 160,000 or so they follow, 500 are journalists who might write about panties. Say that, of those 500, 100 notice the follow and are intrigued enough to click through to the company website. Some percentage of that hundred journalists have been intrigued enough by this unusual product to read about it, and a few have written about it.

I’d like to know whether those write-ups have led to lots of sales, but the panties and I aren’t on those terms, so I can’t tell you.

If you have lots of time (or, perhaps, some low wage offshore workers), you could do this, too. It’s a gamble, but it’s one that paid off for the panty company. Their undergarments retail for $52-$85 each (and apparently this is their half price sale), so they’re probably a high profit item. It might very well be worth the gamble.

Before trying this approach, ask yourself some questions:

• Do you have something unusual enough to be buzzworthy? If this company were, say, an excellent local sandwich shop, this method wouldn’t have worked for them.
• Are you willing to swap the benefits of social media done right for the possibility of getting some buzz? It might absolutely have been worth it for the panty company. Make sure it would be for yours before choosing this route.
• Do you have another idea for what to do next? This isn’t a long-range strategy. It’s designed to create buzz about an innovative product, and it seems to be working. It’s not designed to create regular customers — which is what you need for a successful business.

It’s completely reasonable for someone who’s building a website not to want to let people see it. It may sound unreasonable if you’re the person who wants to see it — and maybe even the one paying for it — but it’s a desire based on experience. The experience may include things like what The Oatmeal described in How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell. It may just include things like people getting fixated on punctuation before anyone has proofread.

This is why it’s essential to distinguish between testing and asking peoples’ opinions.

Asking people’s opinions sounds like this:

• Do you like it?
• How do you feel about the colors?
• Do you love this Contact form as much as we do?

Testing sounds like this:

• Please navigate to www.URL.com.
• What does this company do?
• I notice that you became frustrated at one point. If you had really been trying to make an appointment, what would you have done at that point?

Completely different.

Testing should begin early in the web design process, preferably before the designer falls in love with the design.

Ideally, it should start with the old website, if there’s a redesign. Checking the analytics can give you a lot of information about how people interact with the old site, and help to track down any confusions or problems. This information should be taken into account while planning the site architecture.

More testing should take place with the mockup. Random viewers who are not web designers or regular customers of the company should be asked things like, “What does this company do?” and “How could you buy from this company if you wanted to?” Again, any confusions or problems should be handled before going any further.

Certainly, the client’s opinion should be asked at the mock up stage. However, it should be clear that you’re taking about design. This is not the time to fine-tune content or debate details of the shopping cart.

Testing should take place at the development site, preferably before the client sees it. If there is a check out process, someone should try it out and make sure that it works. Points at which the people building the site want to say, “No, you’re doing it wrong!” should be carefully noted. Everything should again be fixed.

Only when all the testing is complete and you’re sure that the website really works should you begin asking people’s opinions. If big changes are made, it’s time to test again before you launch.

We also like to look at the analytics a couple of weeks after launch and make sure that we don’t see signs of confusion.

So the answer to, “When should we test our website?” is easy: early and often. The picture at the top of this post? That’s roughly how we look when we test websites. However, we have people and computers rather than dials and danger symbols. That possible point of confusion would definitely have come out in testing.

That’s what we’re doing for Uncle Sam’s Safari Outfitters, a local sporting goods and Army Surplus store. Their current website, which you can see in the screenshot below, had a lot of the characteristics they wanted: nature photos, a natural color scheme, their Uncle Sam logo, social media connections, and a simple navigation that showed the basic categories of products they carry.

Unfortunately, other companies with the same name come up first when people search for Uncle Sam’s. Their site doesn’t show up at all when people search for the kinds of products they sell. They don’t use web analytics, so they don’t know whether the current website brings customers into the store, but they know that they want it to do so. They also want to be able to update the site with new product information, blog posts, announcements about sales and events, and videos showing the fine points of their products.

We’re working with designer Paul Fraley of Fresh Eyes Design on this project. Paul kept the original color scheme and used nature photos, but his redesign is a hardworking one: our content is incorporated for better communication with the search engines, major selling points are highlighted with graphic elements, and the all-important message about the products carried is incorporated in a way that adds to the site without detracting from the look of the photos.

This is a WordPress site, so it’ll be easy to add new information regularly, the key to getting plenty of repeat visits. That should also help Uncle Sam’s get the search rankings they deserve, as the oldest sporting goods store in the region and the only military surplus store. With a dynamic, professional looking website to send people to, their social media — which includes plenty of amazing photos on Facebook — will be more effective in sending them customers.

Google’s new Offers plan may trigger a bit of deja vu for longtime users of Google Places. Google has always had an Offers option, which has been free. Companies who try to update those old offers now will see this:

The new Offers option is free right now but will become a paid option in the future.  If you’ve used the offers in the past and had good results, you should certainly jump on it now, before it becomes a premium feature.

