Intermarketing by Merkados™

Using Teasers Effectively in Online Marketing

admin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:35 +0000

The concept of a teaser

A teaser is a perfect way of presenting your information without giving away all of it. With the rise of interactive marketing the concept of teasers has become more and more utilized. With the amount of information that you can find online it’s difficult to prove your value to anybody these days. With a teaser people learn about your products and at the same time allow you an opportunity to explain why should they care. But wait, can the wrong teaser harm your business?

In this article, Alex Centeno MBA, creative director and online marketing strategist with over 10 years of experience online, provides you with his no-bs, straight to the point, take on how to create effective teasers. Give your users a taste of your product or information while gaining an advantage that can generate a lot of business. These interesting keys will transform your potential market into faithful buyers.

So what are the keys to providing the right teaser?

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Track Scrolling in a Page (Engagement) with Jquery and Google Analytics

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:19:55 +0000

So I came across a post by RTP Harry from http://runtingsproper.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-analytics-tracking-content.html where he explains how to track scroll depth in Google Analytics.

Since I was looking for exactly that for one of our projects I was excited to give it a go. However it didn’t work. And so I started in my usual journey of understanding why it wasn’t working, fixing it and then sharing it with all of our readers. So here it is:

Problem:

You want to track the engagement of your users and therefore you would like to see in Google Analytics if your users are scrolling down your pages and reaching at least 90% of the length.

Solution:

This could be done in several ways, however in this case probably the easiest solution is to use Jquery (client-side) and Google Analytics.

To begin, Google Analytics provides something called Event Tracking. This allows to track things happening in your website, blog or page. And that is exactly what we are after. Most of the time this behavior is used to track downloads of PDFs videos or clicks on links. This time we are going to track scrolling on a page.

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Great Hotel Website Designs

admin — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:37:38 +0000

Most of the time we give examples of bad design. So today I decided to give our readers a break and show some great design and hopefully explain some of the reasons why we think these designs are better than average in terms of design. So for today we have four designs in total. So we are going to start with the most simple and then finish with the best.

Number 4.

http://www.SimpleHotelSites.com

Click to Visit

SimpleHotelSites is not per-se a hotel site, it is more a template for hotel sites. However it is in our list, first because we were involved in the design, but also because we love the simplicity of its footer. These days most designers invest the majority of their times designing interaction, and the main section of the content. However, very seldom we see somebody investing time in finishing strong – the footer. So here it is to SimpleHotelSites.com

Number 3.

http://www.grandhoteltremezzo.com/

Click to Visit

The idea behind this design is very bold. They are using a complete 100% background that stretches depending on the screen size of the user. Very cool that you can toggle in and out the important navigation and the reservation request bar. Great execution. Of course, the problem becomes evident if the user has a large screen and therefore some pixelation occurs. But overall it is a beautiful design.

Number 2.

http://www.sandals.com

Click to Visit

This hotel site is extremely clean and well designed. Even when you take a look at the enormous amount of information that they are trying to present in the homepage. This amount of information automatically makes any site very difficult to read, however they have managed to organize it beautifully without looking crowded. Also, the temptation would be to increase line-height (leading) in the main text to make it appear more roomy, however they cleverly reduced the value of the text in paragraphs and maintained a nice cadence while reducing the overall size of the scrolling bar. Organization is key. I love how they finish with a bold telephone number that makes it clear that they are in business. Minor mistakes made me place it before the winner.

Number 1.

http://www.bellagio.com/

Click to Visit

It is obvious to me that a hotel like Bellagio would have a fantastic website. However, it seemed obvious that other hotels in Vegas would also have them, wrong. They don’t. So that is why I am giving this one the edge. I like the extra attention that they gave to online marketing details like the organization of the main navigation items. From most important to least important (left to right). They placed the Make a Reservation Item FIRST, and not last. Very important distinction. This shows care and attention to detail.

Not to even mention the fact that the video execution is marvelous. It re sizes correctly without creating horizontal scroll bars in smaller screens. This is absolutely one of my favorite features. Of course I had to study the css myself because of the great execution.

In terms of usability I feel like there was a bit more that could’ve been done. Specially in the critical item of requesting a reservation. This should be a process that is easy and fast.

