When you're looking for more organic (direct from unpaid search results) traffic to your website, there are plenty of techniques you can use to help you get a better position in search engine results. This process is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Without getting into too much depth on this, today's SEO should really gear it toward providing searchers with more value rather than trying to game a search engine algorithm. That said, there are still ways of seeing how you can add more value for people in a way that will also get you more traffic. This is a situation where I feel everyone wins and is the ideal of SEO.

​If you're interested in understanding more, you can visit my article on SEO tips.

Among the tricks of the trade, SEO professionals use a number of tools to track search engine rankings for various keywords and ESTIMATE the clicks generated from them each month. These tools have been important because several years ago as Google moved to https:, SEO experts lost the ability to get a bunch of information like rankings and clicks from Google Analytics directly.

But a fairly new tool called Keyword Hero restores much of that data directly inside Google Analytics, and it's become a favorite for me to the point that I now recommend it to anyone I do business with -- even if they won't know how to use it, by setting it up (which is simple), it builds up data that any SEO pro they work with will be able to use.

(Go ahead ... use that link to check it out: there is a FREE version that lets you track your 25 most visited pages.)

With Keyword Hero, instead of Google's common "Not Provided" result in Analytics (which means they're not telling you what people searched for to find you), you can once again get people's exact searches. So you're no longer wondering what keywords are driving traffic ... or SALES. It's all reported.

If you have a local storefront with nearby foot traffic, whether you're a retailer or restaurant or a service provider, there's a nifty technology you can use to entice some extra visitors. It's called a beacon.

I thought it was important to write about this because there are services that will charge you a monthly fee for something that could cost you around $20 one time. Now you might still want to spend a little extra each month for tracking, but you don't need to pay the "arm and leg" that some of these companies will try charging you.

Also, a quick heads up: there is a simple way to use a beacon (and that's what a lot of companies will charge you for) and a far more complex way to use them, which we won't go into here. (This can involve in-store positioning, active push notifications and more; this is usually for corporate scale retailing.)

Let's get started.

A beacon is just a small device that sends out a Bluetooth signal. Smartphones within range of that signal may pick up a simple message from that beacon -- in the example we're discussing, they would pick up a URL (the address to a web page) and would display the title to that page as well.

There are USB beacons that are powered when plugged into a USB port; and there are those powered by batteries like the one pictured here. Battery life will depend on settings (frequency and power of the signal you're sending out), but should last from several months up to a year or two.

You can get them inexpensively on Amazon here.

Imagine setting up a web page that's hidden from your main website navigation -- its only purpose is to promote a special offer or reason for people who are just outside your business to stop in.

So you might make the meta title of the page say something like:

"Buy One Get One Slice of Pizza Right Now! Stop In."

A meta title is simply a title you give a page in your website builder (not necessarily the title you might show on the actual web page). If you build your own site, you probably know what this is; if someone builds it for you, they will know. Your meta title limit is around 55 characters including spaces.

If someone clicks on that message, then Bam! ... they're taken to that web page on your site and you can give them all the details, including a great looking photo of someone biting into a slice of pizza.

Remember, they're only getting this message if they're within a store or two of your store, so it's not hard for them to stop in.

Remember I mentioned those services that will charge you a lot to set this up? Well here's the thing they might not tell you about the type of beacon marketing we're discussing: while it is easy to set up, it is a passive message and not all phones will even pick up the message.

A push notification is an active message -- it alerts someone that it's waiting for them. But with a beacon URL message, you will get a little icon at the top of your phone screen; when you swipe down on an Android device, you can see the message and choose to click on it.

A phone also needs to have bluetooth turned on, and from my experience it doesn't work with iPhones.

So how many people walk by your store every day? 100? Around 80 of them are probably running Android. People check their phones a lot, but they'd have to check it when near your store, notice the icon, and then swipe down to see the message. Then they have to click to visit your web page. And then they have to decide to visit your store.

Will that be a small number of people? Maybe one person a day? Is that still worth it if the beacon just costs you around $20 and setup is simple and the battery will probably last you a year?

Of course if you're in a busy downtown area, things get a lot more interesting, even if a relatively small percentage of people respond to your message. It could still be a lot of visits for a small, one-time purchase!

Before you jump into this, please note that a beacon will ONLY send someone to a secure website. This means that someone must be able to access your site using https: rather than http: -- if in doubt, just go to your website with https: at the beginning and make sure it shows up. Or ask your web master.

More and more website builders are providing a FREE option for https: websites, so look into this. Google and others are pushing for all sites to be secure in order to protect visitors, so it's a good idea to take this step anyway, and might give you a slight edge when it comes to search engine rankings (when someone searches for anything related to your website). At least for a while. When everyone's using https:, no one will have a search engine advantage from doing so.

Beacons are limited in how much data they send, and this literally means that a URL (the website address you're sending out) must be very short. Even if you think your URL is short, it may not be short enough and you may need to use a URL shortener. Don't worry, these can be free.