What about the future? Well, Google seems to plan a service just like that of myDealCompass. myDealCompass provides this option for businesses at a single monthly price, regardless of the deal, number of deals, or how often the company changes its deals; Google isn’t saying what the cost of its Offers will be. Google has a heck of a lot more reach than myDealCompass, but for local businesses, that probably doesn’t matter — check your stats at Google Places and you’ll see that the billions of Google users aren’t being shown your restaurant or hair salon’s Places page. Still, Google does advertising very well indeed, so this may be a good option for companies that want to use the Daily Deal model. Try it out during the free stage and see what the ROI will be, so you can make a wise decision in the future.

Read another view from Rakesh Agrawal.

The first step is to get into the web analytics and dig around thoroughly. In this case, we’re looking for the Maybes.

You may be familiar with the classic marketing advice that there are three kinds of people visiting your shop: people who are ready to say Yes, who will already be buying; people who have already decided to say No, who won’t be buying regardless of what you say; and Maybes, people who are undecided. The Maybes, the advice says, are the ones for whom you should tailor your marketing.

Maybes can be the ones who abandon their carts, the ones who spend a lot of time on the site but never call, the ones who download and use your free services regularly but haven’t quite decided to go with the premium version yet.

For Ken, we were able to identify a set of behaviors that looked like a group of Maybes. We created a persona based on this data, followed this hypothetical (but data-based) individual through the site, and came up with a plan to speak to the Maybes more clearly.

Give your own website a look. Are there Maybes you could be communicating with more effectively?

First, a reality check. Sometimes people who plan to have a vlog figure it’ll be less trouble than a blog. They assume that they can just point a phone at themselves, ramble a little, and post the resulting video in a few minutes. A blog, they reason, will require thought and planning and work, while a vlog will just be like saying “Good morning” to the family or making small talk in the office elevator.

On the other hand, there are people who think that a vlog will require tons of costly equipment and special skills, a studio, and an army of specialized helpers.

Neither idea is true. When it comes to vlogs and blogs…

Some things are the same.

You need a website. You can actually have your entire vlog on YouTube and not bother with a website — just as you could in theory keep a blog on Facebook and have no website. If you’re vlogging (or blogging) for your business, this is a mistake.

At your website, you have control over the image you project. You can surround your videos with good text (key to rankings and conversions) and images. You can produce an effective call to action which people will see even if they don’t watch all of your video, and many people won’t.

At YouTube or Vimeo, on the other hand, you have a much better chance of getting thousands of views and having lots of people share your video. We like to create YouTube channels, upload videos there, and embed them into a website.

Quality counts. People are still fairly receptive to amateur video online. A person speaking sincerely into a camera can still get good results. But the tolerance level for poor quality camera work, with shots jumping around or blurry images, is definitely lower than in the past. We can assume that people will become less tolerant of bad lighting and poor sound quality as time goes on, just as the average moviegoer now expects much more in the way of special effects than the audiences of a decade ago.

Content is still king. What you say needs to be entertaining or useful or both, whether it’s text or video. If you have something new to say, or can fill a felt need that isn’t currently addressed in video online, you’re in a good position.

Don’t get complacent, though. We’re working right now with a company that works on a very specialized piece of machinery. Right now, there’s only one choice for tutorial videos about this piece of machinery, so it doesn’t really matter how good that video is. When we make a new video with more exciting scripting, a more attractive speaker, and some snazzy animation, our client will be able to compete with that one video easily. So make sure you have something useful and entertaining to say — but also be aware that your competitors may be watching you.

Regular posting is a must. Just as with blogs, successful vlogs are updated regularly, usually at least two or three times a week. You can fill in occasionally at your vlog with something relevant from YouTube (we do this for some of our blog clients who want more video than they care to produce, and it can be effective — especially if you use the embedded video as an illustration and add original written text), but you have to produce and post original content on a regular basis to get results.

Some things are different.

Vlogging can take longer. We have clients who, when they did their own blogging, would take hours or even days to write a single 300 word blog post. Clearly, this is not the best use of their time. If this describes you, then vlogging might take less time. For most people, vlogging takes longer. You have to come up with the ideas, write a script or at least an outline, shoot the post — probably more than once, edit it, add your introduction and end card, upload and/or embed it, and do the markup as well as the associated text. This is almost certain to take you hours.

Vlogging is not for everyone. You don’t have to be an actor to be successful with online video, but there are things that can help or hinder you, even assuming that you have something good to say. Fairly attractive people with pleasant voices and neutral accents are more likely to succeed in building a following. You can blog from a cramped studio apartment full of barking dogs, but vlogging requires something less distracting in the way of a space. You need some hardware.

It can be a two (or more) person job. There are successful vloggers who work with a webcam and a teleprompter app and do everything alone, start to finish. For most people, a camera operator is a big help. You may need a writer, an actor, an editor, an animator — these jobs involve different skills. If you have all these skills yourself and can create a good video with a webcam or a camera on a tripod, you’re well suited to vlogging.

The focus is on you. If you have the potential to be a celebrity, even in a small way, you can benefit from that with a vlog. A magnetic personality and high energy level can show in a blog, but they can really shine in a vlog. If you or someone in your organization has star quality, take advantage of it by getting that quality on camera.

Read more about using video for your website:

• 10 Quick Tips for Your Company Video
• Video and SEO
• Video Interviews for Your Website
• Video Production

First, you must have a Google Analytics account. Go to the GA website and sign up. Next, go to the Admin page and tell Analytics what URL (web address) you want to track.

You’ll give the account a name, type in the URL, and specify the place and time zone. Make sure the name will make sense to you, even if you later add another account. For example, you might not want to use the name of your company if you might later want to add a separate blog on a different domain.  I use the URL itself.

Next, you’ll have to agree to the terms of service. At this point, you can choose whether to allow Google to capture and share information about your account. Saying yes lets Google learn more about how people use the product, and it doesn’t let anyone see your individual account information, so I say yes, but I come from an academic background, so I believe that information wants to be free. If you have a different philosophical stance, now’s the time to take that stance and say no by unclicking those boxes.

Now Google will generate some code for you.

You copy the code and paste it into the code at your website. In order to do this, you must have access to the code.

This is very important. You don’t want some business competitor to be able to see just where you’re getting all your traffic, do you? So you don’t want it to be easy to get analytics information for your website. This code must be placed into the code of your website, right before the </head> tag on each page.

If you don’t know what that means, you should send the code to your webmaster and ask to have it installed. We’re saying “on each page,” so you may be worrying that this will cost a lot on your large website. No worries. Your webmaster will use includes or a template to install this all across your site. It’s a small task.

For WordPress users, it’s an even smaller task. Install a plugin like WebNinja or Google Analytics for WordPress.

You’ll need to find your Google Analytics ID number. It looks like this:

Your plugin’s Settings page will have a place to put this number:

You’ll still have to give your Google Analytics log in information to be able to track data — again, you’re being protected from malicious use of the code, so don’t be troubled by this.

You should see data in 24 hours.

Here’s a website we’re getting ready to launch, a site with 20 products, not thousands of SKUs. This is typical of small-scale e-commerce sites, and it faces some typical challenges:

• How do you keep your online store from looking meager?
• How do you make the shopping experience meet customer expectations when those expectations are based on Amazon and Zappos?
• How can you be found by people looking for your products?

Laying out your store is important, since you can’t dazzle visitors with myriad products. Instead, you need to make your shop very browsable. As with flowers, the more you have the less you depend on design; it takes artistry to make a branch and a couple of flowers look good, but anyone can get a good effect with a couple dozen roses. Equally, if you have half a dozen products, you should plan on a nice layout to make your store look good.

WordPress is fantastic for small e-commerce, since plug-ins do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of development. We generally use WP E-commerce, a free plugin with plenty of upgrade options. Designer Tom Hapgood styled the shop and the checkout options to make this little store look good.

A couple of the nice things:

A click on the item’s image on the Store page makes the image expand nicely. The visitors doesn’t have to click onto another page to see the product more clearly.

When customers do click through to get more information, they can still see their shopping cart as well as the main navigation for the website, and site search is also still available.

When they’re ready to check out, customers can check on shipping before they commit themselves, and they can easily change quantities or remove items — as well as finding their way back if they decide to do some more shopping.

The whole shopping cart is styled to match the website’s design, too.

While the programming for the shopping cart is covered by the plugin, it won’t look this way right out of the box. You need a designer to make it look this good. Tom has styled several websites for us with this plugin, and every store and shopping cart looks completely different.

The key? Think about usability. Walk through the experience yourself and make sure that you would be happy with the way the shopping cart works if you were a customer. Your designer is responsible for making the store look good. Tom is also very conscious of usability, but we know from experience that some designers are not. Know that there are alternatives, remember that your website may be art but it still has to function well, and be as insistent as you need to be.

Being found by people using search engines doesn’t depend on design. You need unique descriptions. Unique products would be even better for a small shop, since Amazon’s millions of pages and millions of backlinks pretty well guarantee that you can’t beat them on searches for products. If you have excellent content, you’ll be found by people looking for what you have, and they’re likely to buy while they’re there. Just be sure that what you have isn’t just a manufacturer’s description shared by you and hundreds or thousands of other websites.

Good design, usability, good content — sounds like a good website, doesn’t it? That’s the good news: the same things that give you a good website can give you a good e-commerce shop, too. Just make sure to apply them. Too many websites feel as though they put all the effort into luring visitors into the shop and don’t care what happens to them once they’re in the cart. This is part of the reason for high shopping cart abandonment rates.

Make the effort all the way through the shopping experience. Success will follow.