Our Monmouth Blog

2007 Monmouth County Fair
Presented by the Monmouth County Park System and Monmouth County 4-H
The 2007 Fair will be held July 25th - 29th at East Freehold Park.
2007 fair hours are Wednesday - Friday 5pm-11pm, Saturday, 11am-11pm, Sunday11am-6pm

Friday - Pay-One-Price ride wristbands will be available and honored from 5 pm to 10 pm. “Ceili Country” will be on stage at 8 pm. Fair times - 5 pm to 11 pm.
Saturday is Baker’s Day in the Home and Garden Tent. Bring your best-baked goods to the Fair from 8 am to 11 am for judging. It’s lso Kids Race Day where your diaper dasher or toddler waddler could run away with a ribbon! “Jobonanno” will be on stage at 8:45 pm. Fair times - 11 am to 11 pm.
Sunday is Antique & Classic Car Show Day, Bluegrass Festival, and the annual Clown Parade. Pay-One-Price ride wristbands are 15.00 and will be good all day! Fair times - 11 am to 6 pm.

For more information visit the Monmouth County Parks Website.

One of the most important aspects to properly manage your website is to understand user behavior. If you do not have a good tool to extract this data from your website you are missing out on opportunities to improve your website traffic. There are many good free tools available that can be easily installed with minimum work.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool that I use and really like. The dashboard provides a concise view of your sites traffic, where your visitors came from, and your most highly visited pages. The dashboard provides a simple and easy way to drill down into the data to get more information with over 80 reports. For example, Google Analytics breaks down your sites traffic sources into three useful categories: direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines. The graphical format is easy to use and identify trends.

AWStats is another valuable tool. While AWStats does not have all of the graphical elements that Google Analytics does all the data is there. The 1 page format is simple and easy to use and also provides drill down to details. I like the fact that AWStats provides details about Robots and Spiders visits which is a data point that Google Analytics does not offer.

Overall these are two robust statistics packages with lots of features and useful information. If you do not have statistics on your website today I would urge you to get one of these packages on your website. This is an important tool to enhance your online marketing capabilities.

Regards,

Howard

This looks like a really nice event so I thought I would share it with you:

43rd Annual Open House at Rutgers Garden on Saturday, July 28, 2007 from 9am to 3pm (Rain or Shine). The open house at Rutgers Gardens features plant sales and other activities including:
- Tours of the Rutgers Gardens, featuring the Donald B. Lacey Display Garden
- The latest releases in Annuals
- Ask the Experts Clinic
- New Exhibitors
- Garden Talks
- Children’s Activities

For more information goto the Rutgers Gardens website.

When was the last time you sent a thank you letter to a client? A thank you letter is a great opportunity to re-engage your clients and thank them for past business. A thank you letter is a form of relationship marketing. Relationship marketing is a easy tool we all should be using to grow your relationships with your clients and prospects.

What is relationship marketing?

Wikipedia defines relationship marketing: a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960s and emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. It involves understanding the customer’s needs as they go through their life cycles. It emphasizes providing a range of products or services to existing customers as they need them.

More importantly a thank you note validates your clients purchase and improves your chances for future contact and referrals.

What other tools do you use to market your relationships?

Regards,

Howard

Sources:

Relationship marketing. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved July 20, 2007, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/relationship-marketing

Can it get much better than this? I don’t think so…..

Event Site: Tom River

Address: Washington Street, Toms River, NJ

Phone: 732-341-8738

Website: http://www.downtowntomsriver.com

Description: This yearly festival in downtown Toms River is a great way to beat the midsummer heat, featuring contestants from ice cream shops throughout the state vying for the title of New Jersey’s best. Fun for the whole family, with games, rides, food, entertainment, and best of all ice cream tasting. 11:30 am - 5 pm.

Date: July 21st, 2007

It is time to easily and simply define your target market.

Many business owners fall into a trap of running their business only by prior experience and instinct. In many cases businesses are managed without a formal business plan or defined goals. New business owners may have had a business plan they created when they first started but have since tucked it a way in a file never to been seen again. I would like to suggest the creation of a persona or personas to help define your target market. While typically used in web design and usability a persona can be an extremely helpful tool in making business decisions of all types.

Wikipedia defines “Personas or personae are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are given characteristics and are assumed to be in particular environments based on known users’ requirements so that these elements can be taken into consideration when creating scenarios for conceptualizing a site”.

Why should I create a persona?

The exercise forces us to think about our most valued resource our customers! Personas help their creator put a face to client information and raw data while converting it into a friendly, usable format. The process of creating the persona can be very enlightening. I am often surprise by how little we know about out customers. Once created we can surmise what our target market may need or want in a given scenario (or use case) with our persona.

How do I create a persona?

Usability.gov put together a great list of what characteristics to include in a persona:

• a name and a picture
• demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
• job title and major responsibilities
• goals and task in relation to your site (or business)
• environment (physical, social, technical)
• a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site

Usability.gov also provides an excellent sample of what the end result should look like. I think it is important that you tailor the characteristics to your business needs. For example, if job title is not important but affluence is you should add that data. There are no right or wrong data points to add, remember this exercise is for you.

Resources:

Personas. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved July 17, 2007, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/personas

Personas. (n.d.) Usability.gov. Retrieved July 17, 2007, from Usability.gov Web site: http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html

The Quick Chek New Jersey Festival of Ballooning is the largest summertime hot air balloon and music festival in North America and is the premiere family entertainment attraction in New Jersey.  It holds the dual distinction of being a recipient of The New Jersey Governor’s Award for Best Special Event, as well as the American Bus Association’s designation as a Top 100 Festival in North America.  Held annually at Solberg Airport in Readington, NJ, the festival truly has something for everyone!  From twice daily mass ascensions of up to 125 special shape and sport hot air balloons, to headlining concerts, non-stop family entertainment, hundreds of crafters and vendors, great food, fireworks, a balloon glow, and more, the festival is jam-packed with stuff to do.

Check out the website: www.balloonfestival.com

The 21st Annual New Jersey Sandcastle Contest is Wednesday, July 18, 2007! Sandcastle building takes place from 8:00 am until noon Awards Ceremony to begin at 1:00 pm 18th Avenue Beach, Belmar.

Check out their website: www.njsandcastle.com

For information about the 2007 Sandcastle Contest, please call 732.863.1900 x106.

Having personally seen the horror of both towers burn and fall, I pass this along to you. I do not know who the originator of the chain email I received is but it struck a painful memory and American pride. I know I will “never forget”.

USS New York

It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. It is the fifth in a new class of warship - designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite LA to cast the ship’s bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept 9, 2003, “those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence,” recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. “It was a spiritual moment for everybody there.”

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the “hair on my neck stood up.” “It had a big meaning to it for all of us,” he said. “They knocked us down. They can’t keep us down. We’re going to be back.”

The ship’s motto? “Never Forget”

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a process for increasing natural search engine results. There are no magic elixirs to get you top rankings over night. SEO is never completed it is something that needs to be tweaked and watched on a regular basis. But if you are committed, success is possible even with competitive keywords. Since PPC (Pay Per Click) has gotten extremely expensive search engine optimization becomes even more important for all businesses from smallest one person operations to the largest corporations. It is not uncommon for businesses to bid over $5 per click on competitive keywords. There are a few things to keep in mind when you commit to SEO either by doing it yourself or having it done by a professional.

Content is king when it comes to site engine optimization and drawing visitors to your website. Choice of language and descriptive terms are very important because ultimately this is how a search engine will categorize your site. There is a great tool called SEOQuake which has a key word density tool. This tool provides a quick and accurate picture of what your site keywords are. It is important that the keyword density of your content align with your meta keywords. Wayne Hurlbert in a great post on webpronews.com said “No more than 2% of a web page’s words should be the targeted keywords. Any more will be considered spamming.” He also reminds us that “Poorly written copy might draw some extra visitor traffic, but is unlikely to convert that traffic into sales.” We must resist all attempts to needless stuff pages with keywords, it will not help your efforts.

If you want to be successful your pages must be correctly coded. Your site should validate properly according to W3C coding standards. W3C Markup Validation Service, is a free service that checks Web documents (pages) in formats like HTML for conformance to W3C recommendations and other standards. Once you have properly coded pages <Title> tags, meta “keyword” and “description” tags, and <h1> tags can have a great influence on your search results. I would like to dig deeper into successful coding of pages in a future post but I would like to point out a simple check without looking at any code. What do your page titles say about your website to its users and search engines?

Site age plays a large role in how well a site ranks particularly in Google. Jim Boykins Internet marketing specialist has said “… a huge majority of sites will not get into the top 30 of Google for competitive phrases without having been online for at least 2 years.” in his Feb 2007 blog post. Jim Westergren and randfish of SEOmoz.org have discussed in detail about Google sandbox and the credibility/time delay it puts on sites. Unfortunately there are no short cuts here with a good amount of patience you will see results.

Without being technically savvy there are several things you can do to see the SEO health of your site. The bottom line is that if any of the basic principles I have discussed here are not correct on your site than there are things you can do to improve your natural search engine rankings.

Regards,

Howard