Blogging Brainfreeze

Do you ever get stuck when it comes to writing a blog like I often do?  I understand your pain!  After searching around on the web reading blog after blog, I noticed several things that seemed to be consistent on blog postings - the viewpoint is usually informative, well written, and overall entertaining.  Here are a few ideas that will hopefully help with the writer’s block.

• Research your ideas before you write about them and see what other bloggers are writing about on your topic of choice - what works, what doesn’t work?  There is nothing wrong with a little comparison.
• Try writing a how to or posting a video tutorial that will be useful and informative.
• Ask readers to rate your previous blogs, once you’ve gathered the results and have chosen a winner, then post them for others to enjoy.
• Give a free recommendation or piece of advice that has been useful to you, others may find it helpful also.
• Use your Frequently Asked Questions for your blog.
• Don’t forget to add your personality into your blogs - it doesn’t all have to be serious!
• Write about what specifically makes you the best in your business, what techniques or programs do you use that no one else knows about yet?
• Post a picture and ask for readers to comment on it, visual blogs can definitely keep it interesting!
• Post a blog and then submit a comment that says how well written and genius it was.
• Find another post that is particularly badly written and then constructively criticize the article.

Laura Kalkman
Director of Marketing
ROCKET MEDIA

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

ROCKET MEDIA offers an analytic system for tracking voice and web visitors/callers. We call it ROCKET Analytics. The main focus of this blog is on the web side of things. With the ROCKET Analytics - Web our clients can:

• View a ton of detail about what their website visitors are doing on their site
• Referring link / search phrase that brought them to the site
• What page they are leaving on
• Real time data as it happens
• Daily, Monthly or Quarterly e-mail with website results
• Detail about the visitors (Location, IP, Internet Provider, Size of Computer Screen..)
• Ad Cam

The most beneficial part of the web analytics is that it shows an “Ad Cam” which is an included application displaying:


• Pay-per click campaign data for all efforts combined (Google, Yahoo, MSN…)
• Social Network campaigns (YellowBook, Chamber of Commerce, ToFixIt! ...)
• Conversions for each campaign
• Trending
• The lists go on…

The majority of our clients have signed on for our analytic services and they love seeing the positive benefits of their Internet marketing efforts but I have been getting a few calls lately with the same puzzled question:

“It is cool to see the analytic data that ROCKET Analytics – Web provides me with… but what does all of it mean to me and what do I do with the results?”

This is a valid question especially if everything is looking up for their websites: lots of people are visiting; the conversions from the ad cam are positive, etc. Besides just seeing proof that our Search Engine Marketing experts are dominating in the Pay-Per Click (PPC) realm for them and the site we built them leads visitors straight to their call to action, ROCKET Analytics – Web can also make it possible to analyze the trending from the visitors and clicks.

With this analysis, we can make updates to the site (additional landing pages or calls to action) to catch any of those site visitors that make an early exit because their question is not immediately answered. We can make conclusions based off of the key word/phrases people are searching to find the site and use them to suggest blogging topics, or further enhance PPC campaigns.
My favorite phrase that ROCKET MEDIA uses to highlight ROCKET Analytics is,

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure…”

That is exactly right. One of the first rules of marketing is to measure everything, to prove it is working. If measuring the marketing efforts isn’t part of a company’s marketing campaigns, there is no point. They won’t know if it is working, they can’t confirm that they are providing their campaigns to the right audience or show what their conversions are.  Asking potential clients how they found your company when they call in, isn’t good enough anymore and ROCKET MEDIA has the solution for everyone! ROCKET Analytics.

• ROCKET Analytics – Web
• ROCKET Analytics – Voice
• Request a FREE Demo of ROCKET Analytics


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Social Media. Don’t be afraid to jump in - Start today!

People are talking about your brand online and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But you can join in. And ROCKET MEDIA thinks you should.

Go ahead. Dive in. The water’s warm. Go to Technorati.com (a blog search engine) and search your company’s name. What’s there? Are you surprised?

Don’t be. Conversations about your company and thousands of other brands, products, services, people, places and things are happening every day. According to a recent blogger study, about 21 percent of bloggers write about companies and their products once a week, and almost 2/3 of them trust other bloggers the most when looking for product information.

And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But you can join in. And we think you should. Becoming part of the conversation is the best way to potentially influence it. And there are other benefits as well:

• Establishing your company as an industry thought leader
• Amplifying your SEO strategy
• Increasing traffic to your web site
• Generating real-time customer feedback about your products and services
• Giving you a direct voice to consumers during a crisis
• Boosting your reputation

Standing at the end of the diving board can be scary, I know. Especially if you’ve never been swimming before. So get your feet wet first. For the next 30 days, do two things: 


• Play. Find some blogs that interest you (there are millions of them). Let’s say you like rock music. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of a few of these blogs. Follow them for the next couple of weeks. Leave comments on posts that interest you. Read other people’s comments.  Or find social networks and message boards about fly-fishing. Get used to the tone and style of social media. It’s different. It’s human.
• Monitor. Assign someone on your team to look for conversations about your brand in the social media space. Use Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, Boardreader, and YouTube searches to start. Also, subscribe to bloggers who write about your category. Look at this information daily. What patterns are you noticing? Are there opportunities to engage?

You will learn a lot about the space and how your brand is being portrayed. If what you learn and find interests you, we suggest a deeper dive with a social media audit. A third-party audit will give you quantitative and qualitative information about your brand and how it’s being discussed in the social media space. Most importantly, audits are the foundation for developing a social media engagement strategy.

When you’re ready to take the engagement plunge, keep these principles in mind:


• Make your conversations authentic. Don’t fake it. No spin. No marketing wak-wak.
• Be transparent. Tell people who you are. Don’t hide behind a fake profile or character. People want to connect with the people behind brands.
• Lastly, contribute to the community. Your value in the social media space is ultimately about what you bring to the party. Help others succeed. Share your expertise openly. Better the community, and people will reward you.