Goo.gl (yes, run by Google) and Bit.ly are perhaps the most well known. Both are free, though bit.ly offers a premium option. Although you don't need to set up an account to shorter a link, I recommend setting one up so you can get at least some insights into how many times the link is clicked. This will give you a small idea of the value of this simple marketing technique.

However, if you have a lot of nearby foot traffic, it could make sense to take your tracking to the next level, and for that I recommend Click Magick. For just $17/month (or less on an annual plan), this robust platform gives you way more features than I should mention here, but here are a couple that might be most important to this kind of marketing:

• Automatic bot filtering. One challenge with other shorteners is that you'll sometimes see a bunch of clicks that came from robots crawling your website. This makes you think you're getting results that you aren't getting. Click Magick helps to filter this out.
  
  
• A/B split testing. Possibly the most important feature for this form of marketing ... your short URL can send people to 2 different pages and you can see which one works best for you. You'll see which title attracts more clicks, and if you include a different coupon code on each page, you'll see which page converts into more customers.
  
  
• Add a message bar, popups, or countdown timers to any page you link to. (Even if you don't own the page. But in your case, that detail may not matter.) If you don't already have a popup to capture email addresses on the page, this can add that, as long as you have an email service you can connect with it. This could help build your mailing list even if people don't stop into your store right then. (Offer to email a coupon for their next visit!)

Basically, if you have a lot of local foot traffic and know the importance of smart marketing, I encourage you to at least take a look at Click Magick and scroll down the page to read its feature. You'll pretty quickly get a sense of how you can use it and see if it's right for you.

So now the rubber meets the road: getting a beacon actually set up for your business. It's not hard.

1) Click this Amazon link to get an inexpensive beacon.

2) While waiting for that to arrive, set up a landing page that you want to send people to. Make sure the page is secure or the beacon won't work.

3) Set up an account with a URL shortener as explained above. If you're using Click Magick, check out its features and set it up as you like so you're ready with your short URL for the beacon.

4) The beacon should arrive with instructions on how to add a URL. If you order the one I've linked to:

• First download an app called RadBeacon onto your smartphone. This will speak with your beacon to tell it what URL to send people to.
• Squeeze the beacon briefly until you see a brief green light, which indicates it's on. Then squeeze the beacon for about 5 seconds until you see a green light flash a few times. It's then ready to be programmed.
• Open RadBeacon on your phone and click "Scan" to find your beacon. You may need to use the PIN 0000 (try this first) or 00000000 (4 or 8 zeroes) when you first configure it. You can change your PIN when setting up the beacon.
• For our purposes, turn off iBeacon, AltBeacon, and Eddystone UID. Turn on Eddystone URL.
• Enter the short URL (from your URL shortener) that points to the page on your website that you want people visiting.
• Choose your advertising rate of 1 to 10. This basically means it will send the signal from 1 to 10 times per second. The more it sends, the faster it will use the battery, but the easier it may be for phones to pick up the signal. You may want to choose a 5 and test this on your own phone. (Remember, your phone will need to have Bluetooth turned on for this to work.)
• Choose the "Transmit Power" -- again, the higher you go, the further the signal will be sent but the more quickly it will use its battery. The lowest power will only send a signal about 5 meters while the max will send it about 35 meters. This is affected by barriers like walls and the materials of those barriers.
• Once you're happy with your settings, squeeze the beacon briefly until you see a single flash of green light again. This leaves it on but it is no longer configurable. Now test it with your phone.
  

Phones may pick up the signal quickly or there may be a delay. You're looking for a symbol at the top of your phone. When you see a symbol you're not familiar with, that's probably. Swipe down and see if you can find your URL. Test it by clicking and make sure it takes you to the correct page.

Test from different locations around your store and see how far your signal is reaching.

And finally, if you ever want to turn off the beacon, a single squeeze should give you a single red flash. (Just remember to turn it on each day, or leave it on at all times.) Any time you need to configure it again, make sure it's on and squeeze for 5 seconds. But if you changed the PIN, make sure you've written it down or you won't be able to change the settings!

I hope this helps you to understand the wonderful world of beacons and beacon marketing.

​Today I wanted to point out a couple other important ways to manage your PPC manager:

1) Make sure they're making good use of negative keywords. You don't have to know how this is done, but in your regular review of your account, ask to see the search terms that are driving traffic.

If you're a barber, you may be bidding on the keyword "haircut" and you want to show up for searches like "where can I get a haircut" (and your ads should be limited to showing up for people in the area you serve). But you don't want to show up when someone searches for "how can I give a haircut," because this isn't the audience you want to pay for. Your PPC manager should be including "how to give" and "how can I give" as negative keywords, along with any other terms you see that aren't appropriate for your ads.

