Websites with extreme SEO search marketing resultz, Resultz Digital!» Business Planning

The end of Flash? It is for Flash Mobile on smartphones and tablets.

Marc — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:04:47 +0000

Earlier this month Adobe announced in an email to developers that it was ending Flash Mobile. Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO, explained the strategy as follows:

We believe that HTML5 is a significant catalyst for growth for Adobe. And it’s a multi-year vector of innovation for most of our products. HTML5 is great for Adobe and great for the industry.

The key phrase I just used, and I people to make sure we all recognize this, is that most of our products – absolutely HTML5 is going to result in the substrate of the web undergoing a major overhaul – but it’s much bigger than just web pages. It’s the foundation of how content is going to be delivered in the years ahead.

Web, video, publishing, gaming are all going to increasingly rely on HTML5 across PCs, phones, TVs, and tablets. That is the foundation that we’re building toward and that’s the foundation we’re going to take a leadership position in.

A couple of days later Flash developer Mike Chambers expanded on the reasons for ending Flash Mobile and the future of Flash in general. He noted that:

Finally, given the growth of HTML5 on both mobile and desktop browsers, we decided to more evenly balance our resources dedicate between Flash and HTML5.

Halting development on the Flash Player for mobile devices frees up resources for HTML5 development (tooling, frameworks, browsers).

So the future at Adobe calls for less Flash and more HTML5. Contemplating Adobe’s increasing investment in HTML5 development tools and at the same time terminating Flash for mobile devices and what it means regarding Flash overall brings to mind the following quote from Winston Churchill; “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Can it be that in a few months or a couple of years that as Flash Mobile went, so will Flash? To learn more regarding the problems and performance of flash on mobile devices read this analysis by GigaOm on why Flash Mobile did not work out.

Give it some thought when you make an investment in your website. With site visits by mobile devices quickly climbing towards 15% to 20% of the total site visits, according to IBM, it is a very important marketing consideration. For your website and marketing it seems that “to Flash or not to Flash” is the question. With Adobe putting its money on HTML5 for its future shouldn’t you?

It seems time to revisit some of the basic issues. Do you remember April 2010 and Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Flash? particularly concerning security, reliability and performance?

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

In retrospect Steve Jobs had reasoned answers, before hardly any of us had even thought of the question.

5 Great Custom Google Analytics Reports for your website – FREE

Marc — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:04:09 +0000

My Dad often said “what gets measured gets done”. And these five custom reports seem to “channel” that wisdom helping you understand your website traffic and set and meet goals. All particularly important if you are an online marketer or derive other revenue from your website. And the standard Google Analytics reports often don’t provide some of the data detail you need.

I will be brief, just do the following now. Get the details, why these are most useful, how to use the reports and install the reports in your Google Analytics account by going to this Search Engine Watch article by Greg Habermann “My Top 5 Most Used Custom Reports in Google Analytics“.

These are excellent well crafted reports for analyzing your site traffic and making well-reasoned changes to your site to increase your results and meet your goal.

This is one of my favorite articles of this month and if you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.

New census info on the number of US weddings

Marc — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:32:05 +0000

Some data points and facts on changes in the numbers of weddings (marriages) from the latest census. While weddings have declined to the lowest point since 1970 in the US, it is not all bad for wedding professionals, some states have had significant increases. You need to click on the links to get the data points. From the New York Times an interesting graphic of some factoids. And from the US Census, here is a simple state by state, table of the trends.

Measurements – Four Favorite WordPress Stat/Analytics Plugins for your Site’s Dashboard

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:30:36 +0000

One of the treats with a WordPress based website is how easy it is to measure results of your posts and other marketing activity. What gets measured gets done and the plugins discussed in this post can help.

Of course you can get all this from Google Analytics, and if your hosting company provides the server host logs, in programs like AWStats, Webalizer and Analog those too. But you have to login in to those services. I think it is great as long as your are in the Admin area of your WordPress based website to see how your site traffic is while you are right there … writing a post, approving comments or otherwise updating the site.

Below are four WordPress stat plugins that I like. Not sure which one I like better, they all provide a little bit different view of your site traffic and depth. They are all current (as of this post date) work well with WP 3.0 and fortunately they all seem compatible with one another.

WordPress.com Stats

If you have activated Akismet (and you should) you should also install and activate WordPress.com Stats. It uses the same API key that you use in Akismet. WordPress.com Stats provides an excellent data set for quick review with nice “drill-down” functionality. All the data is processed in WordPress’ servers so this plugin will not slow down your site or load your server. Very fast. Ultra easy to setup.

Analytics360

This plugin was developed by Alex King for MailChimp. (Alex is also the author of the indispensible Twitter Tools plugin.) Analytics360 allows you to pull your Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard for easy review TOGETHER with your MailChimp data. In one panel you can see how your posts and email are driving site traffic. Trends in site traffic and list growth. And your site’s top traffic sources.

This plugin does require Google Analytics (also free) and will work with or without MailChimp, but the basic MailChimp account is free and allows you a list of up to 500 addresses and 3000 sent emails per month. If you don’t already have Google Analytics tracking in your site, Google Analyticator is a very simple to use plugin that makes placing the Google Analytics script easy.

Clicky

I am liking Clicky more and more; it has very easy to read, useful interface and uses your real time site data. Joost de Valk (a true WordPress SEO master) created a new Clicky plugin to take advantage of the many new statistical features offered by Clicky. The basic Clicky stat account is free and provides some unique views of your website traffic. It is simple and quick to setup a Clicky account and then install and enable the Clicky plugin.

Woopra Analytics

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.” And I find that somehow the Woopra’s WordPress plugin stat reporting interface is fun to use (“fun” and “stats” don’t normally go together) and again provides some unique perspectives into your site visitors and traffic. Like all the other plugins listed here you will need an account for the data tracker, but the basic Woopra account is free and simple to setup. Just visit the Woopra website and sign up. Then place the script in your site’s footer, activate the plugin and you are good to go.

May you have great measurements! If you have any questions just email me. All four of the tools are running on this site.

Business planning, require your website to help achive your goals

Marc — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:13:48 +0000

It is time your website started working for you. Recently most successful real estate agents and brokers have set their gaols for 2009 and revised their business plan with steps to advance their goals. But very few have included their website as part of thier plan. Mailings, calls, ads, presentations are often all quantified activities, but not their website’s visitors, search placement or referrals. Yet most real estate website owners will still “feed” it $400 – $600 or more a year in expense. Why not apply the same measurements and standards that you apply to calls or presentations or mailings?

Below is a table of some Google search terms and related average monthly volume for Denver. On average there are well over 200K searches on these Denver real estate terms every month. (You can look up the same info for your market using the Google keywords tool ) How many does your website get? If your website just received 1% of the total volume (~2,000 referred visitors) every month how many transactions would that help you make? What is your business plan to gather your share of this search volume? Where does your website appear in the ranking for these types of searches? Can your current website even compete or hope to get sufficiently high to get search referrals on phrases like these?

Having a website is no longer about have an internet “presence”. Major marketers figured this years ago. For real estate in 2009 it should be all about marketing and increasing your income.

The first step is to learn;

how many visitors your website currently average per month,
the cost per visitor,
how many transactions your website was responsivble for in 2008
and establish goals for for each of the above for 2009.

More to come in future posts. In the meantime, if you have a questions or ideas please post a comment.

Google Monthly Search Volume
Search Phrase			monthly avg
denver homes			49,500
denver houses			27,000
denver mls			4,400
denver new homes			1,300
denver property			27,000
denver real estate			74,000
denver realtors			22,000
denver relocation			1,000
homes for sale denver			1,900
realtor denver			1,000
realty denver			2,900

Total			212,000