&pws=0

You can also sign out of google’s personal web search program in your account settings.   Even if you do not use the search wiki to vote results up or down, google does appear to be trending and custom tailoring results based upon your traffic patterns.  In doing SEO, it is important to know that the results you are looking at are not biased.

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

Recycle Bank is influencing the creation of a cutting edge process called single stream recycling. They supply their customers with a Recycle Bank garbage bin in which they can throw all of their paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The bin has an RFID microchip inside, which is read by special levers retrofitted onto city garbage trucks that weigh the amount of garbage. This value is sent to each individual consumer’s online Recycle Bank account, where it is converted into Recycle Bank Reward Points at a ratio of 2.5 reward points for each pound of garbage. These Reward Points can then be redeemed at local businesses that consumers normally buy from, such as Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, and many more. What an incredible incentive to get people recycling!

With such a dynamic program that will certainly increase the recycling rate, RB gains the credibility to negotiate exclusive long term contracts with city municipalities to deliver garbage from Recycle Bank customers to material recovery facilities (MRF) and in essence divert trash from going into a landfill. This creates great economic value for the city by allowing them to sell the trash to manufacturers such as Coca Cola or Pepsi instead of paying landfills to take the garbage. Wow, make money instead of pay money? and Recycle Bank takes a cut off the money saved from landfill diversion rather than the money earned from sales to manufacturers. A very smart marketing decision that influences cities to broadcast how much money they made in a year, which in turn gets other cities excited about the Recycle Bank program.

This is big for 3 reasons:

1) high profitability with exclusive municipality contracts and a valuable online advertising engine

2) environmental health through the elimination of waste

3) the ability to influence consumption behavior

This 3rd reason is what really fascinates me.  With other green businesses, sure it’s great to benefit the environment, but obviously the price has to be right for adoption. And yet, even when the price is right, people are lazy and don’t want to change their behavior. They might call their utility company and say I want green power, if and only if its cheaper (Austin Energy). With Recycle Bank, the single stream recycling program that they’re pioneering is enough to influence people to actually start recycling. And even more so, RB gains the ability to influence consumer purchases with their Reward Points system. For example, they’re planning to roll out a program that gives people greater rewards for shopping at ‘green’ businesses.  Organic food stores, LEED certified establishments, and even specific products.

This is a business that’s right in front of the American consumer’s face… they can touch it, they can feel it, they can put more money in their pocket, while being guided to a healthier life and changing their local environment. Recycle Bank becomes an incredible solution to the entire consumption side of the sustainability equation. We still need the west coast to figure out solar and fuel cells so we can get off coal and oil, but this is a practical solution to get us moving in the right direction. I’m lovin it!

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Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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Enjoy!

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Are you tracking visitors to your website? If the answer is NO, then you have to catch up with the times. If you owned a hardware store, and I could tell you information about:

• who your customers are
• how many customers you have
• how they find you
• how long each of them are in your store
• what they are looking at
• how long someone is in a particular section
• is this their first visit
• what they bought
• at what point did they decide to leave

Would you not practically beg me for this?
Not only is this information available to you, but you can get this information daily.. FOR FREE.. granted it does take some work to set up. We generally charge clients a set-up fee to incorporate Google Analytics into all of the pages of their website, and charge an additional monthly reporting fee to show this information in a “friendlier” format than Google provides. (tying traffic stats to sales statistics and other “key performance indicators”)

There are many different products that offer Site Statistics… some use embedded code, some you have to install on the site yourself. Here are some we have experience using.

