Tomorrow I’ll eat whatever I feel like eating, but I’ll also do 20 crunches and take a 20 minute walk.

Day after tomorrow? Diet and exercise will depend on convenience.

The important thing is to start doing something, right? Once I start making an effort everything will fall into place. I wasn’t dieting and exercising before so anything I do is going to make a difference. At least it will be better than doing nothing. Cardio. I forgot to add cardio. All the experts say cardio is good. I can dust off that DVD….

Does this sound like you?

Do you believe that if I follow my chosen course of action for 6 weeks I’ll see results?

Think I’ll be pounds lighter, more toned, and ready for the beach?

Probably not.

Doing something just because something needs to be done is not as effective as paying attention to what you’re doing, setting goals for change, and then planning to reach those goals.

Are you marketing like this diet?

• Do you have ads in local publications because you know you’re supposed to advertise (and besides, their sales reps called you)?
• Have you thrown up a website because everybody is on the web these days and something is better than nothing?
• Have you added social media to your marketing strategy because all the experts say social media is good?
• Doing direct mail or email campaigns…just because?

Do you have a marketing strategy or are you just doing some marketing because some marketing is better than no marketing? Are you making decisions based on your target market data and how social media fits into your marketing plan as a whole? Are you trying a little bit of everything, hoping that something will give you the results you want? Is your company going to be ready to join me on the beach in 6 weeks?

Like a diet, exercise, and your overall marketing strategy, social media is more effective when you follow a plan. So…do you have a plan?

If you do have a plan, I salute you. Good job!

Follow your plan. Validate your plan. Tweak your plan.

Follow your plan.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

If you don’t have a plan, make a plan.

Choose your target market. Decide how best to reach them. Decide which social media platforms and internet marketing strategies work best for you and how best to incorporate them into your marketing plan.

If you need help, call the Impression Chefs. We’ll help you plan the marketing mix that’s right for you.

The Impression Chefs — Results are our specialty.

Any questions or comments?

Are you feeling lost? Overwhelmed? The Impression Chefs can help.

Are you too busy trying to learn and run your business to learn and run your website?

Is your site performing the way you want it to?

Performance and economy — what is your website doing for your business and how well is it doing the job?

Your website, like a window display, isn’t supposed to just sit and look pretty. Displays are intended to draw people in. While window displays are intended to capture the attention of passersby, websites have to be more focused. While some potential customers will happen across your website, you don’t really have the luxury of relying on traffic generated by nearby businesses as you do with a window display. You need to actively draw traffic to your web display.

Does your site positively reflects your business and brand?

Are you seeing the traffic you want on your website?

Do you have a good understanding of what your website traffic is?

Is your home page serving its purpose as both a window to give people a glimpse of what you’re about and a door to invite them in to learn more? What are you doing with the visitors on your site? Are you content to let them look through the window and move on, or have you laid out your site in a way that’s designed to get them through the door? Once visitors do click beyond the front page, do you have other displays set up to keep them browsing longer (or get them to buy)?

Think about your website in department store terms for a moment. Your window display (home page) got the potential customer in the door. The merchandise is arranged artfully and the displays are great. Say customers find something they like and would love to buy, or need some information about a product. How many laps around your store will customers have to make before finding answers? Have you ever wandered around a department store trying to find a sales clerk or manager? Have you ever decided it wasn’t worth the effort or that you could find what you’re looking for at another store?

Is your website informative, intuitive, and easy to navigate? If not, is your merchandise good enough that potential customers will keep searching your site until they find what they’re looking for? How many potential customers have you lost because it didn’t appear that you had what they wanted…or they didn’t want to have to search for it.
Do visitors to your site have options besides “Look” and “Buy”? Are your visitors taking advantage of those options? Are your site’s visitors taking the actions that you want them to — signing up for a mailing list, making a donation, or making a purchase, for example? Is your website set up to capture and process all of the visitors and information that you’d like to have?

Do you have all the functionality you want?

Can your website do everything you wish it could?

Do you know how to begin answering those questions?

Take a look at your website as though you’re seeing it for the first time. Better yet, have someone whose opinion you value drive you to and through your website. If you’re not happy with the results, give us a call. We don’t build websites that just sit and look pretty.