We’ve helped brands conduct audits, establish ongoing monitoring services, and craft complete engagement strategies. The pool may look deep, dark and ominous, but in our experience, the rewards of jumping in outweigh the risks in most cases. So get wet, and enjoy it.

Proof
Want to learn more? The Society for New Communications Research is a think tank in Palo Alto that studies new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication and their effects on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society. 

Society for New Communications Research link:  http://www.sncr.org


Spencer Williams
Designer
ROCKET MEDIA

What is an ISP, and How Do I Connect to the Internet?

What is an ISP? If you have ever wondered how your computer actually links up to the internet, here’s how.

An Internet service provider (ISP, also called Internet access provider or IAP) is a company which primarily offers their customers access to the Internet using dial-up or other means of data telecommunication. Sometimes ISP’s may offer email accounts to the end user as well. Nowadays we laugh at even the mention of dial-up service. It is so old and archaic that normal dial-up speeds can’t even handle the size of most common websites built in the last several years. You may recall that old modem of yours making the loud phone beeps and chirps as you connected to your Prodigy account back in the mid 90’s. That’s what dial up is: a slow, mundane, noisy connection to the internet through your phone line. Everyone blew a fuse, lost some hair, and even grew a few gray ones while trying to download images or surf the net, only to be cut off because a sibling or child of yours picked up the phone to call Jimmy and see if he could play basketball. Oh great, not again! You mean I have to dial up and redo what I just spent a half hour downloading? Good grief, there has to be a better way. Well, thank goodness for technology and all of it’s ever increasing speed and ease.

There are a few larger ISP’s around that offer Cable and DSL internet service. Cable is faster, usually around 3 mega bits per second (Mbps) and can be upgraded to 20 Mbps for a fee. DSL services can speed you along your surfing way at about 300 kilobytes per second (kbps), and can vary from 128k up to 3 Mbps. DSL technology and software has improved over time, so if you are getting DSL, be sure to ask your ISP what speed they offer. All computers nowadays are equipped with ethernet cards that can then connect to your cable modem, and then to the internet. Remember, everything you view goes through your Internet Service Provider to your computer. Email also goes through your ISP before it reaches you. ISP’s are your gateway to the limitless possibilities of the world. Another great thing about Cable and DSL connections is that they are always on. You never need to sign in and dial up. If your computer is on, your internet is on.

Well, why is knowing how fast an internet connection is so important? When it comes to designing and developing websites, such as the ones built by Rocket Media (click here to view examples from our portfolio), we want to know if our finished product will load fast enough. This is crucial in the web world, since you only have 5 seconds or less to gain somebody’s attention. If they are spending that whole time waiting for your page to load, they may already be thinking about trying another option and pass you by.

During the design and coding process of building a website, it is important to keep the file size down. Adding images to your site can improve the overall appearance and visual quality of your presentation. But, images are usually large in file size to begin with, so we optimize them for the web, taking up the least amount of space possible. This enables your page to load faster when viewed. Other factors come into play when loading a web page, such as how much code your internet browser has to read before displaying the actual page. Viewing videos on popular sites sometimes require a certain amount of buffer time before you are able to actually see the video. Videos are usually the largest files contained on a website, and are fast becoming the most popular pages to view on the web. We watch sports highlights, news stories, funny videos and more. Our appetite for more video driven content has been increasing rapidly for years. New, cool looking video players are always popping up. If you think back 10 years, we had nothing like we do now on the internet. Why, you ask? Because the internet service providers, our computers, and our browsers couldn’t handle the sheer volume of data that has to be shared to display a video.

Now we can thank our current ISP’s for providing us with the bandwidth and speed to have a more enjoyable surfing experience. When I started using the internet in the early 90’s, it was pretty boring and slow. I am on the internet more during the day than when I sleep. Most of that is because of my job, but I love getting on a computer and googling something I wanted to know about. I enjoy watching my favorite sports teams and reading up on the game recaps. An entertaining video on YouTube now and then is great, too. This is all possible thanks to my ISP at work and at home, who give me the connection I need to accomplish my work, and to have a little recreation now and then as well. If our internet service was any slower we would get bored and have to spend our time doing something else, like reading a book, or playing basketball…


Sara Taylor
Project Manager
ROCKET MEDIA

Help For Ipod Users

My household has finally jumped on the band wagon and joined the ipod craze, but trying to figure out how to work this incredibly small thing is another story.  I found a great website that has been a huge help when I have had questions - from trying to figure out if i should manually manage my songs to learning how to charge this thing… Check it out!

http://www.ilounge.com/


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Blogging, what is it and how does it work?

I’ve been asked several times over the past month “Should I start a blog?  What if...?” The answer is yes, you should.  Or more accurately, if you’re interested in blogging you shouldn’t feel afraid to blog.

So what is it? According to Wikipedia, “A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” So it’s a journal that allows you to post your views on subject matters that mean something to, your business or your readers. Here’s a rundown of the good and bad things that will happen to you when you blog.

The Good


• You publish something that helps somebody.  You’ve used a lot of tutorials, newsgroups, and other people’s posts in your career.  Think of your blog as a way to pay it forward.
• By writing out your position on anything, you’ll be forced to crystallize your thoughts on a subject.  I very frequently use my blog as a way to “pre-can” arguments and explanations for later.  I’ve used my blogging material in consulting roles.  I think that the simple act of expressing yourself is a good way to learn.  What do you think about a subject, and why?  Can you defend that statement?
• It’s a way to practice communication
• You’ll get noticed in a positive way and turn it into professional gain.  Arguably, writing a blog is the best thing I’ve ever done for my career.
• It’ll be funny to go back over old posts and see how your ideas have changed


The Bad


• You end up being wrong.  Somebody will write a comment that tells you why your approach is wrong and they’ll often say “just do this...” Cool, you just learned a new trick.  You end up being wiser for the experience.
• You look like an idiot.  Again, you’ve learned something
• “foobar" or another BlogCoward is going to call you a name.  Nothing nearly as bad as what my wife says about me.  Sticks and stones...
• You’re going to make a very opinionated, inflammatory post and get criticized for it.  Oh my gosh, somebody might disagree with you!  It’s okay, just keep it cool. If you say something that you know is going to make people mad, expect the flames.  Saying that though, I’ve been surprised several times by the reaction to a post.  You might just want to reread your drafts and tone down the language (believe it or not, I do this but things still leak through).  Besides, you might have deserved the flames in the first place.


Sometimes words are just not enough, so here is a video I found that does a great job of explaining blogging.



Looking for ways to start blogging? Check our my article on ”blogging resources” or contact ROCKET MEDIA for professional assistance.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Ahh, Good Old Political Fun!

As the elections loom closer and closer we start finding the many political propaganda campaigns popping into the main stream of our media frenzy. I came across this game that pokes fun at the Obama vs Clinton battle. We all know how that battle concluded but with this game you get to take matters into your own hands - the old fashion way. Cheers!





Sara Taylor
Project Manager
ROCKET MEDIA

Shopping Internet Style

Shopping on the Internet is easy and convenient, so much so that it can get you into trouble if you are trying to stay out of stores… Every where you look there are ads and promotions that are trying to entice you to visit the websites of your favorite stores that sometimes offer better deals than shopping in the actual stores.  Free shipping and coupon codes make it hard to resist sneaking in a few minutes during the day to browse, or if you are like me, consuming several hours of your weekend.

If you have been around the shopping block like I have, then you have seen a wide variety of shopping cart solutions out there, some more user friendly than others.  From Ebay’s bidding wars to The Gap’s four stores in one shopping cart!  Hopefully you have realized how important it is to offer your products and services not only in your store, but also on your website.  If not you could be missing out on a huge part of the market of shopper’s that prefer to stay home rather than fight the crowds in stores.

We have provided a large variety of online shopping cart’s to many of our customer’s who have decided to get on board and take advantage of this new trend.  Just recently we created a custom shopping cart solution for United Food Bank, they decided that an interactive drag and drop cart would make a fun and user friendly addition to their new site (check back with us soon to see when the brand new website for United Food Bank will be launched!!)

From a standard shopping cart to an interactive cart, we have done them all.  Give us a call to see how we can improve your shopping cart!


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

A font is a font, and then some…

I fully admit that I am a font whore. I love fonts. And this font video had me in tears this morning. In that good way!





Laura Kalkman
Director of Marketing
ROCKET MEDIA

Click Fraud

You are considering Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns for your company but one thing has your mind boggled… “If I Pay-Per Click , what’s to stop my evil competitors from searching me and clicking on all of my ads, using up my budget?” This is called Click Fraud and there is a ton of positive and negative information on the web about this issue.

Here is the lowdown on how Click Fraud works… Once your competitor has clicked on your PPC ad, a few times, their clicks are no longer charged/billed against your account. However, search engines still allow the ‘evil competitors’ to continue viewing and clicking on your ads.

Google is staying on top of this issue by creating a site that will be filled with information about Click Fraud and correlated issues people have with their Pay-Per Click Campaigns. Learn more about Google’s Click Fraud Information website.

There are also organizations and councils that are in the process of finding exact solutions to Click Fraud. A dependable resource is the Click Quality Council. This organization has currently released a list of principles to ensure click quality and a video explaining their principles.

________________________________________________________________________________

The Click Quality Council’s Principles to Ensure Click Quality:

1. Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.

2. Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.

3. Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.

4. Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.

5. Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.

6. Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.

7. Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.

8. Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

________________________________________________________________________________

ROCKET MEDIA offers solutions such as ROCKET Analytics Voice and Web to compliment our Pay-Per Click campaigns and Internet Marketing efforts. ROCKET Analytics also includes Click Fraud technology and reporting.

If you have any questions about your specific campaign involving Click Fraud or would like to have a free consultation about how ROCKET MEDIA’s Internet Marketing solutions can help your company contact us today.

Learn More about ROCKET MEDIA’s Internet Marketing.

Learn More about ROCKET Analytics - Voice and Web.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

How not to submit a project

”I need help with a project.”

Believe it or not, we’ve gotten these kinds of inquiries before (one not that long ago). I’m really not sure what people expect to get back from this sort of “request” but the bottom line is, it’s just not anywhere near being enough to even start a decent conversation. What kind of a project? Web? Search Marketing? Logo? Print?

Moral of the story is quite simple… If you have a project for a design firm, it’s best to provide at least some detail to get a good conversation going. We decided to make it even easier for you… simply fill out our service inquiry form - it’s that easy.


Spencer Williams
Designer
ROCKET MEDIA

ROCKET Analytics - Tracking Your Success

Have you ever tried to accomplish a task but felt you were going nowhere? Tired of butting your head against a brick wall for the thousandth time? Now try that same task again, but with measured results that you can see, showing how effective your efforts have or haven’t been.

Welcome to the modern age. We spend more time per day on the internet looking up and researching our favorite topics, music, videos, news, politics, sports, and purchase goods online more than ever before. Anything and everything you do while surfing can be tracked and stored by computers. While it is happening we have no idea what is taking place. Quad-core processors in your Mac (or PC for the old fashioned people), can process billions of calculations per second. What visitors look at on the internet and what they click on is instantaneously processed and stored by tracking software. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. How about knowing what operating system visitors use, their I.P. address, browser, length of stay on a web page, what keywords were used to get to your site, and more? Even the most minute details like where on the screen visitors clicked can be recorded. ROCKET Analytics easily tracks all of this and more.