• Google Analytics – Almost any question you could ask can be answered with Google Analytics. HOWEVER, for the beginner, it seems almost as if you need to go take a class to figure out where everything is. There is also a delay in reporting, so you don’t see your stats until the next day. On the bright side, everything you need to know can be found… and its FREE.
• OneStatFree – I found this while looking to find a live stat counter, and have loved it for its simplicity. The free version doesn’t offer too much information, but it provides the basics. My favorite option is to click the recent visitors tab, and see all of the information provided, like a snapshot of each visitor. If the traffic comes from some corporation it is listed.. very cool to see, tells you the entry page, duration, location, etc.. etc.. Again, this is live tracking, so I can watch my traffic flow real-time.
• Open Web Analytics – My experience with OWA has been very positive. They have some cool features such as heat-map, which shows where visitors are clicking on a page (our usability experts also love this). It also has some other nice features such as for the referring site, it will tell you the anchor text that was used, as well as the context text (ha!) surrounding the link. This is a pretty cool if you are a blogger using wordpress, as they have a simple plugin that you can use, and they have integrated RSS and ATOM feed statistics. This is an open source analytics program, and I don’t believe they have a hosted solution.. aka .. all of the reporting is done on your site.
• Woopra – I found a link to this cool looking site while tweeting yesterday. It is still in Beta, and I’m not in just yet, but it looks really cool, and has my attention. We’ll see how it works.

There are lots of other tracking tools out there with great reputations (though not necessarily free). Omniture for example, is a very popular tool, and of course, because you pay for it, you get a lot more. I wouldn’t recommend Omniture for just anyone, it is more of a solution used by big names like Ebay, WalMart, Microsoft, and PayPal… just to name a few.

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• Search Engine Optimization
• A Few Tips For Climbing The Search Engines

Step 1 - What are you promoting? – Login to Facebook, then go to the Create Ad page and enter the url you want your traffic to go to. (For our clients, we customize a landing page for each ad in an effort to better convert the traffic).

Step 2 – Select your demographic – I love the functionality here. As you are selecting your audience, and using the auto-suggest for keywords, watch the top of the page. You will see it is construction a paragraph that explains your target audience, and displays the approximate market size for that demographic. I do wish there was a feature so you could choose all BUT high school students.

Step 3 - Create your Ad-Copy. Here are Facebook’s guidelines for ad copy. Keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish. If you just write something crazy in an effort to get traffic, your conversion rates will be low. If you are specific, and enticing, visitors to your site will know why they are there, and will be more like to join your site, or purchase your products. They will even let you upload a photo to attach to the ad. Your logo, or an image of the product works best here.. but mind the size, you don’t want a distorted image.

You can also specify social actions that relate to your ad here. If you are a member of a group, or have an application, Facebook will enhance your ad with associations to the actions of those groups or apps.

Step 4 - How Much Do you Want to Spend – The first choice you have to make is whether you want to pay based on the number of views (cost-per-impression) or on the number of actual clicks your ad receives. The cost per impression (CPM) is a good idea if you are just trying to spread awareness, as it carries an overall lesser cost. Keep in mind though, your ad can receive a lot of impressions on a site like Facebook, and just because it is loading on the page, doesn’t mean that eager eyes waiting to see your ad.

A good portion of Facebook users are going to be blind to advertising. This is why I generally recommend taking the cost-per-click (CPC) route, as you truly “get what you pay for”. Facebook will recomend a CPC price based on what others are suggesting, and as a general rule, put the most you are willing to pay for a click to ensure you get the best positioning.

You have a final option to specify if you want the ad to run continuously starting upon approval (Facebook does check the ads before they go live) or if you would rather the ad run only during a specified time. This is in case you only want to test out the service for weekdays, weekends, holidays, or special events.

Step 5 - Review and Pay – Alright… now just review the ad to make sure everything looks in order, enter your credit card information (if it isn’t already stored), and click Place Order. Facebook will review your ad, and unless you did something bad, like advertise for porn or ignore their guidlines, you’re ad will soon be sending traffic to your site.

You might also be interested in Millennial Marketing and Facebook Ads

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You can only narrow your targeted advertising down so far when using some of the traditional online advertising strategies. Google Adwords allows you to target specific keywords (a proven method), and they will use IP addresses to geo-target your ads to people in specific areas. You can roughly determine the demographics of a particular website for your CPM (cost-per-impression) advertising based on content..e.g. the most frequent visitors of dating sites are single males between 30 and 45 years of age, and they are interested in …

Like many advertising services, Facebook offers you the option to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which means exactly that. You only pay when someone clicks on the ad. You can also choose the CPM method, which can save you money and offer more overall exposure for your $. They launched the program in November, and have received both positive and negative criticisms.

The real (and almost only) benefits at this point are the advanced targeting which can narrow down a demographic well enough that you are almost ensured a great conversion rate from the advertising. Obviously, the more advanced your targeting, the less amount of impressions, but if your conversion rate is up.. who cares? There are also some creative marketing techniques to using Facebook as a market research tool, and tapping into the opinions of the Millennial Generation.

To get a feel for what kind of information Facebook has in relation to a particular demographic, login, go to your network page, and click network stats. Here you can view the stats for Raleigh/Durham (one of my networks)

On Monday, I’ll post the simple walkthrough for creating facebook ads.

It has been an exciting experience watching the reaction of Facebook users as they integrated the advertising into the site. I’m really curious to see how the recent decision to make SocialAds (another feature they had launched) opt-out.

A couple of great links for more reading on this topic:

Red Orbit – A 101 Course on Facebook, just in case you’re still trying to figure out “what the Facebook fuss is all about”.

Facebook Business – This page sums up quite well all of the solutions that facebook offers for businesses looking to gain exposure to their rapidly growing user base.

Read Write Web – This is an opposing view to Facebook advertising. Though I agree with Alex at RWW on a couple of points relating to Facebook needing to spruce the algorithm to better consider contextual placement, I tend to feel that he has grossly underestimated the potential, and failed to recognize the possibility that the advertisers he mentioned may have chosen a broad and even unrelated demographic for the sake of additional exposure.

We have a really interesting article coming up soon relating to Facebook, as we announce an application we have been developing for a client. If you need help with your marketing efforts, we would be glad to assist you.

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One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can.

1. 301 Redirects - With almost every customer of ours, the first thing we do is set up a redirect to or from the ‘www.’ sub-domain. If you fail to do this, the search engines may determine that you have 2 websites (http://www.grapethinking.com and http://grapethinking.com) and split your ‘google juice’ between the two of them. The fix is really simple if you have an apache server with a hosting company that provides htaccess and mod_rewrite.
2. Dynamic URLs – Which is easier to interpret? grapethinking.com/a-few-tips-for-climbing-the-search-engines OR grapethinking.com/?p=4586 It shouldn’t be that difficult to make your url structures dynamic so you have ‘pretty’ links. This will not only help your search engines, but also make it easier for your visitors to browse your site.  It is generally a good practice for your url’s to include your page title.
3. Site Map – If you want to make sure the search engines crawl all of your site, you should place a site map .xml file and point to it within the robots.txt file. The more friendly your site is to the search engine, and handing it a map the second it gets to your site is pretty nice, the more friendly the search engines will be to you. If you don’t have a site map, there are plenty of sites that will create one for you. One I recently used was XML-Sitemaps which was much simpler than downloading google’s python script, even though I am a fan of Google Webmaster Tools.
4. Dynamic META info – This topic has been beat to death across the internet, but with good reason… it IS important. Make sure you use dynamic information for creating your meta titles. If they are all the same, your just telling the search engine that every page in your site is the same, AKA: you are boring. The meta descriptions aren’t as important because the robots can generally determine the more important content of the page (see next). The meta tags, while extremely valuable about 5 years ago, are now pretty much irrelevant.
5. Content Placement – When you buy a magazine, book, or newspaper, the most relevant information is on the front cover. It’s the first thing you see. Search engines seem to think right along those same lines. The closer the information is to the top of your page the more important and relevant that content must be. If you haven’t specified meta information, and you haven’t effectively used CSS to layout your content, you may even find Google putting your navigation menu as your site’s description. You don’t necessarily have to have the relevant content displaying at the top of your page, it just needs to be first in the HTML file.
6. Your Hosting – That’s right… your hosting can play a large role in your search engine rankings. If you have shared hosting, you might be on the same server as one of those nutsos blowing viagra and cialis all over the place, or even worse, a porn site. Even though you may have a different domain name, your IP address will still be the same, and you will be punished. It’s worth the extra cash to get a designated IP. If your bootstrapping, you can always choose a hosting company that makes it tough for spammer to create accounts via call to verify or requiring one year upfront payment instead of month-to-month.
7. AJAX – Ajax is great for forms and images, but don’t try to “AJAXify” your whole site. This wonderful technology can provide great UI, but search engines are blind when it comes to javascript, and the fact that your site sits under 1 never-changing URL does not help much either.  Believe it or not, a relatively large percentage of users (~10%) have javascript disabled, and would not be able to use your AJAX heavy site.  Most large companies have JS disabled by default for protection, and a lot of users typically turn it off to speed up their browsing experience, and eliminate pop-ups(unders,overs,etc..).  JS and AJAX can greatly enhance your site, but should not be required.