Don't have them show this in a report; have them show you in your actual account so that nothing's being left out.

2) Make sure they're testing different ads for high-volume groups. Truly valuable A/B testing is actually tough to do because it involves a lot of volume to be statistically valid. And if that volume takes too long to occur, then things like seasonality, competition, and changing needs / desires can alter how and why people click on ads. But if you have a lot of volume for certain ads, make sure variations are tested against one another so you can attract more visitors.

3) Consider adding prices to text ads. Contrary to the former point (going for a high click through rate, or CTR), adding prices to ads may purposely dissuade certain people from clicking. That's a good thing. It helps to pre-qualify your visitors. You don't want to pay for visits from people who won't buy at your price point. This may lower CTR while increasing your conversion rate and ROI (or ROAS - return on ad spend).

It's not reasonable to expect a PPC manager to continually change prices in ads. But if prices change on occasion, I believe they should be willing because it can help you to spend more efficiently. However, it is then YOUR responsibility to communicate all price changes. You may also choose to just do this for your most popular products or services.

4) See if they need to adjust for your business schedule. You may choose to take in account orders that come in by phone when setting your bids. Sometimes these can be tracked, but not always, so your ROI or ROAS may look worse than it really is when your call center is operating. But if you do this, make sure your bids are being reduced after hours. You campaigns can be set up to do this automatically.

​Likewise, your business might do better or worse on weekends depending on your audience and what you sell. Again, make sure bids are adjusted accordingly. These adjustments can be broken down by day or even to the specific hour, so pre-business, during business, and post-business hours so you can see when conversions are taking place and adjust accordingly.

5) See if they need to adjust by device type. You can have them break down any campaigns results by desktop, tablet, and mobile device to see where your clicks are coming from and where you get your conversions. Be careful on this: people often move between devices before making a purchase, and sometimes use mobile phones (for example) to do research before making a purchase on a desktop. But be aware that you can make decisions from this data.

6) If you're running Shopping Ads, make sure bids are being adjusted on individual SKUs. Shopping ads are those ads with product pictures and prices automatically in the ad, often at the top of search results for products (not services). They are based on a feed provided by your company. These are run differently than text ads -- your PPC manager does not get to choose the keywords that your products show up for. However, they can and should still be using negative keywords and should break the feed out to individual product SKUs, at least for higher volume products. They can then get more or less aggressive bidding on that product, depending on how well it's converting over time.

Woke up to zeroed out data on Google Analytics today (February 9, 2017). Last night traffic and conversions were showing up just fine, but today the conversions and revenue all showed zero. The rest of the data was still there:

To be clear ... I already have a transaction and revenue showing up for today's sales. But the transactions and revenue from yesterday all disappeared. Data that had been there last night.

So I looked online to see if others were talking about it. No one was ... BUT ... the fascinating thing is that the same type of thing happened on February 9, 2015, as seen in this article (with their image showing below). In other words ... what's up with February 9 and Google Analytics?

Last time, Google had people's data back in place by the end of the day and I presume the same thing will happen this time. Did you experience any problem with Google Analytics dropping your data today? (Update below image.)

UPDATE: And there it is ... 8 am and the data has returned. Strange to have it disappear at all, but everything seems in order!

If you use Adwords and you haven't yet rewritten your ads to take advantage of their expanded text ads, you might end up kicking yourself if you put it off any longer.

Expanded text ads launched in the summer of 2016 on the Adwords platform. I immediately put them into use on a high-volume account and had a massive increase in CTR (Click Through Rate) across the board. Sometimes I had twice the CTR with expanded text ads. Sometimes I had more. I don't think we had one campaign that didn't see a lift when using them.

And they seem to convert at least as well. I've said before that you want to pre-qualify visitors as much as possible with your ad so you can actually avoid clicks from those who aren't a good match for what you offer. With expanded text ads, you're both more visible AND able to better qualify visitors because you can tell them more about what you offer.

As you can see in the image here, I tested several expanded text ads vs. older ads, both with plenty of impressions; both over the same period of time; all falling very close to the same average position on the page. The CTRs on the expanded ads blew the rest away in every case.

So get onto those ads. And if you're a small business who needs a hand with your Adwords account, I welcome you to get in touch. Most agencies won't work with small accounts, but I enjoy working with small businesses and can lend a hand whether you need one-time setup help or ongoing management of your account.

I remember a teacher pointing out when I was just a kid that using "xmas" to stand for Christmas pretty much removed the whole point of Christmas. It removed "Christ." So when I shorten it, I've always had the habit of using "Cmas" instead. Makes a lot more sense to me.

So when I tried running some Google Adwords ads related to Christmas products, I wanted to use Cmas ... but knew that most people would probably better recognize Xmas. So I decided to try both and see which one got a better click through rate, or CTR.