The Impression Chefs builds websites that work.

Any questions or comments?

Next Post: “Social Media and Internet Marketing…Do You Have a Plan?”

In that vein, this might be a good time for us all to give thoughtful consideration to our own online “nations” — our websites, social media networks, and over-all online presence — to evaluate how they’re doing. This message won’t be as long as the  President’s address — we promise — and won’t feature a response from the “opposition”. We just want to give you a framework to start thinking about other issues that impact you. In this three part series we’re going to focus on three key areas – security, performance, and social media.  These aren’t your only considerations but we believe that these three are particularly important when it comes to your online success.

Security

Online security is a vital issue that most people do not take seriously. Breaches in online security can lead to loss of revenue, decrease in customer trust, black-listing by search engines, and more trouble than most of us want.

There are many ways that a site can be compromised – but this isn’t a primer on online security. For good information on online security, click here (HostGator’s blog) and here (World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)). What is important to know is that websites do get hacked, and even the smallest of sites can be the target of unauthorized tampering. Awareness of this threat is the first step in ensuring that you’re ready to deal with problems if they occur.

Your site is not too small or too obscure to attract a hacker.

In this post we will highlight two important aspects of enhancing online security: backup and recovery plans, and password security.

Backup and recovery plans address the “what if’s” of your online presence.

What would you do if your website crashed?

What if your website was hacked and/or vandalized?

Do you have backups of your site files and databases stored remotely and readily available?

Can you contact your hosting provider and ask them to restore your site from a back-up?

If your hosting provider is a pivotal part of your recovery plan, you may be out of luck if disaster strikes. As a rule, the major hosting companies do not provide backup and recovery services…but don’t take our word on that, read theirs (emphasis ours):

GoDaddy – Terms of Use, section 4-vii

You agree to back-up all of your User Content so that you can access and use it when needed. Go Daddy does not warrant that it backs-up any Account or User Content, and you agree to accept as a risk the loss of any and all of your User Content.

1 & 1 Hosting – Terms and Conditions, section 3.1.8

You are responsible for backing up Your Data on your own computer. 1&1 does not warrant or otherwise guarantee that it will back up your data or that data which has been backed up can be retrieved, and will not be responsible for any archiving or backup of Your Data. If any of Your Data is damaged, deleted, lost or corrupted in any way, or becomes otherwise unavailable due to termination or suspension of your account pursuant to this Agreement, 1&1 will have no obligation or liability to you.

HostGator - Terms of Service, section 5

Your use of this service is at your sole risk. Our backup service is ran on Sunday of each week, overwrites any of our previous backups made, and only one week of backups are kept. This service is provided to you as a courtesy. HostGator is not responsible for files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on HostGator servers.

This is a small-but-representative sampling of the language most web hosting providers use in their terms of service. If your site files are lost or damaged, you’re on your own to replace and restore them.

The solution is to ensure that you have your own reliable and readily available backups of your sites’ files and databases. And to be truly effective, your backups need to be stored on a server different than the one where your website lives. The Impression Chefs currently offer clients whose sites are hosted with us complementary basic remote backup services. We’ll soon be introducing new robust remote backup and recovery services for those clients who want more security. Whether your web host offers these services or not, they are VITAL.

Think of backup and recovery services as health insurance for your website.

passwords

Most of us log in to a variety of sites throughout the course of a normal day. In terms of security, important questions to ask are:

• “How secure are your passwords?”
• “Do you use the same password for every site you log into?”
• “Are your passwords easy to guess?”

If the answers to those questions are “Not very,” “Yes,” and “Pretty easy,” you’re asking for trouble. Having insecure passwords is like leaving your house key under the doormat – if there’s easy access it’s not secure. Four words to remember for password security: strict, original, individual, and restricted.

1. Strict — You should have a strict password policy for yourself and members of your organization.  Password requirements should be consistently enforced.
2. Original — Do not reuse passwords across multiple sites.
3. Individual — Every authorized user should have their own username and password.
4. Restricted — Only give access to users who need it. If the access can be restricted, make sure that someone has only the privileges they need to get their job done.

Delete user accounts as people leave your organization, you change developers, or the account is no longer needed

Here are some  guidelines for creating passwords (I did not create this list – it’s excerpted from the Host Gator peer support forum: thanks Stef! – but it’s pretty good): 

• Use a combination of letters, numbers, special characters, upper and lower case
  (use at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, one special character)
• Don’t use a password that can be linked to you in any way – no birthdays, kids or pets names, home towns…
• Don’t use anything that can be found in the dictionary – words or acronyms
• You can use the first (one, two or three) characters of every word in a sentence
• You can concatenate two words together (like j0ke=l0l)
• You can use words without the vowels (like CntGt1n! (can’t get in!))

On a related note: you’ve also got to be careful with those password recovery/identity confirmation questions. In the days of social networking, finding out someone’s place of birth, high school mascot or graduation year is relatively simple. Revealing information in a consolidated area or manner makes the job even easier.

If your email address is viewable via Facebook, be careful that the answers to gain access to that account don’t appear there as well.

There are many tools available to help you keep track of all your passwords and keep them safe. For Windows users, KeyPass is a good choice. It works well, is secure and is free. For Mac users, Keychain is included in the operating system. There are many other options out there. Do a search for “password manager software.” Once you find one you think you like, search the title of that software with the word “reviews” to check it out.

software updates and security enhancements

Is your website running on software that is more than a year behind the update curve? If so, you’re asking for trouble.

Whenever software is released, hackers immediately start looking for vulnerabilities in that software. Software publishers work to provide patches for those holes as quickly as they’re discovered. It’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re applying those patches by updating your software. And I say “responsibility” because keeping your site updated reduces your chances of being hacked – consequently reducing the chances of your site becoming a distribution point for malware, a source of SPAM, or a tool used in other nefarious Internet activities. Plugins and other software used in conjunction with your site need to be kept up-to-date as well.

Upgrading should not be taken lightly.

These days it may be relatively simple to click a button and activate an upgrade script — but you want to make sure that everything will go smoothly. You don’t want to break your site in the process of securing it. There are a lot of dependencies in a website — the server software, the site template or theme, and plugins to name a few — you want to make sure that everything that works before an upgrade will still work after (or that you have a viable substitute for the things that wont work). This shouldn’t scare you away from updating, however…a hacked site is worse than one that is having a minor compatibility problem.

So, take a look at your site’s source code. If your site’s software  is woefully out of date, take care of it! If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone who can. The Impression Chefs will be happy to help you update your site. Contact us. We offer as-needed support as well as on-going service plans that will help keep our site operating in top form.

Next Post…Performance and Economy

Any questions or comments?

All the experts say so. It must be true…but where do you start?

Blog, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…these are only a few of the social media venues that are available to you. You have to be careful, though, when you attempt to use them to grow your business.

Getting involved can be a good idea. Horning in can actually be detrimental to your image and ultimately your business.

While there are many bulletin board type sites on the internet, social media space is not a community bulletin board. You can’t just print up 500 flyers, stick them all over different web sites, and expect a positive response to your advertisement. There is a danger in coming across as a telemarketer or a stereotypical used car salesman online.

Think of social networks (meaning blogs and other interactive social media) as social engagements. You might attend a social event — a party for example– where you don’t know anyone. Unless you’re either extremely gregarious or completely socially inept, you wouldn’t announce your presence at the party by jumping up onto a table, pulling out your bullhorn and introducing yourself en masse. More than likely, you’d strike up conversations with a few different individuals or put yourself in proximity to a couple or small group and try to become part of the conversation — first by listening and finding out the topic of conversation. Once you know what is being discussed, you determine if you can add anything relevant. If you have something to say, you add your two cents when the time is right.

You wouldn’t join a couple in conversation about the health problems of elderly parents, for example, and jump in with, “Parents. Where’d we be without them, you know? My name is Salesman, by the way. I have these underwater woven baskets, imported all the way from Atlantis in my store. I’m running a sale you won’t believe right now. You should stop by. Here’s the address.”

Don’t drop in to the comments section of every blog you come across and tell folks they should go and check out your blog if they want some really good information, or go to your URL and buy your product.

…and by the way…Hi. I’m new here. I’ve got a great web site with these really cool products. I’m even willing to cut you a deal for no reason at all. Is anybody out there? Will somebody please talk to me?

No.