Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
Posted on

Black Friday Celebration

I am not blogging today as I am in Ohio celebrating my Mom’s 85th birthday this weekend, but I am hoping that my husband is already in line at Best Buy before 4:00 AM to grab the technology gifts for our kids. I will be on the road all day and so I am just hoping that the early bird will get the DSiXL this year times three!

I hate Black Friday! It seems like the stores are opening earlier and earlier this year to get the shoppers first and then hold them captive for hours in lines to check out. Here was my killer Black Friday experience.

Several years ago, we didn’t have a ton of money to spend for the kids and according to them, they were the only 11 year olds on the entire planet that did not have a Game Boy Advanced Game System. Sigh… Circuit City had a really deep discount and we needed three for our triplets. I convinced my husband we should get up before dawn and go to Circuit City and buy them. They were about $80 each so nearly a $40 each discount. We go there at 4:30 AM thinking about how smart we were and when we turned the corner of the building and saw the line wrapping all the way around the store with other parents who were smarter and got up earlier we were shocked.

We still had to wait an hour in line just for the store to open. (Note to self take a coffee mug and food next time.) We got into the store, had to wait again as they were over the Fire Marshall limit and got our three Game Boys. Then we waited in line four – yes that is right four hours to check out!

The key to Black Friday shopping is to do the following:

  1. Stay up all night why even go to bed?
  2. Better yet, sleep in your clothes in the parking lot or have an all night tailgate party.
  3. Take tons of food with you. You may even be able to sell some in line and make money.
  4. Choose your store carefully. You may never get out!
  5. Make sure the discount is really, really big to make it seem like it is worth your while.
  6. Better yet see if you can buy it online and sleep in!

Although I won’t be in Waldorf on Black Friday, rest assured I will go to the mall at night in Columbus, Ohio – see you there!

Posted on

HootSuite Moves To A Paid Model

If you are serious about social networking and social media then you are probably using HootSuite already. If you are not, HootSuite is our application of choice for our various writers and to house our myriad of client accounts.

HootSuite has been free for the last two years and we have enjoyed and really used the service. In fact is wasn’t until Facebook chopped Fan Page posting by third parties that we really found out just how much we depend on the application to manage our growing social media enterprise.

In the next seven days if you use HootSuite, you will be forced to choose either the free restricted use option or will have to move to the Pro paid option that is based on a pricey fee structure for team members. You get yourself free and four more team members for $15 each. Add another member and it is $30 per member up to a cap. Ouch that can get expensive for certain businesses ours included.

Social media is here to stay and our service offerings and number of clients is steadily growing with HootSuite, even the paid Pro version we can quickly and effectively do the work we need to do. I consider HootSuite and integral part of our service offerings.

Please note HootSuite will pay me a small commission if you sign up for a Pro account, but that is not my reason for writing this post.

Posted on

Google Places Tags Do They Work?

So does that little yellow icon that you just bought for $25 for the month that Google will show next to your Google Places aka Google Maps listing work to drive traffic?

Interesting question and here is the statistical data from one client that shows it is not worth the money.

Before the Tag: 14,150 impressions with 1400 actions

After the Tag: 10.351 impressions with 1001 actions

So traffic did not increase nor did actions. Additionally the clicks into the website also decreased.

So why would anyone want to pay $25 for the Tag icon? Well I can think of several times when the Tag may actually help. If you put a discount or special offer in the wording of your Tag, you may have terrific results. In our test case the client did not want to use a promotion and only wanted to highlight his web address.

As Google offers 30 days of the Tag free it may be worth it to your business to test the use of a Tag, but only with a promotional offer. Make sure if you do this that you print the page of your 30 day results in the control panel to use as your benchmark as there is no way to sort data and review old figures if you forget. The control panel will only show the most current 30 day results.

Then make a note on your calendar to review your After figures and compare the two; doing your own statistical test. Make sure you deactivate your tag is you didn’t like your results by clicking the billing tab and then deactivate or you will get billed for the next 30 days of service.

If you find out Tags have worked for you, make sure to leave a comment and your before and after stats to help us all out!

Posted on

Paying Monthly for SEO Services? What Exactly Are You Getting?

Now that you have had your website optimized and you are improving your organic search placement, it’s time to ask your service firm exactly what are you getting for your monthly service fee.

It is not uncommon for a business that has had optimization done by an SEO firm to be paying a monthly service fee of anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a month. But what are you really getting for this monthly service fee? Do you even know?

For $300 a month times 12 months that’s $3,600 a year, not an insignificant amount of cash, it is important to know what you are getting. To find out, it is key that you ask the right questions to evaluate the answers in order to identify if this expense is warranted or is just an income stream for your SEO firm that they are hoping you will not challenge.

Here are the pointed questions you should ask your own SEO firm:

  1. What is my monthly fee paying for? If this is for link work, how many links did you get me last month and the month before?
  2. If this is for your code to remain on my web page and is just a monthly subscription fee to keep the code there let me know this clearly. What happens when I stop my services with you?
  3. I understand that no one can pay their way to the top of Google so if I am paying you $300 a month and $3,600 a year exactly what am I getting for my money? Anything?
  4. If you say you are tweaking my code weekly or monthly for my $300 investment. I would like to see what tweaks you actually did last month and the month before. Were these done only to my home page?
  5. If I stop my services with you what exactly on my home page will be changed if anything?

Pretty pointed questions if you ask me, but questions that you as a business owner should ask and know the answer to, to make sure that you know exactly what your SEO investment is doing. It is important for you as a business owner to know that many SEO firms have this model for pricing and that they do not do much on a monthly basis to help you retain or improve placement after their initial work is done. This is an income stream for them and they just hope you are not asking the questions to pin them to the wall to really tell you, if they even will, exactly what they are doing monthly for you for this payment.

I would be highly surprised to hear that the things that an SEO firm does to earn the $300 for a monthly subscription fee is actually worth the actual cash value if your webmaster billed you by the hour to do the same things. Especially if your SEO worked does not include blogging, content creation, or any changes you can notice on your website. You may simply be paying $300 a month for a “feel good” report at the end of the month to encourage you to continue to pay monthly services.