AirFareWatchdog – Get Alerts to Find the Best Deals to Your Destination

May 19, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

As an online marketer, we look for different targeting and segmentation tactics that are designed to increase reach and conversion rates.

A very effective and flexible tactic we’re testing these days is targeting Vacation Rental & Hotel deals to markets that offer inexpensive airline fares into the destination we’re marketing.

The hardest part of this tactic is figuring out what airlines are running the best rates and when. It can be time-consuming to search different deal sites. We set out to look for a way to bring the deals to you without much work.

We found help in the form of a website that watches for deals that coincide with trips and destinations. It’ll take you about 5 minutes to sign up for alerts from Airfarewatchdog.com!

Not only can you get tips on flights from SPECIFIC markets, you can subscribe to “Arrival City Fare Alerts” for our local airports. This way you’ll get notified every time airfare goes on sale TO you, regardless of the flight’s city of origin.

You can set the frequency of alerts to your email, and can even suspend alerts if you’re to busy to deal with promoting them, or on vacation and want to limit email to your inbox.

Some things you can do with location specific deals:

Target PPC ads to the departure city.
Send an email blast to subscribers who are located near and around the targeted departure city.
Buy ads in online newspapers and magazines that serve that particular area.
You CAN buy print advertising, but it’s expensive and usually takes some time to set up and get running. You need to be flexible and quick to get the targeting and ads set up.

Check out the configuration below and sign up for alerts that will help you build deals and market them to specific locations quickly.

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEM, Toolbox

PadiAct: A Tool to Grow Your Email Signups on Your Website

May 18, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

Getting more of your website visitors to self-register for your email newsletter is a pain-point for many business websites. One easy solution you may want to try is to use a “popup” inviting visitors to sign up for you newsletter. Of course, you shouldn’t overdo it and irritate your users, but you should probably at least test this more aggressive tactic.

For a quick and easy tool that delivers “popups” on your website, check out PadiAct.

PadiAct makes it easy to setup, configure and install this functionality right into your website. Some advantages of PadiAct:

Direct connect Constant Contact, Mailchimp and more to push you subscribers right into your email system.
Reporting and statistics on your success.
Configure to “pop” after a certain # of page views, visits, and more.
Configure to slide in from the bottom, slide from the side, or pop up and cover your page.

Here is an example screen-shot of the pop up style window:

I really like the idea of a dynamic popup type call-to-action over a static “email signup” area taking up prime real estate on the website. PadiAct also offers pretty cool segmentation and targeting cirtieria like referrer, # page visited, certain pages visited, geography, etc.

It looks like they will be adding some new features soon too that would be great… we would like to see multiple campaigns that go beyond Email… for instance, maybe ask someone along the way to Fan me in Facebook (or “like”… whatever), sign up for my RSS feed or accept a special offer.

PadiAct is $25 for small business size use and offers a free 30 day trial.

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, Marketing Musts, Toolbox

Tools to Secure Your Content from Scrapers and Stealers

April 27, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

There are a number of tools out there to help protect your website and its content from:

Screen Scrapers who are grabbing your content and using it on their website.
Unauthorized use of your text or photos.
Competitors who are stealing your content and using it on their websites.

Copyscape will search for copies of your pages on the web. It is for plagiarism checking and searching for duplicate content. You can just do some on-the-fly searching by putting in your website URLs. Or, you can sign up for their CopySentry program which for about $.25 cents per page and it will do a weekly search of the internet and notify you of new instances of your copy being stolen.

Photos are a harder nut to crack.

Tineye is a tool that will help you find images on the internet that are the same as or very similar to yours. It is far from perfect though.

Watermarking your images is a great way to start protecting them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, Toolbox

Email Marketing Basics – Cleaning Your List

May 19, 2010 by 1BlizzAdmin

Recently the Blizzard office has moved to Constant Contact as our Email Marketing service of choice. They have a great platform, easy to use features, and the ability for clients and project managers and experts to collaborate on all blasts to send more solid messages to subscribers.

With these great features comes a few frustrations. We have run into a few instances of lists being a bit “dirty” and ending up with a few too many spam reports according to Constant Contact’s rules.

Constant Contact has a loose rule of around 1 per 100 email addresses in any particular send, we have seen lists closed down for less than that. Constant Contact has pretty standard spam rules, and whether you’re working with them or MailChimp, VerticalResponse, or iContact, you’ll probably have the same issues if you’re working with an old list or one you’re not sure about the origin of.