I ran two ads that used Xmas in the headline, and two identical ads that used Cmas in the headline. Of course you cannot perfectly control all other variables in an outside setting like Google Adwords. The position of the ad is one such factor; the other ads or organic listings running nearby could also alter someone's actions; etc.

So to some degree, I have to consider this lack of control in the results, but I'll point out that the best performing ad in terms of CTR was only in the second best Average Position (4.8), and was nearly in the same position as two other ads (5.1). The worst performing ad Averaged a Position of 4.3. On that factor alone, you would expect it to have more visibility and therefore more clicks.

In fact I found what you might have predicted: Xmas performed 92% better than Cmas in terms of CTR (if you combine the two ads for Xmas and the two for Cmas). And this was verified as statistically significant through this handy calculator, which I recommend you use if you are running your own tests like this, lest you assume valid results too soon.

Now this isn't to say that Cmas wouldn't outperform Xmas in another setting, for a different audience or whatever. But this is just a simple Christmastime example of why it's important to run different ads in your campaigns and see where you get better results ... as long as you have enough search volume to legitimately test them.

One caution: remember that CTR isn't always your test subject. If I offer a "Free Science Fiction Book" in my ad, I might get a lot more clicks than if I tell people the book costs $12.95. But if the book does in fact cost $12.95, all the "free book" clicks (a high CTR) would be useless and a wasted investment; those clicking on the $12.95 ad (a low CTR) would be much more targeted to actually coughing up money for that book. In short, not a bad idea to weed out the wrong audience with your ad; save money on those clicks for a better audience!

​When I first took over a large Pay Per Click account (managing both Google Adwords and Bing Ads), the goals were fairly modest in terms of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) -- how much revenue was generated for every dollar spent. And the agency managing the account successfully ran things at or above that goal each month.

At first blush, that sounds like a happy situation for the client, but hidden behind that story are two mistakes that you can avoid by knowing about them and what to do about them:
​

​Most PPC agencies charge based on a percentage of what you're spending each month. That means they have an incentive to build as much volume as possible. Since you're setting the goals, and you WANT to ramp up while meeting those goals, this can be a good thing.

But unless you're overseeing things closely, they could be throwing a lot of money out the window simply because they have no incentive (unless you've built one in!) to exceed your basic goals. This almost certainly isn't malicious, but it sure doesn't help you out. Some examples I saw included:

* Product-specific keywords sending visitors not to the product page, but to the home page.

* Keywords / ads sending visitors to pages that no longer existed.

* Keywords / ads that had run for a long time and were proven not to convert well, so every click averaged a financial loss. Yes, you have to continually test ads and keywords, and there are often short-term losses; that is part of marketing. But these weren't getting bid down or turned off.

What to do #1: At least spot check product-specific keywords and make sure you can see that they're pointing to product pages. (If your account is small enough, check them all.) Then as new keywords are added into new groups, review them before they go live. If you don't know how to do these things, have your PPC agency walk you through the process. They should gladly be transparent, and if they're not, this is a red flag.

What to do #2: There are complex methods for seeing which specific ads are sending people to dead pages, but you can easily check to see if this is happening in general. 1) Go to a made up page on your site and get an error response. Copy the name of that PAGE (not the entire URL, just the page) from your browser address bar. 2) Go to Google Analytics for your site and click on Behavior --> Site Content --> Landing Pages and look for the search box. Search for the page name you copied. 3) See if there is any traffic to that page from your "Paid Traffic" channel. If so, you know your PPC agency has some cleanup work to do. Ask them to do so, then run this simple test from time to time.

​If no one knows your brand and will never search for it, this won't be an issue for you. But if people know and trust your brand, and they search for it before buying, then brand keywords could have an extremely high ROAS. This is partly because your cost per click is likely to be very low, and your conversion rate very high. Those familiar with your brand may also spend more with you than a first-time buyer.

This is the result of branding work done by your company and has nothing to do with the success of your PPC management agency. Yet the agency can use that high ROAS to skew the overall ROAS of the account. So if you wanted to make $4 for every $1 spent (a 4.0 ROAS), but 25% of your sales come from people searching for your brand (only 5% of your spend), then an overall ROAS of 4.0 isn't really 4.0 -- it might be a really high number for your brand keywords and a lower number -- like 3.0 -- for your non-brand keywords.

Again, this wouldn't necessarily be an intentional deception or anything, but if your agency doesn't think to point this out and break these numbers out separately for you, you may not get the return you're really looking for on your non-branded keywords. (And you'll be missing an opportunity to measure some of the value of your brand.)

What to do: Make sure your PPC agency runs branded keywords in their own campaign so you can look at their ROAS separately and set separate goals for your agency to pursue. This doesn't mean you won't pay the agency for the cost of those branded keywords, and it doesn't mean you're dissuading them from expanding the account. It just means you have more meaningful information to make decisions from as you work together as a team.

Of course it's a separate topic as to whether you should pay to run ads for your brand if you're already the #1 organic search result for that term. But most brands seem to have found that it's more profitable for them to do so -- especially given the low cost and high ROAS -- and this is only truer as search engines place more ads ahead of organic search results. (You don't want your competition stealing your brand searches!)

In any case, now you're armed for better overseeing those who oversee your PPC ads. May this save you cash and headaches while leading to more of the sales you're looking for.

Did I miss something important on this topic? Do you have insights to add or questions to ask? Feel free to comment below!

You have to love this online generation where you can use so many things for free because they're digital. No exception in the world of digital marketing where some of the best tools are free, or at least have free options. Hotjar is one of those tools.

(And their free account is so generous, it will be adequate for most small businesses. So if you have a website, sign up for free! My links are referral links but they don't pay me anything. I might get a t-shirt or something. ;)

Coming out of beta on April 1, 2015, Hotjar has pretty much exploded onto the scene of website UX analysis and feedback because of the quality and depth of what it offers. For short, I'll refer to this sort of system as "UX analytics," and if that sounds technical and snooze worthy, it just means "understanding user experience." How are people using your website? Where are they getting stuck? What are they looking for? Are they getting confused by part of a form you've asked them to fill out? Etc.

If you only get three people a month to your site, this kind of feedback won't have a lot of meaning and you'd better focus on building traffic. But once you have traffic, it's important to know what's working for real-world users and what is not. And that's where UX analytics help out.

Frankly, there are two basic levels of this sort of software. One takes a ton more data and is "enterprise expensive." And while that level may have its use, systems like Hotjar can still be used on websites of any traffic levels. In fact, Hotjar's proprietary algorithm provides extrapolated data to keep costs low despite high traffic levels. This is one of the ways they set themselves apart, and also why they can offer so much for free.

In fact, at this price level, the only real competition I see to Hotjar is Lucky Orange, which doesn't offer a free account. (So if you like free, you know where to go.) Honestly, the two services offer almost the same service suite with two big differences:

•  Lucky Orange has a built in chat feature. But you can already get an awesome, full-featured free chat software from tawk.to, so there's no need to have that built into your analytics.
  ​
• Hotjar has a built in "user recruitment" process, explained below.

So while Lucky Orange is popular and offers a nice UX of its own, Hotjar will actually offer the better value for many businesses. Let's take a look.
​

Heat maps gather information from many visitors to a single web page and show you the hot and cold areas of that page. They can show you how far people are typically scrolling down on the page (do you need to get some critical points higher up so people will see them?). They can show you  where people tend to hover their cursors, which gives you an idea of the content they're focusing on. And it can show you where people are clicking the most.

Now the fact is, many websites already have Google Analytics installed and, with a Chrome extension called "Page Analytics," to somewhat see what people are clicking on in your websites. (The site needs GA installed and you need to be logged in.) I say you can somewhat see where they're clicking because it will show you clickable elements that have been clicked, but it won't show you (for example) if people are clicking elsewhere on the page, which might indicate that they're confused and think something's clickable when it isn't.

The latter type of insight is something you can get from a true heat map like the one from Hotjar. And Google's tool doesn't give you the extras of cursor hovers and scrolling depth, which tells you a whole lot more about how you may want to restructure your site.

In my work with Lighting Supply, we used a heat map to test an element on the web page that a former marketing vendor had recommended. In the image below, you can see the "3 simple ways to search!" box -- we wanted to know if people were using it, since we were considering design alternatives. As it turned out, almost all of visitors used the search bar at the top or the navigation bar near the top. Almost no one touched the tested element. So we removed that and the ads next to it in favor of a rotating banner that could showcase the company's most important deals.

While a lot of marketers make decisions from guesses and assumptions, professionals test those assumptions. That's where heat maps (and the other tools discussed here) come into play. They help you see what you need to keep and what you need to change in order to boost conversions.

This feature can be addictive, because it allows you to watch recordings of people actually using your website. As you can see in this image, it traces their mouse movements so you can see where they are and where they've been, and it highlights the moments when they've interacted with something on a page. This also moves with them between web pages (assuming you've installed Hotjar on your entire site rather than just certain pages). So you can truly see what a session is like for them.

Like many of Hotjar's features, this is not unique to their service; but again, it's free and carries a ton of value.

To speed things up, you can choose to skip past pauses in their mouse movement, though in some cases you may want to see the whole recording so you get a better sense of hesitations, depth of reading or watching something, etc.

Even before you enter a recording, you can see where the user is based as well as pages visited, time on site, device, browser, and operating system. You can also tag a recording so you can come back to it later. (You might set up tags like, "Click Confusion" or "Button Not Working" or whatever you're seeing, then later pull up all the recordings with that tag.) And if you're looking for a certain type of recording, you can filter by any of this, as well as things like landing pages and exit pages.

And finally, at the push of a button, Hotjar will give you a link to share the recording with others if you like.

Did I mention that it's free up to a certain (generous) usage level? Check out Hotjar.

I'll talk about these two features together because they help in a similar way. Both help you figure out where people are dropping out of their interactions with you. With Hotjar funnels, you can set up a series of pages that you expect people to pass through; the tool will then tell you how many people are dropping out on each page. If one page has an especially large drop out rate, you'll know to spend more time improving it. Which takes you back to heat maps and visitor recordings (and takes you forward to the tools shown below).

In a similar way, Hotjar Forms help you to see how people fill out your forms. If they have no problem giving their name and e-mail address, but balk at the required phone number, you'll see the drop off occurring at the phone number, and you'll know whether you need to reconsider requiring a number.

Maybe you do need that phone number, but if you lose people who got that far in your marketing process you want to be able to reach them again. In this case, you might build a form that only captures name and e-mail, placing the person into your mailing list. That form then takes them to another page to fill in the remaining details. Now if they drop out, you can still reach them by e-mail.

​See how powerful this sort of tool can be?

Sometimes you might know where people are getting stuck and leaving your site. You might watch the recordings and study the heat maps. And you might still wonder what needs to be changed.

Well ... why not ask? Hotjar gives you three ways to do this, two of which I'll cover in this section.

First, you create a "Poll" that shows up on the page. The name is a little misleading to me, because a poll typically has set answers that someone can choose from. Hotjar's Poll feature allows you to ask a question and provide set answers; but it also lets you choose if you want someone to write in their own answer. This means you can really get their specific feedback on a page. You can ask anything you like. You might consider: "Do you have any questions not answered by this page?" Or, "Is there any one reason why you wouldn't purchase this product right now?"

You can also have each answer lead to another question if you like, though I recommend being careful about asking too much of visitors.

Adding to the power of this feature, you can set the poll to only address people on certain devices and you can have it pop up immediately, after a set time, after someone scrolls down the page, or even as they start to leave the page.

You can do something very similar to all of this with a survey, but the survey pops up as a whole page interaction. You'll also get a direct link to a survey, so you can send the link out by e-mail if you want to get answers from your followers, and in this case it can be about much more than one specific page.

There's one more form of user feedback that I think helps Hotjar really stand apart from its competition, and that is User Recruiting. This basically recruits people who are willing to spend a little time with you to discuss your website. I think in many cases, it would be useful to talk with them by phone or Skype and to use Skype or join.me to share a screen.

You recruit them by offering something. Maybe it's a free consultation, or a gift card, or a book, or whatever it is that you'd like to offer. If they're interested in what you're offering, they fill in a short form to be considered. You can then choose any of these people to talk with.

By speaking directly with them, you can really get into details, especially because you can ask follow up questions on the fly when they provide you with answers that surprise you or that you want to know more about. What do they like about your site or product; what don't they like; what were they confused by? And much more. Did they like the product but think it was too expensive? Would a different pricing structure suit them? Or did they just not like the colors you offered? Maybe they did make a purchase -- was it easy?

I haven't seen this built into any similar platform and, for the right business, can see this making a huge difference. And if you really take the time to listen and address their concerns -- while also providing a nice incentive for their time -- I bet you can end up with some big fans, the kind who will be vocal about you and share your business with others.

In short, there's a ton of value packed into Hotjar, all for the low low price of ... FREE. Yes, usage is limited on a free account, but it's surprisingly generous because of their algorithmic approach to providing you with data. And because of this, I can see many small businesses getting by with a free account. And many larger businesses happily paying to upgrade because even paid accounts are ridiculously affordable.

The one thing you can't ignore is the need to test what's really happening on your website if you're going to treat it like a business. If it's a hobby, that's fine. But if it's a business, you have to adapt to people wants and needs. That's what marketing is, and it's what Hotjar can help you successfully do. Get a free account today!  ;)

If you're a real estate agent / Realtor, I'm sure you're trying to be seen by anyone who's ready to buy or sell a home. But by the time they're looking, it may be too late. Why? If someone doesn't bother to actively research agents and find the right fit for them, they may simply call the name on a listing sign. Right?

But if they do go searching for an agent, who are they going to find? Chances are, they'll find:

• Agencies rather than agents in most search engine results; if they happen to find the agency you work for, what are the odds they'll look to you as the agent?
  
  
• Agencies or agents who are aggressive enough to advertise in the search engines. Given the value of a single client, this is a great idea if you know what you're doing. If not, the cost of these ads could break you.
  
  
• Agencies or agents who are aggressive enough to advertise through social media, through retargeting, through print ads, etc.

In all these examples, I could be talking about you. But the vast majority of real estate agents are not doing these things. Many will simply take calls through their agency, and will perhaps send out some printed letters or postcards in hopes of attracting some clients. Some will also use social media, but the world of social media has changed, and even if you build a big following, only a small fraction will ever see your posts unless you "pay to play."