So there you have them folks. Please don’t hesitate to comment below or if you happen to have an example of a great website or a bad design simply send it our way as well.

Hasta la vista.

Programming a Slider for WordPress 3.3

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:40:15 +0000

If you are a designer or developer starting in the use of WordPress as one of your Content Management Systems of choice, then perhaps there will come a time when you’ll want to implement a Homepage slider.

So what is a Slider exactly? A slider is also known as a “Featured Image Section” that usually transitions from one message to another either by fading in and out or by other effects like SlidingUp or ZoomingIn. In any event, the use of Sliders has been a very popular one because not only is it the most prominent thing in a page because of its size, also it has movement. This combination will attract the eyes of your audience better than anything else, and therefore is a good promotional tool for your site.

Now, you could hard-code the slider in place and be done with it. However, wouldn’t it be better if you could simply upload your images via your WordPress Admin Interface and they would show up in your slider?

Solution

Activate Featured Images for your posts in your WordPress Admin Section. This is easily done by adding a couple of lines of code to your functions.php file. If you don’t know what a functions.php file is, then perhaps you need to start by checking out the basic components of your themes and revise the codex to learn more about it first.
```
// adds support for the thumbnails in the pages.
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
```

Also while you are there, make sure you create a resizing option for the image that is going to be used in your Slider.

// slider size for Sliders in the Home Page
add_image_size( 'slider-image', 980, 342 ); // Exact Size of the sliders 980 x 342

Go to your Homepage template (perhaps index.php) and locate where you are intending to create the slider. Then simply create a new loop and call the Featured Images of a particular Category of Posts:

/*
* Selection of Slider by User
*
*
*/

// create a wp_query for the slider. This loop will only include posts with category slider and limit the amount to 5
$slider_query = new WP_Query('category_name=Slider&posts_per_page=5');
if( $slider_query->have_posts() ) : while ($slider_query->have_posts() ) : $slider_query->the_post();
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) :
// grab the attachment image with the right resizing option and put it in $image.
$image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id(), 'slider-image' );


" width="980" height="342" />

// back to php
endif;
endwhile;
endif;

That’s it, now to use it is very simple. Simply create a new post and select category: Slider. That tells WordPress that this post is to be used in your Slider Section in your Homepage. Then upload an image as a “Featured Image” for that particular post. This image, will be modified by WordPress to display in the right size.
What you are doing behind the scenes is very simple: You are first creating a new loop(see codex if you need more help with understanding loops), then you grab the Featured Image of the posts with category “Slider” and then finally you create an html image tag with the results of that loop. In this case I am limiting the results to 5 posts for speed of loading.

Hope this helps and don’t hesitate to comment below.

Until next time,

Alex

When Great Websites Go Bad – Tips to Improve

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:51:48 +0000

As a professional digital media designer, I am constantly in contact with great and not so great websites. So what I wanted to do in this quick post, was to give some advice to those new designers that know how to do the main ground work: design by hand, implement digitally, slice the design, code in html, css and php and then build the website; but they unfortunately lack the knowledge of how to refine the last details.

This happens to be extremely important in aging websites. As a website progresses in its life, its owners often request things to be modified and changed. Perhaps a new image added to that page, and another bullet point to the frequent asked questions page, or to create another page, etc. This is certainly not uncommon. But what happens is that the design itself starts to look like a Frankenstein and its look goes BAD.

So here are some tips to prevent those things from happening:

Tips:

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Deleting eMails from your Server using SSH

admin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:02:29 +0000

You may be in a dilemma. You have hundreds of emails arriving in your account. And now you either check them one by one or you delete them by the page. The best way to do this is instead to delete them via SSH.

I understand that this post may not be for everybody. You may not even know what SSH is. So this post is not for you. Believe me, SSH can be dangerous. So if you don’t know what you are doing it is probably better for you to do it page by page in your webmail application.

On the other hand if you are a systems admin here is how to do it:

SOLUTION

Log in via ssh.
Go to > /home/NAMEOFACCOUNT/mail/DOMAIN.COM/EMAIL
execute the following commands:

rm -rf cur
rm -rf new
/* these two will remove all current and new emails from your account */

That’s it and now you should be good to go.