If your list is flagged as spam, these companies require you to show proof of subscription for a percentage of the list. Every person I’ve talked to at Constant Contact has given a different percentage, so if this does happen, you’re going to hope you get someone in a good mood on the phone when you call for your list review.

We have been struggling with a way to clean up these lists BEFORE we load them into Constant Contact, and with trial and error we’ve come up with a pretty successful way to ensure our lists are clean and less likely to raise red flags with your Email Marketing provider.

Step 1:

Make sure the subscriber list is as updated as it can be in the CURRENT email marketing program and also in Constant Contact

Step 2:

Draft a blast in the CURRENT program thanking them for participating and asking them to reconfirm their desire to receive messaging from the client. Ask them to “click here to Update subscription” or “Click here to Unsubscribe” within that email with big easy to read buttons. Anyone who wants to update their subscription will be taken to Constant Contact to do so, where we’ve already uploaded their information and they just need to update and/or confirm it.

Anyone who wishes to unsubscribe will do so within the CURRENT email marketing program that doesn’t have as strict rules when it comes to spam reporting.

Step 3:

Once we have a satisfactory open rate, the list of unsubscribers can be exported from the CURRENT email marketing program and then applied against the list in Constant Contact. Anyone who wishes to stay will have already updated their information in Constant Contact.

I imagine we’ll get an open rate of around 20 to 30%. That 20-30% could make or break our list when it comes to our first send with Constant Contact.

Recently the Blizzard office has partnered with Constant Contact as our Email Marketing service of choice. They have a great platform, easy to use features, and the ability for clients, project managers and experts to collaborate on all blasts to send frequent, solid messages to subscribers.

Constant Contact has a loose rule of around 1 per 100 email addresses in any particular send, we have seen lists closed down for less than that. Constant Contact has pretty standard spam rules, and whether you’re working with them, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, or iContact, you’ll probably have the same issues if you’re working with an old list or one you’re not sure about the origin of.

We have been looking for a solution to clean up these lists BEFORE we load them into Constant Contact, and with trial and error we’ve come up with a pretty successful way to ensure our lists are clean and less likely to raise red flags with your email marketing provider.

Step 1:

Make sure the subscriber list is as updated as it can be in the CURRENT email marketing program and also in Constant Contact.

Step 2:

Draft a blast in the CURRENT program thanking them for participating and asking them to reconfirm their desire to receive messaging from the client. Ask them to “Click Here to Update Subscription” or “Click Here to Unsubscribe” within that email with big easy to read buttons. Anyone who wants to update their subscription will be taken to Constant Contact to do so, where we’ve already uploaded their information and they just need to update and/or confirm it.
Anyone who wishes to unsubscribe will do so within the CURRENT email marketing program that doesn’t have as strict rules when it comes to spam reporting.

Step 3:

Once we have a satisfactory open rate, the list of unsubscribers can be exported from the CURRENT email marketing program and then applied against the list in Constant Contact. Anyone who wishes to stay will have already updated their information in Constant Contact.

I imagine we’ll get an open rate of around 20 to 30%. That 20-30% could make or break our list when it comes to our first send with Constant Contact. When the line between good and bad is blurry, we need all the help we can get to make sure we’re doing things to help our marketing, not hinder it.

Benefits to Having a Clean Email Marketing List

You’re only marketing to those who WANT to hear from you, and not wasting time on those who don’t.
You can ask for more information as you clean your list, such as city and state, family or romance, etc. This tactic can help you segment your list. A segmented list lets you speak to your potential and past guests on a more personal level. For example, you can send specials and packages designed for drive-to or fly-to guests based on where they live.
You wont get in trouble with the email marketing programs – which wastes a lot of time trying to FIX, instead of spending that time making money.

Learn More about Email Marketing!

Email Marketing Basics: Designing Blasts that Convert
Tuesday, June 1st, 11 AM MDT
Learn tips and techniques to simplify your email marketing design and increase your click-throughs and conversion rates.
Sponsored by Mouse On House

Email Marketing Basics: Segmentation and Targeting Your Email Lists
Tuesday, June 8th, 11 AM MDT
Learn how to segment and target your email lists for better conversion rates.

Need help getting your email marketing program off the ground? Blizzard has a new plan that’s designed just for you. Call or email our team today for more information!

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEM Tagged With: email marketing

How to Assess the Strength of Your Incoming Links

November 10, 2009 by 1BlizzAdmin

LinkDiagnosis is a free tool that gives you an in-depth analysis of links pointed at your website. It requires a quick Fire Fox plug-in but is worth the minute of extra work.