ROCKET Analytics is a real-time website analytics and tracking service that enables businesses to maximize the effectiveness of their websites through powerful information about their visitor interactions. In real-time, ROCKET Analytics interprets your website traffic, building dynamic reports for trend and marketing analysis. Imagine being able to see what is going on with your website and then optimize your performance whenever you want. It is web based so you can have real time results and live stream reports straight to your desktop. This enables you to view everything at a glance, from any computer anywhere in the world.

Some of the great features of ROCKET Analytics are:


• See what pages your visitors view and how long they stay on each page.
• Understand what keywords and phrases are used to find your website.
• Use keyword trending to your advantage to manage your pay-per-click spending and monitor what your visitors are searching.
• Receive live stream reports directly to your desktop.
• Touch Mapping - See an overlay of your web pages so you know everywhere your visitors have clicked.
• Know who your top referrers are and what links visitors clicked to get to you.
• Track your secure pages with our SSL code snippet.
• Monitor website up-time and be notified instantly of any downtime.
• Visually track visitors’ geographic location, from country right down to the city they’re viewing from.
• Observe traffic within specific time periods: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
• Save your reports to Microsoft Excel for offline analysis and portability.


Knowledge is power, and knowing why visitors stay on your website gives you an edge over your competition. As part of the Analytics package, you get a fully functional, graphic based report system. The navigation is user friendly and easy to move through, and you will have many instant reports at your fingertips.

Having a website out there is a great way for you to show everyone more information about your products and services. Having the right tools to optimize and increase your websites performance is even better. It’s like taking a Honda Prius and racing it in a Nascar race; you would get smoked by everyone else out there with a more powerful and faster vehicle that was made to go 200 miles per hour. Wouldn’t you also want a vehicle with the same capabilities?

To find out more of what ROCKET Analytics can offer you, go to our analytics page by clicking here, or by calling Rocket Media at (800) 339-7305.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Does your website work for you?

Too many small/medium business owners have a website because it just seems like the thing to do. Unfortunately they don’t stop to think about how their business can be improved by having a website. Better yet, a website that works for them.

Think about it… if you’re spending time and money to have a website developed, shouldn’t you be getting a return on it? Whether that return is an increase in sales, leads, calls, emails, etc., the one thing your website shouldn’t be doing is just sitting there. If it is, it’s probably not doing a whole lot for your business, except sucking a few bucks a month for hosting.

But here’s the key. In order to get a return on your site, it needs to be designed with these areas in mind:


• usability
• search engine rankings
• click-throughs

So before you run off to check with your designer on how to get a return on your site, be sure to ask if the site is usable, search engine friendly and if it will lead users to the path you need them to in order for them to get in touch. Sadly, not all web designers know how to do that.

Want us to review your site and provide you a free list of suggestions?


Laura Kalkman
Director of Marketing
ROCKET MEDIA

SEO vs. SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing marketing avenue. Search Engines are constantly implementing new rules and creating new loopholes to keep rule breakers and frauds from ruining the game. The name of the game: optimization.

There are SEO companies out there that promise their clients that they can get them ranked with Google in organic search as number one. A lot of times this is the smoke being blown somewhere you don’t want it.  Organic search ranking is the listing of companies below the paid, highlighted ads found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. In order to reach a high ranking in organic ads, your site must have a plethora of relevant content, lots of referral links TO your site, correct tagging, TIME….the list goes on in Google’s “Webmaster Guidelines”.

No SEO company can get you to the number one spot over night. There are a lot of Search Engine Optimizers out there who are looking to break the search engine’s rules in order to get you to the top. Watch out for them. Google lists things to be weary of if you must go through an optimizer, all viewable on their “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” page. The main factor is time. It takes time to reach the top of organic search listings and if you don’t have time, Pay-Per Click (PPC) Marketing may be the better route for your company.

This is the main reason ROCKET MEDIA chooses to focus on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) through Pay-Per Click (PPC) ads. With PPC we are able to guarantee your success on search engines and measure it for proof. PPC ads are the listings of companies in the highlighted top section of your search results which extend on over to the right hand side column. With these ads, the company doesn’t pay to be shown, they pay once clicked on – they pay per click on their ad. If you want to be number one listed in the paid ads section, ROCKET MEDIA can get you there, we can do it over night and we can guarantee it.

Of course, with every custom website ROCKET MEDIA builds from scratch we consider and follow all of the current organic search rules. The fact still remains that playing the game of SEO ONLY is not reliable. My recommendation, when it comes to deciding where to put your company’s Internet advertising dollars, go with what is reliable, dependable and guaranteed – Search Engine Marketing through Pay-Per Click campaigns.

If you are interested in getting your Search Engine Marketing campaigns started contact ROCKET MEDIA today for your free consultation and quote.

Learn more about ROCKET MEDIA’s SEM services.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Blogging Resources

So you want to start blogging. Your burning to discovered the inner blogger within you but your not sure where to start. Here is a quick list of free blogging solutions to help get you started.

• Blogger
• WordPress
• TypePad (free trial anyway)
• Squarespace (another free trial)

If you need help getting started, want to integrate a blog into your existing website or just want professional help - contact ROCKET MEDIA.



Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Google’s new browser - Chrome

Not only did Google announce Chrome, its new browser that’s making a splash all over with a comic book, but there’s a bit more funny history as well.

Several years ago Microsoft had a project code-named Chrome. It was supposed to be a multimedia browser. The project was killed a few weeks away from shipping.
There are even still some articles up about the Microsoft Chrome project. Here’s one about the project getting killed.

But, more seriously, and not so humorous: I wonder what will happen to funding for Mozilla’s Firefox now that Google is headed into the browser business?