So there you have it… 7 of the more common SEO mistakes made by web developers. Granted, what you do on-site is only the foundation of optimizing your site, the off-site is what really provides the most weight in search engine rankings.

Grape Thinking is a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO). If you are interested in having a professional provide you with an analysis of your site (with detailed instructions on how to fix the problem areas), request a free quote.

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We recently started a series on getting your online sales vehicle rolling. Today, we are going under the hood to talk about the e-commerce engine used to power your shopping cart. At Grape Thinking, we have an established relationship with Inertia Beverage Group, as Paul, Andrea, and crew, in our humble opinions, have the best grasp and influence on the changes in the industry and are truly “Powering the Wine Revolution”. As such, they rank as our recommended engine.

So, what does this sales engine do exactly? As a winery, it has the vital role of coordinating the sales request between your customer and their bank, your fulfillment center and your bank.

A good engine should:

• have a simple and fluid shopping interface
• automate orders from customers
• track discounts, coupon codes, taxes, and shipping
• be integrated with your fulfillment center for tracking product depletion
• automate wine club shipments
• allow wine club members to easily manage their accounts.
• automate credit card processing
• provide easy access to sales reports
• self-update without disrupting your business
• offer sales volume and ship-to-state monitoring for compliance issues. (a service now free for anyone)
• provide simple tools for updating product selections, descriptions, and pricing
• come equipped with customer service and support tools for shipping and billing issues

Some of the most well-known sales engines available in the market today are Inertia Beverage Group’s “ReThink Engine”, eWinery Solutions, and Nexternal. They all require a set-up fee, which is used to create the shopping cart on your site, and have ongoing expenses – a combination monthly fee and/or commission. The great thing about paying them a commission is that it creates motivation to set up multiple affiliate networks with sites such as: RadCru, Wine.Woot, WineSpies (coming soon), Wine.com, Ambrosia Wine, … to name a few.

Part of getting set-up with the engine of your choice, will require you to establish merchant bank accounts, to accept payments from Visa, MasterCard, etc… This is not a difficult task, and can generally be accomplished by phoning the Merchant Bank, filling out an application, and faxing it back.

You will also need a website and webhost. Some of the providers, like Inertia, offer web-design and hosting as an additional service. There are also some up and coming online communities that will offer you a profile as a winery, that can be used as your webpage, and linked to your shopping cart/landing page/e-commerce engine.

We have invited all e-commerce providers to post their information on our site to try and bring the discussion to one place, and have a true resource and guide for those of you interested in direct sales. If you are a winery, feel free to comment with any questions you have regarding being set-up in direct sales. If you would like to inquire about our services, just Contact Us. As a peak into the future, we’ll get into more detail on fulfillment and distribution, web-page design, and marketing techniques.

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Now… here comes the fun part. Getting YOUR link out, and turning that funny looking bit of text into revenue to use for dinner and a movie. Here are some things that can help:

• Write a blog post, incorporating your new affiliate link
• Place the banner ads in rotation on your site
• Seek out people who need your product (forums and other blogs)
• Run a viral campaign based around one of your affiliates (We can help here!!)
• Don’t forget to include links in your newsletters
• Create an additional page on your site listing all of your affiliates, and why you chose them

Most importantly, remember that when you send people to someone else’s website you are laying out your reputation. Don’t be an affiliate just for the money, make sure you would actually use the product or service.  Check out our some examples by doing a search at TasteVine.

If your trying to sell your wine online, check out this post on “Building a Direct Sales Vehicle“

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