Strategy Concepts: Increasing your Strengths – Small Business Series

admin — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:46:19 +0000

You are probably not in the business of confrontation, however there are plenty of occasions in the life of a small business owner where you’ll need the benefits and advantages of the strength position. Every one of the small business owners that I meet with on the regular basis wants to grow their business, every single one of them. In this post, I am going to share with you a common problem that I see with most small business owners. This problem is so prominent that I am sure that you are suffering from it. I give you a quick example of the problem and of course give you one way of solving it and pro pulse your business forward.

This post shouldn’t be free. But it is. So make sure that you check it out.

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Keychain Access Window Problem – A’s in Squares Mac OS X

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:02:58 +0000

So let’s say that you turn on your Mac for another day at work and all of a sudden when you get the keychain access window to enter your password, you end up seeing something like the one in Figure 1 below. Your keychain access windows (your system) is having all these weird characters and now you can’t read your messages for access. You may start by going to Google and trying to find solutions, however you may not find anything, just like I did.

Figure 1.

What do you do to correct this? Not only it is annoying, also it may be dangerous to click something you can’t read. Imagine if you install something that you shouldn’t!

Here is how to fix it:

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Alex Centeno MBA.
Creative Director & Digital Media Strategist
Merkados Interactive Partners
www.Merkados.com

Do you want higher rankings in major search engines? It is easy: think.

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:45:47 +0000

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.” Henry Ford.

As an internet marketing consultant, I get the same question over and over again: how can I rank in the top 10 in Google for a very broad term? The answer is probably going to sound simple, but it is truth in my experience.

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Online marketing shaped by the need to become

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:00:48 +0000

One thing every online marketing specialist has to understand is that no matter what he does he always is dealing with individual persons. Once you get involved with analytics the first problem is to start thinking that since you can track behavior as a group of users, all of them are the same. It is very important to understand that in the marketing business you assume that a market has similar needs and desires, and that they want to fill them with great intensity. The more they wait to fill their desires the more stress they receive, until they release the tension by fulfilling the desires.

All of us have desires. Either is a real need: a car, a house, a cell phone, a lottery ticket, friends, love, hosting, bananas and others, or it can be an abstract desire: I want to know the secret because it is secret. For example: a tv show says: “in a few seconds we are going to show you the biggest secret of all times!” and instantly they create in the viewers the abstract desire of completion. You want to know what it is. What for? It doesn’t matter. You just want to know.

The abstract desires can be created at any given moment by websites in different ways. You can create this desires by creating un-conclusive statements to marketing phrases: for example: ” This product comes loaded with all your favorite features! What features are they talking about? Your favoriteâ€¦ How do they know my favorite features? By in-conclusive statements you transform the perception of the customer, because no matter what your copy says the brain has to process it and agree or disagree.

For example: Right now you can agree or disagree with this article, but by reading it you are changing your perspective because you ask yourself if you agree or not.

You can direct the attention of your online users by the way you transform their emotions. For example if I say:

* Think for a second about the smell of the ocean, the warm sand and the breeze, feel the sun burning your skin little by little, think about the feeling later when your skin is all red and it hurts to touch anything, you donâ€™t want to do that.

If you read the last paragraph you don’t only read it and keep going but you actually set yourself in the picture because most of us has experienced that and it is painful.

You can use online copy to create sensations that will move the understanding of your audience in many ways. Some will make them buy, some will not.

If you go in sweater store in the middle of the summer and it is 115 F. out and the store has this huge carpet with long hair and you happen to realize that the A/C is broken inside you probably won’t buy.

Same situation, the hottest day ever, you look up an you see a beach bar selling bear for half price, the bear is 33 – Fahrenheit – just when it is starting to ice, you can feel the little pieces of ice going down your throat – yes, it is very probably that you would buy.

Statement number one in Marketing: Life is about value. You, as everyone else, is fighting to be, to become. Things give us pleasure because they allow us to get closer to becoming or being. We buy food, cars, houses, pens, CDs, magic cards, plastic bags, ice, cheese, stationary bikes. Get it? Just to become. The value of everything is determined by the ability to give that power> a glass of water from a neighbor won’t be of value most of the time, except if you need that water to survive in the desert.

If you want to market products online successfully, find that one characteristic that makes people become, and share it with as many people as you can.