Get yourself a preview copy of the browser and check it out yourself.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Presidential Paintball… yeah it’s a game.

Yet another political game combating the two party candidates in a game of Paintball.





Sara Taylor
Project Manager
ROCKET MEDIA

To Blog or Not to Blog?

Writing a blog can be challenging and stressful if you don’t know where to start.  Luckliy there are some great resouces out there that can walk you through the process.

Blog-blogging.com explains that a blog should have a few basic components:

Your Blog Title - which allows you to name your entry

The Body - which contains your content

Trackback - which allows other sites to be linked back to your blog

Permanet Link - the URL of your blog article

Comments - which allows readers to leave comments on your blog

Adding a Blog to your current website will give you a great way to communicate with your current and potential customers about new products or services you are offering, product recalls or warnings, or sharing information on latest industry news.  If you have been looking for an inexpesive way to vamp up your website, adding a blog will be a great addition.  Contact ROCKET MEDIA to find out about adding a Blog to your website!


Laura Kalkman
Director of Marketing
ROCKET MEDIA

Going Green the Simple Way

Green… It sounds expensive and trendy but, “going green” can be as expensive or as inexpensive as you want it to be. Now, when people hear the phrase, “Going Green in the Office” they expect to read about solar panels and unique building techniques that some new office down town has implemented. It is time to keep it simple. I have listed a few general, simple things that you can do at your office to “go green” without remodeling your whole office building.


1. Open the window shades and turn off the lights for a certain amount of time each day (as long as it is still bright).
2. Turn the air up or down a few degrees depending on the season OR open the windows. The temperature inside your office does not NEED to be the extreme opposite of the outside temperature all year round. It is silly to have to wear a sweater during the summer because the air conditioning is so cold, or not wear a sweater during the winter because the heater is so warm.
3. Buy your staff a bus pass and offer an incentive for riding.
4. Buy the staff each their own water bottle to use instead of providing the plastic cups that they fill and then throw away, and then fill, and then throw away.
5. Office supplies stores offer many organic options and office supplies that have been recycled and remade for purchase. Check some of these options out here.

How ROCKET MEDIA Can Help You Go Green?
A simple way that ROCKET MEDIA can help your business take a step towards the green, is Email Marketing.  Email Marketing is very easy to replace your direct mail campaigns with and, using our technologies, you will be able to tell how many people you delivered to, actually opened the mail and read your message. Better yet, you can measure how many people truly completed your call to action and if your campaign was successful, which, if you use ROCKET MEDIA, there really is no question.

If you are sending your monthly/quarterly/annual newsletter through the mail, ROCKET MEDIA’s Email Marketing can also help you save some trees by designing a template that looks and feels just like your website and allows your staff to easily type in the content without having to know coding. Replacing your postage mailed newsletters with email newsletters, saves trees, postage, and offers a reliable/measurable call to action every time.

Save some trees TODAY! Contact ROCKET MEDIA for your Email Marketing quote.
There it is folks, the Simple Way to “Going Green”.  All options mentioned above are easy, cost effective and make you feel good about contributing to the cause. Give them a try and see how good it feels.



Sara Taylor
Project Manager
ROCKET MEDIA

Template Site or Custom Site?

When you think of the reasons a customer may choose to go with a template website instead of a custom website, you assume it must be because of the price difference, right?  After checking out several template website providers the price difference is not as far apart as you would imagine (several of the template sites were actually priced MORE THAN average-priced custom sites!!!).  So then, if there isn’t much of a price difference, why would a customer choose a run of the mill template over a unique custom site?  Your guess is as good as mine….

This is a great article I found that weighs the pros and cons of Website Templates vs. Custom Websites.  Check it out and decide what is best for you!

http://www.webpagemistakes.ca/custom-web-design-website-templates


Sara Taylor
Project Manager
ROCKET MEDIA

Why Do I Need a Content Management System (CMS)?

Like it or not a business’s website has become a necessary staple in today’s competitive market, and keeping your website content current is imperative. Before I got into this field, I use to think there was a magic password to every website, and all you had to do was login and update....turns out that’s not the case. The other side of that big, beautiful, fancy site is hard, raw coding - not so user friendly.

Keeping your website content updated and relevant will keep your customers coming back for more and give them a better understanding of your business. Relying on an experienced website company to build this program is key (one like....ROCKET MEDIA!) Picking the right company is almost as important as choosing the right financial advisor for your investments. Why would you trust just anyone with your most prized marketing tool? Your website programming team should choose the very best solution out there and consider all your current needs and even your future ones.

If you are new to the CMS idea, or have been stuck on weighing the pros and cons of adding the system, consider this - how much do you spend a year on website updates? Or how many times have you put off changing the content on your site? What about all those new services you offer but no one knows about because they aren’t being advertised? The system pays for itself.

So what can this system do? This easy to use web based system will allow you to create new pages, update your navigation, publish articles or calendar events, upload and edit graphics, and so much more from any computer in the world that has access to the internet. As an administrator, you can set limits for other user accounts and allow them to access certain sections of the site, or as a user you can change monthly promotions on your site. With this system, you will be amazed by all that you can do and you don’t have to be an experienced website programmer even understand html coding. Once the CMS has been built into your website, it can always be updated and reworked down the line if you or your business find that you have different needs later on.

Maybe you only have the need to update a specific section of your site, a CMS can be added to just a specific area such as your news article section or maybe your products page. Whatever you need, we can help you.

If you are thinking of having a website built or maybe in the process of it, adding the CMS to your site while it is being built can save you time and money. While we are designing and creating your site for you, we can build the CMS around the site. But for those that think they have missed the boat, don’t worry we can build the CMS around your existing site. This is a major overhaul for your site, it will be rebuilt from the inside out, but one that is surely worth it.

Are you ready to get your project started? Let us know!



Spencer Williams
Designer
ROCKET MEDIA

Email Marketing - Get Your Products & Services Out There

As the designer who creates and sends out monthly email newsletters for ToFixIt!, an online referral service, I have the opportunity to touch many people’s lives through this medium. ToFixIt! can fix, repair, or remodel anything in your home or office, fix, clean or modify your car, and provide even more great services you may need. Since they cater to such a broad demographic and geographic range of consumers, specialized email newsletters get sent out monthly to cover everyone they need to. ToFixIt!’s monthly email newsletters contain important articles, communications, updates and coupons that their valued clientele want to receive. There are corresponding links to each company on ToFixIt! who takes part in the newsletter. This way consumers can go directly to the web page they need with the corresponding information they need.

This model of email marketing can easily be tailored to suit your needs. Maybe you just want a campaign to send out an email promoting a weekly special, or specific product to your customers. A monthly newsletter is a common practice for many medium and large sized companies, and keeps their consumers well informed. Often, companies will have internet only promotions and coupons that are better than any offer you will find in their store.

At Rocket Media, we do things the right way. Spam is a buzz word in the internet world, and we strive to stay away from that. When your company carpet bombs anyone and everyone with mass emails that they don’t need or want, you not only tarnish your company’s image, but look out for watch agencies and possibly your Internet Service Provider to be giving you a call really soon about your practices. We use opt-in email lists where the end user willingly gives you their email address in exchange for more information and offers from you.

The design and layout of the email piece is important to catch the eye of the consumer you are catering to. You may notice that any email you have received as a result of signing up for updates and offers from any website is usually colorful, catchy, informative, and to the point. Having eye candy is great for the end user, so you may want a specific product image with your offer for example. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Branding is key, so you definitely want your company represented with well placed logos and colors on your email marketing piece.

Another important aspect of the email campaign is to have a call to action. It helps to have a prominent button or graphic that links directly to the page you are promoting. Don’t forget to have your company’s contact information readily available for anyone to click through to your website, or give you a quick phone call. If your consumers don’t know who, what, where, when, or why, you are just wasting everybody’s time.

Remember, you can have the best looking marketing piece, but if you don’t have any relevant content on it, no one will bother seeing what else you have to offer. Content is key. Make sure you get your point across and in a useful manner, but don’t write a novel either. Newsletters, for example, can have decent sized articles in them that link on to bigger and better web pages. Or, you if you are promoting a single product or service, just a few descriptive lines will do the trick. Catchy slogans and titles on the page help send the message well.

Lastly, Rocket Media monitors behavioral tracking statistics of your email campaign for you. If you have no recordable goals with recordable results, you are just going around in circles. We can monitor your campaign and make modifications as needed the next time around to create a more effective ad campaign.

Rocket Media provides a turnkey solution making it easy for you to begin your email marketing campaign. We handle everything including development, implementation and management. Email Marketing is an effective and relatively simple marketing strategy that will help get you in front of the consumers who want you to send them your best offers and services.

To inquire about more on what Rocket Media can offer you, Call us at (800) 339-7305, or Click Here.


Aaren Hofferth
Designer
ROCKET MEDIA

Viacom Knows Everything You Are Watching On YouTube

On July 1st, Viacom won a legal battle against YouTube that forces YouTube to release member data that contains such information as your computer IP, the videos you have watched, what you have uploaded, and more. Viacom claims to be doing this so they can prove that users are watching copyrighted material, and watching it more than user uploaded material (with the exception of videos that are marked as private). Many bloggers and media outlets are speculative that Viacom may use the information to hunt down and sue YouTube visitors who breach the no copyright agreement—but Viacom says this is not their intention.

Currently, web giants such as Yahoo, MSN, MySpace, and YouTube are not liable for what their users upload, though they do discourage it as much as possible. Legal action is being taken to try and make video sites such as YouTube responsible for what their users upload. In my opinion—this just isn’t possible unless all material is viewed by YouTube before it goes up, which is ridiculous. A businessweek.com article points out that the current DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) protects website owners from illegal practices caused by users. It seems like this is a step backward.

I have also been reading users comments on others articles about this news—and it seems a lot of people are saying this is a violation of the constitution because it is a) taking private information and making it available to others, and b) going against free speech. Now, I’m not on Viacom’s side on this one, but they are losing a lot of money that should rightfully be theirs. It doesn’t matter how much money they have already made—they still have the right to it. In fact, when you copyright something, you are legally bound to protect that copyright or else you lose it. So their options are, lose the copyright, or try and stop the people who are violating it.

All in all, I just hope that the information given to Viacom is only used for what it is intended to be used for, that it is not stolen or sent out by someone untrustworthy, and that it does not cripple probably one of the best websites of our time.


Laura Kalkman
Director of Marketing
ROCKET MEDIA

Why do I need a website?

Why do I need a website?

As a marketing/sales associate here at ROCKET MEDIA, I get one question asked of me over and over and over again, and that is, “Why do I need a website?”. Alot of times this question flat out baffles me. To me, that question is like a business owner asking, “Why do I need people to know about my business?” or “Why would I want potential clients to contact me?”. The answers to those questions are obvious: To gain more business!!! That is the name of the game here, people. To deny, or question, an outlet that could produce your potential success is just plain crazy!

For most companies, a website is categorized as a piece of advertising. But really, it is much more than that. At ROCKET MEDIA, we refer to websites as each company’s individual 24-hour sales person. A sales person who, doesn’t eat, sleep or take bathroom breaks!

Having a website isn’t the only battle. There are many things you need to consider when thinking about creating your website:



1. You want it to look great!
The look and feel may be the first and only impression people get when they come to your site. If the site seems at all hoaky, I ask you, what do you do? I personally, hit the back arrow to my old Google search and look for a different company that actually looks legit. This is not a one time advertising outlet that could be a waste of money like some magazine and newspaper ads, this is your full time advertising piece. If you are going to put your advertising dollars anywhere, your website look and feel is the place to start. After that I would suggest any other Internet marketing outlets. I am sure you are thinking, “Sure, the sales girl for a website design firm, WOULD suggest this.” But really, take my advice, you WILL see the difference.

2. You want it to be informative.
Content, content, content! Going to a site with a bunch of pictures is nice if you are looking for something that doesn’t require much explanation. But, the goal is to have your potential clients come to your site and be able to find all of the answers to their questions, easily and in the most non-confusing way. You should explain on the home page, why users need your services and what puts you on a higher stomping ground than your competitors. Then, on each of your service (or product) pages, you should explain the service, what you do in your process and again, why that consumer or viewer should use you for this service. An FAQ’s page is also a great page to have on your website. It should be filled with a plethora of frequently asked questions with answers that, not only, answer the question but also sell the service or product the question is referring to. A plethora of content on your website is not only helpful to the potential clients, but also to Search Engines that show you in key word searches (like Google search). The Search Engine spiders love sites that have lots of information talking about relevant search topics that relate to your service or product. When you get to the content part of your website creation, you want it written well, so, if you must, invest your money in a content writer who knows all about writing for the Internet.

3. You want it to sell for you.
Last but not least, if your website is bringing in leads either through your contact form or by phone, your site is doing its job. To make sure this is happening, plan your site to have a call to action on every page. Weather it be a graphic that instructs viewers to “Call us TODAY” with the number clearly listed or a contact form for viewers to fill out contact information fields and their comments or questions. There has to be a reason for the viewers to be on your site besides just finding information. Most of the time, they are looking for a way to contact you to request a quote or find out how much you charge. You want viewers to see these call to actions right off the bat so that there is not question of ...”How do I get ahold of this company?”.

So, that is my “in general” advice for anyone who asks the question, “Why do I need a website?”. I can answer many more questions as well as customize your website to your business, anytime. Give me a call! I would be glad to work with you on getting your 24-hour sales person up and running while following my website must haves.

** To request a quote for your custom website design, click HERE, or call ROCKET MEDIA, toll free, at: 1-800-339-7305. We look forward to working with you soon! **



Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Tips for writing effective landing pages

While researching the process for creating effective landing pages, I collected a short list of tips to consider. These suggestions focus on content development for your website.


• Make sure your headline refers directly to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click. Match your language as exactly as you can. (Close is good, exact is best.) This way you keep your visitor oriented and engaged. This is by far the most important part of your landing page.
• Provide a clear call to action. Whether you use graphic buttons or hot-linked text (or both), tell your visitor what they need to do. I use a minimum of 2 calls to action in a short landing page, 3-5 in a long landing page. Copy tests here will give you the biggest bang next to testing headlines.
• Write in the second person – You and Your. No one gives a rat’s patootie about you, your company, or even your product or service except as to how it benefits him or her.
• Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase. This is business, not a personal expression of your art.
• You can write long copy as long as it’s tight. Often writers err on writing a little long on the first drafts because it’s easier to edit down than to pad up skimpy copy. Your reader will read long copy as long as you keep building a strong, motivating case for him/her to act. However, not every product or service will require the same amount of copy investment. Rule of thumb: Think longer copy when you’re looking to close a sale. Think shorter copy for a subscription sign-up or something that doesn’t necessarily require a cash commitment.
• Be crystal clear in your goals. Keep your body copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Don’t add tangential thoughts, ancillary services, and generic hoo-hah. Every digression is a conversion lost.
• Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets. Most visitors are skimming and skipping through your copy. Make it easy for them to get the joke without having to slow down.
• People read beginnings and ends before they read middles. Make sure you keep your most critical, persuasive arguments in these positions.
• Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines (that’s lines, not sentences). Vary your paragraph line length from here. It helps create visual dissonance and makes it easier to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines long at any time.
• Write to the screen. Take a piece of paper and frame-out where your text, buttons, and design elements will go. Consider how much of your content will be seen “above the fold” or at the first screen. You can still go long and have visitors scroll downward. If so, you’ll want to make sure you repeat essential calls to action, testimonials and other components so no matter where your visitor is, an ACT NOW link or button remains is visible.
• Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page. This could include navigation bars, visual clutter, and links to other sections. You want the reader focused solely on your copy, your supportive visuals, and the offer you’re making without being tempted to wander around the room.
• Don’t ask for what you don’t need. Ask for only enough information to complete the sale or the desired action. This isn’t the time to conduct a marketing survey. Every question you ask, every piece of information you require will chip away at your response. Keep it simple
• Assume nothing. Test everything. These tips and techniques will get you started, but they just scratch the proverbial surface. Design elements are critical, too — color, images, layout — as well as video, audio, and other interactivity elements whose purpose is to more deeply engage the reader and boost response. They all merit a deeper look and testing where it makes sense.


Need help creating effective landing pages for your site?
Get a free consultation.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Landing Page 101

At ROCKET MEDIA we spend a great deal of time preaching and practicing the art of “landing page” development. So what exactly is a landing page and how can it work for your website?

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

Here are a few examples of ways that landing pages are used with various traffic sources:


• Traffic is sent from a pay per click (PPC) search marketing campaign (such as Google AdWords) to multiple landing pages optimized to correspond with the keywords the searcher used.
• Traffic is sent from a banner ad or sponsorship graphic to a landing page specifically designed to address that target audience.
• Traffic is sent from a link in an email to a landing page designed to prompt a purchase or other action.
• Traffic is sent from a blog post or sidebar link to a landing page that pre-sells affiliate products or encourages an opt-in to a sub-list.
• The page you’re currently reading is a content landing page designed to organize many related pages around an overall theme.

Need help creating effective landing pages for your site?
Get a free consultation.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

5 ways to annoy the crap out of your visitors

The following article should be engraved in the memory / head of every web developer, web designer, website owner and pretty much anyone having anything to do with the production of a website.

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Making visitors to your website feel comfortable and welcome is crucial to online success. It is much easier for people to click the back button than it is for them to walk out of an actual store or brick and mortar office. After all, they didn’t spend the time and $5.00/per gallon in gas to get to your website like they would have if they had travelled to your physical location. The only thing they have invested is the minuscule amount of energy it took to click the mouse a few times - no big deal to back out and pretend they were never there.

The best way to make sure they bail out of your site without ever acting on your call to action (buying something, contacting you, downloading your free report, signing up for a newsletter, etc..) is to annoy the crap out of them.  Here are 5 sure fire ways to do that…

1. Use Flash Intros
You have about 3 seconds to convince your visitors to stay on your site.  (And that will usually only hold for another 3 seconds unless you can convince them again to stay even longer.) You can take up that 3 seconds with a fancy flash intro that they can’t get out of and don’t care to see.  The first thing a visitor wants to see is whether the site is relevant to what they are looking for.  Since most flash intros are designed not to convey information, but instead are an attempt to impress the visitor with graphics and music, you can annoy them by using them right when they arrive at your site.  They are like showing commercials in your store.  You have already got the person there, you don’t need to show them another commercial when they walk in the door.  Personally, if I want graphics and music I’ll watch a Disney movie.  I don’t even like the flash intros that I can get out of easily, but if you must have one you can make it a little less annoying by making sure the “Skip This Intro” button is clearly visible.

2. Play Music
Nothing is more annoying than a website with music on it.  Oh wait… yes there is… a website with music on it that you can’t turn off.  In the offline world music is used in offices, stores and restaraunts for various reasons - make the customers relaxed, get them in and out quickly, make them want to stay awhile, make the store appeal to a certain demographic, etc.  This does not translate to the online world.  You need to set the tone of your website with your graphics, content and navigation.  Playing music just annoys the crap out of people and drives them away.

3. Clutter Your Landing Page
If you really want to annoy people make sure your landing page is so filled with graphics, ads, and content that their eyes hurt just thinking about trying to find what they are looking for.  When someone lands on your page they need to be able to immediately see that the page is relevant to what they are looking for, feel that they are on a professional site of a professional company and feel comfortable and confident enough to delve deeper into the site.  You want their brain to say, “Ah, this is nice.  I think I will stay awhile.” Unless of course, you want to annoy the crap out of them… then you want their brain to say, “Aargh!  What the hell is this?  Back! Back!”

The above 3 things you can do to annoy the crap out of your visitors can be done in the first 3 seconds that they land on your page. However, if they make it past those you still have a chance with these.

4. Hide From Your Visitors
Although people have gotten more comfortable doing business online, they still need to be reassured that there is a real company behind the site.  So if you really want to annoy them, act smarmy and hide.  You can make your contact page difficult to reach by only giving it a small text link in the footer of your page.  Another really irritating thing you could do is not have a toll free number for people to call and only be reachable by email.  This will most likely annoy them enough to make them leave.

5. Keep Things Long and Complicated
If you have not annoyed your visitors enough and they have made it to your sign up/order/action page, don’t fret.  You still have a chance to annoy the crap out of them and make them leave.  Here’s what you do - make them jump through hoops to do business with you.  This means making your order page 4 pages long and require everything from their mother’s maiden name to their shoe size a required field.  The more complicated things are and the more barriers visitors run up against, the less likely they are to follow through with your call to action.  Although they want things simple and uncomplicated, they also want a lot choices when it comes to payment options.  So make sure to only accept 1 major credit card if you really want to annoy them enough to bail out.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of annoying things you can do on your website and these are just a few of them.  What’s your best advice on how to annoy your visitors?
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I couldn’t have said any better.
source: http://www.marketme.com/2008/07/18/5-ways-to-annoy-the-crap-out-of-your-visitors.html



Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Secrets to Success with Google AdSense

Secrets to Success With Google AdSense: This one hits the nail on the head. In fact, it’s true for most advertising - you have to give it time and tweak it for it to bring the results you want.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Web 2.0 simplified. It’s not really a new WWW

Maybe you’ve heard the term, maybe you haven’t: Web 2.0. Personally, I think it’s for the birds…

What has always bothered me about “Web 2.0” is that can be so confusing for people with no direct connections to or deeper knowledge of the Web or technology industries. And even then some smart people were confused. My good friend, for example, who is a very skilled IT/networking pro had to ask me what Web 2.0 was all about.

Thanks to the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, the term has proliferated and is used and overused. It’s defined as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Typically it just means all the cool new apps and technologies you see just about anywhere on the ‘net: blogs, RSS feeds, social applications (think MySpace, Facebook), etc.

The problem with the term is that it makes it sound like there’s a new Web; a new Internet. But there isn’t. It’s the same Internet. Yet it’s not. Confused yet?

You see, it’s the same Internet as far as how it works and what developers need to do to get a page or site up on the Web. But it’s different in the sense that what we do within the boundaries of the Internet guidelines, rules and structure, is getting more sophisticated, slicker and just plain cooler every day.

It’s this confusion that has made even Tim Berners-Lee say it’s nothing more than jargon. So if you’re a marketer, please, quit using the term. And if you’re confused about Web 2.0 and wonder whether you need to catch up, you can relax. You haven’t missed anything.


Ben Kalkman
CEO
ROCKET MEDIA

Writing for Your Website

Recent studies have shown that 79% of web users don’t read online content word-for-word. It probably has something to do with another interesting figure: Reading online is 25% slower than reading on paper. Unfortunately, many people continue to make