This is why email marketing is so critical for real estate agents, just as it is for any business. Most marketers will list this as one of the most important things to do from day one in a business. Yet many real estate agents / Realtors never understand the importance in building a consistent clientele in this way.

And given how inexpensive email marketing is, there's no reason you shouldn't be doing it.
​

In some cases, you can catch people at the exact moment they're ready to buy or sell a home. But if you want to think long term about your business, then it's important to develop a list of people who grow to trust you over time and remember you when the time is right.

This is why email marketing is so powerful. It lets you stay in people's minds on a weekly or monthly basis by sending out a newsletter. And this doesn't have to be some in-depth email that few will ever read from start to finish. I know one Realtor who used to send out a monthly email with one tip per e-mail that most people would find useful, even if it had nothing to do with real estate.

This way, he continued giving people value, building on the power of reciprocity (where people want to pay you back for the value you have given them; this is built into most people). He also branded himself by following the tip with a reminder about his success in real estate. This helped with both trust ("he's successful") and recall.

Another form of content could be special deals you've scored with local businesses exclusively for your readers. People love to feel exclusive, and anyone who used the deal would get a clear financial benefit for reading your newsletter. Make sure they get their deal by mentioning you to the business -- this way the business can track the benefit of working with you, and YOU are making people say your name and associate that with a great value.

Of course send out your listings. If you have local readers, share your listings. If you happen to have so many that this would overwhelm readers, send a weekly digest of new listings, or send your best ones. You never know who's starting to think about a move, and what listing might strike a chord. Plus, your readers may know someone else who's looking for a listing.

Automatically send your blogs. That's right ... a good system can automatically send out the blogs you write on your site. So if you're having an open house or have other news to share, there's no need to spend time writing an e-mail to your list about it. The system can send this news out automatically. I recommend using one blog for this kind of news and a separate one for your listings and NOT automating your listing e-mails. That's because you'll want to more carefully prepare a listing e-mail. For instance, check out the section on "Images" below.

Think of all the time or money you put into trying to land clients. With email marketing like this, you could spend just a couple hours a month (at most!) putting together an honest tip or deal for your readers. You could have a boilerplate reminder about who you are at the end of each email (including a link to your listings.) It wouldn't take long, and a good autoresponder system (see my recommendations below) can cost under $20/month. (Or FREE up to 500 subscribers if you don't mind their branding included and don't need more advanced features.)

Now imagine that you've built a list of 500 people in your community who hear from you each month. If each one moved only once every 10 years, that would be 50 people per year, or about one a week. Each one might represent both a home sale and purchase. If you only landed 10% of these (5 per year) as clients, wouldn't that be a pretty solid return on a couple hours of effort per month?

Now what if you scored more than 10%? Or built a larger list?

This is the power of staying in people's minds and giving them value over time.
​

Of course it's one thing to talk about staying in touch with a list. It's another to figure out how you build that list. While I can't explain all the following in detail in this blog, let me give you some ideas:

• Build your own real estate website so you can attract your own search engine traffic (no other agents to compete with) and direct ads to your own site rather than an agency site (where you could lose those leads to other agents). I think this is critical for every agent, though most won't do it. (Big advantage to you if you do!) Add an email capture for to your site and give people an incentive to join. (Maybe it's just the promise of monthly tips to enhance their lives. But maybe you partner with local businesses and provide a few exclusive coupons in the first email!)
  
  
• Build your own real estate smart phone app and include an e-mail signup form in the app. Apps are likely to soon be a big deal in search engine rankings, and those who jump in early should have the advantage. Meanwhile, the right sort of app will automatically update with blog content and other site content; it can also link to your real estate listings; and besides email marketing, it also allows you to reach out with Push Notifications to everyone who downloads your app. This is an awesome way to send out alerts about your latest listings.
  
  
• Ask your local social media and email contacts if they would like to subscribe. (Presumably you're focused on local real estate, so local contacts are important. Modify this if your business is a little different.) The people you know can start your list and give you incentive to make sure you send something every month. Ask them to let other locals know about the newsletter.
  
  
• Include an invitation at the end of every newsletter for your subscribers to share with others. This invitation comes after you've just provided the reader with value at no cost to them. Again, the power of reciprocity will sometimes come into play here, and they will forward that value on to others.
  
  
• Invite open house attendees to join your list. You can even keep a computer or smart phone open to your lead capture form so people can enter their e-mail address on the spot.
  
  
• Include an invitation to your mailing list in your email signature. This way, as you're sending regular emails to your contacts, they also have the chance to see what you offer and join your list.
  
  
• Try scoring clients when they're thinking of selling their home by offering an email series with tips about preparing a home for sale. So far I've focused on manually sending out an e-mail every month to your list. But these services can also automate emails that go out over time, on whatever schedule you set. With this sort of series, you can offer one tip per day and have them go out every day for a week. This way, someone about to sell their home would get YOUR name and contact information 7 times in a week. If they don't already have a real estate agent, there's a good chance they'll reach out to you when they're ready. And when they join to receive this series, they'll also be added to your regular mailing list.
  ​

Hopefully by now you see how obvious it is that you should be email marketing by building a list and reaching out to that list at least once a month. And hopefully I've stimulated ideas about how to build that list and what to do with it.

Now what service should you use for your email list? Honestly, there are a lot of good ones that start at "FREE" if you don't mind their branding and missing a few advanced features. That said, as a professional, you might not want to show their branding, and it's under $20 to have up to 500 subscribers.

I personally recommend AWeber because they're less restrictive than others about sending things like "affiliate" emails. So if you ever had an arrangement, for instance, to promote something to your list (besides homes) that you earned from, that could be a problem with other providers. If you do look at other providers, just make sure to check out their Acceptable Use policies.

• Everything you could want in an email marketing service, even for power users.
  
• ​​Integrates with tons of other software.
• Unlimited landing pages (so you can build web pages where people sign up for your newsletter).
• Beautiful sign-up forms (for your landing pages, even if you have your own web pages). This can collect whatever info you want on subscribers, like city, buyer vs. seller, etc. (Make these things optional if you want more subscribers.)
• Automatic emails to your list every time you write a blog.
• Simple "drag and drop" email builder with 1000s of images you can use.
• A hosted archive of your newsletters.

$19/month for your first 500 subscribers. (Less when paying ahead.)

Please share! I hope you've found this information on email marketing useful and that you'll share it with other real estate agents! No, of course not your competition. That would be crazy talk. But share it with your friends in real estate who you want to see succeed. Thanks!

Two of today's newsy names have just made big changes to how they do business, and it raises the question of when it makes sense to change a business model.

On October 6, McDonald's rolled out "All Day Breakfast." While there are some limitations, this was overall something that McDonald's fans had requested for years. Now there are a lot of pundits talking about whether or not this will be enough to save McDonald's, and only time will prove anyone right or wrong.

But the point with McDonald's is that they've been falling from their once great heights, and they have to do something to adjust to today's market. So kudos to them for trying something. They're also working on some healthier food options, and I suspect that both will be good moves for them. I personally wonder, though, whether the brand itself is what consumers are looking for. In an apparent effort to create a different feel to the business, McDonald's launched a new creepy Hamburglar, as you can see from this Google search result.

In any case, when business is NOT going well for a long period of time, some sort of change is needed, and McDonald's is responding. We'll see if they responded in the right way.

Meanwhile, though, this brings up the question of whether you ought to change your business model when things are going exceptionally well. Or at least appear to be going well.

Jet.com emerged from beta in July of this year with a goal of having millions of members by the end of the year. They are touted as an Amazon competitor, but they had a different business model. They would make most of their money from annual memberships of $50 and then provide prices close to wholesale. Which would be highly valuable to the consumer, if they truly gave wholesale prices, which are often 40% or more below retail. In this model, if you shifted just $500 per year in groceries and home essential shopping to jet, you might save $150 or $200 per year. And I think many people would do much more shopping than that.

Since their launch, Jet has become one of the leading online retailers, is approaching 20,000 orders a day, and has garnered all sorts of media attention. Seems like the kind of results you'd want to have. 

But even as I've shopped at Jet, I couldn't help but feel I wasn't really getting wholesale prices. In fact, I would compare with Amazon and a couple other low price stores; Jet was often the lowest. But not always by a ton, and not to the tune of making me think I was buying at wholesale. In fact, prices seemed to be creeping upward since launch.

Then yesterday (October 7) just 3 months after their public launch, they announced that they would offer memberships for free. This only confirms the fact that they're not offering wholesale prices, because they have to make profit somewhere. And what this says to me is that they don't want to beat Amazon by being different. They want to beat Amazon by being the same. Sure they have tricks like choosing smart cart items to save even more. But in short, they're trying to get people to sign up and shop regularly for low prices.

Amazon's already doing that, Jet. You had me at "wholesale," and sure ... you'll continue to have me with low prices. When I can find what I want. But Amazon has a big jump on Jet in terms of functionality, features, infrastructure, selection, a marketplace where others can sell items, a powerful affiliate force, and so much more. It makes me wonder how long Jet can compete by being another version of Amazon. Or for how long they can lose money trying to beat Amazon prices while ramping up. Or really ... why they changed their business model.

This isn't to say the new approach won't work better. But they must have thought long and hard about a membership site that offered wholesale pricing. Why would they so quickly abandon something they knew would take several years to turn profitable?

I'll love to see where this goes, and more competition at this scale is generally good for the consumer. But it makes me think on business models and when it makes sense to change. And I'd love your insights on McDonald's, Jet.com, or anything related to this topic of changing business to stay on top.