Type in your URL and it crawls then exports a Link Diagnosis Report including:

Your incoming links
The anchor text those links use
What page the link is coming from
Total back links
Estimated strength of the length
Page rank of the page that the link is coming from

Try it and find out who is linking to you and if the link is valuable.

Check out Blizzard’s other favorite tools in our toolbox.

Do you have questions about what to learn more about the power of links? Get Blizzard’s on-demand webinars including:
All About Google VI – Link Popularity
All About Google VII – Getting Good Links

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEO, Toolbox

Site Maps 101

October 1, 2009 by 1BlizzAdmin

What is a Site Map?
A site map is one page of a web site that lists all of the pages (URL’s) for that particular web site and to each page of the site. The structure of a site map is typically in an outline form listing the web pages within related categories or themes.

Most web sites that do have a site map just list every page in the form of a link from the “home page” down to the “contact us” page with no flare or logical order. Site maps are typically left alone with no existing optimization and are just me PRÃ�ï¿½XIMA ETAPA: tramo Merlo (San Luis) hacia San Rafael (Mendoza) rely part of the site’s architecture.

The Evolution of the Site Map
Google first introduced the site map in June of 2005 and then it was not until the next year that Yahoo! and MSN joined with Google to recognize the fact that site maps are needed for individual web sites to submit their site’s pages to the search engines.

Google’s size limit for a site map is 50,000 URL’s which, to me, is more than enough. I, personally, have not worked on any site that has more than a few hundred pages so leave it to mighty Google to give us way more bandwidth than we will ever need.

XML vs. HTML Site Map
An XML site map is a version that Google likes to use almost exclusively. With Google being the #1 search engine out there and growing by the day, why not adhere to their guidelines and best practices. An XML site map has a very beneficial feature called the “priority tag” which tells the search engines what pages are most important therefore indexing and crawling those pages first.

Those priority pages would probably be the “home” page, the “vacation rentals” page, etc… Any page that you would like the search engines to see first and foremost (your “money pages”) would get tagged. This allows the webmaster to control what pages the search engines can see and index.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Design, How To: Tips & Tools, SEM

Tools to Get the Most Out of Your Twittering

September 14, 2009 by 1BlizzAdmin

Almost everyone that uses Twitter on a regular basis has their favorite tools to enhance and manage their experience. There are many tools out there, and new ones are popping up all the time.

Here is a list of some of our favorite tools, and all are free!

Manage and Organize Your Twitter World:
TweetDeck – This is as a free helpful Twitter management tool with various features that are easy to use including: sorting, searching, spell-checking, groups, marking favorites, simplification of retweets and replies and more.

Before you decide to make the TweetDeck switch, you can check out this video on How to use TweetDeck

Be a part of the 2.0 world – Tweet a Pic!
TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter and is simple to use. It also offers an app for mobile phones so you can Tweet pictures when then happen.

Net-Work-It
One of the challenges with marketing and networking through Twitter is finding followers and getting people to follow your Tweets. Wefollow and Twello offer an easy to use directories to find people to follow as well as adding yourself to their directory.

Keep Your Eye on What is Being Said
Tweet Beeps set up Beeps to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company or anything that you want to keep your eye on. They will email you reports of any mentions automatically. “It’s like Google Alerts for Twitter!”

Track Your Links
Bitly allows you to shorten, share and most importantly track links that you put into your Tweets. Analyze the effectiveness and success of your Twitter marketing by seeing who clicks from your Tweet to your website or blog. Bitly can be used from inside TweetDeck or as a sidebar on your desktop.

Mass Social Network Updates
From Ping.fm you can post to many more social networks than Twitter including Facebook, Twhirl, and more. Ping supports over 40 networks sites, so it’s a great way to create a presence if you have something valuable to share. (Insider Tip – remember that your Tweet’s don’t disappear, so think before you update.)

Stay Away from Spamming Twits
Twitchuck allows you to check Twitter accounts to see if they have been reported as spammers before you choose to follow them.

Schedule Future Tweets
Sometimes you need to tweet when you can’t be at your computer. Easy Tweets and Future Tweets allow you to schedule tweets to post when you can’t.

What the People Are Saying
Browse to find most popular topics under discussion on Twitter in the past 24 hours Tweetag

If you are new to Twitter make sure to check out Mashable’s Top 7 Twitter Tutorials and follow us @BlizzInternet. Don’t forget about Facebook or LinkedIn!

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEM